First Look: FactBox Case Organizing Software

FactBox is a cloud-based tool for collecting and organizing the facts and evidence in your cases. It’s a bit like Evernote or OneNote, but built specifically for lawyers, investigative journalists, and others who need to make sense of piles of facts and evidence.

Here’s how you might use it. While reviewing a deposition transcript you uploaded to FactBox, you come across a key admission by the witness. So you highlight it and create a new fact in FactBox. You can associate that fact with a case, categorize it by the issue(s) to which it relates, and add your own notes. The fact will be linked back to the page in the deposition transcript on which it appears.

When you need to assemble your thoughts for a hearing or trial, you can sort your facts, hide irrelevant facts, and export them to a Word document you can edit further if you want to.

FactBox is $45/user/month (or $38/user/month if you pay annually). If you cancel your subscription, FactBox won’t toss your data for 6 months so you can re-subscribe if your needs change and your information will all still be there. That’s helpful for firms that need to drop their subscription for a few months between cases. (Of course FactBox will delete your data from its servers if you ask it to.)

Speaking of data, FactBox encrypts data in transit and at rest, and uses a secure server facility for file storage. Its website says it is “sophisticatedly paranoid about security,” which sounds like the right attitude. It is not HIPAA compliant.

I think FactBox looks like a great tool for organizing evidence. Sure, you could get by with Evernote or OneNote, but neither will automatically organize your facts and evidence in a timeline, link facts directly to supporting documents, or integrate with Dropbox, Box, and iManage.

If you regularly need to organize facts and evidence for reasonably complex cases, the price tag shouldn’t faze you (and you are probably already using or considering a more expensive option like CaseMap). Otherwise, you might not be all that excited to add another $45/user/month on top of your practice management software, Office 365, QuickBooks or Xero, etc. So if you find yourself thinking FactBox would be nice to have but not essential, you are probably better off using Evernote or OneNote. You can save FactBox for that big case where you really need it.

If you are on the fence, you can try FactBox free for two weeks to find out.

First Look: FactBox Case Organizing Software was originally published on Lawyerist.com.