TechnoLawyer: Litigation/Discovery/Trials

Coming May 31, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Barbara Norris explains why lawyers should not create their own trial exhibits, Jason Havens compares Tabs3/PracticeMaster, Time Matters/Billing Matters, and PCLaw plus he provides some tips for Mac users, Elizabeth Markus reviews OmniPage and PaperPort (including where to find free online training), Miriam Jacobson explains how she uses Quicken Deluxe 2000 for client trust accounts, and William Kelly reviews Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In (yes it's affiliated with the famous David Allen philosophy). Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming June 1, 2007 to Fat Friday: Sarah Laracy reviews the redaction capabilities of Acrobat 8 Professional, Don Angus shares his experience with Apple's Mighty Mouse plus a tip to keep wrist pain at bay, William Kelly compares the Treo 650 to the BlackBerry 8700, Charles Tievsky reviews Canon's DR-2580C scanner, and David Amkraut weighs in on New York's Lawyer Advertising Rules. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming May 17, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Doug Jacobs compares Amicus Attorney, Time Matters, and AbacusLaw, Anthony Vrsecky shares how his firm uses QuickBooks Pro for trust accounting, Jeff Lisson offers some advice for choosing a Web hosting service (having learned the hard way), Yvonne Renfrew discusses multiple monitors, pivot monitors, and online forum etiquette, and Steven Loble reviews Concordance for discovery documents. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a new yet familiar e-discovery service, a financial news resource, and online service tailor-made for law librarians and other book lovers. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

The E-Discovery Hostess with the Mostest
By Dennis Kennedy

Lawyers beginning to delve into the world of electronic discovery often express surprise at how even simple cases can involve large amounts of electronic data. "Help" is usually the first word that comes to mind.

LexisNexis Concordance's Hosted FYI aims to provide that help by combining "state-of-the-art" data hosting and security with e-discovery tools built on the familiar Concordance platform — priced a la carte based on your needs.

With Hosted FYI, you and your team can review, process, store, retrieve, redact, and share documents in a secure, centralized, and always-accessible environment. Rather than task your IT staff with daunting security and management requirements, Hosted FYI enables you to take advantage of the capacity, experience, security, and staffing of LexisNexis. As a result, you reduce your internal staffing and infrastructure costs, keep important data in an environment equipped for disaster recovery, and free your firm to focus on winning cases, not worrying about IT and security issues.

You can also take advantage of Hosted FYI's project support teams, including project managers and technical support representatives. These litigation support professionals can help ensure the integrity of your discovery data and, most importantly, track chain of custody. Thanks to this neutral stewardship, opposing counsel will likely consider using Hosted FYI as well, streamlining the discovery process. Even better, you can move cases midstream into Hosted FYI that you're currently handling internally or with other vendors.

Hosted FYI uses the well-known Concordance platform, a litigation environment familiar to many law firms and one used for many of today's biggest cases. Law firms that already use Concordance can easily move to the Hosted FYI environment seamlessly and without retraining their litigation support staff. You can quickly review and redact information, search, organize, and annotate email and other documents in their native file format (including metadata). The Web-hosted approach enables lawyers, paralegals and others to work simultaneously whether in the office, home, hotel room, etc. with access to only what they need to see.

Hosted FYI also provides you with financial controls. You can avoid building out infrastructure or hiring additional staff. Instead, Hosted FYI's a la carte pricing options means that you pay for only the services you need. The billing is also simple as you receive a single bill for what you use. Learn more about Hosted FYI.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming May 3, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Charles Stokes reviews Microsoft Access for litigation support with a few important caveats, Yvonne Renfrew explains how to save Outlook email to a PDF file using Acrobat 7 (and we tell you how to do it with Acrobat 8), Edward Zohn discusses why it really doesn't matter which word processor you use, Kent Davis shares three document management options for a midsize law firm (120 users), and Andy Satori offers his suggestions for effectively wiping a hard drive. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming April 24, 2007 to TechnoFeature: The new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) have been in effect for almost four months — but perhaps you haven't yet found the time to study them. Luckily, attorney Bruce Olson has. In this article, Bruce shares his top ten tips for the new rules and their impact on the process of e-discovery, covering everything from the basics (read the rules!) to the safe harbor provisions. Whether you're just starting to familiarize yourself with the new FRCP or simply need a refresher, don't miss Bruce's top 10 tips.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming April 20, 2007 to Fat Friday: Dave Culbertson reviews and provides a comprehensive guide to getting started with the Fujitsu ScanSnap s500 in a law firm, Eli Nelson discusses the risks associated with clawbacks and sneak peaks during discovery, Joyce Glucksman reviews her Treo 650 after nine months of use, Andrew Shear reviews PasswordMaker, and Charles T. Lester, Jr. explains how to see a file's metadata using Windows Explorer. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming April 5, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Adam Drennen suggests two more ways to secure your wireless network (but also discusses their vulnerabilities), James Boatman reviews IntelliPDF BATES Stamp and provides some tips no matter which utility you use, David Bernier provides some PracticeMaster tips, Debbie Westwood shares how she made the jump from paralegal to litigation support specialist and how others can do the same, and Christopher Largay reviews his firm's upgrade to Time Matters 8.0. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers the new version of a popular e-discovery program, a Web site monitoring service, and an online court rules service. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Bring Order to the E-Discovery Chaos
By Dennis Kennedy

