If there are several suspects or hypotheses in a case, facts and evidence, etc. must be assessed as “for” or “against” each rather than just “for us” or “against us”. Proposition Analysis, (still) a unique feature of MasterFile, enables litigators, investigators, journalists and academic researchers to do just that.
Reporting in MasterFile is as as simple as displaying an appropriate or custom view and printing all or selected parts of it — or pasting them as a table into a new or existing Word or Excel document. In this post we show how MasterFile’s Grab ‘n Go briefs simplify the creation of polished reports in Word or PDF from a collection of such selections to present to your client, or for other uses, in a couple of clicks.
Keeping track disclosures to the court and other parties is important for various reasons and so in this post we look at how you record and track pleadings and disclosures from a MasterFile perspective.
Issue/Topic cross-tables are designed specifically for situations where a set of issues applies to many entities eliminating the need to create and maintain duplicate sets of the issue outline. For example, let’s say your case involves several elevators with the same issues. Think of the cross-table this way: every row constitutes an issue and every column the entity it applies to. We show you how it looks conceptually and as a view in MasterFile.
Now you’re probably wondering what’s so special about linking information to issues — after all linking is quite a common feature. What’s not, however, is being able to instantly review what’s linked to an issue or topic at a glance — especially with two mouse clicks. As a client of our’s said: “Issues and Topics, a feature MasterFile offers but should more aggressively highlight, has been invaluable”. That’s what sets up apart from CaseMap and other litigation support products like Concordance, etc. In MasterFile, issues and topics act like a live index and outline, connecting everything in the case. We reveal all in this post.
Tabs look so simple we often take them for granted without imagining there is anything more to really understand! There are actually two kinds: collections of types of documents and collections relative to an issue or administrative matter. In this post, we take a look at how MasterFile’s views replace and/or enhance this dual organizational structure.
Litigation support products, including us(!), make much noise about “linking” because linking allows you to locate information quickly. Our competitors present a confusing and dizzying array of “linking” abilities: CaseMap® has 8 types, including Casemap object, issue, document, related files, and other links; Summation® 11-20, including transcript, evidence, file attachment, Summation case organizer, cross links, and more; Concordance®, on the other hand has no “linking” like CaseMap other than tagging documents or notes with issues.
In this post, we unravel some of the problems with those approaches. We explain why MasterFile’s doc-links are “issue linking done right” and eliminate the problems of broken CaseMap file links, a mishmash of CaseMap document ‘short names’ and the chaos of ad-hoc cross-links to information.
Today users demand to be able to “work from anywhere without restrictions”, so every vendor claims “mobile user support”, “Internet support”, “work from anywhere”, etc. But, all mobile user support and synchronization technologies are not created equal. To us, mobility means working as though you’re in the office whether you’re on-line or off-line. No limitations. No restrictions. In this post, we cover how that’s seamlessly handled in MasterFile.
Document management system vendors tell you to just scan evidence and store it in the DM system, along with work-product. But DM systems are not designed to let you take thousands of documents on the road with you — they don’t even offer full text searching of content when you’re disconnected from the network! Litigation support systems, on the other hand, are designed to manage evidence and images and OCR them. But then your case file is split — outgoing work product in the document management system and incoming documents in the litigation support system. We (naturally) think MasterFile is better and explain why.
We wondered: “Why should legal firms incur the costs of acquisition, installation, support, maintenance, and training of two major systems just for documents. Could one be sufficient?”