Category Archives: Mobile

LexisNexis Canada Adds Quicklaw iPhone App

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Posted in Apps, Canada, Case Law, iPhone, LexisNexis | Tagged

Update:  The following review was done using an iPod Touch 2G.  LexisNexis Canada has confirmed that it was designed for Apple 3G and 4G products, which explains some of the results outlined below.

Legal publishers continue to lag in getting mobile apps to their users.  Fastcase.com was first out the door over a year ago with an iPhone app which has garnered a lot of praise from users.  WestlawNext has an iPad app but otherwise the Thomson Reuters approach seems to be mobile Web sites, rather than apps, although their presentation of mobile offerings doesn’t appear to actually show all of their options.  Apparently, you can still rock it old school with Westlaw’s Palm OS clipping tool!  Blackberry and Android users are still relying on mobile Web sites.

This is the environment into which LexisNexis Canada releases its brand new iPhone app for its legal research service Quicklaw.  It follows the lead of the US LexisNexis app, which offers case name and citation look up. I was able to log in with my personalized LexisNexis profile as well as with a typical LexisNexis username and password.

As an app goes, it is pretty straight forward.  You can either select to search by a case name or search by a citation.  When you type in your search, it retrieves a document.  Wait, did I say A?  That was the odd thing.  I tried a couple of searches based on a single party name (try Strother, for example) and retrieved one document.  The case was formatted cleanly but I know that there are more results.  In fact, when I received an error message that the document I requested was too large and I should retry my search on Quicklaw, I did retry the search at the full Web site.  I retrieved 30+ hits using the same search-by-name form.

Once you have retrieved a document, you can share it (e-mail, etc.) or you can run it through LexisNexis’ citator, Quickcite.  The screen automatically rotates to landscape mode and the results are displayed in a clean version of the full Quickcite screen.

LexisNexis Canada Quicklaw iPhone App Quickcite Results

LexisNexis Canada Quicklaw iPhone App Quickcite Results

And that’s it.  It is a very basic app and, based on the single document retrieval, not a very useful one.  The citation search may be more useful if you are pulling up a case and you know the cite, but I don’t see any value in the case name search.

It also seems to have time out issues.  I was testing the app on an iPod Touch with a WiFi connection and expected it to come along pretty quickly.  But I had a half dozen error messages, most of which seemed to be time out errors rather than the reasons included in the error (document too big, etc.).  If I reran the search, I often was able to get the final result.

LexisNexis Canada Qucklaw iPhone App Error Message

LexisNexis Canada Qucklaw iPhone App Error Message

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Print Off Your Research Through the Cloud

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Posted in Android, Apps, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh, Windows | Tagged , ,

One of the challenges lawyers will face as they become more mobile is how to manage their information. There are obvious ways if you can keep it electronic: print to PDF or save it in its native format and upload it your cloud-based storage or e-mail it as an attachment. There are some documents that you may need to save in print and we are starting to see some interesting options developing for printing from anywhere. While Google Cloud Print is getting a lot of press, it is not the only game in town.

Let’s look at Google Cloud Print first.  When it was initially released, it would only find locally-connected printers.  So despite leveraging the Internet, networked printers weren’t available.  That’s changed and – once you’ve configured it through Google Chrome – I can now see both my networked laser printer as well as my locally installed printers, both physical and virtual, like PDF printers.  It’s free but it’s usefulness is limited.  It will only work from Cloud Print enabled resources, and there aren’t many.  It’s obviously early days, though, and this is going to have a big impact for mobile researchers.

Printershare is an alternative and it has a free version that is essentially a trial.  You can print 20 pages and then you need to upgrade. Mobile users may be particularly interested in Printershare because you can print from just about anything and it will find nearby printers using WiFi and bluetooth networks.  Using the Printershare Android app, I could locate nearby printers as well as printing back to my own, remotely shared printer.  Printershare is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android.

PrinterOn is another print-via-the-Internet resource, based here in Canada.  You can download and install your own free version of their PrintWhere software.  They also offer an iPhone/iPad app as well as one for Blackberry.  Once installed, the PrintWhere software discovers available printers.  When you send a print job, it is encrypted and sent from PrinterOn’s servers to your printer.  I wasn’t successful at getting their software to run, but I’m inclined to see it as a problem with my machine (and perhaps Windows’ firewall) in light of the success they’re having bringing PrintSpot (printing hot spots) online.

There are other ways to print remotely by configuring your network to allow Internet-based print requests to come in and find your printer.  That’s great if you’re comfortable managing that set up, but I’m going to keep my eyes on cloud-based printing as it seems to be the easier way to have printer access when I’m away from my network.

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Mobile E-mail on Android Easier with K-9

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Posted in Android, Apps, E-mail, E-mail Management, GMail, Mobile, Outlook | Tagged ,

One important way you can impact your productivity is when you can take a tool that works for you and wrangle more information with it.  If you use Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail, you may know that you can manage multiple e-mail accounts with the software.  For example, if you have an e-mail address with your law firm’s domain (you@your-law-firm.com) and a personal address from Google Mail, you can access both at once.  Being able to look at all of your e-mail at once can reduce the need to have two different applications open or two different places to visit.

Mobile users with Android devices may have missed that possibility, where you might have been using the default e-mail Android e-mail app for one account and an app for another account, like the GMail for Mobile app.  You might take a look at K-9 Mail as an alternative.  The free app works like typical dessktop software, managing multiple accounts and having a broader feature set for managing each account than the default software in Android.

I have been using K-9 and like the single view to my e-mail.  It picks up Google Mail accounts very easily; other accounts may require a bit more customization.  Since it uses IMAP – leaving messages on the server even when I move them around and reorganize them – I can always see the latest activity in my accounts without synchronizing, even if I have accessed the accounts from another computer (or even another Android e-mail app!).

If you’re an Android phone user, K-9 is definitely worth a look.

[via Lifehacker]

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Mobile Lawyers Accessmylibrary for Free Business Research

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Posted in Android, Business Information, Canada, Cengage Gale, iPad, Mobile, News, U.S. | Tagged , , ,

Libraries appear to be fighting (losing) battles over funding, prestige, perceptions of usefulness around the globe.  One of the things that many North American public library systems and consortia have been doing is licensing electronic databases for your use.  They skew heavily towards primary and secondary school users and that type of research.  But there are business information databases and directories that can be helpful to any legal researcher.  Greg Lambert and Ann Lee Gibson mention these databases in a recent American Bar Association Law Practice magazine piece.

Information Today reports that Cengage Learning’s Gale Group has released an app for iPad and Android devices that makes using their Accessmylibrary resource easier than ever and takes you into fee-based resources normally only accessible from your library’s site.  You can access some information by going to Accessmylibrary.com and entering information about your local public library.

The apps use geolocation to determine which library’s resources are available to you, looking in a 10 mile radius.  Open up the app while you are on the move and you’ll see that the library – and subscribed databases – has changed.  It’s great marketing for the libraries, except that you never have to enter one to get access to this information.

Unlike my local public library, where I have to enter my library card number, the app does not require any additional authentication.  In at least one of the libraries that I can see during the day, I can get access to databases like Legaltrac, the National Newspaper Index, and the CPI.Q Canadian Periodicals database.

Grab the app and keep it in mind when you’re looking for a quick answer or secondary information relating to your legal issue.  Open it up on your commute and see if you have resources available that are different from your local library.  It’s a great resource for information that might not be found in your typical legal research subscription.

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