TechnoLawyer: Legal Research

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a federal tax law research tool that facilitates point-in-time analysis and redlines showing changes (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of a legal research service that now provides insights on the judges overseeing your cases in certain federal practice areas, practice management and legal accounting software that can download bank and credit card transactions for faster reconciliations, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

Tax lawyers are historians. Specifically, they often must identify differences over time by comparing versions of the Internal Revenue Code (Tax Code) and related materials. Surprisingly, most do this by looking back and forth at two versions of these materials, which can lead to mistakes in interpretation.

Standard Fed Plus … in One Sentence

Launched recently, Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, U.S.' Standard Fed Plus is a new online practice tool based on the Standard Federal Tax Reporter that enables you to compare versions of the tax laws and commentary at different points in time with redlines of the changes.

The Killer Feature

Given that lawyers usually redline their own documents, why not the law too? This clever idea led tax-lawyer-turned-product-director Benjamin Snipes to develop Standard Fed Plus accessed within Cheetah, Wolters Kluwer's new legal research platform.

When you navigate to a section of the Standard Federal Tax Reporter in Cheetah, Standard Fed Plus displays a timeline across the top of the page listing every date on which that section changed. This facilitates a Point-in-Time Analysis — click a date to read that version, click another date, etc. If you need more context during your research, you'll find links to the corresponding legislative history and Standard Federal Tax Reporter commentary. You can also find tax-related case law. Standard Fed Plus can save you about 15 minutes per search according to Snipes.

Given the volume of changes that can occur in the Tax Code, the Redlining Comparison Tool in Standard Fed Plus enables you to compare two versions of a section with additions in green and deletions in red similar to Track Changes in Microsoft Word. In fact, you can copy and paste this redline intact into a Microsoft Word or WordPerfect document such as in a research memo or opinion letter you're drafting. The algorithm Snipes and his team created further reduces "immaterial noise" from the redline.

"Standard Fed Plus is part of our ongoing effort to introduce new, user-friendly and authoritative solutions to frequent challenges faced by tax attorneys and other tax professionals, and integrate accurate content into their workflow," said Dean Sonderegger, Vice President & General Manager, Legal Markets & Innovation. "Even looking beyond the game-changing Point-in-Time Navigation and Redlining Comparison features, Standard Fed Plus combines authoritative content, expert analysis, practice tools, and a current awareness for legal professionals seeking to gain insights on today's most challenging tax matters."

Other Notable Features

In addition to its federal tax offerings, Cheetah contains primary and secondary tax materials from the CCH and Aspen imprints across many other practice areas ranging from antitrust to employee benefits to securities and more. Iconic titles such as Mergers, Acquisitions, and Buyouts by Ginsburg, Levin and Rocap are exclusive.

Cheetah sports a new, responsive design that adjusts to any size screen from a large monitor to an iPhone. Features such as auto-fill and auto-suggest speed up your searches. Related Content and Metadata links enable you to dig deeper without having to run a separate search. You can use the ever-present Copy Link tool to send a colleague to a case, Tax Code section, etc.

What Else Should You Know?

Standard Fed Plus currently encompasses versions the tax laws from 1986 to today, including CCH's commentary and legislative history, and will soon extend this history back to 1917. Learn more about Standard Fed Plus.

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.

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a legal research service that now provides insights on the judges overseeing your cases in certain federal practice areas (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of practice management and legal accounting software that can download bank and credit card transactions for faster reconciliations, practice management software with a Dropbox-like mechanism for sharing files with clients, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

Winning a case requires more than understanding the facts and applicable law. You also need to size up the judge, opposing counsel, and the parties. Understanding this human dynamic can tip the balance in your favor.

Lexis Advance … in One Sentence

Lexis Advance is a leading legal research service that now includes litigation analytics from Lex Machina.

The Killer Feature

When you next have a case on an antitrust, copyright, patent, trademark, or securities issue, you can use Lexis Advance to research the judge presiding over your case. Soon you'll also be able to research opposing counsel and competing law firms.

This data comes from Lex Machina, a company LexisNexis acquired in 2015. Lex Machina transforms data from federal court dockets into live charts. In Lexis Advance, you can access this data by clicking on the hyperlinked judge's name in the text of a case or in the new Legal Analytics box to the right of the case text.

