CALLOUTS AND SPLIT SCREEN

As mentioned in our review of Exhibit A, any app which attempts to call itself a trial presentation app has to do callouts. These are the zoom in boxes attorneys use to ‘callout’ certain areas of an exhibit, say paragraph 3 of a document, so that the jury can focus on a particular part of the exhibit. While Exhibit A was the first to offer this ability but did so with some bugs, TrialPad has executed this feature flawlessly. Callouts are as simple as selecting the callout tool from the toolbox menu at the top of the screen and using your finger to select the area to zoom in on. What sets TrialPad apart from Exhibit A is the ability to not only do multiple callouts on one document, but to do have two documents on the screen (split screen) and do callouts from each of the exhibits simultaneously. Each callout can be moved around to difference positions on the screen by dragging with your finger.

As you can see, this sort of thing is imperative if you want to compare and contrast two versions of a document, say a contract, and bring the difference between them to the jury’s attention. In the example above you will notice that the annotations made to the underlying exhibit are shown in the callout as well (this has been lacking in some other apps which do callouts).

One suggestion I have however is that because TrialPad automatically sizes the callouts to the width of the screen, it can be a bit confusing when you have two callouts from separate exhibits to know which document each came from originally (since they are both the same size). One solution might be to have the callouts downsized a bit and shifted either to the right or left depending on from which exhibit it was called out.

Bottom line is that this feature was executed perfectly with TrialPad 2.0.

VIDEO CLIPS

While I knew the ability to play video on TrialPad 2.0 was going to be available, what I didn’t know was that we would be able to make video clips using TrialPad 2.0. Calling up a video is simple as they are accessible in the left hand pane under the “Video” tab. Once a video is selected it is loaded into the presentation area and ready to play. I have so far loaded a 4 GB deposition into TrialPad 2.0 and it literally was brought up instantly and ready to play. Play controls come up over the video just like they would when watching any video on your iPad, along with the ability to ‘push’ the video out to an AppleTV.

What is a surprise however is that below the video are two new icons. One to take a snapshot of the video from wherever the playhead is and the other to create a clip of the video. This is nice if you want to create a snapshot of a part of a video or want to create a clip on the fly of a portion of a deposition. When you press the clip button a “filmstrip” of the video opens up with the standard yellow brackets used by iMovie and the built-in video function of the iPAd, allowing you to trim your video to only play a certain portion of the video. The only problem is that the size of the editing window is a bit too small and it takes a couple of tries sometimes to get the clip to “trim” to exactly where you want it. Once you’re done trimming the video though, the resultant clip is saved in your list of Videos as a clip and you can use the edit button to rename the clip to anything you want. This is a killer feature and to be honest, one I hadn’t thought of putting into a trial presentation app on the iPad for fear the hardware could not handle it (forgetting that the iPad already lets you trim videos in the Video app and iMovie already).

WHITEBOARD

The other nice addition to TrialPad 2.0 and one which is certainly available in other trial presentation apps is a blank whiteboard for drawing. This was a feature TrialPad had to include in the new version and it has all of the standard features you would expect: multi-colored drawing pens with variable widths, the ability to erase and undo drawings and the ability to save the whiteboard, email it or add it to DropBox directly from TrialPad 2.0. This feature is quickly becoming a standard feature in these apps and it’s good to see TrialPad getting on board.

KEYNOTE VIEWING

While most developers will not understand why, TrialPad’s new feature of allowing keynote presentations to be displayed in TrialPad 2.0 is probably one of the most welcome for me as a Mac-using trial lawyer and fanatic fan of Apple’s Keynote. I don’t know of any other trial presentation app which will allow you to bring in Keynotes into the app and display them (it shows them slide by slide), annotate on them and save them using the HotDocs feature, but I was really excited when I saw this ability in TrialPad 2.0. Now when I want to bring in portions of my opening and show them to a witness, to demonstrate the jury the credibility of exactly the slide I showed them earlier, I can open my Keynote in TrialPad 2.0 and mark on the actual slide, emphasizing certain parts, etc… this was a really nice touch and another I didn’t expect from the new version.

There are many other new features to TrialPad 2.0, such as importing of PowerPoint slides, multi-page TIF’s, list view of cases, exporting of pages as PDF’s with or without annotations, moving exhibits between cases, multi-colored laser tool (one of my favorites) to name but a few. TrialPad has just risen the bar for other trial presentation apps with all of these new features and it will be exciting to see what this new competition will foster in this growing market!

TrialPad’s initial cost is $89.99, which is certainly higher than any of the other trial presentation apps out there. However, given the attention to detail in the user interface, highlight readability, split screen feature, multi-callout functions, and the rest, $89.99 is certainly worth the cost of the app.

