Pacific Legal Technology Conference - Part 1
I spent the day at the Westin Bayshore attending the Pacific Legal Technology Conference. I’ve divided my notes into three sections: the techie stuff, the semi-techie stuff, and the real stuff. I took lots of notes, but reduced them down to the points that were either really cool or new to me.
60 Tech Tips in 60 Minutes
This session gave a whirlwind tour of new aps, gadgets, tips, and points to ponder.
- Infrared Projector Keyboard – you just have to see it to believe it
- Computrace Lojack for Laptops – here’s how it works: load the software onto your laptop, where it silently monitors and maintains contact with Computrace. If the laptop gets stolen, notify the Computrace Recovery Team and your local police. As soon as the stolen laptop gets connected to the internet, the software starts regularly calling the Recovery Team, allowing them to track the location of the laptop. The police use this tracking info to locate the laptop, and voila – thief gets busted and you get your laptop back. (If they can’t locate it, you get the cost of the software refunded.)
- Belarc Advisor – I’ve used this before, but never realized that you can use it to keep a record of software registration keys. Nice!
Powerpoint for Powerful Settlements
While the session focused mainly on creating presentations for settlement conferences, the speakers also talked about general best practices. The tips on the acual software were most useful, and I learned some nifty commands you can use during a slideshow:
- Hit “B” to go to a black screen, “W” for a white screen. Toggle on and off.
- Hit Ctrl-S to get a numbered list of slides
I also learned that spell-check in Powerpoint is horrible – you really need to check it manually!
I often get asked where to find photos for Powerpoint presentations, and though it’s hard to believe, I often recommend the Microsoft Office Clip Art and Media Gallery. Naturally, I was pleased that the presenters mentioned it as a good source (Good! I’m not crazy!) All you have to do to get at the photos is limit the type of media to “photos” and throw in a search term or two; there are lots of good ones, and they can make excellent backgrounds for slides.
PDF: The Latest Tricks & Techniques
People are seriously fired up about how cool the new version of Adobe Acrobot 8 Professional is. It has a wealth of features that are particularly useful for the law office, including:
- Bates numbering and redaction tools
- PDF “Packaging” – create a sealed package comprised of several PDFs
- Save an entire website in Adobe, internal links intact. This is VERY slick and I anticipate that it will be a huge time saver, especially for internet defamation matters. External links can be converted and brought into the PDF as well.