Does It Compute?

Windows 7 / Office 2010

It seems the new Windows 7 will start popping up on computers in late October. So if you are thinking of buying a computer with Vista – don’t. Wait until October. Stores and retail outlets have been pushing the 64-bit Vista and the same will no doubt be true of Windows 7 (frequently referred to as “Vista as it should have been”).

Aside from hardware and configuration issues (count on 4GB of member and a dedicated memory card with at least 256Mb of memory), the key issue will be 64-bit machines. However, you need to watch out for this, because many older and legal-specific programs may not run on a 64-bit system. In addition, many older peripherals (printers, scanners, etc.) may not have 64-bit drivers and therefore may not work. Manufacturers have, of course, resisted writing 64-bit drivers: why write a new driver when they can sell you a new printer? So buying a new computer may also entail buying new printers, scanners, and other peripherals as well. Be sure to check this out so you have a true picture of what the upgrade will cost you if you go 64-bit.

True, you can run Windows XP on top of Windows 7 to run your older programs, but this will take a lot more setup.  So all in all, going to Windows 7 will be a lot more complicated than just buying a new PC.

At the same time Microsoft has been trumpeting Office 2010, which will supposedly have a web-based version that will work with any browser and on a MAC as well as windows.  The kicker here is that apparently (as of now, at least), this will work only if you are running Sharepoint on a Windows server. So again, a lot more complicated than the announcements would make it seem.  As with all things Microsoft, buyer beware!

A New Twist on Attorney Signature Blocks

Everybody is familiar with those interminable signature blocks about attorney client privilege, the Treasury Dept., IRS etc.  Here’s a new one I saw the other day on an attorney’s email:

NOTICE: The National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to actively petition your President, Congress and Senate, to revoke the USA Patriot Act (USAP Act) and any other laws that attack the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, or to replace them through the election process at the earliest possible time.

That pretty much says it all.

Fujitsu Scanners and Worldox

Fujitsu and Worldox have recently announced a program to get a $25 mail-in rebate if you are using Worldox and buy a Fujitsu S1500. Since this is one of the leading scanners on the market, this is a good deal.

The program also shows a very efficient way of using the scanner with Worldox. You set the scanner to produce OCR’d PDF files. These pop up in Acrobat when your scan is complete. Using “save as” you can then port this file over to Worldox.

This does have the drawback of leaving behind a copy of all your scans, which can start taking up space rather quickly. However, if you define the scanned documents to be saved to, say, “c:\scans” and then write a one-line, old-time batch file to delete them (“del c:\scans\*.* /Q”) the process is pretty efficient. Put the batch file on your desktop and run it once a week. With a little extra effort, you can also get it to run through the Windows Scheduler.

Not quite the true integration of a one step process, but pretty efficient nevertheless. The same process will work with all current or recent Fujitsu scanners (e.g. the S510) as well.

Security? What Security?

Ever have the feeling that all that “security” at airports and federal buildings was pretty worthless – designed to do little more than harass people into greater compliance with the ex-Bush administration’s agenda?

Well, it turns out that you were correct. The Government Accountability Office reports being able to smuggle 10 bombs into high-traffic federal buildings in 10 tries, including the offices of a U.S. senator and representative and agencies like the departments of State, Justice and  Homeland Security [sic].

The GAO apparently used actual bomb parts (and even videotaped some of the efforts!), and assembled the bombs in restrooms (some of them were locked, but were opened up by your friendly security officers).

The story was on CNN and the Associated Press but only very briefly. And while it appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times didn’t think it was “fit to print.” Google “bomb federal security” to see a number of the articles.

On the computer front, for years the Department of Homeland Security has basically flunked security tests (recent “improvement” still means that 20 to 30 percent of hacking attempts succeed).

Maybe it’s time to recognize that these so-called “security” measures are worthless. This is hardly surprising, since most of the security personnel are low or minimum wage employees on a par with burger-flippers at MacDonalds.. Certainly the funding (which is not even allocated on a most pressing need basis - on the last reports I’ve seen, Wyoming gets almost twice as much per capita as New York) could be better used elsewhere.

