Does It Compute?

Hamlet 2000, A Movie

Somewhat to my surprise, this recasting of Hamlet actually works. With Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, the head of the multi-national corporation, Ethan Hawke as Hamlet and Bill Murray as the officious Polonius. You have to get used to the idea that the film takes place in New York, with a corporation called “Denmark” and a “Hotel Elsinor” – but with all the characters still speaking Shakespeare’s lines. But it actually does work.

If you get a chance, definitely worth a look.

Formatting Legal Documents with Word 2007

When Payne Consulting decided to discontinue it’s “Word xxx for Law Firms” series and not publish a volume for Word 2007, a serious void was created, especially since the changes in Word 2007 were fairly radical compared with previous versions.

Jan Berinstein’s Formatting Legal Documents With Microsoft Office Word 2007 goes a long way toward filling the gap. The book is designed as a “how to” guide rather than a reference guide, with sections like “Where Did It Go” concerning various topics (Section Breaks, Switch Windows, Spell-Checker, etc.) and “Miscellaneous Tips for Working Smarter and Faster.”

Reflecting Jan’s background in WordPerfect, the book also includes numerous references to the differences between Word and WordPerfect. Whether or not you, like many people, pine for WordPerfect even years after switching to Word, this will help make the underlying structure and functionality of Word more comprehensible.

The guts of the book lie in advice on how to customize Word – I immediately when out and followed some of her suggestions (such as how to get rid of the Ribbon bar while maintaining common functions via drastically expanded use of the Quick Access Toolbar) with very satisfying results. Her instructions also let me get rid of that horrible (and hard to read) Calibri font which is now the default for Word.

Contrary to most people who write about Word, Jan downplays the use of Styles. Most authors tend to the view that “if you implement a system of styles, Word will work really well.” In practice, however, small firms frequently do not have the staff or expertise to create an extensive set of styles that are needed to “make Word work really well.” So Jan’s approach, which stresses how to do things individually rather than relying on pre-canned packages, makes sense to me.

Specific chapters devoted to Paragraph Numbering Pleading Paper, Cross-References, and Tables of Contents/Authorities will be indispensable for firms that do not need to make the investment in Levit & James Best Authority.

Finally, sections devoted to file conversion and metadata point users in the direction of additional utilities that will expand or complement your use of Word.

The book is self-published by lulu.com and priced at $35.95. At that price, even if you only adopt a couple of suggestions to make your self more productive and efficient with Word, it is well worth it.

What Does It Take to Set Up an Office?

Ross Kodner has just finished a three-part series on your “Minimum Daily Technology Requirements.” published on the Technolawyer Small Law Blog. Part I covered Hardware, Part II Software and Part III “Everything Else.”

Taken together with Sharon Nelson’s 2009 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide (available from the ABA bookstore), this will provide a small or startup firm with a framework for what they should be doing.

Obviously a startup solo may not be in a position to do everything at once, although leasing from specialized leasing companies may be an option. These companies typically allow you to lease hardware, software and consulting costs over a 2-3 period at what amounts to about a 20% premium over buying everything all at once. But you get to spread out the cost. Avoid “leasing” from hardware companies as it is generally not cost-effective.

The other important function that these articles serve is to give you an overall picture of what you need even if you don’t implement everything at once. This lets you make a plan over time and at the same time “scratch what itches most” when you are first starting, while at the same time having an overall plan that can be implemented in stages.

Ever Expanding e-Discovery

Issues surrounding e-Discovery continue to dominate the legal tech world. A recent article by Mark Sidoti and Paul Asfendis on law.com examines the potential discoverability of digital voicemail. The conclusion: digital voicemail, which is frequently forwarded as email, is likely to be considered discoverable on roughly the same basis as email.

Perhaps more important, as one descends the formality ladder from formal letters to email to telephone conversations, careless and flippant formulations in digital voice mail is likely to be even more informal and potentially damaging then even email.

Will Twitter will be next on the list of discoverable items? (that’s a serious question).

Google's Book Scanning

There has been a certain amount of misplaced controversy over Google’s agreement with a number of major university to scan old and “orphan” books (out-of-print books that are still under copyright but where the copyright holder cannot be found).

This is short sighted. The ability to have the accumulated mass of books available online is a tremendous resource not just to students and researchers but to anybody who is looking for a particular hard to find book. This is particularly true if you are not located in a city with a major university library.

Google plans to make free access to the books available at one computer in public libraries.  Spreading the knowledge is a good thing. In fact, they should really scan everything, but that’s probably not in the cards.

Guts and Glitz

As more software companies move to yearly updates, they are forced to add “new features” (glitz) in order to make the updates attractive. This frequently conflicts with fixing older problems (guts).

And since most of these programs are mature, the “new features” are tending to be less and less compelling as a reason to upgrade. Users are understandably annoyed at paying for “updates” that are little more than bug fixes.

This problem is compounded by the fact that LexisNexis, for example, recently laid off half a dozen developers for both Time Matters and PCLaw. And a recent story in the Seattle Times  (May 7) reported that Lexis has laid off 35 developers in Bellevue Washington (out of 300 there) and that the jobs would be outsourced. The lost jobs for Time Matters and PCLaw reportedly will also be outsourced. 

