My top iPhone apps for maximum productivity | Legal Loop

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Every year or so, I like to share a roundup of the iPhone apps I use most often for work-related purposes. I find that the apps I rely on change over time. New apps are released and technology changes, leading to improvements in my workflows and my preferred apps. Hopefully, you’ll find that a few of these apps will help increase your productivity as well.

Right now, the apps I rely on the most are, not surprisingly, generative AI tools. I have paid subscriptions to Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Both of these tools are easily accessible on the home screen of my iPhone. Throughout the day, I use these apps for different purposes and also vary my usage based on whether I’ve hit Claude’s much lower data limit.

Another app I use frequently is Google’s NotebookLM. This is an AI-powered research assistant that summarizes, organizes, and answers questions about your specific documents while grounding its responses in the sources you provide. I use NotebookLM to analyze a group of work-related documents and also to help study for a wine certification I’m working on

Wispr Flow is another app that I use often. It’s an AI-powered dictation tool that converts natural speech into polished, formatted text in real-time across any application, automatically removing filler words and correcting mistakes as you talk. This app’s dictation results are far superior to output from the native functionality available in my MacBook, and I tend to use it for dictating articles or correspondence.

A different type of transcription app I like to use is Otter. Otter is a tool that records and transcribes meetings. It does a great job identifying the different speakers and also has tools that will allow you to summarize the meeting, query the transcription using AI chat, and add comments.

I also use the Google app a lot, primarily to conduct searches using photographs that I’ve taken. I’ve found that by searching using an image, I’m able to locate the information I need very quickly. Here’s a non-work-related example: recently, our toilet broke. So, I took a picture of the broken part and was able to very quickly identify it and locate a replacement part using Google image search.

Another app I use many times each day is the 1Password app, which is a secure password manager that centralizes your login credentials, sensitive documents, and payment information within an encrypted vault. Using it you can generate strong passwords and autofill them across all your devices.

Finally, one of my most essential professional tools is Slack, a channel-based communication platform that streamlines collaboration by replacing fragmented email threads with real-time messaging and integrated huddles. At my company, 8am, I use it daily to stay synchronized with my internal team; additionally, I’ve leveraged the platform to build a dedicated community for legal technology journalists, where we share breaking stories and analyze the latest industry trends.

It’s clear that my workflow has become increasingly intertwined with AI, but what I value most about these tools is the friction they remove from my day. Whether I’m using Google to fix a plumbing issue, dictating an article through Wispr Flow, or keeping up with the legal tech world on Slack, these apps serve as a practical bridge between my professional responsibilities and my personal interests. My home screen will undoubtedly look different a year from now as new tech emerges, but for today, this lineup is what keeps me efficient, organized, and ready for whatever comes next.

Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney, author, journalist, and Principal Legal Insight Strategist at 8am, the team behind MyCase, LawPay, CasePeer, and DocketWise.She is the nationally-recognized author of “Cloud Computing for Lawyers” (2012) and co-authors “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” (2010), both published by the American Bar Association. She also co-authors “Criminal Law in New York,” a Thomson Reuters treatise. She writes regular columns for Above the Law, ABA Journal, and The Daily Record, has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law and emerging technologies. She is an ABA Legal Rebel, and is listed on the Fastcase 50 and ABA LTRC Women in Legal Tech. She can be contacted at [email protected].