One of the best things that I did in law school was participate in a clinic. I was a part of Georgetown’s criminal law clinic where I had the chance to try jury and bench trials, one semester as a prosecutor and one semester as a public defender. And of course there are many other types of clinics devoted to all sorts of areas of law, all of which are a nice change of pace from memorizing cases. I was intrigued to see an article by Maria Clark of New Orleans CityBusiness about a clinic at Loyola Law School in New Orleans that teaches students to create law-related apps. The students wrote web-based apps, not native iPhone apps, but they look pretty useful on an iPhone. For example, the Multiple Bill Calculator lets you quickly calculate minimum and maximum sentences under the Louisiana Habitual Offender Law. Neat. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
I like the title – “Paper or Plastic” – of an article by Philadelphia attorney Maria Harris in which she discusses attorneys no longer bringing tons of paper files to court and instead relying on PDF files. When I am in court, my GoodReader app with all of my documents is one of the best tools I have.
John Edwards of Law Technology News recommends apps for attorneys who travel. I’m taking depositions in San Francisco this week, and I used some of these apps during my travel, such as GateGuru and FlightTrack Pro. He should have also mentioned TripIt.
If you are interested in a an easily-accessible version of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the ABA released a $24.99 digital version of the 2013 edition that you can purchase in the Rulebook app. Last year, I reviewed the version of the Bluebook released for the Rulebook app, and I still find it very useful to have that citation guide easily available on my iPad.
Ohio attorney Will Harrelson discusses using an NAS server at your law firm to store files that you can access from an iPad in this article on Lawyerist.com.
I suspect that a large number of attorneys using an iPhone previously used a BlackBerry. Vauhini Cara wrote an interesting article in The New Yorker about the rise and fall of BlackBerry.
When will the next iPhone be announced by Apple? According to sources with a very good track record of predicting things like this, the announcement will be on September 10.
In addition to a new iPhone, Apple will release iOS 7 this Fall, the next version of the iPhone and Pad operating system. Rene Ritchie of iMore wrote a good preview of what we will see based on the information that Apple has made public. And of course, I’m sure that Apple also has some interesting surprises for the release.
Earlier this week, I reviewed a great iPad stand called the Stabile PRO. At least, that is what I should have said it was called; in much of my review, I called it the Stabile 2.0 by mistake, which is a different, less expensive version that lacks features such as a pivoting head. Sorry about the confusion. The Stabile PRO is the version that I have been using and that I recommend.
And finally, I often hear about folks getting a new iPad and giving their old model to their kids, but how about instead giving it to Rover or Morris? Sophia Hollander of the Wall Street Journal writes about iPad apps for pets to use. The article includes a video with scenes like this one. Must be a slow news day on Wall Street.
I love using my iPad at my desk as a sort of second monitor. I can look at emails on my iPad while I am doing legal research on my computer. I look at a document on my iPad screen while I am drafting a memorandum about the document on my computer screen. But it is awkward to look at an iPad flat on a desk next to a computer monitor, and even when the iPad is propped up by the Apple SmartCover or any of dozens of iPad stands that sit on a desk, the iPad is lower than my computer screen. But when an iPad is in the Stable PRO by Thought Out, it has the height of a computer screen, perfect for a dual monitor setup, and perfect for when you just want to look straight ahead at your iPad screen while you type on an external Bluetooth keyboard connected to the iPad. Thought Out sent me a free review unit of this stand a few weeks ago and I am somewhat surprised how useful it has been. I find myself using it every day, and it makes my iPad even more helpful in my office.
[UPDATE 8/14/13: Note that in my original review, I incorrectly called the product that I have been testing the “Stabile 2.0.” The product I reviewed is actually called the Stabile PRO. There is a different, less expensive product called the Stabile 2.0 which is lighter and has a fixed vieiwng angle. Click here for a comparison. My guess is that most people would found the Stabile PRO worth the extra $40 to have the better viewing angles and a heavier stand, but it is nice to have the option to get a $60 version or a $100 version.]
