Does It Compute?

HP Acquires Autonomy/iManage

So HP has acquired Autonomy, including iManage document management for some $10 billion.  What does this mean?  Historically, when hardware/networking companies acquire software companies, the results have been fairly disastrous. This goes all the way back to Novell’s acquisition of WordPerfect. And of course, more recently LexisNexis’ acquisition of TimeMatters, PCLaw, Juris, etc. 

The reason is basically simple: the acquiring company knows nothing about the legal/software industry (the acquiree).  This was already true when Autonomy acquired iManage. An article by Evan Koblenz in Law Technology News quotes an anonymous law firm source close to Autonomy as saying “"iManage took a nose dive when Interwoven got bought by Autonomy. Their customer service was top notch, and it was painful when it got bought.”

Over the past 10 years or so and multiple sales and acquisitions, PCDocs, now OpenText, has similarly gone downhill.

So there is no reason to expect things to be different this time around.  If I were at a firm using iManage, I would start looking around.  Judi Flournoy, chief information officer at Loeb & Loeb was quoted in the same article as saying: “I don't think it is HP's area of expertise, software specifically, and software that we rely upon for document production. It will be very interesting to me if they do keep the document management.” If iManage gets spun off again, things could get even worse.  There has already been what could be the beginning of a brain drain at Autonomy with the departure of it’s vice president for e-discovery and compliance to Google.

What this means is that the remaining players, primarily Worldox and NetDocuments, will start picking up slack from dissatisfied customers (this has already started happening, in fact). It also, once again, raises the issue of cloud-based document management. I addressed this issue in a recent blog but will no doubt be returning to it frequently, since it will be a critical issue in the next year or two.

LexisNexis Sunrises Billing Matters

LexisNexis just announced that it would reverse it’s previous decision to discontinue (“sunset”) Billing Matters at the end of 2013 and would “sunrise” it.

Why did they do this?  The argument that LN has “listened to it’s customers” flies in the face of virtually every decision they have taken since TimeMatters was acquired.  Various tame consultants have exulted.  Jeff Krause is a little more upfront than most. He notes that the “naysayers”

“will say that LexisNexis is changing its mind - again.  They will say that this is happening because LexisNexis was unable to make the link between Time Matters and PCLaw work as promised.  Those statements may be true but the fact remains that this is the right decision.  If you believe that the original decision was a mistake, can you really fault LexisNexis for correcting that mistake?”

But was the original decision a mistake? Billing Matters has always been something of a bomb. Best reports from the time the first “sunset” announcement was made indicated that it never had more than about 5,000 users at most and more likely around 3,000.  PCLaw, by way of contrast issues serial numbers consecutively, so the highest licenses number indicates the number of firms it has been installed in (although all of them may not still be using it). That number is now in excess of 100,000. In fact, the original decision was the only rational one.

So why DID they do it?  Two reasons come to mind.

First, LN has not been very successful at getting Billing Matters users to switch to PCLaw. The attraction of a single unified code is very persuasive, and under Lexis’ management the link with PCLaw has had repeated problems (apparently in part due to lack of communication between the two programming teams). Sales of TimeMatters are down, and indications are that Billing Matters users were likely to go elsewhere. So “sunrising” Billing Matters is most likely an effort to contain losses.

The second scenario is much more speculative, but intriguing. STI’s Tabs/Practice Master combo has a unified code base. Gavel & Gown has just release Amicus Premium Billing, which integrates a single code base with Amicus Attorney Premium Edition. Lexis may well have felt pressure to have a competing option remain in the market – especially since Amicus has had a certain amount of success in converting TimeMatters client data to Amicus Attorney.

From a technical point of view, after having no one working actively on Billing Matters for 2 years or more, Lexis Nexis is likely to have problems getting back up to speed and producing an “update” that does not introduce its share of new bugs. If Billing Matters is coming back from the dead would it be fair to call it a zombie product?

Worldox Web/Mobile

Worldox Web/Mobile has been around for a while, but never really caught on. The main reason for this, in my view, is that so many lawyers routinely access their office PCs from home via Logmein, GoToMyPC, etc. that it wasn’t really necessary. I do, however, have several clients that used Worldox Web/Mobile as an “Extranet” – a way to give specified clients (usually major clients) access to a specified subset of their documents.

However, with the release of the Worldox iPad app, which requires Web/Mobile as a back end, there is a new interest.  The iPad app is “free” but the Web/Mobile is not (a 5-user setup would cost you $1,250 plus $250 a year maintenance). Web/Mobile is priced per named user, so if a larger firm had only two users that needed access, they would buy the base server ($1,195 including maintenance) and licenses for each user that needed it. That’s still pretty steep for a “free” iPad app.

