My friend Ben Stevens over at the MacLawyer blog participated in a recent debate for the American Bar Association Journal about Macs vs. PC’s. Of course Ben won the contest. As Ben explained, “Of course, I had a much easier position to argue since the facts were so strongly on my side.”
The whole debate reminds me of a recurring experience I’m having with my Mac as of late. Everytime I pull it out at the courthouse or in deposition, I become the subject of curiosity and questions. It seems a lot of people in the legal profession are curious about switching. I attended a day long seminar recently in Los Angeles about a PC-only application that I use often in my practice (CaseMap). I run it in Parallels with no problems. I think I sold about 10 Macs that day. The funniest thing was the speaker hunted me down afterward and told me how funny it was for him giving the presentation and looking up at about 100 Dell logos with one shining Apple in the middle. Then he told me he wants to switch too.
We have HORRIBLE technology in our practice. We’re using a few Windows 2000 servers that are all based in our main office in the panhandle while our remaining 8 offices all use Citrix clients to access our accounts on those servers. Out of date technology, lots of slow-downs, and when the main office goes down, everyone goes down. Plus they use WordPerfect, does ANYONE use WordPerfect anymore. The only ray of light is that because it is a Citrix based system, using the beta Citrix client for OS X I can log in to my account from my Mac and it’s just like I’m actually sitting at my desk in the office. Alas, the big firm life means I have no chance of changing an of that, but I have run into several attorneys in my firm who have commented on the fact that I use a Mac and when I explained that they could too, I think I made a few switchers as well.
“Plus they use WordPerfect, does ANYONE use WordPerfect anymore.”
Well, Katie, I do. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to move to Macs in my office. There isn’t anything comparable to WP’s feature set on Macs. No macros, limited merge capability. No reveal codes. Wordperfect is one of the best things about being on a Windows platform. (Well, there’s Timemap, Casemap and a few other programs, but WP is right up there). I sincerely wish Corel hadn’t dropped the ball.
Cheers