MacLawyer’s Great News about Dropbox & Rocket Matter Integration

Image via CrunchBase

As a happy user of Dropbox and Rocket Matter, I strongly recommend that you take a look at Ben’s article from his interview with Larry Port of Rocket Matter. The article provides what you need to know about Dropbox and Rocket Matter integration.

From my perspective, this is important news for any lawyer who wants an integrated billing, database, and timekeeping solution. Again, MacLawyer comes out with great, practical, and timely news for those who care about technology in the legal field.

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• Legal Productivity (legalproductivity.rocketmatter.com)
• The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 10.28.10 (abovethelaw.com)
• The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 10.22.10 (abovethelaw.com)

Microsoft Office 11 for Mac — Looks Good

Office Mac 2011 is definitely an upgrade from the 2008 version.  Among other things, the user interface has improved dramatically.  The various tools and tabs on the ribbon are useful and intuitive.  In fact, I would claim that the Mac version is better than the Windows version.  I still have to figure out the ribbon UI in Windows and gave up long ago.  One of my favorite additions to the Office Suite is the “Notebook” template, which is very much like the Notebook offering made by CircusPonies.com, without any significant cost differential.  Most of the templates are more on the consumer side and I am looking forward to seeing if my Windows-based pleadings templates will be compatible with the Mac version.  Another key issue will be looking at the ease of being able to insert tables for exhibit lists, witness lists, or for demonstrative courtroom exhibits.  The Powerpoint program seems equally intuitive and the interface is clean and understandable.  Again, the templates are are little simplistic, but easily tailored to meet the needs of a trial lawyer preparing a presentation with use of video clips from a deposition, pdf exhibits, images, and interactive elements. The spreadsheet element of Office is what one would expect and offers a number of good templates, including invoicing, timesheets, and other useful tools for the legal profession.  Finally, I really like the smooth interface between SkyDrive and the Suite.  I have been using SkyDrive or its predecessors for some time and have enjoyed the remote accessibility to my files, especially during trials and travelling.  SkyDrive also makes it easy to share files with clients, which is becoming more important as cloud-based technology develops.  All in all, the suite is just one more reason to justify the transition to Mac as an office tool.  While many of us in the legal world are stuck on Wordperfect, this offering may just be the reason to finally break the chains so that lawyers can more easily interact with clients (most of whom use Word).  I give this new version of Office a 9.5 out of 10.  If there were templates for pleading, I’d give it a 10.  For additional reviews see, TechRadar.com and ZDNet.com.  For an article on whether it’s worth your time, money and effort to upgrade your present office suite, you can see this MacWorld article which does a good job of speaking to this issue.

Microsoft Office 2011 Looks Promising for Mac Users

Microsoft is releasing Office 2011 for Mac users on October 26, 2010.  If you already have purchased Office 2008 in the last couple of months, you get a free upgrade to 2011.  The office suite looks very promising.  Among other improvements to the suite, Office 2011 is including Outlook for Mac.  Up until now, they have offered Entourage, which is an ostensible version of Outlook with considerably less features and a less polished user interface.  With Outlook, calendar integration, task integration, and collaboration ought to be quite a bit easier.  As to the new version of Word, one can expect to see the “ribbon” user interface that is present in the PC version of the suite.  According to MS, “Office for Mac 2011 gives you an enhanced user experience overall, as performance and launch times have been improved in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Your documents feel “lighter,” since they load fast, and respond quickly to your commands. And searching text within documents has never been faster.” Overall, this sounds like a worthy update to a program that needs to come up to speed for Mac users, especially those of us in the law. Try finding a usable pleading template for Mac Office 2008 some time !!!