Lawyers have never been accused of being technological frontiersmen, but that should come as no surprise in an industry grounded upon the concept of stare decisis; that is, we do what was done by those before us. Case in point: I can think of no other industry in which Corel WordPerfect still predominates as the word processing application of choice. Not necessarily because it is the best application, but instead because it is what we as a profession have always used.
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Indeed, when we do venture out onto the technological edge, we tend to underutilize our tools. Consider how many attorneys in your office use their PCs for little more that an occasional e-mail or, for that matter, never use their PCs at all. As somewhat of a technophile, I was inspired that approximately one half of the attorneys at my own upstate New York law firm, Maynard, O'Connor, Smith & Catalinotto, were Palm users. However, I soon discovered that each and every one of them used their Palms as glorified address books and calendars. In fact, many of the attorneys still kept paper calendars and were reluctant to completely migrate to their Palm's for calendar management. With all of the great technology out there for Palm toting lawyers, how does one convince others to take the leap and begin to use their PDAs to their fullest? The answer, I have learned, is surprisingly simple: give them the tools and show them how to use them.
In a recent case study, the Palm toting lawyers at Maynard, O'Connor were equipped with Think Outside Stowaway keyboards, Blue Nomad's WordSmith word processing software, and Bachmann Software's Printboy Deluxe application for infrared printing. To round out the arsenal of mobile office technology, each printer in the office was retrofitted with infrared capability by way of a Bachmann InfraReady print adapter. With a little bit of training, and a whole lot of coaxing, our case study participants were off and running. Their mission: challenge themselves to use their Palms in ways they would not otherwise have considered. The results were impressive, as each participant, without exception, breathed new life into their glorified address book, which soon became an integral part of their mobile practice of law and key to a newfound efficiency, both while in and away from the office.
First a quick look at the tools. Detailed reviews of these products are available on pdaJD.com, as well as elsewhere on the web. Accordingly, this article will hit the high points of the products and their usefulness to lawyers.
As lawyers, our words and our time are what we sell. Therefore, maximizing our efficiency in the preparation of our written wares is critical to the success of a law practice. Any mobile word processor must, at a minimum, support full synchronization of character, line and paragraph formatting, footnotes, endnotes, and multiple typefaces in order to avoid lost time reformatting documents created on the PDA once synchronized over to the desktop. Synchronization to WordPerfect as well as Microsoft Word is also essential. Given the increasing size of applications and need for the availability of reference materials, form documents and client information while away from the office, memory card support is becoming increasingly important. Rounding out the wish list for the perfect PDA word processor is integrated spell checking and thesaurus functionality. Blue Nomad's WordSmith 2.1 does all this, and then some. Indeed, Wordsmith contains such other features as a multi-paste clipboard manager, bookmarking, autosaving back-ups, and the ability to search documents for particular paragraphs of interest by previewing the first line of each paragraph. There can remain little doubt that WordSmith is the Palm OS word processing application of choice and the application against which all others are measured.
Quick and accurate text input and portability are critical to a road warrior. It is difficult to imagine a portable keyboard more suited to the task than Think Outside's Stowaway Keyboard, which is available for Palm branded PDAs as Palm's Portable Keyboard and available as the Targus Stowaway for use with Sony Clie, Handspring, and various Pocket PC model PDAs. When folded for storage and transport, the keyboard is only slightly larger than the PDA itself. Once opened for use, the keyboard is a fully tactile, full-sized keyboard, virtually identical in feel to the keyboard sitting on your desktop at home or in the office. The result is portability with unrivaled comfort and accuracy, with no need to relearn key feel and positions, resulting in instant efficiency.
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The final piece to the road warrior tool kit is the ability to create great looking output of the written word. Bachmann's PrintBoy Deluxe software and ultra-portable InfraReady print adapter are built to the task. PrintBoy Deluxe provides printing capability to most of the more common printers that we encounter in a professional setting from each of the Palm OS native applications, in addition to numerous other third party applications, including, of course, WordSmith. Indeed, PrintBoy output supports full formatting for WordSmith as well as other applications. The InfraReady adapter is a small device - roughly one half the size of a deck of playing cards - that quickly and easily connects to any parallel port printer, providing the printer with an infrared lens enabling IR printing directly from the PDA. As a result, there is no need to wait to get back to the office to synchronize documents to your PC and the print them in order to get great looking hard-copy output of your work product. The device fits easily into a brief case and takes less than five seconds to install. Or, you can, as we did, keep it plugged into your office printer for ready to go PDA printing. Enough about the products, so I recommend that you visit the websites of these vendors for more information on their products.
Prior to introducing these high-tech tools to the Maynard attorneys, a quick poll revealed that they were primarily using only the PDA's native applications: Address Book, Datebook, To Do List and Memopad. In fact, 88% of the attorneys interviewed stated that their primary use for their Palm was for calendaring appointments and deadlines. Slightly more than half used the address book as the second most important app. Significantly, with regard to their perceptions of their Palms as word processing tools, a majority of the attorneys, 63%, considered the memopad application as the third most important function. Informal discussion revealed that most of the attorneys either (i) never even considered using their Palms for word processing or (ii) found that the native memopad application fell so far short of their needs that it was completely ineffective. Specifically, the absence of formatting features and the 4k-size limit to each memo prevented the effective use of the native memopad application for word processing.
