TechnoLawyer

Today's issue of Fat Friday contains these articles:

Steve Gordon, Why Our Law Firm Video Has Exceeded Our Expectations

Jonathan Jackel, Review: iPad Plus a Defense Against iPad FUD

David Lopez, Review: Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S80 Page Scanner

Don't miss this issue — or any future issues.

How to Receive Fat Friday
Our most serendipitous offering, Fat Friday consists of unsolicited contributions by TechnoLawyer members. You'll no doubt enjoy it because of its mix of interesting topics and genuinely useful knowledge, including brutally honest product reviews and informative how-tos. The Fat Friday newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Answers to Questions: Steven J. Best discusses Time Matters, Amicus Attorney, and the dos and don'ts of practice management software, Ed Detlie shares how to save to JPEG with a Fujitsu ScanSnap, Caren Schwartz compares PCLaw and Outlook for case management, Ben Ballard reviews the CaseMap Suite, and Robin Meadow reviews X1 for desktop searching plus she shares her file naming convention. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive Answers to Questions
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Originally published on August 11, 2010 in our free BigLaw newsletter.

A few weeks ago, I helped you figure out when it's time to leave your large firm job behind. Whether you've decided to stay put or are feverishly working on your departure memo, you can't claim to have done time in Biglaw without completing certain rites of passage. At my undergrad alma mater, you couldn't graduate (with any dignity) without having both copulated in the library stacks and peed on a famous statue in the middle of campus. Given the humorlessness of the legal profession and the dismal job market, the BigLaw Bucket List below does not require you to defile a colleague in a supply closet or urinate on a Redweld … at least not at the same time. Before you earn your last inflated paycheck and kick the BigLaw Bucket, make sure you've earned your stripes. All 50 of them.

1. Bring a cocktail to every meeting.

2. Reference Rocky III repeatedly on a conference call, and say "I pity da fool" at least once.

3. Give an enormous box of your city's best donuts to the overnight word processing crew.

4. Sample all the cafeteria entrees at least once and fill out the feedback card.

5. Locate the mythical office shower and take one.

6. "Forget" to attach a document to buy yourself more time.

7. Tweet "In client meeting, LOL" from a client meeting.

8. Fart in a partner's chair.

9. Take your family on a tour of your office.

10. Seduce a paralegal.

11. Send a "high importance" email to a colleague asking if he or she wants to combine dinner orders.

12. Wear the same outfit every day until someone says something.

13. Steal someone's lunch from the communal fridge.

14. Give a good review to someone who means well but doesn't deserve it.

15. Pose for a photo with your deal toys.

16. Replace the water in the coffee machine with Gatorade.

17. Ask for a new computer before you give notice.

18. Take friends out for dinner and charge it to Business Development.

19. Conduct a messy break-up on speakerphone.

20. Perform a public records search on your supervising partner.

21. Sneak your dog into the office.

22. Buy and prominently use a "#1 Lawyer" mug.

23. Send a letter on firm letterhead to Steve Jobs about the iPhone 4.

24. Rap your voicemail greeting.

25. Request to connect with the managing partner on LinkedIn.

26. Invent a funeral and take a personal day.

27. Ask HR to have your firm photo retaken every year.

28. Send an email to your assistant thanking her or him for the hard work.

29. Take your firm's black car service to a White Castle.

30. Replace your "Ladies and Gentlemen" email salutation with "Listen Up People."

31. Read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover in the handicapped bathroom stall.

32. Switch your 401(k) contribution amount every term.

33. Organize an unnecessary teleconference.

34. Vomit at a firm social function.

35. Plant a receipt for condoms in a BNA Tax Portfolio.

36. Take out your own garbage at the end of the day.

37. List Seamless Web sushi delivery man as an emergency contact on your medical form.

38. Submit a scathing, unsolicited 360-review of a partner.

39. Keep your office door closed for the day while working in pajamas.

40. Send a scone via interoffice mail.

41. Describe a colleague to a partner as "definitely not partner track."

42. Affix "Born to Ride" bumper sticker to your firm-issued laptop.

43. Respond to a partner emailing you an assignment by stating, "Can't right now, at a club."

44. Practice a wind instrument in your office after hours.

45. Backtrack on an already-negotiated point by claiming Opposite Day.

46. Purchase telescope/binoculars for office.

47. Send office-wide "Does anybody know a good malpractice attorney (for a friend)?" email.

48. Prepare a tearjerker farewell speech.

49. Send in a juicy tip to Above the Law.

50. Become a BigLaw columnist for TechnoLawyer.

How to Receive BigLaw
Many large firms have good reputations for their work and bad reputations as places to work. Why? Answering this question requires digging up some dirt, but we do with the best of intentions. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, BigLaw analyzes the business practices, marketing strategies, and technologies used by the country's biggest law firms in an effort to unearth best and worst practices. The BigLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers an eDiscovery archiving service for blogs and social media (see article below), an online service for legal holds, a multifunction inkjet printer, electronic discovery document review software, and a voice control app for Android smartphones. Don't miss the next issue.

