Archive for category Digital Workflow
Best of 60 TechTips presentation
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Cloud-computing, Digital Signatures, Digital Workflow, Document Assembly, Presentations on February 3, 2012
Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing a 60 tips in 60 Minutes session with several good friends and follow law-techies. Even though I’ve done dozens of these 60 tips programs in the past few years, I always wind up learning something. Here are a few of the most interesting tips I picked up:
- Asana – An online collaborative project management tool, sort of like Basecamp, but free if you have less than 30 team members. This one was recommended by Catherine Reach Sanders (who just moved from the ABA Technology Resource Center to the Chicago Bar Association).
- Pathagoras – a document assembly tool that works with Word for Windows. It’s free to try for 90 days, and from what Jim Calloway described, it’s a powerful tool for transactional lawyers who create variations of form documents and need a tool that makes it easy to do this.
- How to create a Digital ID for using with Adobe Acrobat, which Nerino Petro says is a surefire way to have true digital signatures that actually get accepted by the recipient. I’m going to start using this for sure.
- Let Me Google That For You – I forgot about this one, but it’s a classic. If you’re adept at using Google but find that you get annoyed when people ask you for information that they could just as easily have googled themselves, you need to check it out. I won’t ruin it for you; just go do a sample search and you’ll see what this tool does.
If you want to see all the tips that we did, here’s the link to our presentation.
Casemap – Digital Case Management
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Casemap, Digital Workflow on December 31, 2011
If you’ve attended any of Dane Ciolino’s seminars on digital case management you know he’s a firm proponent of using Casemap. For those of you who want to review the benefits of Casemap, or who want more in depth explanations of how it can help your law practice, check out these videos that Dane created. They were done for a law school class on Practical Lawyering, but also they’re useful for lawyers who want to learn how to use Casemap better.
Dictation software (you speak, computer types)
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Digital Workflow on November 21, 2011
Lately, attorneys at our live seminars have been asking about Dragon Dictation software; they want to know if we think this is worth considering. The short answer is: yes.
Nuance, the company that creates the Dragon Dictation software, now has versions for both the PC and Mac. The PC version is more mature, and that’s the one we can recommend. The Mac version is not quite ready for prime-time, unless you are willing to suffer some minor slings and arrows. Also, it costs twice as much as the Windows version (which is crazy since it doesn’t work half as well).
On the PC side the latest version is called Dragon Naturally Speaking 11. You don’t need to spend more for the premium version (or the legal version). The Home version that comes with a USB headset is good enough to get started with, and will probably be all you’ll ever need. That version sells for about $80 on Amazon.
Set up takes about 10 minutes, and the voice training is another 10 minutes at most. At that point you’re ready to experience something truly magical. You speak words and your computer types them. But, just because it’s magic that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do anything more than speak. You have to learn to issue the proper commands to get the software to do what you want. And learning those commands takes a little time, and a little getting used to.
Everyone who uses dictation software extensively will tell you that it takes a few weeks to get to the point where you don’t have to think about what to do in order to get results to appear on screen. But, if you aren’t super fast at typing, or if you have wrist strain from typing, then the effort will seem trivial. Even if you do type fast, you’ll find that you can dictate a lot faster than you can type.
Many people will say that they’ve tried Dragon and found that it just didn’t work very well. You have to remember that dictation software has gotten much better, and computers have gotten much more powerful, in recent years. So if you haven’t tried dictation software in a few years then you might want to give it another shot.
Bates-Stamping in Acrobat 9 Professional – Step-by-Step guide
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Digital Workflow on November 21, 2011
Bates-stamping is incredibly useful for legal professionals. If you own the Professional version of Acrobat you can easily stamp a PDF document (or a batch of PDFs) with text, or sequential numbers. I put together a handy PDF guide that contains the step-by-step instructions for how to do this.
The guide won’t help for Acrobat X Professional, because the initial steps are under different menus than the prior version. However, it should work for Acrobat 8 Professional. Remember, that Acrobat Standard does not have the bates-stamp feature.
End of the year CLE seminar in New Orleans is now scheduled
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Cloud-computing, Digital Workflow, Ethics, iPad, Live CLE Seminars, Mobile Lawyering, Presentations on November 15, 2011
Our usual end-of-the-year seminar will take place again between Christmas and New Years. Except that this year we’re offering two full days of CLE. You can sign up for one day, or both days (with a discount if you attend both days). And for a short while, we’re offering “Early Bird pricing.”
