Does It Compute?

What Should I Do? Upgrade to TM 10?

I am being asked the following question with increasing frequency: “I am running a previous version of Time Matters (usually 8 or earlier). Given the state of LexisNexis and the uncertain future of Time Matters, what should I do? Should I think about switching?”

Obviously there are a lot of things to consider, but here are some general parameters.

Time Matters 10 is essentially a service release which fixes a large number of bugs and is generally more stable than previous versions. Also, the Pro version has been eliminated and replaced by the SQL version (previously labeled Enterprise). If you are a small firm running Pro, you should definitely upgrade to 10. It will be much faster and more stable.

After that, it depends on how much data you have (how long you have been using the program), whether you have heavily customized Time Matters  and whether you are willing to “start over” (at least in part). Converting data to any other program will be quite expensive and probably incomplete (i.e., you won’t get all your data, especially if your TM has been extensively customized).

Next, of course if you are sufficiently frustrated to be willing to “start over” then you completely free to make any choice you want. Most people are not willing to do that.

Lastly, I agree with Steve Stockstill who posted a comment to the effect that it is not a question of “whether” the SaaS model will become dominant, but “when.”  In my view, the current offerings are largely immature, but are developing very rapidly.

Therefore I think that the best option (depending on some of the above criteria) is probably to temporize:  upgrade to TM 10, keep it for 2-3 years and then see where things are at.

The Cost of a Document Management System - More

A consultant from Baker Robbins (one of the major consulting firms in the U.S.) asked me to expand on the numbers in my Document Management Cost post last week, in particular “what broad cost elements did you model: HW, SW, network, maintenance, staff, configuration, training. What revenue elements did you include: quality of search, time required to file email, time required to share document with client? I think if you look at cost + revenue you might have a different picture.”  Also, Erik Mazzone published a blog on “A Few Pro-Cloud Points,” which is worth taking a look at.

I took the numbers from a Technolawyer post. The breakdown for 25 users is as follows:

Item	Worldox	iManage	NetDocuemnts
Base Software Additional Server Maintenance (5 yrs) Implementation (Install + Training) Web module     (5 yrs maintenance) PDA module     (5 yrs maintenance) Local replication of data Document Upload	$10,000 N/A (not needed) 10,000 17,500 1,779 1,800 N/A (included) N/A N/A N/A	$9,950 5,092 15,090 25,000-35,000 10,383 8,860 4,385 4,385 N/A N/A	$64,410 (5 yrs) N/A N/A 1,800 N/A N/A N/A $7,500 (5 years) $0.2/page =$20,000 for 1,000,000 pages (or a firm could do this themselves)

Some of the imponderables that the user asks for are hard to quantify because they relate to ease of use and the ways in which a firm uses its DMS and its specific needs.  However, based on my experience and speaking with other consultants, some things are pretty clear: iManage is going to be by far the most expensive to maintain in terms of administrative time (not to mention the fact that the future of iManage is somewhat in question since its acquisition by Autonomy, NetDocuments probably the least expensive.  The same goes for training and other ongoing costs. However, it would be a mistake to think that NetDocuments has NO administrative costs.  Somebody has to do configuration, new users, training, etc.

The argument concerning the Present Value of the monthly sum vs. paying a big ticket up front is a reasonable one.  However, there are also leasing options by companies that specialize in leasing to law firms (such as Baytree Leasing), which let you lease the software (and consulting time) for a 3-year period and own it at the end of that time. This could have tax advantages (check with your accountant) and based on generic numbers I got will turn out to be less (possibly substantially less) than the NetDocuments cost over a 3-year period, especially given current interest rates. This is something that a firm would need to investigate further.

Things like quality of search, email integration and various features are things that have to be investigate on a firm by firm basis. A feature that one firm considers an essential deal-breaker could be irrelevant to another firm.  Overall, my impression is that in terms of basic functionality, these programs are essentially a wash, but that specific firms will come to differing conclusions based on their needs. Firms that have specific detailed needs may find an advantage with one program over another.

