Does It Compute?

Figs and Prosciutto - Mmmmmm

We recently had dinner at a northern Italian restaurant. One of the appetizers was fresh figs and prosciutto.  It was absolutely fantastic and is extremely easy to make on your own (assuming you can get the ingredients).

Wrap fresh figs with a slice of prosciutto
Sear in a frying pan with some olive oil. Press down on the figs with a cover so that the bottom is seared.  Not more than 2-3 minutes.
Serve.

This has to be one of the most fantastic things I have ever had.

Unreadable Documentation

The latest fad in blogs and help files features Microsoft newest (Office 2007) fonts and the use of a lot of color.

There’s only one problem. They are hard (i.e., next to impossible) to read.  I once consulted and opthamologist about the use of color in presentations. He told me that while 15% of the population is color blind to some degree or another, if you used high contrast colors - e.g., black on white; black on yellow; white on dark blue (like the old WordPerfect DOS screens) you would be ok.

However, the newest fad seems to be to use a variety of pastels on white, which are LOW contrast colors (e.g., orange, lime green, etc.). I, and I’m sure many others, find these extremely difficult to read. In fact, on one web site I recently visited I found it so hard to focus that the only way to read something was to print a hard copy, and even that was difficult to read.

Given the notoriously short attention span of people who visit web sites, this is a sure way to drive people away from the web site.  In addition, for help files, people using them are already seriously stressed, and you don’t want to add any more stress just to get them to find a solution. So take a test: which of the following is easiest to read.

The answer you want is buried deep in the registry.

The answer you want is buried deep in the registry.

The answer you want is buried deep in the registry.

The answer you want is buried deep in the registry.

The answer you want is buried deep in the registry.

The answer you want is buried deep in the registry.

The lime green and orange seem to be the current favorite colors on a number of sites and documentation I have seen. Go figure

Worldox Tips & Tricks

I’m honored that the snazzy new Worldox web site (www.worldox.com) refers to my blog and Worldox Tips & Tricks. So to make life a little easier, here’s a list of the 31 Tips and Tricks since I started this blog almost a year and a half ago.

Worldox Project Feature (Aug. 20) 

Getting Archived Emails into Worldox (July 31)

Setting line colors and fonts in Worldox (July 10)

Worldox/web mobile released (June 25)

Hyperlinks Using Worldox (June 19)

Drag & Drop Emails Firm-Wide with Worldox (May 22)

Attaching an Email to Another Email (April 25)

Saving Documents as Versions in Worldox (April 14)

“Reverse Lookup” from Outlook to Worldox (March 21)

“Personal” Files in Worldox (March 7)

Worldox and the Road Warrior (Jan. 15)

Adding a Signature to Emails Sent from Worldox (Dec. 28, 2007)

Sizing the Viewer in Worldox (Dec. 10, 2007)

A list of the previous Tips & Tricks was published on Dec. 6, 2007

Windows 7 Blog

For some time now, there has been a school of thought that believes Microsoft has recognized that Vista is more or less a disaster and will push rapidly toward the release of “Windows 7.”  This view was strengthened 10 days ago when Microsoft started a new blog, “Engineering Windows 7.”  Although intended as a “developers” forum, the blog’s authors, senior Microsoft engineers Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, state:

The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. ... We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

So ostensibly the blog is aimed at the people who have been most critical of Vista. The initial posts, as you might expect, generated hundreds of comments, most of them positive. While it obviously remains to be seen whether Microsoft will (or can) deliver, the very fact of the blog would seem to be encouraging, and also to indicate that anyone buying new PCs at present would do well to load them with Windows XP. The life cycle of a PC is about 3 years, which is probably slightly more than the time it will take for Windows 7 to appear.

Facebook and Twitter in the Workplace

Should the use of Facebook and Twitter (or LinkedIn) in the office be allowed?  This question always arises periodically and generates a lot of heat.

The first thing to say is that it is not a moral question, but one of conflicting priorities.

