Does It Compute?

Matthew Homann's Lists

Matthew Homann specializes in lists of “ten rules” or “ten tips” on his blog “the [non] billable hour.” Generally I find at least one item useful and the “rules” usually encapsulate an entire approach to law firm management and marketing.

A recent list, “20 More Tips, Tricks and Ideas” included one that I’ve always toyed with but never quite came around to implementing.

Pick your least favorite client – the one you hope doesn’t call. Fire him.  If you’re feeling in a good mood, let your secretary fire a client too. Great for morale and the bad clients probably don’t produce a lot of income anyway.

Online Training -- Is It Worth It?

There has recently been a significant increase in on-line training offerings. LexisNexis is offering the “On Line University,” the recently formed Affinity Consulting Group (a conglomeration of leading consulting firms for various programs) has launched the Affinity University. Many other consultants have sponsored videos and other training materials. Why is this and just how good is on-line training anyway?

The “why?” is pretty clear: It’s the Economy, Stupid. Virtually all software companies have eliminated printed manuals in favor of massive help files, so there is no “reference manual” people can consult. Law firms don’t want to spend money on training (however shortsightedly, but it’s a fact), and legal programs such as Time Matters, PCLaw, Amicus Attorney, Practice Master, etc. can’t really be rolled out without training, so on-line training appears to offer a way out. It offers the illusion of being cheaper (although, at $99 for an hour’s session, if you have ten users, it is hardly cheaper, even with discounts). In many cases it can be scheduled at a convenient time, you do not have to leave the office (or your desk). Some firms (such as LawBill) offer training CD’s for a fixed price. Other companies, such as PCDocs, offer “how to” manuals which can be purchased for a fixed price.  Probably the best on-line training solutions are 3-5 minute video snippets such as Time Matters “help cam videos.”  If you are in a relatively isolated area, it can make training available from people who really know what they are doing, as opposed to mediocre training or no training at all – this is really the main thing on-line training has going for it.

However there are three major drawbacks to on-line training. 

•    The first is that most often, in-house training uses the firm’s actual data. This makes the training and examples more real to users and consequently more effective.  In addition, it encourages people to ask questions (an integral part of training) because they know what they are trying to do in various scenarios.
•    Secondly, when sitting at your desk instead of in a classroom, it is all to easy to do something else while “watching” the training – make a phone call, answer an email, shuffle papers, etc.  I know I’ve done it during webinars. This dramatically reduces the effectiveness of training. 
•    Lastly, from an instructor’s point of view, with on-line training there is no way to tell when people’s eyes glaze over and you lose one or more members of the “class.” Classroom training is considerably more interactive and hence effective.  Although most web-based training solutions offer an option for questions, somehow it isn’t the same as a real classroom. The 3-5 minute video snippets on a single topic are one form of on-line training that avoids a number of these pitfalls.

All things considered, on-line training is a second-best, fallback solution. If you are isolated or a solo it can be a reasonable alternative. And it is certainly better than no training at all.

STI - Great Tech Support

I recently had an issue with setting up Practice Master to integrate with Worldox for a demo for a prospective client. I called STI and explained that I was a consultant, that all I had was a demo version of Practice Master and that this was for a prospective client. Tech Support was extremely helpful, made no protestations about licensing, and rapidly came up with the answer (a issue with the Worldox API that had subsequently been fixed). Sure enough, I downloaded the latest build of Worldox and problem solved.

That’s what really good tech support should be like.

Worldox for the Mac

Worldox Web/Mobile was originally designed for the PDA, and works with just about anything from Blackberrys to iPhones. Given that most people have remote access to their office, the primary function of PDA access is usually to email documents to other people.

However, since Worldox Web is platform independent and works with just about any web browser, this means Mac users (otherwise shut out from the majority of legal software) can use their browser to access the firm’s Worldox document store. It won’t be quite as slick as the regular Worldox program, but will be perfectly workable. 

There are Bugs and Then There are Bugs

What exactly is a software “bug?” To what lengths should companies go to exterminate them? Should consumers have an expectation of “bug-free software?” 

To take the last question first, software will never be “bug-free” for two reasons.  The first is of course the Great God Profit. In the spirit of Steven Leavitt’s Freakonomics, it is clear that it is not in the economic interest of a large company to produce bug-free software – it is simply too costly. This is where smaller, individually owned companies have an advantage: they are not as tied to quarterly financial reports as larger, publicly owned companies. They are also likely to be more personally committed to producing good software if they created and developed it themselves. The second reason is more substantive. Even with all the Quality Control in the world, no company can test for all the possible configurations and uses (and abuses) the software will face in the real world. Unusual configurations can expose shortcomings that no amount of laboratory testing could reveal.

As for the key question of just what is a bug, a lot of people tend to define a “bug” as anything software does that they don’t like. Or, as one user put it recently, “a bug is when the program does something it should NOT do” and possibly also “when the program does NOT do something it SHOULD do.”

From a developer’s point of view, a bug exists when the software does not perform the way it was designed to.  If it was supposed to do “x” but does not, that is a bug.  If it was not designed to do “x” then it is “Working As Designed” (WAD). (You may have heard this from tech support).

No matter that the design is flawed, idiotic, etc. The frustrated question “how could they not see this is stupid” is irrelevant here (although linked to the axiom that any time you have to start a sentence concerning software with the phrase “you would think that....” you know you are in deep trouble).

This is a golden opportunity to invent two new acronyms: WAPD (“Working As Poorly Designed”) and even WAVPD (“Working As Very Poorly Designed”). Are these bugs?  Not technically.  Are they infuriating?  Oh yeah.

