THE OMNI SHOW

Jerry Geiger: So I developed a waiting tag to see that I can review every Friday to see what do other people owe me. And I'll tell you what, I used to, before I started using OmniFocus, I'd be waking up at night thinking, forgot about X, Y, or Z. But being able to get it out into the program and knowing it's there and that it will remind me with these tags is very helpful to my own peace of mind.

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The Omni Show, where we connect with the amazing community surrounding the Omni Group's award-winning products. My name is Andrew J. Mason, and today we learn how Jerry Geiger uses OmniFocus. Welcome, everybody, to today's episode of The Omni Show. My name is Andrew J. Mason, and we're super excited to be able to talk with Jerry Geiger today. He's a trial attorney since 1985 and a partner at Newman Williams in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Jerry keeps 150 roughly open litigation files moving at once, each with their own string of deadlines, and he runs all of it through OmniFocus. Here's the part that I love. His office runs on PC, so he bought a MacBook just to use OmniFocus, and he's called it one of the best pieces of software that he's owned. So we'll get into his filters and the template that builds a whole case in one tap, and also how he makes it all work on a PC in his office. But Jerry, first of all, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Jerry Geiger: Yes, thanks for having me, Andrew. I enjoy your podcast, by the way. I listen to it all the time when I'm out running. So it was one of the things that motivated me actually to get OmniFocus after I heard about the program, and I find it interesting to hear how other people are using it. I don't think I've mastered all of the technicalities of it, but I think that although there might be a steep learning curve for some, you don't have to use all the features to get started.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, well, fantastic. I mean, we're honored to be in your ears as you're running, so thank you for that. But also, I think that's what this is all about. There's a thriving community of people here that are interested to see how they can improve their own systems or what other people have going on, and it just kind of spurs us all on, so I appreciate that. I think I'd love first for you to take us back. Talk to us, I mean, having hardly anything to do with OmniFocus, how you became a trial lawyer, and what did your system look like when you were kind of first getting things going?

Jerry Geiger: That's an interesting question because one of the things they don't teach you in law school is the productivity part of managing all of the different obligations that we have. And especially when you're a trial lawyer. You know, there may be, when I first get a case, and most of my practice is in federal court, but the judge issues an order that schedules a number of deadlines. And so the standard order that comes out might have at least a dozen deadlines that we have to track. And when I first started practicing law, one of the questions I asked my first boss was, well, how do you manage all of this? Because I've seen lawyers use sticky notes pasted onto their office walls, notebooks, whiteboards, and I've tried just about everything. I think I've read the GTD book multiple times. I tried various types of software, but nothing provided the features that OmniFocus had, and so it's been really important for my practice. But I will say we have separate software in the office that tracks things like statutes of limitation and other deadlines, a contact management program. But the granular abilities of OmniFocus is really what turned me on to it.

Andrew J. Mason: Absolutely. Absolutely. And talk to me a little bit about what a typical day looks like for you. Where do you start in OmniFocus when you sit down in the morning, or is it kind of more of a focused slice of your day that shows up? How do things roll in that regard?

Jerry Geiger: Yeah, well, most lawyers are on PCs because I think most legal software is on a PC. And so before the Omni Group created the web interface, which I was really thankful for, my day would start by normally using my iPad to check what deadlines I have and running certain filters. You know, I typically have a 7-day filter and a 30-day filter, so I look at what deadlines I have coming up in the next week and the next month. But now that it's available on PC through the web, I'll frequently check my PC to see what deadlines I have. The other thing I'm doing on the side is I've really become fascinated with AI, and so I'll have Claude or ChatGPT go through my email inbox every morning at six o'clock, and it generates a report of all case filings in the past week and what mission-critical deadlines are out there. And so I do a combination of looking at OmniFocus and looking at what the reports are that were generated by AI.

Andrew J. Mason: I love it. Talk to me too about in our kind of brief conversation before we showed up here on the call today, you mentioned Drafts, you mentioned TaskPaper, a template. A new case comes in and OmniFocus ends up getting that project with every deadline almost already in it. How do you go about building something like that? And what did you find is useful to go ahead and put in that template?

