By Wells H. Anderson and Seth G. Rowland
As Published in the GPSolo Magazine’s May/June 2014 Issue — Almost six years before the entire legal world was forced into tele-work by COVID-19, Seth Rowland teamed up with Wells Anderson, his colleague of 20+ years, to explore the upsides and downsides of different kinds of remote communication methods.
Most lawyers are familiar with Text-processing tools (like Word and Wordperfect), search engines (like LexisNexis, Westlaw and Loislaw) and litigation support databases. However, few have worked with true brainstorming tools that assist a lawyer in reaching conclusions and identifying connections between information.
Two tools that should be part of the “thinking lawyer’s arsenal” are MindManager® from Mindjet (www.mindjet.com) and allCLEAR® from Proquis (www.proquis.com). MindManager creates idea maps that let you link issues, facts, documents, and solutions in a multi-branching tree. allCLEAR’s FlowCharter and Analyzer builds process diagrams and lets you evaluate multiple paths in the process to determine which path is optimal. On a scale of one to five, I would give MindManager a 5 and allCLEAR a 4.5.
AllCLEAR’s FlowCharter and Analyzer build process diagrams and enable you to evaluate multiple paths in the process to determine the optimal path. The FlowCharter builds tree diagrams and organization charts from a simple text editor in minutes, and then enables you to refine these charts with powerful graphic tools to get the precise look you need. Analyzer, enables you to then add data to each of the
steps and branches in the chart for the purpose of finding all the paths through the process, and helps you calculate totals, averages, and probabilities. A more complete review is provided below.
