Does It Compute?

Reading off a Computer Screen

A lot of people, including me, habitually say that they “don’t like to read off the computer screen.”

However, I recently read an article by Cory Doctorow, co-author of the blog boingboing.net, which convinced me that this is a misformulation. The article is in his book “Content” available free for download from his site craphound.com

    He makes a very simple point: people DO constantly read off the computer screen: emails, blogs, RSS feeds and so on. What they actually mean is that you don’t like reading LONG, book-length works. This requires a different kind of concentration, or as he puts it, a different cognitive style:

"The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel."

The various e-book formats (Kindle, Sony), fall in-between, because they are not really book size. Plastic Logic has announced a business-oriented reader about the size of a regular notepad (8 ½ x 11), to be released some time in 2009.

This would be a great device for law firms and other businesses where people have to take with them and review large amounts of paper.  It remains to be seen whether it will catch on.

A New Wrinkle in Spam

The last few days, I have been seeing a new wrinkle in Spam.  When you delete a spam message, you see a popup saying that the sender has requested notification when the message is deleted and do you want to notify them? Obviously, you do not want to do this.

I have always thought that asking for notification was a really obnoxious thing to do, but this has more serious repercussions, since it tells the spammer that the address is good. I suspect many people have automated this setting to just do it so that they don’t have to be bothered. But especially now you want to make sure that this notification setting is not automated – or set to never acknowledge receipt requests – so that you don’t give spammers more information about your account.

Where Do You Go for Reliable Information?

I had a friend who used to say that every year he knew 10% more and fell 15% further behind. So how do you go about keeping up with technology?

Of course, there are blogs and trade publications such as Law Technology News or eWeek. But I find there are three other indispensable sources.

The first is Technolawyer, devoted exclusively to legal technology.  And aside from people with an ax to grind, paid-for advertising in the form of “TechnoReleases,” or the endless debate of Word vs. WordPerfect, overall, this is a valuable source of information.

Second, for all things Microsoft, is Brian Livingston’s Windows Secrets. Whether it’s new releases, patches, bugs or “how to,” this has become one of the few sources I trust on Microsoft issues.  With some 400,000 readers, this is a powerhouse in the technology world.

Last, but not least is Woody Leonhard’s Office Watch. Chock full of tips and tricks as well as things to watch out. One of the few sources that tells it like it is about Office products.

The Financial Crisis -- GIGO

From a computer point of view, an obvious question is that given all the endless analytics, data mining, etc. that banks and financial institutions do, why didn’t they see all this coming some time ago? 

The answer is simple: like Enron some years ago, they didn’t want to.  Apparently the assumptions and information that were fed into the computer radically underestimated the risks involved in mortgage and other security operations. The computers reflected the optimistic assumptions that there were no potential problems involved and also the oversimplified data being used.  As one article noted, the assumptions were akin to a weather forecaster in Houston analyzing the onset of Hurricane Ike by looking at the average wind speeds over the last month.

So in this case, garbage in, and money hemorraghes out.

Mark Twain on Congress

As the US potentially enters a depression, complete with questionable bailout plans that may do little but enrich the people who caused the problem in the first place, it is worth recalling once again Mark Twain:

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
        Mark Twain, Following the Equator

LexisNexis: TimeMatters and PCLaw

In my last post I noted that LexisNexis appeared to be backtracking on the idiotic attempt to rebrand TimeMatters and PCLaw as "LNFOPBTM" and "LNBOPBPCL" respective.

Sure enough, the latest TechnoRelease from Technolawyer (definitely worth subscribing to, by the way) features an ad from Lexis Nexis for its "Pracice Management Programs" including plain old "TimeMatters" and "PCLaw."

But the question remains:  is this cosmetic or anything more? Time will tell.

LexisNexis Update

Is LexisNexis backtracking or is it just cosmetic changes?  Faced with massive blow-back after a variety of stupid moves – such as rebranding TimeMatters and PCLaw, now sometimes referred to as the “Software formerly known as TimeMatters” – LexisNexis seems to be backtracking. Apparently those programs will now be referred to by their actual name, not, e.g., “LexisNexis Front Office Powered by TimeMatters.”

Billing Matters is being discontinued (even if it still may be possible to buy it for a while more). Originally, LexisNexis was planning to create an über-program, integrating TimeMatters, PCLaw and even Juris into a single, subscription-based, web-based product.  This, combined with the urgent need to stabilize the buggy release of TM and PCLaw 9, led to “skipping” version 10 this year. However, it now appears that there may be a version 10 next year, so perhaps creating the über program is more difficult that they foresaw (not surprising, since LN doesn’t really have a clue about software – they sell books, even if electronic versions of them).

