Apple’s iPad was released in the UK on 28 May 2010. Since then I have used mine daily in my practice as a corporate lawyer, both in and out of the office.

So after a year and a half of this, what is the point for lawyers? Are tablets just a gimmick or are they on the verge of magically revolutionising legal practice?

I should probably start with an apology for the Apple-centric nature of this piece. My experience is with the iPad (and in practice almost every tablet I see in business meetings is an iPad), but other tablets are available and most of the points in this article are just as applicable to them.

I use the iPad a lot in meetings for taking notes, referring to documents, looking up company information and the like. All this could be done on a laptop, but the tablet is a lot less intrusive as it lies flat on the table rather than erecting a barrier between you and the client.

The absence of a clicky keyboard is also a bonus!

Fortunately, the device is less of a talking point in meetings than it used to be (for the first couple of months it had a negative impact on productivity as a large part of each meeting was spent talking about and demonstrating the iPad!).

I don’t see the iPad as a replacement for a laptop or desktop given that a lot of the workload of the average lawyer consists of editing long documents (which is really easier using a computer). Surprisingly, the most obvious casualty of my iPad adoption is actually my office printer.

I have a twin monitor setup on my desktop, but pre-iPad I would usually print off long documents to read them as this isn’t easy to do on a monitor or a laptop.

A PDF version of a document on the iPad is a totally different ballgame. You can pick it up, pore over it, or lean back in your chair and browse through it. You can pass it across the boardroom table or hand it to a colleague to read.

You can also mark it up with comments and notes, jump to a specific page or bookmark or search for terms in the text.

It is also easy to carry several boxes worth of documents around with you in a package which weighs just 1.5lbs.

Because of this, I hardly ever print documents now unless they need to be signed and a day out of the office or travelling requires me to pack just the iPad rather than a bag full of files.

There is room for improvement. A display optimised for document reading (like a colour version of the Kindle) and wireless synchronisation with my office document management system would be top of my wish list.

However, even as things stand the iPad has seen my printer gathering dust for the last year or so.

I have also found that the iPad is more than just the sum of its parts. After all, if you list out the various things you can do using an iPad, the reality is that most of them could be done on a laptop with a 3G dongle (and things like editing legal documents would be much easier on the laptop).

What the laptop can’t deliver is a solid ten hours of use from one battery charge, instant restart from a sleep state and permanent connectivity.

This means that the iPad is often a better alternative to a laptop when you are out of the office as it lets you get things done in the odd five minute slots when firing up your laptop wouldn’t be worth the effort.

On connectivity, my advice to anyone getting an iPad for business is to prioritise 3G over storage capacity. 16GB is plenty for documents and applications if you don’t want to load up with music and video and the iPad really comes alive when you have constant connectivity.

The data plans are pretty cheap (at least when compared to smart phone tariffs) and in my experience relying on wifi connections when out and about is painful.

Finally, the intuitive nature of iOS makes the iPad a lot easier to set up and use than any PC. This has been borne out by the experience of the firms who have adopted large numbers of them and reported extremely low IT support costs for the devices.

There are some downsides. From day one the biggest problem with the iPad was how to actually get your files on to it. There isn’t a central filing system as such in iOS. Data used by apps is “sandboxed” so that other apps can’t access it directly (there is an “open in ”¦” function which allows you to open a file in a different app, but you can then only save it in that app, not back to the original location).

The obvious solution is a cloud syncing service like DropBox, but this doesn’t comply with either the Data Protection Act or the Solicitors’ Code of Conduct if used for client information or other personal data. Briefly, there are issues with the 8th Data Protection Principle as the data is likely to be stored outside the EU and also with the 7th Data Protection Principle as the provider doesn’t accept the necessary information security obligations.

Legal technology providers have started to address this and I am currently trialling an online Data Room service called Project Fusion which provides secure, DPA compliant cloud storage and allows you to access your documents on the iPad using GoodReader, which is my current favourite platform for viewing and marking up PDF documents.

GoodReader is also one of the few apps on the iPad which fully utilises Apple’s Data Protection API so that any data stored in the app is securely encrypted. In combination with Project Fusion this provides a secure platform with meets the requirements of the DPA and the Solicitor’s Code of Conduct.

Some law firms are using virtual desktop solutions such as Citrix to access their office systems, but I prefer being able to use native iPad apps so the cloud hosted solution works well for me.

What next for the iPad and tablet computing? I haven’t actually moved up to an iPad2 as the original model does everything I need, but the next big change is going to be software rather than hardware.

Apple will be releasing the iOS5 operating system in the autumn which will incorporate the iCloud (basically a cloud service which synchronises your apps, data and media across all of your Apple devices) along with a list of other changes such as a Blackberry BBM-style instant messaging service and full Twitter integration.

By themselves none of these changes are particularly essential for lawyers, but they do strengthen Apple’s position as a computing “ecosystem” where your data is stored in their cloud and pushed out to each new device as you buy it.

People will have very different perspectives as to whether this is a good thing or not, but I think it will strengthen the iPad’s position as the tablet of choice for lawyers who use an iPhone or an Apple computer.

There are some other players to watch as well.

RIM’s Playbook tablet should logically be able to leverage the widespread adoption of Blackberry handhelds to become the tablet of choice for IT departments. At present though, the Playbook seems to be crippled by the lack of an onboard email client (for this you have to tether it to a Blackberry handheld using the “Blackberry Bridge” application).

Google’s acquisition of Motorola means that they also have to be on the watch list for future Android-powered tablets (or maybe even a Chrome OS tablet further down the line?).

Regardless of the manufacturer, my experience with the iPad leads to me to believe that tablet computing could be a real hit in the legal sector.

Whether this comes through mass adoption by IT departments or a more insidious process of firms providing support for devices used by individual lawyers I predict the iPad will become an increasingly common sight in law firms over the next few years.

Jon Bloor is the head of Business Law at Lees Solicitors LLP on the Wirral, Merseyside. He also has an interest in legal technology and social media.

Email jb@lees.co.uk.

Follow him on Twitter @JonBloor.