Content tags describe the content or nature of the document: for example, "financial statements". Source tags describe where the hardcopy may be found: for example, "blue folder 12A". The OS X desktop client has really smooth PDF integration: when you put a PDF into a note, Evernote spreads out every page of the PDF for viewing and for displaying full-text-indexed search results. If you didn't do your own OCR (thanks, Adobe Acrobat Pro!) on the PDFs, Evernote (Premium) will make them searchable anyway (yea, even unto the handwriting). You can become just as fast doing this on the computer, but it takes the right gear and a bit of practice.Įvernote is probably the best general-purpose document-oriented knowledge manager out there today. The one advantage paper has over PDF is that you can flip through it fast, spread it out on a table, and pencil in notes.
Without the confidence that all your documents are in the system you will flounder in anxiety.īuy a second monitor. The rule is, either a document is in the system, or it's not a binder containing some scanned and some unscanned documents must be treated as wholly unscanned. Just scan everything and examine them all once they're on the computer. When you're going through your physical papers you may be tempted to assess each document for its relevance to your case. The Windows Evernote client knows how to watch subdirectories of scans/ for new material. Sometimes I give each physical folder a corresponding folder under my scans/ directory. There's no need to muck with the filenames: an ISO8601 format of YYYYMMDDHHMMSS provides sufficient uniqueness.
After uploading the PDFs to Evernote, bulk-tag the scanned files with the name of the folder it came from, so that when you next need to go from soft to hardcopy, you know where to find it. Place papers back into the folder in order of time scanned. Write onto each paper folder the time you scanned it. For efficiency I defer the OCR to an overnight batch using Adobe Acrobat Pro, or you can just leave that job to Evernote. Liberate all your paper documents onto the computer.īegin by scanning one folder at a time. Tools I Didn't Use: Zotero and MacJournalįirst, the tool I didn't use: by all accounts Zotero is pretty awesome for academic researchers, and if the majority of my resources were online rather than actual paper documents, I would probably be using it now. I built an 80% approximation to Casemap using a nimble, mostly free team of small mammals. It deserves its leading position in the ecosystem: it helps you structure your thinking, marshall evidence, and get new members of a legal team rapidly up to speed.īut as a knowledge management tool it feels like a dinosaur about to topple. Casemap outputs affidavits the way Photoshop exports JPEGs. Twelve years after its debut, Casemap finds daily use in large law firms which also have all the charm and effectiveness of the Soviet military bureaucracy. The TimeMap extension throws up your case history in a timeline whose graphic design conventions reminded me of an eight grade science fair. It feels a lot like a hypertrophied MS Access application. Along the way, the dramatis personae go into a persons table. It manages lawsuits by brute force: every argument or claim is recorded into a hierarchy of issues every issue is supported by a set of facts every fact is grounded in a document. Here's how I used those tools to help cut costs, marshall arguments, optimize my interactions with lawyers, and win the case.Ĭasemap by LexisNexis has all the charm and effectiveness of a Soviet tank. In a supporting role, we also used Dropbox, Mindnode, TimeLine3D, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. I used several applications to manage the evidence. The judge dismissed all the opponent claims and awarded my side just about everything we asked for, and more. More than a year later, in August 2011, the trial ended. The documentary evidence occupied twenty-two volumes of paper folders containing over 2000 documents spanning 7,326 pages. The national newspaper tracked the story and the story even got picked up by a number of random blogs. Four sets of lawyers (five by the time the trial ended), including two senior counsel, plus court hearing costs, added up to over $40,000 a day in expenses. Over the course of six weeks, a total of 16 witnesses took the stand. After a year of trading affidavits and unsuccessful negotiations, we went to full trial in open court.
Starting in June 2010 I was involved in a civil case.
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