Worldox has responded by offering a hosted Web/Mobile solution for $25/month per named user.  So if 2 attorneys had iPads, the cost would be $600 per year. The crossover point (where it becomes cheaper to own than rent) comes at about 8-10 users when you factor in hardware costs.

Worldox Web/Mobile provides full access to your entire document store and the interface pretty much replicates the user’s configuration on their desktop: the same profile groups, the same Quick Search Bookmarks, and so on. As with most web-based services, you have to download a document to edit it, and then upload it back to your system. The only significant functionality that is lacking in the Web/Mobile system is the link to email.

I have just completed a generic set of Worldox Web/Mobile instructions (a sort of mini cheat sheet), which you can consult on my web site here.

Privacy, Blackberries and the British Riots

I saw an article last week to the effect that Blackberry was being “blamed” for “contributing” to the uprisings in Britain that were sparked by the police killing of a black man. Why?  Because apparently one of the main modes of communication was not Facebook, not Twitter, but Blackberry Messaging. And Blackberry Messaging is .... gasp! .... secure! Messages cannot be hacked into by what my then teen-age daughter used to refer to as “the parental element,” including various governments.

Research in Motion (RIM), which makes the Blackberry, has run into this issue before, notably in India and Saudi Arabia, where the government wants to be able to intercept messages at will. But the structure of Blackberry messages is such that RIM cannot decrypt them even if it wanted to, which is one of its main advantages over the competition, especially for law firms.

This illustrates the rather schizoid attitude that currently exists toward the right to privacy. On the one hand, people commonly use programs like Facebook and Twitter which offer virtually no privacy and which bend over backward to accommodate government spying. Other cloud-based programs, such as DropBox, have a very bad record when it comes to maintaining the confidentiality of information stored in their services. Google may offer even less privacy and security of your data (and it keeps it forever).

On the other hand, bar associations ethics committees demand that lawyers maintain a “reasonable expectation of privacy” for their clients’ documents. Various approaches that would give a “reasonable expectation of privacy” such as encrypting email, or strong passwords that are frequently changed, have never caught on because they are seen as “too difficult.”

So the bottom line is that Blackberry is alone in offering secure communication in a world where there is virtually no “expectation of privacy.”

KnowledgeTree and Document Management

Knowledge Tree is a newcomer to the collaboration and cloud-based document management field. Based on their web site, they have mostly non-legal clients.

Like many “store and forward” products, saving a document to Knowledge Tree is based on a windows explorer model: “click upload, browse to the right location, and save” as one of their demo videos says. This simply replicates the error-prone model of saving to a physical location.

KnowledgeTree seems to focus on being an industrial-strength cloud-based file sharing program, a step up from the DropBox family of programs. Thus it lets users add one or more “tags” as searchable metadata. It also features a variety of workflow options and document alerts to notify users when documents have been changed. The document store is searchable (including with some boolean operators).

However, it lacks critical document management features, in particular the ability to “lock down” the system and oblige users to actually use it. It’s claim to simplify the uploading of documents with drag and drop technology actually illustrates one of the program’s core weaknesses. Furthermore, it integrates only with a vary limited range of products. So with KnowledgeTree you would constantly have to switch back and forth between the documents (probably a minority) stored in the cloud and everything else. Not a model of efficiency.

So if you are looking for a more industrial-strength version of DropBox, KnowledgeTree is worth checking out. If you are looking for a full-featured document management system, however, you would be better off looking elsewhere.  As a rough estimate, KnowledgeTree is about where NetDocuments was 4-5 years ago, so it might be worth checking back in a few years.

Collaboration, Document Management and the Cloud

The growth of online collaboration tools presents a conundrum for law firms: both an opportunity and a problem.  First, the structure of the problem. 

The leader of online collaboration is probably Google Docs. Google has also released a plugin to Microsoft Word that lets you sync your Word documents with Google Docs. You can give other people rights to view/edit specified documents. However, you have to manually upload selected documents to Google.

Alternatively, using one of a variety of products – DropBox, Smartsync, Sugarsync, SpiderOak, etc. (and new products are popping up at a rapid rate) – you define a directory on your local hard drive and synchronize it with the directory in the cloud. So if you make a change to a file on your hard drive, it is changed in the cloud and vice versa. You can also share the cloud location with other people, so that multiple users can make edits to the same file. The features and functionality of these programs is expanding rapidly to meet competition. Dropbox is probably the leading program, but has been plagued with security issues that have made many people leery of it.

So if you want to create a “extranet” where you can park selected documents for a given client, you could easily use one of these programs or Box.Net (which I use for sharing files with clients).  Similarly, a “war room” for litigation could be created so that various parties to the litigation would have access.  The advantages of sharing files across platforms (PC, phones, Mac, etc.) are obvious.