The Stable PRO lives up to its name. It is heavy (just over 3 pounds), made of steel, and very strong and sturdy.
The vinyl-covered pads on the “arms” of the Stable PRO securely and safely hold your iPad on the device. You can pivot the device to point your screen in lots of different directions, but there is a lot of friction so that when you are just touching the iPad’s screen to interact with the iPad, it stays put.
Note that I am using the device with the optional Grapple PRO
accessory. You don’t need this accessory — you can just sit your iPad
on the Stabile — but with the Grapple PRO attached, your iPad is held
snug in place so that there is no risk of it falling off or getting
accidentally knocked off. I recommend getting this accessory.
The iPad can sit on the Stabile in either portrait or landscape mode. And if you have the Grapple PRO accessory, it adjusts to work in either mode.
The design of the Stabile reminds of an Apple iMac computer. It looks very nice and is obviously well made. It even looks good from the back, which is important because people who walk in your office are likely to see this device from the back while your iPad is on your desk.
The Stabile PRO is heavy enough that this is not a stand that you would want to take with you when you travel. You’ll want to keep it on your desk so that you can easily set your iPad in it whenever you want to view or read items on the screen. Indeed, the Stabile holds the iPad at a perfect height for viewing and reading
items on the iPad screen. As noted above, it makes your iPad feel much
like an external monitor — except that you can lift your iPad off of the Stable whenever you want to use the iPad as a flat tablet.
The bottom of the Stabile PRO has flat non-skid black polyurethane 3M feet. They keep the Stabile PRO in one position so that it doesn’t slide around your desk even when you are pushing on the iPad screen with your fingers. They seem to me to be very well attached, but it is nice that you can buy cheap replacement feet if you need them.
The version of the Stable PRO that I tested is silver, which matches the back of the iPad and also matches the silver on the Apple Wireless Keyboard. It’s a great color. The Stabile also comes in black or white.
Thought Out did a great job with this product. I had no idea how helpful my iPad could be when placed in this position, and the product itself is well-designed and well-made. The Stabile PRO is a unique and very useful iPad stand.
South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn posted yesterday on his iPad Notebook website that Wacom Bamboo Styluses are currently on sale at Staples. There are three models available, but my favorite is the duo because it is the perfect length and it also includes a pen, just in case you ever need it. Here is a link to my 2012 review, and I’ll add that I have been using this stylus many times a week for over a year and it is simply fantastic. There are other great styluses on the market — I also like the Adonit Jot Pro and still use it from time to time — but the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo is the one that I keep coming back to again and again. If you are just going to get one stylus to use with your iPad, I think that the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo is the one to get.
I usually recommend using Amazon to buy a stylus because their prices tend to be the best, but I see that right now, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo costs $31.99 on Amazon while it costs only $29.99 (a $10 discount off of their regular price) at Staples. Granted, the $2 difference is not huge, any you may prefer to buy from Amazon anyway if you are a member of Amazon Prime, but since this is the lowest advertised price that I have ever seen for this best-in-class stylus, I thought that it was worth sharing the news that Justin Kahn discovered just in case you are in the market for a stylus right now.
By the way, the most common use for my stylus is to take handwritten notes on my iPad, and my current favorite app to do so is GoodNotes. I also use a stylus from time to time when I am annotating PDF documents with an app like GoodReader or more recently, the excellent iAnnotate app that I reviewed last week.
You can click here to buy online from Staples, or you can just pick one up at the store if there is a Staples in your area. I presume that this sale will last about a week, and if you are reading this post after the sale has ended, then your best best is probably to buy the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo from Amazon. Wherever you get it, a good stylus is a very useful iPad accessory.
