November 9, 2009 by Jim Fiorato
With the latest release of Nextpoint Trial and Nextpoint Review, you now have the ability to apply bates stamps and bates numbers to your documents in a flash. Say goodbye to any manual stamping processes you do today. No ink stamping of each page, no applying stickers, those days are done. You can also say goodbye to applying a bates number and throwing that valuable document identification information away.
When you’re ready to stamp, go ahead and perform your search or filter, select your docs, and click the “Bates Stamp” button.
Bates Stamp
Nextpoint also puts the ability to flexibly configure the stamping of your documents in your control. You can add as many lines as you like to the stamp, choose to stamp every page in the document, and control the start number of the stamp.
Bates Template Configuration
And one of the best things is that as we store this identification number in the Nextpoint database, so you can filter and search ranges with it, and really put that number to work for you. Also, with our cloud processing infrastructure, we can scale to stamp tens of thousands of documents for you in a jiffy.
You’re going to love this feature, and it’ll save you and your staff a ton of time.
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We’ve recently rolled out some really powerful tools to account administrators in Nextpoint. It’s been a long time in the works and we’re happy to announce that qualifying Nextpoint accounts now include a powerful dashboard to monitor usage across all case databases and to customize the application to match their firm brand.
Usage and Statistics:
The Nextpoint dashboard shows a usage summary for each case and totals across the entire account. There is a ton of detail including database/storage sizes for every category of data that can be broken down by day or processing statistics that get as granular as every import batch. If you need a quick view of storage and access or are looking for something much more detailed, the dashboard is the place to go.
Customization:
We like our brand at Nextpoint, but recognize that you like yours too. We now have powerful tools that allow account administrators to customize the look and feel of the Nextpoint applications. You can choose colors, logo, and favicon to blend the application feel with your own brand and you can also customize the URL.
We hope you enjoy the new power of Nextpoint Account Dashboards. As always, please get in touch if you have any questions.
Posted in New Features, Tips & Tricks, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
One of the things people love about our presentation tool Theater is the ability to use our powerful search engine to locate and open any document from the trial database. Sometimes you just don’t have a handle on a exhibit or bates number and it’s great to find documents using titles or even text from the documents. But other times when you are in the midst of a witness examination in trial you need a super fast tool to pull up docs using their exhibit numbers or witness tab id’s. So recently we rolled out some improvements to make switching documents from within the presentation window simple and fast.
To switch documents in Theater, simply hit ‘f’ (for “find”) to get focus on the find box, type in the exhibit number (e.g. P-1 or Px1), and hit enter. If you prefer to find an internal page you can add a space followed by the page number (P-1 4) and you’ll immediately go to that page of the document. And in cases where you have saved document treatments, another space followed by the treatment number will jump immediately to that treatment (P-1 4 1). This makes it a breeze to keep up with a witness examination that’s moving along quickly.
Simply enter the exhibit number (“p-37″) to jump to the desired document.
Entering “p-37 1 3″ is showing the third document treatment for page one of plaintiff exhibit 37.
In some situations, you might run into multiple matches for the entered value. In this case we provide a simple drop-down that you can activate using the enter key that will show additional information about the duplicate matches. Using the arrow keys you can select the document you were looking for and enter to open it in Theater. If the value entered doesn’t match any documents in your trial database, a small and discreet warning icon is displayed allowing you to quickly try again.
These changes are already available and being used live in court as we write this post. We hope you find value in them as well.
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Making designations in a transcript has traditionally been done via the old standby: the highlighter. It’s great for visually calling out a few sentences and thanks to the good folks at Crayola, you can even use yellow in certain cases and pink in others! … but when you take things electronic, you know you can do better (web tour, video).
On printed paper, you need that sentence to be as bright as possible, so you can actually find it when you’re frantically flipping through the stack later. Electronically though? Any product worth your time is going to provide easy (and well-organized) access to anything you’ve designated.
And what about when the same sentence (or sub/super sets) need to belong to different designations? We’ve all had that really enjoyable experience of the green/yellow/pink highlighters coming together to form such a lovely shade of bleh.
These factors and more came together to lead us to our original “marked in the margin” style of designations. Multiple designations in the same area? Some w/notes attached and others not? No problem.
Of course, as with any technological solution, sometimes it’s nice to be able to head back to the old standby. One of our new export options will provide that capability via the “Enable Background Highlighting” export option.
When background highlighting is enabled, the background of the designated text in the PDF is highlighted. We keep your sidebar denotation of “multiple designations” but with the additional familiarity of the highlighted text.
Posted in EDD, Featured Feature, New Features, Tips & Tricks | Tagged Deposition, designation, highlighting, Transcript | Leave a Comment »
Creating and organizing treatments has never been easier, but what about when you’re ready to take them with you?
Request an export (by any Designation Label or Issue) via the new sidebar widget on the bottom-right corner of your “Documents Landing Page”:
The result is a PDF that contains the original version of each page, alongside the corresponding treatment(s). It’s great to be paperless but exporting to PDF (and then printing) can be a very handy tool when preparing offline.
Posted in Featured Feature, New Features | Tagged callouts, document treatments, export, theater | Leave a Comment »
Until recently, we’ve focussed on document treatment creation as a trial preparation feature. Our create-on-the-fly interface (demo video) has drawn raves reviews in the legal industry, and beyond. It provides our clients with a big advantage in court: create something that looks impressive and focuses the audience, literally in seconds.