This link takes you to a summary with the judge's biographical information, open cases by practice area, comparisons to other judges in the district, cases filed by year, and case timelines. These latter charts give you a sense of how long the dispute may take to resolve and the odds of a trial. Lexis Advance users can access these summaries without a Lex Machina subscription.

"With access to summary charts, graphs, and information about judges from Lex Machina, Lexis Advance users can quickly and accurately understand the justice presiding over their case, better anticipate his or her behavior and illuminate probable case outcomes — with the option to click out to Lex Machina for more detail," says Sean Fitzpatrick, Managing Director for North American Research Solutions at LexisNexis. "It is an early step in our strategy to integrate high value analytic and visualization tools directly into the Lexis Advance research experience."

Other Notable Features

For deeper insights, you can click from this summary in Lexis Advance to the Lex Machina website if you have a subscription to the latter. Lex Machina's Motion Chains enables you to analyze your odds of success for a specific type of motion based on historical data. Similarly, you can see how opposing counsel has performed on similar cases or before your judge. You can also research parties, case damages, venues, practice areas, etc. for business development purposes. As you research, you can download briefs, exhibits, and other documents from cases of interest.

Lex Machina offers a growing number of specialized apps. For example, Patent Portfolio Evaluator lists the complete litigation history for a specific patent. Damages Explorer enables you to forecast likely damages and attorney fees as well as compare damages when forum shopping. Early Case Assessor gives you an overview of the plaintiff's litigation history from recent activity to venues to counsel. Other apps consist of Courts & Judges Comparator, Law Firms Comparator, and Parties Comparator.

What Else Should You Know?

In addition to litigation analytics, you'll notice another new feature in Lexis Advance — Reason for Shepard's Signal. This provides you with instant context for each dreaded red or yellow Shepard's signal or instant peace of mind when the signal is green. Reason for Shepard's Signal is currently available for cases since 2003 with older cases coming soon. Learn more about Lexis Advance.

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.

Today's issue of TL Serendipity contains these articles:

Neil Squillante, My Legaltech Discoveries: Lexis for Microsoft Office, PhraseWizard, Centerbase, Litify, Symphony OCR

Jeff Stouse, Straight Talk About Legal Software Upgrades and Annual Maintenance Plans

Roy Greenberg, Best Places to Get Help With Dragon

Michael Schwartz, Why I'm a Cloud Skeptic

Danny McDonald, Why I'm a Legal Technology Cynic

Don't miss this issue — or any future issues.

How to Receive TL Serendipity
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.

It's time for the TL NewsWire Top 25 Products of 2016 Awards. TL NewsWire subscribers chose the winners of these awards. When subscribers clicked for more details about a product we reported on, they passively cast a vote. Passive voting is the most meaningful type of voting for awards. The winners below genuinely attracted the most interest from TL NewsWire subscribers.

This year a word processor earned the top spot! Major themes among the winners — practice management (8 products), litigation (5 products), legal research (3 products), time capture and billing (3 products), and add-ins for Microsoft Office (3 products). Also among the winners — a smartpen and accompanying app and notebook, a project management app, a virtual desktop service, and a marketing automation app.

TL NewsWire is free — sign up now so you can choose next year's winners.

Congratulations to all the winners! Without further ado …

WINNERS OF THE TL NEWSWIRE TOP 10 PRODUCTS OF 2016 AWARD

Congratulations to the 10 hottest products of 2016!

1. WordPerfect Office X8

This first place finish may surprise some, but not longtime fans who have vowed never to use that other word processor. These fans told Corel they wanted advanced PDF tools, and Corel delivered in WordPerfect Office X8. You can now convert PDF image scans into WPD files, and use Reveal Codes to search and destroy formatting problems. Additionally, you can create your own PDF forms, including digital signatures.

2. Zola Suite

Five years ago, Fred Cohen and his team of designers and engineers set out to build cloud practice management software without compromise. In 2016, this hard work paid off with the launch heard round the legal web. Zola Suite's web, Android, and iOS apps have feature parity. With advanced technologies such as Gmail and Office 365 email integration, telephone call tracking, and a OneNote replacement, maybe you can have it all.