Faced with massive consultant resistance to its new programs (that deprive consultants of sometimes marginal, but important income), LN is in the process of creating a 10-member “CIC Council” supposedly to advise them. This sort of thing has a long history– for years Microsoft had a “legal council” for example. Whether it proves to be more window dressing or something substantial remains to be seen.  The fact is that the book-sales model of LN reps (where they get commissions ONLY on new sales and nothing for on-going and return customers) and the consultant-based model, where the priority is on long-term relationships which product a regular income flow are fundamentally incompatible. 

Lastly, LN has continued its stress on international markets (as opposed to the US), in particular Australia. The LN research model outside the US uses the Rosetta system (which is not used in the US). In Australia PCLaw has been beefed up to be the “Total Practice Advantage” program, for Australia, with a corresponding jump in price from $895 to $5,000 (after that they have to purchase the Affinity search engine, which is even more expensive).

Recession? Think ROI

Lawyers are somewhat notorious for not doing any serious analysis of their Return on Investment (ROI) when considering new purchases. But in the midst of a recession, this would be a good time to start.

Some purchases are difficult to assess.  A new computer, for example, is likely not going to make you markedly more efficient and could perhaps be put off.

However, software programs in the categories of Practice Management, Document Management or Document Assembly are a much different case. The math is so simple and so overwhelming that I am constantly surprised more people don’t do it.

Let’s say that a given piece of software saves you 10-12 minutes a day, or an hour a week.  The overall cost of the software (including installation and training) is $800 per user. 

So if you bill $200 an hour, and save an hour a week, the software pays for itself in a month!  No matter how you adjust the numbers, the results are still spectacular.

While these are “soft” numbers, in the case of practice management/time and billing software, you are likely to capture up to 10% more billable time that otherwise would “fall through the cracks.”  So if you bill even 1,000 hours a year (and most larger firms have quotas much higher than that) at $200 an hour (for yearly billings of $200,000), you are actually taking in $20,000 more a year.

So: think ROI. This would be a good time to implement those savings.

How To Decide When To Upgrade

New versions of most software come out every 18 months or so (sometimes more often). People frequently feel like they are on an upgrade treadmill – no sooner have they settled in to a product and it has stabilized, than they are being asked to upgrade to the newest “latest and greatest” version which supposedly fixes all the problems with last rotten version (which in its time was touted as fixing the problems of the previous rotten version, etc.). Microsoft always seems to be particularly committed to denouncing the previous versions of their software in an effort to get people to upgrade.

How do you decide what to do?

First of all, software vendors have two different models.  There is the PCLaw/Worldox model, in which upgrades are included in the price of tech support. In this model, upgrades are “free” (with minimal expense for implementation and upgrade training). Then there is the Time Matters/Amicus (and most other vendors) model who expect you to pay BOTH for support AND upgrades. This makes the upgrade decision much more of a financial issue.

That said, there are positive reasons to upgrade and negative ones.

Positive reasons include some new feature you have been wanting for years, or fixes to annoying problems that have been bugging you. Obviously when you read through the “new feature” list of a product you need to decide which features are relevant to your practice and therefore worth the “price of admission” for upgrading – or if taken as a whole the new features will make your life easier. Or, as increasingly the case with mature products, whether the new features are just window dressing and don’t really add very much to the product. This is increasingly the case with products that insist on a yearly upgrade schedule, such as many products from LexisNexis. In this scenario, upgrading every other version often makes sense.

Negative reasons to upgrade focus on obsolescence. It is prohibitively expense for software vendors to support all previous versions. Typically, they support the current version and the two previous versions.  After that the oldest version is “sunsetted” and no longer supported. Since the version is old, it may also become increasingly difficult to find consultants who can dredge up out of the depths of their memory how those old versions functioned.  While it is all very well to say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” you really want to avoid a situation where if it DOES break you will be UNABLE to fix it!  The potential financial risk in running a product that is no longer supported is simply too great.  So, if you have a version that is about to become unsupported, that should be a strong incentive to upgrade.

Good Books

Here’s a list of books I have read or reread recently. Most of them have appeared in my blog at one time or another, but here they are gathered into one place

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic. Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighel, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies. Smart Ways to Work Together

Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone

Charles C. Mann,1491. New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Sharon D. Nelson et al, The 2008 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide

John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences

Julian Richards, Stonehenge. The Story So Far.

Dava Sobol, Longitude

Dick Teresi, Lost Discoveries

Hans L. Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian

Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots & Leaves. The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation!