Fastcase is now offering a free research service on the iPad. While most of you are probably familiar with Lexis and Westlaw, Fastcase is a service those of us in Virginia are familiar with because it has a contract with our Bar to allow us free legal research. It’s a solid service which provides every basic need that a courtroom attorney would need.

The app on the iPad is free with an option to pay money to get some additional services. However, the free services are pretty much everything you’d need for quick, off the cuff research of caselaw or statutes while you are in a courtroom.

(note: click on the images in order to view them full size)

When you first log in you are given a choice between searching caselaw, searching statutes, or browsing statutes. Note that the interface has large enough, simply laid out options so that you don’t have to zoom in or tap the screen several times in order to hit the button you are trying to hit.

The search page gives you a number of fairly standard options to select from. Among other things, these allow you to choose the jurisdiction you are searching, the dates for the search, and how you want the results sorted. When you tap on one of the selections it will give you a menu which allows you to scroll through and further hone your choices. After that, you tap in the spot for the entry of the search terms and the on-screen keyboard pops up to let you enter your search terms.

Once you’ve entered your search term, you have get a screen which is a list of possible cases to view (or statute if you are searching statutes). Each has a brief quote from the case including the search term you enter in order to help you decide which case you want to view. Once you tap on a case, it pulls that case up on the screen and your search terms are highlighted.

All-in-all, this is an excellent tool for in court usage (when you desperately need to find that case) or on the road when you need to look up a case while traveling. It will not displace the need for your laptop or desktop when you are writing briefs, petitions, etc., but it’s a useful tool for those occasions when you can’t just whip the laptop out and start typing away.

Williamsburg is hoping to save $2,000 a year by using the iPads rather than generating the mounds of papers which are needed for meetings and inter-office memos and legal papers and everything else that council members need. Now they will be able to generate the documents on their computers and send them to each council member’s iPad via email or Dropbox or Evernote or any number of other means and never have to waste paper and ink printing any of it out.

It’s a good plan. The iPad a useful tool for the modern office. As everyone reading this blog knows, we have done our best to become as paperless as possible in the Wise Commonwealth Attorney’s Office. Both our Circuit Court Clerk’s office and our office have developed similar programs which allow us to both view the Clerk’s file and our office file via any computer. Using the iPad allows us to use these rather than running off copies for court. Prior to the iPad you either printed papers from your office computer or packed up that desktop and carried it to court every day. The tablet is also useful for accessing statutes and cases online when you need to do some quick research in the courtroom. No need to copy statutes from books or print cases from Lexis. Personally, I find the most useful app to be Evernote, which allows me to enter .pdf documents from a case file on my regular computer as well as personal notes and then access them on all my computers. It is particularly useful on the iPad. The combination of the Evernote and the iPad has allowed me to stop taking any files to court. I’m sure that a little ingenuity on the part of the Williamsburg City Council will make the iPad at least as useful for them as it is for us.

I was given the Sewell Minideck to review on my blawg, CrimLaw, but it worked well and I thought I’d cross post the review here.

This is a useful device which will allow you to hook multiple monitors to your computer. It’s amazing how quickly you come to rely on having three monitors running at the same time. Right now I’m sitting at my desk with the primary monitor (the one built into the Mac) displaying a browser (Opera), one displaying Evernote, and the last has TweetDeck up. Heck, I wish I had another monitor, or two, up and running because now whenever I need to use Lotus Symphony or a second browser I have to minimize TweetDeck or Evernote; I may just have to buy another Minideck. Or two. Or three. Having multiple monitors running at the same time turns out to be a convenience I never knew I needed, but now don’t want to do without.

Caveat: Have some realistic expectations for this product. You’re not going to pump enough video through a USB cord to render the 3D graphics in Space Warriors on the Zombie Planet of Doom 6: The Awakened Re-Reckoning. Still, it’s perfect for office use.

Ease of Use: 5 out of 5

Output: 2.7 out of 5

In operation, this program is simplicity itself. When you first pull it up you get a blank square with a CONVERT button at the bottom.

All you have to do is use the mouse to click and drag .pdf files into the box and click convert. There’s very little else you can do. The only setting you can really change is whether the output will be .doc or .rtf. It was a little disappointing that the program converts into .rtf rather than .odt, as .rtf is a relic of a bygone era and .odt is the modern multi-platform format. However, that’s more of an advanced user complaint and it is hard to fault the program much for this flaw because most people won’t use anything other than .doc because of Word’s predominance.

