Does It Compute?

Comcast Shafts Users, Unannounced

So I got back from vacation only to find that my outgoing email did not work (incoming was received fine).

This happened once before and a tech told me he had “reset the modem” which fixed the problem. At various times and with various technicians, I was told that Comcast did not support Outlook, in fact did not support any email systems but their own, and finally that my port 25 was blocked because my account was a suspect source of spam (“large amounts of email”). When was it blocked? Don’t know. How do I get it unblocked?  You can’t.  In short, one big screw you.

More calls elicited the “information” that Comcast was now globally blocking port 25 and that this information was on its FAQ page.  Well, the FAQ page wouldn’t load (“problem loading this page”). Searching help gave a page with “loading information” but nothing ever loaded.

However, it turns out that ISPs all have an alternate port address. So if you are trying to set up email and are using Comcast, you will have to find out what it is.  This would be a reasonable solution if (1) Comcast bothered to inform customers about it and (2) it did not require a number of different phone calls to get the information - after the 4th call or so you have no idea whether they are telling the truth or not.

Hyperlinks Using Worldox

Many firms need a supplemental way to track pleadings or other documents in large cases. Traditionally these were similar to deposition summaries before it became possible to do those electronically.  Building on this sort of tradition, one way to do this is to create a kind of super Table of Contents - a list of all the pleadings in a particular jurisdiction. You can then set list the actual document ID number (assuming you are using a document management system such as Worldox) and up hyperlinks to the documents. Then the attorney can see at a glance all the relevant pleadings, as well as possibly other information, such as when the document was filed.

There are a few tricks to creating these hyperlinks in Worldox, however. If you are using WordPerfect there is no issue - Worldox just opens up, you select the document to hyperlink to, and you are done. However if you are using Word, the traditional Word File Open screen first seems to pop up and lists only the document ID numbers. Not very useful. However, if you click on the “browse” button (at the top of the window and to the right), Worldox opens up and you can select the document desired.

There is an additional trick if you are linking to PDF files. When you go to select the PDF file you get the pop up screen saying that Word may not be able to open a PDF file and do you want to open with the native application. Normally, that would be the proper choice. However, in this instance if you select “open with native application” the document actually opens in Acrobat - a hyperlink is not created. To create the hyperlink, you have to tell it to “open with Word” - and the hyperlink is created properly.

However, rather than going to the trouble of creating an entirely new and separate document, there are several other options that may be more efficient. 

The first, lo-tech one, is to create a code and put it in the description or comment field.  Thus “pld_MA” would be pleadings in Massachusetts; “pld_CA” would be pleadings in California, and so on. If you wanted to include additional information, you could do so in the comments field, e.g., “filed June 17, 2008.” Thus a search for “pld_MA” would find the equivalent of the document described above. The advantage to this is that the documents are much easier to consult and manipulate and the list is dynamic - you don’t have to revise a document, etc. You can scroll through the documents with the viewer much more quickly than you can open separate documents through hyperlinks. The only disadvantage is that you rely on people to enter the codes correctly (on the other hand, you rely on them to create the listing correctly too).

A second option would be to use the “Project” feature of Worldox GX SR1. You could create a “project” that contains all the relevant pleadings for a jurisdiction. The project is searchable and shows you the list of documents. This is also dynamic in that you can add or subtract documents from the project at will.

While the comfort of having a paper listing is reassuring, there may be better ways to accomplish the same thing.  Experiment with it.

What Is the Future for Time Matters and PCLaw?

So what does the future hold for Time Matters and PCLaw (and other acquired products, but those are the ones I am most familiar with). Most importantly, should you upgrade to the most recent version?

To cut to the chase, yes, you should upgrade to TM Version 9 and PCLaw 9, especially if you are on a version previous to version 8. Previously, I have encouraged clients to adopt an “every other version” strategy for Time Matters (unless there was some specific feature they particularly needed), so why the change? (Note that since PCLaw upgrades are free with maintenance, this is a somewhat different situation.) My reasoning on this is a bit lengthy.

