Before the demo from Clarity Legal Software, the attorneys from Foreman, Lewis & Hutchison (the hosts of this fine seminar) showed how they re-enact a client’s story in their office so they can better understand a case.

When they were done re-enacting the scenes from a tragic death of a client in police custody, Rafe Foreman turned to the audience and allowed us to shout out questions we had after watching the re-enactment. Kern Lewis listed the questions as they were blurted out, and then we all went through a few of the questions suggesting appropriate images to use on Keynote slides to tell the story. Kern explained that this approach is outlined in Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points book (now updated for PowerPoint 2007).

I’ve heard Cliff speak before and he tells a fascinating story of helping attorney Mark Lanier tell the plaintiff’s story in the Vioxx litigation.

Then John Callis of Clarity Legal Software took the seat at the head of the class. Unfortunately, I did not have much previous experience with Clarity products, but I had heard so many great things about John and his group, that I was really looking forward to hearing him speak.

I was impressed that John was one of only two full-time employees at Clarity, and John is himself the chief software developer. This was significant because I saw him take notes for future features as the audience gave him feedback and asked questions.

John is gracious and sincere, thanking many of his customers in the audience and honestly answering all the questions that were thrown at him (and there were a lot). John was only there for a few hours because he had to get back to a trial he was supporting himself down in South Texas.

John explained that Clarity started in 2006 as a Mac-based company, but they now develop for Windows and Linux in addition to the Mac. Their two main products are DepoSmart (transcript manager) and TrialSmart (trial presentation).

John first went through DepoSmart which can import a wide variety of transcript formats from ASCII to LiveNote to Summation. DepoSmart also accepts a wide variety of video files and allows you synchronize the text and video yourself if you so choose (Clarity will do it for you as well).

DepoSmart will also easily import text and video that is already synchronized. For example, a court reporter or co-counsel can send you a transcript and video that had been synchronized in Trial Director or Sanction, and DepoSmart will accept that just fine.

A question came up regarding RealLegal’s E-Transcript file format which usually gets delivered to attorneys from court reporters in .PTX format. While DepoSmart cannot accept the proprietary .PTX format, it’s a simple task to download the free E-Transcript Viewer from RealLegal that will allow you to view the nicely formatted .PTX file, or convert it to a .TXT file (which will import easily into DepoSmart). The only problem is that on the Mac side, RealLegal only supports “Mac Classic Mode” which pre-dates the Intel switch. Since most Macs in use today run on the Intel processor, some suggested using Parallels or VMware Fusion to run Windows and use the free E-Transcript Viewer to convert the .PTX file to .TXT. But instead of firing up a full virtual machine, someone recommended just using CrossOver Mac instead. This will run the Windows version of the E-Transcript Viewer just fine without requiring a full, virtual Windows environment. I tried this and it worked flawlessly.

Next, John Callis gave a demo on TrialSmart, which has become a simpler, but very viable, alternative to Sanction or Trial Director. John honestly admits that TrialSmart is not going to give you all the bells and whistles that you’ll find in those two competitors, but if all you need is an easy-to-understand and stable trial presentation application with basic features, then TrialSmart could be your best option. And if you’re looking for a native-Mac trial application, it is the ONLY option. Clarity Legal Software is one of the few software companies that are truly focused on the Mac-using legal market (as evidenced by their name).

A few features in TrialSmart that got me and the crowd excited were 1) the ability to move documents around on the screen once you pull them up in presentation mode; 2) the ability to re-size video and documents in presentation mode; and 3) an “image preview” window that can live on your primary monitor so you can see what you’ll be showing on your secondary monitor (the projector in the court room). Clarity provides several excellent video tutorials and list of features on their site.

I was extremely impressed with John and his products and I plan to incorporate them into my own repertoire very soon. Even more important, it was evident that John was focused on giving the Mac legal community some functional software, and reacts to support requests as quickly as possible.

Guest post by Brett Burney.