On the iPad/iPhone

Court Days Pro ($2.99) is a ‘legal specific’ date calculator that allows you to ‘build’ a set of dates. Dates can be added/subtracted as court days or calendar days and long dependent chains can be built from a single trigger event. If the calculated date falls on a weekend or recognized holiday, the calculation can bump the date forward or backward to the next closest court date. Court Days Pro is handy for creating dates which are usually static and triggered by a single event, such as discovery schedules, time to answer, days until the statute of limitations runs etc. Once calculated, the dates can be exported directly to the built in Calendar app or emailed. You could also check out Court Days (.99¢) made by the same folks, iPhone/iTouch only and fewer features. Both Court Days and Court Days Pro allow adding custom state recognized legal holidays. The reviews for this app on iTunes are somewhat negative. It appears from the negative reviews that people are having difficulty with navigation and input because none of the complaints make much sense if you spend a little time understanding how the app works. Recommend ignoring the iTunes reviews and playing around with the app for a little bit before you give up.

Date Ranger (Free). Date Ranger is really simple on the surface. Two boxes, two dates and you’re off and running. Here’s the neat trick: once you have a date calculated, you can ‘swipe’ that date onto the other box. This makes calculating dependent sequential dates a breeze.

HiCalc HD (Free) offers a variety of handy calculators, including a basic date calculator. It presents the dates in dd/mm/yyyy format which can be a bit confusing. HiCalc also displays the day of the week which will keep you, at least, from calendaring something to occur on the weekend but may result in you calendaring on a legal holiday.

Lastly, DateInterval (free) provides a bare bones, knuckle dragging friendly count days forward from a date or the difference between two dates.

On the Mac

Several free options exist for calculating dates on the Mac. First up is Date Calculator, a somewhat dated (2005?!?!) widget available here. The widget allows addition, subtraction and difference calculations for dates. FreeLawTools offers an online calculator that uses either court or calendar dates for the calculation, and will also exclude legal holidays/weekends from the result by shifting the day forward or backward as you desire. Finally, WolframAlpha. If you don’t already know, WolframAlpha “is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data.” So, of course, it can calculate dates.

Wolfram Lawyer’s Assistant (Reference App)

Speaking of WolframAlpha, they have just released for the iPad Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant ($4.99). The app offers up a unique set of reference tools for lawyers including, among other things, a Legal Dictionary, a quick reference for Statutes of Limitations for all 50 states, blood alcohol calculator, IP Address Lookup, historical weather, damages/estate planning/real estate calculators and statistical information.

The date calculator can calculate business (i.e. court) or calendar days between two dates or forward from a specified date. But, if you want to count backwards… sorry, despite the fact that this App is provided by the world’s most famous online calculation machine, WolframAlpha, it can’t count backwards. Counting to a huge number of decimal places Pi? Check. Counting backwards on your iPad. Meh, not so much.

Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant also fails in the Statute of Limitations area. For the Utah Statutes of Limitation periods, it lists a 1 year SOL for “medical malpractice actions based on insertion of a foreign object.” Not. Quite. Right. The Lawyer’s Assistant is also a little rough around the edges in terms of user interface. Finally, the thing throws advertising for other Wolfram apps at you in the bottom corner of the home screen. Considering it is a paid app, advertising (even for your own wares) is a major no-no. Final thoughts: wait for the next revisions or corrections to the current version before purchase unless you really need one of the math calculators.

Looking back at this collection it becomes obvious that the paradigm is shifting toward the iPad/iOS for ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ development. The best date calculator to be found is Court Days Pro, on the iPad. A date calculator widget for Mac OSX hasn’t been updated in six years and Wolfram just cranked out an iPad specific app, but provides nothing on desktop for legal reference. Interesting.

Update: 

Fresh from the mind of David Sparks (MacSparky), Siri can also calculate dates (and probably add them to your Calendar too).

Try this.

Siri …

“What is 30 days plus December 7″

“How many days are between November 1, 2011 and December 7, 2011″

Thanks David… just when I had finally resolved to wait for the iPhone 5.

