The iPad for Litigators

The new iPad is out today! The new iPad is out today! The new iPad is out today! OK, that may not be as funny as Steve Martin's screams about being in the new phone book in The Jerk, but a lot of people are really excited about the new and improved iPad released today.

Trial lawyers are also pretty excited about the iPad. With great apps for trial presentation and preparation and a very simple interface, lots of lawyers are successfully using iPads in the courtroom for jury trials and other types of hearings. iPad for Litigators is the topic of the 53rd Edition of the Digital Edge podcast. Our guest is Tom Mighell. Tom blogs about the iPad in the legal community at iPad 4 Lawyers.  Tom is the author of the book iPad in One Hour for Lawyers and the author of the newly announced book iPad Apps in One Hour for Lawyers. Tom and I have done several programs about lawyers using iPads in and out of the courtroom. So my co-host, Sharon Nelson and I chat with Tom about how trial lawyers use iPads. It turned out to be a pretty good podcast if I do say so myself and the show notes have links to the apps we discussed as well as a link to purchase the archive of a CLE presentation Tom and I did through ALI-ABA with trial lawyer Jamie Moncus.

I hope you can listen to our podcast on The iPad for Litigators.

The iPad for Litigators is a hot topic

Later today I will be presenting for an online CLE titled The iPad for Litigators. Don't bother rushing to enroll as the program is now sold out. The last I heard they were closing in on 600 registered to take the class. (It will be repeated on February 3, 2012.)

My co-presenters are Tom Mighell, chair of the ABA Law Practice Management Section, blogger at iPad 4 Lawyers and author of iPad in One Hour for Lawyers and Jamie Moncus of the firm Hare Wynn, who recently obtained a $37.5 million verdict using iPad trial presentation technology. I hear more every week about how lawyers are using iPads in their practices. I am grateful for the opportunity to co-present on this topic. As is almost always the case, I have learned more preparing for this program and may learn even more during the program.

Friend is Now a Verb: Judicial Ethics and the New Social Media

I did not get to hear my friend, Judge Herbert M. Dixon, Jr., give the keynote address at the American Bar Association Annual Meeting session titled “‘Friend is Now a Verb: Judicial Ethics and the New Social Media,” which was sponsored by the ABA’s Judicial Division. Judge Dixon is a former ABA TECHSHOW Board member and is technology columnist for the ABA Judicial Division’s Judges Journal, ABA NOW had some good coverage of Judge Dixon's remarks and Connie Crosby posted her extensive notes and the video the judge showed the audience. The panel discussion following the keynote sounds like it was lively.

Judge Dixon warned the judges about the trouble they could face by friending lawyers on Facebook or using social media to obtain information about witnesses or litigants. He recounted several well-documented horror stories. I definitely think his warnings are well-placed. I also think some of these issues are very challenging.

I've considered some of these issues. Some of them seem to be more about how the tools are used rather than the tool itself. I understand that it is a clear and simple rule, and in many cases appropriate, to say a judge shouldn't "friend" those lawyers who practice in his/her court on Facebook. But should it be a hard and fast rule? I seem to recall a judge who invited all lawyers in a smaller jurisdiction to "friend" him so he, operating without staff support, could place dockets and updates there. That would certainly have been appropriate on a court website, so does it become wrong if done via Facebook? Well, sure there is more to Facebook than that. Facebook can allow lawyers to send hidden direct messages to the judge. But that is sort of like e-mail, isn't it? Or, to be silly, sort of like having a listed telephone number in the directory and answering the phone when it rings.

I get the problem. If the judge is Facebook friends with one lawyer trying a case in the court and not the other, it looks bad. It might even be a violation of judicial ethics. (Deciding that is way outside of my pay grade.) But didn't that exist in the pre-Facebook era, too? Judges go to the same churches with lawyers and often belong to the same clubs. They may cheer for the same high school football team. Some big city lawyers may not appreciate the almost impossible to escape web of relationships in smaller, rural communities.

A recent news item noted that Missouri had passed a law limiting the ability of teachers to "friend" their minor students on Facebook. That doesn't seem unreasonable to many, particularly with the anecdotal accounts of bad teachers using FB as an avenue for exploitation and abuse. And yet, you have to wonder whether a teacher e-mailing or texting a student should be deemed per se wrong. And let's not forget that a lot of text messages are things like "I'm running late" or "Are you here?" Is texting wrong but calling voice on the cell phone OK? Personally, if teachers are taking a small group of students on a field trip in another state, having all of their cell phone numbers seems like a wise precaution rather than a wrongful act.

Judge Dixon knows me fairly well and he knows I am not taking issue with him. But I guess the larger point to me is that the Internet and the mobile web allows us to be directly connected in all sorts of personal ways and I think as a society we are still grappling with the implications of that. I would truly hate for some judge to be in trouble because he Facebook friended a high school chum for the class reunion who was a lawyer who never appeared in his court and they both forgot about it months later when the lawyer did unexpectedly appear in his court for the first time. We have agreed as a society that some guilty should go free as the price for a system where innocents are hopefully not imprisoned. So maybe that means blocking thousands of positive student-teacher interactions in the name of blocking a predator.

