Documents for corporate clients are kept on a secure Domino extranet. This includes copies of minutes, scans of stock certificates, and other information. All are instantly available anywhere in the world to those with appropriate permission.

TimeLine
For litigation we developed TimeLine. TimeLine tracks everything that's important to a case from the tiniest facts to the most obvious deadlines. In complex litigation, we're able to spot fact patterns and track issues that might have been missed using traditional techniques. In simpler cases, TimeLine gives us a power tool that previously couldn't be justified in smaller cases.

We feel TimeLine is better than off-the-shelf programs costing thousands of dollars for two reasons. The first reason is the power of Notes/Domino plumbing, something that's always there in every database, making even simple databases powerful. Tracking versions, security, Web, sharing, permissions, automatic knowledge base, replication, and remote functionality all are there, virtually automatically.

The second reason we feel TimeLine is better is subtler. No programmer knows what a practicing lawyer really needs, even if a lawyer attempts to tell the programmer. And few practicing lawyers have the programming skills of a professional programmer. However, Notes lets lawyers easily construct relatively complex, mission-critical applications at a level of power no programming novice would be able to do with another technology.

Probably, no one is more insistent on doing things "their way" than an individual lawyer. The computer revolution destroyed a lot of that individuality by forcing lawyers to change a large part of the way they operated to fit the programs forced upon them. Notes gives power back to the individual. Our Notes applications do what we want, the way we want.

The bottom line
Our staff is liberated to function at a higher level. Our legal knowledge is leveraged. We are freed to spend a higher percentage of time really practicing law. There's less menial work and more high-level thinking. Less spinning and more focusing. More shared knowledge and less lost knowledge. More inventing and less re-inventing.

In the practice of law, information is power. The ability to manipulate information is dynamic power. The ability to do it anywhere, anytime, is ecstasy.

You can't control what the facts of a case are. You can't control what the applicable law is. Therefore, to win a close case, you must control everything else that can be controlled. Notes makes that more doable. Anything that gives a lawyer an edge can be of incalculable worth.

Getting the databases done
The key is not to expect instant gratification. Our first custom Notes database was New Case Reports. This made electronic what previously was a paper report of every new matter in the office. Suddenly conflicts checks became easier. Simple things like looking up telephone numbers became easier.

The progenitor of TimeLine was begun next. This was a much tougher database. It took years for it to evolve into its current elegance, but in reality, it's never done. There are always things to tweak based on changing conditions or new techniques.