TechnoLawyer: Litigation/Discovery/Trials

Coming September 14, 2006 to Answers to Questions: Jason Havens reviews Tabs3 and compares it to Timeslips for law firm accounting and time-billing, Debbie Westwood reviews Lotus Notes for document collaboration, Nancy Merreot explains how to archive e-mail using PST files and Adobe Acrobat 7, Nikki Rodeman discusses the bar code scanning system she discovered (and we provide tips on using bar codes for trial exhibits), and John Keller reviews Skype for outgoing calls. In addition, this issue features links to 5 additional Posts in the TechnoLawyer Archive. Don't miss this issue.

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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 hosted e-mail service for small and mid-sized law firms, a new expert witness online research service, and a free Firefox plug-in that enhances Google. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Got E-mail? Get Archived.
By Dennis Kennedy
Still managing your own e-mail server? Or perhaps you host your firm's e-mail at an ISP. If so, your e-mail may lack advanced applications such as BlackBerry support and archival and search capabilities.

Here to help small and mid-sized law firms and legal departments is NTT America, a division of NTT, the world's largest telecommunications company (more than $100 billion in revenue).

NTT America's new service, Email Archiving Solution, aims to provide law firms with peace of mind with regard to all aspects of e-mail infrastructure. In addition to providing traditional POP and MAPI e-mail, Email Archiving Solution coupled with hosted Microsoft Exchange also provides for wireless e-mail via RIM's BlackBerry and Microsoft's ActiveSync (Treo and other Windows Mobile smartphones).

You also get the benefit of the latest in anti-spam and anti-virus protection (say goodbye to the deeply flawed Bayesian filters and highly annoying challenge response technologies of yesteryear).

Living up to its name, Email Archiving Solution also provides you with advanced archiving capabilities, which you can configure by mailbox (both incoming and outgoing messages). NTT America claims that this service can meet any regulatory or internal compliance requirements.

Even if you have no compliance needs, this archiving technology has other benefits. For example, a powerful search engine enables administrators to search for and retrieve lost messages and entire mailboxes — much faster and with more certainty than restoring a backup.

Email Archiving Solution also addresses another problem with traditional e-mail systems — storage costs. Thanks to some nifty technology, NTT America has figured out how to reduce such costs and pass along the savings to law firms. For example, its "single-instance" technology means that it stores just one copy of an identical message (such as those group messages sent to everyone in your firm).

NTT America's service level agreement (so-called "SLA") guarantees a 99.9% uptime thanks to its secure and highly redundant data centers. When you do need help, you can get it 24/7. Email Archiving Solution does not require any software, licensing, or maintenance fees, IT staff, or on-site servers. Instead, you just pay a low monthly subscription. Learn more about Email Archiving Solution.

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 August 11, 2006 to Fat Friday: William Lloyd explains why, for him, multiple monitors increases productivity, Gregory Miller reviews PinHawk Law on the Blogs NewzDigest, Jim Sewell discusses his firm's paperless workflow, Paul Lepine explains how to change a Word file's creation date and discusses a helpful file management feature in Word 2003 absent from earlier versions, and Celia Abbott reviews Easy Bates. In addition, this issue features links to 4 additional Posts in the TechnoLawyer Archive. Don't miss this issue.

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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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a network appliance that makes short work of electronic discovery tasks, an online service that enables you to create multimedia presentations, and a handheld document scanner. Don't miss the next issue.

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

E-Discovery for the Rest of Us
By Dennis Kennedy
Electronic discovery can seem like a daunting world of software, services, and outside vendors, all combined with arcane technology issues. But what if you just want to work with a limited amount of e-mail and other electronic data?

Cricket Legal Technologies' Cricket Box may hold the answer. The Cricket Box is a dedicated electronic discovery appliance designed for law firms and litigation support consultants. It gives you a dedicated, turn-key solution with no software to install or configure. Just turn it on, follow the on-screen wizards, and start working.

A simple interface enables you to handle most of the standard tasks in today's world of electronic discovery. Just drag and drop your documents, and then use Cricket Box to filter, de-duplicate, and bates stamp your documents before exporting them to other litigation tools. Cricket Box can handle images, text, and metadata in many file formats.

