Category Archives: iPhone

What’s In Your Legal App Folder?

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As this is supposed to be a blog that addresses the use of Apple products in a law firm, I thought we would do the standard end of the year app review. While I have not yet incorporated the use of these products in the courtroom, I do use them all of the time while in the office, on the road, and at home. There are some real Mac studs out there using all kinds of Apple hardware and related software products in really creative and useful ways – both inside the courtroom and the office. Guys like Finis Price and Ben Stevens have so much experience and knowledge in these areas. But for now, it’s just me here. These are the top five law apps that I have in one folder on both my iPhone 4s and iPad.

Fastcase

Fastcase is the one app that simply over delivers consistently; and, therefore is indispensable. As a free alternative to Westlaw or LexisNexis, this app gives you legal research capabilities in your pocket of comparable, and in some cases superior, value. Upon launching, you have the options for searching by case law or by statute. Under the case law search, you set the jurisdiction to be state specific, federal or to include all; date ranges; and sorting order. Searching by statute works similarly. I have found using Fastcase to be ridiculously easy when you quickly want to find the text of a case by searching on the citation or cases that cite to your case. Cases include footnotes and hyperlinked citations within for easy navigation and further research.

The same is true for searching statutes. Here, however, you can also browse the statutes in a top down manner. In the Maryland statutes, you can browse the code for each separate year 2008-2011.

You can adjust your settings to control how many results per page are displayed and the order in which they are displayed, along with other controls. One drawback is that you can not print the case or statute from your iPhone or iPad easily. There are workarounds to make this possible but for the most part, you need to go to the website version in order to print. And you must have a Fastcase account if doing so. But a lot of state bar associations have relationships with Fastcase to make it free to their members. In any case, Fastcase does more than you expect it to and for a price far cheaper than expected.

Court Days

Court Days is a fairly new addition to my legal apps folder. This handy utility allows you to calculate dates – using both calendar days and court days. In date-to-date mode, you give the app the start and stop dates and it calculates the number of court days in between and/or the number of calendar days (breaking down number of weekdays, weekend days, and holidays). Start and stop dates are easily set with the standard date wheel. In court days mode, you have even more options. You give the app a starting date and ask it to calculate the date for a given number of days before or after that date. Again, the result can be displayed in court days and/or calendar days. The app can be set to use different state holiday calendars and even use custom holiday for specific jurisdictions. And for convenience, you can set it up to give up to three sequential dates. So you can pick a mediation date thirty days out, a pre-trial date 15 days beyond that, and a trial date 60 days thereafter. It’s a really very useful app, especially so since it is free.

Nolo Plain English Law Dictionary

This app is handy for exactly what you think it mint be good for – quickly looking up legal terms and definitions. Published by the Nolo Network it is heavy on advertising but useful for its limited purpose. Users can search on a particular legal term or phrase using some limited boolean logic and have the app provide a general plain english definition along with related terms. For instance, a search on contributory negligence returned a very workable definition along with 50 other related terms such as assumption of risk, comparative negligence, last clear chance, etc. One nifty little feature, with the app open if you you shake the iPhone you get a random word of the day and its definition displayed – fun for those times when you are waiting. This app will not make people forget about the more expensive Black’s Law Dictionary app, but the price is right for what it does – yep, you guessed it, it’s free.

LawBox

Here again is a free app that does one thing pretty well – give the user a place to quickly look up a bunch of federal rules and procedures. LawBox provides access to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, Bankruptcy Procedure, Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Evidence along with a copy of the Constitution and US Code title 28 Judiciary and Judicial Procedure. You can search within any of these databases or drill down from the top to find the rule that meets your need. Once found, you can double tap to bring up a side bar that allows you to email the rule citation along the text of the rule. It’s not a terribly broad app but it does its one job pretty well.

MSBA

Last, but not least, the Maryland State Bar Association (MSBA) publishes its own mobile application for a variety of mobile devices. Like LawBox, this is simply an application to look up published material. As you would expect, this app tailors its content to Maryland specific material. Thus, the Rules of Evidence are the Maryland Rules and not the Federal Rules. Along with evidence, the app presents the Rules of Professional Conduct, Ideals of Professionalism, MSBA Code of Civility, and rules regarding Attorney Trust Accounts. These are all helpful for controlling the difficult opposing counsel as well as keeping yourself from becoming that guy.