First, it is clear that LexisNexis is committed to pushing products into a Software as a Service model - Web-based subscription. In fact, sales reps are already pressuring potential buyers to buy into the LN Total Practice Advantage - which is TM plus a variety of Lexis research options. If you currently use LexisNexis for research, this may make sense. Otherwise, it is just going to cost you a fair amount extra. Currently, if you end a subscription, you wind up with a network version of the latest release of Time Matters, so your data is intact and usable (but that option could well change). I won’t go into the merits of SaaS, but there are a lot of issues to be considered: see my blog of April 4.  http://doesitcompute.typepad.com/heckman/2008/04/negotiating-a-s.html

Logically, this means that sooner or later, the various LN products will be available primarily, if not exclusively, on a subscription basis. One possible scenario for this is that LN will raise the price of the standalone product and offer more or less deep discounts for the SaaS version. Apparently this is already happening to some extent.

This trend is reinforced by the fact that LexisNexis seems to be focusing its efforts internationally rather than in the U.S.  Thus the new Senior Vice President of its Global Practice Management Solutions division (of which TM and PCLaw are a part), Kate Holden, is headquartered in England, not Dayton. This appointment is so new that her bio is not even listed yet on the Lexis Executive Bios page.

Recent acquisitions include (at least) the Locus practice management system in Australia, and Axxia and Visualfiles in England. See also the acquisition of the LAWbase practice management program in New Zealand, announced last week. Note that all these acquisitions involve practice/case management programs.

The international focus of LexisNexis is part of the answer to the argument: “Lexis would be crazy to alienate its customer base by going the SaaS route exclusively.” The fact is that Lexis’s actions since the acquisition of TM and PCLaw have already significantly alienated its customer base: overall customer satisfaction has noticeably decreased, and Lexis may find it easier to buy into less competitive markets than to fix its offerings in the highly competitive U.S. market.

The major push to SaaS is likely to happen sometime within the next 3 years or so. It is likely that there will be a Time Matters 10 in 2009, but it quite unclear whether there will be a TM 11 around 2011, and I would be rather surprised to see a version 12.  For LexisNexis one advantage of the SaaS model is that they do not have release new whole releases, they can simply update the software.

LN is also likely to consolidate overlapping products, starting with Billing Matters and PCLaw, possibly by refusing to sell new standalone versions of Billing Matters, and then sunsetting it as the versions of TM sunset and are no longer supported. Expect this to happen to Billing Matters within the next few months. More globally, they apparently plan to consolidate all the products - TM, Billing Matters, PCLaw, Juris, etc. into one monster, subscription-based product. How long this will take and how well it will work is anybody’s guess (don’t hold your breath or bet money on it). While the idea of putting all products into the same SQL-based code base sounds rational and attractive, implementation is likely to be extremely difficult (read: buggy).

So why upgrade?  Many firms have so much invested in Time Matters (still arguably the best program of its type on the market) that switching is not really an option. LexisNexis (and many other companies) typically support 2 versions back from the current version. Thus the current version is 9, so versions 7 and 8 of TM and PCLaw are supported, but not version 6. Version 9 will continue to be supported through version 11 of these products. Hopefully, in the next year or so some of the outstanding bugs will also be fixed.

Overall, then, it is likely that TM 9 will be the most stable version over the longest period of time. So it is worth upgrading, especially if you can take advantage of one of the sales that are offered periodically. Since PCLaw upgrades are included in the cost of maintenance, this is not as much of an issue. However, to the extent that it may be “fused” with TM, it would still be a good idea to bring it up to date as well.

Dell Technical Support

A lot of people like to rant about Dell Support.  While I’ve had my share of problems with the hardware over the years (particularly laptop screens and motherboards), I’ve always found support to be quite good.

When I got home this weekend to cap off a great vacation, I found I couldn’t send outgoing email (although I could receive it - I’ve had this issue with Comcast before), and one of my computers appeared to have died - it would not boot, claimed there was no boot drive and would not recognize the drive ID.

When I bought this particular PC (an Optiplex 755) about 9 months ago I took the plunge and got Dell’s Gold 24/7 4 hour response support contract for Small and Medium Businesses.  So I called Dell about 10:30 am Sunday morning after trying a couple of times and running the built-in diagnostics (which did not recognize a hard drive).  Jason, the tech (NOT outsourced to India), walked me through testing (by switching the hard drive and CD/DVD drive cables) and determined that the problem was with the motherboard. He was great.

