Scripting For Lawyers is written by Larry Staton Jr., an attorney located near Charlotte, North Carolina. I have been using Macs and AppleScript since 1998. I began using Macs in the law office in 1999 when I helped to write a billing interface to a case management system written in FileMaker Pro. I also wrote AppleScripts to generate documents from the case management system in AppleWorks, Apple’s old word processing application.
More recently, I designed several FileMaker Pro databases that generated documents in Microsoft Word using AppleScript. With the help of these AppleScripts, the firm cuts its document production time down from approximately 300 seconds per document to under 10 seconds per document. Considering that the firm often generated several documents at one time, the time saved from the document production easily paid for the cost of developing the script.
Besides AppleScript, I have written scripts using Ruby, Python, Perl, JavaScript, F-Script, and various Unix shells. I’ve also written Web applications in Ruby on Rails, Seaside, and WebObjects and designed databases in OpenBase, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
I am available for consulting through my company, Sweetpea Software.