I don't mean to suggest I have the answer for I certainly do not. I would always err on the side of protecting children. And yet, you can go back to the days of law school as you read Connie's notes and it will not take long before you say "But wait, what about this particular fact situation?" So it is with rules and exceptions and the law.

I'm sorry I missed seeing Judge Dixon at ABA Annual Meeting as we often run into each other there. So maybe blogging about his keynote serves a similar purpose even though some would say I shouldn't friend him on Facebook-- and, of course, I'm not even licensed to appear in his court.

His First Jury Trial

Trial lawyers have great stories. Veteran Oklahoma City trial lawyer Rex Travis shares the story of his first jury trial. I pass this along not as a long practice management tip, but just because it is a great story. Download FirstTrial.Travis.OklahomaBar

TrialPad 2.0 for the iPad is a Breakthrough

TrialPad 2.0 for the iPad is so good, this isn't even a review. It is an unabashed fan letter. Even non-litigators can benefit from this great app, especially if you have an iPad 1 that you won't be trading in for a while. First of all, I have been referred to as thrifty (well, OK, maybe even a tightwad.)  A few searches will find my byline attached to features like High-Tech Penny Pinching for the GPSolo magazine. So when I first blogged about TrialPad right after ABA TECHSHOW 2011, I noted that I was initially a bit put off by the $89.99 price tag. Apps are supposed to cost 99 cents, right? Or at the very most $4.99! After seeing TrialPad 1 demonstrated, however, I could see that it could be worth that price.

Recently released TrialPad 2.0 for the iPad, however, renders the value proposition a moot question. TrialPad 2.0 for the iPad is not competing with 99 cent apps. It is a legitimate competitor to trial presentation software costing tens of thousands of dollars in purchase and training costs. Best of all, you don't have to go through days of training. Anyone who managed to complete law school can figure out the basics of TrialPad in an hour or so. TrialPad.com has FAQ's and some short videos to help.

The more expensive trial presentation software packages certainly have more features, but they also have more complexity. TrialPad 2.0 can be used in ways you would never use the traditional presentation products. If you are going to a wired courtroom with a projector, it just takes a few minutes to load seven or eight documents into TrialPad, making it useful for a short evidentiary hearing or an argument on a motion.  Carrying your own projector and screen obviously takes a little more time for setup. For a jury trial, it probably makes sense for another lawyer or assistant to run TrialPad when lead counsel does the trial. But at least it is possible to do both with a single lawyer.

Any lawyer who might want to display images from an iPad on a screen and projector can benefit from this tool. I see this being used for mediations, settlement discussions, planning, training and most any time you want several people to see a display using a screen and projector.

What's new in TrialPad 2? You can see the new features here. The most-awaited was the ability to do call-outs so that a paragraph can expand out of a dcoument for easier viewing by a jury. There's a new white board feature that could be useful in all sorts of settings. Now it can import all sorts of file formats besides PDF, including JPG, PowerPoint, Word and multi-page TIF's. (I haven't tried this yet, but I note that Oklahoma State Courts Network site displays filed pleadings in multi-page TIF's.) It can play videos and create short clips from longer videos!

TrialPad 2.0 can even partially make up for the display limitations of your iPad 1. As manof you know, external display is greatly improved with the iPad 2, although depending on the app, it is far from perfect. But if you want to use TrialPad to display the image from your iPad 1 through a projector, it is now this easy: Click the Power button on the top right corner of your iPad, and while holding it down, click the iPad Button on the front of the iPad. You will see the screen flash white and hear the camera shutter sound. Now open the Photos app on your iPad. A JPG of that screen shot will be your most recent photo, click on it to open it and use the arrow key to send it to TrialPad. Then you can use TrialPad 2.0 to display that with the projector. After you have done this a few times, it takes far less time to do than reading these instructions. And it is easy because TrialPad 2.0 now accepts JPG images.

If you missed the earlier discussion about using an iPad and Google Maps during depositions, you can review that here.

For a detailed review of TrialPad 2.0, Finis Price has a nice one here at TechnoEsq. There are more reviews here at TrialPad's website. TrialPad has a blog and Twitter feed as well. I have done several presentations on using iPads in the Courtroom in the last few months, two with my friend Tom Mighell (http://ipad4lawyers.squarespace.com/), and most recently to the Oklahoma Association of Defense Counsel. I always save TrialPad until near the end so I can end with a big finish. The trial lawyers have always been very impressed -- and that was just TrialPad 1.5 ! For many lawyers, this will be $89.99 very well spent and it will make you love your iPad even more.



 

New Ideas for Lawyers and Google Maps

There are so many technology tools that it is sometimes a challenge to recognize all the ways that they can be used. Well, one of the neat features of the iPhone and iPad is that you can save a screen shot of whatever is displayed on the phone by holding down the power button and the Apple home button at the same time. The screen shot will be saved with your other photos. The other tool is Google Maps.

