The law

[liamh]

I've been using Scrivener for a couple of years now for my personal writing. I am a lawyer, for my sins, and about a month ago I decided to use Scrivener to help me compile a complicated witness statement in a litigation claim. It's been a revelation; it's almost as if Scrivener were designed to be used by trial lawyers. What I have found useful are:

- the ability to import pdf files of evidence directly into research folders and refer to them - in split screen mode - as I write;
- the ability make notes on the scratchpad, document and project notes on the fly; and
- to be able to compile the draft as a witness statement and to export selected pdfs to make up final draft for service along with an exhibit of documents centrally (whilst preserving my working notes on the documents for later use in court),

I feel like I have just scratched the surface.

[KB]

Hi,

Thanks for posting your feedback on how you use Scrivener for your legal work. We have a few lawyers using it, it turns out - in fact we're doing a profile of an attorney who has talked about Scrivener and how he uses it quite a lot soon, and we want to get onto the web page about how it can be used by different types of writers, including lawyers, with a breakdown of the different things that may be useful for each on there, so your feedback here is really useful.

Thanks again!
All the best,
Keith

[tammycravit]

Just thought I'd jump in here and add a "me too". I'm a paralegal, not an attorney, but in addition to using Scrivener for my creative writing projects, I'm starting to use it for my legal work as well.

In fact, I'm starting to use a Scrivener project to organize/draft/assemble an appellate brief that one of my supervising attorneys is putting together, and so far it's working well for that purpose. Keith, if you're interested in such things, I'd be happy to put together a tutorial/post/etc. in three weeks or so showing how I ended up setting things up and how it worked for this larger project. (I might also be talked into doing a screencast, though I don't quite know how to do that and don't presently have any screencasting software besides whatever Quicktime X does out of the box.)

-- Tammy

[KB]

Hi Tammy,

Thanks - and yes, I'd love it if you felt like doing something like that. We have an interview with another lawyer going up on the site soon, about how he uses Scrivener, so something like this would go really well with that.

Many thanks again!
All the best,
Keith

[tammycravit]

Thanks - and yes, I'd love it if you felt like doing something like that.

Be glad to. I'll keep an eye on how things evolve as I do this brief, and then write something up.

And let me just say, as a long-time writer of both fiction and non-fiction (and as someone who spent 12 years in the computer business before becoming a paralegal), THANK YOU for an amazing piece of software! My spouse and I just switched from PCs to Macs, and Scrivener alone makes that switch a no-brainer for me.

Warmly,
Tammy

[ptram]

During the latest months I've spent a lot of time listening to law experts for the work around a noir. I unterstood how a writer's work may be similar to a lawyer work, sometimes.

Paolo

[tammycravit]

Still working on putting something together about how I'm using Scrivener for legal briefs (along with a Scrivener template and a copy of my export settings file), but I thought I'd share a profile of me which was published today on the Practical Paralegalism blog, run by North Carolina-based paralegal and author Lynne DeVenny. My profile gives a nod to Scrivener:

Favorite Legal Software: Not strictly legal software, but the (Mac-only, for the moment) program Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/) is fabulous for organizing and managing large legal writing projects such as trial and appellate briefs.

[themakcompany]

Hey KB,

I'm a non practicing attorney and for the love of God I use and love Scrivener too. For all my writing needs. It's Thanksgiving here and when they ask me at the table what I'm thankful for it will be KB and his program called Scrivener. Really looking forward to page count for screenwriters in 2.0. Hope it works but I'm sure there will be other cool stuff inside as well.

Cheers,
MAK