“It’s the sort of thing that’s easy to adopt into your practice, instead of having to adapt your practice to it." Meet Kansas City attorney Tim Davis a workers’ compensation defense lawyer, lifelong Mac advocate, and the attorney championing his firm’s move to become a LIT SUITE Enterprise Partner.
Timothy “Tim” Davis is of counsel at a roughly fifty-lawyer general civil firm in Kansas City, Missouri, which is the ninth or tenth largest firm in the city — depending on who’s retiring and who’s just been hired. Tim’s focus is workers’ compensation defense, but his interest in legal technology runs much deeper than any one practice area. He has been an Apple-using lawyer since the original Macintosh, was once on Apple’s legal circuit when Apple had a dedicated legal vertical, and is one of the most articulate voices on the LIT SUITE in the lawyers’ community.
Right now, he’s also championing something specific inside his firm: making the firm an official LIT SUITE Enterprise Partner, so that the firm — not its individual lawyers — owns and controls the LIT SUITE licenses. Tim’s argument to his partners is the one any operations-minded litigator will recognize: the apps are too central to how modern litigation actually gets done to leave them on a per-lawyer credit card.
“It’s intuitive, it’s easy to use. It’s the sort of thing that is easy to adopt into your practice, instead of having to adapt your practice to it.”
That is exactly the case Tim is making.
“Lawyers with Computers Will Replace Lawyers Without”
Tim came to legal technology by way of a mentor. Back in the 1990s in southern Missouri, a Solo Practitioner of the Year named David Vandagriff gave him a line he has never forgotten, and may sound familiar in the newer context of artificial intelligence: “Lawyers will never be replaced by computers, but lawyers with computers will replace lawyers without computers.”
Tim took it to heart. He brought his Macintosh into a small-town firm whose secretaries were still walking floppy disks between two un-networked word processors. He spent nights at the office, after his kids were in bed, learning every legal-tech program he could get his hands on — Robbins Analytics, BeeDocs’ Timeline 3D. He demonstrated for Apple at user-group meetings, attended Macworld Boston as part of an Apple program, and was sent around the Midwest to speak at Apple-hosted seminars about using Apple products in the legal field. He learned, in his own words, “to see things across fields. A contractor showed me how a spreadsheet could do a lookup, and I went, wait a minute, I could use that for workers’ comp benefit rates.”
That instinct of “Whose problem am I solving, and what’s the smallest tool that solves it?” is exactly what brought him to the LIT SUITE.
Why DocReviewPad Is the Center of His Practice
For Tim’s workers’ comp defense practice, the heavyweight e-discovery platforms are the wrong shape. Relativity, Everlaw, and Disco are designed for cases with hundreds of thousands of documents, multiple simultaneous reviewers, and the storage costs to match. A typical comp file doesn’t need that. What it does need is a fast, organized way to live inside the medical record.
“I can dump all the medical into DocReviewPad, and I can literally just zoom, and pull it up and annotate it and follow up. Where does this go? Who ordered that? I can do the notes and then shoot that out to wherever it needs to go. I can digest and get a sense of what’s going on.”
His workflow is templated. Every new comp file starts the same way: a Case File with folders for medical records, medical bills, payroll, correspondence, and pleadings. Anything new gets OCR’d first, dumped into the right folder, and renamed with the date at the front so it sorts chronologically. From there, Tim works through each new batch of records, checking the path of treatment, identifying specialist referrals, watching for the prevailing-factor questions that win or lose a comp case.
The payoff isn’t theoretical. Tim told us about a case he inherited that had been running ten years before he arrived: a worker who had a heart attack, then a kidney transplant, then a second transplant, and was gearing up for a third, all of it allegedly tied back to the original work-related cardiac event. The total claimed medical exposure was somewhere between one and two million dollars.as soon as the deposition ends, not weeks later, when a budget-conscious schedule used to dictate.
“I talked to a nephrologist and we sat down. I had a lot of medical records. I put them all into DocReviewPad, and between reviewing the documents and the reports and the searches, she was able to determine the kidney wasn’t at all related to the heart attack. So we paid him for the heart, about $75,000, instead of one or two million.”
The opposing attorney, a friend by the end of it, agreed.
A second case sharpened the point. A plaintiff claimed years of exposure to industrial solvents had caused his leukemia, and sued fourteen defendants. Tim used DocReviewPad’s issue-coding to walk the medical literature against the claimant’s exposure history.
“With fourteen defendants making deposition designations, I realized instead of just issue-coding for liability and damages, TranscriptPad let me do Plaintiff’s designations, Defendant One, Defendant Two, Defendant Three. Now I could print a beautiful little report — mine, theirs, all of it — instead of highlighting a condensed PDF.”
That multi-party designation trick is a workflow worth using, especially in mass-tort and complex commercial cases where everyone is staking out a piece of the same transcript.
The “Witness” Issue Code
Tim’s other small-but-mighty habit is a custom issue code he just calls “witness.”