In the past, Apple users could simultaneously sync to MobileMe and to Google services. Products such as SpanningSync and BusyCal/BusySync as well as built in Google sync made it easy to play in both worlds.

Now, Apple has drawn a line in the sand by requiring the MobileMe user to designate their MobileMe account as the de facto dictator over calendar data. There are some work arounds, such as BusyCal’s setup. But that work around is difficult, error prone and not nearly as low friction as a plain vanilla Google to Google sync.

So, for those who used both MobileMe and Google services, and allowed others to edit calendar data via Gcal, a choice must be made: (1) move over entirely to Google services; (2) risk a difficult high friction and error prone work around; or, (3) force other users to adopt MobileMe at $99/year.

Given the sketchy work around, and potential loss of data through sharing, all of this is by way of an unfortunately long lead in for a product called SpanningBackup. From the developers of SpanningSync, SpanningBackup allows you to share your calendar and/or delegate email to staff or colleagues without worrying that they will delete or somehow otherwise bork your entire calendar/gmail/contact setup.

SpanningBackup does just what you might think: it backs up ALL of your Google data. All emails? Check. All contact data? Check. All calendars? Check. All Google documents? Check.

There are two drawbacks to SpanningBackup at this time. First, data is backed up only once per 24 hour period. Second, with the exception of Google Documents, discrete pieces of data cannot be restored. For example, SpanningBackup will restore a calendar to its earlier state for a previously backed up day. If a shared user somehow deleted your calendar data on Friday, you could then roll the calendar back to the previous state in place on Thursday. In this sense, SpanningBackup is more of a wholesale ‘revert’ than a back up and restore plan. SpanningBackup is cloud based and costs $39.95/year, a cheap price for peace of mind. If you are using Google Apps or just Google to share data, SpanningBackup is well worth a look.

While prepping for a jury trial recently, it became apparent that we needed a better way to track responses, information, decisions to strike, strikes for cause, peremptories etc. during jury selction, a.k.a. voir dire. Bento seemed a perfect fit for this task.

The template is designed to work on an iPad and, accordingly, incorporates as many checkboxes and choice lists as possible so that there is minimal distraction during jury selection.  Jurors are sorted by juror number, and there are smart collections which filter as follows: Challenge for Cause; Plaintiff’s Peremptory (exercised); Defendant’s Peremptory (exercised); Remaining; Selected.  Several of the fields do allow text entry, such as the Notes, but other fields are intended to give you a quick fill such as ‘gut check,’ and ‘tort reformer’ drop down choice lists which allow a quick ranking of the potential juror.

The template works great on the iPad version of Bento with one exception, smart collections based on a ‘choice list’ field do not transfer over.  Accordingly, none of the smart collections in this template use the choice field to preserve functionality on the iPad. Enjoy and, if you come up with suggestions or modifications, please post in the comments.

Bento on the iPad is $4.99, although having the desktop version certainly is worth the cost and syncs with the iPad wirelessly.

Speaking of ‘jury work,’ there is an interesting iPad app out there that allows you to track the reactions of people who get seated as jurors during the course of the trial.  It is called JuryTracker and, if you were so inclined, you could track juror reactions as the trial progresses.  JuryTracker costs $9.99.  Also available as a commercial iPad only app is iJuror, a stand alone app for the iPad that assists in the jury selection process. iJuror is also $9.99.

O.K. I have five Google Wave invites available to give out. 5 and only 5. If you want to give Google Wave a try, post in the comments.

Another widget added to the collection, replacing the previous time zone clock set up, is iSlayer’s Organized.  This hand widget gives you clocks, calendar, todo and a place to jot down your notes.

1. Date Calculat0r by Bright Light Software. You can calculate the days between two dates, add dates to a particular date, or count backwards. Great for scheduling orders and discovery cut-off dates.

