What law firms in the United States use macintosh computers?

Dear JB,

I have looked, and looked, and cannot find THE definitive answer to
your question, but have uncovered a few things that I hope you will
find useful in attempting to understand this very difficult market:

Guessing that there are approximately 6,500 law firms using Macs and
approximately 130,000 Macs in use.

As to the number of firms, “in February of 1998, the American Bar
Association conducted a  survey of small law firms. According to this
study, 74 percent of lawyers work in a firm with 20 or fewer employees
(i.e., a “small” law firm). The results, as far as Macintosh use goes,
were surprising. Approximately 8.9 percent of the firms reported that
Apple computers were the dominant brand used in their firm. This is an
even more amazing statistic considering that this study was compiled
before the introduction of the iMac, the G3 or the iBook! The
percentage of Macintosh users in the small law office market must be
greater than that now.”  http://www.lawofficecomputing.com/mac.htm
Law Office Computing, August/September 2000.  

There are 881,000 lawyers in the United States.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/01statab/labor.pdf (Statistical
Abstract of the United States, frame 18, page 380, table no. 593).

Using these statistics, the number of lawyers working in small firms
would approximate 881,000 x 74% = 652,000. If the average size of the
“small firm” is 10 attorneys then there would be approximately 65,000
small firms, where presumably 10% use Macs.

This rough approximation would indicate that 6,500 firms using Macs.

Or another take, if each attorney in the "MAC" firms in fact used a
Mac, then there must be approximately 65,000 Mac's in use by the
attorneys and another 65,000 by support staff, for a total of 130,000.

But the 10% number is highly disputed. Apple says the number is 25%,
while one market watcher claims that the number is much smaller, and
slipping. http://www.lawtechnews.com/march02/mac_corner_p37.html;
http://www.statejournal.com/Archive2000/art4214202001.cfm


Various web-sites that may interest you:

http://www.macattorney.com/

http://www.apple.com/smallbusiness/legal/

http://www.maclaw.org/

http://www.lawtechnews.com/

http://www.abanet.org/lpm2/mac/home.html


Again, I hope that this information is helpful even though there does
not appear to be "the" list of firms available in the public domain.
Incidentally, I reviewed various material in our law firm and did not
find anything close to a list of firms.

If there is ANYTHING I can do for you, please let me know.

Tom



Search Terms:

://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=statistical+abstract+of+the+united+states

://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&querytime=WPRXjB&q=%22law+firm%22+mac+apple

Although not satisfied with the answer, given the difficulty I myself
ran into finding similar data, I am happy.  This was a hard question
and for some reason there just isn't a lot out there on the subject. 
But the comments and answers that were posted were at least good
stepping stones into finding an absolute answer.  thank you.

According to this article,
http://www.statejournal.com/Archive2000/art4214202001.cfm, the
American Bar Association has a legal technology survey each year,
which shows how many firms among those they surveyed use Mac.  A
followup at the ABA website
(http://www.abanet.org/tech/ltrc/survstat.html) shows that the report
costs $249 for members and >$300 for non-members.  I don't know if the
report would give you the details as to the names of the firms though
(they may if you are willing to pay for the info)

By the way, there's a machintosh interest group at the ABA.  Their
website is
http://www.abanet.org/lpm2/mac/home.html.  THere's a link that says:
list of law firms that use machintosh on that site.  But unfortunately
that link is dead.  You may want to contact them to see if they do
keep a list.