TechnoEsq

Creating a Legal Document Scanning System with ScanSnap

Finis Price — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:33:04 +0000

So everyone knows we love RocketMatter and Finis uses RocketMatter as his case management system in his personal injury practice. Our friends over at RocketMatter’s blog, which is also a great resource for other technological things for attorneys routinely post about technologies and articles to help the legal professional in his practice. Most recently, they have blogged about Finis’ favorite scanner, the Fujitsu ScanSnap, perhaps one of the best non-tank style scanners. Larry Port describes the ScanSnap best:

A Fujitsu ScanSnap is like Paris: when people talk about it, you can’t imagine it living up to the hype. But when it’s your turn to take a look, all expectations are completely surpassed.

We couldn’t agree more. The ScanSnap is small, lightweight and incredibly fast at scanning documents, all without jamming or misfeeding. Did we mention it comes with Adobe Acrobat as well as ABBY FineReader to automatically convert documents into Word docs? At any rate, RocketMatter has a great post about how to use the ScanSnap in your practice to develop a cheap (the ScanSnap runs approx. $500) legal document scanning system. Coupled with a program like Hazel, this rivals the large scale document management programs the large firms have.

The article discusses how to set up Profiles for quick and easy document scanning to a folder. From there, scanning incoming mail, correspondence, photographs and whatever else you need scanned is a breeze. Head over to Part 1 and Part 2 to read the rest.

And if you’re not using a ScanSnap or aren’t using RocketMatter as your case management system, give Finis a call or shoot him an email and he will be more than happy to tell you why you should be using both.

Another Reason the iPhone is the Lawyer’s Phone

Finis Price — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:03:05 +0000

Not a week after finishing the final draft of an article discussing the iPhone’s superiority over phones such as the Droid and Nexus One (basically Android OS phones) for attorneys, an analysis by DisplayMate has revealed the Nexus One’s screen, while offering a higher resolution in icon displays actually lacks the sharpness and correct coloring of images and video of the iPhone. Of course, this was too late to include in my article but it is important nonetheless as it is a perfect example of ‘more is not always better’. You see, Google has been touting the Nexus One’s higher resolution OLED display, coming in at 800×480, as being far superior to the iPhone’s 480×320 LCD display. But in the epitome of the saying, these extra pixels do not equate to better images as we see in the photo below (Nexus One on the left and iPhone on the right).

As you can see, the color gradient of the Nexus One has a number of skipped ’steps’ of coloring when contrasted with the smooth gradient through color intensities as seen on the iPhone. This is caused by the Nexus One display only being capable of displaying 16-bit color which allows for only 64 intensity levels for the color green and 32 levels for red and blue. The is very common on cheap low-end lcd’s but is completely unacceptable in a $500 device. The 16-bit display further causes problems when viewing photographs and video, resulting in poorly rendered images with over-saturated colors, gray-scale tracking errors and a host of other problems. This case be best shown in the image below (again Nexus One on the left and iPhone on the right):

Obviously, the Nexus One is not the “super phone” is has been touted to be and while it may display icons much more sharply than the iPhone, what good is that once you’ve opened a program and are attempting to actually view images or video? Once again I have a feeling we will hear the standard argument of ‘the NEXT version will be the iPhone killer”. At what point are these arguments going to be seen for what they are – cover-ups for the inadequacy of the current offering of phones.

If you’re an attorney looking to buy the best smartphone, heed my advise from my soon-to-be-published article and do yourself a favor, buy an iPhone.

Electronista

reQall and Evernote – a Virtual Assistant for Attorneys

Finis Price — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:33:35 +0000

Perhaps two of the best iPhone applications for attorneys, reQall and Evernote, are working in a partnership which should benefit all attorneys if not all mankind using an iPhone. If you’re not familiar with these apps, you should be and should stop reading this post and immediately download both from the iTunes store and then come back and read the rest of this post. Go ahead, we’ll wait. You can download them here: reQall and Evernote.

How can reQall and Evernote save your life? By making your life and your practice more efficient. One of the biggest problems attorneys face is organization and the capture of information. Just like every other person in this digital age, we are constantly bombarded with information. However, we are also constantly attempting to track this information and not lose those brilliant ideas we come up with while in the car driving to a deposition or that amazing article or article we read on the Internet. reQall and Evernote are both applications which seek to step in and capture the information you have in your head or in front of you and archive that information into a searchable digital format. reQall organizes, analyzes and gives you the reminders of the information and Evernote helps you capture it. To better understand how these applications interconnect it is necessary to explain each app individually.

