Scanners are becoming a part of every law office’s equipment, but finding the right scanner to fit your needs can often be difficult and confusing. For smaller offices, the first foray into the world of dedicated scanners is usually a small desktop or workgroup scanner such as models from Fujitsu  or from Visionner in the $400 to $600 price range and are dedicated sheet fed scanners. Ideally, any scanner that you add to your office should be able to output scanned files to PDF format. The better scanners in this category usually also include software for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and some type of image organization software such as PaperPort from Nuance.  

PCMagazine on its PCMag.com website has published Dynamite Desktop Document Scanners comparing several leading desktop document scanners. This article provides a review of each scanner as well as a comparison chart comparing all of them. It should be pointed out that Fujtisu has released the ScanSnap S510 which is a newer model than the model reviewed.

The article also does an adequate job of detailing some of the differences between the different methods of duplex scanning as well as other features that set these dedicated document scanners apart from your average photo scanner.

One major issue to be aware of is that the ScanSnap does not include a TWAIN driver. What is TWAIN? According to Sue Chastain from About.com “Twain is the interface standard for Windows and Macintosh that allows imaging hardware devices (such as scanners and digital cameras) to communicate with image processing software.” This means that you can’t control the ScanSnap from any other software other than its own, which scans directly into Adobe Acrobat. However, since it does scan directly into Acrobat, this is not as large of a negative as it could be. Furthermore, some popular legal software programs such as Time Matters places a Save to TimeMatters button directly in Adobe so you can save directly to TimeMatters.

Fujitsu personnel that I’ve spoken with state that by not including a TWAIN driver Fujitsu is able to keep the cost of the ScanSnap lower. Another thing not to overlook is the fact that Fujitsi almost always has a $50.00 off coupon for the ScanSnap making the final cost of the ScanSnap around $375.00. With the entrance of the Xerox Documate 152 and its doppelgänger, the Visioneer Patriot 430, you can get a scanner in this class that includes a TWAIN driver for around $150 more than the ScanSnap.

The Fujitsu fi-5120c compares favorably with both the Canon DR-2580 and the Documate 262 and is the scanner that sits on my desktop at work. While about twice the price of the ScanSnap, it is designed for a higher duty cycle and includes a TWAIN drive as well as Ultrasonic double feed detection and other features. 

If you are thinking of starting to scan documents in your office to improve your practice management, then you need to seriously consider a dedicated document scanner like those mentioned above.

From the folks who bring you InformationWeek comes bMighty.com, a website focused on the IT needs of small and midsize business. Since I’m always on the lookout for useful technology sites, I checked out bMighty.com when I received the announcement that it been launched.  The primary question that I always face when exploring these websites is will there be any useful information for lawyers on this new site? I’m happy to report that for bMighty.com, the answer appears to be yes.

 With sections on tech news, reviews, storage and other technology information, I read through several articles and came across Put Your USB Drive To Work: 5 Strategies For Going Mobile : the post provides information on a number of very useful tips for using your USB thumb drive to help improve your mobility. Authored by Serdar Yegulalp of InformationWeek, the article focuses on five ways to use your USB thumb drive to improve your mobility. According to Yegulalp:

The article provides concrete examples that are actually useful and then provide the links to the utilities mentioned. I especially like the section on using TrueCrypt,to encrypt and protect that confidential information that you may have stored on.

This post is definitely worth saving as it contains using their USB thumb drives to increase their mobility and efficiency.

According to PC Magazine.com, Palm has canceled the Foleo. You can read the article here. All I can think of at this moment is thank goodness: Palm has managed to avoid launching a product that was literally a day late and a dollar short.

When Palm announced its Foleo mini notebook earlier this year to a great deal of fanfare publicity, many of us really wondered who was going to use this device. Touted as a replacement for many users notebook computers, the Foleo was intended to be a lightweight replacement for those that needed basic word processing and e-mail access on the go.  Ever since the product was announced, it seemed like a never ending line of pundits were questioning who would be using this device and how effective it would actually be?

At LinuxWorld 2007 in San Francisco last month, Palm had a large booth showcasing the Foleo in all its glory.  I have to admit that the form factor and weight were very nice; however, when you started asking questions and looking at its feature set, to me, the Foleo fell far short of the mark.

Equipped with 802.11b Wi-Fi access, limited memory and programs, quite honestly, the Foleo represented old technology as far as I could tell.  When I questioned one of the Palm staffers in the booth about why the unit did not have at least 802.11g ., I was told "802.11b is the most widely deployed standard today." Excuse me?  Technology that has been out of date for more than two years is what you're going to bank the success of this new product on? 

Even with the hundred dollar discount that was to be provided at the time of the product launch, the Foleo would still cost $499, which is a significant amount of the purchase price of a low end notebook computer with a full feature set.  Apparently, the folks at Palm must've finally gotten the message that the Foleo was potentially a disaster. You can read CEO Ed Colligan's letter explaining this decision here.

