Month: April 2025

Last week, I attended the American Bar Association’s annual legal technology conference, ABA TECHSHOW 2025. It was the 40th year of this conference, and in light of that anniversary, there were parts of the conference that looked back on how far legal technology has come over the decades. But as always, the core focus was on how technology can improve the practice of law today and in the future.

Unsurprisingly, AI was a major theme of this year’s conference. There were tons of educational sessions specifically devoted to that topic. Even in the sessions with a different focus, there was often at least some reference to AI. And on the Expo floor, almost all of the vendors were talking about how they were incorporating AI to make their products better. Seeing one topic become so predominant throughout the conference reminds me of 2009, when the iPhone was just taking off and there was so much excitement at TECHSHOW about the best iPhone apps for attorneys, and 2013, when so many attorneys were starting to understand the promise of the iPad and so many of the TECHSHOW vendors were emphasizing how well their services worked on an iPad. Of course, nowadays, being able to use a legal technology product on the iPhone and iPad is virtually a given, so much so that the only thing considered remarkable is when an offering lacks iPhone/iPad support.

Last week, one of the sessions that I taught was a fast-paced, jam-packed hour-long session on tips and tricks for being more productive with an iPhone and iPad in a law practice. There was so much to discuss, and I could have easily gone for at least another hour.

The other session that I taught, along with Prof. Kenton Brice of the University of Oklahoma College of Law, focused on the newest technology from Apple—the Vision Pro—and explored not only how lawyers can use this product today but how future VR and AR technology will allow lawyers to represent their clients more effectively, especially in litigation.

The keynote address was delivered by technology activist Cory Doctorow. It was incredibly thought-provoking and addressed numerous topics that are at the intersection of technology and the law, such as antitrust regulations and user privacy. I don’t agree with everything that Doctorow said, but he made a lot of good points and delivered them eloquently.

As always, there were lots of interesting sessions and not enough time to see everything, but I enjoyed the sessions that I did see. Here are Texas attorneys Mark Unger and Mitch Zoll discussing ways to use AI in a law practice:

Here is my podcast co-host Brett Burney along with Tara Cheever of Lit Software presenting a slide to discuss the exciting technology of USB-A. (Just kidding; they were talking about presenting evidence at trial using an iPad.)

On Thursday night, Brett and I hosted a fun dinner at the Italian restaurant Petterino’s. We were joined by North Carolina attorney Shaunis Mercer, Prof. Savanna Nolan of the University of Georgia School of Law, Atlanta attorneys Mike Dunham and Gregory Jacobs, San Antonio attorney Mark Unger, Ian O’Flaherty of Lit Software, and Cleveland attorney Paul Schumacher. In this picture, we are joined by Bill Vance (CTO of my law firm, Adams and Reese) and his wife who shared some laughs with us during the evening.

Friday morning, Brett Burney and I recorded the most recent episode of the In the News podcast from the Expo floor. It is rare to have the chance to record while we are in the same room, and it was especially nice that we had some guests on the podcast, including Vance and Washington, D.C. attorney Michael Eisenberg.

Friday night, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of TECHSHOW, there was a 1980’s-themed party. A few folks at the party looked like they were still in the 1980s, including Barron Henley and Gina Roers-Liemandt, and I got a chance to use a cellphone that was about the same size as the one that my father used in the 1980s.

Reid Trautz of the American Immigration Lawyers Association wore items from TECHSHOW 1998 and TECHSHOW 2011.

Here is Steve Embry, one of the co-chairs of TECHSHOW 2025.

The Expo floor was very active this year, with vendors showing off the latest and greatest in legal technology. I found it valuable to talk directly to many of these companies about their products, and I saw quite a few things that I hope to soon have at my own law firm so that I and others can use them. Unfortunately, I was too busy to spend any time in the Puppy Lounge sponsored by Clio, but I did enjoy watching the puppies march in Friday morning as Brett and I were recording the podcast. (Check out the video at 52:37.)

Finally, it was fantastic to talk to so many iPhone J.D. readers and In the News podcast listeners at TECHSHOW—some of whom I have met in the past and others who I was meeting for the first time.