A Time of Transition

World Software, makers of Worldox, recently announced that Ray Zwiefelhofer will be the new President of the company, with Tom Burke retiring to the “strategic and visionary” position of Chairman and CEO. In the year that Ray has been with Worldox I have met with Ray several times and been very impressed. The transition also raises broader and much more interesting questions than the specific future of Worldox.

Many of the currently leading legal software companies were founded in the late 1980's and early 1990's and are thus 15-25 years old. They were founded by individuals (sometimes with a couple of collaborators) with drive and vision (and a touch of megalomania) that created massively successful companies. Examples include Time Matters (Bob Butler), PCLaw (Ron Plashkes), Amicus Attorney (Ron Collins), Worldox (Tom Burke), Tabs/Practice Master (Dan Berlin), or Juris (Tom Collins).

These companies prospered because their founders made good decisions about the software. Companies that made bad decisions disappeared and either went out of business or are no longer major players (Abacus and Needles come to mind).

As these companies gained market share and reputation, they became targets for acquisitions. While LexisNexis has been in the forefront of gobbling up these companies, let us not forget the fate of Great Plains (Microsoft), Peachtree (Sage) or SoftSolutions (Novell). Once that happened, the “Acquire, Merge, Destroy” syndrome took over.

The remaining independent are now beginning to face the problem of transition as their founders become of an age to retire. Worldox is the first company to face this issue and will no doubt be watched closely over the next few years.  Personally, I am very optimistic (as opposed to my views on the future of LexisNexis products).

The next generation of similar companies are being created on the SaaS model – Clio, RocketMatter, Houdini or Bill4Time are obvious examples.  One reason I am very hesitant about these companies, aside from the fact that they are as yet not mature products in terms of functionality, is that the inevitable shakeout has yet to occur. It is unclear which ones will succeed and which ones fall by the wayside.

Kindle 2 Update and Other E-Readers

My Kindle 2 has just gotten a software upgrade so that it now supports PDF files and also can be rotated sideways (manually). This is useful because when you scrunch down a full-page PDF to Kindle size it is pretty tiny (especially for my old eyes). You can plug the Kindle in and just copy PDFs from your computer.  I immediately put a couple of software manuals on it to test. A couple of minor stability problems, but I'm not sure if that will continue.

In the meantime, Barnes & Noble has brought out an e-reader (the "Nook") which is less proprietary than the Kindle and also has the major advantage that you can “loan” a book to someone else for 2 weeks.  So with Sony’s eReader and others perhaps coming to market, this opens the question of how the market will evolve.

Hopefully, Kindle will abandon its proprietary policies (and also let you loan a book to someone, even if only for a limited period of time). A reasonable solution to the issue of mass distribution of books would be the ability to loan a book for a specified period of time (2 weeks to a month) to a specified list of people (your “friends” list).

If a common format evolves then the various eReaders would compete based on functionality rather than on proprietary formats. However, it is not clear that anyone has the clout to take on Amazon.

Bad Passwords and Good P@$$w0rds

Jim Calloway recently had a useful blog about good passwords and bad. 

Like most people, he recommends multiple passwords for different sites, which virtually makes a password manager mandatory. He also has a link to the “500 worst passwords” which are pretty amusing and a thorough article on good passwords and bad.

If you don’t want to go whole hog, there are a couple of lesser techniques that can be very effective.  The first is to use a phrase rather than a single word.  My favorite example at a client site was a user whose password was “idontgiveadamn.”  A not-so-good example was “johnpaul17.” When I saw this, I asked the user: “let me guess, your kids names are John and Paul and you’ve had to change your password 17 times .” Right.

The second technique is substitution.  Pick a password that will be easy for you to remember and then do a certain number of substitutions for non-alpha-numeric characters.

For example, change a to @
change o to 0 (zero)
change s to $
change I or L to 1 (one)

In addition, you can preface or follow the password by a character such as tilde (~) or exclamation point (!), or put the year the person started work in parentheses (08).