Seating is limited because we prefer a more intimate setting, as opposed to a large hotel venue. We do our seminars in the large conference room on the first floor of the IP Building at 643 Magazine St. (behind the US Fifth Circuit). The room will hold about 50 people, which is perfect for us.
Dane Ciolino and I will be doing most of the sessions, but we’ll be having some excellent outside speakers as well. Jeff Richardson of iPhoneJD fame will be doing a session on mobile lawyering that will cover the use of tablet devices such as iPads. And Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan from the Eastern District of Louisiana will participate in a panel discussion of common e-discovery issues.
We’ll be doing an email blast in a few days, which should get a lot of attention from folks that may not have typically been to our seminars. So, if the readers of this blog want to reserve a spot they should sign up soon. For more details, and to sign up, click here. If you were there last year you’ll remember we had a lot of fun with giveaways, and this year we plan to ramp up the giveaways. We’re also planning lots of other things to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.
Digital Recordkeeping
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Digital Workflow, Paperless lawyering, Scanning on October 9, 2011
People ask about what paper records they need to keep when they start scanning documents. The honest answer is that it depends. But an honest (and practical) answer is that you don’t need to keep as much paper as you think you do. Here is a list of resources that address the issue of digital recordkeeping.
iPad book recommendation for lawyers
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Apple, Cloud-computing, Digital Workflow, iPad, Paperless lawyering on October 4, 2011
If you have an iPad and you want to get the most out of it, buy my friend David Sparks’ book, iPad At Work, and listen to whatever he recommends. David has a great podcast called Mac Power Users (which he does with Katy Floyd), which I highly recommend.
A quick example of how digital signatures are invaluable
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Acrobat, Digital Signatures, Digital Workflow on September 12, 2011
Last week I was out of town speaking at two events sponsored by the Louisiana Disciplinary Board. After I arrived at my hotel room I checked my email and found an urgent message from a client who needed me to sign some documents and transmit them to London, England as quickly as possible.
The intended recipient needed my signature within 24 hours in order to be able to complete a transaction that my client needed done as quickly as possible. My client found out that the lawyers in England would accept my signature by PDF, with an original to follow.
If I didn’t have the ability to sign the PDF version of the document using a digital signature I would have had to jump through several time-consuming and highly disruptive hoops. Instead, I merely opened the PDF that was required to be signed and affixed my digital signature using the stamp tool in Adobe Acrobat X. I then flattened the PDF to ensure the signature was imprinted permanently onto the PDF and then emailed it off.
The next day I printed out the three signature pages and signed them in ‘wet ink’ and transmitted them by Federal Express. The client was extremely pleased that I was able to so rapidly accomodate his last minute urgent request, and I was happy not to have my out of town trip disrupted.
What about the readers of this website? Do you use digital signatures, and, if so, have you had any situations where it has made it easy to deal with a problem like the one I encountered?
Synching devices is hard
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Digital Workflow, Strategy on August 31, 2011
We’ve reached the point where we no longer just expect our various devices to synchronize our key data; we absolutely depend on it. You have a computer back in the office, and maybe a laptop—a smartphone for sure. And, like most lawyers these days, you have your calendar in electronic form and available on all of your devices.
Is all of your critical calendar data synchronizing accurately?
The only way to really be sure is to periodically audit your various devices and see if they are harmonized, or in chaos. Once a week you should do a spot check of your devices. Or maybe only once a month, if you’re really confident.
Here’s the thing: most of us tend to assume that everything is fine, but the reality is that synching devices is actually pretty hard. There are a lot of “moving parts,” as they say. Even if you have a reliable service that you use to synchronize your electronic calendar, you still might hit a snag if one of the devices gets hung up in some way. How would you know?
Maybe you should check once in awhile. That’s all we’re saying.
Bates-Stamping in Acrobat 9 Professional – Step-by-Step guide
Posted by Ernest Svenson in Acrobat, Digital Workflow, PDFs on August 29, 2011
Bates-stamping is incredibly useful for legal professionals. If you own the Professional version of Acrobat you can easily stamp a PDF document (or a batch of PDFs) with text, or sequential numbers. I put together a handy PDF guide that contains the step-by-step instructions for how to do this.
The guide won’t help for Acrobat X Professional, because the initial steps are under different menus than the prior version. However, it should work for Acrobat 8 Professional. Remember, that Acrobat Standard does not have the bates-stamp feature.
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