Below is a picture of the program set to convert to .doc (left) and .rtf (right).

Once you have entered as many .pdf files as you wish to convert, you click the CONVERT button and they are rather quickly converted to the output format. I’m going to concentrate on the .doc format and assume that the .rtf conversions will contain the usual flaws which occur when one uses that format. And, as I said above, I don’t imagine many people will use any format but .doc anyway.

I put 5 files through the conversion process.

The first was this week’s court docket. We get this via email every week in a .pdf format. After conversion, this would only show blank screens when I used Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice to view it. However, in Word the entire docket came up, but it was basically converted into an image which made it even less useful than the .pdf file was. I rate this as a 1 out of 5.

The second was a law review article which I had downloaded from Lexis. It converted this so that it looked exactly like the law review article. The conversion worked in Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice as well as Word. The only difference was that the Lexis graphic only appeared when I used Word. I rate this as a 4.5 out of 5.

The third was a document which came when I got DropBox for the iPad and it had several graphics included in it with the text formed around it. This converted perfectly when I used the .doc file in Word, in the other word processors it converted the text but did not show the graphics. I rate this a 5 out of 5 (AnyBizSoft made no claims as to any program but Word).

The fourth was a brief I had previously written and converted into a .pdf via Lotus Symphony. When it was converted it looked almost exactly as it did in the .pdf. There were some flaws which appeared no matter which word processor I used. Things I had underlined (such as case names) had a [tab] added at the end with the underlining continuing. As well, the right side of each line was a hard return rather than a margin. Thus, if I went to add something the line extended off the right side off the page and when it finally moved to the next line it did not join the line below it, but forced the lower line to go down a line. I rate this a 3 out of 5.

The fifth was a sentencing guidelines document. This is a .pdf which has blanks where information can be added. After conversion, when I looked at this on Word, it got the formatting perfectly, but where the information had been entered it was blank. I rate this a 0 out of 5.

Overall Recommendation: If you are looking to convert simple documents this program may prove useful, but it is not robust enough to be something relied upon in an office receiving multiple .pdf’s from various sources or those using the more advanced features of .pdf

Follow along on the screenshots after the jump below to see how easy it is to save files to DropBox.

Most files on the iPad, including email attachments, can be opened in GoodReader. Once you have your file in GoodReader, select “Manage Files” on the right side of the app and select the file you want to move. Notice the options to Cut(Move) or Copy? Select the one you want.

Once you select the file you want to move, a green dot will appear next to the file name, and scissors will appear below the file name if you chose “Cut” instead of “Copy”:

Next you want to select “Connect to Servers” on the right side of the GoodReader app. Here you can connect GoodReader to your DropBox account.

Select DropBox, and the list of folders and files you have in your DropBox account will appear in a new window with an option to “Paste” at the bottom right of the new window:

Select “Paste” and the file you selected in GoodReader will be pasted in your DropBox account and available on the DropBox website and any device you have DropBox installed on.

The file then appears in your DropBox account:

And in the DropBox App:

Super easy, and extremely beneficial! You can even email a Pages document to yourself from the Pages app then save if straight to DropBox. I’ve used it several times to save documents I’ve edited in a shard DropBox folder.

iAnnotate is both an elegant PDF reader and a powerful annotation tool that finally lets you work with your PDFs. You can open documents from email, sign and send out contracts fast, enter notes for edits, sketch diagrams, copy text, and add highlights or underline with the drag of a finger!

Aji has a great overview with some “how to” material available on Youtube HERE.

I’ve been using iAnnotate for about a week now, and it has improved my iPad workflow. There really is no other app like it anywhere in the app store. While I’m not going to do an intensive review, I am going to show you how I’ve been using iAnnotate in the real world, especially when I really needed it in an important case recently.

Since iTunes now supports two way file transfers, that’s the method I’ve been using to place most of my PDF files in the iAnnotate app. You can also import them from your DropBox, GoodReader, mail, etc…. accounts by the simple “open in” feature. I have not tried Aji’s PDF reader service, so I cannot comment on its functionality, but below is a sample from my DropBox account.

Once opened in iAnnotate, you are ready to edit and mark up your PDF. You can open multiple PDF files and sort through them in convenient tabs that show up across the top of the app itself.  Note the tabs at the top of the app in the screen shots below.  Imported documents show up in your iAnnotate library.

