“As an attorney fascinated by legal software solutions, I can’t overemphasize the rapidly-growing importance of legal software to all types of law practice, driven by the inexorable increase in the ratio of software/internet era attorneys to older, computer-phobic lawyers.

And now, LexisNexis has stunned the legal community by its July 24th acquisition of CaseSoft and its product lines: the legal killer app CaseMap and its sister applications TextMap, TimeMap, DepPrep, etc. Product info available at: www.casesoft.com CaseMap is unique. It’s not a Business of Law product like case management software (Amicus Attorney, etc.); it’s a PRACTICE of law product. I used a couple of the earlier versions for awhile, years ago, and knew it was going to be big eventually, and I’ve wished I still had it ever since (It’s potential uses go beyond law [think Writing, Science, Financial, Education, Pharmaceutical….]) Imagine being able to dynamically database all the facts, legal issues (and their elements, sub-issues, and more), the pinpoint-cite-applicable laws/cases/authorities to each of those (sub)issues (positive & negative), evidentiary sources, witnesses, parties, specific claims, filings, page-cited discovery documents/ transcripts, etc., and imagine being able to interconnect them all in the hyperlinked analytical way that an attorney’s brain must (if successful) do. Imagine the result in a quickly accessible, comprehensively reviewable, and easily understandable computer database, as opposed to the lawyer’s typically chaotic row of crammed accordion files full of scribbled notes, clerk memos, pleadings, thick transcripts with post-it notes, etc., all in linear format (no hyperlinking) and hard to carry. And it’s not just a few attorneys making reference to CaseMap–per their website: The United States Attorney’s Office has 15,000 CaseMap and TimeMap license sets and the US Securities and Exchange Commission has a CaseSoft Product Enterprise License for 1,100 users. LexisNexis is going full force with this software assault on the legal market, also launching Time Matters 8.0 and Billing Matters 8.0, the latest versions of their popular case management and billing software, respectively. However, the case management/Business of Law software field is full of rapidly evolving competition, so this second blast from LexisNexis’ double-barreled software shotgun is not as big a deal as their CaseSoft coup. Now that there’s a big name behind CaseMap, it’s revolution will finally be getting underway, and developers better be working on something to compete with it. How? Duplicate the functionality, of course, even improve on it, but focus on Ease of Use, make it Intuitive to begin with, as CaseMap’s biggest weakness (only weakness?) is its frustratingly steep learning curve and rather demanding data-entry requirements. The software should also Look Better, but that’s just my opinion, and I could be wrong.”

Can you imagine how much energy it would take to teleport a human being using exact science? You would have to have a computer the size of Los Angeles to just store every bit of encoded information about YOU. You as a human being and a singular object. What about your clothes? That would have to be another city block just to encode encrypt your clothes. If it was computer driven, all the information would have to be recorded, the particles broken down, or just vaporized, and then reconstructed from those same atoms, or the surrounding atoms in order to reconstruct your form. Who’s to say bilocation won’t occur? (Bilocation is the ostensibly supernatural act of appearing or being in two or more locations simultaneously.)

An explanation of how hard (and expensive) it would be to create JUST THE COMPUTER necessary for teleportation. A human being contains [1 YB (yottabyte)] of information – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes — 10008, or 1024. A typical computer hard drive can hold around [80 GB (gigabytes)] of information- 80,000,000,000 bytes or 109 bytes. 125 quadrillion PC hard drives is what it would take to transfer all that information, that’s 125 million million. About a 1000 km cube of CD-ROMs. Our national debt is around 8 quadrillion. This does not include the memory required for the transference of this information. The fastest connection to date is about 7 gigabits per second, and at that it’d probably take you a few centuries to get where you’re going via teleportation.

GeoShell is a free desktop replacement shell for Windows. A replacement shell, for those of you who do not know, replaces the default “explorer” shell that Windows uses. This means that it gets rid of the usual taskbar, desktop and start menu, and instead uses its own. GeoShell was first built as a shell that uses minimal resources (back in the day when memory wasn’t so readily available), but over time it has become much more powerful, yet still using less resources than explorer.