We will be going to trial with TrialPad twice in July so be sure to check back here as we put TrialPad through its paces in a real court-room setting. We are looking forward to what all of these apps have to offer and are now even more excited for the iOS 5 update to come out bringing with it wireless displaying of these apps on the AppleTV.

For my readers, I have obtained 4 free passes to my webinar. Simply email me at finis[at]TechnoEsq.com and the first four readers who email me. I look forward to seeing everyone there and should you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

There are a number of trial presentation apps in the App Store for the iPad which have all of those features but the one feature every trial lawyer needs – callouts. Callouts are those boxes which zoom in on a particular area of a document. We’ve shown you an early look at TrialPad 2.0 which has them (and we’ve spoken with the developer Ian who has advised us that 2.0 has been submitted to the App Store) but unfortunately Exhibit A has beaten every other app to the punch with the release of v.1.3.0. Among other things, the new version of Exhibit A has true callouts, block highlights, redaction features, exporting of exhibits via email and a completely new interface. Let’s take a look at these new features.

CALLOUTS
Let’s just get to the guts of this update. Without the ability to do a callout of a portion of an exhibit, trial presentations on the iPad weren’t truly competing with anyone except for themselves. Now that we finally have an app which can do it, others will follow suit out of necessity. To create a callout in Exhibit A, you simply open an exhibit and select the “Tools” button to select the callout icon on the far right. Creating the callout is as simple as sliding your finger from where you want the upper left side of the callout window to start and sliding to where you want it to end. If you’ve ever used a trial presentation program on a PC, it’s exactly the same except you use your finger or stylus instead of the mouse.

As you can see the callout is presented beautifully, with the underlying exhibit greyed-out and the callout contrasted against the background, perfectly sized.

While it is nicely displayed, I have a few issues with the callout feature which I am sure will be addressed in future updates. First, the annotations made on an exhibit do not get “called-out”. For example, if I create highlights, draw marks or other annotations on an exhibit, and then callout that area, those markings do not show up in the callout as you can see below.

This is the sort of thing that happens in early versions of software and is missed by programmers since they don’t typically foresee this sort of usage of a tool. While it may seem minor, this is certainly something which must be fixed before using Exhibit A in trial or a courtroom setting.

BLOCK HIGHLIGHTS
This feature is pretty straight-forward but seems to be ignored by some other developers. Many times it is necessary to highlight portions of an exhibit and so other apps allow this by giving you a free-hand highlighting tool, which Exhibit A also provides. However, when highlighting lines of text or entire paragraphs, using the free-hand tool is cumbersome and to be blunt, messy. The inability to create nice blocks of highlighted text is definitely an issue in other apps and so the inclusion of this in the latest version of Exhibit A is most welcome. My only complaint about this feature is not really about the feature but in the way highlights in general are created in Exhibit A as well as most other trial presentation apps save for TrialPad. Instead of creating a highlight which increases the contrast with the text below, Exhibit A merely places a semi-transparent block of yellow on top of the text, thereby making it difficult to read the text below and negating the point behind highlighting, to call attention to a part of an exhibit. I have provided examples below of highlighted text in Exhibit A and TrialPad to better visualize this oversight.

Exhibit A

TrialPad 1.0

REDACTION
This works just like the block highlights, except allows the user to redact portions of an exhibit. For some reason developers keep putting this into their apps, probably because ‘redaction’ sounds like a legal term. In practicality, your exhibit should probably be redacted before trial using a desktop app. Regardless, it works as advertised, allowing for redacted areas to appear as either a block of white, black, red, green or blue. To use redaction, it is selected in the same tool area as highlighting. Problem, and this is a MAJOR one: when you redact an area, if you make a callout of it, the text below appears! Why? Because the callout feature does not callout annotations and the redaction tool is simply another annotation. This oversight makes the redaction feature incredibly dangerous and could potentially cause a mistrial. It must be fixed ASAP.

INTERFACE
I must say the new interface for Exhibit A is nice, albeit with a few quirks. Once you get used to how things are accessed however, most functions are quite seamless. As you can see below, the creation of cases is accomplished at the main screen, as expected. There is direct access to DropBox from this main screen which allows for creation of DropBox folders, downloading of multiple files and folders as well as uploading of exhibits from Exhibit A into DropBox.

This view provides a good overview of each case, displayed cunningly as a briefcase, as well, with a display of how many exhibits are in each case below the name of the case.