So these are the apps I have in my legal folder on both my iPhone and my iPad. All I can tell you is that they work for me – your mileage might vary. Next time, I’ll discuss other non-legal specific apps that I think most, if not all, lawyers ought to have on their mobile devices.

Is Apple Following Me?

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I don’t know who broke the story first, but Fox News and CNN both have reports out, as do others, breathlessly warning iPhone and iPad 3GS users that a “secret file” is stored on your device which allows Apple to track your whereabouts at all times. They infer that this information could fall into the wrong hands – quoting that Apple has “made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements.”

That’s not entirely correct. It seems that since the previous iOS upgrade to version 4.0 that Apple has this unencrypted file that stays on your iPhone or iPad 3GS which stores location data and time derived from cell phone tower triangulation. Why it’s there is not known. It could be that Apple is using it to test for or prepare for some future feature to be released. In any case, a couple of smart researchers found the file and wrote a quick program to display the information on a map so that the issue could be brought more urgently to the public’s attention – and to presumably get Apple to do something about it. To their credit, the researchers purposely made the application a little “fuzzy” be blurring some of the location results even though the underlying data file is much more granular.

The issue seems to be whether users should a) be made aware ahead of time that this data is being collected (certainly seems like a privacy issue) and b) be given an opportunity to opt out of such collection. I guess both are reasonable points – although I might argue that the horse has already long left that barn. But in any case, for me, the real issue is that Apple wasn’t smart enough to put this data behind a firewall of some sort. The fact that this data file was so easily recognized and exploited is not good. On a day when Apple once again announced record earnings, they have a little egg on their face for sure. And now the government wants answers – well, at least Senator Franken (D-Minn.) does.

What do you do about this? Well, practice good fundamental security in the first place. Your iPhone and/or iPad should be password protected – particularly if you are an attorney and keep client information on it as I do. You set that under Settings:General:Password Lock. Also, you should use encrypted backups when syncing your device to your desktop computer. This is done in iTunes under the Summary:Options pane when you have your device connected and selected. And lastly, your desktop computer should also be password protected. You can provide for that by setting a password on Systems Preferences:Accounts. And I suppose you could always turn off your iPhone or iPad 3GS when you don’t want to be found. But that seems to defeat the purpose of having the phone.

1Password Is The Way to Go!

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1Password LogoAs I mentioned, one of my longstanding and only recently realized New Year’s resolutions was to get a handle on my password security. If you are like me, you have literally dozens, if not hundreds, of login/password combinations to try and manage. Email accounts, websites, bank accounts, etc. And like most people, it is easy to fall into the trap of just using one password for everything. And therein lies the problem. If the bad guys get hold of that one password, you have a big problem on your hands.

This is the issue that 1Password by Agile Web Solutions, Inc. solves – and does so darn near perfectly. The application is both a password management program and a password generator. So you can use the program to create incredibly complex random character/letter/number combination passwords that NSA might have trouble cracking. And once generated, you can have the program remember them so you don’t have to.

Here’s what you do. The application walks you through the setup process pretty easily. There are only two tricky points. One, you will have to come up with a master password. This is the key to unlocking 1Password (so that others can not get into it and discover all your secret password stuff). This is the only password you will then have to remember. Then, you tell 1Password where you want it to store your passwords. Here is where it gets interesting. There are 1Password applications that you can purchase for your iPhone and iPad as well as your mac computers. If you want all your passwords to be synced so that the protection features are shared across all the platforms you use, you have to store the 1Password keychain in a common space that all have access to. The suggested methodology is to use the popular DropBox application. Dropbox is free and very popular. Once you set up a DropBox account and place a special DropBox folder on each of your platforms, anything you put in it is shared across all platforms through the magic of the “cloud”. So storing your 1Password keychain in your DropBox folder makes it accessible to each platform that uses 1Password.

Once installed, 1Password looks over your shoulder and anytime you log into an account of some sort, it asks you if you want to remember that login information in 1Password. At this point you can save the login info, and better yet, use 1Password to change your password to a more secure one and replace the old. When you next go to that site or login, you can ask 1Password to fill in the pertinent password. And voila!

I think the cool thing is you can ask 1Password to remember logins (on websites that ask you for userid and password), accounts (such as email), identities (for all the information such as name, address, phone numbers, etc. that many sites ask for), software licenses, and wallets (bank accounts and credit cards). Given that I can sync all of my password data across my iMac, my PowerBook, my iPhone, and my iPad – I think this program is indispensable. I’m totally on board with it now and can’t for the life of me understand why it took me so long to start using it.

Give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.