Review: TimelinePad — create and present interactive timelines

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.