Efficiency experts have always pointed to the fact that constant monitoring of email leads to a (sometimes dramatic) loss of productivity. Many studies have shown that if you keep your email program closed, and then open it for a specified 5 minutes an hour, or 1 hour a day, you will be much more efficient because during the remaining time you can focus on the task at hand. Humans are not very efficient at multi-tasking, and switching back and forth from one thing to another reduces the efficiency of both tasks. Lawyers implicitly know this which is why they so often have their phone calls screened – so as not to be interrupted.

If email is a constant interruption, that goes double for Instant Messaging, Twitter or social networking programs. So why not just ban them?

The fact is that many “personal” activities that would have been unheard of in the days before unions (not to mention 19th century sweatshops) have become part of the cost of doing business for almost all companies, although the degree to which this is allowed varies widely, from the Walmarts and sweatshops employing undocumented workers to white collar offices. Over time, personal activities (phone calls, email) that could be thought of as a “benefit” have tended to be viewed as a right.

So the question is not “should they be allowed,” but at what point does allowing social networking programs in the workplace become too expensive a “cost of doing business?” After all, when I first started working in law firms, 4 weeks of vacation was the norm. Now it is two weeks (and sometimes less for new hires). Many benefits (in particular health insurance) have been reduced or made more expensive. Why not apply the same analysis to the use of social networking programs?

Just as with email, firms should adopt a policy for the acceptable use of social networking programs. Whether this comes in the form of a monitoring program that allows a user, say, 20 minutes a day on social networking sites, and then counts down – “you now have 17 minutes left, 16 minutes, 15 minutes....” or just a sense of who is abusing the privilege is a matter for each firm to decide depending on its own firm culture. 

Worldox Project Feature

A new feature in Worldox GX that is little-known or used is the Project feature. Projects are a supra-organizational form that let you group together documents that may or may not all be of the same type. This gives you a “binder” or “portfolio” of documents that can be instantly consulted at will.

Here are some examples of documents that might be combined into a Project.

– Closing binders for real estate transactions. For larger deals this can run into dozens or even hundreds of documents. Since these documents have gone through various drafts, and there are all kinds of supporting or related materials (memos, emails, etc.), it can be useful to identify them separately.

– Lists of trial exhibits for litigation.

– Lists of all the relevant document for an estate planning client, including for example (for both client and spouse), wills, trust agreements, living wills, health care agent, power of attorney, guardian, and conservator.

– Projects can also be used to define “form banks.”  If you gather together all the forms you typically use for a given type of project, you can associate them into a “form bank” Project. Since Projects can be added to or updated, this provides an easy way to maintain your best practices.  As a related example, I keep all my proposals for various types of software in a particular Project for that software. This lets me easily review previous proposals as needed.

To create a Project, simply click on the Project tab at the bottom of your Worldox list. You can then search for and drag appropriate files to the project, give it a name and save it.  When you want to edit the project, select it in your Worldox list, click on the Project tab and click the “Edit” button to the right of the Project window.  You can then add or remove additional files.  Note also that the project list is dynamic: If you edit a given file that is part of a project, the edited version appears in the project.

King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell

I have been rereading Christopher Hill’s masterful “The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714" (2nd ed. 1980) and came across the following paragraph.

“All agreed that the King had certain prerogative rights, such as the right to mint coin or to create peers. What James and Charles also claimed was an absolute prerogative right to take any action outside the law which they thought necessary for national defence or national security as defined by themselves. This prerogative the House of Commons and the common lawyers denied to the government, but it is a right which Parliament exercises today. It is the ultimate right of sovereignty, which in any state some authority must exercise. Parliament and common lawyers did not deny the existence of the royal prerogative, but since it was being used to meet novel problems, they rightly thought that the King and his favourites were stretching it unprecedentedly. From the King’s point of view his critics seemed to be acting in a merely negative and obstructive way.”

Sound familiar?

Remember that Oliver Cromwell had King Charles I beheaded in 1649. Over a hundred and twenty-five years later, the first ship commissioned and built during the American Revolution was named the ... Oliver Cromwell. It was ordered on January 30, 1776 and launched June 13, 1776, three weeks before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In the next three years, the Oliver Cromwell captured nine British ships. When it was finally captured by the British in 1779, it was renamed “The Restoration.”

