What Kind of Lawyer Are You … Mac or PC?

Question of the Week

Posted Feb 28, 2008, 12:23 pm CDT
By Molly McDonough

We’ve been carefully following Mac v. PC issues for a long time, but more closely since “MacGate” at law school exam time uncovered headaches for Apple computer users a while back.

Then this month’s issue of the ABA Journal came out with a cover story/debate about whether lawyers should stick with marketshare and cling to their PCs or venture into Mac territory.

This made us wonder …

Have you confronted the Mac v. PC issue? And if so, what did you decide?

Answer in the comments below.

Read last week’s question and answers about dealing with a workplace bully.

Our Favorite Answer From Last Week:

Posted by "Maria V": When I was a paralegal at a small firm before law school, my boss left a note on my chair one day asking me to get him a box of pencils from the supply room and to sharpen them for him. I did, and left them on his desk. After he got back, he came by to see me. “These pencils aren’t sharp enough,” he said. “I need you to re-sharpen them.” Power trip, anyone? At the time I was only 22, it was my first job out of college, and I was too intimidated to say anything. After similar incidents over the course of a year, though, I got more confident and less scared and I began speaking up when I felt I was being disrespected. Right before I left, my boss asked me if I really thought I would be treated better at my next job. “I’m going to make sure of it,” I replied. And I’ve had pretty good working relationships ever since.

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Posted by John A. Davidson - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 9 hours, 3 minutes ago

If I had my druthers I’d like to have Xerox Globalview. Its no longer available but everything worked together. Having used the product since it was Star. I hated to see it go. I suspect that the Mac is more Star like then PCs. Alas, I’ve learned the value of being main stream.
Posted by Jonathan W. Fitch - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 8 hours, 45 minutes ago

My firm has used Macs for the last 20 years. As compared to PCs, they have long held the edge in network stability, ease of use and design elegance. File sharing of Word documents was a major problem some years back, but of course no longer. Caveat: we are a 20 lawyer litigation firm; I do not know have Macs would compete with PCs in larger networks.
Posted by Danielle Cole - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 6 hours, 38 minutes ago

Our Firm currently uses PCs, but I am a Mac user at home and would love to see a switch to mainstream use of Macs in the legal environment. The fact is that Macs are faster, more reliable, and the bells and whistles are far superior—all of which outweighs any downside to additional costs upfront. While I have experienced some type of computer “issues” on every PC I have ever worked on (whether while in school or at anyplace I’ve ever worked), I’ve never had a single issue with my Mac—no crashes, no locking up, no lost data, no viruses, no problems period. To quote Michael Buble, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day!”
Posted by Kirk Chocholek - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 6 hours, 33 minutes ago

I think it is wise to employ the best of both worlds. The reality is that more employees are familiar with PC applications and this is something that should be considered when making a legal technology assessment. Apple, however, has a history of innovation that cannot be ignored. It may not be a bad idea to have at least one in the office.
Posted by Susan - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 6 hours, 28 minutes ago

I’ve always been a Mac user in my personal life, but the firms I’ve worked in have always been PC. When I was in law school, my school was just developing the ability to take exams on laptops. Students used their personal laptops, with software installed by the school. As a Mac user in a PC world, I just knew there would be glitches if I tried to participate. Rather than risk the time and effort spent on a final exam, I decided to stick with the tried and true pen and paper. And damn did my hand hurt by the end - but it prepared me well for the laptop-free bar exam.
Posted by Stuart A. Forsyth - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 6 hours, 20 minutes ago

I have always been a Mac user in both my personal and professional life, even in all-Windows work environments. Mac is simply better and easier.
Posted by Yvonne Fournier - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 5 hours, 37 minutes ago

It hasn’t been a year yet since I switched to Mac. The transition has been a learning experience. Unfortunately, some research suppliers are not compatible with Mac. Having said that “I will NEVER go back to the PC world.” I deal with the little problems by using Parallels. I have two computers in one. And the Mac is SO RELIABLE, it never crashes,
Posted by vacationguru - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 5 hours, 28 minutes ago

Each platform has it virtues and woes. With PCs you focus on the functioning of the computer, since one always seems to need this and that component which, of course, did not come with the computer and has to be downloaded and installed - tasks which often involve the IT department (thank god for that, I am in IT - for over 20 years). With Macs, the focus is on the work and enjoyment of it, the tech aspects are taken care of by themselves - mostly. (Shame on Apple, I would have been in a different line of work if Apple had prevailed. That said, I have Macs at home. I do Help Desk and IT all day at work. Last thing I want is to go home and have to fix family’s computers… They all got Macs whether the chose it or not. Its my *domain*, after all! - Mother rules, anyway. Mother and Techie, lords it over. So there).
Posted by Tim - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 3 hours, 20 minutes ago

I switched to the mac sometime ago and haven’t looked back. There is a growing number of software titles out there. Clarity Legal Software, www.claritylegalsoftware.com, has an excellent transcript management software and DayLite is excellent for storing materials.

