Litigation Support

?Using Macs in Trial II? - Day Two - Circus Ponies NoteBook

By Brett Burney

The second day of the “Using Macs in Trial II” seminar started off with Jayson Adams from Circus Ponies Software giving a full demo of their highly functional NoteBook application. They are one of the few Mac software developers that actually have a “legal” section on their Website.

Jayson first showed some of the universally appealing features of NoteBook like their full-fledged indexing engine and the ability to re-organize your outline bullet points by dragging-and-dropping.

There was an extended discussion in the room when Jayson talked about exporting and sharing content from a NoteBook file. Probably the easiest way to export a NoteBook file to send to someone is to create a PDF file. But Jayson discussed NoteBook’s built-in ability to “Export to HTML” and “Export HTML to the Web.” These exports are beautiful and even keep the NoteBook “feel” complete with spiral binding and page corners that can be clicked to flip the page. While Jayson commented that you could store your exported HTML NoteBook on a .Mac account, Ben Stevens mentioned that he regularly burns his HTML NoteBooks to CDs to give to clients.

Jayson discussed using Stickers, Links, and the Contents Card. He also gave a short demo on the new features coming in NoteBook 3.0.

Kern Lewis took over from Jayson to talk about how he and his firm use NoteBook in their trial practice. Kern stated that they keep all the correspondence, documents, and filings on their internal server until they’re ready to go to trial. They then create a NoteBook file into which they embed all the briefs, deposition transcripts, etc. so that everything is available at the click of a button from one file. When they need to look at a document, they simply double-click on the embedded file to open it up. Renée Mancino added that she usually creates a few tabs in her NoteBook files for chronologies.

Next up is Marketcircle’s Daylite & Billings.

Guest post by Brett Burney.

Full post as published by The Trial Technologist's View on March 01, 2008 (boomark / email).