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| Summation Blaze 5.2 Platinum Edition | Litigation Support |
 Summation Blaze is a mature legal product whose primary purpose is the
organization, searching and summarization of legal documents. The program uses a filing
cabinet metaphor to organize jobs, folders for your various cases, and sub-folders for the
various documents in those cases which you load onto your hard disk.After loading your documents, you "Blaze" the documents (e.g., index them), either separately or all at once. After blazing, you can do almost anything you ever thought of with your text. The searching and summarizing capabilities of this program do not stop at the boundary of a document or case: You can search, summarize and create reports on any set of documents. The program also creates a list of all words in the document, much like the word list you can order as part of a deposition. Double clicking a word in the list opens a window showing the location of every occurrence of the word in your documents. This also causes the program to display the first occurrence of the word in the main window. You can also jump occurrence to occurrence to see the term used in context. Using the various search methods Summation offers (including a "fuzzy search" which finds words similar to the search word), you can then select all of the text in the deposition, contract, correspondence -- whatever your text is -- that relates to each issue of interest for what you are doing. After all of the text is associated with each issue, you can print out reports summarizing this information. Notes can be associated with parts of the transcript and categorized by issue. Scanned images and voice messages can also be attached to transcript notes. The Platinum Edition's Bar Code feature is increasingly useful as multimedia presentations become more and more common in court as well as in meetings. With a compatible bar code scanner, you can mark any part of any document or image, print out a bar code from the program, and with a swipe of the bar code scanner, instantly bring up the parts of the transcript or images selected onto your monitor or LCD projector. If you have been to a legal seminar lately, you have probably seen a bar code system in action. This bar code system is almost infallible. New features and enhancements in Blaze 5.2 include the ability to drag-and-drop transcripts into the program, link a document summary to the document itself in its native format (Word, .pdf, etc.) and link multiple documents to the document summary (an image of the document as well as an electronic version). The most exciting new feature is the ability to capture real-time deposition or trial transcription from a computer attached to your stenographer's keypad. All you need is a free communications port. Your stenographer needs to be able to send output in Caseview version 4 or 5 to your computer. From the lawyer's point of view, setup is accomplished with a wizard, and all you need to know is the COM port you are connected to and the baud rate setting from the court reporter's computer (it should usually be set to 2400 baud). If you set up the issues you want to flag beforehand, you can simply click on the transcript as it flows across your screen to mark the text as associated with that issue. You can also set up a list of words (with an association to an issue) for the program to automatically mark every time the deponent says the word. Text flow can be stopped so that you can examine and notate the transcript; resume automatic scrolling with a mouse click. I tested Summation's new real-time capability with my court reporter and found it to be very efficient. One note of caution about this program overall: If you don't put all of the relevant data into the program, your reports won't contain all of the relevant information. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. This program does take a commitment to set up properly so that it can be fully utilized. The description of the searching and other capabilities of this program in this review does not even scratch the surface of the features of this program. Summation is available in several different flavors with different features. I reviewed its more robust configuration, which included higher-end options like OCR and a bar code system. See Summation's Web site for details on what each edition includes. One pet peeve: The program was designed to allow use of the Microsoft Intellimouse Wheel, which allows you scroll through a document by sliding the wheel towards you. If you are going to read documents on your computer monitor, you spend a lot of time scrolling. Summation's Mouse wheel support, however, works only sporadically. In testing, it seemed to work more consistently in Windows 95 than 98. If you are reading a 200-page deposition on a computer screen, the lack of consistent mouse wheel support detracts from the otherwise stellar functionality of this program. |
Summation Legal Technologies Inc. (800) 735-7866 www.summation.com Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0 $2,495 for Platinum Edition Reviewed by Steve Schmidt, attorney, Singer, Smith & Williams, Albuquerque, N.M. PROS |
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