“Anytime there’s a name in a transcript on one line, I just tag it “witness.” Later I can print that out and say, all right, who are all the people that have been named in this thing? Are any of them relevant? People mentioned but not deposed — should we depose them?”
It’s the kind of move that costs nothing to set up and saves an associate a half-day of re-reading transcripts looking for names. He’s offered it to colleagues at his firm gearing up for back-to-back depositions, alongside the broader suggestion: dump every transcript into TranscriptPad, search across all of them at once, and let the issue codes do the rest.
Building Toward Enterprise
One oeason Tim is pushing for the LIT SUITE Enterprise Partnership isn’t ideology, it’s institutional resilience.
Tim’s firm doesn’t currently mandate the LIT SUITE the way some firms have mandated TranscriptPad for depositions. iPads are available to any attorney who wants one; the apps are reimbursed by the firm. That’s fine for early adopters. It is not fine, in Tim’s view, for the long-term health of a litigation p on screen.
SomThe reason Tim is pushing for the LIT SUITE Enterprise Partnership isn’t ideology, it’s institutional resilience.
Tim’s firm doesn’t currently mandate the LIT SUITE the way some firms have mandated TranscriptPad for depositions. iPads are available to any attorney who wants one; the apps are reimbursed by the firm. That’s fine for early adopters. It is not fine, in Tim’s view, for the long-term health of a litigation practiceave the verdict there. I always like showing the verdict to the jury and then using the markup tool to write ‘You should answer this “X” by yes’ and put a red X. Always, always.”
The reason Tim is pushing for the LIT SUITE Enterprise Partnership isn't ideology, it's institutional resilience.
Tim's firm doesn't currently mandate the LIT SUITE the way some firms have mandated TranscriptPad for depositions. iPads are available to any attorney who wants one; the apps are reimbursed by the firm. That’s fine for early adopters. It is not fine, in Tim’s view, for the long-term health of a litigation practice.
“I just, you know, I think everybody in at least the litigation section should use it. Then on the corporate side — if you’re doing a presentation to a client, put it on the screen. Do a callout: “Let’s talk about this paragraph. This one is important because…” You can do a second document, show why it’s important, show how it didn’t work in another deal. This is their proposed, this is our proposed, this is why we want to do it this way. It doesn’t have to be just litigation."
Becoming an Enterprise Partner means the firm owns the licenses. It means a new associate is set up on day one. It means a transition out of partnership doesn’t take key institutional knowledge with it. And it means Tim’s successors inherit the workflow he’s spent years refining.
To that end, he’s already bringing in the next generation. A brand-new shareholder and a brand-new associate are learning his comp workflow. One of the firm’s newest shareholders, has gotten very good with TrialPad and now runs the tech side for his co-counsel’s trials. Tim describes it as “expanding his horizons,” but it’s also exactly what big firms once paid hot-seat operators to do.
For Tim, that’s the broader case for the LIT SUITE in any firm: it isn’t a single-attorney tool. It’s a way to give a whole practice — comp defense, complex commercial, corporate transactions, even — a shared, reliable, screen-up-and-go vocabulary
On Efficiencies (and Pricing)
When LIT SOFTWARE moved its annual pricing a few years back, there was understandable hand-wringing on a Mac-lawyers list Tim follows. He wrote a post in response. We quote it here because it is, in fact, the exact pitch he’s making at his own firm.
“This is a company that is constantly evolving and growing and listening and incorporating your thoughts into the software to make it better. This is a company that is constantly looking at new products to add to the suite. They held off on the price for quite a while. And for most of us, this is probably two hours of billable time in a year. It’s a great product. Suck it up and use it. Or if you don’t, see what’s out there — but I think you’re going to be disappointed, and you’ll come back to it.”
He has the receipts on the efficiency side, too. He’s especially excited about TranscriptPad’s video sync and edit capabilities for cases where his firm does video depositions, a feature that, by his calculation, will more than pay for the entire LIT SUITE in savings. (A nationwide firm we work with measured exactly that in their Atlanta office last year, and saw six-figure savings against what they used to pay court reporters for syncing.)
"I've Touched Everything"
Ask Tim why he keeps DocReviewPad open instead of just delegating the medical review to staff, and you get an answer that may resonate with any litigator who came up before paralegal-driven document teams:
“I like hands on. If I’m the one doing the syncing or putting the documents in or going through, I’ve touched everything. Then I know the case better. It’s back there percolating, and I can come up with better theories and better ideas about where we go. Or, you know, when we should never settle this case. That’s the fun. That’s the beauty. You don’t realize you’re doing it, but you have that muscle memory."
That muscle memory — across DocReviewPad, TranscriptPad, and TrialPad — is exactly what Tim is trying to build into the next generation of his firm’s litigators. The Enterprise Partnership is the structural step that makes it possible. And he is, in his own words from a meeting a few weeks back to the head of his firm’s litigation section, telling everyone who will listen: you need to look at this.
Learn more about Timothy Davis, Esq.:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tim-davis-bb116610/
Firm website: www.sb-kc.com
Firm Twitter/X: @sblawyerskc
Firm Facebook:www.facebook.com/seigfreidbingham
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