Office-in-a-Briefcase — Tech for Military Lawyers

[Note: sorta in construction]

Many are familiar with my office-in-a-briefcase: the color printer, color scanner, computer, and some peripherals that do — yes — do fit in a briefcase for traveling. Listed on this page are some items that I use or have come across that are useful in a mobile practice. Many of the items are free (it’s about overhead remember). Unfortunately lawyers using a military internet connection or computer may not be able to use all of these items because of restrictions.

Free items:

Are you like me, do you read a lot of blogs or websites everyday for information. Here is a neat plug-in for Firefox that allows you to open all of the sites with a single click. You can let the sites load while you go and get your coffee or tea. A time saver which you should consider installing — the Morning Coffee plug-in.

PureText to copy parts of text for cut-and-pasting of small parts of a .pdf document. PureText is free. You highlight what text you want to copy and paste, click PT, and it removes all of the formatting and meta-clutter so it is easier to paste and edit into a document.

Here is a free way to convert the whole .pdf document to a Word or .rtf file which can then be manipulated. (I stopped using Adobe a long time ago, it’s very expensive even for updates, Nitro is a cost-effective alternate to Adobe so you may also want to look into Nitro.)

PDF to Word – it’s free (currently)

Every so often do you get a file and you can’t open it? Check its file extension. The file extension comes at the end of the name of the file and is [dot].bz, and is a key to the name of the software program that created the file.

.bz

If you go to OpenWith.org you will find a host of free programs that may point you to a “reader” program that allows you to open the particular file you are having trouble with.

Pay by the month or to purchase:

I currently use eFax Plus, they use SSL technology which means there is more safety in the transmission of documents via an email based fax. But I am thinking of changing. When I first started with eFax they were among the newest and the best. Now that may not be the case. FaxCompare has an interesting review of internet fax solutions (look at this and you’ll see why I really am thinking of changing).

CiteGenie (90 day trial, and then a small fee compared to value in time). This is a plug-in to Firefox, with Explorer on the way. This would be an opportune moment to shift to Firefox as your web-browser. I’m one of those who believe that any browser than Explorer is better. (Note: for those of us in Virginia who get FastCase free through the bar, CiteGenie is not yet compatible). The developer has this to say:

Cutting and pasting when doing legal research using your browser is simple. But having to construct the citation for what you pasted is not so simple. This is especially true with legal citations from sources like Westlaw. You have to stop and copy the case name separately, determine the pinpoint page numbers, and adjust the date and court name format.

So I decided to write a browser plugin that would automatically add a pinpoint citation to the text I copy and paste. Thus CiteGenie™ was born.

Gwabbit.

gwabbit is an Add-in for Microsoft Outlook and the BlackBerry that finds, gwabs and adds contacts from your emails to your Outlook address book with a single mouse click! This week my technology item is PhoneTag. PhoneTag is a fee based system to receive voicemails as a written email. While on a business trip to Los Angeles in 2003, James Siminoff was out to dinner with friends. Before they could sit down, William had to sort through a 20 minute backlog of voicemails gathered during a day filled with meetings. Jesse commented to James, “Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just read your voicemail?” At the time, James was working with voice recognition technologies and had a creative idea on how to build a system that would enable people to stop listening to voicemail and READ IT. …and with that, PhoneTag was born. A person calls and leaves a voicemail. That voicemail is transcribed and then sent, along with a .wav file, to your email. The fee ranges from about $0.35 for each voicemail up to $30.00 for a flat rate with unlimited voicemails per month. The lower rates have a flat fee and then a cost for each individual voicemail over the flat rate mails.