I-Pads are now one of the leading apps being used by United States trial lawyers.

That's the finding by legal technology lawyer and writer Robert Ambrogi in the online US publication National Law Review.

In his article 42 Essential Apps for Trial Lawyers in 2016 http://www.natlawreview.com/article/42-essential-apps-trial-lawyers-2016, Ambrogi describes the I-Pad as indispensable with it being used as a vital tool to organise cases, present evidence, and conduct research on the fly, pick jurors, along with many other legal tasks.

In the New Zealand legal sector, practitioners are not embracing the digital technology quite as hungrily as their United States counterparts.

But the founder and strategic advisor at E-Discovery, which specialises in legal technology, Andrew King, says their use is increasing all the time.

"The access to I-Pads, tablets, I-phones and other smart phones are an integral part of any lawyer's toolkit," he says.

And Mr King says it is not just the so-called young Y-generation lawyers with the appetite for technology, although he points out they are part of the Facebook generation that have grown up with access to these smart technologies.

"Technology allows lawyers to practice law better, many of the tasks that used to involve considerable manual work can now either be automated, or its effectiveness improved, allowing lawyers to provide greater value to their clients," he says.

Andrew King says legal work that traditionally involved considerable manual paper based tasks has now been replaced with digital technology such as eDiscovery software, practice and matter management, billing, legal research tools, conveyancing, dictation and general information management.

And he says the future for lawyers will continue to be technologically driven.

"Technology will evolve more and there'll be further automation of tasks that are time consuming, costly and presently performed by people," he says.