Forgetting your phone at home seems like a disaster, and six hours of screen time a day is the norm. A smartphone helps you organize work processes more efficiently, simplify your sports activities, and improve the quality of your rest. It can also help you sleep better, brighten up those hour-long waits at the ASGM, and make new interesting acquaintances without any extra effort. To do this, you just need to choose the right app. We asked lawyers to share their favorite programs and compiled a selection of useful services.

Surprisingly, the lawyers surveyed by Pravo.ru had few purely legal apps on their smartphones. The maximum is “Consultant+” for quickly searching for a regulatory legal act or a plenum, and “Kontur.Fokus” for quickly checking a counterparty.

This is partly due to the fact that there are simply few programs “tailored exclusively for lawyers,” says David Kononov from the law firm Lemchik, Krupsky and Partners. But this is normal, because a lawyer does not use just one thing in his work. “He needs completely different tools, from a daily planner to a timer and a voice recorder when he rehearses before a court appearance,” explains Kononov.

A lawyer also needs services to while away the time while waiting for a court hearing and to relax after a difficult process or tense negotiations. For example, an audiobook app and a meditation program are perfect for this, but let’s take things in order.

Business applications

When communicating with clients online, it is important that the service provides at least basic guarantees for the protection of transmitted data and does not link the user to his phone number, notes Vladimir Efremov, partner at the law firm Arbitrazh.ru. According to the lawyer, these requirements have become especially relevant during the pandemic, since many confidential meetings could not be held in person due to flight restrictions. And here a good solution is the Wickr me messenger.

It was created in 2013 after reports of mass surveillance by the NSA. In terms of functionality, Wickr me is not much different from regular messengers. Its main feature is information security. Wickr me does not require a phone number or email address to register, which ensures complete anonymity, the lawyer believes.

It transmits all information, including photos, audio, text and video, in encrypted form. The application also has an option for secure audio calls and the ability to set a timer for self-destruction of messages. At the same time, Wickr me itself does not have access to either the user’s messages or the list of his contacts.

For the iOS system, this application was launched back in 2015, for Android a little later, in 2016. The principle of operation is very simple: after installation, the program adds an additional keyboard to the basic settings of the phone. You can switch to it in the same way as changing the input language. Visually, “Yandex.Keyboard” is almost no different from the built-in one, but it has a number of additional functions.

For example, when typing in Russian or English, Yandex keyboard prompts pop up, there are ready-made sets of gifs on various topics and a quick search for images on the Internet. In addition, the service has a built-in translator function, and if necessary, you can use it to draw something for your interlocutor. But perhaps the most important “working” function of the program is speech recognition.

Unlike built-in speech recognizers, Yandex’s service can automatically place punctuation marks and does it “at a decent level,” the lawyer says. “Of course, the resulting text requires some editing. But overall, the time savings are significant,” he shares.

Trello is one of the most popular project management services. You can work in it both through a browser and through an application. Externally, Trello is a desktop with boards on it. You can use them yourself or connect other people to them – colleagues, friends, etc. Within each board, you can create lists, and within them, cards with checklists and comments.

The application is built on the principle of the Japanese Kanban system, in which team members can see both the entire volume of work and the status of each task at any given time. This is very convenient for planning multi-layered and branched tasks, notes Yulia Mikhalchuk from the law firm Saveliev, Batanov & Partners. Roman Yankovsky, a partner at Tomashevskaya & Partners, who uses Trello for both work and personal matters, says the same.