Sept. 21, 2016 – For many years now, Microsoft and Apple have competed to attract users to their computer, laptop, and mobile device products. If market share is any indicator, most lawyers use Windows-based computers. But is that the best option?

If you are a solo or small-firm lawyer with control over technology decisions, you may wonder what hardware and software systems are best for you.

In this Q&A, we get some perspectives from Mark Metzger, an attorney in Naperville, Ill. He runs the Law Office of Mark C. Metzger, which focuses on business planning, elder law, estate planning, and real estate transactions. He is also a technology guru.

Metzger – who is presenting two sessions on Macs and iPads at the State Bar of Wisconsin’s 2016 Wisconsin Solo & Small Firm Conference, Oct. 20-22, in Wisconsin Dells – stopped using his Windows-based machine years ago. He now uses Macs to run his law practice. But he still uses Windows software for limited purposes.

A faculty member of the annual ABA Tech Show, Metzger loves Macs, for various reasons that he will explain. But he doesn’t think Macs are right for all lawyers.

He says the decision to use a Mac or a Windows-based computer depends on what you are trying to accomplish. For instance, a Mac may not make sense for a bankruptcy attorney. But a litigator may find ample reasons to make the switch to Mac.

When did you start using Macs in your law practice?

May 17, 1989. Well, that was the date I began using a Mac as a practicing lawyer in a law firm. But integrated use is a little harder to pin down. My first job out of law school was with a large Chicago law firm, and I brought in a Macintosh SE/30 and I set it on my desk. Those were the days without internet, and I was using it for a limited set of tasks. By the mid-1990s, that was replaced with a Windows machine.

It wasn’t until after 2001 when I got a Macintosh laptop at home, that new era after Apple went to OS10. I began experimenting with photos, video, and playing music on it. I found that to be more enjoyable than keeping the Windows machine up-to-date, which was taking an increasingly larger and larger amount of time. Probably by the summer of 2007, I was actively looking into how I could run my office on a Mac.

I joined a free Google Group called MILO (Macs In Law Offices). At that point, there were about 2,500 people on the list. It’s more than 6,000 now. You can ask questions and get answers. I was amazed that lawyers were doing this already, and I thought it was worth a try. In early 2008, I put a Mac on my desk next to the Widows laptop I was using. So I was sort of using both. Over the course of the next three months, I realized I was using the Mac more than the other machine. I made the decision to do a hard switch on April 1, 2008. It’s worked great ever since.

What are the biggest differences between using the Mac and a Windows-based computer?

Lawyers generally do the same tasks on both. The work of a lawyer on computers is largely organizing information, word processing, and email. The tasks are not different based on the two platforms. In some cases, we use different software. In some cases, it’s the same. For example, I use Microsoft Office on my Mac.

Most Macintosh users who do presentations will tell you that although we have access to Microsoft PowerPoint, we only use it when we are speaking at a conference where they want to consolidate everything on a Windows machine and put all the presentations in one file. Mac users, I would say, prefer an Apple-based program called Key Note. I think it’s a far superior piece of software for presentations.

So why do you like Macs so much?

There’s an old saying that actually bears a lot of truth. That is, “they just work.” I’ll give you two examples of that and then one practical reality. I’m kind of the IT person in my firm for reasons that will become apparent in a second. When one of the team members has a problem with their Mac machine, the question typically comes in the form of: ‘My computer is doing this or it’s not doing this.” The first question I always ask them is, when is the last time you rebooted the machine? The answer inevitably is, I don’t know, three or four weeks ago. So they restart the machine and the problem is solved.

That’s a significant difference from my Windows life. In my Windows life, every machine had to be booted fresh everyday if you wanted to have any chance of it working well. Few if any of them would survive going to sleep at night and being awoken in the morning maybe more than once or twice before everything just came crashing down and you needed to restart the computer. Then the restart was a several minute long process while you waited for everything to happen.

The Macs have complete tolerance of that, ‘put me to sleep and ignore me for a day, or three, or five – then open my lid back up and use me without a hiccup’ to the point where my team regularly forgets that every once in a while, you just need to restart the computer, period. And so, that to me is a huge benefit in terms of stability.

What about security?

Yes, exactly. That’s the second major benefit. In the Mac world, we simply don’t have the volume of virus and malware problems that we do in the Windows world. There are lots of theories as to why. I’m not competent to tell you exactly why that is or isn’t the case. But one of the reasons I often read about is, Macs make up a smaller collection of machines. Therefore, it’s a smaller market and therefore less attractive to the virus writers who can get more bang for their buck by pursuing the larger world of Windows-based machines, which is maybe 70 or 80 percent of the machines that are out there.

The second major theory I read in the press is that the Macintosh operating system is based on UNIX. The source code for UNIX has been publicly available since 1963. Most of the weird little security bugs that would present loopholes to allow hackers to gain control of a machine were closed over the ensuing 50 years. Windows, because it’s proprietary and does not have source code that is viewable and examinable by folks outside the company, hasn’t had that same benefit. I don’t know which of those theories is correct. Maybe it’s both of them. But for whatever reason, those security issues are not the same for Mac users.

