Nearly every industry of business uses some kind of mobile technology in their day-to-day functions these days. Lawyers are no exception. The American Bar Association’s Legal Technological Survey Report revealed that 94 percent of lawyers said they regularly or occasionally use their smartphone at home for law-related tasks and – shockingly – they even used their smartphone in the office more often than a desktop computer.

What makes a lawyer truly mobile? Most just use their devices to check an email while grabbing a coffee at Starbucks while not knowing that there are legal-specific apps they can use to make their phone a veritable law office on-the-go.

Law in the Cloud

The cloud offers lawyers unparalleled flexibility in terms of what they can access on their smartphones. A mobile device can turn into a fax machine, scanner, and can even be your transcriptionist.

When the entire office is connected to the cloud, communication becomes so much simpler. A lawyer out of town can access and update their schedule and send it to their office immediately instead of waiting until they’re on a work computer or they can get ahold of someone who can update their schedule for them.

Just think: the more you can use your phone for your legal work, the less you have to rely on clunky desktop computers. That means money, time and space well saved. As long as you have an internet connection, you can work from anywhere because of the cloud.

Be Safe

One similarity between working remotely and working on a desktop computer still remains – you need to protect yourself from cyber criminals!

A smartphone can be hacked or flooded with spam the same way a computer can, and you need to take the same care in protected your phone that you do with your home or work computer.

We recently covered three free apps that will strongly fortify a smartphone against potential data breaches, but there are some other basic strategies lawyers need to be aware of. The first is two-factor authentication, which means that when an application gets a login from an outside device it’s not used to seeing, it will send a code to a second device that will need to be punched in before granting access.

The second strategy is that lawyers need to know malware exists on smartphones, even iPhones, and take proper precaution. There is a preconceived notion floating around that you can’t get a virus on a smartphone, and while it’s true that it’s definitely more commonplace on a computer, there are definitely viruses and malware that affects smartphones. Due to this misconception, people more brazenly click links from random emails or go on unprotected websites on their phones only to be surprised when they see they’ve been hacked.

There are many ways to tell if a hacker has accessed your phone and Inc.com made a pretty comprehensive list on what to look out for.

To learn more about how the cloud can help you realize the true potential of working remotely, read our Services page on the TOSS C3 website or call us anytime at 1-888-884-8677 to ask us about the plethora of services we offer for lawyers on the go!