2. Easy Envelopes by Ambrosia. Previously covered here, great little envelope application that hooks into Address Book.

3. Clock. Built into OS X but duplicated four times, to cover the time zones. Handy to have when trying to schedule a phone conference with someone in a different time zone. Clocks arranged East to West coast and local time popped to the side a bit for highlighting purposes.

4. Quickcal by “Smelly. Puppy.” This widget allows you to enter natural language events and todos on your calendar. Awful handy when combined with the Clock set-up above. Simply type “Phone Conference with Super Expert Next Tuesday at 11:00 a.m.” hit return and it adds it onto iCal. (Donations encouraged. Easy Envelopes and Date Calculator are used as lead in freebies to attract you to the company’s other products. Quickcal is a solo project and a little PayPal could go a long way).

Well, that’s it. If you have a favorite widget or widget workflow not shown here, brag about it in the comments!

Not so long ago, the federal court clerk refused an efiling and requested it be refiled… the problem? The pleading had a scanned signature on it which showed up in nice blue ink and the federal efiling system required black and white. A quick attempt to save the document as black and white from Adobe Acrobat Pro failed, as did the attempt to print as black and white back to Acrobat Pro…. grrr. However, opening the document in Mac OS X’s built in Preview provided the solution… Save as gives the ability to save as black and white, even though the $300 Acrobat Pro refused to do so!

A TUAW blogger recently posted about a ‘plug-in’ that provides the ‘missing’ thesaurus function on Leopard. Chuckling smugly with the self-satisfied knowledge that Mac OS X already had built in Thesaurus (and Oxford Dictionary, and Wikipedia), I scrolled down to the comments only to learn something new myself.

If you command-click (or right click) on a highlighted word you get a choice to look up the word in Dictionary (which also has tabs for Thesaurus and Wikipedia). But, what I didn’t know was that if you hover the mouse over any given word and hit control-command-d, you get this beautiful, useful pop up as seen below. What’s more, moving the mouse around will alter the content of the pop-up depending on which word the mouse is currently hovering on. It almost always seems the commenters have better suggestions than the blog itself…. *hint*. Big ups to TUAW commenter Michael Sternberg for besting the TUAW staff, and me too.

If you’re tired of trudging through AbiWord to open those Wordperfect documents, give Open Office 3.0 beta a spin.

Need to summarize some depositions? Need to summarize/build a chronology of a huge medical chart? Often litigators face the daunting challenge of collecting chunks of discrete facts/information from a diverse set of documents, usually Adobe PDF files. If you are using Adobe Acrobat Pro, Journler can help with a little AppleScript. If you have never used AppleScripts before, don’t worry, it’s no big deal. But, to make this system/script combo effective, you really do need to either (1) save the script as an application; or, (2) use a launcher such as Butler or Quicksilver. If you use either Butler or Quicksilver already, then I am assuming you don’t need instruction on how to launch an AppleScript from within Butler/Quicksilver. So, for the remainder, this article assumes you are saving the AppleScript as an application.

The Script

Here’s the nut, the pivot, the basis on which you can quickly extract those golden nuggets from deposition transcripts, medical charts, long winded contracts or other voluminous discovery. The script will send to Journler either: (1) a new entry in Journler with a link back to the resource, document name, file path, a specific page number reference and all tags associated with the smart folder to which you are adding; or, (2) append the currently selected Journler entry with a new resource, document name, file path, a specific page number reference to the currently selected entry in Journler. Update: WordPress has been rendering the em-dashes to dashes and straight quotes to smart quotes… Script Editor and Applescript hate those. So, em-dashes are stripped from code below, but you will still need to use find and replace to change quotes or here is a downloadable text file (adobe2journlerv1) you can open, cut and paste.

