TechnoLawyer: TL NewsWire

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a consumer-friendly hard drive array, an online service for managing medical information used in litigation, and document comparison software that can compare anything to anything. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Drobo Arigato Mr. Roboto
By Dennis Kennedy

What's the second most annoying aspect of hard drives after disk failure? Running out of disk space! With our office computers bulging from our own documents not to mention the documents of our clients, and our home computers experiencing a similarly expanding digital waistline thanks to music, movies, and photos, the traditional hard drive just doesn't cut it anymore.

But the world of storage beyond the hard drive is filled with acronyms like RAID, SAN, NAS, and other terms that are too complex for the average lawyer, leaving us between a rock and a hard drive.

Enter Data Robotics and its new consumer-friendly Drobo automated storage robot that manages data storage for you. It's designed to ensure that your data is protected and expandable. And it minimizes your need to understand the intricacies of data storage management.

Drobo is a USB 2.0 enclosure that houses up to four 3.5 inch SATA hard drives of any size and make you wish. You need not use all four drive slots initially. LEDs display the status of drives and their remaining capacity. If the lights are green, all is good. Red lights tell you to add or replace a drive. Yellow lights let you know that you are at 85% of capacity and it's time to add another drive or replace an existing drive with a larger one.

On your PC or Mac, Drobo shows up as one very large hard drive — up to 2 TB at which point it shows up as two hard drives. You use this space like a regular hard drive, but behind the scenes it mirrors, protects, and manages your data to provide redundancy in case one hard drive fails.

You don't have to select RAID levels, match hard drive sizes, or delve into network storage esoterica. Drobo's approach to data management speeds up data migration, switches you to other drives if a drive fails, and gives you quick access to new capacity when needed. Drives slide into Drobo without the need for special tools.

Drobo currently works with both PCs and Macs. Expect a Linux-compatible version later this year as well as a version with an eSATA interface. Drobo sells for $499. Learn more about Drobo.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers two new online services that can help law firms with marketing and public relations, and a software program for working with deposition transcripts. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Frequent Flyers
By Dennis Kennedy

Designing and publishing marketing materials is time-consuming and committee-intensive, resulting all too often in endless debates about color or word choices and unopened boxes stored in closets for years after being printed.

vFlyer has created an online marketing and distribution platform that could help you put an end to all those committee meetings — and with better results to boot. It offers a simple, template-driven way to create brochures, flyers, and other marketing materials, and an easy way to distribute your materials to a variety of online and offline audiences.

vFlyer offers many channels to reach your audience. You can distribute PDF or HTML versions of your flyers by email (vFlyer can import your email lists). You can print your flyers to send by mail or hand out. You might also take advantage of new online channels and distribute your flyers through Google Base, Oodle, Edgeio, and more, or post flyers to Craigslist and eBay.

VFlyer's Flyer Creator makes it easy to quickly create professional-looking flyers. Flyer Creator provides a choice of standard templates or you can customize your own. You can add photographs and embed URLs. In the paid versions, you can even embed videos. vFlyer also offers custom templates for eBay and Craigslist.

You can output flyers in a variety of delivery formats, including PDF (for printing or emailing) and mobile or text messaging formats. You can also create RSS feeds.

vFlyer also offers a number of "widgets" that you can use to place your flyers and other ads on your Web site or blog, or even on social networking sites. These widgets come in Flash and JavaScript formats. You simply generate the code you need and place that code on your site or blog.

vFlyer is available under a subscription model with pricing based on features and numbers of flyers that you can create. A free, ad-supported version gives you 5 active flyers. Paid subscriptions start at $9.95 per month and go up to $79.95 per month with discounts for annual subscriptions. Learn more about vFlyer.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a lawyer-centric discovery program and two online document management solutions. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Discovery Easy Enough for Cavemen (and Simplicity-Seeking Lawyers)
By Dennis Kennedy

Those instant classic television commercials about car insurance so easy to apply for even a caveman can do it have me wondering what else cavemen might find easy enough to understand in today's world. Discovery? Probably not, but LexisNexis Concordance has taken great strides in that direction with the new version of its flagship discovery program — Concordance 2007.

Designed for lawyers, Concordance 2007 sports a "completely revised, highly intuitive interface" that produces faster data access, improved document searching, and streamlined e-discovery features. The new release also integrates online Lexis.com research and a "send to" function to share your discovery data with other litigation and e-discovery software tools, including LexisNexis's Total Litigator and CaseMap. You can use Concordance 2007 from your desktop, laptop, or the Web.

