Does It Compute?

Acquire, Merge, Destroy - Now Comes the Destroy Part

PCLaw used to have one of the best tech support departments of any software company. Wait times were generally under 1 minute (except at year end), and support was very good.  Now, support is being moved from Toronto to Dayton and first level support is staffed by friendly – and completely inexperienced – midwesteners. But at least at the first sign of a non-trivial question, they would escalate to second level support in Toronto.

But now it seems that the second level support in Toronto is being dismissed en masse (presumably so LexisNexis won’t have to pay Canadian severance packages) and then only 8 or 10 are being rehired. So in essence, LexisNexis is destroying what used to be one of the best support operations in the business (plus, it was a profit center for PCLaw). And the remaining support people are not exactly going to have a warm and fuzzy feeling about job security. Even for Lexis, this seems like a completely irrational move.

At NY LegalTech in February, a number of people remarked that every time Lexis acquires another product it is more money in the pocket of the companies that have remained independent. In this case, Amicus Attorney (also located in Toronto) will have a great opportunity to pick up some experienced technical support people. Meanwhile, PCLaw support will continue to deteriorate.

Amicus Attorney - In house Intranet

Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell’s new book on collaboration tools and technologies got me thinking. They talk about using Intranets for in-house collaboration. My first reaction was: “that’s way overkill except for the largest firms.”  But then it occurred to me: wait a minute, Amicus Attorney features the equivalent of a built-in Intranet, even if almost nobody uses it.

When you open Amicus, at the left of the “Dailies” page, there are customizable links to web pages - you can use it to link to the firm’s web page, to have the administrator put up important information, or for almost any other purpose.

This can let you link to your firm’s web page, internal documents, or other information. I had one client who used it to display all court appearances, for example.

A related function is the “Library” (also underused). This was originally designed to link to web pages. In this way it could serve as an organized repository for all the useful links that anybody in the firm uses. Since some users will obviously be more adept at Internet research than others, being able to store and organize these links can be a big time-saver. You can also use it to refer to firm documentation, HR manuals, practices and policies, or as a “brief bank” that lists links to the firm-standard forms, pleadings, contracts, retainers, etc.

"Collaboration Tools and Technologies"

I’ve been reading the new book by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell on Collaboration Tools and Technologies.  The book is a goldmine of concrete suggestions - many of which don’t involve a lot of investment, but making the most of the tools you already have.

In fact, that’s one of the main lessons of the book, in my view. People already have a number of collaboration tools which most often are either not used or poorly used. By putting some thought into your workflow, you can make collaboration dramatically more efficient with the tools you already have.

If the book has a weakness, it is that it tends to be a little abstract, or algebraic. In a way, it could hardly be otherwise because “every installation is a snowflake,” unique. So it is next to impossible to prescribe universally applicable solutions. But it is unfortunate that the book barely mentions commonly used practice management tools such as Time Matters or Amicus Attorney. For example, both these programs have an “in-house Instant Messaging” function, but this is not discussed in their chapter on Instant Messaging.

Similarly, the book barely mentions document management systems, yet if you want effective collaboration on documents, a firm really needs to have one in place.  Brief banks, for example, can collect forms, pleadings, motions or other documents that the firm has standardized on as containing its preferred language for various situations. Brief banks can also serve as a great training tool for new attorneys: “here’s how we deal with the following situation, and why.”

Still, even if you only get a couple of ideas that make sense in the context of your firm, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies will have been extremely useful. It can be ordered from the ABA, at ababooks.org

Software as a Service - Rolling Back Patches?

Many Software As A Service (SAAS) issues have been addressed frequently – who owns the data if the provider goes bankrupt? What about security and confidentiality? Is there provision for running locally if the Internet goes down?  The need for a good license agreement is clear.

However, here’s one that I have never seen addressed at all, and it could be extremely important.  One of the advantages touted by the SAAS providers is that the software is patched and updated centrally, without all the pain usually associated with doing an in-house updates. So your software is always up to date.

But in this day and age of yearly updates, new patches are increasingly bringing along new bugs of their own. Time Matters users have seen this happen repeatedly in the last several services releases, and Microsoft patches have been notorious for breaking things for years.

In some cases, these new bugs may affect you not at all or minimally. However, a not insignificant number of firms have reported having to “roll back” a patch to the previous release due to issues it created. So, this raises two questions: If you subscribe to a given software via SAAS, when the vendor patches or updates the software,

(1) Will you be notified of the patch/update before hand? and
(2) Does the vendor commit to rolling back the patch if it causes problems for your site (at your sole discretion)?

These provisions would be critical points to include in any contract.

OCR Digital Photographs of Text

Abbyy FineReader 9.0 was released a couple of months ago and now provides the ability to OCR digital photographs of documents. Shades of 1950s spy movies. Take secret photographs with your camera and turn them into a Word document!

To test this ability, I took a photo of an open book with a 7 Megapixel camera. The book was open, so the pages were curved and not flat (always a problem with OCRing xeroxes if the book was not pressed down on the glass and each line is curved). Abbyy correctly recognized the photo and the OCR quality was acceptable. There were a few mistakes. but no major errors and the “curve” in the pages was corrected for.

Then I tried it with a cellphone camera (I have a Treo 750). Even after several tries, I simply could not get a good enough photo to scan, but if you have a newer camera, you will probably be ok. Cellphones, not.