Earlier this week, Minneapolis attorney Lisa Needham explained on Lawyerist.com why she loves the GoodReader app. My last post dedicated to GoodReader was over a year ago, but in case anyone forgot, I love the app too. Indeed, I probably use GoodReader more than any other app on my iPad except for the Mail app, and it is one of my top recommendations for lawyers using an iPad. She also notes in her article that the “good folks over at iPhonejd.com” — those “folks” would be the triumvirate of me, myself and I — recently reviwed iAnnotate, but she likes GoodReader better. Frankly, I do too, but I use them for different tasks. For simple reading and annotating of documents, GoodReader is awesome. But if you need to do more complicated work with a PDF file, a more sophisticated app like iAnnotate or PDFpen or PDF Expert can manipulate and annotate PDF documents in ways that GoodReader cannot. And I also recommend that all attorneys get the Adobe Reader app because sometimes it can handle PDF files that other apps cannot, plus it is free so why not have it for just in case you need it. Enough about PDFs, let’s get on to the news of note from the past week:
It’s a good idea to be ready for power outages, especially now that we are in hurricane season. Last year I wrote an article with tips for using an iPhone during a lengthy power outage for the TechnoLawyer BigLaw newsletter, and it was recently posted on the TechnoLawyer blog. Check it out for my advice.
If you use ProVantage for your law firm time billing and financial management, you can now use Bellefield’s iTimeKeep to access ProVantage records on your iPhone and iPad as noted in this press release.
Jesse Londin of Law Technology News writes about Bike Crash Kit, a free app with tips for those who end up in a bicycle offered by personal injury law firm Flanzig and Flanzig.
1Password is one of the most useful apps on my iPhone and iPad. Read my review to find out why. The app usually costs $17.99, but it is currently on sale for only $7.99 — a great price for an incredible app. Click here to get 1Password:
David Pogue of the New York Times reviewed the new Moto X smartphone this week, the latest Android smartphone. I mention the article becuase in it he notes that there are more than 4,000 touch-screen phones available — including six different models of the iPhone and 3,997 different Android phones. Gulp.
I recently wrote about Wireless Emergency Alerts on the iPhone such as AMBER Alerts. This week, there was an AMBER Alert in San Francisco around 11:00 pm, and that was the first AMBER Alert that many iPhone users in the area had ever seen. It resulted in a lot of articles about these alerts, such as this one from Lex Friedman of Macworld. If you still don’t understand what these alerts are, I encourage you to read about them now so that they make sense to you when they occur.
T-Mobile started selling the iPhone in April, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that as a result, T-Mobile gained customers last quarter for the first time in four years. Note, however, that as reported by Kevin Bostic of AppleInsider, T-Mobile insists that its new “Un-carrier” ad campaign is the real reason, not the iPhone. Regardless of who is right, I’m glad that T-Mobile users can finally buy an iPhone.
Long before the iPhone or the iPad, Apple sold the Newton. Mat Honan of Wired wrote a good article on the Newton’s lasting impact.
And finally, I’ve long been a fan of the great commercials used by Apple. I really like the current series of commercials called Photos Every Day, Music Every Day and the latest FaceTime Every Day, all of which you can see on Apple’s YouTube page. But you can also turn back the hands of time and watch this video of none other than Siskel and Ebert reviewing Apple commercials back in 1986. I miss those guys.
If you are interested in hearing me talk about the iPad and iPhone, here are some of my upcoming speaking engagements.
The New Orleans Bar Association is currently hosting the Free on Fridays CLE, a series of one-hour CLEs that address the latest technology issues and cutting edge topics relevant to lawyers. If you are in New Orleans this Friday, August 9th, I’ll be giving an iPad for Lawyers presentation from 10 am to 11 am. The CLEs are free for New Orleans Bar Association members; non-members pay $35.00. To register, you can email Rebekah Burg or call NOBA at (504) 525-7453.
If you practice employment law, consider attending the 7th Annual Labor & Employment Law Conference, sponsored by the ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law. The conference is in New Orleans November 6th through 9th, and on Thursday, November 7 at 2:15 pm, I’m on a panel to discuss Apps for Employment Lawyers along with James McKenna of Morrison & Forester in San Francisco, Natalie Kelly of the Georgia State Bar in Atlanta (and Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2014) and Jeff Taylor of Absolute Legal Services in Oklahoma City (and publisher of The Droid Lawyer).
And finally, if you are a member of the Product Liability Advisory Council, I’ll be talking about using the iPad as a litigator at the Fall Conference in Las Vegas.
If any of those work into your schedule, I’d love to see you. Otherwise, you can find me here on iPhone J.D.
I work with a large number of PDF files in my law practice, and I’m sure that I’m not alone. All federal court pleadings on PACER are in PDF format and many state courts are moving to PDF electronic documents, other counsel frequently send me files in PDF format, when I do legal research I download the cases in PDF format, exhibits are in PDF format, etc. Perhaps most importantly, when I know that I’m going to work with a document on my iPad, I usually prefer that it be in PDF format. The iPad has the built-in ability to view PDF files, and the free Adobe Reader app offers even more options, but for professional work with PDF files it is nice to have a more powerful app. A few weeks ago, Branchfire sent me a free review copy of their $9.99 app iAnnotate, and I am incredibly impressed. This seems to be the most powerful and sophisticated app that I’ve seen for working with PDF files on the iPad. I am not sure that I would recommend this app to a mere casual iPad user because it is going to be overkill, but for those who want all of the tools at their disposal, this is a fantastic app.
There is typically a tension with PDF apps. On the one hand, you want to have access to lots of tools to annotate a document. On the other hand, you don’t want all of those tools cluttering up the screen when you are just trying to read a document. iAnnotate strikes a perfect balance by providing tools on both the left side of the screen that you can easily make disappear with only a tiny tab remaining so that you can access them again when you need them. Similarly, you can tap in the middle to make the tools at the top disappear, or tap again to see them.
Let’s talk about those tools at the top. The top left tab brings you to the main screen (more on that in a moment) but most of the tools at the top are tabs to your open PDF documents. Keeping multiple PDFs open at a time is incredibly useful, making it easy to switch back and forth between several documents. The gear at the far right brings up app preferences, and right next to it is a Dropbox circle. If you are reading a document that you accessed from your Dropbox account and you have modified the document on your iPad, the circle turns red to warn you that you are working with a changed version of the document. But if you tap that circle (or close the document) the changes are synced back to Dropbox. It is a great Dropbox integration that works really well.
On the right there are tools to work with the document. All of the common tools are there in the default toolbar, but what makes this app truly useful is that you can both modify the default toolbar and create your own additional toolbars. A simple flick from the right side of the screen switches between your active toolbars, so you can create toolbars with different tools for different types of tasks.
And boy are there a lot of tools to choose from. Here is a picture showing all of them, which I had to stitch together from three different screen shots on the iPad:
The tools include, for example, two instances of the pencil tool so that you can use one set by default to drop thin black lines and another set by default to draw thick, translucent yellow lines (useful for highlighting a scanned document). There is also a true highlighting tool which works great with OCR’d documents. There are tools for navigating within the document, tools for rotating the document, and tools for adding and working with bookmarks. You can use the standard pencil tool to sign a document, or you can use a specialized signature tool that makes it easier to sign and create a stamp of your signature that you can quickly and easily apply in the future.
Speaking of stamps, the app comes with a lot of built-in ones, and you can add any picture as a stamp. I created a picture of an Exhibit sticker and made a stamp out of it so that I can easily place virtual exhibit stickers on documents. For a stamp you use frequently, you can even create a custom stamp tool for the toolbar on the right that applies that specific stamp; the icon on the stamp tool even changes to a picture of that stamp.
If you ever need to save a copy of a website, iAnnotate does a better job than any of the browsers on my computer. And there is even a tool icon that brings up the full list of tools so that you can quickly select one that isn’t normally on one of your toolbars.
And those are just the tools on the right side of the screen. On the left side of the screen, there are five sets of tools such as Thumbnails and Actions that give you even more options for editing aspects of the document, copying a document, etc.
On the main screen, you can view a list of files that are local on the device (either in list view or in icon view) or tap Connections to access cloud-based storage such as Dropbox.
