Does It Compute?

Playing with the iPad

I had the opportunity to get a loaner iPad in connection with another project, so I have been playing around with it.  What it does is very slick. 

In essence, however, it is a passive device. You use it to check email, check the web, look up an address, check Facebook, play songs, etc.  While the screen is nice and big, the iPad seems to do very little you can’t do on an iPhone or a Droid – just with bigger text.

The keyboard is so clunky that typing large amounts of text is simply not practical. This fact is reflected in emails I receive all the time that say something like “sent from my iPad. Please pardon the typographical errors.”

In addition, the iPad’s shortcomings have been widely reported – no multitasking (though this may be coming), no USB port, no camera, no Flash for playing videos, poor battery life, etc.  On the other hand, my 3-year old granddaughter loves to play learning games on the iPad. No need to use the mouse, keyboard, etc. You just poke at a picture.  Sort of like Fisher-Price toys that teach kids to count or spell.

So that’s the iPad: a Fischer-Price toy for adults.

For a more comprehensive review, see Ubergizmo.

Gore Vidal

It’s been quite a while since I indulged in quoting authors, but with the elections coming up I can’t resist quoting Gore Vidal. He is the author of superb novels of American history – Burr and Lincoln in particular are must reads – as well as one of the most incisive social commentators of the last 40 or 50 years.

In a TV interview with Bill Maher in April 2009, he had the following to say:

 “There is only one party in the United States , the Property Party...and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt–until recently...and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."

Illegible White Papers

I have recently downloaded a number of “White Papers” on various subjects that share one characteristic: they are virtually illegible. They use the new Microsoft default font which is light grey rather than black. When used against a lightly-colored background, I find them almost illegible. And of course when you have to squint and tilt the paper against the light to even see it, it makes it hard to concentrate on the content.

Many years ago, I became concerned whether PowerPoint type presentations would be visible to people with some degree of color blindness – which amounts to about 15% of the population. I asked my opthamologist of the time about this, and he said that as long as you used a high-contrast color scheme there would not be a problem. Slides might appear as shades of gray, but they would be legible.

Admittedly, I have bad eyes, but I fail to understand why somebody at the companies that are commissioning the web sites doesn’t call a halt to bad web design that is undercutting the message they are trying to get out.

Reasons to Go PaperLESS

Technolawyer published earlier this week a Whitepaper it had commissioned from me (on behalf of Fujitsu) on “Top Five Reasons to Go Paperless.”  You can download the paper here.

The bottom line is that even a modified PaperLESS implementation – where you don’t scan everything, just most, or the most important, things, can increase your productivity and improve client service by letting you find things faster;  reduce your operating costs by saving on storage space; and provide better security.

Running PCLaw 7 under Windows 7

I recently had someone call me who had PCLaw 7 and had bought a new Windows 7 64 bit PC. They wanted to run PCLaw 7 under Windows 7. Not supported, and as usual LexisNexis wanted an arm and a leg to upgrade and pay the punitive reinstatement fees. Could it be done anyway?

Turns out, it can.  There are a couple of tricks. 

As always with Windows 7, I recommend turning off the User Access Controls – really annoying and the utility is marginal. This will make it a lot easier to install and customize programs.

First of all, old Windows Help files will not run under Windows 7. So you have to download winhlp32.exe from the Microsoft site. You can find instructions here.

If you don’t do this you will get really annoying messages that the help file cannot be opened. The messages won’t go away and you have to manually dismiss the program, so do this first.

We copied the old data to an external hard drive, reinstalled the program on the Windows 7 and then linked up to the data. When you install the program, you want to right-click on the autorun or setup file and select Compatibility.  Set the executable to run as if it were Windows XP SP3, disable the fancy screen fonts for Windows 7, and set the program to run with Administrative rights. Do this to the PCLaw executable as well.

With those two things done, everything went very well. PCLaw is up and running under Windows 7.

The same approach may work for other legacy programs as well. As usual, your mileage may vary.