Reining in the Cloud

The childhood rhyme "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" may have once applied to life on the playground. But as in-house counsel and litigators know, words can result in dire consequences, particularly in today's increasingly wired world. For corporations, the rising use of social media — blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and the like — represent an explosive new area of electronic data to manage and for your adversaries to mine in the event of litigation. But until now electronic discovery tools have focused almost exclusively on archiving email messages as opposed to social media. Fortunately, help has finally arrived.

Cloud Preservation … in One Sentence
Nextpoint's Cloud Preservation is an online eDiscovery service that archives and preserves content from Web sites, blogs, and social media.

The Killer Feature
The people who work at your company (your clients for those of you who serve as outside counsel) continually add to, delete from, update, and refine your corporate Web sites, blogs, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and more. Nextpoint designed Cloud Preservation to automatically crawl these online properties at predefined intervals, creating a comprehensive and searchable archive of this content, including HTML source code and images.

"We are very excited to bring this product to the marketplace," CEO Rakesh Madhava told us. "We heard from our customers there was a need for a simple archiving solution for their intellectual assets on the Web and we are pleased to provide them with the progressive technology and expertise to fill this need."

Other Notable Features
Cloud Preservation is Web-based, requiring no installation. Sign up, identify what you want preserved, and set a weekly, monthly, semi-monthly, or annual crawling schedule to begin building your archive. The search engine facilitates Boolean queries. You can add filters to your searches such as date range as well as conduct account-specific or crawl-specific searches.

Cloud Preservation supports multiple levels of data exportation, ranging from PDF files of any page to comprehensive batch exporting into popular file formats such as Concordance and Summation load files, EDRM XML, Trial Director, and more.

Nextpoint offers several other SaaS products such as Discovery Cloud and Trial Cloud, all of which integrate with Cloud Preservation for a comprehensive eDiscovery solution from preservation through trial.

What Else Should You Know?
Monthly pricing plans for Cloud Preservation begin at $9 for five feeds and up to 1 GB of storage. Companies with more complex needs can obtain a customized quote. Learn more about Cloud Preservation.

How to Receive TechnoLawyer NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The "In One Sentence" section describes each product in one sentence, and the "Killer Feature" section describes each product's most compelling feature. The TechnoLawyer NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to TechnoFeature: Every law firm needs word processing software to produce their work. But does every law firm need to upgrade to Microsoft Word 2010, the new version of the world's most popular word processor? That's the question Word expert and trainer Jan Berinstein answers in this TechnoFeature article. Specifically, she assesses the six most important new features in Word 2010 from a law firm's perspective. What does Jan think? Read her analysis to find out.

How to Receive TechnoFeature
Our flagship newsletter never disappoints thanks to its in-depth reporting by leading legal technology and practice management experts, many of whom have become "household names" in the legal profession. It's in TechnoFeature that you'll find our oft-quoted formal product reviews and accompanying TechnoScore ratings. The TechnoFeature newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to BlawgWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 102 articles from the past week worthy of your attention, including our Post of the Week. Here's a sample:

Adobe's Advice on Purging PDF Documents of Metadata

A Frugal Attorney Reviews the Motorola i1

Nail Non-Verbal Negotiation by Mirroring Your Opponent

Law Firm's Ad Derides Service It Uses

Don't miss this issue or future issues.

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Our newsletters provide the most comprehensive coverage of legal technology, practice management, and law firm marketing, but not the only coverage. To stay on top of all the noteworthy articles published in blogs and other online publications you could either hire a research assistant or simply subscribe to BlawgWorld. The BlawgWorld newsletter has received rave reviews and is free. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on August 2, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

I recently reviewed Apple's iPad in the TechnoFeature newsletter. Below you'll find reviews of two iPad apps on which I've come to rely — Aji's iAnnotate for reading and annotating PDF files and Culture Code's Things for project and task management.

IANNOTATE

iAnnotate serves as a competent PDF reader that enables you to create notes and highlight portions of PDF files. It is very easy to use and a potentially valuable tool for lawyers. iAnnotate costs $9.99.

iAnnotate's tools include sticky note comments, underlining, highlighting, strikethrough, freehand drawing, and bookmarking. The highlight, underline, and strikeout annotation features only work with PDF files that you upload through the iAnnotate PDF Service.

The what? The iAnnotate PDF Service is a software program for Mac and Windows that enables you to sync your iPad with your computer via a WiFi connection to transfer PDF files.

File transfer represents iAnnotate's greatest weakness. Computers with extra layers of security sometimes preclude the application from working. iAnnotate does not support the most popular cloud storage locations yet. As with other document apps, you can sync the documents through your iTunes software.

iAnnotate has great potential and already qualifies as very useful. I hope later releases will fix some bugs and address the deficits, especially the issue of file transfer. Until the developer resolves these issues, iAnnotate will not realize its full potential. Nevertheless, if you buy an iPad, you'll find iAnnotate worth the $9.99 investment.

THINGS

Things offers rudimentary project management functionality on your iPad for $19.99. I should note that the developer also sells an iPhone version ($9.99) and a Mac version ($49.50). They all do basically the same thing (no pun intended), although the interface appears slightly different in the various versions.

