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.