The Hidden Life of Deer

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has a new book: “The Hidden Life of Deer.” Well worth reading, although gardeners may be a bit upset at her willingness to let deer eat her plants down to the roots. 

The book follows two others in a similar vein, “The Hidden Life of Dogs,” and “The Tribe of Tiger.”  (That’s cats – based on her position that a house cat is nothing but a miniature Tiger and that if the size difference between us and a cat were reversed, we’d be dead meat in 30 seconds.) Both will show you things you never knew about dogs and cats respectively.

She is also a highly respected anthropologist, and has also recently published a book on the Bushmen of the Kalihari desert (she first went to the Kalihari 50 years ago with her parents). “The Old Way: A Story of the First People” makes fascinating reading. Her basic thesis is that a small group of hunter-gatherers has survived for over 30,000 years then there must be a reason for everything they do and they must have been doing something right (before their way of life was wiped out by the South African and Namibian governments in the 1980s).

Time Matters Indexer

When Time Matters 9 released the indexer as a standalone program, it created a certain amount of confusion. The Indexer is set to run on the first workstation that logs into TM, and there is no way to control it.  If you try starting TM on a separate workstation “first,” that takes up a separate license, which is obviously not a solution. The Indexer, to state the obvious, is responsible for indexing all the Time Matters data and makes searches extremely fast.

It is possible to disable the indexer entirely by creating a simple text file with Notepad named norun.txt. Put this file in the ...\Data\Index\LNDATA folder on the server where the shared Time Matters data is located. While the file is in that folder, the data indexer will not start. But that is not really a solution either.

Ideally, it should be possible to run the indexer as a service, but LexisNexis has not addressed this issue in TM 10.

It is, however, possible to run the indexer with command line switches. Create a one-line text file (call it tmindex.bat or whatever) that looks like this:

Start c:\tmw9e\tmdatndxe.exe /data=c:\tmw9e\data

(obviously the location may change according to the location and version of Time Matters). You can then set this batch file to run on startup. (Thanks to Jeff Stouse). This can be done either on the server, or on a separate PC (perhaps an older PC that is being replaced), a la Worldox Indexer.

Chris Sperry has written a utility that does allow you to run the indexer as a service, but I have not tested it. Contact Chris through Jumpstartsolutions.com

Take Documents to Court on a Kindle

Sharon Nelson’s blog reports on an attorney who takes documents to court on his Kindle DX (the larger format version) and uses Kindle to show them to the Judge – with no objections so far.  It is fairly easy to upload a PDF file to Amazon and have them put it on your Kindle. I have done this with one or two documents and it works fairly well. There are a few more formatting errors than with a native Kindle book, but the result is quite acceptable.

This would also be an easy way for, say, a consultant to take the manuals for various programs with him on a Kinde.

Even better would be a reading device that would integrate with a Document Management System and would let you download directly to it from the DMS. You might even be able to mark up the documents and then upload them back up to the device. At the rate that readers are multiplying, we may yet see this.

Let Google Scan the Books

The current debate over Google’s proposal to scan millions of “orphan” books – books that are still technically under copyright protection but where the copyright owner cannot be found – defies all logic (leaving aside legalities).

The current copyright laws are absurdly restrictive. Works are (with some exceptions) copyright for 50 years after the death of the author.  Why? So the author’s estate can continue to reap a tidy profit? So publishers can continue to profit? This defies logic.

Leaving that aside, the current status of these works is that almost nobody has access to them and nobody is making any money from them, as they are out of print and likely to remain so.  Google proposes to make them available to libraries and (for a fee) individuals. So the dispute is over how the profits are to be split up and, secondarily, whether it would be establish a de facto monopoly for Google. 

Would the proposed agreement give Google a de facto monopoly?  Probably. If Google is prevented from doing it, will anybody else do it?  No way. So you can have the agreement and access to millions of books or no agreement and no access to any books. This seems like a no-brainer.

For an extensive summary of the history of this issue and options, see the article by Ben Hollman in law.com’s Legal Technology column.

Metadata Ethics Update - ABA

Vermont is the latest state to issue an opinion on the ethics of metadata.  The various opinions always address three issues:

1.  What is the responsibility of the sending attorney with respect to checking for metadata?
2. May the recipient of a document from opposing counsel review a document or “mine” it for metadata?
3. If metadata is found, must the recipient notify the sender?

Aside from legal niceties, a lot of this issue is just plain common sense. Any attorney who does not check for metadata when sending a Word file to opposing counsel is being negligent and self-destructive.

My favorite example of this happened to one of my clients (in the days before metadata had become a hot topic). His firm was using WordPerfect and received a document in Word format. Upon opening it in WP, all the changes, comments, etc. were exposed, including a comment to the effect “Jim, do you think we can get away with this language?” Needless to say, in the course of negotiating the contract terms, my client said “now, you don’t think we’re going to let you get away with that language,” and opposing counsel folded.

Saying that the recipient of a document cannot check for metadata is like the disclaimers on faxes to the effect that if you receive the fax in error you should not read it. In practice, totally useless. In many cases, all you have to do to reveal the relevant metadata is to turn on track changes (which a firm might routinely do in the process of editing a document).

If you find metadata, should you notify the sender?  This is a bit more sticky: most jurisdictions (and the ABA) say that you should, and this is obviously reasonable.

But the main point in all this is that a firm is negligent if it does not use a metadata checker when sending out documents.

To see the ABA’s review of opinions, click here.