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

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.

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

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

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?

Veering somewhat OT:

Steve, agree with almost all you've written above, particularly the primacy of Ecco Pro. However... I would also add Tinderbox to your Mac list. Yes, expensive, complex, no columns, quite user-unfriendly, unlovely to look at some would say, above all a strange beast that is a combination of mindmap and outliner - but (in my view) very powerful. It does things no other outliner does - what other outliner (for example) allows you to categorise the links between nodes, or provides you with three or four different types of visual representation, or gives you a word-frequency cloud?

But, it is true, not of much use to lawyers, I imagine...

Steve Z wrote:

*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?

Not really, however the second-pane does not need to be shown. The same is true of columns. No 2nd pane, no columns, It then becomes a single-pane outliner...
as shown here"http://sqlnotes.wikispaces.com/Formatting

http://sqlnotes.wikispaces.com/Formatting

I haven't had any problems with NoteMap myself, but I haven't tried adding a lot of text to a single topic and I rarely export any of my outlines to Word. I still think that it's the best basic outliner I've seen so far. Very ergonomic and easy to use. I like it because it's simple with a clean interface. Too expensive, though. It's definitely overpriced.

Gary Carson wrote:

I haven't had any problems with NoteMap myself, but I haven't tried adding a lot of text
to a single topic and I rarely export any of my outlines to Word. I still think that it's
the best basic outliner I've seen so far. Very ergonomic and easy to use. I like it
because it's simple with a clean interface. Too expensive, though. It's definitely
overpriced.

-----
Gary, I didn't have any problems with lost text either, UNTIL I started using NM in writing a book. The work-around for for the Word Export is to export to RTF and then open the RTF export in Word.

-c

I can vouch for these problems with Notemap. I ran a test a while ago.

See http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/224/0/report-back-on-notemap-to-word-2007-path for details.

Jack

MindGenius for brainstorming and NoteMap for creating a linear outline. With MS Word the possible exception, MS OneNote is probably the most useful program in my repertoire. I use it for analyzing case law.

I use the CaseSoft suite for case analysis, although I'm more engaged in analysis of law. The CaseSoft products are CaseMap, TimeMap, and TextMap, to analyze facts, draw timelines, and analyze depositions.

john oconnor wrote:

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

john oconnor wrote:

Hello, which outliners do you use to plan your briefs. Also what other software do you
find useful in your practice.

Have you looked at BrainStorm Software? https://www.brainstormsw.com

It is a bit funky plain text can send information to Word/PowerPoint. Use it to collect my thoughts when writing reports on network / disaster recovery.