"WordSmith was developed by a small team of ex-professionals, including an attorney and a doctor. As such, special attention was given to features that would make the lives of busy professionals easier," said Tamara Hinds, VP of Business Development and a self-described 'recovering attorney.' "We are especially pleased to be the only word processor for the Palm that has been called better than Microsoft's PocketWord." Equipped with the unparalleled word processing feature set of WordSmith, Palm word processing has taken an important step forward to push previously technology-challenged attorneys out onto the ledge and provided them with the encouragement to take the leap.
The second most commonly cited barrier for the effective integration of PDAs into the practice of law was the absence of a portable and reliable method for intensive text entry. Many have argued that the success of the Palm OS is, in part, due to the ease and accuracy of Palm's Graffiti handwriting recognition for entering basic PIM information on the fly - thereby allowing a much smaller form factor that its predecessor: "clam-shell" styled PDAs with built-in, unusable keyboard. However, Graffiti is not properly suited for creating and editing larger texts, such as letters, pleadings, discovery documents, and motion papers. Enter the Stowaway Keyboard, the critical piece of hardware that transformed the PDA from a relatively expensive address book and calendar, to a fairly inexpensive, efficient, and effective laptop replacement well suited to most of the tasks we as lawyers do everyday. "Many of us have chosen to bypass the laptop route altogether, opting for the immediate boot-up process of the Palm. I can pull out my Palm and keyboard and begin creating documents in a matter of seconds," noted Thomas G. Daley, a partner at Maynard, "then, I can either print it or sync it into my desktop PC. With my Palm, Stowaway, WordSmith, and PrintBoy, I meet the basic requirements I would have of a laptop, while saving space, weight, and a lot of money."
"With the full-size, touch-typable Stowaway keyboard in conjunction with the increasingly sophisticated software available for handhelds, legal professionals can turn a PDA into a complete mobile communications device," says Rachel Wild, Director of Marketing for Think Outside, the manufacturers of the Stowaway. "They can do real work - receiving and sending e-mail messages, taking notes during conferences and depositions, tracking billable hours as they happen, and calling up and revising important documents - no matter where they are" adds Wild. "By unchaining attorneys from both their paper-based files and their desktop computers, the PDA-and-Stowaway-keyboard combination has the potential to revolutionize how lawyers operate."
The final piece to the puzzle is the ability to print. As more and more printers today begin to incorporate infrared technology, PDAs will increasingly become more commonplace in law offices. The importance of ability to quickly transform electronic notes and data into hard copy cannot be overstated. "The legal profession is among the most dependent on physical documents. Just look around at the stacks of folders in the typical legal office," said Dan Reuvers, Vice President of Business Development at Bachmann Software. "PrintBoy software recognizes attorney's dependence on hard copies and introduces them to a method of accessing them no matter where they are." Fully aware that lawyers are loath to commit significant portions of operating budgets to replacing otherwise operational office equipment, Bachmann Software's InfraReady adapter allows a quick and cost effective way to retrofit existing printers with infrared capabilities.
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As for the Maynard attorneys, implementing these technologies proved to be far more successful than expected. Although getting a room full of lawyers to agree upon anything may be an impossible endeavor, all of the attorneys involved in this study agreed unanimously on a few very significant points. First, there was no dispute that WordSmith, the Stowaway Keyboard, and Printboy were intuitive to set up and to use. Most importantly, however, there was unanimous agreement that the addition of word processing functionality to their PDAs exponentially increased the value and usefulness of their Palms in their work, as the attorneys found themselves using their Palms in all kinds of new ways.
Within the first three months of use, most of the attorneys recounted stories of drafting motions, client letters, discovery demands and other such documents while waiting in the hallways of local court houses, clients' offices and conference rooms of other attorneys' offices. There was a clear consensus that these relatively inexpensive and extremely portable tools had enabled them to capture billable time that would otherwise have been lost.
The Stowaway Keyboard helped increase the speed of text entry while decreasing transcription errors and the amount of time to turn around work-product. "After taking notes at a recent physician's deposition, I gave the handwritten notes to my secretary to be typed. The sequence of getting the information to her, typed and returned for my review spanned several days," said Tracey Farstad of the Maynard firm. "At a recent deposition, I decided to record all of my notes using my Palm, WordSmith and the Stowaway Keyboard. It resulted in my having my typed notes available to share with the Firm's client, as well as for my own review, immediately. Saving days by circumventing an obsolete method of processing information can make a big difference in our business."
Further, because WordSmith does not suffer from the same 4k limit of the native memopad application, WordSmith makes for a great way to carry reference materials such as the Federal Rules of Evidence, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, sample deposition question outlines, and template discovery demands and responses.
While an obvious use may be the ability to take work away from the office with you to finish up at home or on the road, less obvious benefits were also discovered. Aaron Baldwin, a Maynard litigator, noted "the stability of the Palm operating system was invaluable when the office network was off-line and Court deadlines were unforgiving. The work got done even while the rest of the office was off-line."
While it is impossible to summarize all of our findings in this article, what was clear was that a small investment in some very well designed and implemented peripheral products and software paid dividends many times over in increased efficiency and maximizing the usefulness of our Palm investments. With a simple keyboard, a powerful and functional word processing application and the ability to produce great looking printed output, a high-tech calendar is transformed into a powerful companion for the office, the home and while on the road.
Scott R. Almas, Esq. is a litigation attorney at Maynard, O'Connor, Smith & Catalinotto, LLP and the Director of the Capital District Palm User Group in Albany, New York.
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