Vancouver software developer Cartesian Theatre (CT) is tackling one of litigation’s more tedious tasks: assembling large, multi-exhibit affidavits.
CT launched Affidavit Bundler after seeing how much time lawyers, paralegals and law clerks spend preparing evidence packages for courts and tribunals.
“If the affidavit is really large, which in many practice areas they routinely are, the clerical work can take many hours,” CT’s principal Kip Warner told LegalTech.ca. “It’s also very error prone.”
Affidavit Bundler is a standalone, on-premise, desktop application that, in the product’s own words, intelligently automates the mundane, onerous, and error prone clerical tasks of assembling large and unwieldy affidavits. These tasks include creating exhibit cover sheets, placing stamps, paginating documents, generating tables of contents and linking references in an affidavit to the corresponding exhibits.
It can also place electronic signature fields for remote commissioning and identify “orphaned exhibits”—documents that are referenced but missing, or attached without being referenced. “If you have two-hundred exhibits, manually placing e-signature fields would normally take you all day, and you probably would have discovered the morning of the hearing that you forgot one,” said Warner.
The workflow is designed to be straightforward: a lawyer drafts the affidavit, adds it and the supporting exhibits to the application, configures several settings and instructs the software to generate a package ready for commissioning and filing.
CT sees potential applications across litigation, particularly in affidavit-heavy areas such as family, immigration, personal injury, wills and estates, construction and intellectual property law.
Unlike cloud-based legal software, Affidavit Bundler securely processes and stores documents locally. According to the company, the only external communication required is licence verification.
There is currently no other comparable product on the market directed towards Canadian practitioners, though there are similar products intended for the UK and Australian courts.
The application supports Windows, macOS and Ubuntu and accepts affidavit bodies in PDF or DOCX format, with exhibits currently limited to PDF. It also offers document compression and splitting, PDF/A output, oversized-page resizing, metadata scrubbing and file-integrity verification for especially large filings.
Since the product was launched only a few weeks ago, it already has around two dozen firms evaluating or already licensing it. “I’m seeing solo practitioners, small to mid-sized firms, and independent paralegals across diverse practice areas like insurance defence, employment, IP, immigration, general commercial litigation, labour, wills and estates, and others,” said Warner.
“A friend of mine who is a trademark lawyer at a large national firm told me a horror story recently about how they had to compile an affidavit of around 10,000 exhibits. The paralegals spent several weeks on the clerical work with the resulting bill in the six digit range. A technology like Affidavit Bundler, had it been available then, could have substantially reduced the time, expense, and probability of making mistakes.”
Vancouver construction lawyer Adrian Greer described the software as “easy to use and install” and said it helps keep a witness’s changing evidence organized.
On the design choice to support Apple users, Warner had some thoughts to share. “Apple users typically don’t have as rich a selection of desktop software available to them as Windows users, and even less if using the newer Apple silicon machines. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how many practitioners were interested in the software using Apple silicon computers. Then I realized that for small firms and solo practitioners, they don’t have a bureaucracy to deal with and are more free to exercise their own discretion on the choice of software and hardware they rely on, so it made sense. But I was happy to let them know the product can service their requirements too,” said Warner.
The software is licensed through monthly or annual per-seat subscriptions. All features can be evaluated without a licence or time requirement, although generated pages include a watermark. CT’s pricing model aims to be less than $100 per month per seat to keep it accessible to the solo practitioner and small firms.
CT can issue gratis licenses or at a reduced price to legal clinics, pro bono advocates, self-represented litigants and other access-to-justice users on a case by case basis.
Potential additions include integrations with Clio and Dropbox Sign, further jurisdictional refinements and support for more languages (English and French currently supported).
“The main thing is to listen carefully to the customers,” Warner said. “They know what’s necessary for the product to be useful to them. The paralegals are already giving me ideas.”