ABA General Practice, General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division 2011 National Solo & Small Firm Conference

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1 991 ABA General Practice, General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division 2011 National Solo & Small Firm Conference Sponsored by the ABA General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division October 21-22, 2011 Denver, Colorado Setting Up a Law Office: Do It Right and Ethically the First Time! By Jeffrey Allen Graves & Allen Oakland, California

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3 993 Acrobat X for the Mac Reviewed by Jeffrey Allen Jeffrey Allen is the principal of Graves & Allen, a small firm in Oakland, California, and may be reached at jallenlawtek@aol.com. Like David, I have long felt that Adobe Acrobat belongs in every law office and probably should reside on each computer in the office. Unlike David, I am primarily a Mac person. Yes, I have some built-for-windows machines and I have some virtual computers running Windows on my Macs, but I run Windows primarily for purposes of testing and evaluating Windows-based software. For that reason, I use the XP, Vista, and Windows 7 operating systems on the Windows machines and Macs OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on the Mac. I have used and tested the last several iterations of Acrobat (back to at least Acrobat 7) on the then-current versions of both Mac and Windows operating systems. The Mac OS has some built-in PDF capabilities (you can print to PDF and read PDF files using capabilities built into the Macintosh OS). Although these built-in capabilities offer some convenience to the user, they do not provide anything comparable to the features of Acrobat X Pro. The legal-industry-specific features (Bates numbering and redaction) do not exist inside the Mac OS. Neither do you have the portfolio capability or the ability to easily move pages around inside of a PDF file. For that matter, you cannot create searchable PDF files using the feature set built into the Mac OS. Acrobat X Pro offers all these capabilities, thereby easily justifying the acquisition of the program for a Mac OS user. Although there have always been some differences between the Mac and Windows versions of the Acrobat software, the most recent iterations of Acrobat have shown a substantially parallel evolution for the program on both platforms. As a result, Acrobat Pro provides essentially the same features to both the Mac and the Windows platform. I focus on the Acrobat Pro version, as it is the only version that exists on the Mac platform. Although this limitation may seem to favor the Windows platform users somewhat, the observation would not apply to attorneys. I personally believe that Acrobat Standard, while perfectly adequate for many small business and most home uses, would prove insufficient for most law offices owing to the missing features that are included in Acrobat Pro. Of these features, the most important to my practice (and I would expect to most solos and small firms) are Bates numbering, PDF Portfolios, and Redaction. My bottom line: If you have a version of Acrobat older than Version 9 (which included a major improvement to the optical character recognition software), you should consider immediately upgrading to Version X; that is true for both Mac and Windows users. If you have Version 9, the upgrade to X offers some nice improvements, particularly in the interface, and a bit more speed and efficiency, but you can continue to use Version 9 efficiently and effectively in your office. If you want the newest and the best, however, you should get the upgrade to Version X. If you do not have Acrobat at all for your Mac, what are you waiting for?

4 994 PRODUCT REVIEW Voice-Recognition Technology for the Mac Reviewed by Jeffrey Allen Jeffrey Allen is the principal of Graves & Allen, a small firm in Oakland, California, and may be reached at jallenlawtek@aol.com. The publishers of software handling voice-recognition technology (VRT) spent many years more or less ignoring the Mac platform. Yes, we had some basic VRT programs for the Mac, but they had far less sophistication than the programs designed for the Windows platform. A few years ago, that situation started to change drastically. A company known as MacSpeech emerged as the leader in VRT for the Mac. The company s program, while somewhat useful, had far less horsepower under the hood than did Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) for Windows. But DNS did not run on the Mac, except in a virtual Windows environment, and even then not so well as it ran in a natural Windows environment. Ultimately, MacSpeech made a deal to acquire the right to use the DNS VRT engine and rewrote its program to create MacSpeech Dictate, which proved a significant improvement over the previous version of the software and quickly emerged as the best available VRT software on the Mac platform. Not too long after that, Nuance acquired the program and now has the preeminent position on both the Mac and the Windows platforms. After acquiring the software, Nuance issued a new version of the basic program called Dragon Dictate. The current version of Dragon Dictate works well enough for general-purpose dictation but requires a fair amount of training to handle legal terminology and, in particular, legal citations. The software can save a fair amount of time and effort if properly used for general dictation. The program lists for $ and compares to the basic versions of DNS. Although MacSpeech had a legal version of its Dictate software, Nuance has not yet created Dragon Dictate Legal. The absence of the legal version means that you have to do all the training yourself to get the program to deal with legal terminology and legal citations. The task, while doable, has proven somewhat daunting and fairly time consuming. Alternatively, Nuance continues to sell the MacSpeech Dictate Legal version for $ Although not as robust as the Windows version of DNS 11 Legal, the MacSpeech Dictate Legal software works better in most legal dictation than the basic Dragon Dictate, even though it is a bit older and uses an earlier version of the Dragon engine. The legal version comes bundled with MacSpeech Scribe, which enables you to dictate out of the office on a recording device and then import the audio file into the program for transcription (you cannot do that with Dragon dictate; it only accepts dictation in real time). The time-saving benefits and features of MacSpeech Dictate Legal more than justify the additional cost.

5 995 MAC NOTES By Jeffrey Allen The biggest news in AppleWorld relates to the release of the newest iteration of the iphone. The iphone 4 represents a real and substantial upgrade of the iphone hardware. At the same time, it marks Apple s release of a significant software upgrade in the form of the ios 4. Apple s ios4 first came out on the new iphone 4 and almost immediately showed up in itunes as a free system upgrade available for earlier models of the iphone (3GS and 3G only) and recent iterations of the ipod Touch. One caveat though, while the ios 4 works on earlier models of the iphone, to get the full benefit of all of its features, you need the iphone 4 hardware (go figure). Some people have reported that they felt that upgrading to ios 4 on 3G and 3GS iphones resulted in sluggish behavior of the phone. I did not notice that when I ran it on my 3GS for a week prior to receiving my iphone 4. Possibly the slow down may have only represented their perception; possibly it related to an actual slow-down that I did not experience due to different use patterns. I like the ios4 on the 3GS and like it even better on the iphone 4. In my opinion multitasking and folders represent the two newest and best features (that run on both the iphone 4 and the 3GS. The folders feature allows you to create a folder by superimposing one App s icon over another icon. The system creates a folder with a suggested name based upon the function of the included App s. The phone will suggest names such as Navigation, News, Sports, Games, Utilities, etc. You can accept the proposed name or give it your own custom name. Each folder will hold 12 App icons, allowing you to see and have easy access to a substantially larger number of Apps than you could without folders. The existence of folders has made all of my Apps available easily to me instead of leaving almost half of them hiding in invisible pages only available through the use of the search function. Folders also give you an easy way to organize your Apps. I strongly prefer having my Apps organized by subject or function to alphabetically by name. It saves me a great deal of time, particularly as I have collected so many Apps that I could not possibly remember the correct name of each of

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