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| TrialWorks 97 | Case Management Litigation Support Practice Specific |
 TrialWorks 97, developed by several
partners at a Miami law firm, portrays itself as "case management, litigation support
and document management software." A tall order, but TrialWorks 97 comes as close to
delivering as anything on the market.The heart of the program is the relocation of your file cabinet into your computer, using the file-folder-with-tabs metaphor that lawyers prefer. Thus, the main screen for each case has tabs for Correspondence, Pleadings, Depositions and Docu-ments. The real cleverness of Trial-Works 97, however, is that it harnesses the power and scope of the Microsoft Office 97 suite, while giving those applications a lawyer-friendly face. Click on the Correspondence tab and you are at a screen which lists information about all correspondence you have sent and received. As with all information maintained throughout TrialWorks 97, the data is stored in an Access database. The Correspondence database includes author, recipient, date, subject matter and file name. Each column can be sorted and filtered using the standard Access tools. Thus, for example, all correspondence to Mr. Smith concerning settlement can be isolated easily. Each letter can be viewed full-text with a mouse click. Moreover, letters can be generated from this screen, in either Word or WordPerfect, and they will be already formatted on data you inputted at the outset of the case. The Pleadings screen functions similarly. All pleadings are listed with descriptive information and can be sorted and viewed. New pleadings are created in Word or WordPerfect. The Depositions tab reflects a database of depositions taken, including the full text imported from an ASCII disk. The Documents tab offers outstanding organizational features. Each document has a record listing the usual data (author, recipient, etc.) but also of key words, which can be issue codes or terms. Every document can be linked to one or more witnesses. Each document can be captured fulltext. There are also standard reports for witness lists and exhibit lists, as well as the ability to customize reports. In short, TrialWorks 97 transforms the mass of paper in your file cabinet into quickly searchable, sortable databases, saving vast amounts of time and effort. But in addition to these functions, offered in other formats by several litigation support applications, TrialWorks 97 provides the following unique features: 1. A Contacts tab permits entry of all of the usual data (plus a picture!) and links automatically to Outlook. 2. A Research tab contains hyperlinks to the Web sites for legal research and room to add your own. 3. A Settlement tab permits running entries on each contact or discussion, especially helpful if more than one person in the firm is involved in the negotiations. 4. A Presentation tab employs PowerPoint to create presentations from the documents, testimony and other data stored in the program. The only major drawback to TrialWorks 97 is its limited search capacity. Depositions can only be searched for a keyword one deposition at a time, and the same applies to documents, although the fields containing author and other data can be searched universally. Additionally, depositions cannot be annotated as in Summation or other similar programs. The seriousness of these weaknesses depends on the size and complexity of your cases. |
Legal Vision, Inc. (800) 377-5844 www.trialworks.com Windows 95 $695 single user, $495 for additional users Reviewed by Howard Daniels, U.S. Attorney's Office, Los Angeles, Calif. |
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