The recently released TrialPad for iPad is a good start on what trial presentation for the iPad can be, but doesn’t yet meet expectations associated with its high price.

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do …

At its heart, TrialPad is a PDF viewer and organization tool. There are many PDF tools for the iPad, including iAnnotate. Both TrialPad and iAnnotate allow presentation of a PDF through a projector. Both TrialPad and iAnnotate allow markups to be displayed on the screen. Both TrialPad and iAnnotate allow the user to pinch-to-zoom the onscreen document. Both TrialPad and iAnnotate allow the presentation screen to be turned on and off.

iAnnotate, however, has quite a few more tricks than TrialPad. iAnnotate will search through an entire PDF file or group of files for any word. TrialPad only searches the ‘name’ of a document.

iAnnotate will pull in documents from Dropbox. Trial pad relies on the ‘seven easy steps’ kludge iTunes file transfer feature. The developers note that Dropbox support is ‘in the works.’

iAnnotate allows a ‘tabbed’ interface wherein you can project an exhibit or impeachment testimony while privately viewing your direct/cross examination outline on the iPad. TrialPad eschews tabs limiting the display to a single item. iAnnotate includes a large number of built in ‘stamps,’ such as arrows and callouts, and allows you to pick different highlighter and annotation colors. TrialPad sticks to a red pen and yellow highlighter.

TrialPad costs $89. iAnnotate costs $9.99.

Not A Replacement for Sanction, Trial Director etc.

Responding to these criticisms the developers claim that, rather than iAnnotate, a “fair comparison would be TrialPad against full featured desktop presentation software such as Sanction or TrialDirector.” Not entirely accurate. First, TrialPad has nowhere near the features of dedicated laptop trial presentation software. Second, by that standard, we could also compare iAnnotate against dedicated laptop presentation software. TrialPad would still lose in that comparison.

A Little Bit Buggy

TrialPad is also still very much a 1.0 release. TrialPad can annotate a document on the iPad while the projector remains blanked. During testing, the annotation appeared on the projector despite the screen being blanked. Additionally, PDFs sometimes appeared extremely pixelated on the iPad while rendering crisply on a projector. This made it very difficult to annotate with any degree of precision.

A Few Nice Standout Features

Simply put, by setting the price at a steep $89 the developers ignore the Apps ecosystem and economy. Not even Omni Group charge more than $39 for their highly polished, feature rich iPad app OmniFocus which syncs to the iPad without any iTunes kludge needed. Further, Filemaker’s Bento is only $9.99, Pages, Numbers and Keynote are also only $9.99. In short, TrialPad is a solid start and a potential winner, but in the end offers too little for too much money.

Long on the wish list and one ‘killer app’ missing from the iPad was a decent outliner. Circus Ponies Notebook, an outliner and much, much more,  is now available as an iPad app.

For those unfamiliar with the product, Circus Ponies Notebook is a kind of outliner onsteroids. Specifically, the application operates on a “traditional paper notebook” paradigm while incorporating the benefits of an electronic medium such as a word index of all words contained in the notebook.

Notebook for iPad carries over from the Mac platform beautifully. Notebook itself begged for the existence of a tablet before the iPad came into existence. Now that the iPad is here, Notebook can really shine.

Notebook allows the user to take notes on a page in an outline format. Additionally, other electronic media can be incorporated onto the page. For example, an exhibit or pleading which exists in a PDF format can be dropped onto the page and either annotated/marked up using Notebooks annotation tools, or saved as a multipage PDF which will open for viewing. From a lawyer’s perspective, this allows building of a trial notebook, a notebook for oral arguments or hearings, or, a notebook containing all pertinent client/case matter information in one place. Ideally, the bulk of the heavy lifting would be done on a MacBook and then the individual Notebook would be synchronized to the iPad via iTunes.

Thus, while an amazing leap forward for lawyers generally, Circus Ponies Notebook still does have some limitations, quirks and bugs at this time. For example, the need to synchronize Notebooks via iTunes is a kludge.  Hopefully, the ability to synchronize via the ubiquitous Dropbox will come in a future release.

Additionally, synchronizing back and forth between iPad and Desktop Notebook resulted in all tabs on the MacBook side being changed to a solid black color. A few other quirks are that the spiral bound notebook paradigm as a graphical user interface can sometimes be difficult to understand if you are accustomed to working with the standard menu/icon paradigm of computers. Also, some of the display features such as the dual page display became stuck during testing, requiring a power down and restart of the iPad to clear the graphical display.

