The MasterList

Thought Packets: Automate Your Legal Intelligence

As practicing lawyers, each of us has a mental library based on our education, training, and practical experience that is specifically hot-wired to case tactics and case outcomes. We sometimes refer to this aspect of our skills as "legal instincts". These instincts are totally non-automated. The depth of our non-automated legal intelligence is vast. Sometimes we take our instinctive legal intelligence for granted, but it is what we are being paid for, not our form banks.

It is nice to have Internet access to millions of legal precedents and to utilize computerized document production tools that allow us to quickly produce copies of historical forms and templates. But, for the lawyer caught in a shooting gallery of competing deadlines, sometimes it's hard to focus on the moving targets and to decide just what to do. The MasterList™ is designed to assist the practicing lawyer in the tactical arena by expanding the power of instinctive intelligence to assist with instant analysis and accurate legal decision-making in the heat of the here and now.

The MasterList truly "manages" cases. It does this by automating the intelligence of the legal practitioner at the point where mind, red pencil, and craft begin and where make-work and form-work leave off.

The MasterList automates the instinctive intelligence of the practitioner by providing a tactical framework for laying out thoughts, plans, and ideas right with deadlines and events. Tactical thoughts can be laid out in plain and simple descriptions that are organized on a case centric, project centric basis. These "thought packets", so to speak, are distributed and shared over a network. In this way, The MasterList works with the litigator or transactionalist as a powerful tool for capturing ideas and converting them into finished plans.

With The MasterList you control the action. You can jump into the middle of a blazing gunfight and immediately see everything necessary to dodge the bullets and hit the targets. It's like having a cheat sheet telling you where the action is while everyone else is operating in slow motion. You define the level of planning and implementation, but with the added power of a tool that allows you to sight, gauge, and control rapidly evolving complex tactical scenarios.

The aim is to get the best spread of the active intelligence of individuals and team members across the breadth of the case or project. This promotes intelligent allocation of resources and staffing and leads to good timing and sequencing decisions for action agendas. Tactical expertise and knowledge of the best minds on a legal team can be captured as thought packets, task packets, idea packets, agenda packets, and action packets. These are then automated via the database and can be shared and put to practical use in the heat of a case.

The MasterList adds an automated element to your instinctive legal intelligence to expand your legal-tactical bandwidth. The MasterList can "mind" any element of a case for you. Then, when The MasterList reports back to you that "it is time", your mind is instantly refreshed and ready for engagement.

Bill Neubert
The MasterList

White Paper: Thought Packets: Automate Your Legal Intelligence
February, 2001

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