Trust, Security and the Cloud

I read an excellent post recently by Tomasz Stasiuk called “Is Cloud Storage Secure Enough for Lawyers?”

It makes a number of key points about the role of trust in lawfirms. Despite the “trust nobody” mantra, law firms routinely trust their off-site hard copy storage employees, their firm employees dealing with sensitive matters. Many firms don’t even use effective passwords as being “too much work.” Their passwords can be the same for everybody, or even the ubiquitous “password123.”

But when it comes to storage in the cloud all this trust disappears, despite the fact that cloud storage is probably more secure than anything the firm does itself onsite.

Definitely worth a read.  Cloud-based storage is a service whose time has come.

John Heckman Writes for Technolawyer

I am proud to have been asked to contribute a regular column for Technolawyer’s weekly “Small Law” feature.  The various technolawyer columns are free to subscribe to and the Small Law columns can been seen at http://www.technolawyer.com/smalllaw.asp

I will be writing three columns between now and the end of the year, and bi-monthly after that.  My first column has to do with evaluating Return on Investment for various law firm decisions involving practice management, document management or similar software.

Small firms frequently don’t think in terms of ROI and tend more toward an evaluation of the type “which do I want more, a new Mercedes or a new computer system?”

But the numbers are mind-boggling.  If new software saves you 12 minutes a day, that’s an hour a week or 50 hours a year. Multiply that by your billing rate. In addition, you have an extra 50 hours to work harder or go home early.

Time and Billing software is even more productive because it represents actual income.  You can easily bill 10% more time for the same amount of work because the software helps you capture the time you actually spend on things like phone calls and emails more accurately. So if you bill 1,000 hours a year (standard quotas for associates in big law tend more toward 1,700-1,800 hours), that’s 100 extra billable hours. Multiply that by your billing rate (and the number of attorneys in your firm). Can you afford NOT to do this?

Worldox Complete Cloud

Worldox recently announced “Worldox Complete Cloud.” This sort of implementation, which uses an RDP connection to link to a virtual server/desktop in a hosted cloud is frequently known as a “private cloud” and has been popularized by Amazon.

I recently got a demo login and was able to put it through its paces. The first thing to note is that it is extremely fast. I sometimes have response issues with RDPing into client sites, but not so here. This makes sense because what you have is a virtual Windows 7 desktop communicating to a virtual 2008 server.

I was able to run Word, Worldox, Acrobat, WordPerfect, etc. and to customize Worldox without a hitch, By adjusting the RDP settings I could print to the local printer in my office. I was able to install an additional software application. I could surf the web from the virtual desktop, download – in short anything you can do on a local desktop I could do from the virtual desktop.

There are still a couple of issues that involve workarounds and that need to be improved. Lets say you adopt the Worldox Complete Cloud: how do you upload your existing documents?  The company that supplies the private cloud, CoreBanc will either upload them for you if you send them a DVD or provide a private ftp site that lets you upload the documents so that they can be seen by the virtual server. Since this is likely to be a one-shot deal, it should not be a problem.

One issue that remains to be worked out is scanning.  If I scan a document, where does it go?  There are some workarounds here, but Worldox is working on a better solution.

Since the Worldox Complete Cloud replaces your existing desktops and servers, it is not for everybody. It will be most attractive for firms that are a point in their upgrade cycle where they are thinking of buying new equipment.  But let’s say this might be an option for you.

Worldox in a cloud is not cheap.  It starts at slightly over $100 per user per month (but drops with quantity). But consider what a 10-user firm will get for this:

2 Servers (File Server & Exchange Server with spam filtering)
10 Windows 7 Desktops
McAfee Anti-Virus
redundant backup to 3 widely separated locations (Tennessee, California, Texas, Virginia)
10 licenses of Worldox
10 licenses of Office 10 (including Exchange Server)
Management of all patches, updates, etc.

In addition, you can load your own software (time & billing, practice management, etc.) onto the server.

So you will also substantially cut down on consulting costs.  When you add it all up, it becomes considerably more cost-effective.