What has been the practical impact of switching?

A typical day for me in the 2008 time frame, where I substantially used a Windows machine while I was experimenting with the Mac, toward the end, I would calculate that I was spending 7.5 hours per week keeping our Windows machines up and running. That was doing things like adding malware patches, rebooting a machine, finding a new printer driver because this thing had updated and didn’t want to print anymore. Just a constant maintenance of computers is a world of difference. With the Mac, most of the problems get solved with the reboot.

But this was the ah-ha moment for me: Since I made that switch-over in 2008, I have spent a total of less than $300 on outside technical support. And it’s not because I’m remarkably proficient, the Macs just don’t require it. They are just more stable.

I’ve read that there are more “legal apps” that are coming out for Windows-based products, but not as many for Apple products. Is that true?

That’s a correct observation. The legal-specific software that’s out there fits into one of two categories. Either something that runs on a Windows-based server on a Windows-based machine in your office, or cloud-based programs. There are very few Mac-based programs that are aimed specifically at attorneys that run on a Mac or a Mac server in a Mac office. That is by far the big difference between using a Mac as a lawyer and using a Windows machine. But the great equalizer has been the internet.

Increasingly, the legal practice-specific software is migrating to the cloud. They are offering it as a hosted service, and you can gain access through a browser, whether you are using a phone or an iPad or a laptop. It doesn’t really matter what platform you use.

The big two that started in that realm were Rocket Matter and Clio, but there are now a host of exclusively cloud-based platforms. And it seems like every year, another one or two of the major legal software vendors that were previously Windows-only are rolling out their cloud alternatives as well. If it’s a cloud-based program, it makes no difference at all whether you are using a Windows-based machine or a Mac.

Let’s talk about iPads. In what ways are you using your iPad in practice?

The biggest single use of my iPad in practice is for reviewing documents. For years, lawyers have put together giant piles and stacks and boxes of documents and reviewed them one at a time and organized and sorted them. The project was often constrained by the physical ability to lug all those documents around.

In a world where scanners are as plentiful as they are now, and where devices like iPads can manage the content as well as they do, you can put literally tens of thousands of pages of pieces of paper into your iPad and its weight never changes.

And the resolution is every bit as good if not better than it was on the piece of paper that you started with. You can mark those documents up on the iPad, you make notes to yourself, you can add post-it notes, you can choose to share those document sets with other people, with or without the annotations, notes, and comments. The true miracle of an iPad in a law office is the ability to put that gigantic roomful of documents into a piece of glass you can hold in your hand, and mark them and build subsets. By far and away, that’s my biggest use. But I use it for other purposes as well.

Sometimes when I’m meeting with a client in the conference room, we will use the Apple TV to display the contents of the iPad. That means the TV essentially becomes a wireless whiteboard that you can use to demonstrate and show things to your client.

That could include cash spend-downs for clients with long-term care problems. We’ve put contract terms up and worked with clients or to work through the terms in negotiations with a common screen that everybody can see and share. We are probably not far from an era where an iPad or a tablet can be your primary computer. We are not quite there yet, but they are wonderful adjuncts.

Have you always been into technology?

I’m one of those people that technology sort of spoke to. When I was in high school, that’s when the Apple II and the Apple II Plus came out. I would go to the mall with my mom, not because I wanted to go to the mall with my mom, but because I wanted to go to Radio Shack and play with the computer that was set up in the store.

In those days, to use a computer, you had to program it. If you wanted the computer to do something for you, you had to write the program to make it do that. They had not yet developed the software industry, where you could buy programs. So for whatever reason, that struck me as fun and I learned to program and write programs.

When I was in law school, I worked in a computer store. And I had a graduate assistantship in law school, not to do research for a professor, but to install the first computer network at the law school and help people learn how to use it.

What would you say to an attorney who asked, ‘I’m thinking about getting a new computer system for my office, should I go with a Windows-based machine or a Mac computer?

I would ask them some questions about what they want to accomplish, the tasks they know they need to complete. That would allow me to gauge the ultimate decision from there. For example, if I was talking to someone who wanted to build a bankruptcy practice, that’s a practice where there are several different commercially available programs that help manage a bankruptcy docket with all the deadlines and calculations that need to happen, the data that goes into those and the preparation of patterned documents they are required to create and file. At this point, there are only Windows-based tools to do that. So if someone is looking at a world where 90 percent of their day is spent in a Windows environment, I’m not going to recommend they use a Mac.

But you can run Windows on Macs. I do. There’s one program that we use for our estate planning software, it’s based on HotDocs, which is a wonderful technology for document automation. Unfortunately at this point, it only runs on Windows.

There’s a cloud-based version that is not really up to muster, at least not in my opinion. But I spend less than 10 percent of any given day working in HotDocs. So I’m willing to run Windows on the Mac for that purpose. But if 90 percent of your day is in Windows, you shouldn’t be doing that on a Mac. If you are a litigator who is principally going to be gathering and presenting evidence, there’s no reason you couldn’t use a Mac.

It all depends on what you want to do.