MacLitigator owner Peter Summerill is a lawyer at Dewsnup, King & Olsen. Pete has leveraged technology in trial and throughout litigation. Pete’s extensive litigation and trial experience using technology includes working as a Utah wrongful death lawyer, Utah personal injury lawyer and Utah medical malpractice attorney. You can view some of the Utah lawsuits for wrongful death, personal injury and medical malpractice and appellate cases here. Pete began MacLitigator as a creative outlet for the switch from the firm’s use of Windows to Macintosh and to cover his use of Apple tech in the context of his Plaintiff’s personal injury litigation and trial practice. As not only a firm partner and full-time lawyer, Pete worked as the firm’s ‘tech guy’ and switching to Macs has saved a large number of hours and money spent on technology in a small law firm litigation practice.
If you want to contact me, you can ping me through twitter @petesummerill.
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Pete,
I’ve worked a bit with iAnnotate and love it……but can’t seem to figure out the feature you describe of showing one ‘tab’ while viewing ‘another tab’…….can you share the ‘trick’?
Many thanks,
kim
Pete,
Two questions, I read your post recommending DevonThink Pro. Are you still using it and recommending it?
Second, what software do you use for overall case management for tracking contacts related to a case, deadlines, workflow, todos related to a case, the status of discovery and investigation of issues? (I’m thinking of softwars along the lines of Amicus, Rocket Matters, Clio, etc)
Thanks,
Stan
Stan:
(1) Yes, still using DEVONthink Pro. Yes, still recommended for tagging and analyzing large cases.
(2) I use a weird combination of BusyCal, OmniFocus and Bento. BusyCal handles day to day calendaring of appointments. OmniFocus handles task management with separate projects for each client-matter. Bento also gets a separate entry for each client-matter and is used to track non-essential, long view statistics/info.
I have demoed both Rocket Matters and Clio and, back in the Windows days, used Amicus extensively. Since our firm works on contingency, we rarely track billable hours and don’t need those features. If our firm grew in size, Clio or Rocket Matters might be useful. But to date we get by just fine without the added expense.
I am a criminal lawyer in Toronto. I follow your MacLitigator site as I am all Mac in my practice. Quick question. I am starting a murder trial in a few weeks. The disclosure is on 150 CDs with thousands of pages of PDF documents. I am currently using Circus Ponies as my trial book. But I want to analyze the documents – what is the best replacement for Casemap – MacJournal or DevonThink Pro. I read your earlier reviews on both – once you said MacJournal is replacing Jourlner, then a later article said DevonThink Pro is the ultimate replacement for Casemap. What is your recommendation. Thanks for your help.
Sorry for the belated reply. DevonTHINK Pro is definitely the way to go for large document collections. Leave the docs in whatever file/folder structure you normally have on your computer and use the ‘index’ feature of Devon to index all those documents in place. The ability to tag, replicate to other folders and copy links to individual/discrete pages in a multipage PDF are key to analyzing any large document collection which contains multi page PDF files.
I’m a litigation attorney in Wisconsin and a recent (6 mo) Mac convert. Safari recently updated to v 5.1.2. and now I can’t get documents on Pacer to open as pdfs – they’re embedded in the web page. PDfs from other sites seen to open just fine. Any thoughts?
Hello Pete
I just switched to mac from windows. I used to use Paperport and have been working with Devonthink Pro. It is great for document management but there are a few features I miss from Paperport. For example, I used PaperPort to fill in forms — a replacement for the typewriter. Does DevonThink have such capacity? The annotation features appear to just print notes etc. on screen but not to actually fill in a form, such as an EEOC charge form. Or is there something cool in mac (I have snowleopard)? Thanks!
Best bet for filling in forms is Acrobat Pro, Acrobat Reader or PDFPen, not necessarily in that order.
I am a recent mac user and also am using Devonthink Pro. I am confused about where to house documents and the index versus import. I use drop box and believe I am duplicating my documents in several places when I scan them in with my scansnap . I am also unclear where my “inbox” is actually housed. Can you provide some suggestions the best way to bring documents into and store them for most efficiency? Thanks!
I’ve been following your blog and am currently a L2. I got a MAC for Christmas and downloaded PDF Stacks to help me manage my documents. It seamlessly enables me to search my vast library of PDF files that I have in a heartbeat. I thought I’d share it with some of you big guys! It also organizes, manages, shares and prints documents on the fly. Looking forward to your future posts.
I’m leaving a big Seattle firm and buying a small town practice. He used exclusively PCs, and “tried” to convert to Macs last year. He said it took almost a minute to open a single file from his library because the conversion from the old Word version into Macs Word took so long. He gave up. Do you have any ideas on how to make those docs accessible to a Mac? I’d rather die than go PC again….
Hello Pete,
Really enjoy the blog! Ntrepid Corp is new to the legal tech space and will be attending the ABA Tech Show to showcase our new trial presentation software, Timestream:
http://ntrepidcorp.com/timestream.php
Will you also be attending? If so, we would love for you to stop by Booth 910 to get a sneak peek at Timestream and provide us with your thoughts. I would also be happy to supply you with a beta / trial version to preview, in the event that you are interested in sharing your thoughts with your visitors.
Let me know and I’ll send you a copy, thanks!
Any recommendations on a Mac document assembly app? I’m looking for something that isn’t clould based but rather a standalone app. The only ones I see are Hotdocs, RocketMatter and Smoothdocs. Any others?