Although these wireless offerings are in their infancy and the hardware required to use them is certainly not cheap (not to mention the relatively exorbitant service fees), this is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting areas for lawyers to watch for developments in the future.

At a deposition
For those of you reading this article who aren't in the legal field, a deposition is a piece of testimony, given under oath by a witness, that is written down or recorded for use in court at a later date.

As most lawyers do, I normally prepare an outline well in advance of a deposition and refine it as the deposition draws near. I use the outline during the deposition as a guide, not a script, to ensure that I cover everything I need to. It's easy enough to create outlines in your word processor and then convert it into Palm-readable format. However, if you do this, the document will cease to have the features we normally use an outliner for and simply become a static document.

There are several outliners available for the Palm OS, but my favorite is BrainForest from Aportis (at http://store.aportis.com/bfpro.html). The Professional version of BrainForest allows you to create outlines either on your PC or on your Palm device and has great features like collapsible and expandable subsections, the ability to drag and drop text to different parts of your outline, and the ability to create a list from your outline which you can use during the deposition to check-off topics you've already covered. These features make BrainForest ideal not only for deposition outlines, but also for drafting legal briefs, oral arguments, and presentations to clients.

An appropriate warning if you intend to use your Palm device to create outlines and check lists is that extensive use of Graffiti, Palm's handwriting recognition system, can be hazardous to your sanity. If you plan to input a lot of text, your best bet is to get one of the keyboards that have become available for the Palm device. The two most common keyboards on the market are the GoType! Keyboard from LandWare (at http://www.landware.com/gotype/), and the Palm Portable Keyboard from Palm (at http://www.palm.com/products/keyboard/). I prefer the Palm Portable Keyboard because, as the name indicates, it's very portable. This keyboard, an engineering marvel if you ask me, folds to about the same size as my Palm device and works great. I haven't had much experience with the GoType!, but it's significantly less expensive than the Palm offering.

During depositions, disagreements often arise with regard to procedure or points of evidence. For this reason, many of us like to carry reference materials such as applicable rules of procedure and evidence. The rules "handbook" most of us are accustomed to is so bulky that you often have to make a choice between bringing it or other materials you would like to bring to a deposition.

With a Palm device, you can download many reference materials from the Internet for free. For example, I've created Palm-readable versions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Federal Rules of Evidence, the Federal Trademark Act, the Federal Copyright Act, and the Federal Patent Statutes and have those texts available at my fingertips through my Palm device at all times. These documents are available as free downloads at my firm's Web site, at http://www.lott-friedland.com/downloads.htm.