'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.