When it is time to export documents, you can either keep your annotations intact or export a flattened PDF document.
iAnnotate also has the ability to annotate Microsoft Word documents. This is a really neat and useful feature. Simply open a Word document in iAnnotate and as you start to annotate the document, the app will create a PDF version of the document. You can then highlight, markup in a red pen, etc. all over the document and then you can email that PDF file to someone else. If you want to markup a brief for another attorney or secretary to make the edits, iAnnotate is a powerful tool for doing so.
Even after a few weeks of using this app, I know that I am still just scratching the surface of what it does. Suffice it to say that if you want a sophisticated tool for working with PDF files on your iPad, and if you don’t mind a slight learning curve to figure out everything that this app can do, iAnnotate is an excellent choice.
I’m reading a great novel by Patrick Rothfuss called The Name of the Wind. Much of the book involves the main character, Kvothe, recalling the (exciting) events of his life with great detail. At one point he notes that his most defining attribute is his memory, and I’ve always been jealous of people (like my wife) who are great at remembering things. It always seemed that they barely needed to study in school; they hear or read something once, and then they know it. Fortunately, my iPhone does a perfect job of remembering things so that I don’t have to. I jot down something in a Notes app or tell Siri to remind me of something, and the iPhone never forgets, freeing up my brain to focus on analyzing issues instead of worrying about rote memorization. New York Times columnist David Pogue (the keynote speaker at ABA TECHSHOW earlier this year) wrote a great article in Scientific American discussing how smartphones are starting to make memorization obsolete. It’s a good read. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
New Orleans attorney Ernie Svenson told me that he encountered a strange bug that was preventing him from updating apps on his iPad. He pointed me to this thread on Apple’s forums to show that he is not alone. But I see that the very latest posts on the forum indicate that Apple may have finally done something on its end to fix it, so if you are having the same problem, hopefully you won’t have it for much longer.
Readdle is celebrating its sixth birthday by reducing the price of six apps by up to 70%. This includes the great Scanner Pro for $1.99 instead of $6.99 (my review) and PDF Expert for $4.99 instead of $9.99 (my review).
Serenty Caldwell of Macworld offers advice for traveling overseas with your Apple devices. One suggestion: bring an iPad instead of a laptop. I agree; I travel a lot within the U.S., but I can’t even remember the last time I brought a laptop.
Jeff Gamet of The Mac Observer shares a neat trick that was new to me for selecting multiple photos in the Photos app that involves using two fingers at once.
Rene Ritchie of iMore shares a few more tricks, gestures you can use in Siri, Mail, Safari, Calendar and the keyboard.
Brad Nicholson of Touch Arcade notes that Bad Piggies, a game from the folks that brought you Angry Birds, is Apple’s app of the week. Meaning it is free. I’ve never played it, but my seven-year-old son likes it.
And finally, here’s a product that is still in development but looks promising: Egg Minder, an egg tray that holds your eggs in your refrigerator and tells your iPhone how many eggs are in the tray. No more sleepness nights wondering how many eggs you have left!
Every year, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center conducts a survey to gauge the use of legal technology by attorneys in the United States. My thoughts on the prior reports are located here: 2012, 2011, 2010. No survey is perfect, but the ABA tries hard to ensure that its survey has statistical significance, and every year this is the best resource I am aware of to reveal how the approximately one million attorneys in the United States are using technology. Yesterday, the ABA released Volume VI of the report titled Mobile Lawyers. This year’s report shows that a huge and growing number of attorneys are using iPhones and iPads.
Over half of all attorneys now use an iPhone
This year’s survey reveals that 91% of all attorneys use a smartphone, and that percentage increases with the size of the law firm. For example, smartphones are used by 85% of solo attorneys, 90% of attorneys in a firm of 10 to 49 lawyers, 97% of attorneys in firms of 100 to 499 lawyers, and 99% of lawyers in firms of 500 or more lawyers. About two-third of attorneys using smartphones are using a device that they own, while about one-third are using a smartphone assigned to the attorney by their law firms.
