Does It Compute?

First Anniversary of "Does It Compute?"

April 29th marked the first anniversary of this blog: over 260 posts, pretty much 5 days a week.  The blog is driven by two major factors. 

First, my views on the software industry and various software programs. Thus you have rants about Vista; significant analysis of document management issues; trends such as LexisNexis’ “Acquire Merge Destroy” tactics towards the software it has gobbled up over the past several years - primarily Time Matters and PCLaw, but with other programs waiting in the wings (Juris?). These are the posts where I try to answer the title question of the blog:  Does It Compute?

Second, it is driven by my clients.  Over a third of my posts have been in the “tips & tricks” category, including 16 posts on document management issues; 18 on Time Matters, 23 on PCLaw, and 25 posts on Worldox.  Only 11 posts on Amicus Attorney because for most of the year it was not clear whether the new version would become a viable product or not – with the release of 2008 Premium, it seems to have remedied many of the failings of the previous version. These posts result from common questions I get asked all the time, or specific things that come up. A client asks me something and I think “the answer to that issue would make a good post.” Hopefully, these repositories can serve as a kind of advanced version of “Frequently Asked Questions,” since many of them are not just simple day to day issues.

I hope you have found it useful and will continue to do so. I welcome any questions and suggestions.

In the coming year I may blog a bit less often but will also try to contribute some longer and more systematic pieces.

Legal and Illegal Characters - XML Adds Some

Most people know that you cannot create file or directory names with “illegal characters” such as \, *, |, <, >, =, ;, etc. However, with the rise of XML running in the background of a number of applications, there are some additional “illegal characters.” in particular the apostrophe (').  It turns out that XML considers this illegal. 

So programmers who were too sloppy or lazy to explicitly work around this issue may create a situation where you get unexplained errors for something that *shouldn’t* be an illegal character.  The end result is that you can’t  use apostrophes in client/matter names in programs such as PCLaw or Amicus Attorney 2008 PE!

WordPerfect X4 - "The PDF Office Suite"?

The new version of WordPerfect (X4) styles itself as “the PDF Office Suite” and claims the ability to edit PDF files.

While this is mainly marketing hype, WordPerfect does have the ability to both import and export to PDF. Word requires the addition of third-party add-ins to do this.

How well does this work?  The WordPerfect export to PDF has been available ever since WordPerfect 9 and works extremely well. In addition, WP lets you set the PDF security settings and password the results. So if you want to export a file that the recipient cannot copy, print, etc. you can do so. The ability to change these settings is available only if you have the password.

The WordPerfect import from PDF is newer (first introduced in version X3) and not as mature. In this version, it works pretty well, with some limitations it shares with many of the dedicated third-party programs as well. WP does recognize headers, page numbering, etc., so that these are not just dropped into the text in the middle of the document (if the document is only 2 pages, this may not work as well because WP cannot be certain that there is in fact a header). It also recognizes automatic paragraph numbering and converts the PDF numbers to auto numbering in WP (at least for relatively standard numbering schemes).

Where you get problems is with tabbed columns, which WP tries to convert to columns, usually not very successfully, multi-column documents (such as newsletters), and inside address or multi-line headers). It does not recognize the hard returns and tends to run the lines together or format them irregularly. However, it shares these problems with other programs, so this is not unique to WordPerfect.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is that if you have a contract, agreement, deposition, etc. that you want to convert from PDF and work on in WP, the changes are that you can do so with only minimum problems.

Attaching an Email to Another Email

Typically in Outlook you cannot attach an email to another email, you have to forward the email you want to “attach.” 

However, if you are using Worldox, you can in fact attach an email stored in Worldox to another email.  If you open the new email, then click the paper clip to attach a file, the Worldox screen will appear. Select the email you wish to attach.  The only difference here is that instead of double-clicking to attach (as you would with a Word document), you right-click and select “Open.” This attaches the email.

It had never occurred to me to do this until a client asked me about it the other day. Live and learn.

Correction:  Tom Mighell wrote me noting that you CAN in fact attach one email to another in Outlook. The Paperclip (which is what most people use) attaches a file. But if you select Insert | Item from the menu bar of an email you are working on, it gives you the opportunity to insert another email. Thanks, Tom.

Security - At What Cost and From What Threats

Reader Thomas noted that Acrobat Professional can also “undo” basic security that may have been applied to a PDF document (although digital signatures would be more difficult).

This is true, and raises a more general point: what levels of security are required for different types of threat. On the one end you have targeted theft of corporate secrets. On the other end, you have the situation where law firms do not want to send out zip files because clients won’t know how to deal with them.

Basically, there are three kinds of threats: (1) general curiosity - “I wonder what’s in this file?” and employee hostility (“I’m going to quit tomorrow and want to see how much damage I can do”; (2) random hackers that are just trolling the web; and (3) targeted maliciousness by extremely savvy people.

From the security point of view, there is the principle that higher levels of security require more work by the user. How many people actually secure their email using PGP, for example? By and large it’s “too much work.”

Basic security - whether PDF files or the “security” of the built-in password function in Word or WordPerfect, is very primitive. Commercial and even freeware products are available to break these passwords. Of course, this implies forethought - you have to make the effort to obtain one of these products. Basic security therefore is intended to deter only casual and/or not very knowledgeable people.  Unless you are working on high-profile, high-dollar cases, basic protection is probably adequate in most cases.

Securing Acrobat Files

It has become a commonplace for firms to send attachments in PDF format to limit the ability of recipients to edit them. Some firms go so far as to scan documents without OCR’ing them, thinking that this makes them more “secure.”

While this is not the case, there are a number of ways in which Acrobat files can be “locked down.”