All these will make a password that is easy to remember and extremely difficult to break or for anyone else to guess. Here’s some examples (in addition to the one in the title):

roadrage could become   ~R0@dr@ge
manicotti could become   !M@n1c0tt1
instantaccess could become (09)1N$t@nt@cce$$

Note that you do not have to do every single substitution to be effective, just a couple. This is a much better solution than those imposed by overzealous IT guys where the password is random characters, can’t be remembered, and is consequently put on the monitor with a yellow sticky (I actually saw one user that had at least a half dozen stickies on his monitor with all his passwords).

The Cost of Document Management Software

Technolawyer published last week a comparative cost analysis of Worldox, iManage/Interwoven and NetDocuments for a 25-user firm over 5 years. The estimates included web access (necessary to level the playing field with NetDocuments, which is a web-based SaaS product). The results are revealing, particularly when you add what is not included in the estimates.  Here are the base numbers:

Worldox:   $41,045
Interwoven: $79,000
NetDocs   $65,440

This does not include the cost of new hardware over time (almost certainly needed at some point over a 5-year span). It also does not include any costs for version upgrades for Interwoven or SQL (with Worldox maintenance there is no cost for program upgrades and it does not need SQL). It does not include installation or consulting costs for the Interwoven web product (again, needed to establish a par with NetDocs in terms of costs). While it includes start-up consulting and training costs, it does not include ongoing consulting costs for Worldox or Interwoven (presumably NetDocs would have no “consulting costs” per se), which are likely to be significantly higher for Interwoven than Worldox.  Lastly, it does not include the local document service for NetDocs – which lets you “back up” your documents on the web to a local server and thus be fully protected in the event of a web failure or if NetDocs were to go out of business. This would add $1,500/month, or $90,000 over a five-year period to the cost of NetDocs.

What all this means, that if you add in what is omitted in the quotes, the price differential between Worldox and NetDocs or Interwoven is likely to increase over the base numbers, perhaps dramatically. And while price should certainly not be the main criteria for choosing a product, nobody today can argue that a differential of 2x or more will not be a factor. And when you consider that the per-user cost of Worldox for 25 users over 60 months is under $30 a month, it is a bargain.

Security and the Cloud (Again)

There has been a flurry of posts and documents recently on Cloud computing security. Check out Sharon Nelson’s “Ride the Lightning.”

I also recently read Garry Wise’s Lawyers In “The Cloud”– A Cautionary Tale” article, which should be must reading for anyone contemplating moving to Sofware as a Service.

While most of his examples and concerns are appropriate, there are a few major differences between legal software in the “Cloud” and the examples he quotes. Perhaps the major one is that, unlike the theft of hundreds of thousands of credit card and social security numbers, information contained in SaaS programs would not be profitable if stolen. So a major motive for data theft is not on the same scale. It would still apply in certain instances, such as big-number law suits, mergers & acquisitions negotiations or where individuals nurse a particular grudge (family law, divorces, etc.), Government spying on sensitive legal cases.

On the other hand, two points that he raises should be stressed. The first is that most SaaS programs are ill-suited to the demands of Electronic Data Discovery. What happens if you get a discovery demand and can’t comply with it because of the limitations of your SaaS provider?  How sympathetic do you think courts will be to the argument “The Cloud Ate My Data?”

The second is data backup. If you are considering a SaaS program – such as Clio, RocketMatter, Houdini or AdvologixPM – I would think the ability to back up your data to a local server would be a deal breaker. This is the opposite of backing up data to the Internet, but it does protect against loss of data in almost all circumstances.

The pro-Cloud people make one good point: namely that the office security of many small firms is even worse than it would be in the Cloud. See Nicole Black’s article for an example of this view. 
While this is a perfectly valid point, it really is an argument that jumping from the fire back up into the frying pan is a step forward. Wouldn’t it be better to put out the fire?

LexisNexis: Is the Empire Crumbling?

In the wake of LexisNexis’ acquisition of Time Matters, it projected an empire-building strategy around acquired legal software. In short order, Lexis acquired PCLaw, Juris,  Concordance and CaseMap to add to HotDocs, which it had previously acquired. It announced a “privileged” relation with NetDocuments. This gave it solutions to almost any legal software need.

