We still have seats available for those interested. Tad Thomas will be speaking about the practical aspects of using an iPad in a paperless office while Mike Stevens gives us basic tech tips for non-geeks. We also have Benham Sims talking about using the iPad in a criminal practice, Larry Port talking about cloud computing, Bill Roach will present on affordable and EASY to use trial presentation programs for the PC, and I’ll be talking about litigation and trial apps for the iPad.

You’re really missing out if you don’t attend this seminar. More information can be found here.

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!

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.

This episode… we talk about the new iPhone, the iPad and our guest Randy Juip’s conversion of his law firm to Mac

In this episode “iPad, New iPhone and Randy Juip” your hosts Ben Stevens, Finis Price, and our guest, Randy Juip, not only discuss Randy’s conversion of his office to Mac’s, but the upcoming iPhone as well as the iPad.

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We will give a review of FastCase in a few days on our branch-off site, MacEsq.com, in the next few days but U.S. Code doesn’t really need that much explanation as it simply provides the U.S. Code in its entirety. It provides full offline access to the entire U.S. Code so you can search all federal statutes by keyword or citation even when offline. You can even bookmark cites for future reference which is handy given the shear breadth of the information available in this app. This isn’t the most up to date version of the U.S. Code, but is still well worth the price…FREE.