If you go into File | Properties and select the “Security” tab, you can determine whether or not the document can be printed; whether content can be copied (to prevent someone from simply copying the content into Word), whether the document can be changed, whether pages can be extracted, etc. In addition, simply creating a PDF file does not entirely remove all the metadata from a Word document. However, there is a separate Acrobat function to remove metadata, if this is an area of concern.

And this does not count the more advanced security features of digital signatures, passwording or encrypting documents, and so on.

So PDF files can easily be secured, but simply creating a PDF file may not by itself, give you the security you want.

WordPerfect X4 Released

Corel has just released WordPerfect X4. I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, but it seems more interesting than the usual release. Three areas stand out in particular.

Corel has had the ability to create PDF files ever since version 9. The previous version, X3, introduced the ability to read PDF files and convert them to WordPerfect. This version now claims the ability to “edit” PDF files and styles itself “The PDF Office Suite.” It includes the ability to OCR image-only PDFs. WordPerfect also supports tagged PDFs and PDF/A. This could be extremely useful, depending on how well it works.

Secondly, WordPerfect Lightning introduces “web-connected note taking.” This lets you grab information from the web (including screen captures) into one or more notes and then import/integrate them back into WordPefect. It also provides an on-line collaboration environment, including an on-line calendar that can be accessed with any browser. Corel provides 200 MB of free storage space on the web.

Lastly, WordPerfect has focused on conversion and compatibility with Open Document Format (ODF) and (as usual) claims enhanced conversion abilities from Word (including 2007) and other formats.

The move toward PDF and Web/based tools is quite interesting. Stay tuned.

Paper Trails and E-Discovery

Many firms are still more comfortable with a “paper trail” – folders of all the documents in a case – than with electronic files. They may even print out all the emails on a case and store them in the folder. This is understandable as a preference if it includes accepting the significant additional inefficiencies that this sort of storage entails. Personally, if I want to seriously think about a document, I print a copy and mark it up. But I don’t keep it in a folder once I have made revisions.

Such firms also frequently advance two arguments to justify this personal preference, both of which are irrelevant and/or wrong or misleading.

The first is that lawyers “have to keep a paper trail” of clients’ documents.  While this varies from state to state (be sure to check the ethics opinions of your state bar association), states are increasingly finding that (1) most papers files can be destroyed after the case is closed (with significant exceptions for wills, deeds and the like) and that (2) it is permissible to maintain a client file in a predominantly electronic format (again, with exceptions as noted).  Thus for example, the New Jersey Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics addresses these issues in Opinions 692 and 701. Opinion 701 notes that “nothing in the RPCs [Rules of Professional Conduct] prevents a lawyer from archiving a client’s file through use of an electronic medium such as PDF files or similar formats.” A good summary of the current status is available from the ABA website

The second aspect is even more critical, however. Firms for whom document production is synonymous with paper documents – and consequently believe that maintaining the “paper file” is critical in the event of discovery – have to think again. The new FRCP provisions (now somewhat more than a year old) indicate that documents must be produced in the format designated by the party requesting discovery (Rule 34).  Failing that, the “default” as it were is to produce documents in the electronic “native format” that they were originally in. While all the issues here have not been definitively decided, it seems clear that “document production” will henceforth be primarily electronic, and not just scans of paper documents.

Why is this?  First, because electronic documents are so much easier to manipulate and search. But even more important, because they are very likely to contain “metadata” or data about the document that is embedded in the document, but would not be available in a paper or scanned version. This “metadata” can frequently be critical to one side or another of a case.

So a firm that has religiously maintained a “paper trail” is likely to have to go back and re-produce everything from the electronic originals. Your “paper trail” is essentially useless.

Information Is Not Knowledge

“For it is the greatest truth of our age: information is not knowledge”
    Caleb Carr, Killing Time

At a time when the world seems to be awash in information – and, often as not on the Internet, incomplete information, misinformation, wrong information, etc., this bears repeating. 

For information to become knowledge, it has to be processed and analyzed by intelligence. This is where all the data mining techniques, so-called “knowledge management,” etc. break down.  They are presenting assemblages of facts, but there is no context to analyze those facts.  For information to become knowledge, you first have to ascertain whether the so-called “information” is in fact true and relevant. Then you have to figure out what it means. At that point you know something.  As Mark Twain said in an earlier age, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.

To take a current provocative example:

Barak Obama reportedly said that people “cling to guns and religion” due to bitterness and despair over their economic condition.

Karl Marx notoriously referred to religion as the “opium of the people.”

Does that make Obama a Marxist (as some conservative columnists would have us believe)?  Not hardly.

Aside from the fact that this sort of false syllogism seems to be the meat of politics, the question is, are either of both of these statements actually true?  That’s a question for another place and time.

Electronic Letterhead and Form Letters

Many firms have gone over to electronic letterhead. It saves a ton of money in printing costs and is easy to change - and you don’t have to thrown out reams and reams of expensive paper.

It’s easy enough to create your letterhead for a standard blank letter. But what if you use 40 or 50 form letters and each one is on letter head?  If you put the letterhead on each form letter, then changing it is a major hassle - you have to do the edits 40 or 50 times.

Fortunately, there’s a better way.

Create a letterhead document with JUST the letterhead. Store it on your network somewhere.  Create all your forms WITHOUT the letterhead.  Then, create a simple macro that inserts the letterhead document at the top of the form. You can assign this to a keyboard combination (Ctrl-L for example) so that it is very easy to access. 

In addition, as part of the macro, you can insert a “hard” date that will not update when the letter is re-opened - a major problem at many firms.