Flow Charts with Grafio

Wow, have I been busy the past few weeks.  Here in Coweta County, our State Court has four weeks of jury trial calendars for criminal and civil trials, and of course I was on all four!  Without getting into much detail on what exactly I've been up to (more on that in another post), I rejoin my  beloved audience with a brief write-up of an app I have been using called Grafio... and thankfully I can check this task off my Reminders list to stop the buzzing every time I get to work.

Grafio is a diagraming app for the iPad and iPhone I got turned onto by one of the blogs I read regularly.  I had been working with my assistant on getting accurate conflict letters out with the proper hierarchy to help streamline getting them out.  With jury trials all through April, I had at least one to do for each week, and conflict letters can be a real pain when you are busy prepping jury charges and the like.  So I thought I would give the app a try by creating a flow chart to help my assistant get things right.  My first try is the picture up top.

How easy was it?  Well, it took me a while to get things looking right, but the interface is pretty intuitive and I didn't need to refer to the manual all that often.  Connectors between the different boxes will snap into place, and you can even draw your own shapes if you like.  There are many fonts. colors, and "canvas" themes to choose from as well, so you can spend as much time as you want to make things pretty.

My only complaints:  this app drains your battery quickly.  Granted, I have an iPad 2 that may not hold a charge as long as its newer brethren, but an hour or so on the app and you will be surprised how much power was used up.  It is really easy to draw unintended lines if you forget to choose the right tool.  Working with the app more often would remedy this, I'm sure.  Lastly, very small images make it difficult to resize or rotate.  I'm still working this out.  

I do like the app plenty, though, and have made a couple more flow charts to help my staff and clients visualize our legal process, which you can see here:

You can see that your work can be as formal or creative as you like.  I have a tendency to forget how effective these tools can be when teaching or persuading; now that I have this app there's no excuse.

Give Grafio a try, and let me know what you think!

Best,

JD

John D. Duncan is president of J.D. Duncan, PC, founding partner of Prater, Duncan & Craig, LLC in Newnan, Georgia, and is Esquire by Day.  You can find him at www.jdduncanlaw.com, or follow him on twitter and Facebook.