3. Smart Writing Set

Want to get a lawyer's attention? Develop a replacement for the yellow legal pad, which lawyers love to hate. Moleskine's Smart Writing Set consists of a pen with a tiny camera that digitizes your notes. This being Moleskine, the special paper notebooks that work with the pen look as sharp as you in your best suit. The free Android and iOS app stores your notes and can make them editable with its built-in OCR.

4. Contract Tools

Paper Software knows contracts. One co-founder served time in big law, the other is a programmer with machine learning expertise. The result of this dynamic duo is Contract Tools, which adds a suite of tools to Microsoft Word for use with complex contracts. Click a defined term for its definition, find all references to a specific section, locate and finalize all placeholders, and correct inconsistencies, incorrect formatting, and other errors difficult for human proofreaders to spot.

5. Exterro Project Management for Law Firms

Until you can replace your staff with robots, Exterro Project Management for Law Firms might be the next best thing. This project management and process automation software enables you to automate your workflows. When someone completes a task, the person responsible for the next task in the workflow receives a notification. Extensive reporting gives you a God-like view of all your firm's activity, which you can monitor from your beach bungalow.

6. LEAP 365

LEAP 365 easily wins the most impressive product launch of the year as it took place in a (sweet!) suite at Yankee Stadium. This largess underscored the company's significant achievement — cloud practice management software with apps for Windows, web, iPad, iPhone, and Android. During the press conference, four product specialists used LEAP on a different platform while seamlessly collaborating on document assembly and other law firm tasks. Clearly, LEAP had a much better year than the Yankees.

7. ExhibitManager 5

Given how many features Microsoft Word has, it's amazing how many it lacks. ExhibitManager fills one such gap by automatically generating a table of exhibits in a Microsoft Word document based on simple references that you insert while drafting. The software keeps this table updated when you edit your brief. ExhibitManager also manages exhibits using a spreadsheet-like interface, and can create PDF exhibit binders or ebriefs with one click.

8. LexRex

It's hard to believe but the cloud practice management pioneers are nearing their tenth birthday. This means they were originally designed for a desktop web browser. By contrast, LexRex launched this year built for a mobile world with a design that minimizes the number of different screens. The app's Case Categories offer workflow automation, while the Case Summary lists all activity for each matter in a tickler-like manner.

9. LawBase

Many software products require your firm to adapt because of their rigidity. By contrast, LawBase adapts to your law firm. This practice management software ships with templates for practice areas ranging from insurance defense to mortgage refinancing to mass tort. If one of these doesn't apply, the company can work to create a custom template that'll fit your law firm like a glove.

10. Concordance Desktop

Designed for the do-it-yourself law firm, Concordance Desktop added processing to its suite of tools this year. Now for cases involving custodians with mainstream data sources such as Outlook, Windows Explorer, and file cabinets, you can import PST files, scans, and more without a consultant or a dedicated processor like LAW PreDiscovery. You can then use Concordance Desktop's popular document review tools to find relevant documents, apply Bates numbers, and produce them in native, PDF, or TIFF formats.

WINNERS OF THE TL NEWSWIRE TOP 25 PRODUCTS OF 2016 AWARD

Congratulations to the next 15 hottest products of 2016!

11. Firm Manager 2.0

Sometimes software developers focus on user-facing features, while other times they focus on under-the-hood improvements. Firm Manager took both paths this year. Crowd pleasers such as the new templates automate client intake and other routine tasks. Meanwhile, role-based permissions, integration with the online and desktop versions of QuickBooks, and extensive data import tools help law firms switch to Firm Manager in the first place.

12. BlueStylus Time and Billing

It seems like virtually all cloud billing apps cost the same, almost as if they colluded on price. This is of course apocryphal, but if a cartel did exist BlueStylus wouldn't join. At just $7 per user per month, BlueStylus broke the price barrier this year while offering breakthrough features such as automated filing of email messages from clients. Not too long ago, only large firms could afford such technology. Now it costs less than Netflix.

13. ReplyToSome

A few years ago, Peter Norman was holed up in his office at the Singapore outpost of a large law firm where he spent many billable hours negotiating multiparty deals via email with disparate teams of opposing counsel. One misaddressed message could imperil his career. Once stateside again, he spearheaded the creation of ReplyToSome, which adds a suite of tools to Outlook that prevents such mishaps. Even if you don't need to manage large distribution lists, ReplyToSome offers other helpful tools such as SendCheck, which warns you about replying as a BCC and when you forget an attachment.