But two years after each acquisition, Lexis canned the principles of the acquired software programs (with the sole exception of HotDocs), that is, the people with the vision who had developed the programs to the point that they were worth acquiring.  In the past five years, Lexis has regularly announced new management and product champions announced that it would do better. This has all been reminiscent of the recent Mac ads about the announcement of new versions of Windows: this time all the problems are fixed, “trust me.” The fact is that the Practice Management division of LexisNexis (in its various incarnations) has not had “very effective management team in place” (to quote a recent listserv post) since they got rid of Bob Butler.

Last year, Lexis broke off its relationship with NetDocuments, which apparently had not “met its numbers.” This week, it announced it was selling HotDocs to British-based CapSoft, one of the largest providers of HotDocs solutions. Although HotDocs had for years been the market leader in document assembly, recently it has been losing ground to competing products such as Exari and DealBuilder.

In addition, in a move that left me (and a lot of other people) scratching my head, Lexis is now re-positioning PCLaw as the “entry level” practice management program. So if you call Lexis sales and tell them you are a small firm (3-5 users) and want practice management they will suggest PCLaw, NOT Time Matters.  PCLaw is a great time/billing/accounting program, but this is simply weird. Does this mean that PCLaw will get additional resources (which would be a good thing) or will Lexis change its corporate mind a year from now?

Whatever all this means, it is certainly not indicative of a cohesive product strategy.

Google Scholar

Several recent blogs have pointed to the fact that Google Scholar has added a dedicated search for legal journals and court opinions.  Initially, this may be somewhat limited and may not offer many arguments for switching from a paid plan.  Since I don’t practice law, I am not in a position to evaluate it. On the other hand, it also includes the ability to search for patents. With the growth of free search engines offered by many bar associations, and the general tendency to putting “everything on the web” it seems clear that the days of the paid services are numbered. Also, with multiple resources available, it seems likely that you might be able to find additional references by searching multiple sites/services.

In a related move, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has just released a ree full-text online law review/law journal search engine that searches the free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals as well as other document repositories.

Getting the Most Out of Your Existing Software

One of the common calls I get as a consultant says in essence: “I know I’m not getting the most out of my software: how do I make better use of what I already have?”  Even with a marginal upturn in the economy, there is a lot of pressure on firms to make the most of what they already have.  Here are some suggestions that may point to areas where relatively simple improvements or adjustments can reap significant benefits in terms of a firm’s efficiency and productivity.

WordProcessing: Is your firm using electronic letterhead?  Are you using real templates (as opposed to copying over an existing file) for standard tasks such as fax cover sheets?  Do you have any macros at all for common tasks such as inserting a graphical signature in your documents?

Practice Management: Have you customized your practice management software at all or are you just using it as a glorified rolodex/calendar?  By customizing your software to contain information you commonly need to retrieve, you can significantly reduce the number of times you have to consult a paper file. In addition, you can lay the basis for using this information to lay the basis for document assembly to product commonly used documents such as retainer letters.

Time and Billing: Are you using productivity reports such as PCLaw’s Lawyer Budgeting/ Lawyer Overview to put a dollar figure on how your firm or specific partners are doing, as opposed to a general impression of “well” or “poorly.” Productivity reports can also help you identify areas of your practice that are less efficient.

Document Assembly: Arguably using some form of document assembly can be one of the greatest productivity enhancements for a firm. This does not have to be heavy-duty players like Hot Docs. Simpler forms of document assembly ranging from simple word processing templates to merge forms used with a practice management program can yield considerable returns.

Training: When you go through a training session on a new program, if you have a really good instructor, and you are having a really good day, you may remember 70% of the content of a class. Very rapidly even this tends to dissipate so that the minimum a user needs to know in order to get their work done rapidly tends to become the maximum they know about a program. Judicious use of “brown bag” lunch training sessions can serve to increase efficience across the board. One user’s question during such sessions will benefit others who may have had the same question in the past. In addition, if you put out a weekly or even bi-weekly “FAQ” email, it can serve to reinforce training (as an example, see my “Worldox FAQs” on my web ite).