Concordance 2007 focuses on simplifying the discovery process while providing enormous data capacity. The new interface helps you better navigate and organize documents, and should result in reduced training time for busy lawyers and paralegals. The Import Wizard can quickly import email and attachments in their native format. You can import and manage up to half a terabyte of data and thirty-three million records in each database. Need flexibility? Concordance allows 250 customizable fields for each record and up to 12 MB of data (approximately four copies of War and Peace) in each field.

Concordance's Simple Search technology easily locates key phrases and documents for non-technical reviewers. More advanced users can make use of Boolean, fuzzy, wild card, relational, and concept searches. The Synonym Builder enables you to search less-than-perfect OCR documents. Once you find a term, you can highlight it, send it to Total Litigator, and perform research using your Lexis.com account. You can save and re-run searches on up to 128 databases at once. Other search tools help you search on related concepts and find duplicate documents.

Concordance 2007 also provides you with a rich set of review, analysis, and collaboration tools. You can use multi-level folders, add your own tags, and set up public and private folders to simplify document review and manage cases. New organizational management tools provide helpful statistics such as who reviewed a particular set of documents. You can also bulk send entire document sets from Concordance to CaseMap to help you analyze, manage, and strategize your cases.

Other notable features include transcript management, a wide variety of flexible reporting tools, and programmability for advanced users. Concordance also offers state of the art security. You can try Concordance 2007 for free for 30 days.  Learn more about Concordance 2007.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a communications solution that integrates desktop faxing and PDF creation, a free Web analytics tool, and a free Web-based productivity suite. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Double Your Productivity
By Dennis Kennedy

Many lawyers want a desktop faxing tool. Many lawyers also want a PDF creation tool. As digital technologies converge, you can see the overlap between these two tools. Once we scan a document, we should be able to fax it and email it — with one click.

Equisys' Zetafax Duo 2007 integrates the popular Zetafax with Zetadocs PDF. The result is what it calls a visual document builder that enables you to create and combine documents into PDF files that you can can fax or email, whichever makes the most sense for you and the recipient. And you can do all of this from Outlook.

With the Zetadocs PDF component, you can merge documents created in different programs or scanned using any TWAIN-compliant scanner into a single PDF file (e.g., a cover letter created in Word and a bill created in your time-billing software). You can also apply your letterhead, logo, etc., attach existing PDF files, and archive every file you fax and email. Best of all, for routine tasks that you perform over and over again, you can create "automation commands" (macros) that perform a series of tasks with one click (handy for distributing a client newsletter).

With the Zetafax component, you can send and receive faxes using the Zetafax client or, as noted above, Outlook. Because faxes are routed over your law firm's network, they remain secure from sender to recipient. Zetafax 2007 integrates with Microsoft Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, but also supports prior versions of both products. Zetafax 2007 also integrates with just about any other mail sever via its optional email gateway, and many popular CRM programs such as ACT!, Goldmine, and SalesLogix.

Zetafax Duo 2007 installs quickly and takes advantage of Windows Group Policy to let you roll out client software from a central location rather than visiting each desktop. Zetafax Duo pricing starts at $1,295 for 5 users (upgrades start at $795). Learn more about Zetafax Duo 2007.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a trial presentation program, a digital pen, and a digital notepad. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Stay One Step Ahead of Judges and Juries
By Dennis Kennedy

The television generation long ago took its place among jurors and judges, and now the online generation is doing the same. As a result, lawyers have gradually moved from flipcharts, foam board illustrations, and videotapes to the digital medium. Many lawyers take their first digital step with PowerPoint, but soon graduate to a dedicated trial presentation program like TrialDirector to better tell their clients' stories to judges and jurors and gain a competitive advantage over opposing counsel.

inData Corp. has released TrialDirector 5.1, an update to its award-winning trial presentation software. Version 5, of course, shook up the industry last year and racked up record sales thanks to its redesigned interface and other major changes. TrialDirector 5.1 builds on that success with a number of useful enhancements as well as a hot a new feature that has already attracted a lot of attention.

The biggest news is Presentation Preview, which enables you to preview your materials — exhibits, annotations, and other treatments — before you show them live to your audience. You can quickly and easily see how materials will display, and correct and improve them before showing them. inData describes it as like a batter taking a practice swing before stepping up to the plate.

TrialDirector 5.1 builds on its predecessor's ability to issue-code transcripts with your case issues and other designations. In the new version, you can also use the Designation Clip tool to automatically create video clips from any of your transcript issue codes. This means you can pull up clips on the fly faster than ever.

Improved compatibility is another highlight of TrialDirector 5.1. First and foremost, TrialDirector 5.1 offers full compatibility with the Windows Vista operating system. Version 5.1 also integrates with CT Summation and other third party applications, giving you the ability to choose virtually any litigation tool rather then be pigeonholed.

