By visiting MobileIron's portal, KLA-Tencor employees could register their iPads and receive a security certificate on the device. MobileIron and its self-service portal took some of the burden off of the suddenly overwhelmed IT staff.

"People want to do self-service, but you have to give them documentation that they can follow, written at the third- or fourth-grade level with a minimal number of steps," Ballal says.

Among mandatory iPad apps, Proskauer's Collingwood settled on GoodReader for iPad ($5) for reading and marking up PDFs, and Documents to Go Premium - Office Suite ($17) for viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents.

Docs to Go beat out other popular iPad Office apps, such as Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad ($15) and Office2 HD ($8), because of Docs to Go's ability for lawyers to view tracked changes. Version control is critical in the paper-laden world of an attorney. "Clients comment on documents, and you must be able to see what they said," Kayman says.