Building on our existing tools, we’ve recently introduced new organizational features to make advance preparation more of an automated process. Treatments may now (optionally) be linked to Designation Labels and Issues, providing an easy way to retrieve documents with related treatments.
Search to locate key docs, preparing for the deposition of a key witness.
Callout text, highlight, etc to create your document treatment.
When saving the treatment, categorize it by Designation Label or Issue.
Repeat the above steps to create as many treatments as you like. When finished, quickly recall a list of documents to make your final preparations via the Documents homepage.
You’ll also be able to view any Designation Labels applied to a treatment when previewing all treatments for a document.
Posted in Featured Feature, New Features | Tagged callouts, document organization, document treatments, theater | Leave a Comment »
July 15, 2009 by Jim Fiorato
Why is it that in all the introductions to cloud computing we read, the emphasis on processing power is unaccounted for?
The cloud is processing power. The cloud is having 100s or even 1,000s of servers doing work for you for pennies on the dollar. The cloud is about having access to an infrastructure that IT departments drool over. The cloud gives you the ability to turn on servers like turning on all the lights at Wrigely, but at the cost of just a few incandescent bulbs.
So much of the cloud is about power. We shouldn’t miss that point. It’s a big one.
Posted in Deep Thoughts | Tagged cloud, cloud computing, computing power, processing | Leave a Comment »
With many upload formats, we can auto-detect and set standard metadata fields for your deposition & courtroom transcripts, but what about when the format isn’t playing nice? It can be mildly annoying to manually key the data for a single transcript, but doing it for a larger set can be downright frustrating.
Not a problem; by including a loadfile, you’ll have all of your meta preset on completion of your import… So, how does it work?
1. Gather your transcripts/depositions together (most simply by putting ‘em under some main directory).
2. Create a csv loadfile in that directory with metadata information.
- Courtroom transcript loadfiles should be named “transcripts.csv” and contain the fields: filename, date, title, description
- Deposition transcript loadfiles should be named “depositions.csv” and contain the fields: filename, date, volume, lastname, firstname, middleinit, name_suffix, deposition_type
3. Create a zip file of the transcripts, depositions, and loadfiles, and load it as a batch of depositions or transcripts. The information from the loadfiles will take precedence over other information, so you can even combine depositions and transcripts into one batch.
Notes:
- The filename is full path/name to the file, relative to the location of the loadfile. (If the filename starts with “/”, it’s an absolute path within the zip file.)
- The name_suffix is like “Jr.”, “M.D.”, “III”, etc.
- The deponent_type corresponds to deponent types in the web app, and defaults to “General”.
- The fields are expected to be in-order just like in an OLL file, so make sure you include a blank for any data you don’t have, such as a middle initial.
- You’re welcome to include a row with the column headings for your reference; it will be automatically detected and ignored by the importer.
- The importer will try to auto-detect any information you don’t specify through the loadfile, such as a volume number, etc.
The rest of the fields should be fairly self-explanatory. As always, we’re more than happy to assist with any questions or troubleshooting via your Nextpoint rep or at support@nextpoint.com.
Posted in Featured Feature, Tips & Tricks | Tagged Deposition, loadfile, processing, Transcript | Leave a Comment »
Whether you’re a Mac or a PC, one thing is for certain: The Mac ranks in the legal world have never been stronger and continue to grow. The conversion is not without it’s bumps and bruises, as many are discovering when it comes to viewing transcripts stored in the PTX format.
One of the great benefits of web-based applications is the ability to be (largely) hardware/operating system independent. We’re announcing our most recent example: PTX support on the Nextpoint trial application. By bringing PTX support to the web, users with any mix of hardware and operating system will have access to view and work with PTX files. All you need is a browser and an internet connection.
Once your PTX has been uploaded and processed, all of our Deposition/Transcript tools are at your disposal: (Re)view, designate, link to related documents/exhibits, etc.
Deposition/Transcripts Tour on Nextpoint.com
Posted in Featured Feature, New Features | Tagged Deposition, mac, PTX, Transcript | Leave a Comment »
June 17, 2009 by Jim Fiorato
Naturally, I’ve been reflecting about the applications I’ve worked on prior to coming to The Lab, and comparing those applications with what we’ve got here. One of the things that always comes to mind is how the definition of web app can vary so vastly from place to place. I can say I’ve worked on them for the last 10 years, but I think this is the first one that truly fits the bill.
There are many vendors out there touting their software as a web app, but usually this software comes with some of the baggage you’d expect out of an old school client/server application. “One instance per client” apps where client by client upgrades and maintenance scale so poorly that vendors and clients alike spend so much time and money coordinating, the benefits of “access from anywhere” quickly wither away.
True Web Apps should deliver not only on the promise of “access from anywhere”, but also the promise of “update everywhere”. From a consumer’s perspective it’s wonderful to save the worry of coordinating upgrades, from an IT department’s perspective it’s wonderful to get rid of the headache of having to maintain the environment, and from the vendor’s perspective it’s wonderful to have simple deployments of updates. It’s wonderful for all.
So, do you have a web app or do you have a Web App?
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