For the 91% of attorneys who are using smartphones, what smartphones are they using? The survey reveals that 62% are using an iPhone, 22% are using an Android phone, 16% are using a BlackBerry, about 1% are using Windows Mobile, and about 1% either don’t know or selected “other”. Yes, that adds up to 102%, but perhaps some folks use more than one device. Here is a pie chart to give you a sense of the big picture:
As you can see, 2013 is the first year in which we can say that over half of the attorneys in the United States are using an iPhone.
This is the third year in a row that the ABA survey has collected this kind of information, which gives us the ability to see how the percentages have changed over time:
Over just the last two years, we have seen the BlackBerry drop from being an item used by 40% of all attorneys to only 14%: a drop of 26 percentage points. At the same time, the iPhone has grown from 31% to 55%: a gain of 24 percentage points. Android has also seen some growth, from 15% to 20%, and the number of attorneys who don’t use a smartphone at all has dropped from 12% to 9%. Thus, while some former BlackBerry users are now using Android phones, it appears that for the most part, BlackBerry’s loss from 2011 to 2013 has been the iPhone’s gain.
What are attorneys doing with their smartphones? The survey reveals that most attorneys are using their smartphones for e-mail, telephone, calendar, contacts, the Internet and text messaging. Less than 10% of lawyers report using their smartphones for expense tracking, time and billing, document creation, spreadsheets, web conferencing or presentations.
Over 400,000 attorneys use an iPad
Apple released the first iPad in 2010. The survey data for 2011, 2012 and 2013 has been consistent in one respect; every year, about 9 out of every 10 attorneys using a tablet have used an iPad. Specifically, the percentage was 89% in 2011, 91% in 2012, and 91% in 2013. (For those few attorneys who use a tablet but don’t use an iPad, more than half of them use an Android tablet and the small remainder use a Windows tablet or something else.) The survey reveals that over 80% of attorneys using a tablet own their device; less than 20% of tablet users are using something issued to them by their law firm.
While the iPad’s incredibly dominant marketshare for attorneys has remained relatively steady over the years, what has changed is the number of attorneys using a tablet at all. In 2011, about 15% of attorneys used a tablet. In 2012, about 33% of attorneys used a tablet. This year, 48% of all attorneys report using a tablet. With about a million attorneys in the United States and with the iPad being used by 91% of the 48% of attorneys using a tablet, this means that in 2013 there are around 436,000 attorneys using an iPad.
These numbers are impressive in their own right, but I also see a lot of room for growth. We now see 9 out of every 10 attorneys using a smartphone, and while I don’t expect tablet use by attorneys to get quite that high in the short term, it could get close. The iPad is ideal for reading and carrying around documents, managing email and using the Internet, tasks that attorneys do every single day. I rarely make it through a week in my office without another attorney sticking his or her head in my door to proudly announce that they “finally” got an iPad. I expect this trend to continue.
A large market
With around a million attorneys in the U.S., these number suggest that there are over a half a million attorneys using an iPhone and almost a half a million attorneys using an iPad. That’s a lot of potential customers for law-related iOS apps. This is good news for those who already create apps for lawyers, and hopefully will encourage others to create even more great legal apps.
As reported by Lex Friedman of Macworld, Apple announced this week that over 1 billion podcasts have been subscribed to on iTunes. I love listening to podcasts on my iPhone in the car or when doing things around the house, although sometimes I instead use my iPod nano which is convenient because it is so portable. My favorite podcasts currently include MacBreak Weekly, Mac Power Users, The Talk Show with John Gruber, This Week in Law, the Macworld podcast, the iMore show and The Incomparable, but I’m listening to new ones all the time. So far I like the new Clockwise podcast from TechHive, and my brother recently encouraged me to start listening to the Radiolab podcast from WNYC and the Accidental Tech Podcast. Too many podcasts, not enough time … especially considering that I also like to listen to audiobooks on my iPhone every once in a while. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
Virginia attorney Rob Dean discusses building a trial notebook on an iPad on his Walking Office site.
