So what about tablet use for experts? Can it aid in your role as an expert witness: organizing during discovery; preparing for your deposition; enhancing your trial testimony?
There are many, many apps available, and new ones are being developed all the time. Fortunately, there are quite a few websites with reviews and compilations of the best tablet apps. For the legal profession, Robert Ambrogi, who has his own blog on
legal technology, social media, and the law, recently updated his list of the best apps in a post for IMS ExpertServices’ BullsEye titled “
42 Essential Apps for Trial Lawyers in 2016.” In addition, MIT has a useful
guide on apps for academics and researchers. We haven’t found one specifically written for experts yet, but many of the apps and technologies that attorneys and academics use are powerful tools for experts, too. In addition to these two websites, here are two other sites we’ve encountered with information on apps and technology:
- See iPhone JD for reviews of products (battery packs, cloud storage, apps, and more), advice (e.g. concerning security, or how to use your iPad more efficiently), and news. You can also find an index of prior posts on apps as well as other info for iPhones and iPads. ABA Journal named the blog the best Legal Technology blog for several years and added it to its Hall of Fame in 2014.
- The Cyber Advocate is likewise all about tools and tech for anyone in the legal biz and frequently reviews new and notable apps. Check out the archives for info on useful tools and apps.
From our review of apps discussed on the web, we’ve pulled some of the most promising and most noted ones, and compiled our own list of essential apps for experts:
- Dropbox, Box, & Cubby
- These are free with limited storage (up to a few gigs), but they all offer paid plans to increase capacity.
- These sites have become popular as a means of storing files to access from any device. If you want to review your research on the go, or share files with others that are too large to email, these sites are making it quite simple. Does the opposing side want a copy of all the references you cited in your Rule 26 report prior to your deposition? Upload them to a file sharing site so your attorney client can easily download them.
- With so many to choose from, which one is right for you? We found PC Magazine’s best choices for 2016 to be a useful guide.
- LogMein
- Free
- On the road to deposition and realize you need to review a file that’s not stored in the cloud, but is actually on your desktop? Use this app to access your desktop remotely (so long as your desktop is running).
- ToDo / Any.Do
- $4.99; for iOS only / Free
- When you are working on several different cases, each with their own scheduling order, you need to keep track of your upcoming milestones – site visit, expert disclosure, deposition date, trial, etc. These apps allow you to track each project’s due dates. They are full of features (projects, sub-tasks, due dates, categories, etc.), while remaining simple to use. Any.do has integrated speech recognition. With both apps, you can share your lists and sync them among your mobile devices and your computer.
- Goodreader
- $4.99
- MIT Libraries calls this app for reading, annotating, and organizing PDFs “super-robust,” and it is highly recommended by iPhoneJD. You can download documents from the cloud, edit them, and sync changes. It also syncs with cloud share sites like Dropbox and Box, as well as Google Drive. You can group your PDFs into folders. The only unfortunate thing that Goodreader can’t do is OCR.
- Papers
- Free; for iOS only
- When your role requires you to conduct literature searches and reviews in order to formulate your opinions, Papers is for you. MIT Libraries says you can “organize, read, annotate, and share your collection of articles and PDFs” on your mobile devices. Use any of the 20+ built-in search engines to find literature in your field of research. From PubMed to Scopus to ArXiv and Google Patents, a full range of options are available. You can import PDFs from email, Dropbox, or MobileMe.
- JotNot Pro or Scanner Pro
- $4.99 / $6.99
- Ever wind up in the library without quarters? Or don’t want to haul 4” thick ancient texts to the copier? Convert photos into PDFs. Both apps allow for sending and sharing. JotNot also allows you to fax pages for $0.99. iPhoneJD has a 2012 Scanner Pro review for more in-depth research.
- Westlaw Case Notebook Portable eTranscript
- Free
- Need to review an opposing expert’s deposition to write a rebuttal report? Need to review your own deposition as a refresher? The app will allow you to not only review and search but annotate transcripts in the traditional E-Transcript .PTX format.
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- $5.99 / Free / Free
- In need of an app to keep web articles, online content, notes, images, etc. all in one place? Try a note-taking app. These are three of the more popular ones and essentially do the same thing - keeping your notes and clippings organized, searchable and in sync with your other devices. Notability was recognized by Apple as the Best Selling iPad Paid Productivity app in 2015, for the 3rd year in a row.
- Not ready to make the switch to digital note-taking? Here’s a comparison of user interfaces of several different apps - the 3 mentioned above as well as several others.
- Keynote
- $9.99, for iOS only
- Think of Keynote as PowerPoint for the iPad. It lets you create, edit and show presentations on your iPad or import and present PowerPoint files.
- According to Ambrogi, “Although not designed specifically for trials, Apple's Keynote is a popular presentation app among lawyers in the courtroom and elsewhere. It allows video mirroring so that you can present on an HDTV while seeing a presenter view on your iPad that shows your slides and notes.”
- Timeline 3D
- $9.99; for iOS only
- If your trial testimony typically involves chronology, a visual timeline can be beneficial for connecting with the jury. This app lets you create a list of events, add media, and then turn it all into a visual timeline. Timelines can be presented full screen and with 3D perspective, and can be exported to PowerPoint and Keynote.
- Fastcase
- Free
- As an expert, you likely won’t need to review case law frequently, but you may need to review federal statutes, depending on your expertise. If you do, this app allows you to do quick legal research on the go. It was the most popular app among lawyers for the second year in a row.
- Fed Courts
- $2.99
- If you are retained in cases spanning different federal courts, you may want to know the rules that apply to experts in each jurisdiction. This app provides the full text of the federal rules of procedure and the local rules for every federal court in the country, including district, bankruptcy and appellate courts. It also provides access to PACER (if you have a separate account) and lists the address of every federal court.
- Black’s Law Dictionary / Law Dictionary & Guide
- $54.99 / Free
- These are two main apps for you to choose from to keep legalese at your fingertips. Having a general understanding of legal language is essential for expert witnessing; depending on your needs, either option may be appropriate.
Just in case you were wondering about the old standbys – Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, we also wanted to point out that Microsoft’s Office suite for iOS and Android is available for free. So, you can now access your Microsoft files in their native formats on your mobile devices and store them on a share site like Dropbox.
Hopefully this post has plenty of information for you to get started. In the meantime, let us know in the comments if there are any apps you use professionally. Or, if there are any apps you’d like to see developed for experts.