Category: Open source law office and Software you should try.

Open Source Law office: Today NoteCase

I am opening a new category in this blog titled Open Source Law Office - aimed at highlighting open source software and applications worthy of using in legal activities but definitely useful in other activities too.

Today’s highlight is NoteCase - a hierarchical notes manager designed to help you organize notes in tree-like structure, together with links both external and internal and attachments.

NoteCase helped me a lot in an attempt to organize clients with their files and folders, legal reading notes for cases I have, templates and forms I create for a client and can be reused to other cases too. Usage case scenario I am giving here might be too simple for some, but it is designed to show the features of the program and its usefulness. It’s not the complexity of the tool but the way you are using it.

The main screen of the program does not tell you much about the power hidden beneath

Usage case:
I am dividing the documents I use in my legal work in four main categories: CLIENTS, LAWS, HOW-TOs, TEMPLATES. The Clients folder is obvious, Laws contains collection of legal texts and notes I had to study for a case and are generally usable as reference, How-Tos are the checklists with procedures to follow when doing a certain legal activity (like: lists of documents needed when creating a company, steps for filing a certain action, etc.) and are built upon gathering the information and are generally reusable, Templates is the same, reusable, only that here are mostly forms and documents which I fill in and modify for a certain case.

Aren’t simple folders enough for this?
Well, no. I organize these things in NoteCase as Nodes instead of Folders because of the general view it offers, plus search capabilities. It often happens that you create a certain template or document for a client which might be useful to have later as a template. Same, you find out how a certain procedure must be done and it would be useful to have it as a reference in other cases - but almost always you do not have time to create first the template in the templates folder - so, in NoteCase you only put a note and a link to a file in the Templates or How-To’s node and later you can return and make a template out of it.

Let’s create the main nodes by right-clicking in the left screen and choosing Insert Node (shortcut: Insert):

Give a name to the node and click OK. Similarly create the other main nodes/categories:

Populating the categories with contents is as simple as Inserting Child Nodes to the existing ones. For instance, I number and name my clients in the CLIENTS node like this:

I give them numbers so that I can sort them.

Similarly I populate the other categories. Let’s say I have to draft a contract for a client in the Telecom industry. I take relevant quotes from the contracts law and relevant quotes from the telecom law and put them for reference in the corresponding child nodes under LAWS main node. From previous cases I developed my own guidelines on contract drafting and I put them under the HOW-TO node.

Organizing the client’s information and documents:
We generally have a bunch of data mixed with folders, with meeting notes, and also with the corresponding billing and time management files. All this combined with the data I already put under the other nodes.

Folders and Files:
On my computer I have already created a sub-folder for this client under the CLIENTS folder and I already have some files in there which I want in my NoteCase.

For organizing everything I developed a so called “client template” which I paste in the Client Node and fill it in:

You will notice the names between square brackets which designate client folder as well as other documents and notes together with personal data.

THE POWER OF LINKING
Here comes the feature that seduced me at NoteCase: the ability to link to Files, Folders, Web pages and Most Important: Other Nodes.

I simply select the word between the brackets -> right click on it and choose Link Wizard (or simply press Ctrl+L):

For linking to a folder in the computer I type the path to the folder or select a file from that folder using the three dots button at the right of the target file or URL and then delete the filename only:

Use the same procedure to link to certain files after selecting other words between brackets from the client template. This is how I link to the file I use for billing, time, etc.

In the same way you can link to web references for your case. Only that you paste the URL instead of picking a file.

Double-clicking on the links will open either the web browser for the web links, the file manager for folders and the corresponding program for the files linked.

INTERNAL LINKING
This feature I like the most. Let’s say we have identified the pieces of law for the case and placed them under the LAW node. Similarly we have notes on How to Do it under the HowTo. We also have identified a previous case which contains relevant information for the current one and we also have some meeting notes (the meeting notes are placed as child node for the client node).

Let’s bring them to the case by using internal linking:
Select a word between the brackets and call the Link Wizard as before. But instead of typing the file or URL, select first the Link Type - Link to a node:

We are linking for instance the relevant quotes from the contract law by selecting it from the menu that appeares:

Similarly, link how-to, templates, meeting notes, etc.

This way, we have in one single place, indexed all the information belonging to a case, no matter where it really is stored (on the web, somewhere in the computer or as another note in the same software).

Double-clicking on the links for nodes will bring you to that particular node.
What I would’ve loved to see here is a set of navigation buttons for going back to the node you left from - like in browsers.

Drafting documents and adding more notes for the client is as simple as creating child nodes to the client node and linking if necessary because NoteCase supports unlimited nested nodes.

MORE FEATURES

Tagging:
Right-Click on the node and choose Node Properties: it will open a dialog allowing you to add tags to help you in searching through nodes for relevant information:

Searching:
From the Edit menu select Search, or press CTRL+F to open the search dialog which allows you to search either through “Node Title/Contents” or “Node Tags”.

The F3 key allows you to continue searching for the next occurence.

Sorting nodes:
I told you earlier that I give numbers to clients aside from naming the case. It’s useful together with the Sort function you can reach by Right Clicking on Clients node for instance and choosing Sort Children Descending - this keeps my latest clients on top of the list.

Mark node as Completed:
Right click on the client node and choose this option to strike a line through the node name. This way I mark the client file as completed.

Moving nodes around:
Another useful feature which allows you to reorganize nodes and move them around.

Export:
Under the file menu you will find the Export function. This allows you to export the nodes, the branches or the whole tree in other formats. There are not many options as the file format. I use Export to Text files and to HTML files, HTML being easy to import in a word processor for further editing.

As a conclusion:
I found NoteCase a simple, yet powerful tool which allows organizing the tons of complex documents and texts I am working with in a quite versatile way. I never tested the Pro version, advertised on their website, but I am sure it brings more powerful features.

I was disappointed to see the announcement on the website that the project is discontinued. I looked for the reasons on the blog indicated but never found them. The software is still available on the website both for Windows, Linux and other operating systems as well as in the Ubuntu repository. I hope it stays there and that some day someone will take up development again. Just in case, I downloaded the other versions, even if I use it mainly in Ubuntu.

Written by cdriga on February 14th, 2010 with 2 comments.
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