I was sitting at dinner recently next to the wife of a US Federal Judge in the restaurant at the top of a Park Lane hotel. We were watching the passenger jets queueing for Heathrow and she had probably marked me down as some kind of geek for she said “You probably have an app which tells you what they are”.

As it happens, she was right, and I showed her a display of every flight in range and some pretty comprehensive details of the next plane which passed.

In similar vein, I have just been given a Fitbit. Today is its first full day and it tells me that I was asleep this morning from 10:21am to 11:45am. I am not particularly embarrassed about that since we set an alarm for 3:30am so that I could get my wife on her way for an early flight. I started work at 4.30am so my mid-morning kip nearly brings me up (so the Fitbit app tells me) to my target of 5 hours sleep. The app is not just giving me information but telling how I am doing against a target.

The point of both these anecdotes is that we have become accustomed to getting all sorts of information from our phones. Neither of these apps was accompanied by a manual or a training course. They downloaded in seconds and needed little setting up. Like most people, I have many of them, each touching on some different aspect of work or play. It has become the norm, the standard we expect from software tools.

Given iCONECT’s long running pride in its user interfaces and in making life easy for reviewers and those responsible for them, it is not surprising to find that it has produced an app for a particular aspect of eDiscovery work. Its XERA-CONECT allows lawyers, project managers and others to check the status of a matter or matters running in iCONECT-XERA in moments while on the run. That includes (like my Fitbit app) information as to how they are doing against a pre-set target.

The two (very high quality) videos on the XERA-CONECT information page show a lawyer who needs an up-to-date status report before having lunch with a client. The purpose is not the actual review of documents, but the business information needed to keep the clients informed and to make them feel (rightly in this case) that the lawyer is on top of the project.

The point of my discursive introductory anecdotes was to show that user expectations have moved on. So have client expectations. A tool like xera-conect helps the lawyers and the project managers to meet those expectations.