14. TimesManager Legal

James DeRosa knows a market opportunity when he sees one. With an increasing number of law firms using ClaimsManager despite it being designed for insurance companies, he and his team developed TimesManager Legal to better serve the legal industry. If you can think of a billing arrangement with your clients or partners, TimesManager can handle it — split, blended, fixed, ABA, LEDES, UTBMS, etc. TimesManager can also manage complex approval workflows, and integrates with Tabs3, QuickBooks, Legal Tracker, and TyMetrix among others.

15. CaseFleet

A mashup of client relationship management and litigation management that runs in your web browser, CaseFleet automatically builds a timeline of your cases as you enter facts, issues, witnesses, and legal research. Filters enable you to spot critical connections and build your narrative. Meanwhile, CaseFleet's Legal Calendar color codes all the critical deadlines on your cases and syncs with GCal and Outlook, while the Leads Pipeline helps you capture and convert prospects into new clients.

16. Ulysses 2.5

Designed for writing long, structured documents on your Mac or iPad, Ulysses collects all your notes, research, etc. in one place. You write in chunks (such as different sections of a brief or chapters of your great American novel). When you complete a project, you can combine these disparate elements into a single document in Word, PDF, or ePub format. iCloud sync automatically makes your work available on all your devices, including the iPhone.

17. Digital WarRoom Private Cloud 8.8

Ediscovery software seems immune to the all-you-can-eat pricing revolution underway in other software markets. Digital WarRoom Private Cloud wants to change the game with its all-inclusive price of $1,995 per month. Designed for large projects, Digital WarRoom Private Cloud spans the EDRM gamut, offering tools for processing, review, and production. Advanced technologies include data visualization tools to make email easier to analyze and predictive coding.

18. Nutshell

Peter Drucker advised law firms to understand clients so well that their service sells itself. However, you still need software for the nuts and bolts of online marketing. Enter Nutshell, which captures leads from your website and routes them to your intake team, tracks telephone consultations, and enables you to send personalized email messages to hot prospects. Extensive reporting helps you analyze your marketing campaigns.

19. Amicus Attorney Premium 2016

Now part of the Abacus Next family of products as a result of the merger of the year, Amicus Attorney added enterprise-grade document management features, including check in/out and versioning to prevent lost work or duplicative effort. Also new, client-related email appears alongside documents thanks to integration with Exchange and Office 365. Amicus Attorney's client portal facilitates secure document sharing and communications with clients. You can even have clients complete forms through the portal.

19. Thomson Reuters ProView

The future of the law library finally arrived in 2016 thanks to ProView. Both an ebookstore and ebook reader, ProView is the Amazon Kindle of legal references. You can purchase and read ProView ebooks in a web browser or in the dedicated apps for Windows, Mac, iPad, and Android tablets. New editions of an ebook can import your bookmarks and highlights from the previous edition even if the location has changed. Sharing tools enable you to send a relevant section to colleagues or export it to PDF to send to a client.

20. Firm Central

Firm Central recently earned a TechnoScore of A from our SmallLaw newsletter in part because of its exclusive first-party integrations with other Thomson Reuters Legal's services such as Westlaw, Deadline Assistant, Doc & Form Builder, Case Notebook, CaseLogistix, and Practical Law. Among third-party products, Firm Central integrates with Outlook and QuickBooks. The addition of Time & Billing to Firm Central earlier this year, including trust accounting and three-way reconciliation and reporting, checks an important box on the requirements list of many small law firms.

20. Tabs3 Version 18

There's no better way to get paid than from a trust account. This year Tabs3 kicked trust accounts up a notch by automating payments. Once you create a rule in compliance with your jurisdiction, Tabs3 can apply payments to new bills or accounts receivable or both. Support for electronic funds transfer and credit card processing via ProPay further grease the wheels of commerce. The new three-way reconciliation reports provide your clients with transparency into these automated payments.