New Jersey attorney Richard Console explains why he likes the apps Fishead Analytics, SpeakWrite and JotNot Scanner Pro in a post on Attorney at Work.
Rulebook is a great app that I’ve reviewed in the past (here and here). Not only can you download statutes in it, you can also purchase a digital copy of the Bluebook. This week, the Rulebook announced that it is adding new sources from the Texas Law Review Association: (1) The Greenbook: Texas Rules of Form (a style guide for legal citation in Texas) and (2) Manual on Usage & Style (a writing guide).
South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer reviews the New Trent Arcadia Grabbit iPad case that lets you hold an iPad with one hand while you are giving a presentation.
Kevin Parrish of Tom’s Hardware reviews an interesting iPad (or iPhone) accessory, the SanDisk Connect. It is a tiny device — either a small flash drive or a slightly larger hard drive — that connects via WiFi to your iPad. They come in capacities of 16, 32 or 64 GB, and the larger model also has an SD slot. The idea is that you can store lots of media on these devices, such as pictures or video, so that they don’t take up space on your iPad, but the devices are so small that it is easy to carry them around with you. I often tell attorneys that documents and apps are only going to take up so much space on an iPad; the real deciding factor on whether you need to spend extra money on a larger model is how much space you want to have available for photos and movies. But if you keep your media on a SanDisk Connect, I suppose you can get a less expensive iPad. As you can see, I’m intrigued by this new device. Prices range from $49 for the 16 GB flash drive to $99 for the slightly larger 64 GB Media Drive (with SD slot). (Thanks to Houston attorney Reginald Hirsch for the link.)
Mary Ellen Gordon, Ph.D., has an interesting post on the Flurry site analyzing the price of apps. She notes that the average cost of an iOS app is 19 cents.
Nick Bilton and Brian Chen of the New York Times speculate on what might be Apple’s next new product.
And finally, Mike Wehner of TUAW shows off some of the more ridiculous iPhone-related items on Etsy, such as the Cowboy Hat iPhone Charger, perfect for all of the times when you … um … oh I give up.
Whenever a litigator asks me to recommend useful iPad apps, one of my first recommendations is TranscriptPad. If you own an iPad and you work with depositions, you will love this app. And if you don’t have it yet, I encourage you to buy it immediately before the price goes up, as noted below.
First, a little background on what this app does. As I explained in my January 2012 review, TranscriptPad imports the text versions of depositions provided by a court reporter and organizes them into cases. [UPDATE: If you need to work with .ptx files, read the very helpful comments to this post that discuss strategies for doing so.] You can then use the app to read and annotate the deposition. And instead of simply marking all of the important stuff with a yellow highlighter (although you can do that too), TranscriptPad lets you add issue codes as you review a deposition. So if a Question and Answer are relevant to damages in a case, you can select those lines and apply the “Damages” issue code (or whatever other issue codes you want to create). When you are finished reviewing the deposition, the app creates a handy report organized by issue code so that you can, for example, see all of the key “Damages” testimony at one time, all of the key “Comparative Fault” testimony at one time, etc. I’ve used TranscriptPad extensively in my own practice for the last 18 months and the app has been very helpful for many of my cases.
Last night, the app was updated to version 1.6.9. Several new features were added, but by far the most important addition was a vast improvement to the reporting feature. The best addition is the ability to run a report across several transcripts. For example, if a deposition of a plaintiff is in three different volumes, you can now run a single report on all three volumes. Or even more useful, you can now run a report across an entire case. Thus, you can easily see the most important testimony of every single witness that was deposed on the issue of damages or comparative fault or whatever in a single report.
To run these new reports, first navigate to the level on which you want to run a report. In the following example, I have navigated to the top case level where I have all depositions in the case. In this example, I have depositions from Joe Plaintiff and Polly Plaintiff. Simply tap the Reports button at the bottom of the left column.
