iPhones are amazing devices, allowing you to stay organized through contact lists, electronic calendars and automatic reminders; stay connected through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other apps; and stay informed through news feeds, traffic alerts, weather reports and other information. What's more, the iPhone's extreme portability keeps information right at your fingertips at all times. Now lawyers, paralegals, legal secretaries and other legal professionals can use a host of handy law-related apps on their iPhone. Here are a few iPhone apps just for legal professionals:
- DocScanner ($8.99) - allows you to scan documents on the road or to capture papers to your pocket for reading and sharing. Just snap a picture of a document and DocScanner automatically finds the edges and detects paper size. You can save scanned documents to DocScanner or the iPhone's camera roll and send them by e-mail in either PDF or JPG format, directly through the app's interface.
- reQall (standard version free, pro version $2.99/month) - This voice-enabled memory aid, organizer and task manager allows you to capture ideas, tasks and reminders by simply speaking into your iPhone's microphone. Reminders can be delivered by e-mail, IM or text, and items can be sent directly to your calendar.
- Court Days - Date Calculator of Lawyers ($0.99 ) - tracks court-based or other deadlines. Court Days calculates the number of court days or calendar days (or a combination of the two) before or after any date and includes a database of over 60 state and federal court jurisdictions to account for the specific legal holidays in each forum.
- LawStack (free) - provides a virtual law library on your iPhone, including the U.S. Constitution, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Appellate Procedure, Evidence, Bankruptcy Procedure and more.
- LawBox ($0.99) - includes the U.S. Constitution and the Federal Rules of Evidence and Civil Procedure, all fully indexed and searchable. LawBox also features an online store, through which additional rules packages can be purchased. LawBox includes a legal news browser with feeds indexed by practice area and the ability to e-mail or save articles (via Instapaper, a free tool for saving Web pages for later reading) or post them directly to Twitter.
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CaseMate ($4.99) - this portable case management tool provides instant access to case information, including contacts, appointments, notes and call histories. It features the ability to share contacts between cases, e-mail case notes and view multiple appointments in a single calendar view. Contact categories are specific to the legal field (such as judge, witness and attorney) and can be customized to add your own categories. Notes are time-stamped by creation and modification dates and appear chronologically.
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Bill4Time (free) - allows users to make new time, expense, schedule, and note entries on the go.
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Dropbox - an online service for automatically syncing files across multiple computers, has a companion iPhone app, making it possible to access any file, anytime, from anywhere. With the Dropbox app, you can even share existing files or upload photos or videos to your account directly from your iPhone.
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WordWeb (free) - a favorite PC dictionary and thesaurus app.
Review the latest issue of Paralegal Today (subscription only ) for more information on iPhone apps for legal professionals.
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