I usually talk about adding apps or accessories to your iPhone or iPad to make it more useful, but we shouldn't forget that sometimes all you need is a book. Thanks to modern self-publishing tools, it is possible for anyone to create and publish a book that you can easily read on your iPad without finding an agent or signing with a traditional publisher. I recently wrote about how California attorney David Sparks self-published the ebook Paperless, and Sparks plans for that to just be the first in a series.
Brian Owens is a docketing professional in the Atlanta office of an AmLaw 100 firm. As someone who often calculates deadlines in different jurisdictions, he thought that there would be a demand for an ebook that covers the basics of court rule on date calculations and provides the rules for calculating deadlines in federal court and all 50 states. The result is the $10 ebook Calculating Court Deadlines: 2012 edition. Owens sent me a free copy of the iBooks version of the book to review (which requires the iPad; it does not work on the iPhone), but I see that it is also available in Kindle and Nook formats.
Unlike the Paperless ebook that David Sparks authored, Calculating Court Deadlines doesn't take advantage of all of the bells and whistles that one can add to a modern iBook such as video, sophisticated graphics, animation, etc. This ebook just contains little more than the basic text. Having said that, it provides the information that you need if you are a national counsel, in-house counsel, or someone else who wants to have a resource on your iPad with date calculation rules for all U.S. jurisdictions.
The book starts with a basic overview of the concepts relating to calculating legal deadlines such as calendar days versus court days, how to handle the last day when it falls on a holiday, adding additonal days for service, etc. The book then has a chapter for federal courts followed by a chapter for each of the 50 state courts. In each chapter there is a summary of the rules for calculating dates in that jurisdiction, the full text of each of the applicable rules, and then a series of examples that applies the rules. Chapters also include links to the appropriate court website that will open in Safari when tapped. Here is an example of one of the Louisiana pages in the ebook:
I suspect that most attorneys, paralegals and legal secretaries are only concerned about the rules for calculating deadlines in their own jurisdiction, and (hopefully) they already know those rules well. But if it would be useful for you to have the rules for all jurisdictions, this ebook is a way to have all of the rules that you need at your fingertips. I can't decide if $10 is too much for this ebook; it includes much less content than the $5 Paperless, but on the other hand this ebook is written for a much more narrow audience.
Click here for Calculating Court Deadlines on the iBookstore ($9.99): 
Click here for Calculating Court Deadlines on the Amazon Kindle store ($9.99).
