Although posting to my blog has been sporadic, at best, fortunately for paralegals, Jeannie Johnston has tirelessly worked for over six years to build ParalegalGateway.com into the world's largest gathering place and information resource center for paralegals. I look forward to collaborating with Jeannie on some projects in the future. So, check out ParalegalGateway.com, "Where Paralegals Connect," and subscribe to the Yahoo! Group, to stay in the loop.
The best tech purchase that I made in the last year, by far, is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500. My theory on scanning is that if it takes longer than making a photocopy, it's counter-productive. The ScanSnap more than fills the bill, with color and black-and-white duplex scanning, at up to 18 pages per minute. Although it doesn't support TWAIN (necessary to interface with a broad range of image-scanning programs), it comes bundled with the full version of Adobe Acrobat 7.o0, and can scan directly to Microsoft Office applications via the included ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap software. Superbly designed to fold up like a clamshell and automatically turn off/on when closed/opened, the ScanSnap is not only compact and light-weight, it's almost portable. It even scans business cards, and comes with software that uses OCR to help organize and manage them. A bargain at only $409.99 at NewEgg (and with a $50 rebate if you buy before March 31), you could have this little gem at the ready before tax time. Considering that Adobe Acrobat 7.0 now goes for about $150 (with Acrobat 8 going for about $299), the bottom line expense is in the neighborhood of a hundred bucks.
Thanks to Kenneth G. Miller, Attorney at Law, for the great find.
After quite some time away (more than I had planned, of course), I am finally putting a few things together for my blog. The main impetus to crank it up again was learning about amazing new technology by Cirilab, which might just revolutionize the way that paralegals and lawyers work. As tech-savvy law firms transition to the paperless office of the future, Cirilab's technology can be used to leverage unstructured datastores lurking in your electronic case files by "reading" and analyzing all manner of information. The above Mindjet mind map suggests a few applications to consider.
For more information, see my review of Cirilab's software in the latest issue of Legal Assistant Today.
