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mfdynusore · Mar 6, 2006, 06:43 PM

I know there are several lawyers on this board as well as some who have played one on TV. Any recent Law School grads have any experience using a Mac in law school? I am particularly interested in comments about using virtual PC to access windows only test software. Any specific info regarding Philadelphia area schoolos (Temple, Rutgers Drexel) and / or Nortwestern would be appreciated.

zankoku · Mar 6, 2006, 06:55 PM

I am in law school now, and my experience has been that for most purposes a Mac will suit you just fine. The only real time you'll need a PC is if you choose to take your final exams on computer using ExamSoft. The problem is, unfortunately, you won't be able to run ExamSoft using VPC. Once you download your exam templates and launch the exam mode, ExamSoft will reboot your computer and create a closed environment (so you can't access the Internet or your notes). Needless to say, VPC will not run once rebooted and in the ExamSoft environment. I don't think ExamSoft will be making its way to the Mac anytime soon, but I could be wrong.

All that said, you can still opt to take a paper exam (but you'll likely get more words out by typing).

Aside from final exams, all your legal research and writing, and in-class note-taking can be done on a Mac. I would say about 15% or so of the student body at my school seems to have Macs.

If you really want a Mac, I'd say buy one and get a cheap PC laptop (or borrow one) for exams.

besson3c · Mar 6, 2006, 06:55 PM

Originally Posted by mfdynusore

I know there are several lawyers on this board as well as some who have played one on TV. Any recent Law School grads have any experience using a Mac in law school? I am particularly interested in comments about using virtual PC to access windows only test software. Any specific info regarding Philadelphia area schoolos (Temple, Rutgers Drexel) and / or Nortwestern would be appreciated.

I'm not a law student, but you should consider the possibility of a Remote Desktop connection to a very cheap PC, or buying an Intel Mac and waiting for something like Darwine to start supporting the imminent Wine 1.0 release. These sorts of solutions will work far better than Virtual PC, which sucks on PowerPC and may take a long time to work on Intel Macs.

SimeyTheLimey · Mar 6, 2006, 08:25 PM

Examsoft does not work in VPC. However, my school (Georgetown) phased out Examsoft alltogether. Now they just get students to sign an honor code statement, which given the horrible consequences for cheating is quite effective. I don't think that is all that unusual, so you could ask the registrars at the schools you are interested in whether they have the same policy.

I can pretty much guarantee, though, that they will not allow besson3c's solution. They aren't going to let you remote to a computer outside the exam room for reasons that should be pretty obvious. If your school distrusts its students enough to require special exam software, you can guarantee they would freak out if you start accessing a PC somewhere else. And when registrars and deans start freaking out, it usually isn't so great for the student.

Otherwise, as stated above, you can do everything on a Mac. Law school really doesn't use computing power much. If you have word and access to the web, you can do it all.

Y3a · Mar 6, 2006, 08:35 PM

all 3 of my Lawyer clients use Mac's in their practices...

Dr Reducto · Mar 6, 2006, 09:00 PM

About Examsoft, how is it not able to run under VPC?

Wouldn't the restart be trapped by the virtual system? That's the way I would imagine it working under VMWare

OldManMac · Mar 6, 2006, 09:26 PM

http://www.apple.com/business/profil...ut/index2.html

http://www.apple.com/business/profiles/sgrk/index2.html

http://www.macattorney.com/

wdlove · Mar 6, 2006, 09:30 PM

So happy to see that Macs are useful in the legal profession. At my lawyers office, they have two iMac G5's.

ranga · Mar 7, 2006, 01:21 AM

I'm in law school right now and a Mac works fine for everything except taking exams using ExamSoft. I used my iBook for legal research, writing, notes, &c. w/o any problems. I think that about 10-15% of my class uses Macs and many of my profs use Macs and I haven't really heard any complaints other than the inability to use ExamSoft.

Technically it would be possible to get by w/o a PC at all if you are good at handwriting essays. I tried this and found it was very hard. It was much easier to take an exam w/ a computer than to write out an essay. The best idea is to get a really cheap PC laptop that will run ExamSoft and only use it for taking exams.

Good luck in law school.

--ranga

mfdynusore · Mar 7, 2006, 03:03 AM

Thanks, everyone for the replies. To clarify I am doing this research for my son who will be the law student in the fall.Again many thanks.

SimeyTheLimey · Mar 7, 2006, 05:20 AM

Originally Posted by Dr Reducto

About Examsoft, how is it not able to run under VPC?

Wouldn't the restart be trapped by the virtual system? That's the way I would imagine it working under VMWare

The point of Winsoft is to lock down your computer so you can't access most of the hard drive so that you can't cut and paste materials written before the exam. That doesn't work if you have your "operating system" located inside a program that you can minimize and work around.

My school got tired of Winsoft crashing all the time, which is why they eventually gave up.

Note: this is all from reputation. I hand wrote all my in-class exams. It just works better for me.