From a document management point of view, what’s wrong with this picture?  Just about everything. First, it is based on a single individual.  The files reside on your local PC (not a network). So if you wanted somebody else in your firm to work on them, you would have to give them rights to the cloud-based repository. Second, everything about the system is manual. There is no automated save, no indexing, no searching, no “management” features at all. Josh’s trip to Africa is not an adequate model for law firms.

Some more business-oriented programs, such as KnowledgeTree, at adding more “document management” type features, including searching, adding “smart tags” that are searchable to a document, and so on. These will no doubt evolve rapidly (as did NetDocuments a few years ago), but right not they don’t measure up as full-fledged document management systems.

The key aspect of document management from a legal point of view, is the ability to lock down the systems so that use is mandatory: no manually uploading documents. The problem is that once the “synchronized” repository is in the cloud it is outside the reach of the document management system. There is no way to produce an audit trail, track usage, etc. Many of the DropBox-type programs do maintain an audit trail of what happens to documents in the cloud. So in theory, it should be possible to write an API link (as many practice management programs have done) that links the information about what happens in the cloud to the DMS. This has not happened as yet.

So a major challenge facing document management systems will be to develop the ability to establish a link between the DMS system and the “synchronized folders” in a cloud-based repository that otherwise resides outside the purview of the DMS.  Right know, the only way I know of to do this is a multi-step manual process (see my blog on Integrating Worldox with DropBox. 

Whatever company comes up with a solution to this problem will have a major step up on the competition.

Game of Thrones vs. Lord of the Rings

Ever since Milton’s “Paradise Regained” it has been a commonplace in literature that the bad guys are interesting (Lucifer) and the good guys are boring (God). Darth Vader is a lot more fun than Luke Skywalker (as is Hans Solo). Stores sell Darth Vader helmets, not Luke Skywalker masks. Of course, the "bad guys" turn out to be good guys at the very end to satisfy the exigencies of the plot (Darth Vader again).  Or, as the servant Sganarelle says at the very end of Moliere’s Don Juan, when the Libertine Atheist Don Juan is plunged into hell, “His death satisfies everyone: heaven offended, laws broken, women seduced, families dishonored, parents outraged... everyone is happy. I'm the only one who is unhappy: My wages, my wages, my wages.”  Louis XIV's royal censorship ("L'État, c'est moi") forced Molière to drop the last sentence.

I have never liked Lord of the Rings for this reason: much too smarmy for my taste. I recently started reading Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (the series on which the HBO series is based). As opposed to Good vs. Evil, this series is almost purely Machiavellian. It is about power, pure and simple. The Good Guys seem to wind up dead, and the more dishonest, devious and duplicitous you are the more power you seem to wind up having. The “game of thrones” is about winning by any means necessary and at all costs (and killing the other guy).

In addition, it is filled (5 volumes of about 1,000 pages each) with interesting detail. For example, Martin repeatedly refers to wounds being dressed and bound with moldy bread. Moldy bread??  Well, penicillin was originally discovered as mold spores on ... moldy bread. So the roughly medieval society knew about the use of penicillin.

This is a great read.

Is Google Turning Our Memory to Mush?

Nicholas Carr has reasonably asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  His book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” expanded on the theme. See my blog of June 14, 2010.Nicholas Carr has reasonably asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  His book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” expanded on the theme. See my blog of June 14, 2010.

A recent study published by Betsy Sparrow in Science magazine and reported in the Columbia University Research Magazine takes this approach in a slightly different but very interesting direction.

The way people’s memory works has obviously changed over the centuries. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were originally “written” as oral texts by Greek bards. No one today could even imagine “memorizing” the entire Iliad. Similarly, for centuries the Bible was essentially an oral tradition, since only a very small number of priests has access to copies and knew how to read. The invention of the printing press in the late 15th century made the Reformation possible because for the first time people could actually read the Bible. Many of the medieval stained glass windows illustrate various biblical stories and served as a memory bank for the vast majority of the population that could not read. The encyclopedic memory of scholars from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century was notable.

Today, Sparrow and her co-authors argue, “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

This is intuitively obvious. Think of phone numbers.  If you have a phone number that you call very often on speed dial, you may not be able to remember it if someone asks. “Let me check, I have it on speed dial.”  (I know this happens to me all the time).

Clearly the ability to remember data and Carr’s view of the analytical abilities to put things together are linked.  If you can’t remember any data, how are you supposed to analyze it, never mind come up with the links that are necessary for any new theories? In an internet world all facts appear to be equal, leading to what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman criticizes as the “cult of balance.” To paraphrase him, if the Republicans were to declare that the earth was flat, the newspaper headline would be “Parties Differ On Shape of Earth.”

If society is headed toward an epoch when people can’t remember more than 140 characters at a time, we are in a sad way.
.