Strategic Legal Technology

Legal Tech begins tomorrow and I am in position at the NY Hilton. With the show’s emphasis on e-discovery and enterprise systems, we can easily forget that personal productivity is still an important legal technology goal . So, before the din of reports on enterprise systems from Legal Tech coming this week, I report here on three personal productivity tools I’ve been using since the December holiday season, to excellent benefit. 

Desktop Search with X1. In 2009, I had to uninstall Google Desktop Search because it seemed to crash Outlook. (Well, that’s what my IT advisors told me and after uninstalling, the crashes stopped.) For some time, I lived without desktop search, which was painful. I’ve now been using X1 ® Professional Client Version 6.2.4 for about 5 weeks. I find it very useful and better than Google for the most part. It’s intuitive interface allows _fast_ searching of e-mail or files (a tabbed interface allows selecting other categories such as Inbox or music). Fields allow searching by meta data such as sender, subject, or date for e-mail and document type or path for files. X1 provides a viewer for most file types, though I personally don’t use it that much. Working from the search result list, it’s very easy to open files or the file directory in which the file sits. Personally, I like it better than Google Desktop. The only thing I can think of that it does not do that Google does is index web pages visited. (One tech note for install: I had some clutter in my Outlook profiles, meaning some old ones. X1 found these and wanted to index files that no longer existed. This forced me to clean-up old profiles, which is probably a good idea anyway.)

E-mail Autofiling with Xiant. I have long been impressed by Decisiv by Recommind, a product for automatically filing e-mail. That has not been available to me but late last year I read about Xiant Filer for automatically filing e-mail messages. Xiant is a company started by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. Xiant integrated easily with Outlook and saves me a lot of time filing messages (individual messages and threads, including replies, which means I now rarely need to file sent messages - a huge savings in time). I know some people think filing is a waste of time, that with products like X1, you can find messages. But I personally still find it useful to be able to scan a folder of related messages so that I can see the history of a project. I’ve used Xiant a few weeks and its recommended folders are typically good picks and seem to improve over time as it “reads” more of my e-mail and “sees” my filing choices. Though not billed as a feature, Xiant has the benefit of allowing me to find where in my extensive list of nested folders a particular folder sits. Can you tell I am splitter and not a lumper? [Tech note: At least for my install, the buttons Xiant adds to each messages for auto-filing do not work; I can only file from my inbox. Also, though I have three views / windows of Outlook open, the Xiant buttons appear only on one of them. I have not sought tech support to resolve these issues.)

Ease Tweeting with HootSuite. HootSuite is a web site that simplifies writing and reading Tweets across multiple Twitter accounts (and other social media though I only use it for Twitter). I like it’s multi-column interface better than the native Twitter interface, though I continue to use the latter in some instances (e.g., searching Twitter).

[As usual, the above are my opinions and I have received no consideration from any of the vendors / products reviewed here.]