Adobe Acrobat 9

Adobe is trying to use Acrobat to become a major player in the emerging web-based collaboration field. However, these features are probably not of as much interest to law firms.

Acrobat 9 was released in June. It comes in three versions, each one having a major new feature.  Acrobat 9 Standard introduces “Portfolios” – the ability to assembly different documents (including different document types) into a “portfolio” and provide it with a snazzy cover page, table of contents, etc.  This is also an attempt by Adobe to meet functionality provided by competing products such as pdfDocs, which has offered a “Binder” feature for a while now.  One limitation of the Portfolio is that if you send it to a client or other attorney, and it assembles different types of documents, the recipient has to have the programs that corresponds to those documents on their computer. Thus if you include Word documents and the recipient does not have Word, they will not be able to open those documents.

Acrobat 9 Professional adds functionality to the Portfolio feature, as well as adding advanced redaction tools. It also includes a document comparison feature, which remedies one of the main lacks of previous versions.  You do have to convert files to PDF format first, but that is not a major issue.

Acrobat 9 Pro Extended main adds the ability to embed video clips into a PDF document and to convert CAD designs. Neither of these features are likely to be of primary interest to law firms.

Overall, however, Adobe’s OCR functionality still lags behind that offered by other major companies such as OmniPage (from Nuance) and Abbyy FineReader (from Abbyy). So if you do a lot of OCR, it may well be worth while to purchase a more dedicated package.

Acrobat is one of those programs that it pays to keep current with.

Using Routing Slips with Outlook

As I have noted previously, most collaboration in law firms is directional (as opposed to mutual) and involves a workflow.  So how do you organize the workflow?

Ideally you would have an electronic equivalent of the “routing slips” that are frequently attached to publications that circulate within a department. You take a look, check off your name, and forward it to the next person.

Unfortunately Outlook does not have the ability natively to create routing slips (as opposed to GroupWise, which has always been a superior program). However, using Word or WordPerfect you CAN create a routing slip that it attached to the email, so that the email is routed to various people in a pre-defined order.

For instructions creating a routing slip using Word 2003, click here.

NOTE: This functionality has been removed from Word 2007, according to Microsoft to “improve the user experience” on the grounds that the feature is not used very often. True, but not useful for people who do use the function.  Click here to see the justification (under “What’s removed").

For instructions using WordPerfect, click here.

If you are using a document management system such as Worldox, you can attach the file for review using a link to the document (rather than the document itself). You can then either use “review” mode (as the instructions suggest), or have people create versions and assemble them at the end. It depends on how many people there are and exactly how you are working.

This type of functionality is frequently overlooked: if you routinely have to circulate files for review, it is worth taking a look.

Workflow and Another Computer

What will you buy the next time you are looking for a computer?  The answer to this question depends on what you use it for. The assumption here is that people will be buying a second computer - one for the office, and one for travel, etc. It is not relevant, for example, for people who use a laptop as their main office computer and then carry it with them (as I do).

Dennis Kennedy has just published a series of blogs explaining why he purchased an iTouch for his “next computer.”  The key issue in his analysis is how he uses the computer “in a non-work environment,” that is, for email and texting: “I used the wifi to check email, RSS feeds, web sites and to do some Twitter posts.”

This workflow issue ultimately led Dennis to buy an iTouch. That is, a computer that is designed primarily to keep in touch and up to date, but not really to do a lot of serious work (writing) on.

Another option for a new computer is the Ultra-Mini PC laptops. These typically have a 10" screen and weigh in at about two and a half pounds. Lenovo has just released one.  HP also makes one, as do lesser-known copies like ASUS. the Eee PC. 

Essentially, these machines are designed to do the same thing as the iTouch - keep in touch via email and the web.  The obvious advantage is the extreme portability.

So if you find you need more than one PC, one for heavy-duty work and one for “keeping in touch” then one of these options might be right for you.