The motherboard arrived about 12:15 and the tech was there by 1 pm on a hot, horrible Sunday. Of course, it turned out that both the motherboard and hard drive were fried, so I didn’t get back up and running until Monday about noon.

But hardware aside, I think the moral is that if you get the proper support contract, you get what you pay for. And in this case the support was excellent – and on a Sunday no less.

Time Matters / PCLaw - Status after Acquisition

Last February (on Valentine’s Day as it happened and after sitting on it for nearly a year) I published an analysis of the situation of LexisNexis products after its acquisition of Time Matters, PCLaw, Juris and other companies, with a more generalized followup a few days later. How has this analysis held up and what is the current status of TM, PCLaw and the Certified Independent Consultant program?   

While I am no longer “in the loop” as a Certified Independent Consultant, the consultant world is a small one and word gets around, so I have continued to monitor the situation as best I can.

First, virtually all senior management with any in-depth knowledge of either product have been dismissed. New managers have been brought in. Since LexisNexis is essentially in the business of selling books and on-line research materials, it is fair to say that you now have software divisions within LexisNexis that are being run by book salesmen. This is not a recipe for success.

One of the fundamental differences between the books and software is that LexisNexis views its research services (books) as fungible. So if a user switches from Lexis to West, they can always drop the price or offer other perks next year to get the user to switch back. Software, however, does not work like this because firms have a huge investment in their historical data (which in many cases is convertible to another program only with great difficulty). Switching from one program to another is a major undertaking, and firms are not likely just to “switch back.”

In addition, while the PCLaw programming staff is intact, LN disbanded the entire second-level support team and forced only a few of them to reapply for employment individually.  Not a recipe for good employee morale!  At Time Matters, which had had a stable programming core for 8-10 years, half the programmers have quit, which may explain why the service releases for Version 9 have been introducing new bugs and TM 9 still  has some major bugs – in particular related records not updating correctly under certain circumstances. The loss of programmers at TM represents a tremendous loss of accumulated program knowledge and may indicate that Time Matters may actually not be capable of fixing the various bugs (even if it was motivated to), not to mention bringing out a new version.

After numerous consultants complained about the negative effects of yearly releases, LexisNexis apparently held some focus groups and got an earful about yearly releases as well as the cost of annual upgrades. So bingo, there will be no version 10 release of Time Matters or PCLaw this year. Marketing rules! Instead, they will focus (hopefully) on fixing bugs and improving the link between TM and PCLaw.

As far as consultants are concerned, Charlie Rogers, who was in charge of the consultant program, has been kicked upstairs into the position of product “champion” with in the Lexis Nexis Total Practice Advantage program. Many large companies have “champions” or “evangelists” for smaller divisions – Microsoft for one had a “legal evangelist” for many years. While I obviously can’t speak for LN, these are typically dead-end position with no real influence or decision-making powers. Such a position is probably alternatively preaching to the choir or preaching in the wilderness: either way it doesn’t amount to much.

Consultants meanwhile, have been assimilated to the LN sales process. They no longer get any real commissions on sales of products. Sales reps are “supposed” to use consultants to help them present the products. However, since sales reps get compensated ONLY for new sales and not for repeat sales or ongoing relationships, they have no incentive to do this and with perhaps a few exceptions this program has been a total bust. The very structure of the sales program ensures this – it is not a matter of good will. When I worked for a major consulting company there was a rule that the sales guys could not visit potential client without taking a techie (read: CIC) with him. Otherwise the sales guys would inevitably make promises that could not be kept/delivered. There are many reports of this happening with the LN reps.

My guess is that within 3 years the current CIC consultants program will no longer exist, at least not in a currently recognizable form. Already the CIC listserv has been forced to relax its censorship concerning problems with the program somewhat and Bob Fleming’s Elderlaw TM listserv has rebounded – Tom Rowe has even felt compelled to put in an appearance!

This is all very interesting, you may say, but what does it mean concretely?  Should I upgrade? Switch?  More on that to come.