So instead of trundling the book off to be xeroxed (assuming anybody still does research with actual books in an actual library), just take a picture of a few pages and you are good to go.

"Reverse Lookup" from Outlook to Worldox

People generally know that Worldox GX provides “drag and drop” integration with Outlook. You set up a QuickProfile, which appears in your Outlook Inbox under a “Worldox” heading. You can also have sub-matters for clients with multiple matters.

However, I was not fully aware - until a client asked me whether it was possible - that if you click on the “folder” under Worldox it provides a kind of “reverse lookup” without having to go through a Worldox lookup.  Thus if you have, say “Smith v. Jones” that you can drag and drop to, if you click on the “Smith v. Jones” folder, you will see several options for lookups. They are similar but not identical.

The first button, which will be labeled “Smith v. Jones” will find all the files that you have saved using the client/matter/doctype settings defined in the QuickProfile (regardless of whether they were saved by the drag & drop process).

The second button will find all the email messages under the given matter, regardless of who saved them.

The third button will find all documents categorized as “email” regardless of whether they are email messages (assuming that you have Document Type defined as a sub-directory). For example, I sometimes prepare lengthy substantive emails in a word processor and save them as “email.” This lookup would find those as well.

For attorneys who spend a large part of their time in e-mail, this “reverse lookup” feature can save them significant amounts of time since they do not have to leave Outlook to look up emails for a client.

Vista vs. Windows XP - Redux

When Vista was first released, there were basically two schools of thought:
1) Avoid it as long as possible, at least to SP1
2) Accept the inevitable - you have to do it sooner or later anyway.

More recently, however, a third school of thought has emerged. A number of analysts have been arguing that Microsoft realizes (thought obviously does not admit) that Vista is a bomb, and will be fast tracking the NEXT version - currently known as Windows 7, which will be released in 2009-2010 (18-24 months). According to this analysis, Vista no longer becomes “inevitable,” but rather a simple “version” that can be skipped with virtually no adverse consequences.

It is difficult to say at this point in time whether this is correct or not. A key element, however, will be to see whether Microsoft pushes back the June 30 deadline when it currently plans to stop selling XP.  If it does, then the “wait for Windows 7" argument looks very persuasive.

For an extended analysis of the pros and cons, see Randall Kennedy’s article in Infoworld (the people pushing the “Save XP” campaign - which recently topped 100,000 signatures, primarily of IT and computer types).

Conflicts with ActiveWords

ActiveWords is a great utility program - auto text on steroids. It will expand any contraction in any Windows program and do much more. So whether you are in Word, Outlook, Time Matters, etc., you still have the same set of abbreviations that can be expanded.  http://www.activewords.com

ActiveWords will also let you launch programs, open documents, go to a web site, and so on. So people who have frequently used documents on their desktop, can define a shortcut to them in Active Words, and open them simply by typing the abbreviation.

But the very power and versatility of ActiveWords can create issues with some programs, because the technology it uses can interfere with more limited “auto text” functionality within specific programs.

Thus ActiveWords has compatibility problems with both Time Matters and Worldox. In Time Matters, you simply turn off the native autotext function and use ActiveWords instead. In Worldox the problem is a bit more intractable. So if you plan on using ActiveWords and “X” check to make sure they will play nice together.

PCLaw -- Great Responsiveness

Working together with another consultant, I recently had occasion to identify a bug in the PCLaw Trust to General Transfer function.  It turned out that in PCLaw v. 9, if you wanted to manually edit the automatic transfer routine, and you were transferring more than $1,000, you could not edit the amount properly.

What is noteworthy, however, that within the space of slightly over two weeks, PCLaw had fixed the issue and a new build was available (9.10d). Leaving aside the question that this sort of bug in a fundamental feature should not have existed in the first place, this kind of responsiveness is one reason why PCLaw has the great reputation it does.

Amicus 2008 PE Released

Gavel & Gown has announced the release of Amicus Attorney 2008 Premium Edition, replacing Amicus 7.

As would be expected of a mature product, there are few “Wow” features - as in “Wow, I’ve wanted that for years.” There are, however, a couple of nice touches.
•    When creating new contacts, there is a “cut and paste” box - so if you paste, say, the signature block from an email into this, it parses the address into its parts - name, address, company, phone, fax, email, etc.  While you will obviously want to double check this, in my testing it works pretty well - and even with corrections can save a lot of time. It will not, however, accept .vcf files.
•    Another nice touch is the ability to see “tasks assigned to others by me.” So an attorney can track the progress being made by paralegals, assistants, etc.
•    The email integration has been improved to remedy some underlying design flaws. You can now see your unsaved emails, a major flaw in previous versions.

This last point is indicative of a number of other changes. Amicus 2008 has been rewritten for SQL 2005. While it no longer supports SQL Express or MSDE (or SQL 2000), the SQL licenses are included in the cost of the software - you no longer have to worry about paying extra for SQL licenses.

In addition a number of design flaws, oversights and “takeaways” in Version 7 in relation to Amicus V have been remedied. In fact, in my testing, virtually all the problems that clients were experiencing with Amicus 7 have been remedied. 

So I am recommending that Amicus 7 clients take advantage of the “March Madness” sale (25% off the upgrade price) and buy the upgrade, although unless you are currently experiencing extensive issues with 7, you may want to put off implementing until reports are in from people who like to live on the bleeding edge (the result of living on the cutting edge).