The Illinois Trial Practice Weblog

All the Online Reference Sites You'll Ever Need

Here's an article to bookmark from the newsletter of the ABA General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division: "Sites For Sore Eyes: Fun and Handy Reference Sites That Rock!" by Jim Calloway and Courtney Kennaday--

It’s not all about Google, people! There actually are websites that make your search easier and give you better results than the wild hits search engines often produce.

There are a number of references sites listed in the article, but the recommendation of Refdesk.com -- a site I didn't know about -- is one you definitely shouldn't miss. Thanks to Celia Elwell for the link.

The Paperless Office Wiki: Everything You Need to Know

Everything you need to know about "paperless offices" for law firms is now contained at a wiki created by Christinne Newman, Philip Devin , and Kim Ross-Winston. The intro--

The intent of this wiki is to provide you, the end user, with valuable information that may aid you in understanding a paperless office. Specifically, we touched on basic concepts such as the meaning, historical background, philosophy, pros and cons, technology, costs, tips, how-to-links and the like. Because we are not experts in this field and our knowledge of this topic is minuscule, we have conducted extensive research and evaluated online information sources to provide you with the most authoriative, objective, reliable, timely, and extensive coverage on the topic of the paperless office.   

There's lots of good information, including tips about hardware, software, and cost.

Related paperless-office posts from the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog:

1. "Do Away with Paper Entirely? Not Me"    
2. "Notes on a Paperless Office by Ernest Svenson"    
3. "One More About the Paperless Law Office"
4. "The Paperless Law Office: A Report from the Trenches"
5. "The Paperless Office: How-To."

E-Filing Resources for Newbies

Those who don't practice regularly in federal court might still be in the dark about e-filing. Some resources:

• The ABA's Electronic Filing Resource Page contains some basic information about state and federal e-filing systems, as well as a list of vendors and helpful links;
• The ABA's page of Electronic Filing Court Rules will be helpful to any lawyer with a national practice who needs quick links to e-filing instructions throughout the country;
• The Electronic Public Access page of the federal judiciary can help with new or forgotten PACER accounts or passwords.

Thanks to Celia C. Elwell, a paralegal in Oklahoma City, for these links. In Illinois, e-filing is underway in pilot programs in Cook, DuPage, and Will counties. Information here.

The Paperless Law Office: How-To

How are you going to do way with paper at your office, assuming you want to? In his post "Taking a Firm Completely Electronic," Dennis Kennedy tells you how to do it in three simple steps--

• Get Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional;
• Buy scanners;
• Install a search program.

For the complete details, read Kennedy's posts. Or see these related paperless-office posts from the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog:

1. "Do Away with Paper Entirely? Not Me"    
2. "Notes on a Paperless Office by Ernest Svenson"    
3. "One More About the Paperless Law Office"
4. "The Paperless Law Office: A Report from the Trenches"

The Paperless Law Office: A Report from the Trenches

The thing that's often missing from discussions of the "paperless law office" is a description of the hardware and software that's actually being used. At the South Carolina Trial Law Blog, David Swanner gives some of these particulars in his post, "The Myrtle Beach Lawyer Goes Digital." Check it out.

Related Posts:

1. "Do Away with Paper Entirely? Not Me"

2. "Notes on a Paperless Office by Ernest Svenson"

3. "One More About the Paperless Law Office"

Legal Wikis: An Update

A year and a half ago, I did two posts about wikis: "Collaboration Between Law Firms Using Wikis" and "Wikis as a Repository of Legal Know-How." Back then, wikis were just taking off, perhaps thanks to Wikipedia. Now they are ubiquitous, though not necessarily among lawyers.

A good update to my earlier posts is an article at Law Practice Today: "Wikis for the Legal Profession," by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. It starts like this--

Why should lawyers use wikis? They may help lawyers both as consumers and as producers. Most lawyers will get the most value from using wikis created by others. The classic example is the Wikipedia. Wikis can be seen as constantly updated collections of useful information arranged in an encyclopedic or similarly organized way, with hyperlinks to related internal and external information.

On the producer side, perhaps the greatest potential of the wiki tool for lawyers is its use as a collaborative tool or even an information or knowledge platform, especially as a way to gather and manage "unstructured" information easily and quickly. The key feature of wikis in this regard is that multiple authors and editors are able to work together to create a collection of information or even collaborative documents.

The piece goes on to define wikis, explain their uses, and list a number of important resources.