Jerry Geiger: Well, Drafts is a great program for capturing information on a Mac or on my iPad. And so what I did is I created a template of all of the anticipated deadlines that I would have in a case, based in part on case management orders that come out. And I set it up so that it doesn't have hard dates in the note, but it'll put, for example, enter my appearance in the case within seven days of when I generate it, or filing certain types of motions, reports to clients on a regular basis. And so I set this up in TaskPaper. I think I found some tutorials on the internet. And so now every time I get a case, I just change the name of the template to reflect the name of that case. And then with the TaskPaper feature on Drafts, it sends it to create a new project in OmniFocus with all of the dates pre-populated, which is just a time-saving feature that I really like. Of course, I modify it after the fact to make certain tweaks based on the case, but it's a real time saver. I used to manually enter that information. It would take me 20 minutes for each case, and now it generates it in 10 seconds.

Andrew J. Mason: That's incredible. And we also talked a little bit about tags, too. You mentioned a briefs tag, a waiting for tag, for other things that maybe perhaps other lawyers might owe you. And you also just mentioned earlier this call, the due-in-seven or due-in-30-day views. How do you actually start using those day to day? If you could talk us through a little bit of that.

Jerry Geiger: Sure. Yeah. Well, when I say I have about 150 cases, they're in various states of completion. You know, we may have, I may file a particular motion and it might take the judge six months to get back a ruling on that. And so I'm not specifically doing anything on that until I get the decision back. But I also have a paralegal. I have associates in the office who I delegate tasks to. And so when I send out an email with an assignment to a staff member, I'll use the mail function in OmniFocus on the BCC section. And so I send them the project. It ends up, because of the BCC tag, in my inbox. And then I will put a tag in there for the particular person I gave it to. And so that at any given time, I can pull that person's tag up and find out what projects they're working on for me. Because, you know, it's not just managing my own deadlines, but it's also managing my staff's deadlines. And the other thing too is with the waiting tag, you know, frequently we'll send emails to other lawyers or clients asking for information. And when you do dozens and dozens of these, you start to lose track. So I developed a waiting tag to see that I can review every Friday to see what do other people owe me. And I'll tell you what, I used to, before I started using OmniFocus, I'd be waking up at night thinking, forgot about X, Y, or Z. But being able to get it out into the program and knowing it's there and that it will remind me with these tags is very helpful to my own peace of mind.

Andrew J. Mason: Maybe talk to me a little bit about capture. So if something comes up in court or in a call or in a hallway and an idea comes to you or, oh yeah, or what about, or I need to ask that person or call Fred, the infamous call Fred example, how do you end up getting any of those kind of ad hoc bits into OmniFocus?

Jerry Geiger: What I've been doing lately is I use a piece of software called Whisper Memos, and so I have it on my phone and on my Apple Watch, and so every morning I do three to five miles of walking or running, and I get some of my best ideas then. And when that happens and I come up with an idea, rather than putting it down in a notebook, I can press the complication on my Apple Watch, tell it some thoughts on, you know, maybe new ideas I came up with or deadlines I'm concerned about. And it generates a transcript and sends it to my email. And then, you know, based on what it was that I said, I will just copy it over to OmniFocus, and because I do that on my PC at work, I'm using the web interface for that. And then I'll put all appropriate tags into it. One of the features that I initially was underusing that now I think is really critical is the review portion of OmniFocus. Because I have hundreds of tasks in my OmniFocus calendar, personal and professional, when I get ideas about different things. And, you know, sometimes you lose track of that. But OmniFocus gives you the ability to set review reminders at different frequencies. You know, I might need to look at a case only every six months if I'm waiting for something, or it might be weekly. And I can set the review period, and then I make a calendar appointment for myself to do a review of all of these files that come up on the review section at least once a week. And that helps me not lose track of certain things.

Andrew J. Mason: Did you also mention to me that OmniOutliner was a slice of your workflow as well? And if so, how did you end up using that for trial prep or outlining arguments? Where does that show up for you?

Jerry Geiger: Yeah, I use OmniOutliner and I use mind maps to brainstorm ideas. So if I get a complicated case, I'll review the pleadings and I'll try to come up with ideas where I put them in OmniOutliner, which allows me to move things. And if I have certain ideas or I have plans on, let's say, filing some kind of a pretrial motion on it, I'll use it as a brainstorm device, kind of a free flow, adding facts to the outline, and then being able to move it around and organize it. So I find that really helpful because I've never been satisfied with the outline feature in Word, which we use. So I like to more easily move issues around. And it gives me a way of capturing everything that I don't have to be organized at first, but then I can organize it later into some final structure.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. This question I kind of throw in. There's no wrong answer. This is kind of just a fun blue sky sort of question, but let's say you could wave that magic wand and have everybody instantly understand a slice of something about productivity and like, oh man, all of us as humanity, we get it. We all understand it. What has been the thing that's been the most valuable for you that's like, oh my gosh, if everybody operated in this way, if everybody did this one thing or these two things, I think all of humanity would just be operating at such a higher level?

