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Smartphone productivity apps for lawyers
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: February 8, 2013
Here are some free and not-so-free smartphone apps that can help lawyers along.
Prismatic (getprismatic.com). Prismatic creates what amounts to a personal RSS feed from your own social network pages, combining interest-information and news sharing. Users choose what to hear about from their Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Currently only for iOS; getting rave reviews.
CloudOn. (in the Google or iOS app store; free). CloudOn brings Microsoft Office (all of it) to your device through cloud computing and links it to your Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive accounts. Also view .pdfs and fill out.pdf forms. It can also access your cloud storage accounts. Powerful and well-reviewed.
Sparrow (three bucks). This app unifies all of your email addresses into one inbox. iPhone only and does not yet have push capabilities, but is well-reviewed. Provides “an efficient and pleasant emailing experience.”
Paper. This is a drawing program for the iPad that takes your funky scribbles and turns them into polished sketches. Sort of a smart whiteboard. For non-artists who need to share ideas in drawn form with friends (via Tumblr, FB or Twitter) or juries. Basic app is free, extra tools will cost you.
Pocket (which used to be known as ReadItLater). Save interesting things found online and read them later. Share across devices. Pocket creates thumbnails of the saved material, and can save into Evernote. Free.
Zite. Free push-news app designed to get smarter about what you want to read or see over time. Kind of a more disciplined, push-based cross between StumbleUpon and Google News.
Google Drive. A very powerful way to manage content on a handheld device.
Brewster. A contact management tool that combines all of your social platform contact information into one “book” interface. It uses images and tiles rather than text.
Khan Academy. Want a quick overview of a topic before an expert testifies? Khan Academy stores over 3500 free video tutorials on a wide range of topics, including K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and the humanities with playlists on finance and history.
Remember: don’t buy a smartphone that is smarter than you. Then the client will want to hire the phone.