TechnoLawyer: Business Productivity/Word Processing

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers an iPad app for reviewing and annotating PDF and Word documents in new ways (see article below), a portable Bluetooth keyboard, an add-on toolbar for Lexis Advance and WestlawNext, and an iOS app that keeps your Google searches private. Don't miss the next issue.

LIQUIFY YOUR DOCUMENTS

Lawyers have not yet found every missing link for the paperless office, but one such discovery occurred in 2010 when the iPad arrived. Many lawyers use their iPad primarily as a digital briefcase for carrying and accessing PDF and other documents. But when paper becomes digital, why still treat it like paper?

LiquidText … in One Sentence

Now available, LiquidText enables you to review and annotate documents on your iPad in new ways.

The Killer Feature

An area called Workspace exists to the right of every document you open in LiquidText. You can select an excerpt and drag it to this area. Tapping the arrow icon to the left of every excerpt brings you to the relevant section of the document. You can also enter notes in the Workspace and connect them to a section of the document.

LiquidText enables you to group excerpts and notes by topic so that with a tap you can review only those related to a topic. The Map View displays all your groups visually to give you an idea of their relative size (similar to a word cloud).

Other Notable Features

LiquidText can collapse a document to reveal only the paragraphs that pertain to your annotations. This collapsing feature also works with LiquidText's full-text search, eliminating the need to scroll to find the next hit.

Similarly, you can split a document into two separately scrolling areas to compare distant sections simultaneously. Alternatively, you can save your place if you only need to glance at another part of the document.

What Else Should You Know?

LiquidText works with PDF, Word, and PowerPoint documents, as well as web pages. It integrates with Box, Dropbox, and iCloud. You can also use the iOS Share extension to send documents from other apps such as Adobe Reader and Mail to LiquidText. For its part, LiquidText enables you to export an entire annotated document or just your notes and highlights. LiquidText is free for now. Learn more about LiquidText.

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Coming today to BlawgWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 65 articles from the past week worthy of your attention. Below you'll find a sample article from each section of today's issue, including our BlawgWorld Pick of the Week.

Why and How to Use a Password Manager

iPhone Payment Plans Compared

iPhone Service Plans Compared

The 2.5 Hour Apple Event in 2.5 Minutes

How Apple Built 3D Touch

Congratulations to Apple and Microsoft on winning our BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award: Microsoft Office Demo on iPad Pro

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Coming today to LitigationWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 44 articles from the past two weeks worthy of your attention. Below you'll find a sample article from each section of today's issue, including our LitigationWorld Pick of the Week.

Review: Black's Law Dictionary (iOS)

Six Writing Tips From Justice Elena Kagan

New Trial Presentation Options

Don't Be a Jeb "Low-Energy" Litigator

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Today's issue of TL Answers contains these articles:

Neil Squillante, Avoiding Being Ashley Madisoned: Acrobat DC and Cloud Security in General

Caren Schwartz, How to Find Practice Management Software for Personal Injury

Tim Callins, "Holding" the Surface Pro: Is It Really a Tablet? (And What About the iPad Pro?)

Anita Roessmann, Archiving Email as PDF on a Mac: Is There an Easier Way?

Judith Bourne, Review: WordPerfect for Tables of Authorities

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Coming today to BlawgWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 55 articles from the past week worthy of your attention. Below you'll find a sample article from each section of today's issue, including our BlawgWorld Pick of the Week.

Review: Adobe Acrobat DC

Turn Your iPad Into a Surface With This Case

ILTA 2015 Legal Technology Survey

Is Silicon Valley in Another Tech Bubble?

Congratulations to Brian X. Chen of The New York Times on winning our BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award: The Best Smartphone Plan (Currently)

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Today's issue of TL Answers contains these articles:

Anita Roessmann, Tablet-Induced Insomnia and Eye Strain; Review of f.lux

Neil Squillante, How to Organize Your Documents by Practice Areas and Document Types

Donald Coker, PracticeMaster and Tabs3 in a Personal Injury Practice

Chet Lustgarten, Tip: Use Dictation to "Copy and Paste"; BigHand Review

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Originally published on August 28 in our free TL Serendipity newsletter. Instead of reading TL Serendipity here, sign up now to receive future issues in realtime.

Adobe Acrobat DC is huge leap forward but annoying at the same time. It costs $14.99 per month unless you want it on just one computer in which case it costs a one-time $449 ($199 if upgrading).

Except perhaps for compatibility, there's no reason to buy the standalone license because Acrobat DC's best new feature is Mobile Link.

This technology (which you can turn off) saves every PDF document you open in your Adobe Document Cloud account after which you can then open that same document on other devices running Acrobat DC. It works even if you open the document for just a few seconds and then close it. On your other devices, Mobile Link presents a list of "Recent" documents with that document at the top. This brief video shows you how seamlessly it works. It's nice not having to use Dropbox, etc. as an intermediary.

I find Mobile Link invaluable because I often use my iPad as a second monitor of sorts to display a document. I open the document on my Mac, close it, and then open it via Mobile Link on my iPad. This all happens in just a few seconds. It's like magic.

Similarly, when I need access to a document on the go, I just open it quickly on my Mac knowing it'll be available on my iPhone later. Again, no time-consuming copying into a Dropbox folder and then digging it up on the iPhone later.

Now that I've sung the praises of Acrobat DC, let me explain what annoys me.

Every time you open a PDF document on a Mac or PC, the Mobile Link window also opens listing your Recent Files. There's no way to turn off this behavior except perhaps to turn off Mobile Link. I'm now trained to press Command-W twice every time I close a PDF document so that I also close this window. Here's an Adobe forum discussion about this feature.

