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Below are excerpts from the June 2010 GPSOLO Magazine article "Case Analysis Software and Other Law Practice Tools", and a few brief clarifications regarding MasterFile's features mentioned in the article:
"Both CaseMap and MasterFile are good programs with rich feature sets, but they should not be mistaken as substitutes for dedicated practice management software."
[NOTE: Click here to see 10 reasons why CaseMap users are switching to MasterFile.]
"Both CaseMap and MasterFile work by drawing up a list of issues at hand and then enumerating the supporting elements that will provide conclusive winning arguments. Once the issues have been entered, the hunt begins for facts to support the client's position. These facts can have their own supporting documentations and be linked to multiple issues. As a law firm examines documents, videos, voice mails, e-mails, and other materials, these materials can easily be linked and entered into the software for later analysis. This process can also work in reverse—the law firm might come across a document that raises a new issue to be added to the existing list. The power of programs such as CaseMap and MasterFile is that they allow for a dynamically expanding list of elements."
"Depending on the volume of your practice, other specialized software might come into play. Creating an index of 10,000 documents is not much of a task for either CaseMap or MasterFile, but what of larger indexes? Although both programs claim to handle as many as 100,000 documents/pages, what are the operational costs of having this large of a document set? Will your searches within these documents slow down? How long will it take to import all these documents and create necessary secondary information to make them useful to your case? At a certain point, you must consider using a true e-discovery software package such as CaseLogistix or Concordance."
[NOTE: GPSOLO Magazine mistakenly stated that MasterFile only creates document indexes like CaseMap's document "spreadsheet" when MasterFile is also a fully featured litigation support evidence repository (as explained in Ross Kodner's recent Law Technology News article "Trial tech options for small firms with small cases and small budgets"). In response to this oversight we have sent the following clarification to the Joan Burda, Editor-in-Chief of GPSOLO Magazine:
Joan M. Burda
Editor-in-Chief
GPSOLO Magazine
American Bar Association
Dear Joan:
I would like to thank GPSOLO Magazine for featuring our product, MasterFile, in its June 2010 issue under the article "Case Analysis Software and Other Law Practice Tools".
In his article, Ardavan Gurg correctly explains that both MasterFile and CaseMap both offer a rich set of case analysis features. However, it appears he failed to appreciate a significant and major difference between CaseMap and MasterFile when he suggested both require litigation support products like CaseLogistix, Concordance or Summation for evidence management beyond 10,000 documents. We would like to clarify that MasterFile is also a fully-fledged litigation support document repository on par with these products and can easily handle 50,000 to 100,000 documents (approx. 500,000 scanned pages) which is typical of the small to medium sized litigation cases MasterFile was designed for. MasterFile's advanced document loading and bulk maintenance facilities also make handling such volumes a breeze to manage.
Many of our customers are ex-CaseMap users who found CaseMap unwieldy even with 1,000 documents since CaseMap does not include a document repository and thus opted for our cost effective solution rather than taking on the additional complexity of costly third-party litigation support software like the products mentioned above.
We invite your readers to review the material on our web-site where we set out detailed comparisons between MasterFile and CaseMap that highlight the above advantages of MasterFile over CaseMap.
Thanking you once again for featuring MasterFile in GPSOLO Magazine.
Best regards,
Zainul Ebrahim
Click here for a comparison of MasterFile to CaseMap, Concordance and Summation.
Click here for our white paper illustrating problems you face with CaseMap and just a thousand documents.]
"Traditionally, creating graphical timelines was a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, but a simple export function from both CaseMap and Master-File will provide all the information needed by TimeMap to create graphical timelines rivaling those produced by in-house graphics departments."
"MasterFile has included document management as part of its overall system. However, it lacks other practice management capabilities such as calendaring and billing. It also limits your keyword or phrase search to a particular case. ..."
[NOTE: Although CaseMap does not feature a document repository, it also limits searching to a particular case, however, MasterFile's Domain Search does allow searching across cases stored on a server.]
Click here for the full GPSolo article in PDF format.
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