Does It Compute?

Painted Caves in the Dordogne

We took a vacation last week to look at prehistoric paintings in the Dordogne. We visited Lascaux II, Rouffignac, Font de Gaume, Les Combarelles and Pech Merle This is our third trip and overall we have visited some 17 caves.

The carvings and paintings are incredible. There is simply no way that even a double spread page on a large art book can come close to the impression made by the 17 foot long Great Bull in Lascaux, or many of the other near-life size paintings.

But the paintings are even more astonishing when you consider that pre-historic man systematically decorated caves for nearly 20,000 years (from about 32,000 BP - before present - to 12,000 BP). There are some 355 known decorated caves in Europe and more are being found all the time. Further, many of the caves were extremely difficult to access, and pre-historic artists must have lain on their backs to draw images on a ceiling only 3 feet above them. Many of the images are organized and would have had to have been planned ahead of time, such as the 33 foot long symmetrical frieze of mammoths in Rouffignac: 2 mammoths facing each other, then 4 more, then a space than a final mammoth.

Lastly, computer analysis has determined that many of even the most major caves (Lascaux, Rouffignac) were done by one or two artists or a small number of artists working under the direction of a master artist (similar to the ateliers of Ruben or Titian). The amount of organization that went into the major caves was spectacular: in Lascaux, more than 200 lamps have been found, as well as remnants of the scaffolding that was necessary in order to reach a height necessary to do the paintings.

So for a period of almost 20,000 years, there was a stable culture of Cro Magnon man which put a high priority on decorating caves, and which reached an extremely high artistic level.  Since everything else is speculation, all we can do is appreciate the artistry that went into the paintings.

Steve Stockstill on Billing Matters

I’m happy to present another guest blog by Steve Stockstill. Steve was a core developer of Time Matters programs for 8 years, and had risen to the position of Director of Software Engineering for the Time Matters business unit before he left in August 2007. Steve’ s company, Data Equity, has offered enhancement products for Time Matters and Billing Matters for several years.

Dead Cat Bounce

I waited a few weeks to see how the news of the Billing Matters end of life cancellation would resonate. There was a brief flurry of positive conversation but a significant lack of details and no roadmap has deflated the hopes. Most of the Time Matters consultant community is cautiously optimistic and waiting to see how well Lexis can execute a third attempt at visioneering their acquisitions from the mid 2000’s. The corporate mantra has been that Billing Matters will not be sunset because …. “we are listening to our customers and consultants”. The reason is likely due to their inability to execute the strategies needed to end the life of Billing Matters.

Follow the Money

In the last few years the competition has caught and in a few cases surpassed Time Matters. In turn, Time Matters customers have been moving to other practice management products. In addition to losing customers, it would not be surprising that a loss of renewals for Billing Matters has further contributed to the revenue decline. In other words customers may continue to renew Time Matters but look elsewhere for a billing solution.

It’s no secret that when a company acquires multiple businesses in the same market space, the goal is to consolidate the resources and expand the individual markets into a greater whole. Case in point: Time/Billing Matters and PCLaw. For years Lexis appeared to ignore the community while at the same time failed to execute the product visions for both PCLaw and Time/Billing Matters.
In my estimation, the decision to sunset Billing Matters was dependent on executing a likely initial acquisition strategy: create a formidable combined product using the best resources from the Time Matters and PCLaw products and engineering teams. The resulting product could offer best of breed, perfectly integrated Practice Management, Advanced Billing and Accounting.

To Catch a Falling Knife

It’s clear the Lexis Nexis talking points on the resurrection are that they have “listened to the community” and decided not to sunset Billing Matters. Why weren’t they listening in the first place? Do they suddenly understand the significance of integrated billing?

There still remains the fact that Billing Matters has essentially been untouched for several years. Data Equity has provided advanced engineering services to the Billing Matters community for many years, having done so we have learned a great deal about many key data quality metrics. In fact we have reported this information to the Time Matters engineering team. Unfortunately they weren’t listening to us either. In general they have been unwilling to acknowledge potential defects in an open way.

Is There a Change in the Document Management Paradigm?

The functionality offered by a number of new web-based “Document Management” programs on the market raises the question of whether the basic document management paradigm is shifting.

Traditional document management for law firms has several key characteristics:
  ● It is based on a client/matter approach and is locked down: everyone must use it all the time.
  ● It integrates with ALL the programs you use that generate documents (but may not integrate with databases)
  ● All your documents are full-text indexed and you have advanced search capabilities.
  ● It integrates with your email program and scanners.

The newer programs push two characteristics.  First, they are all in the cloud, so you save on expenses connected with your server (although it is dubious that you save money over-all). This means that you can access your documents from anywhere, without having to be in or connected to your office. Second, they are “easy to use” with drag and drop from Windows Explorer.

Typically, however, these programs do not integrate with everything and do not enforce usage. So they fail on that key functionality of document management systems. The “ease of use” via Windows Explorer amounts to “ease of making mistakes” and recreates one of the problems that lead firms to document management in the first place – increased error and loss of documents.