Importing into Exhibit A is performed either by accessing the DropBox icon at the main screen or by opening a case and selecting the “My Photos” button for images already on the iPad. Subfolders are available to sort your exhibits, thus recreating the standard structure of folders used in the courtroom for trial. Exhibits can also be added via WiFi, FTP, iTunes or email and will appear in this area once imported.

One perhaps most overlooked feature of Exhibit A is the laserpointer feature. available when an exhibit is shown, the tool displays a nice bright red laser looking pointer which follows your finger as you drag it across the exhibit. This is quite helpful given the drowning out which occurs when a laserpointer is used on a television screen or projector screen. Often times the only solution is a much stronger or brighter colored laserpointer which can potentially harm jurors’ eyes.

While I definitely like Exhibit A and applaud their effort at being the first among the iPad trial presentation apps to provide us with all of the necessary tools for effectively presenting exhibits at trial I cannot yet recommend Exhibit A for one reason, speed. When creating a callout from an exhibit, there is a noticeable and almost agonizing delay between letting go of the callout area and the rendering of the callout. This delay is so long in fact that I was able to capture two screen captures as the callout was rendered. This delay, while mildly annoying while trying out Exhibit A, is a deal-breaker for use in front of a jury. This is not a limitation of the iPad in any way, I can assure you, since I have developer version of two trial presentation programs which both handle callouts with ease and without any delay. Until Exhibit A fixes this, the new callout feature is just a nice breath of fresh air. Of course, once fixed, Exhibit A will become the trial presentation app of choice until the others can catch up.

I’ve spoken over 10 times this year at various seminars on how lawyers can use their iPads in their legal practice and I’m thrilled to announce my next speaking event on June 2, 2011. This will be a webinar so even if you can’t make it to one of my live “performances” you can see what all of the hoopla is about from the comfort of your desk! I have many new apps to discuss and am thrilled to be talking about some late comers to the legal iPad market as well as show some apps which aren’t even for sale in the iTunes store yet.

Join me for what is sure to be a great webinar at 3:00 EST on June 2, 2011. You can register here and also visit the link if you would like more information. This webinar is approved or is pending approval for credit in the following states:  AL, AR, BC, CA, CO, FL, IN, KY, LA, MO, MT, NE, NV, RI, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WI, WY and at only $129.00 is a steal. I hope to see you there!

I am speaking at 10:45 am at the ISTA Conference Center but make sure to check out the other great speakers, including Matthew Schad on Trial Presentations, paperless offices and other legal techie stuff.  It is one seminar you don’t want to miss and if you come, be sure to say hi if you see me!

There are 18 different educational tracks for lawyers, so you will have a diverse selection of sessions concerning attorneys and law firms using technology.  Be sure to visit the amazing exhibit hall where my favorite case management software Rocket Matter will have a booth along with many, many other amazing products.  You can download the conference guide here.

Rather than leave social media as largely uncharted territory, lawyers can reap the benefits of learning to harness the true power behind these types of sites to further their own careers. These attorneys tend to raise their profiles in the eyes of existing clients and prospective clients alike, which has an overall positive effect on business.

Here are some ways a progressive attorney can utilize social media:

Social Networking

The object of social media sites like Twitter is to gain followers. As a lawyer, you really don’t want to accumulate followers who might potentially need to come to you for advice one day. Instead, you want to connect and network with those professionals who are likely to refer people they know to you.

This means finding a way to increase the number of followers you have who are from a legal or business network. One way to do this is to follow other attorneys and subscribe to blogs that interest you. Leave comments that help to engage the blog owner or other respondents in a conversation.

Once they are following you, it’s up to you to use other forms of social media to let them know about your field of specialization.

Blogging

Using a dynamic platform like a blog can be an ideal way for a lawyer to offer credible legal opinion and expertise. WordPress can be installed easily on a private or corporate domain and makes blogging quick and simple. A blog allows you to establish a professional online presence, whether you have your own firm, or whether you’re working as an employee for a larger firm.

Many employers worry about their attorneys blogging under their own name, as they fear this may detract from the company itself. However, if the message being posted on the blog attracts the right audience, it can be a draw-card for large companies to contact that lawyer as an individual and eventually become a client for the firm.

Insights and Opinions

It should be noted that any legal insights or opinions you do decide to share on social media sites should never be confused as actual legal counsel by your readers or followers.

Wherever necessary, display a disclaimer on your blog, on your Twitter profile or on your Facebook profile. Say something akin to: “Opinions posted to this blog (or feed) do not constitute any form of legal advice”.

Personal or Professional

Perhaps one of the reasons many lawyers avoid social media sites for professional purposes is that these platforms are often seen as being more of a personal nature. However, there are many attorneys who can successfully inject a personal insight or a level of their own personality into their blog posts.