Evernote

Evernote is an application for your iPhone, computer (Mac or PC), Blackberry and web browser. Once you have downloaded the application to your computer and/or phone you are set to begin capturing information. This is accomplished on your computer through either your web browser, which should now have an Evernote icon in the dock, or by opening the Evernote application directly.

Evernote allows you to capture information from any source on your computer. You can highlight important text, grab a whole web page or just type in text directly into a note in Evernote. Once you’ve gotten the data in Evernote, you can tag and mark the data for easy retrieval and archiving. What makes Evernote so great however is that all of this data is synchronized with their web servers. So you can access this information anywhere you have net access or even from the Evernote program on your phone. This is particularly useful for archiving legal research as the tagging features allows you to quickly find data by topic.

Another great feature of Evernote is the ability to perform OCR on photographs. For example, if you take a photo of a whiteboard at the end of a meeting using Evernote, the photo is uploaded to their servers and the text written in the picture is converted to searchable text and added to your Evernote archive. Then you can search for anything written on the whiteboard and the photo, along with the text highlighted within the photo, will appear in your search results. I can’t tell you how many times I have used this to find what was decided in a meeting and none of it would have been possible had I not taken a quick snapshot of the whiteboard afterwards with Evernote.

reQall

David Pogue has a great video explaining reQall:

reQall is a memory assisting device for the mobile user. With reQall, you simply open the program and say what you would like to remember and reQall analyses what you said and figures out if it’s a meeting or just a note, transcribes what you said and if you said “meeting with Ted at 4:00 Wednesday” adds an entry in your calendar for a meeting with Ted at 4:00 for the next Wednesday. reQall also integrates with your friend’s who have the program, so if you said ““Ask Sam to send a letter to Jane Doe on Tuesday,” then reQall would recognize this is a To-Do item and add a To-Do on Sam’s list to send a letter to your client Jane Doe on Tuesday.

What sets reQall apart from other memory apps, other than the speech recognition, is the ability to help ‘jog’ your memory. For example, reQall continuously monitors your location, the time and date and if you are at a location you set for a particular meeting or are approaching the time and date of a reminder you set, reQall will prompt you to make sure you don’t forget that meeting. It is basically a virtual assistant with you constantly to help remind you of the important things you’ve placed into reQall.

reQall and Evernote Together

Together, reQall and Evernote create the ultimate in data collection and organization/reminding. By linking your reQall account to your Evernote account, reQall will automatically collect the data you have in your Evernote account and associate this with your calendar, to-do list and reminders.

So when you are at your project meeting, use Evernote for iPhone to take a picture of the whiteboard, Evernote will recognize what you wrote (e.g., project name, agreed-upon tasks, etc.) and reQall will then link the whiteboard picture in your Evernote account to future project meetings on your Google calendar by looking for matching keywords. Or when you’re planning your next business trip, add reminders in reQall for your travel dates and the things you want to see. Then, use Evernote to research your trip, capturing web pages and pictures about historic sites, walking tours and restaurants or more importantly, souvenirs for your wife. When you’re on the trip, reQall will automatically remind you of your plans and associate them with the items you researched in Evernote. For example, you may have an item in reQall that is “Visit vineyards in Napa Valley.” From there, one tap in reQall and you can see all of your Evernotes related to Napa Valley vineyards and all of those souvenirs you had better purchase while on this “business trip”. Or even more helpful to attorneys, perform research for the Dillon Mediation you have scheduled next week and place it into Evernote with the title or tag it “Dillon Mediation”. If you’ve placed the Dillon Mediation in your calendar, on the day of the Dillon Mediation, reQall for iPhone’s Here and Now screen will automatically show the research you performed while you are in your mediation.

The amount of time and saved information the combination of reQall and Evernote can save is truly astonishing. It is equivalent to having a personal assistant with you 24 hours a day, remembering information, linking that information and recalling it when you need it, whispering it into your ear as you need it. Well, only reQall and Evernote are a lot cheaper.

MILO Chat Weekly Episode 14 – Apple Tablet Rumors

Finis Price — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:59:41 +0000

MILO Chat Weekly – Episode 14 – “I’m old. I’m tired. What can I say?”

This episode… Apple Tablet Rumors!

Hosted by: Victor Medina, Finis Price and Grant Griffiths

Comments? Send them to milochat@miloweekly.com

Subscribe to this podcast using iTunes!

Embedded player here:

Download the podcast directly by right-clicking and saving this link

iPhone Unlimited Plans $99.99, If You Ask For It

Finis Price — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:26:36 +0000

In an attempt to compete with Verizon’s new unlimited plans and perhaps to make it less enticing for users to jump to Verizon when the anticipated move to Verizon is announced, AT&T has lowered the cost of their unlimited voice and data plan to $99.99 (old price was $129.999) effective Monday, January 18. This is great news for lawyers and law firms paying for unlimited voice and data Nationwide plans.

