LiquidText, Innovative Annotation Tool for Complex Documents, Adds Real-Time Collaboration

I first discovered LiquidText way back in 2017, writing at the time that it just might “forever change how you read and annotate complex documents.” The product has evolved in multiple ways since then, and today it achieves another milestone, as it launches real-time collaboration capabilities that enable multiple users to review, annotate and edit documents concurrently.

Learn more about LiquidText in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

For legal professionals, the new collaboration capability expands the product’s usefulness in any number of scenarios where colleagues and teams work together. In its announcement, LiquidText ticks off several:

• Courtroom coordination, for real-time strategy updates during live court proceedings.
• M&A negotiations, enabling teams to securely review and negotiate documents simultaneously across multiple
  locations.
• Patent reviews, to streamline collaborative assessments of complex IP filings.
• Medical records review.
• Academic research, to share annotations and literature reviews.
• Financial analysis, to share reviews of financial documents.

“We designed real-time collaboration specifically for high-stakes, fast-moving environments, where every second counts,” said Craig Tashman, CEO of LiquidText. “With feedback and validation from professionals around the world, we are confident this update will set a new standard for document collaboration.”

While the new collaboration feature becomes generally available as of today, LiquidText says it has been testing it with key law firm partners in advance of today’s release to identify user requirements and test its collaboration features. One of those partners was WongPartnership, one of Singapore’s leading law firms, whose attorneys played a critical role in designing and testing the collaboration features.

“At WongPartnership, innovation has always been a core priority as we firmly believe in the transformative opportunities that new technologies bring,” said Chou Sean Yu, deputy managing partner and head of litigation and dispute resolution in a statement provided to me by LiquidText.  “As an early adopter of LiquidText, we were pleased to assist in beta testing LiquidText’s real-time collaboration tools, which have already made a significant impact by streamlining workflows for our litigation and case preparation teams.”

What Is LiquidText?

So what exactly is LiquidText? At its most basic, it is a mark-up and highlighting tool for PDF and other documents. But it is also a note-taking tool, a document-comparison tool, a document-linking tool, and ultimately a sort of mind-mapping tool.

When I first wrote about it in 2017, I described it as a tool that “turns documents into a more fluid experience that lets you more effectively highlight, select, annotate and connect portions of a document (or of multiple documents with the paid version) in order to enhance your comprehension.”

At that time, LiquidText was available only as an iPad app, and had been named by Apple as the most innovative iPad app of 2015 and by Time magazine as one of the 10 best apps for iPad Pro.

Since then, it has released versions for Windows and Mac, as well as a cloud-based subscription service called LiquidText LIVE. And over the years, the accolades have kept coming, including having been named by Microsoft as the top productivity app of 2022.

Today, LiquidText is a tool that provides users with a unified workspace where they can import multiple documents, extract and link excerpts, create mind maps, and visually connect ideas across single and multiple sources.

Collaborate in Real Time

With the new collaboration capability, users can now do all that with others in shared workspaces. Key features of this new capability include:

• Shared and private workspaces. Users can create shared workspaces for group collaboration and private workspaces for individual notes. Users can move notes between private and shared spaces as needed, maintaining control over what is visible to collaborators.
• Real-time editing. Multiple users can annotate, excerpt and comment on documents simultaneously. Changes appear nearly instantly for all collaborators.
• Notifications. Users can tag collaborators in comments (using @mentions) to send email notifications and invite direct feedback and discussion within the project.
• Document library sharing. Users can share entire libraries of documents, in addition to individual files.

To use the new capability, the user simply clicks the share button and enters the collaborator’s email address to send an invite. Now, both users can add notes and highlight text at the same time on the same document.

Even while collaborating with another, the user can create a private workspace for the same document, so that the user can add notes that are not visible to the collaborator. At any point, the user can view just one workspace or the other, or view both side-by-side. Notes created in the private space can easily be shared by dragging them into the shared space.

When a collaborator is not active in the document, the user can notify the collaborator of a new comment by using the @ symbol and their name.

Fluid Workspaces

LiquidText is a product that is better seen and experienced than read about. I encourage you to go back to my 2017 article for a more detailed discussion of its core features, or check out is three-part Introduction to LiquidText video series on YouTube.

But to recap a few of its key features:

• Every document in LiquidText is accompanied by a workspace. This appears to the right of the document in horizontal view and below it in vertical mode. As you read, you can excerpt text by highlighting it and dragging it to this workspace or, using the ink feature, you can simply lasso the text and drag it to the workspace.
• Excerpts always remain linked to the spot in the document where you found them. But the workspace is fluid. You can move excerpts around or group them together simply by dragging one over another. You can add notes anywhere in the workspace, either typed or freehand. With the ink feature, you can connect anything by drawing a line — connect a note to a spot in the text or connect notes and highlights to each other or even connect a point in one document to a point in another.
• Whether on an iPad or desktop, pinching a document enables you to compare different parts side by side. Say you’re on page 20 of a contract but there is language on page 2 you want to compare. Simply pinch the document to collapse the pages in between and show both page 20 and page 2 in the same view.
• Pinching can also be used to collapse a document to show all of your highlights or search results in a single view.
• LiquidText provides multiple options for annotating a document. Draw or highlight anywhere on the document, in your notes, or on the workspace. Add notes and comments to other notes or excerpts. LiquidText even lets you comment on two or more sections of a document at once or link comments to multiple documents at once.

It should be noted that LiquidText is not a full-fledged PDF editor. For that, you would still use a standard PDF application such as Adobe.

But for reviewing and analyzing complex documents. LiquidText is unlike any other product on the market.