WORKFLOWY IS GREAT FOR LAWYERS!

The following presentation was recorded during a Zoom call in September of 2022.

Well, hello everybody. My name is Matthew Dobler. I'm an attorney from the law firm of Urbana and Probanic in Pittsburgh. And obviously, we're here today to talk about one of my favorite software tools. It's called WorkFlowy. And I want to be mindful of everybody's time because the best way to tell you about a tool like WorkFlowy, especially one that is as simple as WorkFlowy, is just to show you WorkFlowy.

I'm going to do that, but before I dive straight into the demo, please just indulge me in a second of justification because my thesis here today isn't just that WorkFlowy is great. My thesis is that WorkFlowy is great for lawyers. And that's an important distinction to understand right from the outset because at its core, WorkFlowy is nothing more than a really powerful outlining tool. And as we all know, outlining is important to lawyers. It's why we spend so much time working on it in law school. It's the start of all of our legal writing. It's the start of all of our oral arguments.

And just to prove this point, I want to show you the only two print resources that I have in my office right now. Everything else is electronic, except these two books. And I know you can't see it, so there's a picture of what these are. These are the outlines that I had from my law school courses 20 years ago. When our office went to 100% remote, these are the only two books that I took from my office and I brought and I brought home with me.

I think one of the reasons that outlining makes so much sense and that WorkFlowy works so well for lawyers is because outlining is such a fundamental and common part of our education. Because we're taught early how to organize our learning into an outline that becomes a fundamental part of the way we practice once we finish law school. And WorkFlowy takes advantage of that structure and it gives you a robust, unlimited outlining tool that you can use everywhere in your practice.

All right, now the one thing that I want to make sure you understand is that I am an independent reviewer. Okay? I don't work for WorkFlowy. I have no connection to their developers and I don't earn a cent if you decide to earn the software. In fact, if you ask me how much WorkFlowy costs, I don't even know the answer to that. That's, uh, I, I don't know. I'm just a lawyer that's found this tool and I really do believe in this tool so much. I think this is such a critical tool for practicing law that I just want to show share my experience with others.

All right, so if I've convinced you, let me just jump in and show you how WorkFlowy works. So this is sort of what you get when you start with WorkFlowy. And one of the things is that it's one outline for everything. So you start off from a single bullet. And this key concept of WorkFlowy is that you have one WorkFlowy for everything. Your entire life, if you think about it, can be wrapped up into a single outline.

And people often push back against this, suggesting that they need a separate account so that they can have one outline for, say, work and a separate outline for their personal stuff. But somebody that says that has really missed the point of WorkFlowy. Because you don't need separate outlines to keep things separate. You don't need separate lists. You just need more top-level bullets.

So, for example, that lawyer that wants a separate account to differentiate between work and personal stuff, she can get that just by making a top-level bullet called "Work" and one called "Personal." So let's do that right now. Let me create a bullet called "Work" and one called "Personal." And just like that, those are the first two bullets in WorkFlowy. It's that simple.

So you get the point. I could just keep going on through here and I could type all of these sort of top-level buckets that might make up our hypothetical lawyer's life. And bullets as being sort of folders at the top of your computer's operating system. Each of these bullets will be lists themselves that will have sub-bullets. If you've ever heard somebody talking about someone that keeps lists of lists, that's kind of the idea of WorkFlowy. It's lists of bullets and each bullet can become its own list. So it is, in fact, a list of a list.

And obviously, none of this has to happen in any order. You can do it totally randomly. It's not as if you have to create all of your top-level bullets before you can go back and create your sub-bullets. But I actually think it's kind of an interesting experience. It's kind of an interesting exercise to sit down and think through your whole life and see how many of these top-level bullets that you have. Uh, but that's philosophical.

Okay, so let's go on. Let's add some sub-bullets. Uh, and I'm gonna skip here. I'm gonna skip over the work and some of the, the family stuff and I'm gonna jump down here. This one I have here, "Gift Ideas." And I'm gonna jump down there because I think it's a good one to sort of explain some of the basics.

So creating a new bullet is as simple as putting your cursor at the end of an existing bullet and pressing return on your keyboard. And that's it. You make a new bullet. To indent that newly created bullet and make it a child of the bullet above it, you just press tab on the keyboard. Now, I know that there's nothing particularly new here. I'm sure if you've ever worked with bulleted lists in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you're familiar with how you can indent and build out your lists.