21. Boxtop

Our ace product reviewer Ed Zohn runs the products he evaluates in Boxtop to ensure fairness. "Sure beats the old Citrix I used a decade ago," he quipped in a recent email message. Boxtop provides everyone in your firm with a virtual Windows desktop. The wizards at Tabush Group help get all your legal and other software installed in this virtual environment, and can even provide you with thin client hardware that supports two monitors. Boxtop, which also runs on Macs and Windows PCs, supports Microsoft Office, PCLaw, Tabs3, Time Matters, Worldox, and other popular apps.

21. MedMal Navigator

Mention the name Frank Netter to doctors, and they'll wax poetic about his iconic medical illustrations. Now that more than 10,000 of these images reside in LexisNexis MedMal Navigator, you can use them in depositions, settlement conferences, and at trial without any copyright hassles. MedMal Navigator also offers tools for assessing the value of claims, finding expert witnesses, researching illnesses and injuries and applicable standards of care, and of course finding relevant case law in Lexis Advance.

21. MyCase

Proving that technology can save time and money, MyCase's new QuickBooks Online integration enables you to set everything up in a few minutes on your own for free versus the previous implementation that cost $99 and required a one-hour consultation. This integration somehow manages to create QuickBooks invoices that mirror those you create in MyCase right down to every time entry and description — a technological tour de force.

21. Practice Point

Thomson Reuters Legal offers a cornucopia of information services — Westlaw of course but also Reuters News, Practical Law, Westlaw Forms, Business Law Center, and Company Investigator to name just a few. Practice Point serves as your gateway to these services. Need to negotiate a joint venture? Just navigate to that section and you'll find all the resources you need from initial conversation to final agreement. If only Practice Point existed for everything in life.

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.

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a court docket service to keep you apprised of your cases, obtain competitive intelligence, and identify new business opportunities (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of an Outlook add-in with tools for managing large distributions and preventing common errors, a service with model forms and practice guides for transactional lawyers, software for automating the creation of a table of exhibits in Word documents, contract analysis software, practice management software that automates trust account replenishment, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

Court dockets contain a wealth of data. Mining this data can help you identify new business opportunities, find model briefs, and gain insights about judges and opposing counsel. And of course you should always monitor the dockets of your cases.

CourtLink … in One Sentence

LexisNexis' CourtLink enables you to monitor, search, and mine the largest collection of court dockets and documents — all federal courts and more than 1,200 state courts.

The Killer Feature

CourtLink Alerts can notify you via email about recently-filed cases of interest. For example, Litigant Alerts inform you about docket events relating to existing or prospective clients. You can bulk upload your entire client list, choose specific courts, and enter keyword terms and connectors to narrow the scope. The Manage My Alerts page lists all your Alerts and tools for editing and deleting them.

Alerts can also notify you about litigation work that might be in your wheelhouse. You can focus on the nature of a lawsuit such as a practice area, class action, appeal, etc. Similarly, you can create Alerts for filings by an adversary against whom you've won, a judge you've successfully persuaded, etc. With the ability to receive an email notification within an hour of a new filing, you can send a brochure to defendants and appellees faster than your competitors.

A special CourtLink Alerts tool called Breaking Complaints notifies you about notable new lawsuits filed in courts of interest to you. The CourtLink team creates these alerts based on prominent parties and other factors.

Other Notable Features

CourtLink offers a Lexis Advance-like interface for one-off, full-text terms and connectors searches with tools for refining your results by date, jurisdiction, and other parameters. CourtLink can even search PDF images in a case docket. The search results break out dockets, documents, and premium documents. Premium documents consist of model pleadings and briefs in Word format selected by the CourtLink team that you can download and edit.

Courts with their own online dockets typically offer only rudimentary tracking tools if any. The CourtLink Tracks tool enables you monitor both your own cases and other cases of interest. You can create notifications based on granular searches such as document type, new counsel, additional litigants, etc.

Data analysis has become increasingly important in many aspects of litigation. CourtLink's Strategic Profiles powered by recent acquisition Lex Machina enables you to generate charts to analyze the history of judges and opposing counsel. For example, the Nature of Suit Analysis breaks down the history by type of lawsuit, while the Judgment Analysis shows you the number of cases a party won, lost, and settled.

