The successful launch of Ogilvy Renault’s mobile suite of applications received some good press from two major Canadian news outlets over the past week. The Financial Post’s Drew Hasselback points out that Ogilvy Renault’s mobile applications are the first law firm suite to support Blackberry, the smartphone of choice for lawyers. This is an important step for mobile marketing in the legal industry as OR’s lawyers and clients now have the ability to quickly find the information they’re looking for without resorting to the painful experience of trying to navigate a desktop website using a Blackberry browser.
The Montreal Gazette’s Kathryn Leger adds another interesting element to the OR launch and she notes in her article that there is a debate forming over whether legal firms should be developing for the mobile web or various app platforms. Ogilvy Renault has covered both sides of the debate with their mobile launch, giving their customers the choice of viewing their content using the mobile web or an app created for their iPhone or Blackberry.
For anyone interested in finding out more about how this debate is forming, I suggested reading an interesting perspective from Econsultancy: In mobile, it’s not apps versus mobile web, it’s both. Also, you should follow Joyspoon on Twitter as we’re constantly updating our findings on this debate.
With major legal firms like Allen & Overy, Morrison Foerster, Tory’s and Latham & Watkins all entering the mobile space in 2010, it will be interesting to see how the mobile websites and apps produced by legal organizations mature in the coming year.