Blogging at the Beach

So I was off to vacation at our family beach house on Long Island Sound. Complete with laptop and portable, battery-powered printer. The cottage has a DSL line (but no cable TV) so a complete little mini-office.  With a wireless router I could even work while sitting on the sand. Of course, sitting on the sand the glare is pretty intense and it is hard to see.

But the question is, who wants to?  When I was growing up we had a cartoon posted on the bulletin board: “After 5 days at the beach, Wilson’s buttocks were starting to unclench.” So the “take it with you on vacation” mantra has a fatal flaw: when in vacation mode you just don’t feel like working.

On the other hand, I can check emails and do minimal and emergency maintenance, logging in to clients remotely. I also get time to recharge the batteries and think about the future. So as a solo practitioner I can pretty much have my cake and eat it too. Not perfect, but a working solution. 

Portable Printer - Followup

A couple of weeks ago I said I had purchased a new portable batter-powered printer - an HP 470. Well, I’ve been giving it a workout – printing photographs, from the web, documents, etc.

Overall I am extremely pleased. It is amazing that such a small, light, printer (13x5x3) does such a great job. It does, however, have two weaknesses. 

First, the feed mechanism is not particularly robust - you have to be very certain that paper is lined up just right or it can feed on a slant and jam. Not surprising, but still something you have to watch out for.

Second, if you plug in/turn on the printer after the laptop has been booted up, the carriage mechanism for the ink cartridges frequently does not  align correctly and you get a message “carriage feed jammed.” This may be related to the battery-power, since it seems to happen less if the printer is plugged in to a power source (thought it does happen then as well).  If you turn off the printer, log off, then turn the printer on and log in again, everything is fine.  Again, just something to watch out for.

But overall, a great investment if you need printing on the road.

For the Mathematically Inclined

For those of you who have either fond or horrendous memories of calculus, aka The Calculus, check out the following video.

Amicus Mobile on Windows PDA

Gavel & Gown has announced Amicus Mobile, a miniature version of Amicus Attorney that runs on a Windows Mobile-based PDA.  I saw a demo of this product at the Amicus Consultants conference a month or so ago and it looks very impressive.

Amicus Mobile extends the concepts behind Blackberry push email to all areas, so that Amicus functions - calendar, contacts, emails, phone calls, time entries - synch up with the Amicus at the office in near-real time. So if a secretary adds an appointment to your calendar, it shows up on Amicus Mobile within a minute or two.

Similarly, Amicus Mobile keeps a record of all incoming and outgoing phone calls and offers to let you make a time entry for them on the spot (busy attorneys might want to make a “placeholder” time entry and flush out the details later).

The bottom line is that virtually all the functions that are available on your Amicus desktop at the office are available on Amicus Mobile. In addition, it will track changes when your cell phone is out of range and synchronize them later.

At $149 per user (and you only buy as many licenses as you have PDAs) is this too good to be true?  Well, it does have significant hardware requirements. You have to upgrade to Amicus Premium PE, which for older and smaller installations may necessitate a new server (Amicus is having a 25% off sale on the upgrade price for the month of June).  You need broadband access sufficient for the number of users (not usually a problem these days) plus a static IP address or a registered Web domain name. Lastly, it only runs on the clunky Windows Mobile 5 or better operating system (so you will have to ditch your Palm or Blackberry). But if those requirements aren’t burdensome for you, and if you are the type of person who is obsessive about staying connected with the office, this could be a very exciting product if it indeed performs as advertised.

Windows XP SP3 May Cause Problems

Apparently SP3 for Windows XP causes major problems in two known situations: if you are running Norton Anti-Virus and if you have an HP computer with an AMD chip.

Brian Livingston’s Windows Secrets newsletter  documents the issues and provides workarounds. Apparently in some cases you have to uninstall Norton before applying SP3. 

This is yet another reason why turning off automatic updates in Windows is a good idea. You never know when a “fix” is going to break something.  At worst, download the patches and install them manually after verifying that they are ok. Of course, to do this, you have to follow newsletters like Brian Livingston’s.  I would urge readers to subscribe, at least to the free version.