Is your law firm's content mobile enabled?

Over one third of Americans will be using a tablet computer by 2016. This from Sarah Rotman Epps (@srepps), a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, this morning.

Apple’s anticipated iPad update comes as the tablet market is white-hot. In a new report published for Forrester clients today, we’ve revised our US consumer tablet forecast upward: We now expect 112.5 million US adults to own a tablet in 2016, which will equal 34.3% of US adults. In Europe, the numbers are similarly impressive, with an expected 105.7 million tablet users, or 30.4% of consumers 16 and older, in the EU-7 by 2016. With an assumed replacement rate of two years, cumulative unit sales will be much higher: In the US, we forecast that consumers will buy 292.5 million tablets from 2010 to 2016. Tablets are a global phenomenon—we estimate that US consumers constitute only 43% of Apple’s 55 million iPads sold through the end of its last fiscal quarter, with the rest going to consumers and enterprises in the rest of the 90 countries where the iPad is now sold.

These tablets are being used in the workplace, in addition to at home.

Although the No. 1 place where consumers use tablets is in the living room, 37% of US tablet owners take them to work as well. In a recent Forrester survey of 9,912 technology end users at SMBs and enterprises in 17 countries, we found that workers in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and Mexico actually led demand for wanting to use a tablet for work—and being willing to share the cost of the device with their employers.

As a law firm, you need to be asking is our content mobile enabled? Are our lawyers, as well as our business development and marketing/communications professionals, using apps on tablets for their consumption of news and information? Do we as a firm and the people we have hired for web development and the like really know what we’re doing when it comes to mobile? The answer in many cases is no. Lawyers and marketing professionals I’ve sat with have had an iPad, but when I asked if they were familiar with Zite, Flipboard, and RSS reader apps, the answer was no. They had not a clue. I come across a lot of blogs published by law firms and legal marketing professionals which render poorly, at best, on my iPad and iPhone. This shouts “We don’t know what we are doing or don’t care.” Lots of law blogs have their RSS feeds coming out in excerpts, as opposed to full text. Big mistake if you’re looking to build followers. No one wants the inconvenience of going to a browser environment to read your posts when they read other blogs in full text feed without the blog’s design and promotional copy displayed. Many blogs, including a lot of LexBlog Network blogs, which have not yet migrated to WordPress, render the browser interface of the blog on the iPhone and Android phones as opposed to a nice, easy to navigate, mobile enabled interface. A significant number of blogs have not set up their RSS feeds properly for both ease in mobile consumption and for ease in sharing the blog content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn from mobile devices. Many law blogs have screwed up titles and feeds when displayed on Flipboard. Mind you I am not advising firms to build their own apps. In 99.9% of the cases, law firm apps are not the answer. Your target audience is not going to download and use multiple law firm apps. Your audience is going to use tablets and consume content of their own choosing via aggregation apps such as Zite, Flipboard, and RSS readers or on networks which aggregate, curate, and syndicate content from thousands of sources into mobile environments. Forget articles on websites. Forget email newsletters. Forget pdfs. That’s history. Build for the future by beginning to understand how content is produced for and consumed on mobile.