Lab Notes: TrialPad

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By Nelson Garcia 

If you are looking for Mac-friendly courtroom presentation software, TrialPad is an option. Although NLST does not support Macs, we understand that some panel members rely on them and thus have created this overview.

TrialPad is an iPad application developed by Lit Software. It has no relation to Trial Director. It is meant to help present evidence in court, and includes the ability to mark exhibits, zoom live, and organize and search exhibits and files. It does not require internet or wi-fi, and supports multiple formats. You can find more information, including cost, here: https://www.litsoftware.com/

Note: While TrialPad works well with large document collections, you might need to use a flash drive or external drive to store documents that exceed the capacity of the device’s internal storage capacity.

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PDF Gear

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By Nelson Garcia 

If you do not have Adobe Acrobat, PDFgear is an alternative free PDF reader and editor.  It works with Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android and web browsers. It will let you edit, convert, annotate, organize, and sign PDF documents.

Here are some of the things you can do with PDFgear:

Edit: text, images, links, and fields—similar to editing in Word
Annotate and mark: highlight, underline, strikethrough, add sticky notes, comments, stamps, and shapes
Password protect: you can add a password to a PDF
Convert: you can convert PDFs to and from formats like Word, Excel, etc.
OCR: you can extract selected text
Manage forms: you can fill out forms, make new forms, and add electronic signatures
Organize pages: you can merge, split, compress, crop, rotate, and rearrange pages

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Discovery Diagnostic: When You Should Ask the Government to Produce Discovery in its Original Format

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By Alicia Penn and Sean Broderick

Members of our team have noticed an uptick in the U.S. Attorneys’ offices use of eDiscovery review platforms such as Everlaw, Relativity, and Ipro Eclipse to produce discovery to defense teams.

If these types of productions do not cause you problems and you can open, search, and review discovery when provided in this way, you can stop here and skip the rest of this post.

However, if you open your discovery and find the text for an email in one spot, the metadata for the email in another spot, and the images associated with the email somewhere else with no way to realistically put them back together, read on, my friend, we are in this together.

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GridPlayer: A Free Multi-View Video Playback Tool

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By Nelson Garcia

If you’ve ever needed to play multiple videos at once GridPlayer is an ideal tool. For example, you might want to review footage from several camera angles of the same event.  GridPlayer will let you do that, and it is free and simple to use.

GridPlayer displays videos in a side-by-side layout and supports simultaneous playback. The number of videos you can load depends on your computer’s graphics capabilities and screen size. I’ve successfully played up to eight videos at once.

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Guide: 4Sight UCM Package Explorer

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By Alicia Penn and Nelson Garcia

In a case with wiretaps[1] or pen register trap and trace[2] discovery from phone calls or messages, the government may produce the data to you using Package Explorer. Package Explorer is a proprietary viewer that will let you view the data exported from 4Sight UCM, a program used by law enforcement to process information from phones.

You will know you’ve received a Package Explorer file because it will most often look like this:

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