Things organizes projects by lists of activities that you must complete to finish the project. Things is well designed and fairly simple and straightforward to use. It enables you to view your information in several different perspectives including:

1. The "Next" list, which shows all of the next actions for each project, organized by project. You can also sort this list by due date by touching the alarm clock icon.


2. The "Scheduled" list provides a view for tasks to start at a later date, which is helpful if you need to schedule something that could take several days to complete.


3. The "Someday" list enables you to park the tasks that you'll get around to "someday" whether it is working toward a paperless office or buying a new billing program.


4. The "Projects" area lists all of tasks associated with each project. Tap on a project to open it and see the list. Like the other lists, you get an icon bar at the top with which you can filter by tag, move an item to another list or project, mark items you want to pay attention to today, or add new items.


5. The Logbook stores your completed tasks.

Things for the iPad has no import or export options (except syncing with the desktop software), and no way to email a list of tasks to someone else, though you can email individual tasks from each item's info box.

Things' organization of tasks by project makes it a useful addition to the standard "to-do" list program or calendar. I think it costs more than it should. Accordingly, I downgraded its Technoscore as a result of my cost-benefit analysis.

Conclusion

Both iAnnotate and Things make the iPad more useful as a legal tool. iAnnotate offers potentially greater utility, but has more flaws. Things is more polished, but in my opinion somewhat overpriced. Nevertheless, I plan to keep both apps on my iPad (I use iAnnotate more often).

Written by Jeffrey Allen of Jallenlawtek.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of Fat Friday contains these articles:

Dwight Sowerby, Review: Credenza Practice Management Software

Michael St. George, Small Law Firms Are Savvier Than Surveys Suggest

Drew Helms, Attention Legal Vendors: Is Your Web Site Hurting Your Sales?

Warner Mendenhall, Two Characteristics of a Bad Client

Thomas F. McDow, First Impressions: Appearance Matters

Don't miss this issue — or any future issues.

How to Receive Fat Friday
Our most serendipitous offering, Fat Friday consists of unsolicited contributions by TechnoLawyer members. You'll no doubt enjoy it because of its mix of interesting topics and genuinely useful knowledge, including brutally honest product reviews and informative how-tos. The Fat Friday newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Answers to Questions: David Hudgens reviews Brother's multifunction printers, John Plater discusses the future of smartphones, William Shilling shares his experience switching to Macs, David Gossom dicusses a recent upgrade to Windows 7, and Tim Tierney reviews Leap Legal Software for practice management. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive Answers to Questions
Do you believe in the wisdom of crowds? In Answers to Questions, TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers. This newsletter's popularity stems from the relevance of the questions and answers to virtually everyone in the legal profession. The Answers to Questions newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a new smartphone (see article below), an online meeting appliance, a Web analytics service, eDiscovery software for early case assessment, legal holds, and document review, and an iPhone/iPad app for remote control of your computer. Don't miss the next issue.

Light My Fire

Just look around the restaurant during your next power lunch. Judging by the number of diners hunched over glowing touchscreens, lawyers and other professionals have abandoned the once-ubiquitous "CrackBerry" in favor of iPhones and Android smartphones. Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry, is painfully aware of this trend. While RIM still maintains the lion's share of the smartphone marketplace, analysts estimate Apple could bypass RIM as early as next year. Yesterday, RIM unveiled its master plan.

BlackBerry Torch 9800 … in One Sentence
Shipping on August 12, 2010, RIM's BlackBerry Torch 9800 is a touchscreen smartphone.

The Killer Feature
With the Torch, RIM aims to play upon the BlackBerry's core strengths (user-friendly email and physical keyboard) while integrating the touchscreen capabilities of its competitors — an approach RIM executives summed up at a recent press conference with the catchphrase "fresh but familiar."

The BlackBerry Torch is the first BlackBerry to feature both a touchscreen (fresh) and a physical slideout QWERTY keyboard (familiar). The design enables you to switch between the 3.2 inch 360x480 capacitive "multitouch" display (which supports pinching and zooming), and a vertical keyboard that slides out from underneath the touchscreen featuring BlackBerry's signature sculpted keys.

Other Notable Features
The BlackBerry Torch marks another first — the first BlackBerry that will run OS 6. This new operating system features higher resolution graphics and icons, new shortcuts, social networking and instant message integration, and universal search. But its standout feature is the WebKit-based browser, incorporating the same technology behind the Web browsers in the iPhone and Android smartphones.

The Torch's camera sports five megapixels, flash, autofocus, image stabilization, and geo-tagging. RIM is also actively courting outside app developers by opening up the Torch to apps made with simple Web technologies like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 as opposed to the Java-based tools required for earlier BlackBerry operating systems.

What Else Should You Know?
The BlackBerry Torch 9800 will retail for $199 exclusively (for now) from AT&T with a two-year contract. Learn more about BlackBerry Torch 9800.

How to Receive TechnoLawyer NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The "In One Sentence" section describes each product in one sentence, and the "Killer Feature" section describes each product's most compelling feature. The TechnoLawyer NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.