TrialDirector 5.1 also features performance enhancements. For example, it can transfer and load documents much faster. You can now quickly send documents or pages to workbooks with a right-click of a mouse. Existing users will also like the ability to edit information directly from the Case Explorer tree using a grid-like view while still working in the case tree structure.

TrialDirector 5.1 is a free upgrade for current licensees of TrialDirector 5 who have a current maintenance contract. Pricing starts at $595 plus maintenance with volume discounts available. Finally, you'll never again miss an update because the new version will notify whenever an update becomes available. Learn more about TrialDirector 5.1.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a new yet familiar e-discovery service, a financial news resource, and online service tailor-made for law librarians and other book lovers. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

The E-Discovery Hostess with the Mostest
By Dennis Kennedy

Lawyers beginning to delve into the world of electronic discovery often express surprise at how even simple cases can involve large amounts of electronic data. "Help" is usually the first word that comes to mind.

LexisNexis Concordance's Hosted FYI aims to provide that help by combining "state-of-the-art" data hosting and security with e-discovery tools built on the familiar Concordance platform — priced a la carte based on your needs.

With Hosted FYI, you and your team can review, process, store, retrieve, redact, and share documents in a secure, centralized, and always-accessible environment. Rather than task your IT staff with daunting security and management requirements, Hosted FYI enables you to take advantage of the capacity, experience, security, and staffing of LexisNexis. As a result, you reduce your internal staffing and infrastructure costs, keep important data in an environment equipped for disaster recovery, and free your firm to focus on winning cases, not worrying about IT and security issues.

You can also take advantage of Hosted FYI's project support teams, including project managers and technical support representatives. These litigation support professionals can help ensure the integrity of your discovery data and, most importantly, track chain of custody. Thanks to this neutral stewardship, opposing counsel will likely consider using Hosted FYI as well, streamlining the discovery process. Even better, you can move cases midstream into Hosted FYI that you're currently handling internally or with other vendors.

Hosted FYI uses the well-known Concordance platform, a litigation environment familiar to many law firms and one used for many of today's biggest cases. Law firms that already use Concordance can easily move to the Hosted FYI environment seamlessly and without retraining their litigation support staff. You can quickly review and redact information, search, organize, and annotate email and other documents in their native file format (including metadata). The Web-hosted approach enables lawyers, paralegals and others to work simultaneously whether in the office, home, hotel room, etc. with access to only what they need to see.

Hosted FYI also provides you with financial controls. You can avoid building out infrastructure or hiring additional staff. Instead, Hosted FYI's a la carte pricing options means that you pay for only the services you need. The billing is also simple as you receive a single bill for what you use. Learn more about Hosted FYI.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers software for managing client trust and escrow accounts, online sticky notes, and a free service for sending files too large to email. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Stop Losing Sleep Over Client Trust Accounting
By Dennis Kennedy

A surprisingly large percentage of disbarments and disciplinary actions against lawyers arise out of the mishandling of client trust funds. The rules for handling trust funds can seem arcane — especially for bookkeepers and accountants not experienced with law office trust accounting and ethical rules. To make matters worse, many general business accounting programs either do not handle trust accounting or provide only rudimentary or limited options.

Easy Soft's Easy Trust software enables you to take charge of your firm's trust and escrow accounting needs, and comply with the applicable rules in your jurisdiction. Easy Trust can track and reconcile receipts and disbursements for each of your clients separately while providing tight controls and an audit trail.

Thanks to a "simple, elegant interface," you can easily set up client ledger cards and enter transactions. You can create as many bank accounts or client ledger cards you need. Most importantly, Easy Trust prevents common trust accounting mistakes from occurring. For example, by default it guards against client ledgers having a negative balance.

Easy Trust also provides security and control. You can set up an account for each user with its own set of permissions limiting what that person can do in the program (e.g., transaction "entry only" permission without the ability to "print checks" or perform "bank reconciliation"). Other helpful features include overdraft alerts, bank reconciliation, and three-way reconciliation.

Easy Trust generates a variety of useful reports designed to simplify the audit and review process. For example, you can view the prior month's reconciliation reports, enabling you to easily match the reports with the corresponding bank statements. Various bank and client ledger reports can be produced with a single click. Also, users of Easy Soft's Easy HUD RESPA program can import settlement transactions directly from HUD-1 forms.

Easy Trust costs $499. Licenses for additional computers cost $199 each. Learn more about Easy Trust.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a PDF solution with legal-specific features, a Word add-on for law firms, and a solution for administrating  stock and stock option plans without running afoul of regulations such as FASB 123R. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Not Just PDF, PDF for Law Firms
By Dennis Kennedy

With the number of PDF solutions growing like gangbusters, consumers have become pickier. While price remains important, it has become imperative for PDF vendors to further differentiate their products by focusing on the needs of a specific market such as legal.