I've been a Palm partisan for many years touting the benefits of using its products and remember when Palm was the cutting edge in handheld technology.  Unfortunately, those days seem to be passed.  While other manufacturers bring out new smart phones and convergence devices using the Windows mobile operating platform that are sleeker and continue to add features and usability, it seems that Palm continues to trudge along lacking both vision and innovation.  I'm afraid that we may be seeing the end of an era and that without serious efforts by Palm, the company and its products will become nothing more than a footnote in computer history.

Year after year, the expo hall at ABA TECHSHOW® is a terrific place to learn about cutting-edge technology tools for revving up your law practice. I explored the expo hall at the 2007 conference as Law Practice Magazine's product news "man on the scene," and I found vendors displaying a wide array of software, hardware and services for all practice sizes and budgets. Here are some of the items that particularly caught my eye.

AVerMedia Technologies Presenters. AverMedia's reasonably priced AVerVision line of visual presenters and document cameras allow presentation of 3-D objects, papers and other items during presentations and trials. The line ranges from the AVerVision 300AF, a small, portable presenter with autofocus and annotation capabilities, to the mobile SPC300, which has the ability to save images directly to the unit.

Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanner. At 18 pages per minute for single-sided documents and 36 images a minute for double-sided documents (it scans both sides of a page simultaneously), this sheet-fed scanner is small enough to set on a desk but fast enough to meet the needs of a small office. Scanning in black and white as well as color, when teamed up with its included copy of Adobe Acrobat Standard, this is a terrific value.

Riverbed Technology WAN Appliances. Riverbed's Steelhead wide area network acceleration solutions have been highlighted on national TV and are being used by companies throughout the country (including the library district where my wife works) to optimize WAN communications across limited bandwidth. In the past, when WAN traffic was increasing, an organization went out and added another T-1 line. However, this can be expensive and the bandwidth may not be available or be reliable enough for consistent network traffic. Steelhead devices allow for data streamlining, IT consolidation, faster WAN backup and application acceleration in a single solution.

Dell Latitude Notebooks. Dell was out in force, displaying notebooks, desktops and large-screen LCD monitors. But one of the most attention-grabbing moments at the Dell booth was a demonstration of the Latitude ATG, featuring a shock-mounted hard drive and LCD screen and other features that allow it to meet MIL-STD 810F, a military durability standard. Watching a notebook get dropped on the floor without it sustaining damage was pretty amazing.

CMS Products Backup Programs. CMS continues to provide great external hard drives and backup and recovery solutions, with offerings from small portable drives to full-size desktop solutions. Its BounceBack software is interesting in that unlike other backup solutions, it makes an exact duplicate of your existing drive, which can make recovery from a hard drive failure quick and easy. While you can install a new hard drive and restore the information using BounceBack, an easier solution is to remove the hard drive from the CMS drive—this allows you to boot your system immediately.

WordPerfect Office X3. A tour of the ABA TECHSHOW expo floor wouldn't be complete without a stop by the WordPerfect booth, where this year the showcase product was the WordPerfect Office X3 suite. The X3 suite includes improved compatibility with other file formats, as well as Corel WordPerfect Lightning, the new online collaboration tool for capturing, sharing and reusing information and images.

With a total of 140 booths in the expo hall, there were, of course, other great products to be seen. While e-discovery vendors were prominent, there were also vendors providing numerous software and service solutions for practice management, trial presentation, time and billing, digital dictation and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems. To get a full list, go to www.techshow.com/exhibitors.

Note: This is a republication of my article which first appeared in the June 2007 Law Practice Magazine Product Watch Column. 

For attorneys on the go, keeping in touch with our offices and clients is critical and we rely heavily on our Treo or Blackberry devices. My Treo shows the scars of being dropped and abused (and its predecessor was dropped in a lake), and I don't think there is a worse feeling than to watch it bounce across the floor because it fell out of its case or was knocked off my desk. I tried a variety of cases and holders and I'm still in search of the perfect case and belt clip. While researching information for a current article for another publication, I came across Otter Box and its product line: Otter Box makes a number of rugged cases and storage boxes for electronic devices including PDA’s, Smart Phones and iPods, as well as cases for general use. 

According to Otter Box, their Treo case "…completely seals device from the elements while providing access to keypad, touch screen, volume and program buttons, saving customers hundreds from having to replace or repair damaged devices." I've watched their demonstration video and it seems they put quite a bit of thought in their case design as it allows use of the phone, all keys on the keyboard as well as recharging and synchronization without removing the Treo from the case.

At $129, these cases are definitely not inexpensive, but if they save your device from damage or destruction it might be a very small price to pay for the peace of mind.  If anyone is currently using one of these cases, I'd love to hear about it.