"Spotting threats and new business opportunities, assessing the competition's litigation history, and developing a winning case strategy are vital," said Jeff Pfeifer, vice president of product management for North American Research Solutions at LexisNexis. "CourtLink delivers this thanks to its database of nearly 200 million dockets and other court documents, and next-generation analytics insights from Lex Machina."

What Else Should You Know?

You can download any available docket document in PDF format. CourtLink has a runner service for state court documents not available for download. You can share search results and tracked dockets with colleagues using Shared Folders. Learn more about CourtLink.

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.

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers an online resource for researching medical-related case law, images, references, standards of care, public records, experts, and more (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of a collection of practice guides and forms for transactional lawyers, software for managing exhibits and creating a table of exhibits, an iPhone practice management app with one-touch access to all functions, a virtual desktop service with bank-grade security, practice management software five years in the making, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

If you file or defend malpractice or other cases involving medical issues, your research needs invariably extend beyond case law. For example, if you need a medical image, options range from buying an expensive license to using an image from a random website and hoping it's accurate. A trusted resource with one-stop shopping would be ideal.

MedMal Navigator … in One Sentence

LexisNexis MedMal Navigator is a collection of online tools that enables you to research medical-related case law, images, references, standards of care, public records, experts, and more.

The Killer Feature

MedMal Navigator recently gained a new data source — more than 10,000 medical images from Netter Images. Many educators and doctors consider these images of medical conditions the "gold standard." They're made by the same company that publishes Gray's Anatomy, the iconic illustrated reference for doctors.

LexisNexis claims that MedMal Navigator now has 70% more medical images than its closest competitor. Additionally, you need not buy images a la carte but can instead access the entire database without any copyright hassles. You can download images in high-resolution format suitable for trial boards and HDTVs, and share images with colleagues by sending them the corresponding web links or saving them to a Lexis Advance Shared Folder.

"The addition of more than 10,000 premium medical illustrations from Netter Images opens up one-click access to compelling content that helps medical malpractice lawyers bring the complex medical issues in their cases to life with greater clarity and impact," said Sean Fitzpatrick, Managing Director of North American Research Solutions at LexisNexis. "It's also an excellent example of our commitment to offer the premier, one-stop medical malpractice resource."

Other Notable Features

MedMal Navigator organizes information in seven major categories — Case Value Assessment, Standard of Care, Legal Analysis, Expert Witness, Research Parties, Elsevier's Clinical Key, and Medical References.

Before taking on a case or preparing a defense, you need to understand the medical problem and its potential value. With the Elsevier Clinical Key, you can quickly find and learn about a particular illness or injury. For more in-depth research, the Medical References tab enables you to search more than 1,600 medical journals published by Elsevier Science.

MedMal Navigator's Case Value Assessment tool walks you through a questionnaire about your client's case. It then uses your answers to list applicable verdicts in your jurisdiction sorted by how closely they match your case. A chart above the search results plots the verdict amounts against the Percent Fact Match.

The Standard of Care tool, works similarly by providing an interactive questionnaire for client intake. It explains the importance of each question, and provides links to medical journals for context. When you enter the answers, the Standard of Care tool alerts you to potential problems in a lawsuit.

The tools for Research Parties and Legal Analysis draw their material from Lexis Advance. This obviates the need for separate logins. The Legal Analysis tool further saves time by facilitating searches of medical malpractice case law. The Research Parties tool features a new Facebook-like interface for finding public records about a party or witness.

What Else Should You Know?

MedMal Navigator's Expert Witness tool contains more than 365,000 experts, including their curriculum vitae and testimony in prior cases. Learn more about MedMal Navigator.

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.

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a service designed to help you expand your practice by providing model forms, practice notes, checklists, etc. (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of software for managing and referencing exhibits, knowledge management software for mining your firm's work product, three practice management apps, a visual tool for identifying relevant case law faster, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

It's amusing when a relative expresses bemusement that you're not an expert in every area of the law. But when clients ask for help, you either figure out how to deliver or leave money on the table.

Lexis Practice Advisor … in One Sentence

Lexis Practice Advisor offers model forms, practice notes, checklists, articles and other materials for lawyers, and integrates with Lexis Advance and Lexis for Microsoft Office.