So look at how a couple of smart iPad-using lawyers have married those concepts together.

First Rob Dean at his WALKINGOFFICE blog notes how you can load the Google Map and then the Google Street View of a location and save the picture using this technique with his post Need Photos for Court? Take Screenshots with Google Maps.

Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. takes that idea and expands it by using a $5.99 iPad app called Adobe Ideas to have the witness at a depostion mark exactly where he and other parties were located on the Street View of a particular address. His post is titled Using an iPad to recreate a scene in a deposition. After the witness has marked up the photograph, you save it and e-mail it right then to all counsel and the court reporter. It is sort of amazing when you put this all together. You leave the deposition with a photograph of the scene, with the witness having marked with his or her own hand the location of parties, other witnesses, vehicles and other items of note. This would be extremely useful if a wtiness changed his or her story about the locations.

(NOTE: Lawyers without iPads can grab screen shots into their clipboard from their PC's using Alt + PrintScreen and paste the photo into a document or e-mail or other file.)

The Trial Lawyer's iPad

I resolve to blog a lot more about the iPad next year.

I think the iPad is a bit over-hyped, but still has many uses for lawyers, both personal and professional.

I see trial lawyers carrying iPads in courts in front of juries where that just wouldn't be done with even a small notebook.

On our Tech Toys for the Holidays Digital Edge podcast , we mentioned iJuror, a $9.99 app for the iPad that helps lawyers in jury selection. This is one example of a new type of tool that works for the iPad and upcoming similar devices. Scott Falbo was so pleased that we mentioned his creation, he gave us a few codes that will let one download and install iJuror for free.

This offer is only open to lawyers who presently own an iPad. But if you would like a free copy of iJuror for the iPad, e-mail my assistant at amyk@okbar.org. There are a limited number avaiable and when they are gone, they are gone. This offer expires at 4:45 CST 12/22/2010 in any event.

Really Cool Tool: VuPoint Magic Wand™ Portable Scanner

WARNING: If you read this blog post you may find that you have to buy a VuPoint Magic Wand™ Portable Scanner. I mean, first of all, what lawyer hasn't wished for a magic wand before, particularly in certain courtrooms and depositions? 

But seriously, the VuPoint Magic Wand™ Portable Scanner is a great tool for many, many lawyers. It is very affordable at around $80 street price. Portable scanners are very nice tools, but a cordless battery-operated portable scanner that works independently of the computer for under $100 is a great tool. Watch the demonstration video here. How handy is it to be anywhere (court clerk's counter, taking a statement in the home of a witness, looking at a magazine) and think "oh, I'd like a copy of that" and be able to do it almost instantly without booting up a computer.

I mentioned it to a few colleagues and one of them, a Legal Aid lawyer, bought one and has already scanned about 200 pages of police reports in just the last six weeks or so. He loves the Magic Wand. Of course, there is a cord to plug into your computer to transfer the scanned images there. It comes with OCR software included, but I have to confess that I just transferred the PDF files to my computer and OCR'd them with Adobe Acrobat. A microSD card is required, along with two AA batteries. It will scan in color or black & white, at 600 dpi or 300 dpi. But truly, this is a stunningly simple gadget that does just what it is supposed to do at a price every lawyer can afford. It should be a great addition to your laptop bag or briefcase.

Here's the fact sheet with all of the details. Best Buy and Walmart supposedly carry them, although I know of no one who has actually seen one in stock. FTC Blogger disclosure: They are going to have to physically come and pry my review copy out of my hands to get it back. :-)

Lawyers, Meet Mongo

Before I direct you to Mongo, let me note two really great lawyer-columnists who no longer write their columns. In bygone days, there was one primary source for lawyers for information about technology advances. Each month in Law Practice magazine, Burgess Allison used to write Technology Update. His humor was great. I used to LOL reading this column before most of us had seen it typed as LOL. And no one could skewer Microsoft as well as Burgess. We miss you, Burg. Maybe you need to take up Twitter?

Another great column was McElhaney on Litigation in the ABA Journal by Jim McElhaney. Talk about learning at the feet of a master! Although this no longer appears as a regular column, the ABA Journal still runs reprints occasionally because his advice is great and timeless.

This brings me to Mongo. The February 2010 ABA Journal has reprinted a July 1995 McElhaney on Litigation column now-titled Meet Mongo. The tag line says "Unleashing your inner beast in Court hurts you, not the other side." Every lawyer should read this one, even non-litigators. It is funny and so very true. Many of us have had that moment in court where some inner Mongo whispered for us to lash out or otherwise misbehave.

If you want some more good reading and good advice for courtroom lawyers, just input "McElhaney on Litigation" into Google or your search engine of choice. But perhaps you should do this on a date without a lot of deadlines. You could be reading for a while.

Site of the Week: Trial Lawyer Tips Blog

Mitch Jackson has been really turning out some nice tips on his Trial Lawyer Tips blog. I don't do jury trials any more, but I wanted to pass along this nice resource to my readers and encourage Mitch and co-blogger Lisa Wilson to keep up the good work.