Reconsidering bundling apps.

Recently I tried three, and reluctantly settled on one. After a long chat with the founder of one of the others, I’m thinking again.

Not so long ago, I tried out three apps designed for lawyers to handle paperless bundles: to make them, and use them. As I explained, I don’t need the “use” bit; PDF Expert hits the button for my multi-device workflow in a way that none of these services comes close to achieving. But bundling hurts.

At the time, I selected Hyperlaw and rejected Casedo because the former did three things the latter didn’t: OCR; handling emails with (nested) attachments; and handling multiple document types. (I rejected Bundledocs because it did these things, but with an appalling interface and a shocking price tag.)

I’ve tried. But I just can’t love Hyperlaw. It sucked in documents beautifully. But putting them in order, making sure they’re what and where they need to be, took me forever, through an interface that just makes no sense to me. And that process, given that I had several dozen documents to process, ended up taking almost as long as extracting the emails individually would have done.

So I gave Casedo another whirl, on a new M1 MacBook Pro (which, incidentally, is glorious). I like what it does, and how it does it. OCR I can live without; ReadIris does the job well for me. Most of my docs are Word or PDF anyway, so that’s no great hardship. The nested email thing remains a stopper. But I had a long chat with Ross Birkbeck, Casedo’s founder, and I’m reassured it’s a priority.

So I’m trying Casedo. I’ll have to disentangle nested emails myself for a while, which I loathe. But everything else about bundling is far closer to the holy grail of “it just works”. So they’ve got my cash. We’ll see how it goes.