Notice I was reading the “How to become a paperless master” PDF.  Excellent reading if you are interested, written by Ernest Svenson, aka “Ernie the Attorney”.  Check Ernie out HERE and HERE.  His “Paperless Master” document is HERE.

There are plenty of  options present to annotate/mark up your PDF.  The day after Aji sent me the app, I used it in Court in a hearing on a Capital Murder case.  The Edwards case is the pictures is the actual document I used.

I opened it in iAnnotate, quickly used the highlighter option along with the bookmark option and created a concise outline of what I wanted to argue and the points I wanted to make, all organized in bookmark form.  When I was finished, I emailed the PDF to myself and uploaded it to the proper case file, notes and markings intact.

The screen shots below are self explanatory for the most part, so I won’t comment much on them.

Tap the note icon in the toolbar to easily add a note.  Notes also transfer to your final PDF should you chose to use it off the device.

Writing and underlining is easy, and colors are easily changed in the options menu.  See below.

Bookmarks are added by selecting the bookmark icon from one of the toolbars you create.  Bookmarks are then organized in to an easily accessible list.

Sharing your work is easy, you can email it, upload it through iTunes, or even “open in” you PDF viewer of choice on the iPad.  I could not get the annotations I made to show up when opening the PDF in GoodReader, though.

The toolbars are highly customizable, and have a lot of different options, such as location, opacity, etc….

Midway through writing this review, the good folks at Aji updated iAnnotate, and now there is an email icon on the top bar, instead of buried in the menu.  Excellent update, shown in the shot below.

iAnnotate has some really useful features built in, for example, when you email a PDF file, you can choose to send a summary of your annotations with it.  I found this very useful, you get a summary of your main points in the PDF, as well as the ability to copy and paste the text in a different document.

As you can see below, the annotated PDF appears perfectly when opened on your computer.  I could not get the bookmarks I made in iAnnotate to show up in the bookmarks feature of Acrobat, however.

Final Thoughts:

iAnnotate is a must have app if you work with PDF files.  There is no other app that comes close to it in terms of PDF productivity.  I’ve been using it everyday.  The user interface is very easy to use, the menus are intuitive and highly customizable, and it seems very stable.  One feature I would like to see added is a redaction tool for easily removing information from PDF files, but other than that I have no gripes.  If you are looking for a solid way to edit PDF files on your iPad, give it a try.

If you store sensitive material of any kind related to your business, when you replace or upgrade most any type of digital storage device, you may be accidentally opening up your client’s files.

Consider this CBS Investigation into old copy machines.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Your computer hard drive is no different. Thankfully, the American Bar Association posted an article HERE instructing attorneys on proper data deletion to protect clients.

Augusta Digital

Our Circuit Court allows remote access to Court files for attorneys to the cases they are attorney of record on. Our office case management system is basically a website we host on our intranet, allowing any device with a browser to access and open case files.

The iPad works great for those functions, allowing me to open any active or closed case in the last 10 years, view the documents in those case files, and even play the audio and look at any photos contained in them. All of the screenshots below are directly from the iPad’s interface.  Click any picture to open it in the native iPad resolution.

Landscape Screen:

Portrait Screen:

This is the main login to our case and file management system, elegal Casepro. From here, attorneys and staff can log in and view any document we have in a particular case file.

After login with the iPad keyboard, you can then search for cases based on a number of different criteria.

A search reveals the cases within the range/search terms you are looking for, then you can select the case you are looking for.

After selecting the specific case, you can view every document in the individual file. Most are pdf files, .doc files, or audio/video recordings.

Clicking on a link to a document allows the user to open each document in the file as new window, each accessible by clicking the individual link in the Safaril browser.

You can pinch and zoom in on any document to examine it closer.

Audio recordings contained in the files play perfectly within the Safari browser.

With GoodReader I’m able to browse both DropBox and any Network Attached Storage device in our office.

The Circuit Court records are easily accessible with Safari browser also.

Presentations are easy to create on the go with Keynote.

Virginia Code through the Safari browser.

Lexis legal research.

Easy dictation with Dragon Dictate.

Please feel free to stop by the office if you have questions or want to see a demonstration. I’ve been able to get approximately 11 hours of battery life with the iPad, so a full day of Court is no problem.

For accessing and viewing Court and Office files, I’ve yet to use anything that does it cheaper and more efficiently that the iPad. I can carry around years worth of work to Court, conduct legal research, and even sign documents right on the device. It easily outperforms any tablet pc we’ve used in the past, especially in the battery life category. It is definitely going to change the way attorneys do business.