However, as is always the case with AT&T, there is a catch. The change must be made manually either at their website at att.com/wireless or by visiting a store. There is no cost for changing your plan nor does it require a resigning of a contract. Please note however, they will NOT make this change for you automatically, so if you have the unlimited plan like I do and don’t ask to have the price changed AT&T will gladly keep charging you the extra $30.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Jury Misconduct From Internet Research

Finis Price — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:45:13 +0000

We’ve written about the prevalence of this problem before and now it has hit closer to home. A friend of mine, Garry Adams, tried the taser-related death of Larry Noles in federal court a few weeks ago. The jury returned a verdict in favor of the officer who used the Taser on Mr. Noles. Two days later, Mr. Adams received a phone call from a juror who advises him that at least two jurors, including the foreman, whom was described as “the principle advocate for police”, consulted Taser International’s website and used that information to persuade the other jurors to find in favor of the officer. Mr. Adams filed a motion with the court and U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II ruled yesterday that the jurors researching information on the Internet could have affected the jury’s verdict.

At what point are we going to be forced to revert to the sequestering of jurors to avoid such problems? Obviously instructions to the jury to not do outside research is not working and the cost to re-try these cases will go up as more jurors have access to smartphones and the Internet from home while the trial and deliberations are proceeding. Surely the cost of re-trying cases will at some point be larger than the cost of paying for sequestering the jury, but how many cases of juror misconduct that aren’t reported will occur before our courts recognize the problem?

Read the full article on the jury misconduct at the Courier Journal.

Papershow – Finis Interviewed in Wall Street Journal

Finis Price — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:36:46 +0000

We had mentioned Canson’s Papershow in our post back in August 2009 and now Finis has been interviewed for an article in today’s Wall Street Journal on ways small businesses are using technology. This great little piece of technology is basically a digital whiteboard which allows you to draw on paper with a special pen, much like the LiveScribe Pulse pen, and everything you draw is displayed on your computer screen or on a projector. The paper you draw on has a full color palette so you can change the color of the markings as well as different shapes. This is great for virtual meetings when combined with a screen sharing application like GoToMeeting.

David Sparks on the Future of MacWorld

Finis Price — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:30:37 +0000

MacSparky, or David Sparks as his family knows him, has a great post on his thoughts about the future of MacWorld now that Apple will not be attending. His thoughts are insightful, especially given his attendance at MacWorld as not only an attendee but a speaker. Our session is entitled Head on over to his site for the full read.

I am also proud to announce that David and I will be speaking at the ABA’s TechShow in Chicago. Our session is entitled “The Lone Mac in a Windows Law Firm”. Make sure you register early for the TechShow and be sure to comment here or send me an email and I we can get together for socializing.

BeenVerified – iPhone Background Checks

Finis Price — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:17:46 +0000

BeenVerified.com is a service which has been getting a lot of attention in the press lately and they now have an iPhone app! BeenVerified.com offers background checks which include social media usage, marriage and divorce search, relative search, property valuation and state criminal searches. The service is far from perfect, but does offer users a chance to find critical information fast, especially with the release of their iPhone application. The app, which is free, provides full access to all of the information accessible from their website. This would be quite beneficial to litigators looking for information while mobile, such as voir dire or client meetings.

They offer a tiered pricing scale of an annual membership of $96, a 6-month membership for $72 or a monthly membership of $16. Obviously, purchasing the annual membership affords you the best rate at $8/month. They offer a free trial for 30 days and is available here.

Finis Presenting at the ABA TechShow 2010

Finis Price — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:33:15 +0000

I am proud to announce that I will be presenting at the American Bar Association’s TechShow 2010 in Chicago, IL on March 25 and 26. If you haven’t been to the ABA TechShow, I highly recommend attending. As readers know, TechnoEsq went to our first TechShow last year and interviewed vendors in the Exhibit Hall, which is only one of the great things to do at the TechShow. Many seminars are offered for any level of technical knowledge and of course they are all geared specifically to attorneys. Of course, no conference would be complete without mentioning the socialization which comes with such a show and I can personally attest to how wonderful it was last year to meet so many of my fellow tweeters and bloggers finally ‘in person’.

The sessions I will be speaking on are ‘The Lone Mac in a Windows Law Firm’, ‘Mac Software for the Law Office’ and ‘Running Windows on a Mac’. If you can make it to the show, please drop me an email at Finis (at) TechnoEsq.com so we can have an opportunity to meet and chat.