Budgeting: Getting the Most Out of Your Software

In the midst of a severe recession (to avoid the dreaded “D” word), firms are under a lot of pressure to get more out of their software.

One way to do this is to keep better track of your cases and revenue by availing yourself of the budget features in Amicus or PCLaw. Both these programs let you set up a budget for expected billable revenue and then generate reports comparing time worked and/or billed against the budget.

In Amicus, the timesheets page lets you set up a budget for the year and for the month, and then compare what you have actually billed to the budget. While most small firms know pretty well how things are going (good month, lousy month), it will help manage your firm to be able to put numbers on this.

In PCLaw, you set up a budget per month for each timekeeper. You can then run reports on budget vs. worked, vs. billed, etc.

Using Worldox for Closed File Management of Physical Files

I recently sat in on a Webinar which presented (among other things) some of the new and improved features coming in PCLaw 10. One of them was and improved “Safe Custody and Physical Closed File Management” which allows you to manage boxes, sometimes in storage, of a client’s documents and physical items.

It occurred to me that you can also do this in Worldox using the Projects feature. This feature is normally used to collect in one place items like closing documents in a real estate transaction or lists of exhibits for a trial. However, if you created a “Project” listing the client documents and a “place holder” document describing any physical items, you could do the same thing in Worldox. If you put the physical location (storage bin, filing cabinet, whatever) in the comments you could then easily generate a list for a particular client or a list of all the holdings for any number of clients.

Commoditization of Software?

When Richard Susskind talks about the “commoditization” of the practice of law, one of the things he means involves breaking up the component parts of a given engagement (creating an estate planning strategy, or a real estate transaction) into its component parts, each of which is automated through some sort of “expert system.”

In this scenario, the client answers a series of questions (asked by a computer instead of a lawyer in person), and at the end of the interview one or more documents are generated:  engagement agreements, wills, leases, tax documents, etc. Other parts of the engagement might be farmed out to specialized paralegal services (preparing the documents for a corporate filing, for example). Thus while a great deal of time, development effort and expertise goes into these systems, they make it easy for law firms and users to accomplish a single task at a time very efficiently. An overall engagement is comprised of “x” tasks.

When we turn to computer software and hardware what is generally meant by saying that something has been “commoditized” – computers or cell phones, for example?  Different models are essentially interchangeable and can be freely substituted for each other.  Despite the fact that one model or brand might have a temporary advantage due to more advanced features, other brands will soon catch up.  Witness the iPhone’s touch screen which is now being matched more or less successfully by other brands.

Legal internet research has essentially become commoditized. Lexis and West offer very similar services: one option might temporarily be better than a similar option offered by the other company, pricing might be slightly different from time to time (“special offers” etc.), but there is no difficulty or penalty in switching from one offering to another once your contract is up. Both West and Lexis offer automated court forms for the major states. Free services, such as those offered by state bar associations tend to be less feature-rich, but for many users do the job, thus confirming Susskind’s thesis that the price of commodities will tend toward zero (actually, he is not quite correct about that: the price of commodities will tend toward the cost of producing them).

Software becomes commoditized when you can use any one of a number of programs to do the same task – word processing or email for example. However, and this is the key difference from “expert systems,” many of these programs can be termed “shells” – they have no built-in expert systems but are open to be configured to do just about anything or to have “plug-in” utilities added to them. To the extent that expert systems are needed – for example to do Table of Authorities or Tables of Contents, or to strip metadata from documents in Word – people frequently resort to dedicated utilities which are designed to do only one thing, but to do it exceptionally well. They may build in templates to help automate the production of various types of documents, but even these templates will need to be customized to fit your specific needs.

Traditionally, one of the tasks of consultants has been to apply their experience and expertise to particular features of these programs by developing templates, document assembly and other routines that let a firm automate the production of various types of documents. This corresponds more or less to somewhere between Susskind’s categories of “systematized” and “packaged.”

Enter Practice Management programs such as Time Matters, Amicus or Practice Master. These programs all started out doing a few things very well. As computers grew more powerful and as the programs matured, they started adding features so that they could claim “one size fits all” and win the battle for the desktop (which program do you have open most on a regular basis). However, as Richard Susskind says, in reference to knowledge management, “one size fits none.”

