Here are highlights from our Twitter posts for the past two weeks (Sept 7–21), with some additional commentary.

• Evernote is an amazing tool for gathering and organizing digital information. Lawyers could definitely use it as a tool for handling legal research. The trick to Evernote is getting familiar with it. If you’re interested check out this tutorial on iTunesU. Evernote is free for basic stuff, and only $45/year if you use the advanced features.
• If you have an iPhone or iPad, here’s a great podcast with recommended iOS apps for $5 or less. They’re not focused on the legal profession, but the podcast is put together by two lawyers who know a lot about iPhones and iPads, and use them in their work.
• Most lawyers who litigate will encounter an E-discovery issue soon. Here is an 11 minute video on digital review strategies from Josh Gillland, a lawyer who knows a lot about the subject. And knows how to make it interesting.
• Is Facebook secretly sharing what you are reading and watching? Seems like they might be. This is why many people don’t trust Facebook.
• Tom Mighell’s excellent “Blawg of the Day” is the best way for lawyers to learn about useful new law blogs. This Tax, Trust & Estate News blog is a great example of the kinds of blogs that Tom showcases. By the way, a “blawg” is just a combination of the words “blog” and “law.” Many lawyers know that, but I’m sure a few don’t.
• Tom is the author of a couple of excellent books on iPad use by Lawyers, which he talks about on his iPad 4 Lawyers blog. The books are definitely worth getting, and you should bookmark the blog and visit it regularly. 

Well that’s the wrap up for this edition. To get these news tidbits as they come out follow us at the PaperlessChase Twitter page, and if you’re a Louisiana lawyer interested in technology come to one of our live CLE programs. The next one is on Friday, October 19th in New Orleans, and it’s on Email Management for Lawyers.

Here are the highlights from our Twitter posts this week:

• Tired of copying/pasting into your address book? Here’s a better way. Simple, automatic, reliable, & really useful!
• How to Remove Hidden Information Using Acrobat X: link
• Ross Gubmerman grades the readability of the Apple v. Samsung legal briefs: link
• If you’re the type to meticulously file your emails in various folders in your client, stop: link
• 10 Highlights from the 2012 Legal Technology Survey Report: link
• New Orleans lawyers with iPads should sign up for our CLE seminar this Friday, Sept 14th. It’s three hours of CLE credit, including an hour of Ethics.

To get these kinds of updates as they come out subscribe to our Twitter feed (you have to join Twitter to do so, but it’s free).

Ernie Svenson recently did a webinar on Visual Persuasion for Lawyers: How to Explain and Engage with Pictures. The written materials for this presentation are located here.

Lawyers have adopted iPads with surprising eagerness, but many of them don’t really know how to get the most out of an iPad in their law practice. Dane Ciolino, Jeff Richardson (of iPhoneJD.com fame) and I plan to offer a 3 hour CLE course in mid-September to show New Orleans lawyers the magic tricks for being super-efficient with an iPad.

Among the things we’ll cover are:

• How to avoid security issues & client-confidentiality issues
• How to view, edit & share documents from an iPad or iPhone
• How to sign documents, and manipulate PDFs
• How to gather legal information (caselaw, statutes) with an iDevice
• How to take digital notes and recordings
• How to display exhibits wirelessly at trial

The three presenters will use iPads that are wirelessly connected to a projector, so you’ll see firsthand how powerful the iPad could be as a display device in court. The program will include an hour of Ethics credit. For more information, or to sign up click here (I’d sign up early, first to save money and, second, because it will definitely sell out).

If you sign-up but need to cancel our policy is to always give full refunds, immediately and without questions, if you cancel at least 24 hours before the event. So, if you want to attend I’d sign up now, to lock in the low price and ensure you have a spot.

Apple just announced updates to the operating systems for its iOS devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches), as well as the computer operating system (current version called Lion). Let’s take a quick look at the most interesting developments.

iOS Version 6 (coming this Fall; many new useful features, and some really interesting ones)

• Siri upgrade – you can now ask more questions (e.g. who won the last Miami Heat game? What movies are playing at the Metreon?). You can even use Siri to launch applications; this is huge. And Siri will now work with the latest generation iPad.
• Phone notifications – you may have found yourself in meetings where you can’t take a phone call. The new iOS will give you two options when you receive a call, besides “Decline” or “Anwer.” The new options allow you to either (1) Reply with a Message, or (2) Remind you to call later. The “Reply with a Message” option has pre-set responses that all begin with “Can’t talk right now…” – (1) I’ll call you later, (2) I’m on my way, (3) What’s up?, and (4) a custom response that you set up.
• Phone – do not disturb option. This one is huge. It lets you designate a time frame (at night, presumably) during which you don’t want to be disturbed. Your phone will not ring or vibrate at all, except for people in your favorites list (if you choose to enable that option).
• Passbook – a new application that stores your boarding passes, store affinity cards, and electronically delivered movie tickets (e.g. anything with a barcode). Apple has created templates to make it easy for developers to access this application, and presumably it will become more useful the more that developers hook their apps to it. The cards are updated in real time, so theoretically, if your airline gate changes it will update in the app as well.
• Facebook integration – you login once to your Facebook account and associate it with your iPhone or iPad and you won’t have to login again. You can post to Facebook from Safari or other apps that it would make sense to hook Facebook to. Facebook events such as your friends’ birthdays can show up in your calendar automatically. And your friends will be able to see which App store apps you like (assuming you allow it, I presume).
• Goodbye Google Maps – some people will recoil at this, but we knew it was coming. So what’s it mean? The Apple mapping system will have a traffic service with crowd-sourced time incident reports (created in real time by anonymous iPhone users). Built in turn-by-turn navigation. And, for the pièce de résistance it’s integrated with Siri, so you can ask questions like “where can I get gas?” Or even “are we there yet?” to which Siri will respond with your ETA. Apple Maps will also have a feature called “Flyover” which appears to be a 3D map flyover of certain select cities (probably not Topeka, Kansas).
• Lost mode – for those of you that enabled the Find My iPhone option (and you all should) you can also now enable someone who finds your phone to click a button to call you on your lost (and, hopefully, locked) phone.

