We’d like to thank Dave Schaaf for documenting his experience moving from last generation litigation technology to the cloud.  It’s a transition that we foresee everybody making soon enough, but he’s a trailblazer with a perspective that we value greatly. Thanks Dave!

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I’ve been involved in the legal industry for 7 years now, having started out with a jury research and trial consulting firm, before joining Nextpoint. With my old company, I learned the Trial Director platform, becoming a certified trainer, and using it while manning the “hot seat” on major trials. It was a bit cumbersome to learn, but I got to the point where it was a comfortable, albeit frequently frustrating application. Having this esoteric expertise was my livelihood, so I was not exactly open to changing to a new, unfamiliar technology.

When I came to Nextpoint, the Trial Cloud, was in its infancy, and during my first trial with it we only used the deposition designation capabilities, which were amazing. It allowed members of the trial team to create and revise deposition designations, which I could then access to generate a cut list for the depo video, as well as PDF designation reports that could be exchanged with the other side. It represented a sea change from the old school methods of manually highlighting transcripts in various colors of highlighter, or typing in each page/line reference in an Excel spreadsheet. I was pretty impressed with this new web-based platform, but I had no idea the robust future it had.

Screenshot of Trial Cloud's presentation tool - Theater

The next trial I worked on was the first where we used the document capabilities of the Trial Cloud. I had some trepidation with relying on something other than my trusty local Trial Director database. I could understand using it for designations, because the traditional methods were cumbersome, but Trial Director works fine. It’s comfortable (at least to the few people that have mastered it), it ain’t broke, so why fix it? I begrudgingly eased my way into using the Trial Cloud to manage the trial exhibits, so that other members of the team could access them as they were admitted, and I soon saw the advantages of having all the data available to the entire team via the Internet.

My third trial using the Trial Cloud marked a significant advance. While the old guard such as Trial Director and Concordance were rolling out modest upgrades to their decade old platforms, Nextpoint was radically improving the capabilities of theirs. And the best part was that I didn’t need to install anything, I simply logged in and it was there. We had over a million pages of documents we needed to potentially access in court – enough to bog down my local Trial Director database to the point that searching for a particular Bates number could take five minutes, which is an eternity in court, and unacceptable when 100 people in a courtroom are staring at you to make something appear on the big screen. Fortunately, we were armed with a T1 connection in court, so after some frustrating, tense moments dealing with Trial Director I ventured into using the Theater component of the Trial Cloud to display my evidence in court. I was very skeptical that it could replace Trial Director. It didn’t have nearly as many bells and whistles. It seemed so basic. But I found that the brilliance of Theater is that Nextpoint took the few tools that you use 95% of the time in Trial Director, and incorporated them into Theater, and left out the superfluous stuff. The result is that you have the ability to create call out zooms, highlight, underline and redact documents. You can save your treatments so that you can effortlessly recall them later. I have found that the simple functionality is much more user friendly than Trial Director, particularly when dealing with document treatments. In Trial Director, you must go through hoops to bounce between a document and it’s saved treatments, but with Theater, you simply type a single key to recall a treatment, and a single key to clear it. So much easier!

Another immensely useful aspect of the Trial Cloud is how it makes collaboration so much easier. On my most recent trial, paralegals and associates were able to pre-treat the documents they wanted to use for witnesses, save all the treatments, and I was able to access them in court. True division of labor, rather than having multiple people stay up late to create them and add them to a local database. And when it came time to print exhibit binders for the jury, we simply exported the saved treatments, and included them in the binders (with permission from the judge) to direct their attention to the portions of the documents that we covered in the trial.

I got to enjoy the capabilities of the Trial Cloud in courtrooms where we had Internet connections. You might not be so fortunate, but never fear, the Trial Cloud has wonderful exporting capabilities, so that you can prep your evidence in the Trial Cloud, then export it to a Trial Director database. But with more and more courtrooms going electronic, and allowing or even providing Internet connections, the Nextpoint Trial Cloud is the wave of the future. I think it’s human nature to fear change, to be averse to trying something new. But if you check out the Nextpoint Trial Cloud, I’m sure you will find as I did, that it is a major leap forward in evidence management and trial presentation technology. Give it a whirl!

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Dave Schaaf is a litigation technology expert for Nextpoint out of Los Angeles.  He has extensive experience with evidence management, courtroom presentation, and trial demonstrative development.  He’s manned the “hotseat” on major trials for clients such as Commerce Bank and ExxonMobil.  If you’d like to get in touch, Dave can be reached at dschaaf at nextpoint dot com or simply by commenting on this post.