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Case Study
– Jerry Parker, Lawyer |
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Background |
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Jerry Parker is a partner in the law firm Parker & Waichman, LLP
(www.yourlawyer.com).
His firm handles personal injury and product liability cases,
including cases involving defective pharmaceuticals and
defective medical devices. Most recently, they are one of ten
law firms appointed to the Plaintiffs Steering Committee in the
Zyprexa Products Liability Litigation, MDL # 1596. Jerry
conducts extensive research for this litigation as well as many
others. In the course of this research, he regularly uses the
legal database service, Westlaw, business and news services, and
of course the Web. |
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The Problems: |
1. Organizing disparate material
After a typical search, Jerry would find himself with a sea of
documents in a dozen different formats -- HTML, Word files, PDFs,
even plain text -- from scores of different sources. He wanted
to file them all together, by subject. It took too much time and
was very cumbersome to do this by linking them to the
“favorites” of his browser, or to build the very deep
hierarchies he needed, via Windows. He couldn’t just link to the
material on the Web, because he could never be sure it would
still be there when he needed it.
Jerry also subscribes to news services that send notices with
hyperlinks in them directly to his desktop. He wanted to merge
the articles sent by these services with the other types of
information found on a given topic.
2. Saving the results of database searches
A great deal of legal research is performed via databases; and
websites are increasingly based on databases or ASP servers that
generate “dynamic” pages on the fly. Jerry found he couldn’t
link to the results of such searches at all, nor always create
and save a file of all the records he wanted; he was faced with
the laborious task of cutting-and-pasting to a Word document.
3. Time wasted on technicalities
Some of the time Jerry didn’t really need the entire document,
only a section (or a few non-contiguous sections) of it. He
wanted a select, focused information resource, not a vast array
of full-text documents. It was therefore important to be able to
cut-and-paste quickly and efficiently.
But he also needed to record the source information in a
recognized, readable format - not just a long, meaningless URL.
He needed a tool that would convert the source information into
a standard bibliographic citation. Creating such citations
himself was a big waste of time, and there was always the risk
that he’d forget to record the source information when saving
the document.
4. Heavy post-processing requirements
To make the material really useful and to enable him to find it
quickly and efficiently, Jerry needed to add keywords and other
metadata to it. To help him speed-read it, he wanted to
highlight the especially relevant sections and have them in a
separate area in the database, attached to each document saved.
Also, he needed to be able to annotate or add comments.
5. Collaboration
Jerry rarely needed to send material from this resource to
clients, but he did need to send some of it to colleagues
working on the same project. How could he send material
organized in deep hierarchical folder systems, via e-mail? |
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The Solution: Net Snippets |
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Jerry researches his cases himself, and as mentioned, he very
rarely needs to send out professional reports to clients. He was
looking for a tool that would help him organize and manage a
huge information resource that mainly stayed on his own
computer. He chose the “Professional” edition. |
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The Results |
1. Quick, efficient organization of research materials
”I no longer have problems with my deep hierarchical folder
structure,” Jerry notes. “It’s much quicker to make and organize
folders in Net Snippets than in tools that rely on Windows –
including Internet Explorer Favorites. And I can file selections
of any size, from files in any format, simply by dragging them
to the appropriate folder (though I usually find myself using
the Net Snippets toolbar). Whether it’s graphics, text, or
tables: anything Windows can copy, Net Snippets can preserve.”
2. Ability to save dynamic documents
Jerry can now save anything that’s displayed on his screen, or
any selection of it; and he can add selections to
previously-saved snippets, enabling him to build a list of
relevant results from a database search, even if the database
itself didn’t allow him to do this.
3. Fast, easy addition of rich metadata
Apart from basic text editing (including highlighting), Jerry
can add a wide variety of metadata, such as: name, comments, an
unlimited number of keywords, level of importance and “custom”
information (he especially appreciates the ability to add
customized labels to fields). “I can ‘block and drag’ text from
the snippet to fields in the Net Snippets database attached to
the document,” he explains. “For instance, you can ‘block and
drag’ the title of an article to the ‘name’ field, the entire
abstract in the article to the ‘abstract’ field, the author’s
name to the author’s name field, etc. without any re-typing! It
all saves time and makes maintaining an accurate database
concerning your documents easy.”
4. Automatic tracking of important data
Jerry finds it a great bonus that “Net Snippets automatically
captures the title, URL and date you captured the document, and
files that information in the database under the heading
‘source’, which you can view and change.” |
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Unforeseen bonuses: |
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1. The Net Snippets “drop spot”
Jerry discovered that he could now drag-and-drop anything
selected from any Windows application (Office, e-mail, his news
alerts) to the “Drop Spot,” and then add it as a snippet to the
relevant subject folder. “Very Cool”.
2. Easy collaboration, even though he hadn’t asked for it
Jerry can email an entire folder hierarchy to a colleague, just
by right-clicking on it. Net Snippets automatically packages the
entire contents of the folder (all the documents along with the
related database) into a single file for email delivery.
3. The compliance with open-source standards
”I had previously used a different program,” Jerry explained.
“But it used a proprietary format, which is a big disincentive
for any professional researcher -- you don’t have direct access
to the data and you risk losing it all if the file gets
corrupted. Let’s not even talk of what happens if the software
company is no longer in existence. Net Snippets saves everything
in its original format and the information is always accessible
via Windows Explorer as standard files”. 4. Fast
performance
Jerry summarizes the advantage: ”It’s much lighter and faster
than my old program; it doesn’t slow my browser down. The folder
system and interface are more professional and more
user-friendly; and the editing features are a real time-saver.” |
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