Every three to five years, most law firms go through the time-honored ritual of upgrading their attorneys’ hardware. Traditionally, this “refresh” was like buying a new car: It might take a while, cost a lot and mean testing different models, but you knew what the end result would look like. Firms heading into a refresh understood that when all was said and done, they’d wind up with fairly traditional, if beefed-up, desktop or laptop computers.
That’s no longer a given. While familiar-looking PCs will still get the job done, so too, perhaps, will the new generation of tablets, specifically those models that come with laptop-grade CPUs and run full-blown Windows. Or maybe a so-called convertible or hybrid—a flexible (literally) laptop that can transform itself into a tablet—will do the trick.