I’ll end with this post with a picture of some of the past chairs of ABA TECHSHOW from the 1990s to today: Brett Burney (2015, 2026), David Bilinsky (1998, 1999), Natalie Kelly (2014), Tom Mighell (2008, 2018), Paul Unger (2011), Roberta Tepper (2021), Dan Pinnington (2007), Jim Calloway (2005), Debbie Foster (2010, 2018), Allan MacKenzie (2021), Catherine Sanders Reach (2020), Cynthia Thomas (2024), Ivan Hemmans (2022), Reid Trautz (2012), and Steve Best (2016).

I hope to see many of you in Chicago next year at ABA TECHSHOW 2026, which will take place March 26-28, 2026.

Brett and I recorded this week’s episode of the In the News podcast on the Expo floor of the ABA TECHSHOW conference in Chicago. Unfortunately, the sound is not as good as our normal episodes because we had bleed through from one microphone to the next one. I apologize that it is a little distracting when you first start to listen, but my hope is that you will get used to it pretty quickly and then you can just enjoy the episode. And there was so much to talk about this week from iOS 18.4 and the other big software updates of the week and some of the latest developments in the world of legal technology. Thank you to special guests Michael Eisenberg of The Tech-Savvy Lawyer, Bill Vance of Adams and Reese, and a bunch of cute puppies for joining me and Brett during the podcast.

In our In the Know segment, Brett discussed the QR code feature of LinkedIn, and I discussed using the Shared With You feature on the iPhone and iPad, especially in Safari.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

Apple released lots of updates this week. For the iPhone and iPad, we now have iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4. It adds new emoji, the Apple News Food section in Apple News+, four different Ambient Music selections that you can trigger using the Control Center, priority notifications, EU support for Apple Intelligence, iPhone 15 Pro support for Visual Intelligence, a new Sketch style in the Image Playground app, support for robot vacuums in the Home app, and much more. For the Apple Watch, we now have WatchOS 11.4, which gives you the option for your wake up alarm to make a sound even if your watch is in silent mode assuming that you are using the Sleep focus mode to trigger the alarm. The Apple Vision Pro gets visionOS 2.4 which makes it much easier to share your Vision Pro with someone else thanks to a companion app for the iPhone/iPad, plus it adds the cool Spatial Gallery app and initial Apple Intelligence support. And there are updates for the Apple TV and the Mac. I suspect that these are the last significant operating system updates before we learn about major new features at WWDC in two months and those features are released this Fall, but we will see. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• I’m in Chicago right now at ABA TECHSHOW. Brett Burney is here as well, and our plan is to record this week’s episode of the In the News podcast on the Expo floor this morning. Hopefully, all will go well, but if there is any delay in the episode showing up in your podcast app or on YouTube, I’m sure it will be because we are switching up our normal routine.
• Chance Miller of 9to5Mac discusses the major new features of iOS 18.4.
• Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider discusses a few of the new features of iOS 18.4, including some minor improvements to CarPlay.
• Joe Rossignol of MacRumors discusses the new Ambient Music feature in iOS 18.4, which you can add to your Control Center. I’ve checked it out, and it is nicely done. I like the Chill and Productivity channels for having something in the background while I get work done. On the other hand, the Wellbeing channel doesn’t do it for me.
• Juli Clover of MacRumors discusses the new Apple News Food feature of Apple News+. Content comes from Allrecipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food, and Serious Eats. And the layout is very nice. With this new section, Apple News+ now has sections for News, Sports, Food, Puzzles, and just about any other topic that you manually add. The service has turned into a very nice, modern newspaper, and I love that.
• In iOS 18.4, Safari works differently when you open a new tab: it shows your recent search terms. If this is a privacy concern for you (because you share your device), Tim Hardwick of MacRumors explains how to disable this feature.
• Of course, there are also security fixes in iOS 18.4, as noted by Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac.
• Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider notes that the Mail interface on the iPad has been updated in iPadOS 18.4 to match the recent update to the Mail interface on the iPhone. This includes the Inbox categorization feature, which I immediately turned off but perhaps others will find it useful.
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac discusses the new Apple TV interface changes in tvOS 18.4.
• As noted by Amber Neely of AppleInsider, on Monday, Apple very briefly released watchOS 11.4 for the Apple Watch, but before I could try to download it, it disappeared. Then it reappeared on Tuesday morning, then it disappeared again. Then it came back again on Tuesday afternoon. I took a risk and installed it on Tuesday afternoon, and nothing bad happened to my Apple Watch. Yet.
• Apple is releasing a new Immersive Video for the Apple Vision Pro today. VIP: Yankee Stadium features an all-encompassing look at how elite athletes, die-hard fans, dedicated staff, and epic moments make the Bronx ballpark legendary.
• As a reminder, I keep an updated list of all of Apple’s Immersive Video content on this page.
• Twenty Thousand Hertz is a great podcast about sound. The latest episode discusses sound aspects of Apple accessible technology and it is really interesting. It includes interviews with Apple employees who work to make Apple products more accessible.
• Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports that five VPN apps in the App Store have been found to have links to the Chinese military, according to a report in the Financial Times.
• Since President Trump has allowed Elon Musk to control so much of the U.S. government at the same time that Musk owns Starlink, Musk has been able to convince federal regulators to make life more difficult for Globalstar, a competitor of Starlink, as reported by Drew FitzGerald, Mich Maidenberg, and Keach Hagey of the Wall Street Journal. This has important implications for the iPhone becuase Apple is investing heavily in satellite technologies through Starlink.
• The amazing show Severance on Apple TV+ may be over, but now we have a new great show to start watching on AppleTV+: The Studio. I really enjoyed the first two episodes, and I agree with almost everything that John Gruber of Daring Fireball says about the series in this post. If you haven’t checked out the show yet, you should do so.
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac shares a tip for creating a shortcut to trigger Noise Cancellation mode on the AirPods Pro 2.
• And finally, AirPods Pro 2 is now available in Australia, and Sarah Berry of The Sydney Morning Herald and Age flew to Cupertino to interview Kate Bergeron and Dr. Rajiv Kumar of Apple to discuss the product and the hearing aid feature in this video:

The shortlist of app developers that have made the biggest contributions to iPad use by lawyers since the iPad was announced in 2010 includes two huge companies (Apple and Microsoft) and one small company that is hyper-focused on lawyers: Lit Software. Lit Software has been making great iPad apps for lawyers since the year that the iPad was first introduced. Almost fifteen years later, its apps, such as TrialPad and TranscriptPad, are essential tools for many litigators. As of just a few weeks ago, the company now has five apps, and you get access to all of the apps as a part of the Lit Suite subscription. The fifth and newest member of the suite is TimelinePad.

The name of this new app tells you what it does. TinelinePad lets you create and interact with timelines so that you can organize the evidence in your case. Better yet, since Lit Software knows quite a bit about presenting evidence thanks to its work on TrialPad, the TimelinePad app was built from the ground up with the ability to present interactive timelines to jurors, judges, mediation participants, or any other audience. Lit Software has been working on this app for years, and the care that went into creating this app really shows. This is a great new app for lawyers.

Creating events

The purpose of this app is to show events on a timeline, so of course, the first step in using this app is to create events associated with specific dates. For each event, you can assign either a date or a date range (and you have the option to assign a time). You can assign a title of up to 64 characters and, optionally, a subtitle of up to 128 characters and a description of up to 256 characters. To make it easier to associate similar events on a timeline, you can assign a color and/or a symbol or emoji with each event, such as a telephone, envelope, document, dollar sign, etc.

You can attach documents to an event to make it easy to see the document associated with an event whenever you look at it.

You can also assign one or more tags to an event. A tag can be something like an issue in your case, a specific person, a specific company, or a specific place. Tags are my favorite feature in the TranscriptPad app, so I’m glad to see this feature implemented in this app as well.

Although it is easy to create events in the TimelinePad app itself, you can also import them from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Because so many apps for lawyers have an export to spreadsheet option, this option makes it easy to transfer dates and events from another system to TimelinePad. Also, it can be faster to get up and running by entering most of the information for events in Excel and then exporting to TimelinePad for the final adjustments. To make that easy, there is an option in the app to export a blank Excel template that has all of the fields created for you: state date, start time, end date, end time, title, subtitle, description, and even tags: you type words separated by commas, and each of them will become a tag. When you are done typing your information in the spreadsheet, import the spreadsheet into TimelinePad, and your events will be created. At that point, you can customize things like color and the symbol/emoji.

Speaking of Excel, you can also export a timeline to Excel. Or you can export to PDF.

Viewing events on a timeline

Although it is nice that you can export a timeline, you are most likely to want to view it in the app—either on your iPad, or, more likely, when connected to an external monitor. You can view a timeline in many different ways.

Of course, you can view everything on a traditional timeline, and that is probably the main thing that you will do with this app.

