Sep 08, 2019 Desktop/mobile device timeline software that allows Mac and iOS users to build 3D animated timelines: 4.85/7: 7: Aeon Timeline: Desktop timeline creation tool for creative, instructional and course authors, legal practitioners and project managers: 4.7/7: 8: Timeline JS. Try SmartDraw free to make legal timelines, trial exhibits, crime scene and accident reconstruction diagrams, and other legal graphics in minutes. Includes 1000s of professional-looking legal templates and graphics that you can quickly and easily modify and make your own.
I recently saw this meme on a lawyer friend’s Facebook page:
It reads: “Being a lawyer is easy. It’s like riding a bike… except the bike is on fire, you’re on fire, everything is on fire, and you’re in hell.”
My friend is a litigator. I can’t imagine a transactional attorney finding that meme amusing or even relatable. While perhaps not literally hell, litigation is a state of war. As another litigator friend once told me: “I love everything about the law, except judges, clients, and opposing counsel.” That sums it up pretty well. I feel you, brother.
But what does this have to do with software? Well, legal software can make it easier to be a litigator. It can save time, give order to the chaos, and provide added confidence over your caseload.
According to Jeff Bennion, San Diego attorney and writer for Above the Law, “Having a tech-savvy office has been the greatest benefit to me to keep pace with larger, more well-gunned offices. I believe attorneys should have an ethical duty to their clients to pursue and learn how to use the tools available to them to better and more efficiently represent their clients.”
The problems that software solves relate to tracking complex litigation deadlines, dealing with electronic evidence, and organizing one’s knowledge of a case’s factual history and claims. (Sadly, there’s no software yet for dealing with opposing counsel.)
The essential software categories are a calendar app; Microsoft Excel (or Google Sheets); Adobe Acrobat; eDiscovery review software; and software for linking witnesses, facts, evidence, and legal issues. I’ll explain how each of these tools provides massive value to litigators.
Google Calendar
Litigation is all about deadlines. Sometimes you’ll have to track a half-dozen deadlines ticking away simultaneously for a single case. When you have multiple litigation cases, the difficulty of keeping track increases exponentially. Having a trusty calendar app is essential for both the big-picture overviews, as well as the day-to-day management of meetings and depositions.
In my litigation practice, we used Google Calendar primarily because my firm was using Google Apps for Business. Google Calendar is great for checking your schedule on the go, inviting others to meetings, reviewing your team’s schedules, and easily scheduling events involving different time zones. Google Calendar does not help you calculate deadlines, though; and it won’t display any more than one month’s worth of events at a time. (If you’re interested in an alternative, check out CaseFleet’s legal calendaring feature, which is designed to overcome these limitations.)
Excel
From computing dates to calculating damages, Excel is an essential tool for litigators. Many lawyers are very smart people who don’t like math. But in law, math comes up—a lot. Most litigation is about money damages, and these need to be calculated. In more complex cases, damages truly need to be modelled. It’s hard to imagine a better tool for calculating and modelling damages than Excel. For more information on harnessing the power of Excel in litigation, here are two useful blog posts:
eDiscovery Software
eDiscovery is becoming more prevalent each year, as lawyers recognize that the majority of useful evidence consists of electronic records such a emails, text messages, social media posts, databases, and productivity documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). Indeed, 62% of attorneys who responded to a2015 ABA survey reported receiving requests for electronic discovery – an increase of 6% over the previous year.
In my practice, I learned to grow wary of two things that have been the essence of discovery in recent years: PDF files and depositions. I learned to seek native files in response to my discovery requests, and an amazing thing happened: I was able to figure out what actually happened, and had the material to prove it. But I couldn’t have done this work without specialized electronic discovery software. In one case, I received over 300,000 emails in a PST container file. It would have been impossible to review them in a reasonable time manually.
Most eDiscovery software is expensive (even the monthly subscription‑based platforms), but there’s a major exception. Nuix Proof Finder costs only $100—all of which goes to charity. For small cases, Proof Finder does everything you need. Don’t try reviewing native files without it.
Adobe Acrobat Pro
Even though natives files are preferred for producing and reviewing evidence, Portable Document Format (PDF) files are still extremely important in litigation. Most e‑filing is done with PDF files, and many parties insist on producing discovery documents in PDF format. There will even be occasions when an opposing party will request PDF format for discovery documents. In all of these instances, it’s essential to have software for processing text through Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR helps with manipulating the order and contents of pages, extracting pages or inserting page numbers and labels, and for redacting confidential text.
Keep in mind that many ediscovery software packages include OCR. But if yours doesn’t, these tasks come up so often for most litigators that it would be very difficult to perform them without having Adobe Acrobat Pro. Pricing for Acrobat used to be difficult for smaller firms, but Adobe recently moved to a monthly subscription model so that you can add and remove seats, reassign licenses easily, and scale up or down as needed.
Acrobat is also the best way to redact, but there are a few alternatives.
Fact Outline / Timeline Software
The best litigators are thorough fact investigators. They know how to find key witnesses, locate evidence on the internet, request and review electronic evidence, and elicit surprising admissions in depositions. But this attention to detail and aggressive questing after facts leads to an organizational conundrum: where and how will all of these facts be organized? For many, the answer is “in my head,” “in my handwritten notes,” or “in a Word document somewhere,” but each of these solutions is very problematic.
Keeping vital information in disparate places makes it difficult to collaborate and communicate with the other members of a litigation team about fact narratives, and it’s impossible to represent relationships properly in Word documents or handwritten notes. These relationships require a tool connecting facts with related proof evidence, connecting evidence to the witnesses who will authenticate it, and confirming the relationship between the elements of a claim or defense and the facts on which they depend.