tell application “Adobe Acrobat Professional”

activate
if (count of documents) is 0 then
beep
display dialog “No documents found.” buttons {“•”} default button 1 giving up after 3
return

end if
set Document_Name to name of active doc
set File_Path to file alias of active doc
set Page_Number to page number of PDF Window 1

end tell
tell application “System Events”
activate
set New_Or_Selected_Entry to the button returned of (display dialog “Would you like to create a new entry or add to the currently selected entry?” buttons {“New”, “Selected”})

end tell
if New_Or_Selected_Entry = “Selected” then
tell application “Journler”
activate
set Selected_Entry to (selected entries)
if Selected_Entry is {} then
display dialog “No Entry Selected!” with icon 0
else
if (count Selected_Entry) = 1 then
set the_Entry to item 1 of Selected_Entry

else
end if
end if
set Original_Text to rich text of the_Entry
set rich text of the_Entry to Original_Text & return & ” ****” & return & “Document Name: ” & (Document_Name as string) & return & “Page Number: ” & (Page_Number as string) & return
make new resource with properties {owner:the_Entry, type:media, original path:(File_Path as alias), aliased:true}
set the selected entries to {the_Entry}
end tell

else
tell application “Finder”
duplicate file File_Path to “Macintosh HD:Users:username ocuments:Journler:Journler Drop Box” with replacing
end tell
tell application “Journler”
activate
end tell
set the clipboard to ” ****” & return & “Document Name: ” & (Document_Name as string) & return & “Page Number: ” & (Page_Number as string) & return & “File Path: ” & (File_Path as string)
end if

If you’ve never worked with AppleScript, it probably looks like a lot of hooey. Don’t sweat it. All you need to do is copy all of the above, open up Script Editor, and paste the script into the main pane. Next, make the ‘path’ relative to your system. This means substituting your ‘username’ (in “Macintosh HD:Users:username ocuments:Journler:Journler Drop Box” see bold/underline/italics above in script) with your username. If your system is set up as most Mac defaults, you should only need to change the username. Finally, choose “Save As” name it Adobe2Journler choose file format as “Application” and save it to Applications>Utilities.

Reap the Benefits.

Now the fun part… you get to see this wonderous thing Journler, AppleScript & Adobe Acrobat Pro in action. Set up a smart folder in Journler and set conditions for it to require whatever tags, categories, or comments you want to use to sort your information. For example:

Now, with a smart folder set up, hit command/space and bring up spotlight. Type Adobe2Journler (or as much as necessary to pull up the Adobe2Journler application) hit return and it launches the application. A dialog comes up asking if you want to create a ‘new entry’ or use the currently ‘selected entry.’

Choosing ‘new entry’ will bring up a dialog which directs you to choose the smart folder you want to add the entry into. You can also add additional tags or categories at this point. Click complete import and, finally, edit the individual entry in Journler heart’s content

Because this is the first time for entering this resource on this ‘new entry’ you need to hit command-v to get the document path, file name & page number inserted into Journler. If you chose ‘selected entry’ you should already have an entry selected before launching Adobe2Journler and the document path, file name & page number references will be appended to that selected entry.

Sum Up.

Once Journler opens, edit the ‘created date’ to reflect whatever date your document review dictates. You can then add text or notes or copy and paste from an OCR’d Adobe document directly into the Journler entry. One method is to create a ‘new entry’ for each significant date you come across while doing document review, and then simply use ‘selected entry’ for appending information to that date. Of course, more complex cases may require that issues/people have their own separate dated entries.

For deposition summaries, dates are not so important. Get your transcripts in Adobe PDF format, then use Adobe2Journler to send the page reference to Journler for tagging, categorization or commentary. You can also copy and paste from your deposition transcript so that you can see the chunk of text right there in the entry.

Final Word.

This is my first attempt at scripting anything outside of tutorials, so it’s not perfect and the hope is that those with more sophisticate skills will pick it up and run with it. In other words, YMMV… but if you have any skills at scripting, any feedback, input and contribution is much appreciated.

Also, Adobe Acrobat Pro is an unfortunate, but necessary, evil. Apple has discontinued scripting capabilities for Preview.

Finally, a few caveats about using this script. All paths are relative, you need to adjust them and there are no warranties, express, implied or otherwise associated with this script. Also, you can only have one Adobe document open at a time while using Adobe2Journler… If you have more than one document open, you can get a file reference to something other than what you intend.

adobe2journlerv1