Password-protected wikis as a tool for collaboration among law firms still makes sense to me. A caveat is that the wiki must become the sole platform for collecting and disseminating information about the project. Otherwise, at least in my experience, people at each firm will be tempted to set up their own overlapping and competing systems, using software they are more familiar and comfortable with but which lacks the collaborative power of wikis. Meanwhile, the wiki will languish.

If you're going to use a wiki to share and manipulate information, start with the Kennedy-Mighell article, then make sure that all users are firmly on board, committed to the wiki both in concept and in practice.

How to Track Changes with Word

One reason I continue to maintain this weblog is that it provides me with an easy way to keep track of law-related tips I want to remember. Sure there are a lot of posts, but they are organized by category, in addition to being searchable using the box on the left side of the weblog.

Here's another set of tips I want to remember: "Staying on Track with Track Changes," by Tom Mighell and Dennis Kennedy at Law Practice Today. Although I don't use the track-changes feature of Word enough to be an expert, thanks to this article, I don't need to be an expert. I'll just consult it whenever I have a need.

Keeping Track of Deposition and Trial Testimony: from the Complex to the Simple

From Law.com: "Electronic Transcript Management Technology for Litigators," by Lawrence Savell--

For some of us, back when we were in school, the concept of "transcript management" consisted of determining whether a particular elective course should be taken for a grade or on a pass/fail basis, in light of potential GPA ramifications.

Today, for litigators and those who work with and provide technical support to them, transcript management has a very different meaning -- applying technology in an effective and efficient manner to collect, organize and analyze records of testimony from and for use in depositions, hearings, trials and other litigation contexts.

Litigation testimony may well be the most difficult aspect of information generated in discovery for lawyers to get their hands around because of its inherent nature and format.

Among the various transcript-management tools, Savell specifically mentions TextMap, LiveNote SR, and CT Summation Blaze LG.

In my own practice, I favor some less complex tools. Even for keeping track of the hundreds of depositions and many trials in the Vioxx litigation, I feel I have plenty of flexibility simply by loading the transcripts onto a hard drive, making an index of what I have with Notemap, an outlining tool, then relying on DT Search to search across the transcripts for particular words.

For me, it's the act of making outlines that's the biggest aid to learning and remembering important case facts, as I have to consciously consider the item being categorized in order to place it into a hierarchy. By contrast, whenever I receive large litigation databases assembled by others, say in CaseMap, I just can't ever seem to learn or remember the material and end up having to reorganize it myself. For some reason, I have the same problem when I use CaseMap myself, probably because I become frustrated with all the ways the data can be organized. I prefer something simpler, which also makes it easier for me to relearn the material after spending time away from it.

Another aid that helps me organize transcripts is a USB drive, such as the one I wrote about in 2004, where I can dump huge groups of depositions, as well as Notemap outlines, and work on the particular case no matter what computer I happen to be using. Another way to do this is to store everything on a work computer, then access it from elsewhere using a program like GoToMyPC, which was recently featured in "Ten Must-Have Web Sites for Solo Practitioners," by Rick Georges. My law partner, Andrea Lamere, uses GoToMyPC, and it works very well. Still, I like the simplicity of USB drives, which keep being redesigned to hold even larger amounts of information. You just have to be careful to back up your data and keep a tight grip on the drive so it doesn't get lost.

Technology Tip: Receive Faxes on Your Smart Phone

Though connected to email with devices like a BlackBerry or smart phone, lawyers might still have trouble receiving faxes when out of the office. Internet fax services like eFax can take care of the problem. For a modest fee, the company sends all your faxes to your email address as a pdf file. To do this, they'll also need to provide you with a new fax number, but you can simply set things up so that faxes to your current number are automatically forwarded to the new one. That way, you don't need to change your stationery.

Note: This tip was suggested by an article written by Allan Press for the 12/06 newsletter of the Illinois Bar Associations Standing Committee on Legal Technology. ISBA members may be able to access the newsletter here.

A New Resource for Plaintiffs' Lawyers

The Trial Lawyer Resource Center, which just went live yesterday, bills itself as a weblog in which "a number of the USA's top trial attorneys join together with litigation experts to lend their expertise on topics that matter in your trial practice."

Take a look to see who's posting there. If you want to read about how the project came to be, as well as what's planned in the future, read the interview with co-founder Dave Swanner that I posted yesterday at Legal Underground.