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According to the ABA 2014 Tech Survey, 91% of attorneys use a smartphone and roughly 49% use a tablet in their practice. But what they use their phone or tablet for in their practice has not really changed over the four years that the ABA has been doing the survey: they are using their tablets for Internet access, calendars, and contacts. Only 4% report using a smartphone to create documents; that number rises to 17% with tablets. Expense tracking is slightly higher: 10% on tablets versus 7% on smartphones.

But even with all this technology, most lawyers still prefer their paper books. Case in point: at a recent probate seminar, I was surprised when a number of attorneys purchased our Michigan Medicaid Planning Handbook even when I mentioned that this book was in their online partnership subscription and they already had access to it. A few people commented that they felt more comfortable with the paper version. It made me wonder about online resources and e-books in the legal profession and whether those would ever replace print versions. Here is what I found:

1. Paper is what we are used to. In his blog, Plato’s Cave: why most lawyers love paper and hate e-discovery and what this means to the future of legal education, Ralph Losey comments that lawyers love paper because “that is all they have ever known.” He goes on to say, “[T]hey learn to read on paper. They study paper books. They go to law schools where they learn that legal documents are made of paper.… After school, … [t]hey are shown how to generate papers, copy papers, … file papers,” etc. You get the idea. He ultimately concludes, “Lawyers live their entire life in a paper world.”

2. Our brain is wired for reading on paper. Modern screens and e-readers fail to recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper. Not only do people miss that tactile experience, not having it may prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way, explains Ferris Jabr in his article The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens. Ultimately, this can impact comprehension. The brain is wired to perceive text in its entirety as a physical landscape—which explains why, when trying to locate a particular piece of written information, people often remember where the text appeared on a given page. In contrast, screen readers interfere with this navigation and physicality, instead offering an endless scrolling of words.

3. The feel of a paper is important. Lawyers like to spread out with their books and make use of highlighters and post-its, explains Bess Reynolds in The Challenges of E-Books in Law Firm Libraries, in which she documents the e-book trial that her firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP, set up with three publishers. At the end of the trial, not one lawyer asked the library to purchase an e-book. The firm concluded that, if the best an e-book could do was mimic the use of a print book, there was no reason to switch.