A good example is DocsCorp's pdfDocs Desktop, which combines affordability with many features and an integrated desktop approach. PdfDocs Desktop enables everyone in your firm to create, secure, and manage PDF documents, and integrates with popular document management systems.

You can easily create PDFs by printing documents, spreadsheets, email, and Web pages to the pdfDocs printer. You can also create PDFs by dragging and dropping a document onto the pdfDocs Organizer workspace area. The program also handles PDF forms — both creating them and filling them out — a feature that has become "must have" for many law firms.

pdfDocs Desktop helps you secure your documents by both password protection and metadata removal. You can prevent readers from modifying documents, and control who can open and view them. You can also redact information from sensitive documents using a special redaction tool.

pdfDocs Desktop can merge documents created by different programs into a single PDF, rearrange documents, change the order of pages, insert page numbers, and add bookmarks, highlights, logos, watermarks, notes, and Bates stamps. In short, you can perform a wide variety of useful tasks that one-trick-pony PDF creation programs will not let you do.

Of special interest to law firms is pdfDocs Desktop's ability to integrate with popular legal document management systems from Hummingbird, Interwoven, Worldox, and others, enabling you can create PDF files easily with a right-click of your mouse from within those systems. You can also easily save your PDF files in the appropriate folders.

pdfDocs Desktop also integrates with Outlook to automatically convert email attachments to PDF format, and email multiple attachments as a single PDF file on the fly. pdfDocs Desktop also integrates with scanners.

Pricing for pdfDocs Desktop starts at $126 plus $24 per year for support, but volume discounts are available.  Learn more about pdfDocs Desktop.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a free remote access tool, document management software for small law firms, and a utility that converts PDF files into HTML and other formats. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

The Next Best Thing to a Transporter
By Dennis Kennedy

Lawyers increasingly work in settings away from the office, but need access to information on their office computers. Plus they occasionally need support or assistance from the IT department. Having access to all of your computer assets from wherever you are has become a priority for many lawyers. Since you can't have Scotty beam you back and forth as needed, the next best alternative is remote control software.

UltraVNC is a free software tool that enables you to display the screen of another computer on the screen of your computer over the Internet or a home of office network. You can then work on the other computer remotely, as if you were sitting in front of it.

You can use UltraVNC to access other computers, provide support and trouble-shooting, administer networks, give demos or presentations, and perform any number of other tasks remotely. You can also securely transfer files.

UltraVNC is an enhanced version of a popular open source program called VNC that has a long history. It runs on Windows systems. If you use its embedded Java viewer, you can use an Internet connection and a Web browser to view and transfer files from computers supporting Java (that means Mac OS and Linux). The Web browser capabilities also enable you to access a home or office computer from an Internet cafe or hotel room.

UltraVNC enhancements include a Video Mirror Driver to improve the speed and accuracy of screen updates and remote control. Although UltraVNC does not include encryption, plug-ins exist that can encrypt your communications. There is also a helpful text chat feature so you can communicate with the person at the other computer. UltraVNC is free.  Learn more about UltraVNC.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers software that enhances and adds features to Outlook, integrated network security software, and an online client development application. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Take Client Development to a Higher Level
By Dennis Kennedy

Lawyers often focus on cases and matters. But before a case or matter comes into existence, you must deal with people — both existing and prospective clients. The traditional address book doesn't give you enough horsepower for sales, and high-end customer relationship management software is overkill for most law firms. So where do you turn?

37 Signals designed Highrise as a new Web-based approach to capture the middle ground between address books and the big CRM packages. The focus lies in giving you just the tools you need to manage people and projects and nothing more. With Highrise, you can share contacts, assign tasks based on those contacts, maintain a contact history, and, most importantly, group together related people, companies, notes, and other information in a "case," a term that should appeal to lawyers.

You can use Highrise for your own contacts or search for contacts across your firm. Highrise also helps you move from contact list to action. You can act on your contacts by setting follow-ups, calls, meetings, thank you notes, reminders, and more. Highrise can even send reminders to your mobile phone. You can log calls, conversations, email, and other communications with your contacts. You log email by simply forwarding or copying Highrise.

You can also mine new information from your contact lists. See all communications with a group of people. Build a list of all the experts on a given issue. Generate a list of your clients with whom you have not had contact in the last year. Etc.

Highrise comes from the same company that produces Basecamp, a popular online project management tool that we use to write this newsletter. Highrise is available in a free version with limits on the number of cases and people you can set up, and in five other versions ranging from $12 to $149 per month. SSL security kicks in at $49/month, which most law firms would probably deem necessary. Learn more about Highrise.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.