Jerry Geiger: I would say that the problems that I see the most, at least in my own profession, is the tension that a trial practice creates because of all of the various deadlines. And the complete relaxation you get when you've realized that you captured everything on paper, you're not going to forget it. And if you do the review properly, maybe you're going to learn that you're overwhelmed and need to take less cases or you need to delegate more. But the capture portion of all those ideas running around in your head is really important to my well-being. I just see other lawyers stressing about it, and the Post-it notes feature does not work. It's just a bad way of organizing. And the other feature, too, that maybe some people don't appreciate is that I spend a lot of time on the road. I'm in eastern Pennsylvania, central Pennsylvania, and I have multiple ways when I have a thought about something that's due, of getting it into the program. You know, that's either through my iPhone or my MacBook that I take with me to court or, you know, my office computer. But Post-it notes that are on the wall, you don't take those with you when you go to other counties. And so the capture portion is really essential, and the review portion, which people don't do enough of, I find.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, maybe a flip or an inverse of that question as well. That's always been helpful. Somebody is maybe looking at what you do and say, man, Jerry, you know, 150 cases, that's quite a load to have your head around or at least have a system built around your head around. Maybe I'm not necessarily there yet, either in my career or my aspirations. I don't want to have to do 150 of anything. But regardless of where somebody is, is there anything that you happen to try along your journey of, you know, kind of getting to where you currently are? You know, like you say, you know, none of us have it all together. None of us are perfect, but, you know, you can kind of pour some of what's in your cup out to fill the cup of others. Is there anything that you're looking at that you say, you know, that really, I don't know if I call it a mistake or not, but it felt like it wasn't what I was expecting it would be in my journey. Like, I thought I'd try doing tags this way or I thought I'd try doing perspectives that way or, you know, some sort of automation. Is there anything that you tried and you're like, I think this could be a good thing. But then when you look back on it, you're like, it didn't really work out the way that I was thinking. And so, like, you know, if you're trying to be me or trying to do the things that I do, maybe just skip that slice of the journey.

Jerry Geiger: Having everything in a program like this does provide you with a perspective on your practice. And, you know, 150 cases might sound like a lot, but as long as I'm, you know, when I see that perspective of the amount of work that's there, then it's important that I delegate a great deal of that. But having that kind of outline of projects and actually looking at the forecast view, which I do every day on the web version, is really helpful to give me a sense of perspective. I've been listening to a lot of different podcasts on tech, and some of the things that I've been trying, that people are doing, are quarterly retreats or semiannual retreats to think about what do I have on my plate and what are my goals for the next quarter or the next six months. And so having a program like this does give you an opportunity to put that in perspective because you have to look at the big picture. You know, I think we too often, you know, we got 25 deadlines this week on different projects. We're not looking at the big picture because busy does not mean productive. I think too many people confuse the two. You could be busy and not accomplishing anything. So I think that the perspective of the reviews is really important.

Andrew J. Mason: That's perfect. Yeah, that's great advice. Thank you, by the way. Talk to me more about where people can find you. And is there any kind of location on the web if they wanted to stay in your orbit and see more of what you're up to or what you're working on or how they can engage with you? How would they go about doing something like that?

Jerry Geiger: I think primarily, well, certainly my website, it's newmanwilliams.com, but professionally, I'm on LinkedIn, and I do post periodically there about tech issues and about mediation because that's part of my practice as well. I may be doing this for a while, but I'm not averse to tech. I love technology. During COVID, I actually trained myself to code in Python, and I just find it really interesting. And now with AI coming into play, you know, it's going to change the profession and society. And, you know, lawyers have a duty to keep up with technology, and that's what I'm trying to do.

Andrew J. Mason: Very well said. Well said.

Jerry Geiger: But yeah, people need to reach out to me. The best thing is on LinkedIn. My full name is Gerard J. Geiger, and I'd be happy to connect with anyone.

Andrew J. Mason: That's great. Jerry, thank you again for hanging out with us. This has been a fantastic conversation. I'm very sure that folks will find it fruitful.

Jerry Geiger: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Andrew J. Mason: Hey, and thank all of you for listening today too. You can find us on Mastodon at theomnishow@omnigroup.com. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omni Group at omnigroup.com/blog.