This gives readers a reason to continue coming back to read more, as these types of personalized professional blogs aren’t all about trying to drum up more business. Instead, they highlight that there is a real, living, breathing person behind all that legal talk. This can actually help to instill a sense of trust in your as an attorney, which may be beneficial for attracting new clients in the long run.

These simple social media tips could be the key to broadening your professional online presence. Before long, prospective clients will begin to connect with you as a potential source of legal advice.

About the Author:  Lior Levin who works for an E2 visa lawyer that specializes in e2 visas for UK and German citizens.

If you haven’t seen RocketCLE, they offer virtual CLE seminars viewable at any time for extremely reasonable prices. At $9.99, my iPad for Lawyers seminar is a bargain and if I say so myself, quite good. Should you be on the fence about purchasing the seminar, email me and I will tell you all the reasons you should purchase it.

Register here and I look forward to seeing you there!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

After searching around the Internet, I have found relatively few reviews of Exhibitview. My guess is that most people doing reviews of trial presentation software are trial consultants and a program like Exhibitview which seeks to make presenting exhibits at trial as easy as possible is in direct conflict with their business models. Since TechnoEsq Presentations, while being trial consultants, seeks to make technology in the courtroom affordable, we have no such conflict of interests. So I have decided to write an in-depth review of Exhibitview which must begin with certain basic questions: What makes a trial presentation software package good? What should a litigating attorney look for in deciding on one?

GOALS
When looking at any trial presentation software you first have to determine what your goal is with the program. Do you want to present slides one after another or do you want to be able to call up a document on the fly via Bates Stamp or other naming convention? Since the answer to this question determines the software used you must have a clear understanding of what end tasks you want accomplished prior to beginning.

Linear Presentations
Linear presentations are the most common and well-known type of presentations. PowerPoint and Keynote are the most well-known types of linear presentations. Linear refers to the order in which documents or slides are presented on the screen. With these presentations, for the most part, slides are created which flow into one another with the ability to jump between slides but all annotations must be made in advance (with some exceptions). This type of presentation is perfect for opening statements, hearings or, depending on the attorney’s style, closing arguments.

Non-Linear Presentations

When attorneys want a trial presentation program which can call up any document at will they need a non-linear presentation. A non-linear presentation is one which calls up exhibits or videos by either a pre-determined naming convention for each exhibit or by Bates Stamp numbering. This flexibility makes non-linear presentations perfect for cross-examinations, direct examinations and for some attorneys closing arguments. Additionally, these programs allow for annotations “on-the-fly”, allowing the operator of the computer to highlight areas, draw annotations and zoom in on sections of an exhibit at will. Samples of these types of programs are Sanction, Verdical, Trial Director and now ExhibitView.

EXHIBITVIEW

I have found the vast majority of lawyers want an application to highlight areas on an exhibit, draw lines and zoom in on certain areas (a ‘callout’) show clips from videos and present pages from depositions. Exhibitview seeks to outperform their competition with the simplicity which they accomplish these tasks. Programs such as Sanction and Verdical often leave attorneys scratching their heads with the complications in moving a case, importing videos and most times simply finding the tool the lawyer wants to use at any given time. This leads to frustration by the attorney and either a paralegal being sent for the expensive training these companies offer or hands thrown up in despair and going to the fall-back of printing exhibits on foam boards. The problem? Most juries expect technology in the courtroom given their exposure to CSI-type courtrooms on television and if sending the paralegal for training was the option, what happens when that staff member leaves the firm, taking all of their knowledge of the program with them?

Enter Exhibitview. Marketed as learnable in 30 minutes without individualized training, Exhibitview enters the market which has been dominated by the same companies for over a decade. Yet the fact that their program has not been around for over ten years turns out to be beneficial. The interface lacks the clutter and confusion as a result of years of additions and half-updates which plagues the other trial presentations we have been using. What Exhibitview does, play deposition clips, annotate exhibits, callout and play synchronized video it does well. The only complaint I’ve heard from attorneys is the lack of all of the bells and whistles the other programs offer- yet those same litigators are mysteriously silent when I asked them how often they actually USE those features.

Here is how it works:

Presenting Exhibits:
Much like every other app in this category, ExhibitView is first and foremost created to present exhibits. Exhibits are sorted into categories on the right side of the presenter’s screen. As you can see below, these categories range from media (videos), documents, images, and even webpages. You can simply scroll through the listing of exhibits or use the find feature, which has an auto-fill feature, to locate exhibits. To display the exhibit you either drag it to the hot zone in the middle of the presenter’s screen or if using the search feature hit enter twice.