Some limitations also involve using Notebook while simultaneously using the iPad to present exhibits for a jury or bench trial. Right now, it does not appear that Notebook supports external displays. Accordingly, if during direct or cross-examination, the need arises to use the iPad to present a particular photo or PDF file, that file will need to be opened in another application such as iAnnotate, GoodReader or some other application. This has the downside of taking the lawyer away from the examination process, into another application to present the exhibit and away from the notes/examination outline. Hopefully, future versions will incorporate the ability to leverage an external display for exhibits, jpgs and the like.

Finally, Notebook seems at times a bit sluggish while running on the iPad. However, despite these initial small first-generation hiccups, Notebook by Circus Ponies is definitely worth the $29 and goes a long way toward filling a much-needed slot in any litigator’s toolkit.

Working with the iPad at oral argument before an appellate court, trial court or other hearing cuts down on killing trees while keeping all information at your fingers. Rather than print out reams of pleadings and argument outlines, the iPad can display all the information you need, but it takes a bit of work to ditch the three ring binder.  Here are the apps, both iPad and Mac OS X, that will get you there.

OmniOutliner/Circus Ponies Notebook

Drafting argument outlines in a dedicated outliner works far better than the 1998 method of turning on outlining mode in Word. Both OmniOutliner and Circus Ponies Notebook (CPN) provide not only excellent outlining tools, but the ability to ‘attach’ your pleadings, exhibits, deposition transcripts etc. directly within the outline as a PDF file. For purposes of getting an outline onto the iPad, CPN provides the better approach until OmniGroup releases OmniFocus for iPad sometime this summer.

Circus Ponies is much deeper than a simple outliner.  Hyperlinks can jump across the entire notebook to cross reference other related items on different pages. Additionally, CPN provides a robust indexing of the entire notebook and advanced sorting and flagging features. Finally, and crucial to getting all this info onto your iPad. CPN offers two key export methods. First, the entire notebook can be exported to PDF with both page numbers and chapter-page numbers.  Second, the entire notebook, PDF attachments included can be exported as a website. That means that CPN will export your notebook as a fully hyperlinked document with PDF images, functioning expand/collapse arrows on the outline and any tabs added to the side as a self sufficient website.  From CPN choose File>Export as a Website>To Disk.  It’s easiest to do this if you create a ‘temp’ folder on your desktop and save the file there.  CPN kicks out an index.html file and a few folders.  Double click the index.html folder and you’ll open the notebook in Safari/Firefox.  Getting that notebook-as-website on your iPad and functioning is the next step.

Air Sharing HD

Air Sharing HD is the most direct method and highly recommended independent of this exercise.  Air Sharing HD creates a network connected hard drive accessible from your Mac.  Following theinstructions for the software gets you a mounted hard drive on the iPad where you can then drag and drop documents and folders through Finder.  Take the ‘temp’ folder from your desktop containing your Notebook as website and drag it to the iPad mounted hard drive. Next, from within Air Sharing HD, open that temp folder and tap on ‘index.html’ and your complete notebook opens. Tapping on any of the links, tabs or pages works just like a click.  Additionally, you get any PDFs saved inside the outline and, tapping on those PDFs opens them in full screen mode. Hit the ‘back’ button and your back to your outline.

A Second Method: iAnnotate PDF Approach

Another approach uses strictly PDFs. After composing an outline, print the file as a PDF. Then using iAnnotate, ‘import’ those documents. iAnnotate has a ‘server’ application that resides on your Mac. Designate a folder, and iAnnotate will upload all PDFs contained in that folder. This allows you to load not only your argument outline, but also related pleadings and documents. Most importantly, iAnnotate provides a tabbed interface, allowing you to switch back and forth between documents quickly. It is especially helpful that iAnnotate allows searching within a PDF if the document has been OCR’d. In testing, iAnnotate handled a 422 page record on appeal, two 40 page appellate briefs, the argument outline and a few pages of Utah Code Annotated with no problems. By contrast, using Air Sharing HD with CPN, opening the 422 page record on appeal as a PDF was noticeably laggy and slow, although it handled shorter documents just fine. Tablet Legal recently covered iAnnotate’s features in detail.

Both approaches are a bit of a kludge in terms of loading the iPad. Still, it remains much easier and more environmentally friendly than the old three ring binder approach.