The company claims that Cricket Box is easy to operate and can be used without IT support. It features a variety of powerful search and other electronic discovery tools. You can run Boolean, fuzzy, stem and other searches often used in electronic discovery.

Cricket Box uses a SQL Server database, which means it's fast. It can pull data from just about any source, including CD-ROM, DVD, flash memory, hard drives, etc. If you run into password-protected files, Cricket Box can probably crack them for you. The company claims that all these smarts mean you'll never miss a valid document, resulting in more accurate work product than competitive offerings.

When you're ready to export data, you'll find that Cricket Box integrates with Concordance, CT Summation, Ringtail, iConect, iPro, and other popular tools. Cricket Box is sold on a subscription basis. For a limited time, a one year subscription sells for $10,000.

Learn more about Cricket Box.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers an electronic signature service and repository geared at corporate counsel, a comprehensive suite of e-discovery tools, and a service that digitally certifies transcripts. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Electronic Agreements Deserve Electronic Signatures
By Dennis Kennedy
Going in-house was supposed to improve your quality of life, but thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley era in which we now live, your compliance workflow has kicked into overdrive.

For example, you need your worldwide salesforce to sign a compensation agreement with your new commission structure — and track who signed it and when. Similarly, you need to have your technical staff execute assignments of invention, again with archiving and tracking not to mention approval by their counsel. Many other headaches, er examples, abound, including the deployment of nondisclosure agreements by non-legal staff.

If only you could manage this workflow electronically. For several years now, electronic signature laws have permitted the use of electronic signatures, but the adoption of electronic signatures has not occurred because no one bothered to build a suite of tools to make it easier than using paper.

EchoSign's eponymous service may finally help usher in the revolution. EchoSign is a secure Web site for sending, signing, tracking, and storing documents — everything from retainers to nondisclosure agreements to assignments of inventions to deal documents. Instead of e-mailing a file, you just upload it to EchoSign.

To start, you set up a secure EchoSign account using any browser. There is nothing to install and no downloads. Even better, EchoSign's signature service is free.

EchoSign converts Word and other document formats to PDF, and then delivers the file to recipients with signature instructions. Recipients can either electronically sign the document or print and sign it the old-fashioned way. Even when they sign it on paper, the document remains within EchoSign thanks to a special fax number to which recipients return signed documents. No need to wait for these executed documents to arrive in the mail.

When you use EchoSign for signatures, you automatically create a repository of all of your signed documents. You can annotate, search for, review, share, and print them at anytime. With EchoSign, everyone on your team will know which documents were signed and when.

EchoSign's free signature service includes storage for your last 20 documents. To store more documents, you can choose from two plans — $12.95 per month for up to 1,000 documents (Pro) or $20 per user per month for unlimited documents (Enterprise). The Enterprise plan also includes a branded site and other extranet-like features.

Learn more about EchoSign.

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 July 20, 2006 to Answers to Questions: Lynda LaPan offers up an incredibly detailed Word v. WordPerfect Post rivaling D. Paul Dalton's from last week, Caren Schwartz reviews QuickBooks for law firm billing, Larry Lucht compares the Professional versus Legal editions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Robert Browning reviews his experience with several HP LaserJet printers, including his new 1320s, and Bryan Sims directs CaseMap users to a helpful online resource for templates and tips. 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 an easy-to-use Bates stamping utility, a search engine that digs through user forums and message boards, and a nifty pair of wireless iPod headphones. Don't miss the next issue.

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

The "Easy Button" for Bates Stamping
By Dennis Kennedy
The original Bates stamper was patented back in the 1890s. Since then, Bates stamping has served as the primary method of sequentially marking and numbering documents or images as exhibits in discovery or trials. You might be surprised to learn that this long-lived technique has become a leading tool for law firms transitioning from paper discovery to electronic discovery.

For the many litigators searching for the electronic version of a Bates stamping machine or labels, Easy Bates by Rennie Glen Software provides a simple and flexible software tool for Bates stamping today's digital evidence.

Easy Bates focuses exclusively on Bates stamping. It stamps Bates numbers onto PDF and TIFF documents. It also can print labels for paper documents. Easy Bates gives you seven choices of fonts. You can use both letters and numbers, and even create multi-line stamps.