Tapping that button brings up the new and improved Report dialog box:
To prepare a report that shows you the actual transcript testimony (the report that I find most useful) select “Detail” type of report under PDF Reports on the left. You can then decide what to include in the report. By default, every annotation will be included and every issue code, but you can turn off particular types of annotations. For example, if you are only interested in Damages, you can just run a report on the issue code of damages.
Once your report is prepared, it is displayed on the right so that you can preview it.
If you like what you see, then tap the export button at the top right of the screen. That gives you the option to email the PDF report, print the document to an AirPrint printer, send the document to your Dropbox, or open the PDF file in another app. In the following example, I chose to open the file in iAnnotate PDF, another app that I am currently evaluating for an upcoming review. As you can see, the PDF reports are easy to read with the page and line numbers and the full testimony.
These reports are incredibly useful to me because with the passage of time, I often forget all of the important testimony from a deposition. A TranscriptPad report allows me to quickly see all of the key testimony in a case, organized by topic. After spending a few minutes reviewing a report, I am once again up-to-speed on what is good for my client (or sometimes, not so good) about the testimony of a witness.
Note that the text of the report is in black and white. If you chose to highlight or underline text (instead of applying an issue code) as you were reading, that is simply treated as another type of annotation. So just as you might have a report on the “Damages” issue code, the app creates a report of all testimony that you highlighted in yellow, all testimony that you underlined in blue, etc.
The Detail PDF Report is the most useful report for me, but you can create other types of reports. The Summary PDF Report will give you the page and line designations but not the actual testimony. The Annotated (Full) and Annotated (Mini) reports prepare a PDF version of the entire deposition with your annotations included. You can also create reports in .txt format (useful if you want to work with the file in Microsoft Word), Excel format, Sanction format and TrialDirector format.
The ability to create reports across several depositions is a key feature for me, but there are lots of other useful improvements in version 1.6.9. For example, you can now create a mini report with four transcript pages on each page, useful if you are printing out the annotated transcript and you want something that doesn’t take up much space in your briefcase. There are also improvements in the ways that issue codes are handled across a case, including the ability to hide issue codes that are not used in the particular deposition that you are reviewing. The full list of improvements in this update is as follows:
What’s New in Version 1.6.9
◆ New and updated report options, including new “Annotated (Mini)” report.
◆ Reports of Flags and Notes are now included in all reports, and can have unlimited text.
◆ Create reports at any level of your organizational structure: at the transcript level, the folder level, or even across a whole case.
◆ Highlights and Underlines can now be included in reports.
◆ Create report as an Excel file with Issue Codes, Flags, and other annotations in separate Sheets.
◆ Easily show/hide Issue Codes used in other transcripts, e.g. only have medical Issue Codes show in a doctor’s deposition.
◆ Added Copy Text option to Create Designation dialog, and pasted text will include the sources page and line information.
◆ Double-tapping a page/line designation jumps to that area of transcript and brings up the Create Designation dialog.
◆ Search field now also finds exhibit, file, and folder names, in addition to text in transcripts.
◆ Now supports 4 character page numbers for large depositions (current page indicator, page number on slider, page number in transcript, and search result hits).
◆ Added Recent button to allow you to easily and quickly jump back and forth between different transcripts.
◆ Enhanced transcript import to handle additional formatting scenarios.
◆ Rename dialog now updates immediately.
◆ Search results now sorted alphabetically.
◆ Renamed “Pack Case and Send” to more intuitive “Email Case”.
◆ Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
If you haven’t purchased TranscriptPad yet, I encourage you to do so today because the price is about to increase. Ever since the app was first released, it has cost $49.99, but because Apple doesn’t allow developers to charge for app updates, the developer told me that he is raising the price of the app to $89.99 to cover the future cost of development. I believe that the price increase will occur on Monday, July 29, 2013. Even $89.99 is a great price for useful litigation software, but if you don’t have TranscriptPad yet and you want to save $40, you have a few days left. Whatever price you pay, you’ll find that TranscriptPad transforms your iPad into a sophisticated tool for reading and annotating transcripts.
