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New ProView Brings Lawyers and iPads Together

By Robyn Hagan Cain on January 24, 2012 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

If you've been looking for an excuse to purchase an iPad, Thomson Reuters has your solution.

It's an app called Thomson Reuters ProView, and it allows you to access handy legal tools, like codes and court rules, from your iPad. It's the type of product that -- in our lawyering days -- would have only existed in a parallel science-fiction universe.

So why is ProView better than accessing the same information on your laptop, or using a book?

For starters, iPads are slick, fun, and you can use them to play Angry Birds.

From a more practical standpoint, ProView allows you to highlight and make notes in the titles you load, just like you do in traditional books. Unlike other eReaders, ProView transfers your highlighting and comments to the latest volume of a title each time you update to a new edition because it securely saves your notes and annotations on a Thomson Reuters cloud. If your iPad is lost or stops working, your notes and annotations are still available. (By contrast, if you lose a hard copy of title, you're out of luck.)

We like to mark up codes and treatises, and we spent a lot of time re-highlighting/tabbing books when we practiced, so this strikes us as the best thing ever.

For now, available titles are limited. Florida practitioners are in luck because the Florida Rules of Court, as well as several professional development titles, are among the early ProView offerings.

The app is free, so you only pay for the titles you need, but you need a Westlaw OnePass username and password to access the app. If you want to play with the app before making a purchase, you can access McKinney's New York Rules of Court, Federal District, for free. (If you're also licensed in New York, you just got a free copy of McKinney's New York Rules of Court, didn't you?) Thomson Reuters will be adding more titles soon.

If you have an iPad, give ProView a try with a free sample book. And if you're still longing for an iPad, check out this ProView preview.

Court rules look so much prettier on a tablet. Promise. And aren't pretty rules and codes what the law is all about?

[Note: FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters business.]

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