By contrast, the iOS app is a thing of beauty. You're either viewing a document or viewing Mobile Link. One gets out of the way when you want the other. Perhaps Adobe wanted to make the desktop version work like the mobile app but these two computing paradigms require different approaches.

The other annoyance is the license you get for your very expensive $14.99 per month. You can install Acrobat DC on only two Mac/PC class computers (and an unlimited number of Android or iOS devices).

We live in a multi-device world thanks to reliable syncing services from Apple, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others. Indeed, Adobe created Mobile Link for this reason only to tie an anchor around its neck with the two-computers restriction. If you have a work computer, home computer, and an ultrabook for traveling you can't use Acrobat DC on one of them. Ditto if you run Windows inside a Mac at work and have another computer at home. These are common scenarios.

Adobe should take a lesson from Microsoft — the new Microsoft. Office 365 Business and Business Premium cost $8.25 and $12.50 per month respectively. With these, you get to install Microsoft Office, arguably more important than Acrobat given the many Acrobat alternatives, on five Mac/PC class computers, five tablets, and five smartphones. Business Premium also includes business-class email, and contacts and calendar syncing.

I understand that Adobe doesn't want a small business of four or five people to buy one license and share the login. But in being so restrictive it hurts enterprise and prosumer users — pretty much the only people willing to spend money on software.

Neil J. Squillante created TechnoLawyer and serves as its publisher. His areas of expertise include advertising and publishing technologies, information architecture, persuasive writing techniques, and statistical analysis and research. Before founding TechnoLawyer, Neil practiced commercial, intellectual property, and securities litigation at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York City. Neil received his JD from UCLA and served as a managing editor of the UCLA Law Review. He received his BA in Economics from Duke University.

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Today's issue of TL Serendipity contains these articles:

Neil Squillante, Review of Adobe Acrobat DC: Why It's Simultaneously Amazing and Annoying

Roy Greenberg, Is Your Only Backup in the Cloud?

Thomas RuBane, Typography for Lawyers

Steven Brower, The Legal Technology Enthusiasm Gap Among Young Lawyers

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Our most serendipitous offering (hence its name), TL Serendipity consists of contributions by TechnoLawyer members who have important information to share. You'll no doubt enjoy it because of its mix of interesting topics and genuinely useful knowledge, including brutally honest product reviews and informative how-tos. The TL Serendipity newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

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Kathleen Cully, How to Get PDF Page Numbers to Match Reality Using Acrobat; Soda PDF

Tom Trottier, Tip: Free Software for Calculating Judgments

John Ahern, Tip: Make Clients Pay Directly for Hard Costs

Caren Schwartz, Creating Custom Screens and Reports in Amicus Attorney

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Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers an software that adds legal proofreading and research tools to Microsoft Outlook and Word (see article below), case analysis software that integrates with a legal research service, and two applications that enable you to run virtual OS X and Windows machines on a Mac. Don't miss the next issue.

ADD PROOFREADING TOOLS AND MORE TO MICROSOFT OFFICE

All legal documents inevitably contain errors. As a lawyer, you're responsible for getting the law right. But you should not have to shoulder the burden of finding inconsistencies, undefined terms, and other common issues — especially because they're easy to miss. These mundane but critically important tasks are best handled by software.

Lexis for Microsoft Office 5.2 … in One Sentence

Launching this week, Lexis for Microsoft Office 5.2 brings proofreading, legal research, and drafting tools to Microsoft Word and Outlook.

The Killer Feature

The new version of Lexis for Microsoft Office includes proofreading tools for drafting and review powered by Microsystems' well-regarded EagleEye technology.

From the Microsoft Word ribbon, you can use the Terms & Phrases tool to find undefined terms and inconsistent phrases in your document. The Definitions List ensures that you don't miss any defined terms or use inconsistent definitions for the same term.

Lexis for Microsoft Office also checks your document for accuracy and completeness. Regarding the former, it finds missing quotation marks and parenthesis, inconsistent numbering, and incorrect references. Regarding the latter, you can mark items as incomplete using your own custom term such as "Review." Later, you can locate all of these items for removal/replacement before you share the document.

"Effective and efficient document review is vital to the success of litigation and transactional practitioners alike," LexisNexis vice president, Lexis Advance Jeff Pfeifer tells us. "With the integration of EagleEye tools, we are giving Lexis for Microsoft Office users powerful means to automatically scan for consistency and errors, enabling them to deliver more precise, accurate, and complete agreements, briefs, pleadings and other documents."

Other Notable Features

In addition to the EagleEye integration, Lexis for Microsoft Office now integrates with document management systems through Lexis Search Advantage. From one search box, you can search Lexis Advance, your firm's documents, and/or the open web.

The integration with Lexis Advance has grown deeper too. Most notably, your Lexis Advance Work Folders now appear within Word and Outlook so that you can save, search, and download source materials without leaving these programs. Using drag and drop, you can insert quotations from cases, phrases from Matthew Bender forms, etc. into your Word documents and email messages.

The new version of Lexis for Microsoft Office also includes enhancements to the litigation tools. When creating a table of authorities with Lexis for Microsoft Office, you can now use "passim" in place of the page numbers cited. Settings enable you to adjust when it should appear. The page numbers remain intact below the surface so you can still click for a pinpoint preview of the source. Lexis for Microsoft Office supports the 20th edition of The Bluebook.

Also new, Get Cited Documents now exists in both Word and Outlook since email messages often include citations. As its name suggests, this tool retrieves from Lexis Advance source materials cited in a Word document or email message.

What Else Should You Know?

Lexis for Microsoft Office works with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10. It requires Microsoft Office 2007 or later and a Lexis Advance subscription. Learn more about Lexis for Microsoft Office 5.2.

How to Receive TL NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TL NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The newsletter's innovative articles enable lawyers and law office administrators to quickly understand the function of a product, and zero in on its most important features. The TL NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.