Does It Compute?

Catku

You may remember the "computer haiku" form.  Here are some "catkus"

My brain: walnut-sized
Your: largest among primates.
Yet who leaves for work?

The food in my bowl
Is old, and – more to the point –
Contains no tuna.

You’ve bought a new toy
Money wisely spent on me
I love the boxes.

I walk on this shelf
No real destination, just
Love of crashing glass.

The dog licks your face.
You laugh, gratified. His tongue?
I know where it’s been.

A home with a cat
Has no need of sculpture. But
It does need tuna.

What is put outside
In the rain will soon return
To walk on the couch.

The path is long, but
Leads to the mountain’s summit
You go; report back.

You think I am named
Fluffy. I am Ratkiller
To you, Foodbringer

Stealthy and silent
I hunt birds–but listen for
The can opener.

The pig, it is said,
Is smarter than cats or dogs.
Care for more bacon?

Wealth is illusion.
Power but a dream. Tuna,
However, is real.

And anyone who owns a cat owes it to themselves to read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' Tribe of Tiger

Doing a Secondary Search in Worldox

Let’s say you have done a search in Worldox and you have too many hits to review easily. Can you do a secondary or sub-search on just those documents? 

There are three ways to do this.  First, you can hit the binoculars and select “Modify your last active Search.”  This brings up a search screen with your previously terms filled in. You can add to or modify them to refine the search.

The second way is to select only certain types of items.  If you click on the “Filter” field (with a little funnel icon to the left of it), you will see all the different document types you have found. To select just one document type, for example just spreadsheets, click on that document type. Alternatively, if you click on the “funnel” icon to the right of the “Filter” box, you will see all the profile information for the hits. You can select certain ones, or click on the “By Type” tab and select multiple document types to display.

The last way is to start a new search, but click on the button (usually toward the bottom of the profile screen) that says “Search What.” By default this will say “Active.”  Change the selection to be “current list.” That will search only the items in the current list. Note, however, that this search is brute force and is not using the index, so depending on the number and size of the documents in the list it can be somewhat slow.

Is Leasing a Viable Option?

Back in the last recession after the “dot com” bust, leasing enjoyed some popularity for a while. Until recently, it has been fairly dormant. In the last several weeks, however, I have been getting calls from leasing companies that want to push their services.

The concept behind leasing is familiar from automobiles, but works a little differently for law firms. A leasing company typically “leases” the entire cost of hardware, software AND CONSULTING SERVICES for a period ranging from 24 to 48 months. At the end of that time, you have a buyout that ranges from 1% to Fair Market Value (although what the “fair market value” is of 3 year old consulting services is something of a mystery to me). Depending on the terms, you may or may not get a tax writeoff (check with your accountant – generally a 1% buyout may not count).

In return for what amounts to a 10-20% premium compared with the cost of purchasing up front, you get a fixed low monthly payment over the period of the lease, and of course the premium is also spread over the length of the lease. This can provide firms with a way of continuing to move forward even during a recession.

Matt Homann -- Ten Rules of Legal Innovation

Matt Homann has been releasing a series of “Ten Rules of....” on his blog, “the [non]billable hour,” subtitled “Changing professional practice. One idea at a time.”

The latest in the series, Ten Rules of Legal Innovation, is based on the simple principle that the practice of law and the business of law are two vastly different things. It has long been a commonplace that many smaller firms are poorly managed as business propositions. For a long time, lawyers (especially) in larger firms felt that business as such was beneath them – hence the expression “white shoe firms.”  So the idea of fully exploiting advantages that can be realized on the business side is very powerful – especially in the middle of a disastrous economic recession.

Definitely worth checking out.

Check Back in Six Months

There seem to be a lot of new programs lately where my response is: that looks really interesting, I should check back in six months.

These include the new search engine launched by former Google employees, Cuil. Aside from the black interface, I found the results varied widely: sometimes better than Google, more often a lot less useful. And the interface is a mixed bag.

It also includes Clio, a new, web-based Practice Management program. See my blog last week.

Also, Chrome, Google’s new browser. The combined search/address bar is interesting, but at present I see no reason to leave Firefox.

Reinforced Google docs and Open Office 3.  Both of these are worth consideration if you don’t need specific functionality provided by Microsoft and are willing to switch from Outlook.

E-publishing.  See my blog on this.  A coming thing but I am waiting for a screen that’s legible (NOT PDA sized) in the bathroom.

PCLaw Pro -- C-Tree vs. SQL

Over a year ago, LexisNexis started to try to force PCLaw Pro users to migrate to a SQL database structure. Since that time, however, the SQL version has had numerous problems and many consultants have been advised privately by senior PCLaw techs to stay with the C-Tree version. Having been tweaked over many years, the C-Tree version is faster than the SQL version certainly up to a large number of users (40-50). Part of the reason for this is that when a firm uses the SQL version, many queries and reports are translated back to the C-Tree version before they are displayed, thus negating any possible speed issues. There have also been a number of reports with other problems with the SQL version, possibly linked to this hybrid structure.