Mountain Lion (is the next version of “Lion” but not too many changes)

• Will be released in July, and will be a download from the App store. It’ll cost $19.99 for as many computers as you have under one AppleID.
• Dictation – the voice dictation that has been in the iPhone and iPad will now work on your computer, in all applications (including Microsoft Word).
• Reminders – will be available on your computer just as they are on your iPhone and iPad, and will sync across all devices via iCloud.
• Notes – a new app that will allow you to insert images and links. The notes presumably sync across all your devices. Will this replace Evernote? Probably not for power users, but it brings that kind of functionality to people who have not been taking advantage of it.
• Messages – is Apple’s text messaging service that lets you bypass SMS costs on your phone. It’s been on iPhone and iPad, and now it comes to your Apple computer. If you want to respond to a phone call via text message here is the place you can quickly and easily do it.
• Mail – the Apple mail client now allows you to insert photos or videos into an email (i.e. not just an attachment, but actually appears in the body of the message). It’ll be interesting to see where this breaks down, but obviously it’ll work great between Mac users.
• iCloud – updated to work with iWork documents. So now it’s seamless to work on a Pages document or Keynote presentation, and then have it available to you on your iPad or iPhone.
• Power Nap – instead of having your computer go completely to sleep (which means it can’t be updated or do backups) it can now receive updates and send backup data. Works only with the second-generation Macbook Airs, and all the newly announced laptops.

Apple continues to push the envelope with Siri, and voice dictation. The foray into proprietary mapping is interesting, and hopefully will be so incredible that Google Maps won’t be missed. Journalists will be ready to pounce on any snafu with the new mapping service, so expect to see some torches and pitchforks on that one.

Check out this excellent Acrobat X Pro video (the first in a series of Acrobat X Pro tutorials), where you learn how to convert documents to PDF, apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and make basic changes by adding, removing, and rearranging pages within a PDF.

Some of you use Evernote to keep track of notes and web articles. For those of you that use the browser from Google called Chrome there is something you should know about. You should enable the Web Clipping service for Chrome. And you should select the option that tells Chrome to search your Evenote account simultaneously whenever you do a Google search (actually it works for any web search, including Bing and Yahoo).

If you’re like me you’ll love how this works. I tend to toss things in to Evernote and then forget about them. Having them appear as search results reminds me that I have stuff that might be relevant there. And it makes me more inclined to toss things into Evernote because I know that I don’t have to remember to look there. A google search will remind me.

The Digital Workflow team will be presenting “Paperless Chase CLE: Creating and Maintaining a Paperless Office”  in Baton Rouge on July 6, 2012 at the Crown Plaza from 9a.m. – noon (4728 Constitution Avenue, Baton Rouge, LA 70808)

The course is for 3 general CLE credits and we’ll be giving away a Fujitsu ScanSnap at the end so that one lucky attorney can get a jumpstart on becoming paperless.

Tickets can be purchased HERE.

The Paperless Chase seminar is taught by Ernie Svenson and Dane Ciolino, two practicing attorneys who made the transition years ago. Since then Ernie and Dane have shown countless other lawyers and legal professionals how to do smoothly. In this half-day seminar we’ll explain the benefits that lawyers reap from being paperless, and how to become paperless with the least amount of struggle.

Today, I went into the local federal courthouse carrying an 80 GB external USB hard drive. I needed to give it to my opposing counsel so that he could copy some PDFs onto it, and since we were going to be in court for a scheduling conference I thought I’d just bring it along.

As I was passing through the first level of security (where you empty your pockets and show your driver’s license) the guard asked me what the device was. I explained that it was a hard drive. He seemed skeptical. And he seemed confused about what a “hard drive” was. I told him that it was the thing inside of computers that holds the data, except that this one was an “external drive” that I needed to give to opposing counsel. I might as well have been talking about some weird kind of quantum nanotech flux capacitor.

The guard at the receiving end of my scan of pocket contents also wanted to ask me about the hard drive. He also didn’t seem to know what a hard drive was.

It’s sad when the courthouse security folks are flummoxed by contraptions that are sold in bulk at Best Buy or Radio Shack.

Becoming paperless takes time and some planning, but the shift is worth the effort.

We’ve had a lot of interest from Lafayette lawyers on our live paperless seminars and thought “why not take this show on the road?” So here we come!

The Digital Workflow team will be presenting “Paperless Chase CLE: Creating and Maintaining a Paperless Office” in Lafayette at Louisiana Immersive Technologies Interprise on Thursday, April 19th from 1p.m. – 4p.m.

Bonus: We’ll be giving away a Fujitsu ScanSnap at the end so that one lucky attorney can get a jumpstart on becoming paperless.

Tickets can be purchased HERE.

The Paperless Chase seminar is taught by Ernie Svenson and Dane Ciolino, two practicing attorneys who made the transition years ago. Since then Ernie and Dane have shown countless other lawyers and legal professionals how to do smoothly. In this half-day seminar we’ll explain the benefits that lawyers reap from being paperless, and how to become paperless with the least amount of struggle.