The Killer Feature

Mindful of the fact that winning the trust of lawyers like you requires high-quality and updated materials, LexisNexis put together a network of more than 500 practicing lawyers from more than 230 law firms. Each lawyer has years of experience with the legal issues that pertain to the documents they contribute. In addition to reviewing the credentials of these authors, you can email LexisNexis' internal author team with questions about their documents.

Other Notable Features

Lexis Practice Advisor groups its materials by practice areas, including bankruptcy, finance, intellectual property, real estate, etc. This coverage includes business and commercial transactions for four states — California, Florida, New York, and Texas — with more in the pipeline.

Browsing these topics reveals subtopics presented in a step format designed to match your tasks. For example, drilling down to Private Mergers presents you with "Structuring and Planning Private Mergers" and "Preliminary Agreements in Private M&A Deals." If you prefer, you can start with a global search and then filter your results by practice area.

Lexis Practice Advisor groups materials by Forms, Articles, Secondary Materials, Cases, and Statutes & Regulations. The primary and secondary legal research come from Lexis Advance while the rest derives from the authors noted above. Some forms are interactive, enabling you to draft documents in Lexis Practice Advisor. Icons alert you to alternate clauses you can review and add with a click. You can also add your own clauses.

If you use Lexis for Microsoft Office, you can access Lexis Practice Advisor from within Microsoft Word, including all forms. "The integration with Lexis for Microsoft Office gives legal practitioners instantaneous access to the full breadth of Lexis Practice Advisor's on-point content and tools inside the Microsoft applications they use every day," said Sean Fitzpatrick, Managing Director of North American Research Solutions at LexisNexis. "This is a crucial step in our overarching strategy to help customers produce higher quality work in less time."

Lexis Practice Advisor offers M&A lawyers a tool called Lexis Market Tracker based on EDGAR and related data. Using Consideration Type, Target Industry, Deal Amount, and other parameters, you can research "What's Market" on more than 450 deal points for credit agreements. Lexis Market Tracker isolates specific provisions such as Collars and Ticking Fees so you can quickly find what you need for the documents you're drafting.

What Else Should You Know?

You can share materials with colleagues by placing them in Shared Folders. These work across Lexis Advance so they can also contain legal research. You can also export blank and completed forms in Word or PDF format. Learn more about Lexis Practice Advisor.

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.

Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers software that makes it easier to mine your firm's work product for model documents (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of a new Android and iOS app for a popular practice management system, a virtual desktop service with two factor authentication, a new practice management app that launched after five years in development, case analysis software, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

In the 1990s, document management systems revolutionized law practice. Not only could you collaborate on documents more efficiently, but you could also save time on new documents by leveraging your firm's body of work. Today's faster-paced world demands more sophisticated tools than these brute force searches through your archives. Time for another revolution.

Lexis Search Advantage … in One Sentence

Recently updated, Lexis Search Advantage is an enterprise search add-on that enhances your firm's work product with search, legal research, and drafting tools.

The Killer Feature

Lexis Search Advantage is powered by a combination of proprietary LexisNexis technology and IBM's Watson Explorer, a search platform capable of interpreting large data sets such as your firm's documents. As a result, Lexis Search Advantage can identify specific elements in the documents it searches.

For example, suppose you want to search for a legal issue in a litigation matter. You can use either a natural language search or traditional terms and connectors. And suppose your search results contain several briefs from your firm's archives. Below each brief, you'll find a Shepard's scorecard alerting you to potential problems with one or more citations in the document. These real-time Shepard's signals are always up-to-date thanks to integration with Lexis Advance.

When you open a brief, you'll find a living document. A panel along the left side lists all citations, judges, lawyers, experts, and companies within the document. The same real-time Shepard's signals are here too. Click on a citation to read that case. You can also find other documents created by your firm that cite the same case.

Click on the name of a judge, expert, or lawyer, and thanks to the new integration with LexisNexis Litigation Profile Suite you can learn more about that person and their experience. For example, charts show you how a judge has ruled on motions, the types of cases that comprise their docket, etc.

Other Notable Features

Lexis Search Advantage offers similar tools for transactional lawyers. You can search generally for transactional documents or run special searches for a Clause Title or Defined Term. The contextual snippets in the search results help you zero in on model documents. Within a document, the panel on the left side lists all sections, clause titles, and defined terms, enabling you to quickly navigate lengthy documents. You can copy a clause or defined term to your clipboard to use in the document you're drafting.