Plus, PDF capabilities are built into the mac already so there is no need for Adobe.
Posted by Happy Lawyer - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 3 hours, 3 minutes ago

I’ve gone back and forth between the two worlds since I bought my first computer - a Mac. I’ve worked in companies where my 19-person work group was the only Mac group in a division of nearly 1,000 people. Now I’m in a firm that is all PC all the time - except for some folks in marketing. Each has their attributes but without an army of tech support and IT wizards to fix problems, I’d go with the Mac!
Posted by erik - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 2 hours, 29 minutes ago

Mac all the way! Unfortunately, so much of the software is PC-based, that I have to run Windows on VMWare-Fusion. But that works just fine. So I’ve got it all, and I love it!
Posted by Jonathan Starre - 7 months, 1 week, 1 day, 2 hours, 2 minutes ago

I have been a Mac user since my father’s law office bought its first LISA in 1984. (I was one year old.) And while Macs are the superior product, there is one MAJOR drawback to being a Mac-using law student. The California Board of Bar Examiners forbids test-takers from using Macintosh to take their exams.

I come from an era of law students where 90% of students take their exams on laptops, and at my school, Loyola Law School of Los Angeles, it seems that over 10% of students prefer Macs. Until the State Bar comes around, Mac owning students like myself must still find a PC to use to take the Bar, or risk it all by employing an ancient method we have never used to take a race-horse exam: handwriting.

The problem with Macs (well, the State Bar actually) is that I still need to buy either a PC or a pen to become a lawyer!
Posted by Peter L. Wanger - 7 months, 1 week, 17 hours, 58 minutes ago

For Word Processing, I use WordPerfect X-3. WordPerfect has always been a much superior product than Microsoft Word. So I use a PC because WordPerfect stopped making a version for Mac a long time ago.
Posted by Carol K. Werner - 7 months, 6 days, 16 hours, 17 minutes ago

I carried the PC habit with me from “big law” to a solo practice, but after five years acting as my own IT department I got wise and switched to all Macs. I no longer lose countless hours tweaking computers and reestablishing my network settings after operating system updates. I use Office for Mac in order to easily work on documents with other attorneys, but I prefer Pages for correspondence. The two PCs that I kept around just in case haven’t been turned on in months.
Posted by Richard Barrett - 7 months, 5 days, 17 hours, 30 minutes ago

My windows machine has been dead in the water since November - it can’t manage 24 hours without a “blue screen of death”. I don’t have endless hours to spend on the phone with vendor support, co thank goodness I also have a Mac.
Posted by Lynn Carmichael - 7 months, 4 days, 23 hours ago

I have been a proud Mac owner/user since the early 80s when I bought my first 512K. It was followed by a Proforma, an iMac, a laptop and now a 4G. (Amazingly, they all still work but technology has outrun their capabilities.) I met with indifferent IT help in law school as they set up initially for pcs. I have worked on pcs and find them more difficult to us and breakdowns are more frequent. Now that I have a solo prac tice I love my Macs. If I have a problem, support is excellent. However, I did have to purchase a pc laptop in order to use a family law software I wanted.
Posted by Lou - 7 months, 4 days, 15 minutes ago

I’ve been a Mac lawyer for two years now, and there’s no going back. My one irritation is with software companies that continue to ignore us by producing PC-only products. Given all the problems with Vista, the number of Mac converts will only continue to rise, which will force software developers to get with the program or go out of business.
Posted by Troy - 7 months, 2 days, 8 hours, 39 minutes ago

Mac rules! As a recent convert, I tell everyone I know to invest in a Mac. I’m totally addicted. I am also happy to know that I can now use my Mac to take my Bar exams this July! As they say, change is slow, but in the case of Mac, it is undeniably forthcoming! There’s no looking back for me. EVER!
Posted by Michael R. Hoffmann - 7 months, 1 day, 6 hours, 26 minutes ago

I was surprised by the misconceptions about working on Mac’s. I’ve been using them exclusively since buying my first three in 1985, along with a server and printer, all of which I networked in one weekend. When I needed more, I bought 128’s and swapped to 512 mother boards. I’ve been updating every few years since and doing 95% of my own work on them. I don’t recall ever buying a replacement hard drive from Apple. My hubs, routers and modems do not come from Apple. My accelerator cards have not been from Apple, nor have my memory chips or DVD burners. Instructions for most hardware upgrades are online, and as long as I follow the instructions on CRT discharge and power supply safety, I’m not afraid to dive into any Mac. The real savings are in time spent training staff. Most can pick up everything they need to be productive within a few hours, and from their coworkers. Most who came to us having used PC’s switch to Mac’s as their personal machines. The only thing I really miss is a non-Microsoft word processor for OS 10 that works as well as the old WriteNow 4.0 does in Classic. Particularly one that does mail merge from a data document based on field name rather than just order, or from FileMaker Pro rather than the limited Address Book data base. OS 10 is very stable and hard freezes are rare. The occasional one seems related to my continued use of some of my favorite old programs in Classic.
Posted by John N. MacKay - 7 months, 1 day, 5 hours ago

I write this in my firm’s all Windows office on its all Windows network (except for several user supported rogue Macs) on a Mac. I have used MS DOS, Windows and Macs since I tried a Mac Plus on a dare as I was buying a top of the line MS DOS box (Compaq 386) in the mid-1980s. I have not had problems co-existing in a Windows world. The Mac has consistently been easier to use, more productive, and more reliable. It tolerates user foibles better than Windows, and allows the user to focus on work.

Windows is getting better, but so is OS X.

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