You simply drag and drop your document files into the Easy Bates document list and they get electronically stamped.

Easy Bates sells for $199 with significant volume discounts. An unrestricted ten-day free trial is available. Adobe Acrobat is not required. The company has a history of providing free upgrades, and intends to continue this practice as long as possible.

What's keeping you from moving into electronic discovery? If it's the lack of an easy-to-use bates stamping tool, you may no longer have an excuse.

Learn more about Easy Bates.

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.

You don't have time to track 100 business and technology magazines and blogs. We do. Below you'll find our latest discoveries.

Assessing the Importance of Voice Mail in Discovery

Data Mining on the Internet with Google

How Many Hours Would Elihu Root Bill?

And Your Favorite Blog Is ... Huh?

Is Your Firm Really Marketing?

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, tech expert Jill Bauerle covers litigation software that enables you to review documents at warp speed, a cost recovery technology that tracks everything from photocopies to BlackBerry phone calls, and a free online content management system for creating blogs or entire sites. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Review 2,000 Documents/Day Without Breaking a Sweat
By Jill Bauerle
Imagine a technology that can sift through discovery documents and create a radar-like map, making it a snap to identify documents as responsive, nonresponsive, or privileged. Sound like a Star Trek episode? Actually, this technology exists today in the form of Attenex Patterns Document Mapper, which enables lawyers to analyze documents at warp speed (well, ten times faster) and with greater accuracy (2,000 document decisions per day versus 200 using traditional methods). The key lies in the "document map" Attenex Patterns Document Mapper creates of your universe of documents. The software analyzes the nouns and noun phrases and clusters like documents together to help reviewers analyze similar material, and make faster, more accurate document decisions. For example, Attenex Patterns Document Mapper can tie together related e-mail messages, identify key players and dates, and even provide an early risk assessment (especially helpful for regulatory matters). Armed with this data, you can better strategize, evaluate legal theories, and conduct a cost analysis. On a more nuts and bolts level, Attenex Patterns Document Mapper's suite of tools enables you to dynamically reorganize and categorize documents as you review them. Specifically, the "Document Viewer" enables you to review documents in their native format. You can assign up to nine configurable categories (such as responsive or privileged) to documents as you review them. You can also add annotations and perform additional document tagging (e.g., a reason for privilege). Attenex Patterns Document Mapper also features powerful search tools. Lawyers often dread reviewing documents. With Attenex Patterns Document Mapper, lawyers may soon request to be beamed up to the document review room.. Learn more about Attenex Patterns Document Mapper.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, tech expert Jill Bauerle covers a new and improved version of a case analysis tool, conversion software for PDF and other files, and a handy utility for magnifying items on your screen. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Litigation Software that (Almost) Does the Thinking for You
By Jill Bauerle
Behind every open and shut case is a lot of hard work. To help litigators and litigation teams save time while producing even better results for their clients, LexisNexis CaseSoft has released CaseMap 6, the latest version of its popular litigation analysis tool. CaseMap 6 sports many new user-requested features and a "faster," "retooled" database engine that accommodates hundreds of custom fields. Also, its new look will make users of Microsoft Office 2003 feel right at home. Among the new features is the Intake Interview Jumpstart, which enables you to e-mail clients a questionnaire about their case. When you receive their completed questionnaire, you can import it into an existing or new CaseMap case file and even generate a ReportBook. Such automation seems to be everywhere in CaseMap 6, which also includes document index creation, bulk e-mail importing, and tight integration with the new CaseMap Bates Stamper. The revamped Issue Analysis Mode helps you decide when to file for summary judgment, and the MSJ Statement of Fact Creator helps you create the accompanying brief. Similarly, new tools exist for identifying privileged documents, and then creating a privileged log. Other new features include links to CaseMap Webinars for on-demand learning, the ability to create a fact from a document, batch copying of linked PDF files, and bulk updating of linked file paths and field values. LexisNexis CaseSoft has also enhanced existing features, For example, more options exist for creating and formatting ReportBooks, and you can now link to more applications than ever, including CaseLogistix, Interwoven WorkSite, Hummingbird DM5, and iCONECTnxt. Pricing for CaseMap 6 starts at $595; upgrade pricing starts at $199.  Learn more about CaseMap 6.

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.