CaseMap: Coolest Thing Since Sliced Bread
Over the past few years I have become quite fond of the CaseSoft product CaseMap which is now up to version 6. It is a software program which allows you to manage an individual case in a way that will put all the information in the file at your fingertips so that it can be retrieved and organized with ease.
If you are like me, your individual case files take on a life of their own and grow exponentially. Many hours are often wasted hunting for that one document, that one phrase in a document, that excerpt from a deposition and so on. How many of you have picked up a copy of a deposition bristling with post it notes and were not sure what the post it notes were marking in the first place.
CaseMap 6 takes care of these problems. The software is essentially a series of spreadsheets that can be manipulated. There is a spreadsheet to keep track of the facts in the case, one to keep track of the characters in the case be they individuals or organizations, one to keep track of documents in the case, one to keep track of issues in the case, one to keep track of questions as they pop up and one to keep track of research. The fact spreadsheet allows you to keep track of the source of the fact, be it from a witness or a document. You can link to the exact deposition testimony that supports the fact with the addition of TextMap 2, also a product of CaseSoft. CaseMap 6 also links with Acrobat PDFs so that you can link directly to a certain document or page in a document. The spreadsheet of documents allows you to link directly to the documents both in PDF and your word processor documents. Both the fact and document spreadsheets link to the issue spreadsheet so that you can see which fact or document supports which issue. All of the spreadsheets allow you to add many other categories and customize your own categories.
The software can also sort and filter the information and print reports. You can sort out all of the facts attributable to one person or sort out the disputed and undisputed facts. CaseMap 6 also features a summary judgment function which sorts out the undisputed facts and ties them in to the various issues in the case. You can sort out the facts that are the most favorable to your case and those that are most favorable to the other side.
CaseMap 6 also has an Adobe plug in which allows you to bate stamp all of your PDF documents. Your staff will appreciate this to no end. Before, when you were done bate stamping and discovered that you didn't include a document which should go somewhere in the middle of the stack, you probably did something like stamp the document 100299 and then wrote in an "A" at the end of the number. With CaseMap you can simply renumber the whole stack in seconds.
I am only touching the surface of the product in this post as to comment on all of the features would take up entirely too much space on a blog. A couple of examples of the efficiencies this program provides may give you a good idea of what it can do. Imagine you are getting ready for trial and you want to gather all of your sources for your cross examination. CaseMap allows you to print them all out grouped for each individual witness. Compare that to making copies of deposition pages and documents that have been dug out of the file. Imagine a question arises as to whether or not certain evidence is admissible. The question can be assigned, for instance, to an associate who then does the research and enters it into CaseMap. Later you can come back and link between that certain piece of evidence and the research that allows its' admissibility.
I realize that this may be old news to many out there in the blawgosphere, but to any who have not checked it out it is certainly worth a look see. I also understand that CaseSoft was recently purchased by Lexis.
