Review: The Law Pod - federal rules for your iPhone

Fitz Collings is a first year law student at William and Mary Law School.  He got his undergraduate degree in Biology at Cornell, his masters in biotechnology at Harvard, and he plans to practice IP law when he graduates.

In August of 2008, Fitz wrote some web apps (websites specially formatted for the iPhone) containing various federal rules.  He recently converted them to iPhone apps so that you can access the rules even when you don't have an Internet connection.  Fitz calls his company The Law Pod and he currently has four apps:  the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure and the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy.

The apps are straightforward.  Start the app and you will see a list of rules, listed by number.  Tap on a rule number to see the title and full text of the rule.  When you are looking at a rule, you can tap a "Previous" or "Next" button to browse through the rules.  

  

The apps also contain a search box at the top of each page.  On the app's home page, you can enter a term and the app will show you a list of the rules that contain your search term.  You can then tap on one of the rules in the list to see the full text of the rule.    To find a term within a rule, you tap the search area at the top of the screen of a rule, and then as you start to type your term you will see the instances of the word highlighted.

  

Yesterday, I discussed the similar legal reference apps sold by Cliff Maier.  How do Fitz's Law Pod apps compare?  Each has different strengths. 

One major difference is the layout of the home screen of each app.  In Cliff's apps, the home screen is a list of titles.  You need to click on a title to see the rules within that title.  In Fitz's apps, you see a full list of the rules, by number only, on the home screen of the app.  Cliff's layout is better if you don't know the specific rule you want and want to browse by subject.  Fitz's layout is better if you know the number you want and just want to go straight there.  As I noted yesterday, Cliff's app now features a "Jump" button that lets you jump straight to a rule or statute, but you might find it easier to just see a full list of all of the rules so you can scroll and then tap on what you want.

   

Another major difference is that Fitz lists the entire rule on a single page while Cliff has each subpart of a rule on a different page.  For example, if you want to see Fed. R. Civ. Pro 26(a)(1)(A), in Cliff's App you need to tap Title V --> Rule 26 --> (a) Required Disclosures --> (1) Initial Disclosure --> (A) In General.  That's five taps to get there, and you are only seeing that one part of the rule.  Compare that to Fitz's app, in which you just tap on Rule 26 and you are looking at the whole rule, including that first part.  In Cliff's apps, you can browse through subsections using arrows, but you might prefer Fitz's layout in which the whole rule is in front of you at once, reducing the risk that you will read Rule 26(a)(1)(A) but forget about something in Rule 26(a)(1)(B).

   

Those two differences I just noted are largely issues of personal preference, and depending upon what I am doing I sometimes prefer Fitz's apps and sometimes prefer Cliff's apps.  When it comes to search, on the other hand, Cliff's apps are superior.  As noted above, when you search in a Law Pod app you just see a list of rules, and when you first tap on a rule the search term is not highlighted unless you do a second search within that one rule.  In Cliff's apps, when you do a search, you see a both the title of the rule and a contextual excerpt with the search term highlighted.  Moreover, search itself is more sophisticated in Cliff's apps because you can search for a phrase or do a search for both terms or either terms (AND and OR searches); in Fitz's Law Pod apps, there is only a single term or phrase search.  (Look at yesterday's post to see pictures of these search functions.)

Other advantages of Cliff's apps:  Cliff's apps allow you to e-mail the text of a rule to yourself or someone else.  Cliff's apps include the "Jump" feature noted above.  Cliff has many more apps, and allows for inter-linking between apps.  When you restart Cliff's apps, you return to the rule you were last viewing.

Cliff's apps clearly have more features, but be aware that Fitz tells me that he has updates planned for his apps which will add better search capabilities, virtual tabbing/bookmarking of frequently used rules or sections, cross-linked rules, the addition of notes, and stored user preferences.  Also note that you pay a little more for Cliff's apps:  Cliff charges $2.99 for the federal civil, appellate and bankruptcy rules and $8.99 for Title 18 (which includes both criminal law and procedure).  Fitz charges only $0.99 for his Law Pod federal rules apps.

So which should you get?  I think the choice is easy.  GET BOTH.  This is not just me being glib; I prefer to have both sets of apps on my iPhone.  Sometimes I want to take advantage of the advanced features in Cliff's apps.  But for just a single buck more, I can also access one of Fitz's apps for those times when I know the rule number and just want to quickly browse through the entire rule.  I recommend that you do the same -- no matter what your billing rate, you'll spend more than a dollar of your time trying to choose just one! 

You can download each of the Law Pod apps from iTunes using these links:

• Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure - $0.99 -
• Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure - $0.99 -
• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure - $0.99 -
• Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure - $0.99 -

Or just click here for a page in iTunes listing all of Fitz's Law Pod apps:

Comments

[ambimb]

Both of these products look nice and I'm glad they're available, but they're also a little ridiculous. Why do we need a dozen different apps cluttering our phone for each different set of rules? Why doesn't someone get smart and start selling an expandable law database, something like a HanDBase with a catalog of datasets that you can purchase one at a time but which you access through a single, searchable, interlinked app? A wiki would probably work just fine, too. But having a different app for each set of rules (or two apps for each set of rules!) is absurd.

[Cliff Maier]

The issue is that Apple's system is not setup to easily allow that sort of thing. I have considered something like that, but I'd have to pay for credit card processing, server space, etc. (assuming Apple even allowed it), and the ultimate price to the consumer would be higher. Given the small quantity of sales, it's tough to justify the overhead that an expandable app would require.

I've also experimented with combining code sets, but no one is willing to pay the prices I'd have to charge for the combination; people see a price tag over $3, and sales drop right off the shelf. This despite the fact that statutes and rules constantly change, and I don't charge for updates.