The drop-zone is that area which will be displayed to the jury on the projector when it is on. You will notice that Exhibitview has the feature to turn the projector off while enabling the user to call up documents, annotate or zoom in on them, and then seamlessly turn the projector back on for viewing of the exhibit. This is accomplished either by dragging and dropping into the drop-zone. The drop-zone is divided into sections. When an exhibit is dragged into it, the entire drop-zone will light up, meaning the exhibit will be displayed in the center of the display. If the exhibit is dragged to either the right or left side of the drop-zone, only that half of the drop-zone becomes highlighted, indicating which half of the screen the exhibit will be displayed on. Using this, two images can quickly be compared side by side without clicking on any buttons or setup icons. The sizes of the left and right side can be changed via the icons directly above thedrop-zone, allowing for 2/3 and 1/3 splits between left and right or top and bottom. This drag and drop applies to all exhibits including: video, slides, images, pdf’s or anything else brought into the drop-zone.

Anything brought into the drop-zone is displayed on the screen unless the projector is turned off.  One difference between Exhibitview and other trial presentation programs is that the cursor is never brought “out” onto the projector to annotate or perform anything in the program.  All highlighting or zooming in to certain areas of an exhibit is done within the drop-one with the effects not being seen until the annotations are complete.  Additionally, ExhibitView has an undo and redo feature for annotations in the toolbar which makes it easy to create annotations and quickly remove and replace them with the click of a button.

Depositions

ExhibitView isn’t made to just present documents and images however. Synchronized depositions, where the text of a deposition is displayed as the video of the deposition plays is a staple of any good trial presentation software and is also included within ExhibitView. What is superior about ExhibitView’s presentation of synchronized text and video is the manner in which it is displayed. Other trial presentation programs display the sync’d text in a box below the video, with a yellow bar highlighting the current line but also allowing the jury to “read ahead” by showing the coming lines of transcript. Exhibitview presents sync’d depositions the way jury’s are used to seeing it, as a closed-caption. This makes it much easier for the jury to watch the deponent and read the text at the same time and also keeps them from reading ahead, potentially taking away the shock factor. Below is an example of how synchronized text is displayed:

As you can see from the example below, the process of selecting a portion of a deposition for playback is incredibly simple and straightforward. I have always been amazed at how complicated other programs can make such an often used task. In ExhibitView it is as easy as highlighting the text of the deposition you want played and dragging it to the presentation window. Exhibitview then begins playing the video/text of that clip instantly.

This is a much cleaner and more elegant solution than Verdical or Sanction’s method of viewing sync’d depositions. In addition to this, Exhibitview does not require the importing of depositions if you want to just play certain portions or the entire depo. It allows you to insert a DVD of a depo and create bookmarks within the depo for viewing later. When you want to play the deposition or bookmarks, you can just put that DVD into the computer and either play the deposition in full or jump straight to your bookmarks. Of course, you can import a digital version of your depo in most standard video formats and create bookmarks or play the deposition from there, but in today’s age of smaller and smaller notebooks, hard drive space can become a problem and so having the option of playing a deposition or bookmarks directly from the DVD can help alleviate hard drive storage issues.

Much like other presentation solutions, Exhibitview will allow you to create SlideMaker slides, basically like PowerPoint slides, from within the program or import pre-created PowerPoint slideshows. One caveat is that it does not support moving text or videos from imported PowerPoint slides. This isn’t that much of a problem however since you can play a video and display a slide side-by-side in ExhibitView’s presenter screen. One plus side to using ExhibitView’s SlideMaker is that the slides are croppable and resizable, even allowing the user to change to different slides.

Perhaps the most welcome feature of Exhibitview is the automatic detection of projectors. As long as the second monitor or projector is set up as an extended monitor, ExhibitView’s projector wizard will find and setup display to your projector. I cannot tell you how welcome this feature is given the problems often associated with other solutions trying to connect to projectors. Everything an application like this does automatically is one less thing an attorney has to worry about while in trial.

For the money, at $794 including software support, Exhibitview beats all known competition hands down as the best PC trial presentation solution available. The outstanding easy to use interface and features make Exhibitview a no-brainer for those litigating lawyers tired of fighting with their presentation programs in trial or constantly wasting money training and re-training employees in how to use their program of choice. Lastly, Exhibitview works perfectly fine on a Mac running virtualized Windows.

I have worked out a special offer on Exhibitview for TechnoEsq readers. If you enter the coupon code “technoesq” at checkout you receive 20% off the retail price of the software and support bundle. That’s a savings of almost $160! Trust me, it’s money well spent.