3 Apps We Use to Get Things Done in Our Law Office

The more things changed for us during the pandemic, the more they stayed the same. We are a small but nimble office. We were perfecting the art of remote and distributed work before the 2020 came and forced the rest of the world to move in that direction.

I want to take a minute to tell you about some of the apps that we use to get work done, to communicate within our team, and to collaborate with other lawyers.

The WordPress P2 Theme

Email is a huge part of work. And there is no way to escape it. And it is still very much a part of how we communicate with outside counsel, with clients, the courts, etc. But my team relies on email very little for intraoffice communication.

For instant messages, we sometimes use Slack. But for the bulk of our communication, we use P2 – a blogging platform.

WordPress powers most of the blogs and websites you use. And WordPress, itself works out of a distributed model, with its team members working all over the world. How do they communicate with one another: you guessed it – through the P2 blog theme.

I first learned about how WordPress uses P2 in a set of blog posts and podcasts I Iistened to with their founder – here’s a good summary.

Pro Tip: Communication is like oxygen to a company. And the way we work makes it flow even better.

LiquidText

We work on big cases and big cases are document intensive. For our appeals, there are transcripts and for our trial level cases, the discovery comes at us by the terabyte.

LiquidText helps us review it all. It allows us to take lengthy document, annotate them, and arrange them to a single page.

We recently used LiquidText in a huge criminal case with a 50,000 page transcript. That’s how great it is!

Dictate + Connect

 I came of age as a lawyer at the end of the era of dictation. I was trained, in my summers between 1L and 2L year, in Dictaphones. I would dictate letters, transcript summaries, and even short motions. And, like magic, documents would appear on my desk later in the date. With Dictate+, I do all of that on my phone from wherever I am, email them to my paralegal, and the documents magically appear in my inbox later in the day.

Apps to Make a Lawyer’s Life Easier and Better

We power all this software with iPad Pros and MacBook pros, which we all use at home, when we occasionally make a cameo appearance at the office and in court.

There are plenty of other apps we use, but these are the three we use on a daily basis to get the work done efficiently and nimbly.