These programs are shells par excellence. They ship with options for generic types of law, most of which a small firm will not need, in an effort to be all things to all people. Furthermore, unlike expert systems (which are by nature standalone), they exist in a spiderweb of links to and integration with other programs: email, word processing, creating PDF files, merge files and elementary document automation, and so on. This spiderweb of links is one of the primary obstacles to commoditization of software. There are no doubt many individuals and firms (myself included) that would switch to Open Office or Google Apps in a flash except for the fact that they don’t integrate/link with other programs critical to their practice: whether Practice Management, Document Management or whatever.

In order to be used effectively, these programs must be adapted for one or another area of law. So it is not surprising that there exists a huge third-party market to customize – one might say “expertize” them – so that specific pieces of them approximate an “expert system” for one particular feature or type of law, whether it is elderlaw, estate planning, bankruptcy or something else. Initially, and for many small firms, this “expertization” is customized (or in Susskind’s terms, “bespoke”). However, since the demand to customize a program for, say, a real estate firm is the same or very similar for different real estate firms, custom modules have been built that are then resold as separate applications or add-ons. Some of these add-on programs can cost much more than the originally software. One is sold on a subscription basis for $9,000 per year!

We therefore have large practice management programs that are “shells” populated by “expert” modules. Think of it as an iPhone or a browser such as Firefox with many plug-ins, but applied to practice management.

LexisNexis and other companies seem to be trying to “commoditize” entire practice management systems. This is accomplished in part by trying to integrate programs such as Time Matters into an automated forms package and other services. Lexis rebaptises this “Lexis Nexis Total Practice Advantage” (and charges a premium for it). At the standalone level, Lexis is offering “startup” options and various “training” modules to get people “up and running” without the need for customization (i.e., making the program into one or more “expert systems.”). That is, an attempt to make these offerings more like the “commodities” (books and research tools) they are accustomed to selling.

Despite claims of a single unified program, however, structurally, we are left with a “shell” (the base Practice Management program) with various “expert” plug-ins, whether they are custom designed or sold as packages. Trying to further “commoditize” the shell programs will fail for several reasons. First, the programs themselves are too big and complex. To teach users the “bare bones” is essentially to render these powerful programs little more than a glorified rolodex.  In terms of efficiency, this is not productive.

Secondly, to the extent these programs are “simplified,” they tend to strip away the potential to become or use “plug in” expert systems, or at least make it a lot more difficult.

Lastly, the major players (Lexis, West), are committed to keeping their programs proprietary. You will not see (at least in the relatively near future) the ability to plug West’s forms packages into Time Matters or vice-versa. Over time, this proprietary, anti-commodity, behavior may be reduced or reversed. After all, for years Microsoft protected its proprietary format ferociously and forced everyone else to write to its standard. Only recently has it taken the first (and still incomplete) steps toward complying with open standards (which is a further step toward commoditization).

So if we think about the directions practice management software could go, we are left with two main theses.

First, the attempt to simplify programs to a “one size fits all” model is a mistake. The attempt to simplify (i.e., reduce) the underlying functionality will impact the ability to develop expert modules for these programs.

Second, these programs should be moving in the direction of facilitating integration with “plug-in” expert modules, either by creating an API or simply exposing parts of the database so that it can be accessed directly. If Susskind is correct about advanced systems and commoditization, then the future lies not with simplification, but with greater  complexity. Programs will become assemblages of specific routines where surface simplicity and ease of use is underlain by increased complexity and expertise. They will take the form of expert modules being added to practice management and similar programs.

Email Policy / Facebook Policy?

I recently read an interesting article by Jonathan Goodgold in the New Jersey Law Journal on the employment law consequences of Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook or My Space. 

There are two central questions here: First, what, if any, rights or restrictions should be placed on what information employees can post on their personal web sites, Facebook accounts, etc.?  Second, what, if any, restrictions should there be on how potential employers can make use of information posted publicly?

