Your firm is served a complaint from an unfamiliar lawyer. It cites a statute that indicates it changed recently and may put your client at fault. Your new adversary’s client spent time at a hospital near Cape May. Where to start getting the information you need on the firm’s background, the statute and the hospital?

Most of this information can be found in the New Jersey Lawyers Diary and Manual. The “red book,” as it’s commonly called, has been a staple of every lawyers’ office for many years. And for the past few years, the Lawyers Diary has offered an edition for computers.

The hardcover Lawyers Diary includes the official list of New Jersey attorneys as designated by the New Jersey Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection alphabetically and geographically. Each attorney’s listing includes mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and the year of bar admission. The Lawyers Diary is a convenient reference for locating judges, their clerks, getting directions to courts including maps, court terms, motion schedules and filing procedures. The volume also lists fines, penalties and filing fees; addresses for insurance companies, hospitals and their fees for medical record requests; federal and state agencies; and county and municipal officials.

As with any book, however, it’s hard to search for specific information. For example, try finding all the lawyers in a certain town or within a specialty. This is where the computer-based version of the Lawyers Diary has advantages.

New Jersey Lawyers Diary and Manual-PC Edition contains much more information about practicing New Jersey attorneys. In addition to address, telephone and fax numbers, the CD includes lawyers’ e-mail ad-dress and areas of practice. While difficult to search or sort entries in a book, the CD allows you to locate attorneys by name, geography, area of practice, size of firm or zip code. You can easily click from an individual attorney’s record to view the list of lawyers in that firm.

Once a firm is located, you can press the Copy Address button to copy the address to the Windows clipboard and paste it into your word processor or other programs. While it would be nice to highlight a specific attorney within a firm and include that name when the address is pasted, the current version copies only the address, not the attorney’s name. Another minor com-plaint is that when copying an address for a hospital or insurance company, a blank line appears in some of the re-cords. (I may be too spoiled by the added tools available in case management programs.)

The CD version includes several other resources of special benefit to New Jersey practitioners. The lists included in the printed diary can be searched, which means you can locate federal, state and municipal judges, along with their clerks, administrators and other officials. Users of the bound volume have to look through long lists while the CD can be searched by jurisdiction, county or other criteria.

The CD adds biographies of federal and state judges, which can be valuable to lawyers who have a case before an unfamiliar judge. The CD also includes searchable lists of state and federal departments and agencies, along with the names, addresses, phone numbers e-mail addresses and websites of key officials. Also included are government listings including state and federal tax deadlines. The PC edition lists state bar officials and other law-related organizations, as well as sources for vital records such as birth certificates and motor vehicle records.

Rules and fees

The CD has court rules and procedures for New Jersey, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York, including the complete civil practice laws and rules, plus federal rules for civil, criminal, bankruptcy and appellate procedure, and rules of evidence. Also included are the federal local rules for 27 U.S. District and Bankruptcy courts along with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 11th circuits.

Filing fee schedules for federal, state and municipal courts are accessible on the CD. It also includes filing fees for the secretary of state, sheriff’s offices, registers of deeds, police re-ports, and motor vehicle fines and penalties. While it’s more easily searched than its printed cousin, I’d like to see still more search options.

For firms without a networked, computer-based calendar, the PC Lawyers Diary includes an electronic organizer that includes statutes of limitations and can be used for daily reminders. The calendar can be viewed for one lawyer or for a defined group. Appointments and “to-do” items can be created and monitored along with recurring activities. The calendar includes an option to search for case-related entries or even text within an entry. While it’s rudimentary com-pared to case management programs, it can be useful for firms that have been word-processing a daily trial calendar.

The CD contains a number of other useful tools: workers compensation charts from 1995 to this year, the Consumer Price Index from 1983 through December 2001, a life expectancy table, motor vehicle point system and accident codes, as well as a wealth of information related to estate and in-heritance administration and taxes.

Court rules for filing motions in all New Jersey jurisdictions also are on the CD. Since these are in Portable Document Format (read through the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program), you can search for strings of text within the reader to locate specific in-formation.

All state-licensed insurance companies are listed along with their company code. Another valuable compilation is the list of New Jersey hospitals and telephone numbers along with the names of key administrative staff from whom to request medical records and the fees for such requests.

Schedules

Where the CD shines is in its collection of court-related dates, rules and deadlines. It includes judges’ emergent schedules, acting assignment designations, phone numbers, clerks’ names, motion calendars, court rules and procedures, and maps to any courthouse in the state. And court reporters are listed, too.

The date calculator is one of several useful tools when preparing litigation documents or scheduling follow-up client appointments. Other features like the loan calculator, present-value calculator, judgment calendar and the workers compensation rate calculator, can be printed and used as an exhibit.

Computer specifications for the CD are low so any PC manufactured in the past few years will be adequate. The CD can be used directly, installed on a local hard drive or shared across a net-work. The base price is $140 with additional charges for network versions. Included in the price is a semi-annual update to incorporate changes in addresses and court rules. The publisher has similar products for New York, Massachusetts, Florida and New Hampshire.

Now that you know what’s on the CD version, try to picture your office without its red book.

Carol L. Schlein is president of Law Office Systems in Montclair, a training and consulting firm specializing in law firm automation. Copies of previous columns are on her company website, www.losinc.com. For information about her quarterly meetings for Time Matters users, check the website or e-mail info@losinc.com. Schlein formerly chaired the Computer and Technology Division of the ABA Law Practice Management Section.

Questions for Carol L. Schlein on law office technology may be faxed to New Jersey Lawyer at (732) 650-7010, e-mailed to news@njlnews.com or mailed to “Law Technology Questions,” New Jersey Lawyer, Edison Square, 2035 Lincoln Highway, Suite 3005, Edison, N.J. 08817.