Last week, I teamed up with Judge Dan Hinde from Harris County, TX (269th Civil Court) to give a presentation at the Texas Center for the Judiciary's Annual Conference. We did a "60 Apps in 60 Minutes" session recommending apps that might be of interest to Texas judges, but most of the apps that we discussed would be of interest to others as well so I thought it might be useful to share the list on iPhone J.D. Here are the apps that we recommended:
- Judicial Education Conference [the conference app]
- GoodReader
- Dropbox
- Adobe Reader
- PDFpen
- PDF Expert
- Documents to Go
- WordPerfect Viewer
- Office2 HD
- Free WiFi Finder
- Picture it Settled Lite
- GoodNotes
- NotesPlus
- SoundHound
- Reminders [built in to the iPhone/iPad]
- Texas Monthly BBQ Finder
- Open Table
- Launch Center Pro
- LogMeIn
- Groups
- The Weather Channel
- Hurricane HD
- NOAA Hi-Def Radar
- Dark Sky
- Pastebot
- Scanner Pro
- RedLaser
- ABBYY Business Card Reader
- CardMunch
- GateGuru
- Hipmunk
- WestlawNext
- Lexis Advance HD
- Fastcase
- Black’s Law Dictionary
- Barron's Law Dictionary
- Texas Bar Legal
- TDCLA
- Rulebook
- Book of Jargon
- Congress / Congress+ / CongressPro
- Atomic Web Browser
- Chase Mobile
- Eye Glasses
- Dragon Dictation
- Digits
- Netflix
- DaysFrom
- Court Days Pro
- Find My iPhone
- Tweetbot
- Keynote
- Keynote Remote
- iPhoto
- Photoshop Touch
- Pro HDR
- AutoStitch Panorama
- Google Translate
- Calvetica
- Facebook
- Skype
After our presentation, Judge Charles Stephens from New Braunfels, TX shared with me an interesting way that he uses his iPad. He has an account with eFax, which gives him a fax number that sends PDF versions of FAXs to his email. When officers need warrants signed after hours, they can fax the warrant to his eFax number, he can then review the warrant on his iPad, if it is appropriate he can sign and date it using one of the iPad PDF programs, and then he can e-mail the signed document back to eFax so that the officer receives a signed fax and can execute the warrant. It's nice to know that an iPad can help the cause of justice, even after hours.
[UPDATE: After reading the last paragraph, Judge Steve Rosen from the Seattle Municipal Court wrote me to say that he does something similar, but he cuts out the fax portion. He writes: "At 3 am (or whenever), if an officer needs a warrant, she emails a .pdf of the warrant to my work email. She then calls my cell phone to wake me up. Using my iPad, I then log in to my work email and review the search warrant application. If I agree to issue the warrant, I use an app called Sign-N-Send to annotate the warrant, cross out parts I don’t agree with if necessary, and then sign it. I then email it back to the officer. Using this system, our officers get very fast turnaround on warrants (there is no delay for sending and receiving faxes), and I never even have to get out of bed."]