Searches often require refinement. Lexis Search Advantage enables you to refine searches. Refinements from your own document management system include authors, clients, date range, document type, and user tags. Lexis Search Advantage provides additional legal-centric refinements such as citations, jurisdictions, governing law, experts, judges, etc. When you perfect a search, you can save it in a public or private folder.

Because your colleagues don't always assign document types consistently, you can use Lexis Search Advantage's algorithm to automatically assign the document type in accordance with your firm's standard nomenclature.

"Lexis Search Advantage is a great example of the LexisNexis strategy of providing lawyers with technologies that help them work more efficiently," LexisNexis North American Research Solutions managing director Sean Fitzpatrick told me.

What Else Should You Know?

Lexis Search Advantage scales to accommodate any size document collection. One large law firm uses it with upwards of 40 million of its documents. Instead of using Watson Explorer as the search engine, you can alternatively use OpenText (formerly Recommind) or SharePoint. Learn more about Lexis Search Advantage.

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Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a legal research service with a new data visualization tool that makes it faster to assess a case's relevance (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of four practice management systems, CRM software that integrates external data sources, a virtual desktop service, case analysis software, contract management software, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.

The initial stage of case law research involves trying to divine the relevance of the cases in your search results as quickly as possible. Lawyers complain so much about this time-consuming process that LexisNexis decided to take action.

Lexis Advance Search Term Maps … in One Sentence

Launched this month, Lexis Advance Search Term Maps uses color mapping to help you process case law search results more efficiently.

The Killer Feature

Search Term Maps stems from scientific studies showing that our brain processes visual information up to 60,000 times faster than text.

When you enter a Boolean or natural language search with up to five terms, Lexis Advance displays the new Graphical View with a Search Term Location Bar above each case in the search results. Using a different color for each search term, this bar shows a summary view of where your search terms reside in the case (searches with six or more terms use one color). You’ll also know whether search terms reside in the summary, headnotes, opinion, dissent, etc. A legend above the Search Term Location Bar lists each search term in its designated color.

The density of colors in the Search Term Location Bar indicates the overall relevance of the case. An asterisk directs you to the location in the case likely to be the most important. Clicking on a colored area in the Search Term Location Bar displays the corresponding document snippet with your search terms highlighted in their respective color. You can turn off less important search terms to focus on those with greater importance. This updates the search terms shown in the Search Term Location Bar.

Other Notable Features

When you’re ready to read a case, you’ll find a similar Search Term Location Bar in the full document view, except this bar displays every hit in the case. You can visually see the density and location of your search terms. Additionally, the Search Term Location Bar has an interactive slider that enables you to scroll through the case faster than using a vertical scroll bar.

Hovering over a color marker displays the corresponding search terms. Click to jump to that location. For more data, the Navigate All Terms menu lists each keyword and the number of hits. From this menu, you can select just one search term to display in the Search Term Location Bar and in the case.

“Our customers’ response to Search Term Maps has been very positive,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, Managing Director of North American Research Solutions at LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “They immediately understand the power of data visualization and the resulting professional productivity gains. The ability to quickly spot term hit density as well as the location and co-occurrence of terms within their search results allows users to easily identify patterns, judge the relevance of their search results and navigate individual documents with unprecedented speed.”

What Else Should You Know?

In both the search results and document views, a search within your original search displays the new search terms in the color teal to distinguish them from your original search terms. Also, you can use only one color for the Search Term Location Bar if you prefer. At anytime, you can switch from the Graphical View with Search Term Maps to traditional Lexis Advance views and back again. You can also choose which view to make the default. Search Term Maps is available for all case law in Lexis Advance. Learn more about Lexis Advance Search Term Maps.

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.

Coming today to LitigationWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 41 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.

ProView Puts Your Law Library in Your Briefcase

Litigation Tech Companies See Lackluster Funding

The Mechanics of Introducing Exhibits at Trial

Trial Tech Tips: Electronic Exhibit Stickers

Congratulations to Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog on winning our LitigationWorld Pick of the Week award: First Look at Cara

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