Ten Technology Tools for Lawyers
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

Technological advances continue at a rapid pace. Sometimes these advances are useful for those in legal practice. This month I thought it would be useful to do a brief survey of several interesting technology ideas and services that may have escaped our readers’ attention. Some of these I have written about before, and some references to other sources will be included. These are not the top 10 or the best 10, but just 10 tools that I like which I think might be useful for you.

1) RSS Newsfeeds from OSCN.net. RSS stands for really simple syndication. You can receive electronic news items and receive them in a tool called a newsreader. (Users of the Firefox Web browser can receive the newsfeeds in their browser and it is reported that the next version of Internet Explorer will have that feature as well.)

Last November, OSCN.net announced RSS newsfeed service for all new appellate opinions. The result of this might be termed free electronic advance sheets. If you set up a newsreader, you can literally have Oklahoma appellate ruling delivered to your desktop the moment that they are posted to the Internet. When Oklahoma did this, I thought that we were the third state to do so. But Rory Perry, clerk of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, and the acknowledged leader in the field, says we were fifth. You can see his list of state appellate courts with RSS newsfeeds here: http://tinyurl.com/zywnz and you can locate the newsfeeds on OSCN.net by looking under “other links” on the left side of the home page. For more on RSS newsreaders, see “Was 2004 the Year of the Blog?” Oklahoma Bar Journal
(76 OBJ 146), http://tinyurl.com/by7v7.

2) Dual Monitors – I am certain that the idea of attaching two different monitors to the same computer strikes many readers as absurd. For those who use their computers a great deal (and have room) it is a truly useful practice. Think of drafting a brief in your word processor in one monitor while doing the legal research on the other. One idea might be to have your case management software always open on one monitor, while you do other work on the other. Or for that matter, if you are anticipating an important e-mail or the ruling in an appellate case of interest, you can have your e-mail or RSS newsreader on one while you do your normal day’s work on the other. Windows XP supports dual monitors. Flat screen monitors are recommended. You would not want to have two giant CRT monitors on your desk.

3) Smart Phones – Many lawyers have incorporated personal digital assistants (PDAs) like Palm Pilots and Windows Mobile devices into their practices. I understand that it is now not uncommon to see lawyers at the bench entering court dates into their devices. While these devices function quite well, the trend is toward smart phones that combine PDA functions with a mobile phone into one device. The biggest benefit is that most people carry their phone more frequently than their PDA and so calendar and contact information is almost always available. The biggest disadvantage is cost and the bulk of some of the models. Nevertheless, if you do not have one of these, you probably will some day soon. It is just so handy to have the ability to make calendar entries, notes and to-dos when you are out of the office that get automatically synchronized with the office calendaring system. Having all of your contact phone numbers automatically programmed into your phone from your computer is a nice feature, as well.

The Treo and Blackberry lines are the best known and most popular, but there are many choices. Lawyers who are frequently in court may need to pay attention and order a special camera-less version of the phone. It’s really not convenient to enter your new hearing date information if you have been forced to check your phone with the marshal at the front door.

4) Anagram – First of all, I have to confess that I still use Microsoft Outlook. I acknowledge that others have switched to safer e-mail applications. But, like most of you, I am still with Outlook. One of the first things I noticed when I synchronized Outlook with a PDA was that I had many contacts consisting only of a name and an e-mail address. Here’s how I described in my blog a tool that I have used to repair that situation:

I’m sure many of your Outlook contacts look like mine, with just a name and an e-mail address. You can right click on the sender’s name in an e-mail and add it to your contacts, but you have to type (or copy and paste) the address, phone, fax and other fields in the contact fields individually. We should do that, but often don’t. Sometimes I paste a whole signature block into the big space at the bottom of a contact.…Anagram does a great job of streamlining this by capturing highlighted text and inserting it in all the right fields automatically. With a 45-day free trial and a price tag of $19.95, this may be a great tool to power up your contacts (or Palm). http://tinyurl.com/n59my (Feb. 16, 2005)

So if you feel like this might work for you, go download the free trial at http://getanagram.com. There is a Palm version and others as well.