Ask any member of a corporate legal team, IT department, law firm, or legal service provider how they would describe e-discovery — "chaotic" and "expensive" would likely emerge from their mouths. E-discovery usually involves many steps, short response times, and too many cooks in the kitchen. Sensitive corporate data ends up in too many places, costs continue to grow and legal teams tire of the constant fire drill.

Attenex Patterns e-discovery software was designed to bring order to this chaos, enabling legal teams to develop standardized, repeatable processes that reduce the risk, cost, and time associated with e-discovery. The latest version of Attenex Patterns — version 4.0 — includes more than 50 new features and enhancements in the areas of e-discovery data processing, review, and project management.

Some of the key new features include the re-use of documents previously processed and reviewed — including valuable work product such as document marks and annotations. For large enterprises and firms, this re-use can eliminate costs associated with the same documents being examined multiple times to fulfill similar requests.

New project management capabilities and reporting options provide customers with improved insight into reviewer productivity rates and project status. Because Attenex Patterns clusters similar documents together, the new reporting tools enable a manager to verify that all similar documents were marked the same. These reporting tools also provide transparency to project managers who need to know the progress of a matter. Attenex Patterns also now supports the clustering and review of both electronic files and scanned OCR and TIFF documents in 23 languages.

Attenex Patterns' patented email suppression function enables reviewers to de-dupe or eliminate duplicate email messages in a string, dramatically reducing the number of emails to review. Users can also now extract embedded Microsoft Office and PDF files from email messages, ensuring the review of all documents and reducing the risk of disclosing sensitive data embedded in an Excel spreadsheet.

Attenex Patterns provides flexible deployment options unique in the industry.  You can deploy the software on-premise, in a hosted environment managed by an "Attenex Advantage" partner, or in a customized combination tailored to the demands of the customer's environment.

Additionally, Attenex Patterns can integrate with virtually any litigation support software thanks to the new Attenex Patterns Software Development Kit (SDK). Thus, once you complete a review, you can easily export your work product and your final document set to case analysis software, trial presentation software, etc. Learn more about Attenex Patterns 4.0.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Two weeks ago, I poked fun at legal technology predictions.

But that's not to say I don't like reading them. How timely then that Dennis Kennedy has issued his latest predictions in a report entitled: Seven Legal Technology Trends for 2007: Widening the Digital Divide in Law Practice.

Of note, Dennis predicts that:

• BlackBerry usage may have peaked among lawyers.

I disagree, particularly in light of RIM's push into the small business market. I do believe that Treo usage may have peaked because I think Apple's iPhone will grab market share from Palm. I don't think the iPhone will have as much impact on the BlackBerry.

• A sizable number of lawyers will begin using MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks since they can run Windows.

I agree, and hope to see some enterprising legal technology consultants add Windows installation on these notebooks to their repertoire (it's not trivial to install Windows).

• The growth of all-in-one electronic discovery tools for smaller cases that law firms can handle in-house.

I agree since even your run-of-the-mill slip and fall case involves electronic evidence nowadays (such as email admissions).

• A shift from Yellow Pages advertising to search engine advertising among law firms.

I agree. Yellow Pages has not kept up with the times. No one under the age of 30 Fewer people use the Yellow Pages now than during its heyday 20-30 years ago. I use a Yellow Pages as a laptop stand.

Read Dennis' Seven Legal Technology Trends for 2007.

What do you think of his predictions and predictions in general?

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.