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Question for the lawyers
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Posted by john oconnor
Jun 1, 2008 at 06:31 PM
Hello, which outliners do you use to plan your briefs. Also what other software do you find useful in your practice.
Thanks
John O’Connor
Posted by Gary Carson
Jun 12, 2008 at 02:07 PM
Howdy. I’m not a lawyer, but I believe the most popular outlining software for lawyers comes from CaseSoft (http://www.casesoft.com). CaseSoft’s part of Lexis Nexis. They sell applications for case analysis, timeline graphing, transcript summaries and so on. They make an outliner called NoteMap which I think is the best outliner available today (pricey, too—a couple hundred dollars, I think). NoteMap is really excellent. I’ve been using it for several years now.
Posted by Guido
Jun 12, 2008 at 02:33 PM
Hello, I’m a german lawyer and worked with really every outlining tool for a while. I do not recommend you NoteMap, it’s really expensive and has only limited features ( e.g. for hyperlinking to other files or folders ). Now I’m using Mind Manager and imindmap for nearly every task. I cannot recommend strongly enough the mind mapping technique for everyone dealing with legal matters. Here in Germany there are more and more courses specialized only on lawyers and law students showing how to benefit from mind mapping when writing exams, briefs or when preparing speeches.
Bye
Posted by Cassius
Jun 12, 2008 at 05:24 PM
I used to be enthusiastic about NoteMap, but NO LONGER! If you enter more text in a note than can be displayed on your screen without scrolling, you may permanently lose part of the text. CTRL-Z will not recover it. I know, it happened to me. Also, even if you don’t lose text, it is hellish to get NoteMap to scroll text in a single note that extends beyond the bottom edge of the screen.
Also, every indication suggests that NoteMap will never be fixed or updated. For example it has a small bug in sending its text to Word. It could be easily fixed with a few lines (5 or 6?) of code. CaseSoft has known about this problem for years, but has never acknowledged it, let alone fixed it.
-cassius
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jun 12, 2008 at 08:36 PM
It sure is a sad commentary on the state of the outliner field that there isn’t a single enthusiastic endorsement of any single-pane outliner.* A few years ago, I expected we’d have something decent to use in Windows. I say the best outliner for Windows remains ECCO Pro—a product that hasn’t been supported or developed beyond 1997. Brainstorm is a great product, and is certainly a capable outliner, but it doesn’t have many of the features a genuine “outliner” needs.
And it isn’t a whole lot better in OS X land. OmniOutliner is serviceable, but it doesn’t match ECCO or GrandView. Opal, from our friend David Duncan, is a nice jotter-style outliner, but isn’t a powerhouse (and isn’t intended to be). I haven’t tried TAO, but development appears to be glacial. And that’s it.
Well, that’s my rant for the day.
Steve Z.
*Pierre, I know you’re working on SQLNotes—BTW, have you considered creating a stripped down version of SQLNotes that is just the single-pane notepad?