There are so many technology tools that it is sometimes a challenge to recognize all the ways that they can be used. Well, one of the neat features of the iPhone and iPad is that you can save a screen shot of whatever is displayed on the phone by holding down the power button and the Apple home button at the same time. The screen shot will be saved with your other photos. The other tool is Google Maps.
So look at how a couple of smart iPad-using lawyers have married those concepts together.
First Rob Dean at his WALKINGOFFICE blog notes how you can load the Google Map and then the Google Street View of a location and save the picture using this technique with his post Need Photos for Court? Take Screenshots with Google Maps.
Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. takes that idea and expands it by using a $5.99 iPad app called Adobe Ideas to have the witness at a depostion mark exactly where he and other parties were located on the Street View of a particular address. His post is titled Using an iPad to recreate a scene in a deposition. After the witness has marked up the photograph, you save it and e-mail it right then to all counsel and the court reporter. It is sort of amazing when you put this all together. You leave the deposition with a photograph of the scene, with the witness having marked with his or her own hand the location of parties, other witnesses, vehicles and other items of note. This would be extremely useful if a wtiness changed his or her story about the locations.
(NOTE: Lawyers without iPads can grab screen shots into their clipboard from their PC's using Alt + PrintScreen and paste the photo into a document or e-mail or other file.)