Goodgold calls for clearly defined web policies:

    This then raises a host of questions -- what occurs when an employee is on his or her private time and not using the employer's technology? What occurs when the communications are not private e-mails, but public postings on Web 2.0? The lesson to be taken from Stengart is that employers should be working on Internet posting/communication policies for conduct when employees are off-work. Further, such policies must define what type of conduct is acceptable, such as blogging on politics, and what is not acceptable, such as posting disparaging comments about the employer or posting racy or otherwise inappropriate pictures that would be frowned upon by employers.

The essential difference between this and emails is that email policies generally define what an employee can do on company time and using company computers, whereas “policies” governing Facebook type applications try to define what an employee can do on their personal time using their own computers.  Furthermore restrictions on “inappropriate” content (which in many cases is little more than what you can see on a daily basis in Abercrombie & Fitch or Calvin Klein ads) opens the Pandora’s box of unbridled censorship.

The question of what a potential employer should be able to look at is a much different issue.  As Goodgold points out, “if an employee does not want an employer to learn about something they post, the answer is commonsensical, do not post it, do not blog it, do not tweet it and do not post a picture of it on the Internet. If an employee would not say something to their employer in person, do not do it on the Internet.” This is the equivalent of email messages: emails are like postcards. Do not email anybody anything that you do not want the world to see.

No doubt this issue will continue to agitate people and eventually be litigated out. However, an employer would do well to think twice before trying to censor employee’s behavior when not at work.

Every PR Department Needs a Supply

A “newscast” on The Onion television a couple of months ago announced a new drug called “Despondex,” intended for the “approximately 20 million Americans who are insufferably cheery.” Everybody knows people like this and certainly most PR and marketing departments could use a good supply. Check it out at The Onion.

Another Shakeup at Lexis Nexis

Once again, Lexis Nexis has undertaken a significant shakeup of its Practice Management division. The heads of Front Office and Back Office, Charlie Rodgers and Loretta Rupert, respectively, are out or sidelined (Loretta is reportedly in “social networking” whatever that is – besides spending your day on FaceBook). So whatever you thought of Charlie and Loretta, the last remaining “industry people” at a management level in the Time Matters structure are gone. Rob Metcalfe, who was brought in to “integrate” PCLaw is gone. The “Global” practice management group, headquartered in London, is dissolved and has been brought back to the US. The various Front Office/Back Office subdivisions have been fused and are now headed by Jacob Paransky (who knows nothing about the actual programs). Initial reactions to the new overall head of Practice Management, Phil Livingston, seem to be very positive. Livingston remade himself as a money man and CFO after being a third string tackle on the 1981 Oakland Raiders SuperBowl team who according to his bio “specialized in the practice squad” and is not even listed on the 1981 Oakland Raiders roster.

This is yet another sign that LexisNexis is absolutely clueless as to what to do with Time Matters (relatively speaking, PCLaw is in much better shape). Just about everybody at a managerial level with industry experience is gone, and the marketeers and bean counters seem to be in charge. So, a piece of advice: when you have a ship drifting in the middle of the ocean, rudderless, the way to fix it is NOT to bring in a bunch of (say) automobile engineers and bean counters who don’t even know what a rudder is (replacing the rudder will be expensive, after all). One of the smartest things the new managers and executives could do would be to schedule and take the 3-day Certified Independent Consultant class. It would teach them the product and also some of the issues involved in getting the most out of it.

The more serious issue, however, is whether Lexis has lost control of the Time Matters code, which seems increasingly likely. What does this mean?  In a large, complex program such as Time Matters, any particular line of code is linked to, refers to, and has an effect on, other parts of the code. These links are known as dependencies. So if you change one line of code to fix a bug, you have to look at all the dependencies to see what other effects that change may have. Losing control of the code means that you have no way of knowing when making one apparently small change to fix a particular problem will have much larger and unexpected effects elsewhere, essentially creating new bugs. (The “butterfly effect” applied to software.) This is manifestly what happened in the infamous 9.3 service release, where “fixes” wound up corrupting data.

If you believe that computer products, like people, have life cycles, the conclusion may well be that Time Matters has reached, or is nearing, the end of its natural life cycle.