TrialPad 4.0: Trial Presentation Made Easy, by Todd Hendrickson, Lawyerist Blog

http://lawyerist.com/74651/trialpad-trial-presentation/

I recently put TrialPad 4.0 through its paces during  a two-week trial — but not from the start. As in the past, I felt to overwhelmed to add figure out a new app to my trial prep to-do list.

So I started trial using Acrobat to display documents. I am very comfortable with Acrobat, and I knew I would not have to wonder about how to find a particular feature or function in the middle of trial.

After all, like most paperless lawyers, I use Acrobat on a daily basis. But by day two of what I knew would be a two-week trial, I was frustrated with the limitations of Acrobat, particularly the inability to do a call-out on the fly. This was hampering my ability to really emphasize key pieces of evidence.

A heavenly light should have descended.

I had a copy of TrialPad from Ian O’Flaherty, who developed it. Ian was kind enough to provide me with a code to download TrialPad at no cost. This is probably why I felt no need to use it, since I wasn’t invested in it. But now I had to get up and running overnight if I wanted to use something better than Acrobat during my trial. And I did get up and running overnight. I went back to my hotel room, loaded up the documents I knew I would be working with the next day, ran through the process of presenting and annotating, and then set back to prepare for the next day of trial.

With more than a little trepidation, I hooked my iPad up to my projector the next day at trial.

A heavenly light should have descended. I’m not kidding, TrialPad was nearly magical. To say that ease of use is built in is a vast understatement. . . .