You can pinch to zoom in or out of the timeline, and that gesture is great because it is so easy and intuitive, but I actually prefer to use the sliders at the bottom of the timeline because I find that to be more precise, plus it gives me a sense of the big picture at the same time that I decide how much I want to focus on a specific date range.

You can also see a list of the events in date order. Or you can see list of events that are associated with a tag.

Presentations

Creating a timeline for your own use can help you to gain perspective. However, I suspect that most people will want to use this app to show timelines to others. There are two different and equally useful ways to do this in the app.

First, there is War Room mode. Connect your iPad to an external monitor (for example, use AirPlay to wirelessly connect to an Apple TV that is connected to a monitor, or you can directly connect an iPad to a monitor). Everyone looking at the screen will see everything that you see on your own iPad screen. For example, if you are discussing a case with your colleagues, it can be useful for you and your team to see the list of events associated with a specific tag—for example, a specific company or a specific issue in the case—and seeing those events in date order may help you with your strategy, such as preparing your theory of the case. Seeing events on a timeline in date order grouped by something like an issue or a person is a great way to explore the relationships between the events in your case.

A second presentation mode is called Present. If you have used TrialPad before, you will understand this mode: you see everything on your iPad’s screen, but the audience sees just the timeline. In this mode, you can pick a tag on your iPad and then tap each event associated with a tag. As you do so, the audience that is only seeing the timeline will see different events highlighted on the timeline. There are two modes for doing this: one where the event is highlighted, and another where the event is enlarged and floats above the overall timeline—similar to a callout in TrialPad. These two modes make it easy for the audience to follow along as you guide the audience through the events in date order (or reverse date order or whatever makes more sense for you) while still understanding where each event falls on the overall timeline. When you are going through events in date order, you can use the left and right arrows at the bottom of the screen to move forward or backward through events.

If you know that you will want to focus on a specific part of your timeline when you do a presentation, you can create a Scene. A Scene is a snapshot of time, such as a particular month or series of months. By creating multiple scenes, you can quickly zoom to specific parts of the timeline that you selected beforehand without having to pinch and zoom to recreate it while you are in front of a jury.

Layers and more

Even though this app was released very recently, it has already received numerous updates, including a significant one to add a new feature called Layers. You can assign specific events to a layer and then turn specific layers on or off to show just certain events in a timeline at once. I suspect that this feature will be popular.

Other new features for TimelinePad are in the works, including the ability to annotate an attachment to an event (which sounds to me like bringing some of the power of TrialPad into this app), the ability to add a video to an event (such as surveillance video or a deposition clip), and the ability to import from from other Lit Software apps (such as impeachment slides from TranscriptPad—a feature that I discussed in this post).

One feature that I think that would improve this app is an Undo feature. The developer tells me that this feature exists on the Mac version of the app—which I had not noticed because I’ve been using this app exclusively on my iPad—but he says that Undo is still a work in progress on the iPad. [UPDATE 2/2/2025: See the comments to this post for an update from Ian O’Flaherty, the developer of this app, on the Mac version of this app.] Of course, you can manually undo something that you did; for example, if you change an event color from blue to red and then change your mind, you can just assign it a blue color again.

It is not surprising that so many updates have been released and are planned because in the almost 15 years that I have been using LitSoftware products, the company has always been very good about adding new features to its apps. For example, TranscriptPad has been available since 2012, but it still receives significant updates, such as the useful ability to sync video that was added just over a year ago.

Price

Lit Software no longer sells individual apps. Instead, you purchase a subscription to LitSuite. That gets you all of the company’s apps: TrialPad, TranscriptPad, DocReviewPad, ExhibitPad, and TimelinePad. It is similar to purchasing a subscription to Microsoft Office 365 and getting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. For a single user, the price is $600 a year, which gives you all of the apps for the iPad and for the Mac (except for ExhibitPad, which is an iPad-only app). If you want to purchase a subscription for multiple people in your organization at a discount, you can reach out to LitSoftware to take advantage of the company’s Enterprise Program.

Conclusion

I first heard about the idea of this app a few years back when I was talking to the developers at the ABA TECHSHOW conference in Chicago. This year’s conference starts tomorrow, and it is great that this app is no longer just an idea but instead is now a tool that I and other lawyers can use when working on our cases. And with this app, there is now one more reason that the iPad is such an essential device for so many lawyers.

Click here to get TimelinePad.

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This article won the LitigationWorld Pick of the Week award on April 10, 2025. The editors of LitigationWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for litigators and others who work in litigation, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.