5) Desktop search – Approximately one year ago, I wrote an article for the Oklahoma Bar Journal titled, “Utilities Power-up Your PC.” (76 OBJ 911) I mentioned desktop search tools as a hot item then, outlining X1, Copernic, Google and Yahoo desktop search. Since then, there has been a bit of controversy over whether Google’s practice of indexing content on their servers when you index multiple PCs across a network is a client confidentiality problem. I’ve concluded it is a problem and it is better to be safe than sorry. So I think using the applications that are installed on our computer independent of others, Copernic (free) or X1 (www.x1.com $74.95) is better for most of us. I don’t mean to totally dismiss the popular offerings from Yahoo, Google and others. Those who can spend the time tweaking the other services can no doubt make them safe. (Note: Earlier this week, the folks at X1 allowed me to place numerous free copies of their product for download on both OBA-NET and Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog. If you are getting to your Oklahoma Bar Journal early, you should check to see if any remain. Look under “Bar Association Info” on OBA-NET.)

6) Legal Math – Legal Math from Custom Legal Software has been around a long time. It shows its age in some of the somewhat-dated looking interfaces. There’s nothing here someone cannot do with a spreadsheet or other math program. But if you don’t have a tool that easily does amortization tables or computers the interest and arrearages on past due child support, this one is still a gem. Get more information and download at www.legalmath.com. $149 for first user, $85 for additional licenses.

7) Small portable hard drives – Whether you mean USB flash drives that fit on a keychain or small hard drives that fit in the palm of your hand and can back up an entire small firm network or specialized devices connected to a portable hard drive like MP3 players, the fact that you can carry gigabytes of data with you at all times is an amazing development.

8) TinyURL.com – You may have noticed that most of the citations to web sites in this article are to some link named tinyurl-dot-something. The free Web service allows you to make long URLs (Web addresses) into very short ones. I have the TinyURL applet installed on my Internet Explorer links bar. When I visit a Web site that I want to pass along to others, I can click on the link and it creates the tiny URL and copies it to my clipboard. The two main benefits of using the shorter link are that it is unlikely to become a “broken link” if you paste it into an e-mail (as opposed to lengthy links) and for publications such as this one, it produces a link that readers can quickly type into their browser without unfamiliar typographic symbols often found in some links.

I know I’ve mentioned TinyURL in this space before, but it bears repeating.

9) Belarc Advisor – Sadly, you can only use Belarc Advisor on your home computer system as it is prohibited for commercial use. (The least expensive version of the commercial package, BellManage, is $1,750 for up to 50 workstations.) But you can download this free utility here: http://tinyurl.com/5w6o. This takes no user configuration, so anyone can run it. It exhaustively analyzes your system and builds a report of everything from the version of Windows you are using to installed hardware and memory to every application you have installed on the system with license numbers and those oh-so-important keys. This is important information, especially if you don’t know where to find the installation CDs.

10) A CD-ROM storage box – OK, all of you probably have a CD-ROM storage box or two in the office. But I am referring to a very special CD box. Maybe you need to buy a new one that is colored fire engine red. What will make this CD box special is when you use a label or masking tape on the top of it and then write “originals.” Then only put original installation CDs in it. Do this every time you buy a computer with the supplied CDs and every time you purchase new software. With the new software verification procedures from the major providers, this is increasingly important. I cannot express to you how often I hear office horror stories that include the phrase, “And now we cannot find the original CD. We cannot imagine what happened to it.” Take this easy step to help make sure that never happens to your office.

That’s all for this month! I hope to see many of you in the near future at our New Lawyer Experience program April 25 (pre-registration required) or the OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference on June 22 – 24 at Tanglewood Resort.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal April 15, 2006 - Vol. 77; No.12