LegalTech 2005 – Hot Tips!!!

Lots of hot tips came from LegalTech, many of which were not new to me.  Here are three that completely rock!  Okay, the last one was not something I learned at LegalTech, but it’s still cool, so check ’em all out.

1. Anagram – I knew about this program from my friend Buzz, whose company makes Activewords (more about that later).  Anagram is free to try for 45 days and, believe me, after you try it you won’t be able to live without it.  It’s $19.95 after that, and it’s worth 5 times that amount easily.  Here’s what it does.  You can highlight and copy the contact information at the bottom of someone’s email to you (or from a webpage, or anywhere really) and have that information pop into Outlook’s contact manager.  It also works with Palm Desktop, but only on Windows (so no good news here for Mac users).   If you don’t have the Palm Desktop, remember it’s a free download and if you put information in the Palm Desktop you should be able to export it quickly to other programs.  If you care about managing contacts, or about marketing, then you need to use Anagram.  Oh, and it works for adding appointments too.  Look, stop reading this and just go download the free trial.  Then, make a note to thank me later.
2. Accurint – is a fast, inexpensive way of locating people.  It’s not available to everyone, but most lawyers can qualify for an account if they have a legitimate business purpose.  Accurint is run by Lexis/Nexis.  I think the individual searches are less than $10/per search, which is very affordable if you are looking for an elusive witness, or potential defendant.
3. Activewords – I already knew about this, but maybe you don’t.  It’s another efficiency tool that is free to try for 60 days, after which you will become addicted and gladly pay the $49.95 for the Plus version, which lets you use an Outlook plug-in (scroll down).  It’s hard to describe what Activewords does, but I tried when I first started blogging and that’s still my best explanation.  Here’s the PC World article that talks about it.

Errata from LegalTech (not mine, some other guy’s):

One well known presenter at LegalTech, for whom I have respect and therefore won’t refer to by name, was talking about Wireless networking and about increasing security by ‘MAC filtering.’  He explained what a ‘MAC address’ was, saying that ‘MAC’ stood for ‘machine readable code.’  I wrote that down in my notes because I was sure it was wrong, and when I got home I checked to verify what MAC stands for. 

I know at this point I’m talking to only two or three complete geeks, but MAC refers to media access control, not machine readable code.  It’s a little thing, but then if you are going to define a term for an audience you should at least get the definition right.