Outsourcing is not just a matter of the talent of developers (which may well be superior) but of the historical knowledge of a program’s code base. In the case of Time Matters or PCLaw, developers who have worked on a product for 5-10 years know where the bodies are buried, the workarounds, kludges, etc. New developers don’t.

So a recent query on the LN CIC list serve wanted to know when PCLaw would go to a full SQL base without recourse to the c-tree underlay and with full server side processing (this structure by the way is the reason why the non-SQL version of PCLaw is still superior to the SQL version). The answer is: very unlikely. But there WILL be “new” functionality, which may or may not work so well.

These supposedly “infrastructure” decisions concerning developers, tech support, etc. have had a direct result on customer satisfaction, which has plummeted for Time Matters in the last couple of years.

If Lexis does manage to release Time Matters and PCLaw 10 this fall, my advice would be: wait at least 3 months before you actually do the upgrade.

And Lexis is not alone. Gavel and Gown has dived into the same quicksand pit of yearly releases which feature careless oversights and incomplete functions. For example, you can’t make any of the new shipping “daily” displays (which look pretty slick) your default in Amicus 2009 – you always have to select a different one (you can create a copy of one and make that the default, but then you have to do it for every PC). And the new Custom Records which could be a tremendous feature in the Premium Edition, does not allow users to generate usable reports, which renders the feature largely useless in the sense that any data in Custom Reports will have to be double entered somewhere else in order to get reporting – contradicting one of the mantras of all practice management programs that you only ever have to enter data once anywhere and it is accessible everywhere.

Linking PCLaw Client/Matters with Worldox

When various programs are linked – such as Amicus or Time Matters with PCLaw or Timeslips – the client/matter information is exchanged between the programs as well as time entries. Thus if you enter a new matter in one program it is ported over to the other one.

There is no such direct link between PCLaw and Worldox, but there is a fairly easy way to keep your client/matter list up to date.

You can schedule the Worldox indexer to import a given comma delimited file containing client/matter information every night at a given time, say 11 pm. So any accounting program that allows you to export client/matter IDs and descriptions to a given file can be linked to Worldox. The accounting program (say, PCLaw), exports the current client/matter list to a given file (say wdximport.txt) at 10 pm. At 11 pm Worldox imports all the new information in that file (leaving the information previously in Worldox intact). Your list is now current.

PCLaw does not have an automated export facility. However, it is trivial to assign someone to export the correct information (the Client, Matter, Description and Last/Firm Name fields) every day last thing before they leave.

This does mean that there could be up to a 24 hour lag between when the firm gets a new matter and when it appears in Worldox. To compensate for this, many firms create a “client” called “unassigned” or “newclient” or something similar. If you have to work on documents before a client/matter number is assigned in Worldox, store them under “unassigned.” Then, the next day, move them to the new client/matter number.

Cloud Computing - More

I sat in on an interesting Webinar yesterday on Cloud Computing. If focused not on Software as a Service (e.g., gmail, Clio, Rocket Matter), but on Infrastructure as a Service. In this model, a firm (such as Amazon’s E2) makes available on line servers and storage. Thus a firm can expand its storage and capacity within a few hours as opposed to days or weeks. This will be a coming thing for large firms (one of the presenters was Peter Lesser, the Chief Technology Officer for Skadden Arps).

Coincidentally, at the same time I got notification from one of the smaller clients I support remotely that their Internet had been down for several hours – a problem with ATT. So if they had been using a SaaS product, they would have lost all productivity during that time. This is why I (and many others) have serious reservations about this model for smaller firms.

May 1 -- Two Years of Blogging

May first marked the second anniversary of my blog.  Over 450 individual posts, about a third of which have been in the “tips and tricks” category – ways of accomplishing specific tasks in various programs, many of which represent workarounds, undocumented features, etc.

Then there is the long-running commentary on the woes of LexisNexis products (after laying off half the development staff at PCLaw, it does appear that they will be outsourcing programming to India), as well as general commentary on the computer industry and other products.

A lot of my posts come from comments and needs of clients; other come from suggestions and tips of readers. Thanks for reading and keep the comments coming.

Kindle DX

Amazon has just released a new Kindle DX with a much bigger screen – with a 9.7” screen as opposed to the 6” screen of the Kindle 2. Also more expensive. This is supposed to be aimed more at newspapers and magazines although it also supports PDF and other formats. PDF documents can be downloaded from your PC. It will also feature the ability to automatically adjust from portrait to landscape.

Apple is also reported to be preparing an “iPad” which would be a competing product.

However, the iPad and already existing products are aimed at consumer, not legal uses. The Kindle DX will accommodate PDF files. Ideally, one would like to see a reader the size of the Kindle DX or perhaps slightly larger even where it would be possible to export all the case files from a document management system, comment or mark them up perhaps, and check them back in to the DMS. This would make the transition from a very nice toy (and I do love my Kindle) to something with a serious business purpose.