I have raved about this product before: Activewords is a Windows-based piece of software that will save you thousands of minutes of time per year. If you run Microsoft Windows then you need this product. You can try it free for 60 days, which –if you make the small effort to figure out what this software does– will make you a complete ActiveWords zealot.
My friend Roy Salvaggio, who is a 1st year law student at LSU has created a wordbase that makes finding Louisiana statutes and code provisions a snap. It also works with FRCP, FRE, and CFR’s. He plans on sharing it with his classmates. My guess is that the students at LSU will ‘get it’ and become amazingly productive.
One of the associates in our office wanted an ActiveWords ‘script’ that would take her to the Federal Court Pacer site for the EDLA and then input her username and password. I wrote the script for her and now she just types “edla” and poof she’s at the site and instantly logged in. Older lawyers , however, generally don’t “get” the power of this software, which is weird because they are the ones who need it the most. Basically, you can tell your computer what you want done by simply defining a word that you use to invoke the magic action. Like “Shazam.” Who doesn’t want to do that?
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