Recently, MacLitigator had the opportunity to review a new online service called TrialManager. Nextpoint, the maker of TrialManager, claims that TrialManager is:

the fastest and easiest way to manage your evidence. A completely new way to use technology in the practice of law, TrialManager brings the simplicity and power of search engine functionality to your case. Remarkably easy to use, all you need is internet access and a browser to get started.

The Good. 

TrialManager offers a good deal of features, including instant OCR of all documents uploaded to the site. TrialManager really can be a one-stop litigation shop, one where anyone who can do a Google search can instantly be up to speed and searching through an entire case file. TrialManager is cheap, very cheap. Anything less than 500 pages is free… pretty amazing. Even from there on up, the cost remains reasonable, with plans ranging from $29/month for up to 2,500 pages all the way up to $299/month for 100,000+ pages.

Once you get the documents into TrialManager, there are some very useful tagging, labeling, issue coding and search abilities. One very unique feature is a trial presentation mode which allows on-the-fly callouts and context sensitive mouse highlighting.  For instance, if you call out a particular portion of a document, it blows it up and magnifies it. The mouse then changes to a highlighting tool to automatically highlight particular passages of the callout.  

The Bad.

Calendaring and Contacts: TrialManager offers an online calendar. However, the calendar does not provide, nor does the main program itself, any kind of RSS feed. Further, there is no standardized (such as iCal) output for the calendar. Additionally, there is no integration with Address Book or other ‘localized’ content. 

Document Management: Uploading of documents must be done ‘by kind.’ I.E. you can batch upload PDFs, TIFFs, or ASCII files, but each document type must be uploaded separately. Documents once uploaded, can only be tagged/labeled on a per document basis, not a per page basis. Of course, labeling a 500 page document does nothing to advance case analysis. Despite the extensive labeling/tagging, there is no ability to timeline any events.  

Depositions, at present, may only be in text format. There is no ability to handle video depositions.

The product is not any type of ‘e-discovery’ manager or tool. 

The Ugly ASP.

ASP stands for “Application Service Provider.”  Typically, it means the convenience of a system which is entirely in the cloud. No messy software to download and maintain, no upgrade headaches, no hardware. In essence, your local computer/laptop becomes a ‘dumb’ terminal and gateway to the online application. Recently, The Mac Lawyer profiled one such ASP Rocket Matters with a favorable review.  In contrast to the esteemed Mac man himself, Ben Stevens, let me sum up any ASP that has no offline storage/synchronization: it sucks, it’s poison, it’s a disaster waiting to happen, especially if your data is stored in some incomprehensible format which is not readily downloadable and transferable to another platform.

Here is a brief excerpt from a C|Net article detailing the implosion of Red Gorilla, a time & inventory ASP. In 2000:

Red Gorilla had abruptly ditched the application service provider (ASP) jungle in October, leaving its clients hanging. “Our billing cycle was coming to a close…I sent an email to (Red Gorilla) user support, and it bounced back,” said former Red Gorilla customer Pam LaFollette of Kinetic. “That’s when everyone got real pale.”

As attorneys, make that pale times two. First, the business end and chaos created by your litigation management software becoming ‘defunct.’ Second, explaining to the local bar how it is you let an entire case slip away because a third-party internet vendor disappeared.  

TrialManager relies on Amazon’s S3 storage, and is built on Ruby on Rails so security and ‘uptime’ should not be an issue with letting your data live in the cloud.  However, with TrialManager, there is no, none, nada offline availability other than to check off boxes and download single documents. Worse, there is no synchronization of changes made to downloaded documents while offline. So, while Amazon’s S3 service isn’t likely to go anwhere and, Ruby on Rails is a solid and speedy programming platform, there is no guarantee that TrialManager will be around tomorrow to give you the access you need.  When asked how Nextpoint can guarantee that TrialManager will always be available, CEO Rakesh Madhava said “We’re not going anywhere.” Call me a cynical lawyer, or call me to quick to rely on past horror stories such as Red Gorilla, but neither TrialManager nor RocketMatters cost and maintenance savings will help me sleep better when neither offers any sound offline access.

During the demo, the CEO of TrialManager attempted to demonstrate the ‘export’ feature of TrialManager… it failed. I did receive a follow-up email from TrialManager’s tech team which stated that the data and corresponding documents could be offloaded in formats (oll, dat, and xml) which Concordance, Summation or another piece of software can allegedly then use as a load file. My experience with transporting entire databases has been, at best, mediocre and at worst, many days of lost time and effort only to give up and recode everything from the start.  

If you can’t get online, you can’t use the system. So, if in a courtroom and you don’t have online access (or worse, you lose your connection during trial), you are stuck. No matter how slick the callout and highlight features are, and no matter how quickly you can call up a particular document, these features become useless unless you are online. As a litigator, I simply would never put a trial’s outcome or my practice’s continuing viability, at stake based on the often fickle internet connection.