CaseMap

Minnesota lawyer Mark E. Tracy emailed me with a question:  "I spoke with you sometime ago and you mentioned software that was good for creating medical summaries and chronologies.  I'm wondering if you can send me the name of that software?"  The answer is CaseMap.

The best program I have ever seen for creating case/medical summaries is CaseMap.  It is designed to keep track of information and evidence in a case including allowing you to rate how good or bad facts are so that you can better gage the strength of your case or an argument.  It is basically a database that has been tweaked to be more helpful for lawyers.  You could do the same thing with Access and a lot of work, but for a couple hundred bucks you can get CaseMap off the shelf.

Medical records are a particularly difficult piece of evidence to deal with effectively.  The records are often voluminous, disjointed, and written in their own peculiar form of English.  Finding what you want is difficult; finding the story they tell, well neigh impossible.  Enter CaseMap.

What I would do is take the medical records and Bates stamp them.  Then I would start reading through them, no particular order needed.  In CaseMap I would kept track of the Date/Time, Fact Text (medical treatment), Prescriptions (I made custom column), Source (provider/Bates stamp to page).  If you have scanned records, you can even create links to the actual records for ready access.  When you are done, you can produce a chronological report.  That report gives you have a fantastic view of the client's medical history.  The amazing thing is that you suddenly start seeing patterns that were not evident before.  The story told in the medical records comes to life - in that story is the theory of your case.

Medical records are just a good example of the power of CaseMap and only scratching the surface of its power.  It is made to work for all the records, information, evidence, and testimony in a case.  Recent versions allow more links to information like depos, electronic documents, and online resources.  It gives the lawyer a tool to break even the most complex case into its constituent parts for analysis.  I recommend the product highly to any lawyer, particularly anyone doing litigation.  Below is a screen shot:

Good luck.  If you use CaseMap or if you get it, I would love to hear how you are using it and how it is working for you.

- Peter H. Berge

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