In short aside from the hype, these programs tend to have two things going for them. First, they are “in the cloud,” so that users can access any file that has been deposited there (and remember, this does not happen automatically). Second, they tend to integrate with file sharing programs like DropBox, Smartsync, Sugarsync, SpiderOak, etc. While this by no means replaces traditional document management functionality, it does represent a significant challenge to those programs.

Document management programs such as Worldox are starting to offer more fully-featured web access programs. Worldox now offers an iPad app for example (and other vendors either have one or have one in development) which is free (although you have to pay for the underlying infrastructure separately). Worldox also recently issued a “hook” which lets you access Worldox when uploading or downloading files from Dropbox.

Technolawyer Buyer's Guide to Document Management Systems

Technolawyer has just republished a slightly updated version of my Document Management white paper under the title “TechnoLawyer Buyer's Guide to Document Management Systems (Second Edition).”  It is available from Technolawyer here.

In reviewing the document, I was pleased that it has stood up fairly well. The obvious change is the growth of web access modules and the ability to link to the iPad.  NetDocuments continues to dominate the cloud-based document management world without any serious contenders.

Most of the “new” offerings are store and forward systems that don’t really fulfill the two basic requirements for document management: that is, they don’t integrate with all your programs and they don’t oblige users to use them. With the new cloud-based offerings, you might wonder if there is a paradigm change in what constitutes document management. I'll be addressing that issue in the near future.

Keeping Google Docs in Synch with Worldox

I have a solo practitioner client who tells me he is able to keep his documents in Worldox in synch with the same documents in Google Docs.  It works like this.

First, you load the Google Word add-in that keeps Word documents in synch with Google Docs.

You create a document in Word, which synchs with Google Docs. You save it and it is profiled in Worldox. The two are in synch.

You open the document from Worldox in Word. It synchs with Google Docs and is saved to Worldox. The two are still in synch.

From a different terminal, you edit the document over the web Google Docs. Now the two documents are different. But when you open the document in Word/Worldox and it synchs up from Google Docs. When you save the document to Worldox, everything is back in synch.

Where this system would break down would be in a larger firm if a single user did NOT have the Google Docs add-in to Word loaded. When that user opens the document and saves it in Worldox, the changes only go to Worldox. If meantime someone opens the document in Google Docs and changes it, you have two conflicting sets of changes and it is unclear which one would “win” the next time it was opened from Word with the Google Docs add-in.

So this is a system that could work on a small scale, but might be iffy in a slightly larger firm if everything was not configured exactly right.

Hurricane Irene

Well, we survived Hurricane Irene with zero damage – either at our house in Old Lyme, my mother’s house across the river in Old Saybrook, or our family beachfront house.  Power went out Sunday about 6 am, and came back here Tuesday evening about 7 (we are in a priority zone because we live very close to the Library, Town Hall, Fire Station and School. Internet (cable) came back this morning). Phone service stayed on the whole time, although we had to haul out old phones that do not require a power supply (long live land lines!!).The beach house still does not have power. So overall, we were lucky.

The forecasters were amping up the danger reports in order to increase their listener base. In fact, it got so bad that the AccuWeather people started denouncing other meteorologists for panic mongering (“no way is the surge going to be that bad...”). More generally, however, the warnings reminded me of the warnings on pill bottles and various other things, all of which say basically the same thing: “Don’t do anything incredibly stupid that no rational person would do.”  So if you go kayaking in the middle of the hurricane on flooded rivers and the kayak tips over and you drown, whose fault is that?  The governor of Connecticut pointed out that if people don’t adhere to warnings and get in trouble, the state will not be able to help them.

New Englanders tend to be a bit crusty on this sort of subject. The Old Lyme Director of Emergency Management said “Living in New England you should know how to respond to any severe weather activity that could occur in our area.”  The First Selectman said that the hurricane was likely to be “like strong spring tides.”

Now in fact, there was a lot of damage, mostly from falling trees.  But I think the lesson is that you do what you can and don’t get hysterical about things you can’t control. As an example of the ridiculous, I saw a neighbor had “reinforced” their mailbox with masking tape. On the other hand, our beach house, built by my architect grandfather in 1955 has 2x4's stacked the thick way through for the first floor and every single joist is hurricane-strapped.  Pretty unusual in the 1950's. We lost 2 shingles on the front wall, and that’s it.

But what about your office?  The key here is to figure out the source of possible danger. Are you on a river bank?  Do you have large trees that could fall on your roof?  If you are on a hill, there is no sense in protecting against flood, but you might have to worry about mud slides, and so on.  A lot of this is simple common sense and spending some time actually thinking about it.

Obviously you want a current backup stored outside the office.  If there are people who live in areas less likely to lose power (or get it restored faster), they are the ones who should take the backup with them.  You want to shut down all systems including the battery powered surge protector. Otherwise, your APC will simply run down the battery when the power goes out. But if you turn it off, you can always power up for 10-15 minutes (or whatever time you have) and retrieve key information. You want to make sure you have phone chargers that work off your car’s cigarette lighter. You may want to invest in converters that will let you run a laptop from your car.

Disaster preparation is not rocket science. But you do have to think about it a little bit.