Clio posted the results of their 2011 Apple in Law Firms Survey in December, and they reveal a continuing slow, but steady, movement in the direction of Apple.

I covered 2010 Clio’s Survey that coincided with the MILOfest Conference of that year.

In 2011, Clio had 763 people participate in the Survey (down slightly from the 835 that participated a year before). Seventy-six percent of the respondents were from firms that had 10 attorneys or less (up from 50% of firms that size last year).

One of the more interesting numbers was that 25.3% of the respondents were Mac “newcomers,” meaning that they had switched to the Mac within the past year. Last year’s survey only reported about 20% of respondents fell into that category, so that certainly reveals that more lawyers are making the switch.

Why are lawyers “going Mac?” The Survey reported that 46.5% of the respondents said they chose Apple hardware over PC options because the technology was more reliable and secure. This was the exact same number in the 2010 Survey.

The next most popular response to “why” was “usability” at 33.8%, up from 27% in 2010. This tells me that lawyers are finding the Mac and iOS devices to be very intuitive. I usually hear the comment “it just works!”

Next was “familiarity due to home use” at 9.8% down from about 11% in 2010. And coming in last was still “aesthetics & design” which hit on 3%, way down from 7% in 2010. That tells me that the idea that Macs are more expensive because they’re so much prettier is getting blasted away. Macs are finally being perceived as the legitimate products that they are.

One of the biggest contingents in the Survey were lawyers using iPhones, which accounted for about 60.9% of the respondents. This number rose from only 50% last year. Jeff Richardson at www.iphonejd.com estimated last summer thatapproximately 300,000 U.S. lawyers use an iPhone based on numbers from the Annual ABA Legal Technology Survey.

Read more about the 2011 Apple in Law Firm Survey results here.

Last year, the Clio team offered the first “Apple in Law Firms” Survey. There were over 800 respondents to the survey and the results were truly fascinating (well, at least for folks like me!). I gave a full write-up of last year’s results on the blog here, and Clio gave their own write-up, as well as a couple of focused comments.

This week is your last chance to participate in the 2011 “Apple in Law Offices” Survey which apparently sports a new name, as well as a chance to win an iPad 2! You don’t have to be a Mac-user to take the survey – the questions cover iOS devices as well as plans for using cloud-based services, etc.

The survey only takes a couple of minutes, and you have the possibility of wining an iPad 2! Click here to get started and I’ll be sure to break-down the results of the survey once it’s completed.

The results are in from Clio’s 2010 Apple in Law Firms Survey and I wanted to highlight a few points and make a few comments. Jack Newton from Clio first presented some of the results at MILOfest and then released the full results after the conference.

My first pleasant surprise was the number of respondents to the survey. Jack reported that they received 835 responses to their survey which covered both Mac and Windows users.

The greatest majority of respondents (50%) were from small firms with between 1-10 total users. 15% of the respondents were from large firms (> 50 total users). About 10% of the respondents were law students.

Most of the survey questions were directed to the Mac-using respondents, the first being how long they had been using Macs in their office. The greatest majority have been using Macs for over 2 years:

The next question asked which “cloud-based apps” that lawyers were using on their Macs. Not surprisingly, Clio came out on top, but Jack Newton at MILOfest mentioned that the survey was a little biased since Clio was actually sponsoring the survey.

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Clio is sponsoring the “Apple in Law Firm Survey” and I encourage every Mac-using lawyer to respond to the handful of questions at http://macsurvey.questionpro.com.

This will be one of the best gauges of how far the Mac has made in-roads into the legal profession. The survey only takes a couple of minutes and asks which cloud-based or desktop applications that you use in your practice.

The recent ABA Legal Technology Survey reported that 4% of respondents use the Mac OS, up from 3% the year before. But the “Apple in Law Firm Survey” from Clio digs a little deeper to give us a sense of what applications are used by Mac-using lawyers.

From Clio’s blog:

The results will be shared during Clio President Jack Newton’s presentation at MILOFest, a conference designed for lawyers interested in Macs, iPhones, iPads and other Apple products in the law office. MILOFest takes place from November 11-13 this year, in Orlando, FL

By they way, Clio is giving away an iPad to a randomly selected respondent!