Making Smart Phones Smarter

The smartphone revolution has allowed many lawyers to unchain themselves from the office. Everyday tasks such as signing a document or doing legal research would have been impossible to accomplish outside the office only a few years ago. But now, thanks to a growing number of apps that target the legal market, attorneys can truly practice law on the go. Here's a look at some of the best law-related apps around.

Fastcase
If you've ever found yourself sweating through your suit in a courtroom hallway wishing you had a few more cases to cite, Fastcase is for you. It's a surprisingly robust mobile law library for the iPhone that lets you search federal and state cases and statutes. Its legal database is extensive, and the app claims to have the largest free law library on the iPhone. You can search by keyword or citation, using smart-search technology that automatically bumps the most relevant cases to the top of your search query. The application is free, but you need to register and set up an account in order to access some of its more advanced features, such as compiling a search history. Free webinars are available online as well to teach you how to get the most out of the app [www.fastcase .com/iphone]. For legal research on the go, it's hard to beat Fastcase.

PocketJustice
Imagine all nine of the country's top judges locked inside your smartphone. That's the idea behind Pocket-Justice, the app that puts the U.S. Supreme Court in the palm of your hands. It features abstracts of the Court's constitutional decisions and access to recordings of its public sessions, plus an analysis of voting alignments and biographical sketches of all the justices. The app serves up hundreds of hours of oral arguments and offers synchronized, searchable transcripts that identify all the speakers. The latest free version - for iPhone and Android - has text and audio for the 100 most commonly cited constitutional law cases. The complete version with audio for all 600-plus constitutional law cases in the Supreme Court canon sells for $4.99.

Tasker
Tasker is a $5.99 Android app that lets you program your phone to perform a wide variety of actions based on the time of day, your location, the phone's orientation, and other variables. For example, you can set up Tasker to automatically turn off your ringer when the GPS sensor on your phone recognizes that you're in the courthouse. Or you can make it so your day starts with a particular application displayed on the home screen, or so the ringer turns itself off when your phone is facedown. Or you can preprogram it to secretly take a series of time-lapse photos. You can make your phone automatically set itself to "airplane mode" during the night to conserve the battery, but change back to standard mode every 15 minutes to check for voice mail and text messages. Or ... well, you get the idea. Tasker basically tricks out your smartphone and makes it a super-smartphone.

TimeClock
TimeClock makes it easy to track your billable hours as you are working and then transfer the data into a spreadsheet to create invoices. You simply input your hourly rate and the app calculates your total earnings. You can either track your time as you're working by clocking in and out on the app, or manually enter complete time records after the fact. The app also lets you store client contact information and track hours by client, location, or case. TimeClock costs $3.99 and is available through the Android Market. A similar app for the iPhone, called Timewerks, sells for $2.99. Now if only there were an app that convinces clients it's still a good idea to be charged by the hour.

JotNot Scanner Pro
This 99-cent iPhone app turns your cell phone into a portable document scanner - pretty handy when you're meeting a client outside the office and need to scan an agreement or other document to file away. Simply use your iPhone's camera to snap a picture of the document and the app saves the image to a compressed .zip file format, which you can then store, email, or share. JotNot automatically recognizes standard page sizes such as letter, A4, or best of all, legal. JotNot can scan anything - whiteboards, business cards, notes, photos - and it will batch multiple pages of a document to speed up the process. There's a similar app for Android phones called CamScanner ($4.99, or free for a limited version with ads).

Sign-N-Send
Lawyers have to sign a lot of documents, which has gotten to be a hassle in an age in which many forms are electronic. To sign an electronic document, you usually have to print it out, sign it, and then scan or fax it back to the sender. But the free iPhone app Sign-n-Send makes signing and sending back email attachments fast and easy, keeping the document in electronic form while you sign or make other annotations. You can write directly on any email attachment, or draw a text box to insert type anywhere in the document. It then generates a PDF of the finished document, embedding all signatures and annotation into the original image.

Dropbox
The biggest disadvantage to using a desktop computer, a laptop, and a smartphone is that a particular file can end up marooned on one device and inaccessible from all the others. That can be a real pain when the file you need right now isn't stored on the device in front of you. The free Dropbox app for iPhone and Android solves this problem forever. The popular Web-based storage service lets you store up to 2GB of files "in the cloud" so you can access them anywhere, from any device with an Internet connection (more space is available for a monthly fee). With Dropbox, you'll never have to store multiple copies of important files on every device you own. Simply drag one copy of the file to the Dropbox icon on your screen and you'll always be able to find it. Dropbox works with any type of file - Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, photos, or videos - and it lets you share any file with designated colleagues to create a central repository of work files. And since Dropbox doubles as a secure backup for files, you'll never have to worry about accidentally losing a file.

With this and other legal apps at your fingertips, there's no reason to feel chained to the office ever again.

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