This article originally appeared on the Affinity Consulting July 2013 newsletter on legal technology.

The overall theme for the July newsletter is efficiency in legal practice, with special emphasis on paperless office and time management. In an earlier Mac Corner article I discussed being able to work from anywhere using a program called Byword. This Mac program, and its iOS companion apps, allow you to work wherever you are on the same document seamlessly. Today, I’d like to discuss several tools that can help you be more efficient in the office.

Off the top of my head I can think of five excellent programs that are immeasurably valuable for modern Mac lawyers.

Paper Management

The first two programs are paper management programs. On the Windows side of the fence we are often overwhelmed with choices. You can get a document management system like Worldox that costs several hundred dollars or, further up the price scale, a program like iManage Worksite that costs many thousands of dollars. Or you could simply be overwhelmed with paper. We on the Mac side have no enterprise class applications (although Worldox is beta-testing a Mac front-end to its cloud-based offering), but we do have many affordable and understandable options for the small practice.

Two programs that spring immediately to mind are Devon Technologies’ program DEVONthink Pro Office and Ironic Software’s program Yep. Depending on your approach to document management, one of these programs will be more appropriate. DEVONthink Pro Office integrates very well with Affinity’s preferred scanner, the Fujitsu ScanSnap, and allows you to import any number of document types, as well as emails. You can have separate databases for each client. It is also the more expensive of the two, coming in at $150.

Yep, on the other hand, is available in the Mac App Store, and costs $26. While it is not nearly so feature rich, its fewer options may bring you closer to a paperless practice because it is so approachable. Yep allows you to tag documents, just as DEVONThink Pro Office allows, but it requires you to manage your own case folder structure, and does not have the concept of a different file database for each case or client. This is a limitation you can mitigate with some efficient use of Automator Actions. Email me if you would lick advice on these.

Time Management

If you’re going paperless with your documents, you should do the same with your “to do” lists. This is a fertile area of software development on Macs. The simplest way to convert paper lists to electronic would be a program like Evernote, which has both a free option and a $45/year subscription. Evernote’s stated goal is ubiquitous capture and retrieval. If there’s an electronic platform, chances are excellent that Evernote has a client for it. It certainly covers Mac and iOS very well with a native desktop client on the Mac and apps for the iPhone and iPad.

Evernote serves as an electronic notepad and pen that you always have with you. It has templates for checklists, to do lists, numbered and unnumbered lists. In the individual note “pages” you can store images, PDFs, or MS Office documents. You could create separate electronic notebooks for each client, or type of case, depending on you case volume. Apart from managing client and case information, you could have a notebook that contained case citations and excerpts tagged “Summary Judgment Standard,” “Statute of Limitations,” et cetera. You could attach the highlighted PDFs from West Law or Lexis. It’s free to try.

If you reach Evernote’s limits and your “to do” lists become projects with multiple steps and deadlines, it’s time to move a program that easily embraces the idea of projects, steps, and deadlines.

On the Mac, one of the most interesting things that you can do time management-wise is to get a GTD (Getting Things Done) program. Such programs allow you to track all of your “to do” items in one place, just like Evernote. All of the better programs have iPhone and iPad applications that sync seamlessly with the main database on your Mac, also like Evernote. The differentiator between Evernote and GTD programs is that GTD software is designed to have you break down “to do” tasks like “motion for summary judgment” into individual, concrete steps like: “research question 1,” “research question 2,” “write factual background section,” et cetera. As an experienced attorney, you know intuitively the steps to draft a motion, but we all get busy. The point of a GTD approach to practice management is to avoid missing key steps or rushing through work in a time-crunch.

The two leading Mac programs in this area are OmniFocus, $80, and Things, $50. Both offer companion iOS apps and over-the-air sync to update your data while you’re away from the office. The big differentiator between these two programs is how closely they follow David Allen’s philosophy of GTD, which he created with his well-known book Getting Things Done, in 2001. If you are somewhat familiar with a paper version of Getting Things Done, then OmniFocus is a natural fit. If on the other hand, you’re coming from a situation of no time management or project management tool, then Things is probably a more approachable solution. Let me know if you’d like to discuss which option is a better fit for your needs.

Conclusion

I hope this article served as a good starting point to bring paper and time management to your Mac. There are more sophisticated steps we could discuss, such as Automator Actions or Noodlesoft’s fantastic automation utility, Hazel, $28, which lets you automate a ridiculous number of Mac features dealing with documents. But, we have a good start here. Invest in a ScanSnap, a must, and then either DEVONThink or Yep, one of the three “to do” managers, and hit the ground running on a paperless practice for less that $1,000.

July 2, 2013