Many litigators are turning to legal case management software to improve their process for managing case facts. Example programs include CaseMap (LexisNexis), Case Notebook (Thomson Reuters), FactBox (Lynx Workflow), and the Timelines feature in CaseFleet (my own company).
Since I’m most familiar with CaseFleet Timelines, I’ll briefly explain what it does and how it works. Litigators start by listing the witnesses and legal issues that appear in a case. Then, they create facts that are linked to the witnesses and issues. Lawyers and staff can simultaneously upload evidence, such as depositions transcripts, PDFs, and native files and link evidence items to different facts. The goal is to give a litigator a meticulously-organized trial notebook that will grow organically throughout the life of the case,rather than in the frantic days or weeks before trials, hearings, motion deadlines, or depositions).
Conclusion
In litigation, good software multiplies our efforts and helps us do better work in less time, with less effort. Applying technology to litigation bears witness to the truth of Steve Jobs’ notion that computers are “a bicycle for our minds,” enabling us to reach new heights. What technology do you rely on in your litigation practice? Let us know in the comments!
Looking for Law Practice Management software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Law Practice Management software solutions.
Timeline maker software is powerful software where one can use them to understand and remember the events of large time intervals easily.
Related:
The timeline maker softwares have become an important part of the learning industry where it is used in schools, colleges and other learning institutes for a better understanding of events at different time intervals like in history, social studies or for explaining cultural phenomena and for planning future events with large time intervals.
Smartdraw
The software is loaded with amazing features that lets you create chart of historical events and generate time line easily and quickly. The software comes with handy tools like automatic formatting, easy sharing, works well with any device, quick start templates and much more for making an effective time line easily.
Timeline Maker
Timeline maker is an ultimate toll to create time lines superfast and easy. The software offers multiple timeline formats, interactive presentations, easy editing and customization options and much more to help you create easy to understand timelines in no time. The time line maker download is available for free online. One can easily print, share and publish the time created in this software.
Tiki-Toki
Tiki-Toki is unique web-based software that lets you create time lines with beautiful backgrounds easily. The software enables you to create interactive 3d timelines, include videos and images, option of sharing timelines, colour coding of different categories in time line possible and much more with few simple steps. This online based time line maker software is easy and interactive tool to create visually stunning time lines.
Other Softwares for Different Platform
Although most of the softwares support all major operating systems like MAC, Windows, Android, LINUX etc. But certain conversion software may require a different set of preferences and specific operating system may be one of those. Choose the software that works well with your current operating system and its version for best output.
Free Timeline Maker Software for Windows – iSpring
Legal Timeline Software For Mac Free
iSpring Suite includes ‘Visuals’ option that is used for creating time line in Windows operating system. The software enables you to create mobile-ready timelines, lets you add unlimited events and also option of grouping them to periods, adding of photos and videos possible, it also has built-in audio recorder and a customizable player to create stunning timelines.
Free Timeline Maker Software for Android – RWT Timeline
Exclusively designed for Android devices this app is used for making interactive timelines easily. The software lets you add image and videos to the time line, one can add long or short description to the time intervals and much more to create visually stunning timelines. The time line is created on the basis of time of the day, date or event.
Free Timeline Maker Software for MAC – Bee Docs Timeline 3D
This software works well with MAC operating system and helps you to create interactive timelines in no time. The software offer templates, option of adding photos and videos, easy customizing and editing options and you can also use different colors, backgrounds, and different fonts to personalize your timeline. The timeline maker MAC software is easily available for free download online.
More Softwares to Try
If you wish to try more software to satisfy your creative hunger then you can try softwares like HSTRY, WhenIn Time, Time Glider, ReadWrite Think’s Student Interactive Timeline, Preceden, Time Toast, Time Rime, Our TimeLines, myHistro, Timestream etc. All these software are easily available online for free download. These softwares make the task of creating interactive timelines super easy and quick.
Most Popular Timeline Maker Software of 2016 – OfficeTime
As the name suggests this software has been exclusively designed for professional timelines using PowerPoint. This time line maker PowerPoint based software lets you create interactive and easy to understand time lines quickly. The software offers free templates, simple and interactive interface, tutorials to help you create best timelines for business purposes.
OfficeTime is the most popular and downloaded timeline maker software of 2016. This timeline maker PowerPoint based software has features that let you create visually stunning and easy to understand timelines easily. The software is available for free download and can be used for both learning and business purposes.
What is Timeline Maker Software?
Timeline maker software comes handy when you have to create an easily understandable chart of large time intervals and the events occurred in that time period. These software offer features like free templates, photo, and video insertion, editing and customizing options and much more to create visually stunning timelines that are easy to understand. One can also share, publish and print the timelines created using timeline maker softwares.
How to Install Timeline Maker Software?
Installing any timeline maker softwares listed above is very simple. The free download is easily available online that require few simple steps to install it to your computer. You just need to click on the ‘Download’ link and the software will be downloaded in few minutes, then one can open the software from the folder where the software setup has been saved and the software will be ready for use. Most of the software’s icon is displayed on the desktop once the timeline maker download is complete for easy access.
Benefits, Usage and Target Audience
Timeline Software Free
Timeline software are popular with education institutes especially for subjects like history, cultural and social studies etc, as using this software make it easy for the students to memorize large time intervals and events associated with them. The timeline maker software are also used for business purposes like for helping customers, business clients, colleagues and managers understand company’s time-related events.
The core benefits of the timeline maker software include
- Interactive and simple interface
- Tools for sharing, publish and printing timeline
- Editing and customizing options
- Free templates available
- Tutorials to help you in create stunning timelines
- Enables you to add video and pictures in the timeline