The Legal Mac section of the January 2009 Law Practice Today features the article "Outlining Options for Macs" by Stephen D. Chakwin, Jr.:
PCs no longer hold the lion's share of outlining and information-organizing tools. In this article by Stephen Chakwin, learn about the large variety of tools available for Mac users.
The Mac world is rich in dedicated outliners and other information-organizing applications. (In Mac lingo, the word application is used where PC users use the word program. There’s probably some esoteric explanation for the different usage, but I don’t know it.) There’s a detailed and interesting survey of them in a series of columns by Ted Goranson that you can find here. Ted lists capabilities, does comparisons between similar products, and explains some of the design philosophy underlying these differences. You will come away from these articles with new appreciation for things you can do with your computer. You will also want to get and learn all the applications that he writes about.
The first type of outliner I will discuss is what most people think of when they hear the term: a dedicated application that works in standard headline / subhead / subsubhead / note fashion. Most word processors have some similar function built into them, but a dedicated outliner is able to reorganize entries and move information around in a way that makes the outlining function of word processors seem clumsy.
There are two main uses I’ve found in my practice for this type of outliner. What I call a “catching” outline is a way of capturing and organizing incoming information. Since outliners are so flexible, I am not committed to a particular hierarchy or structure of the information. (One of the subtle traps in understanding information is the tendency of the structure of how information is presented to us – or stored by us – to influence how we understand its meaning, even if the structure is random.) I can assign a tentative structure (or none at all, just creating a list) and then go back later and see what I really have in the outline.
The other is a “throwing” outline, one that I use to prepare for a situation in which I am going to be presenting or eliciting information: a witness examination, an argument, a lecture. I can create an overall shape for the event by building a sequence of topics (headlines) and then, within each of these, a subsidiary sequence of sub, subsub, or deeper components, anchored to notes if I need them. With this type of outliner, I can display only the headlines (and key them to presentation slides in PowerPoint or Keynote, Mac’s superior presentation application, or to trial or deposition exhibits, or to anything else I choose). I can reorder the headlines easily and rapidly and test different sequences for effectiveness. I can also focus in on any single headline by “hoisting” it so that it is the only thing on my screen. If you prepare your witness examinations in advance (almost always a good idea), this outlining function is a powerful tool.
There are two main dedicated outliners for Mac. One of them – the most commonly used – is Omni Outliner. The Omni Group makes fine products, and they both work well and look good on the screen. Outliner is a mature product, as it’s up to Version 3.7 as I write this, with Version 4 on the horizon. It is full of features but is easy to learn on a basic level. There are also video tutorials on the Omni web site. The two missing features that are most asked-for – a zoom ability to make up for aging or tired eyes and small screens and cloning (the ability to insert a specific heading in more than one spot in an outline and have it change in all places to track modifications you make any one) are alleged to be on the way in Version 4.
The other main contender in this category is called Tao. Tao has a few features that the Omni product does not – most notably cloning. It also has an extensive set of keyboard commands that I have found idiosyncratic. The appearance of Tao on the screen is spare and functional, and it looks more like a Windows program than a Mac application to some users.
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Most attorneys are closely tied to their cell phones of choice, and everyone has his own opinion of which type of phone is the "best." Two lawyers that I know (and highly respect), Jeff Richardson and Lee Rosen, recently weighed in with articles published in the January 2009 Law Practice Today webzine with their thoughts of how the iPhone compares with the Blackberry. You can read their articles at the links below, and I invite your comments with your own thoughts as to which phone is superior.
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