GeoShell is a modular “bar-type” replacement shell, meaning that instead of a fixed taskbar, you get to create “geoBars” that you can place anywhere on your desktop, and on each geoBar you get to pick which plugins you want to put on it. GeoShell has many plugins available, like a mp3 player remote, a weather checker, a rss reader, just to name a few. Furthermore, GeoShell is highly customizable and once you get the hang of it, you can really increase your efficiency in using your desktop.

The problem of paying doctors in the US looks simple from the outside. It is not. It’s an expensive paperwork nightmare. While patients have to be quickly sorted between those who owe copays and those who don’t, doctors have to combine diagnostic codes (laid out in the ICD-9 coding system) with procedure codes (using the HCPCS system) just to get an idea of what has to be paid. Since the Level 1 HCPCS codes are, in fact, the AMA’s proprietary CPT codes, billing involves issues of copyright.

But getting a bill out the door is only the first step as insurance companies use every excuse they can to deny claims and downgrade what is paid. Errors are rarely in the doctor’s favor. It is a confusing mess of incompatible paper and electronic systems that bloats administrative costs and is a huge drain on the national medical budget and is a threat to the health of any medical practice. Ex-Medic software, publisher of Ex-Medic, is a small software company that removes a great deal of the pain and agony of the medical billing process. Based on top of 4D’s eponymous 4D database engine, Ex-Medic is a slickly done application that handles all aspects of medical billing, paper and electronic. The entire patient workflow outside the patient chart is covered. From setting appointments to handling co-pays to writing requests for payment to insurance companies and the patient, Ex-medic does it all. As information is entered, the program remembers every code, every price, every insurance company, every patient so data is only entered once. The number of billing clerks needed to handle an average practice shrinks dramatically because while billing can be complex, it’s highly repetitive. Ex-Medic runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and extensive support and handholding comes free with the program. This is a company that is actually selling a solution instead of just a packaged product claiming to be a solution.

Deep Freeze from Faronics wipes clean all changes made to your hard disk when you reset the machine. What I liked the most about Deep Freeze was that the system was perfectly stable and there was no increase the bootup time, unlike other software I tested, such as CleanSlate and GoBack.

You can do anything you want – Surf the net, install doubtful software, change registry settings – And it will be wiped clean when you reset the system. In fact, you don’t even need an anti-virus or anti-spyware program, if you are using Deep Freeze. To put it in a nutshell – Once you install Deep Freeze, the only thing that can affect your hard disk is if you take a hammer and smash it to bits.

Jungle Disk – Amazon.com has an amazing new service that appears to be taking off. The service is named S3 – or Simple Storage Services. Essentially, it makes disk storage an “Internet Attached” service accessible to programmers via a set of web APIs. What makes S3 a big deal is the pricing model: $.20 per GB of data transferred and $.15 per GB/month of data stored. If you do the math, this is dirt cheap given that your file objects are stored redundantly at Amazon’s formidable data centers and securely available from anywhere on the net. Many new start-ups are using the S3 for their storage needs and bypassing the purchase of storage farms for their operation. Up until now, this was a ho-hum for the average user – but now – there are several open software solutions which extend the power of S3 to everyone.

One of these recently started using is Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com). Essentially you download the JungleDisk client for your Windows / MacOS of Linux platform ( I use all three) – and configure the software with your own Amazon S3 storage keys – then voila! You have a secure virtual drive that works from anywhere on the Internet, on any computer you have. Under the hood, Jungledisk works as a so-called WebDAV Proxy process – so you access your files through a WebDAV interface included in all modern OS’s. So far, I am impressed by JungleDisk’s usability and stability. Another beauty of S3 is becoming supported by a variety of vendors – so your data is not hostage to JungleDisk – you can always try other S3 client programs for your computers. No more tape or CD back-ups for me, JungleDisk/S3 is the way to go!