Et 2, iPad?

Anyone who has sat through a CLE seminar on e-discovery, watching attorneys fingering their iPhones as the speaker rattles on unnoticed, knows that the burgeoning interest in the legal community in the iPad — and now the iPad 2 — isn’t strictly professional. And no, they weren’t using the sophisticated devices for high-tech note-taking.

I remember my first iPad sighting. I watched a young man at a cafe put down his iPhone and produce from his shoulder bag a purple velvet bag held closed with a drawstring. From the velvet bag emerged (cue cherubs and archangels) a tablet that looked like an oversized iPhone, which he held in his hand like a sacred artifact. He quickly returned it into its velvet housing, drew the drawstrings closed, placed it carefully back into his shoulder bag, and went back to his iPhone. I wasn’t sure he did this out of fear of sullying the sacred and the new or if he really didn’t know what to do with the damned thing that he couldn’t do with his iPhone.