Since Blake is busy working this week, he’s unable to attend the “Using Macs in Trial II” seminar this Friday and Saturday in Dallas, Texas; so he has graciously allowed me to “guest blog” a few updates from the show.

My name is Brett Burney and I author the www.ediscoveryinfo.com blog. I do some trial technology consulting along with my e-discovery projects so I am a big fan of Blake’s blog and have been looking forward to learning more about how lawyers use Macs. I’ve also written about using Macs in law practice for Law.com.

I was thrilled to see 70+ attendees at the conference. I’m not sure how many they had last year, but attendance is easily doubled. The majority of attendees are either solo or small firm trial lawyers. Some of them brought staff members.

The sessions kicked off with Rick Borstein, a Business Development Manager at Adobe that focuses on the legal market. Rick also authors the excellent Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog. Rick spoke for two hours and demonstrated a plethora of features available in Acrobat 8. A few attendees probably found some of Rick’s points a little too geeky, but I though he did a fantastic job of covering PDF Binders vs. PDF Packages, PDF “normal” (i.e. printing to PDF) vs. scanning to an image, Bates Stamping and Redaction.

Rick demonstrated that the PDF created by using the built-in PDF driver in Macs results in a larger file than the PDF created by using the Adobe PDF print driver. Rick also shared some of his favorite settings for creating an efficient PDF.

There was some interesting discussion in the room about showing PDFs in full screen mode (under the View menu or ⌘L). This is an easy and beautiful way to show a document in full screen, and even use bookmarks to jump to specific spots in the document.

Next Kern Lewis (the seminar’s tireless organizer) went through his “trial suitcase” showing everyone what he takes with him to trial. Among his items:

• Hard shell suitcase for transporting all the equipment
• An external iSight camera that they use as an Elmo when necessary
• A Keyspan serial to USB adapter so they can hook into the court reporter’s realtime feed
• An Airport Express Base Station for the war room
• A Canon Pixma iP90v printer
• Duct tape for taping down cables (although several folks correctly reported that some courts will NOT allow duct tape since it leaves residue - one person suggested using blue painter’s tape but the better suggestion is from Blake to use “gaffers tape” instead)
• 50ft VGA cable
• USB hubs

I would like to point readers to Blake’s excellent series of “What to Pack for Trial” for additional suggestions:

• What to Pack 1 of 5
• What to Pack 2 of 5
• What to Pack 3 of 5
• What to Pack 4 of 5
• What to Pack 5 of 5

After dinner, the group came back to the main room to discuss video-taping depositions and video conversion. Kern, like several others in the room, carries his own video camera and microphone to tape every deposition. Kern uses a JVC Everio hard-drive-based video camera which means that he offloads the video every night to a computer so he can be ready for the next day. A lot of discussion ensued around the best way to convert the resulting video to QuickTime format so clips can be created easily with QuickTime Pro.

Kern uses the $99 Cinematize2 to convert video, but others suggested just using the free MPEG Streamclip from Squared5. Finis Price suggested an excellent product called turbo.264 from elgato which is a USB hardware video converter that will effectively take the burden off the computer’s processor for video conversion.

Day One was fantastic and I’m looking forward to Day Two which will include presentations from Circus Ponies (NoteBook), MarketCircle (Daylite), and Clarity Legal Software (TrialSmart & DepoSmart).

Tags: using macs in trial