NOTE: Years ago, after I gave an all-day, everything-you-need-to-know-about-computers presentation, someone said after seeing my course materials, "You ought to publish this stuff!" I began to put together "The Law Office Computer Survival Guide," which I intended to sell and keep up to date as a loose-leaf reference service. It never was published, as I set it aside to get "Corporate Update" out the door. This is the beginning of my efforts to do a "brain dump" of information and opinions, and to keep them up to date. The good news is that you won't have to file the pocket parts, and I won't have to ship it to you. The bad news is that I haven't figured out how to charge for it. Stay tuned, and feel free to ask questions, answer questions, or make suggestions. -- Jim Eidelman

Litigation Support Notes:

Concordance: The best general-purpose imaging and text-searching software is probably Dataflight's Concordance, which can be purchased from and supported by a number of consultants, including our associated Boston group, Legal Computer Solutions (Neil Aresty, et al.), which has a special page for Concordance. They have been promising software for transcript management that will handle page and line numbers, question and answer pairs, etc, for over a year, and they continue to say that it will be available "Real Soon Now." Pricing:
Summation: Summation is the leading general-purpose, do-everything litigation support package for PCs. It runs on DOS and Windows, and shares data between the two versions. The integration of the database and transcript searching has always been Summation's strong suit, and it's transcript searching has always been my favorite. You can have a hundred or more depositions on a directory, and the searches will search across them all, with reports of page and line numbers that contain the hits, question and answer pairs, and other features that distinguish it from general-purpose packages. The imaging is on the weak side, however, and the system is notorious for becoming unstable with large document database populations (over 50,000 to 100,000 documents.)

Current version is 4.3. Brand new product now in beta allows partial one-way replication. That is, you can't synchronize two databases, but you can break off part of one to take to a deposition on your laptop. Was notoriously buggy and unstable in the Windows version a year ago, and still has a reputation for that among many who gave up on it. However, many who are working with it now report that the early stability problems in the Windows version have been overcome. Version 5.0, expected to be released this summer, is supposed to support full replication.

Jim Keane is one Summation expert we work with often, and he is doing some advanced work with sharing Summation data and images over ISDN.

Pricing:

$700

(Concurrent Users)

Infogrator from Docuwork. There are sites in US and England, which is the host of the DocuWork information. I have always hated the name, but admire the concepts behind this "second generation" package more than any other. Developed in England by a research group lead by Vijay Mital, working with Advocate Systems' Ralph Marx in San Fransisco, it is the first system designed for use by lawyers who are reviewing documents on screen and navigating through the information in a free-association, hypertext way. Much of the integration is superior to Summation, although the transcript searching doesn't have the question-and-answer pairing or page and line number reporting.  
Do it Yourself John Tredennick, trial lawyer at Denver's Holland and Hart, has been using a variety of generic programs for litigation support. Their strong IS staff can support Visual Basic, Microsoft Access and other applications, and they have built some nice applications with these tools. Some of the latest techniques involve using:
  • Microsoft Access. Very nice, customizable interface. A little slow and no expoded sorts, but otherwise meets needs for the database in typical cases.
  • Imaging with Adobe Acrobat. The traditional way imaging works is that the image is stored in a TIFF file, which like a fax, is just a graphic picture of what the page looks like. You can't edit it, search the text, or copy the text. The image is then OCRed using Omnipage, TextBridge, or a similar program, then imported into a searchable text database. The text must then be linked somehow to the image, so that if you do a search and find the document, you can then display the image. Acrobat magically combines the two. You can scan a paper document so that you can see the image, but it can also OCR the document and convert the text image to true text. That's what John is doing with many of his documents. (There is also an Adobe Acrobat ActiveX Control that will allow for embedding PDF views in web browsers and other programs.)
  • Imaging with the free Microsoft/Wang image viewer (available from Microsoft or Wang). The Wang imaging viewer is distributed free , along with programming hooks (an API) to tie the images to your own database applications.
  • Still no do-it-yourself solution for transcripts.
 
     

 

(c) Jim Eidelman 1997

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