CaseMap 4 - What's special about the new version?

Organizing Legal Research - I've been playing with the new version of CaseMap, which has several new features.  The most powerful new feature is the Authorities Table/Spreadsheet.  Up to now CaseMap has been a tool strictly for organizing facts in a case.  Which is fine.  The facts are the hardest part of a case to keep organized because there are usually so many, and they appear in so many different places (testimony in depositions, documents, physical objects and places etc).

But the law is hard to keep track of too.  Virtually every case that I've worked on has had multiple legal issues to manage (e.g.  personal jurisdiction, contract interpretation, damages, evidence issues etc.).  Up until now I haven't seen a tool (I'm sure there are some, but I haven't seen one) that lets you organize your legal research and case authorities easily.  And even if there is such a tool as a stand alone product, I would still prefer one that integrates with my fact organizational tool.  CaseMap 4 does that.   But forget organizing facts for a second.  I venture to say that appellate practitioners like Howard and Denise would use this new version just for its ability to organize legal authorities.

Here is a brief idea of why CaseMap 4 is a good tool for legal research.  Let's say you have a case with various legal issues.  You create an outline of the top level issues and the sub-issues.  Let's say a top level issue is Breach of Contract, and the sub issues are "parties' intent" and "rights of first refusal" (this is because the case involves whether the parties intended a right of first refusal to apply to one brand of a franchisor's product or all brands).  And you have legal issues related to damages and also to evidentiary issues that are going to come up at trial.

In an outline view of the case your outline of legal issues might look like this.

Breach of Contract

Parties' Intent

Scope of RFR

Requirements to prove RFR

Damages

loss of future revenue?

speculative nature of plaintiff's claims

Evidentiary Issues

Admissibility of Coporate Counsel's testimony

In the course of a 5 year lawsuit you might have a slew of research, case cites, random thoughts, internal memos and other things related to just those few issues.  How do you organize these disjointed pieces of knowledge into something coherent that you can filter down on quickly?  Answer: with CaseMap 4.

Picture a spreadsheet with each row containing a reference to legal issue, and fields to specify whatever you deem to be important such as a citation to a legal authority, jurisdiction, type of authority (statute, memorandum, law article, case opinion, regulation, background materials) and so on.  Information organized in this way can be quickly drilled down to find all authorities that meet a certain criteria.  You want to find all cases that relate to "the scope of a right of first refusal"?  You search based on the "cases" field and the "RFR" field.   You only want the ones that were decided in Georgia?  You further refine your search. 

And where are these cases, articles or statues that you are going to retrieve, you ask?  Good question.   Well they can be Word Processing documents or PDF files on your network drive, or on they can be on the Web.  Here's how it works.  CaseMap lets you "point to any file or web address" in one of the fields which is called "linked file" so wherever the case is you just put the path in that field.   And, from thence on, anytime someone is looking at the authorities in CaseMap and wants to see the underlying authority they just hit F9 and voila the case, memo, or other source authority appears.  As if by magic.

Obviously this feature makes sense for litigators who have to keep track of both law and facts, and keep track of the links between law and facts.  But, as I keep saying, this feature also makes a lot of sense for pure appellate types too, even though they don't often have to organize facts.  Why?

Well a human lawyer's mind tends, over time, to remember legal issues by the case that the issue arose in.  So I might remember that the GrabAss case is the one that had the vicious dispute about rights of first refusal.  And years later I would say "well I can pull up CaseMap and see what authorities we had in that case," and go from a overview of the case as a whole to drilling down to the key cases that involve the issue I'm looking for.  In fact, if I were smart, at the end of each case I worked on I would export the authorities information out of that particular case file in CaseMap and then import it into a master CaseMap database of all authorities.  Then I could search across all of the information in all of my cases.

As Bob Wiss, the co-founder of CaseSoft says when he gives his presentation: CaseMap is a tool for thinking.   That's true enough.  I would add that the more you "think" about how to use your "thinking tools," the more you get out of them.  CaseMap makes it easy to get a lot done with minimal thinking effort.   But if you think a little bit more you can quickly build a very powerful database that gives you powerful leverage over your most valuable lawyerly commodity: your knowledge.  This is knowledge management at a very low cost.  All it takes is a small amount of money and a modest amount of commitment.

Last update: 6/5/2003; 10:08:26 PM.