Macs are showing up on law school campuses at a truly astonishing rate. At least two schools I know of are expecting half of the incoming fall 2008 students to be using Macs. This is a far cry from 2005, when the Intel Macs hadn’t been introduced and Macs were few and far between in law classrooms.
Thankfully law school IT departments across the United States are taking notice of this trend. Yesterday I took part in one of the sessions at the 2008 CALI Conference for Law School Computing. The session was attended by 30+ IT professionals, all of whom work at law schools. The topic was managing Macs in a law school IT environment. I attended virtually, using Skype video via my home iMac. I’m happy to report that it went off without any technical glitches.
I spent a few minutes telling the participants a bit about trends in the Mac law student community over the past three years. Then John Daly, who works at Fordham Law, went into detail about the challenges law schools face in supporting Macs. He also described how Fordham has dealt with these challenges. There were also some interesting questions and back-and-forth after John finished his presentation.
While some IT managers see more Macs as a good thing (less support calls for Mac users), some are still skeptical (supporting Macs requires staying on top of another OS in addition to Windows). But none of them are denying that Macs are moving into law schools in a big way.
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