Afternoon Legal Links ... The iPad now has a TrialPad app -- and lawyers are loving it ... Why writing skills may be the most important skill a paralegal can have ... What it means when law firms and startups give away legal documents -- and how its changing the legal industry From the latest edition of iPhone J.D. -- Lawyers using iPhones & iPads -- comes a story from attorney Christopher Abernathy, a family law attorney in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. It seems that Abernathy is in love with the new TrialPad app from Apple -- which bills itself as the award winning iPad app that’s the easiest and most effective way to organize and present evidence -- and he thinks you would like it, too. Writes Abernathy: Each evening, in preparation for the following work day, I copy files to a “Court Files” subfolder. A client file is then created and set up in TrialPad. This allows me to create a trial folder which can be expanded and organized over time. For each court appearance, documents are placed into the appropriate client TrialPad folder, organized and annotated. By the time of trial, minimal preparation is required. At the end of each court appearance, the files in Dropbox are deleted, while files in TrialPad remain locally on my iPad. Sounds pretty cool!: bit.ly/1wcwfc1 The Legal Talk Network has dedicated an entire podcast to the writing skills of paralegals and why theyre so important. After all, paralegals and paralegal students often have difficulty developing their writing skills to the level expected from legal industry. The legal professionals rely heavily on both verbal and written communication, and writing is an essential necessity for both lawyers and legal secretaries. Because the other employees in a law firm will not tolerate inadequate writing skills, all paralegals need to learn to write in a concise and precise manner with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. But how should they get started? Heres how: bit.ly/1DGzrW5 Over the past five years, law firms in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston have put online – for free – the documents that startups need to execute basic legal transactions. New sites, Cooley GO and WHLaunch, join first-movers Founders’ Workbench and Start-Up Forms Library, to enable entrepreneurs to incorporate their company, secure early-stage financing, hire employees and compensate them with stock options. SeriesSeed has emerged as an industry standard for documenting seed investments, and StartupCompanyLawyer offers answers to over 100 frequently asked questions, along with a term-sheet generator. But as big law firms mimic their small clients’ “freemium” business development model, they face increasing competition from startup companies seeking to disrupt the legal industry: tcrn.ch/17yt7m9
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:12:21 +0000
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