It appears that LexisNexis is starting to recognize this, although the semi-official CIC forum is still rejecting posts that try to point it out in response to queries about the slowness of the SQL version.  Once such user recently emailed me noting that PCLaw tech support frankly acknowledged the problems with the SQL version and quickly walked their firm through reverting from SQL to C-Tree.

The C-Tree and SQL versions are installed from the same executable, just with different license numbers. So if LexisNexis refuses to sell you a C-Tree license (which has until now been their official position regarding end users), find a CIC has have them order the C-Tree version for you.

As for the CIC forum, founded about 2 and a half years ago on the “Three Monkeys” theory: Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil about Lexis Nexis products, they are not doing end users any favors by censoring posts that correctly point to issues.

John Updike - Widows of Eastwick

John Updike is one of my favorite authors. His just-published “Widows of Eastwick” (sequel to “Witches of Eastwick”) is a hilarious read – although to some extent you have to be from New England to fully enjoy it.  Some tidbits:

“Yes, I have some money now, but it’s New England money. It hates being spent, except for educational purposes.”

[The Pharohs] were like our Presidents. We won’t elect people who don’t believe in God, or pretend they do. They believe on behalf of everybody. They make us all feel better, the way even an awful Pope used to do.”

At a pay phone on the Great Wall of China, in response to a suggestion of calling their children: “They wouldn’t get the wonder of it. They live in a world where when you dial the local airport for information you get somebody in India reading from a card in an accent you can’t understand.”

“The upkeep on the Maine place had become monstrous...The people who went to Maine for the summer were Puritan stock and wanted to be punished for being rich. So no, I’m happy to go to Rhode Island.”

“It is sex, it turned out, that engages us in society, and keeps us on our toes, and persuades us to retract our rough edges, so we can mix in. Without the sexual need to negotiate, there is little to curb neurotic crankiness.”

“We can’t wrap our minds around what happens to us – these milestones. Weddings and funerals. Graduations and divorces. Endings. Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.”

Clio Practice Management

As more and more applications migrate to the web, it was inevitable that a web-based practice management program would appear. Actually, there are already a large number of them for medical practices (and I have at least two doctors who use them). Now there is one for law firms: Clio -- named after the Muse of History.

I’ve been testing it for the past week or so – it just came on the market in early October.  At this point in time it is clearly a work in progress (as they freely admit). However, it does have the basic elements of a practice management program – calendar, todos (tasks), notes, documents, contacts, matters, billing, bank accounts, etc.  Some of these modules don’t quite work yet (e.g., billing). There is for the moment no email functionality, although there is a plan to allow for a bcc of an email to your Clio account.

The interface is extremely “clean.” Thus if you start typing a matter name in the matter box, there is a type-through function that fills it out as you type. But there is no “drop-down” button to do a lookup on. This takes a little getting used to, but is quite functional.

Although not publicized, they will walk you through the process of importing a contact and matter list.

To address the issue of reliability, they have set up a third-party escrow for all your data, so if the company were to go under (a real possibility for this kind of startup), your data would be intact.

For the moment, this would be best suited for somebody just getting started with a small amount of data. However, as the company expands functionality, it is a program worth keeping an eye on and checking in every couple of months or so. There seem to be a lot of those these days.

E-Publishing

The future of e-books is looking bright. Google has just signed a deal to scan and publish millions of out-of-print books. Later this month, a group of European national libraries is going to launch Europeana, with an online database of 2 million books and other cultural and historical items. When you add to that Amazon’s Kindle, there will be millions of books available. Another source is Feedbooks, based in Paris. Project Gutenberg has about 25,000 books available, largely more technical/academic, although with a number of historical novels. It claims over 2,000,000 downloads in the last month.

In addition, a number of technology and science fiction authors are releasing their books in PDF or other format.

To date, however, the readers to process this are not where they need to be. Yes, there is Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s e-reader as well as PDA format (although how you could read a 300 page book on a PDA is beyond me). Others are planned.

Probably within the next several years, the content of the main libraries of the world will be available.

Thunderbird and Worldox

As I have noted before, one of the main reasons that people stick with Outlook is all the integration with other products available. Virtually all PDAs, for example, link with Outlook – so it is easier for software makers to rely on that link rather than writing multiple links to a variety of PDAs.

Worldox GX, however, now has a “hook” to Thunderbird. It is limited and requires additional manual effort, but it works. When you do a “Save As” of an email, Worldox pops up. When you try to attach a file, Worldox pops up.

However, because Thunderbird supports only simple MAPI (and that only partially) rather than extended MAPI, some of the additional automation available with Outlook is not possible – Worldox does not automatically pop up when you send an email, you cannot “drag and drop” emails to a pseudo-folder in your inbox (though you can go through the Worldox “WorkZone” icon).

Nevertheless, if you really want to get rid of Outlook, and don’t have other integration requirements, Thunderbird could be an option.