And actually, I'd offer that that simplicity is part of what makes WorkFlowy so useful because it's not as if it really offers anything that new. What it does is it takes a bunch of existing technologies that you already know and it sort of weaves them together into a list. It's sort of like a, a list maker tool meets a memo book.

Now, the first difference you'll see between WorkFlowy and, uh, like a bulleted list in Word or something like that is that there are no limits on either the vertical nor the horizontal axis. In other words, this list doesn't need to fit on a piece of paper, not even hypothetically. So unlike Word, the canvas that you write on in WorkFlowy can extend on and on. As many bullets as you make, as much as you want to indent them, WorkFlowy will adjust.

Now, obviously, if you write on and on and on and you indent on and on and on and on, soon enough there's going to get to be so much writing that it'll get impossible to use. But WorkFlowy has got tricks to deal with that overload. For now, the lesson is that your WorkFlowy outlines can have an unlimited number of bullets.

This notion of an unlimited number of bullets is critical and it's one of the things that people have a hard time understanding. So I just want to punctuate the sentence by pointing some things out. Some users have millions of bullets. I have only 89,000 bullets. But still, that's 89,000 bullets. And the point is that they're free. So you got to use them. You can't be stingy about creating them.

Once we talk about this, I assume that you get a sense of how all this data got into WorkFlowy. So I'm going to stop animating all the populations. The rest of the examples I'm going to show you assume that you understand how everything got typed in. I'm just going to demonstrate how you can use WorkFlowy to manipulate existing data.

And this is a great opportunity to illustrate a second fundamental concept of WorkFlowy, which is the idea of bulleted level zooming. So once we've created a bunch of bullets, there's a pretty familiar way that we can see or hide what's underneath them. Again, this will feel comfortable to anybody that's used a computer in the last 20 years. It's just this idea of collapsing or showing the contents of a drop-down by clicking on a little triangle. Again, this is very straightforward.

Where it gets slick, though, is the ability to click on the bullet and jump straight to a zoom of its contents. So in this regard, each bullet can become its own list. It's the title of the list and its child bullets are now promoted up to the top. So once you've zoomed into the appropriate level of the outline, which hides everything else, all the subordinate bullets can either be expanded or collapsed.

So when you go back to that lawyer that wanted a separate outline for work and personal stuff, she could get it by just clicking on each bullet at the top level. So here's an outline for work, and here's a totally separate outline for personal. And as long as you look at it in these views, the two of them don't meet. You don't see the two of them. You have to go up higher to to see them.

Pardon the interruption, but I want to talk through a few specific use cases with you. And as I talk through some of these places where WorkFlowy really shines, I'll show you some of its specific features.

So the first topic I want to cover is scripting questions for direct and cross-examinations. The basics here are simple. This is a list-making tool and you're making lists of questions that you want to ask. So they're perfect for each other. When you can collapse the questions down to topics, it makes it easy to visualize the examination from a higher level.

Now, WorkFlowy has an easy function and a corresponding keystroke to scratch an item off. So during your examination, you can scratch off questions as you go. Scratching off a parent also scratches off all of its subordinate bullets. So if you eliminate one topic area, you can easily eliminate all of the subordinate questions. This works well if, for example, you have a question about military service. If the answer to the first question is no, the rest of the questions about military service are irrelevant and you can skip them. WorkFlowy makes it easy to visually represent this relationship.

But it's deeper than just questions. Scratching off an outline. WorkFlowy works great in an environment that includes a Dictaphone and a transcriptionist. In other words, what works really well is to dictate a long list of bulleted items and then use WorkFlowy. So I can close my eyes and just speak the questions I want to ask and my secretary transcribes them and sends me an email with the bulleted list. When the email comes back, I just copy and paste it from the email directly into WorkFlowy and automatically I've got hundreds of bullets just waiting to be dragged around, collapsed, and reorganized. With deposition transcripts loaded into my iPad and my handheld Dictaphone, which I know will ultimately be feeding WorkFlowy bullets, I can literally do hours and hours of work from anywhere.

Writing. Obviously, an outlining tool is helpful for writing. But check out this feature. As you're doing your research, when you find a source you want to include in your brief, you simply take a screenshot of the document. Because it's a screenshot, it doesn't really matter where you got the document. It doesn't have to be printed. It doesn't have to be saved. It doesn't even have to be downloaded. You just take a screenshot. Then you can drag that screenshot right into your outline where you want it. And it can now be collapsed or dragged around anywhere like any other bullet. This is also really useful for documents you want to use with witnesses and scripts of directs and crosses.

And actually, the ability to drag and drop pictures into outlines wasn't always there. It's a relatively new feature. And before it was there, I really couldn't recommend WorkFlowy for lawyers because it was so frustrating that you couldn't do exactly this. But when they finally added this feature, it was everything I wanted it to be. And it really does make WorkFlowy a super-powered legal organizational tool.

All right, trial. I mean, I guess it goes without saying that your entire trial can be reduced to an outline, including your entire opening, the questions you'll ask, and your closing. From a macro to a micro perspective, it's all there and you can organize it all in one outline.

But the other killer feature is the way it lets you work with your trial team. Like Google Docs, WorkFlowy is cloud-based and it updates automatically. So you could easily have a second seat in the courtroom or the deposition room. Or if you're doing remote depositions, you could just have that second seat beyond in the Zoom room and have that second seat listening in and adding new questions to the bottom of your list as you go. That could happen very easily.

And, you know, in fact, I did this presentation this morning for my paralegal. He's a, he's of course my, uh, my number one test audience for everything. Uh, and he told me, he told me that I should stop here and really point out the collaborative nature of WorkFlowy and how well it works with teams because it really does. It allows you to work together very, very seamlessly and very smoothly.

Okay, a to-do list is a pretty easy thing to conceptualize with a, with WorkFlowy or something like that, right? Uh, I like to organize mine by days. And I can tell you how good it feels when you scratch things off that list. And I'm telling you, I'm in my to-do list, I don't know, a dozen times a day, 20 times a day, without questions.

But watch this. If you use at WorkFlowy with a team and you share your outline and you add these tags, see where we've added these tags up here? If you add these tags to your to-do list, then people just can just click on their name and see only their tasks. Now, I don't want to spend a whole bunch of time, so I'm sort of underselling the potential of these hashtags, but they make long lists really manageable, which is especially important when you're parsing many tasks among multiple people on a team.

And that kind of brings me to my last and maybe my wildest idea. Uh, but just listen for a sec. I mean, indulge me here. Uh, if you had all of your cases in WorkFlowy and you had a template new client bullet, you can build out all the fields that you want to capture, just the exact same way you would with a fancy twenty thousand dollar a year case management software. Then when you get a new client, you copy and paste that template bullet and you're ready with consistent fields for all of your clients. It's searchable, taggable, and you can add images. I mean, I'm just saying, if you put some work into it, I think you could go a long way towards organizing even a fairly busy firm.

Okay, so that's WorkFlowy. Uh, and again, I know I'm, I'm leaving stuff behind. Uh, but again, I want to be mindful of everybody's time. And I could sit here and talk about this all day. So I thought maybe I'd, uh, open it up and see if anybody had any questions. Are there any questions that anybody has at this point in the presentation?

One of the participants asked a question about the use of screenshots of documents in deposition and trial outlines. It's still a picture. So, um, I mean, generally the way I use that tool is when I'm sort of in the very early phases of writing a brief and I'm just sort of gathering like ideas and I don't even, I don't know what order they're going to go in. I don't even, I don't know what I'm going to use. But I'm sort of reading stuff and and I'm highlighting and, uh, I'm dumping it all into a folder. And what I do right then now is I take a screenshot of every sort of blurb I want and I drag it and I make a WorkFlowy bullet out of it.

So like very much, you know, I always try to make analog, uh, metaphors, right? So it's very much like the old cards that people used to use, the index cards with the box, right? If you start by making a card with every thought that you want, then you can later go back and put them in the right order. And, and, you know, I guess you can't really indent them with a card box, but you put them in the right order. Uh, and that's exactly what I do in WorkFlowy. Is I take all the all the cards, uh, and I, I get them there and I sort of, you can visualize them and drag them around where you want them to be. Does that answer your question?

The next question asked if there was training available for lawyers that wanted to use WorkFlowy. WorkFlowy definitely has videos out there. I've never seen anything specific to lawyers, which is exactly why I've always wanted to proselytize this way because I really do think that this tool, and, you know, the other thing I think is fantastic about it is because since it's not been designed or marketed for lawyers, it's not priced for lawyers, which is, which is good. I think if if they realized that they had a tool that was so helpful to to legal practice, I think it would get gobbled up by Lexis or something like that and it would all of a sudden be very expensive.

Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. Thank you to everybody for coming.