Does It Compute?

The Dog Ate My Homework

That was the old excuse when I was in school.  Then it graduated to “The computer ate my document.”  Today the excuse is “your email must have been gobbled up by the junk mail filter.”

Plus ça change...

InMailX for Worldox

InMail X is a new product from Australia that aims to improve email integration with Worldox (it also works with SharePoint, Worksite and some other products). In addition to basic Worldox integration it also has some other, in my view even more useful, functions.

When you click the “Send and File” button that is added to Outlook, InMailX pops up a list of recently used client/matters together with their description. If this for a matter not previously used, you can also pop up the Worldox dialog to select it, and it is then automatically added to your “Favorites.” InMailX also lets you define a tag to be added automatically to the subject line so that you have more information than the Re:Re:Re:Re: that may or may not have anything to do with the actual email. So for example, you could add the client/matter number or name to the subject lines. If you copy rather than move an email to Worldox, inMailX adds a column to Outlook showing what file it has been copied to, including the description, not just the client/matter number.

You can also save copies of a given email to multiple client/matters – a bad practice, but one that is frequently demanded by clients. This does save copies, however, so you have more than one copy of the same email.

One of the more nifty features allows you to truncate the back and forth “conversations” when you print an email, so that you can specify how much of the email you want to print (e.g., only the actual email, or the email and what it is responding to) without have to print pages and pages that you just throw out.

But another feature is even more important. InMailX lets you remove metadata from Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files. If desired, you can add something to the file name to indicate it has been cleaned (e.g., “Cleaned”).  Thus InMailX takes the place of other metadata removal programs such as Payne Consulting’s popular MetaData Assistant.

Furthermore, if you email multiple attachments, inMailX will convert them all to a single PDF file AND let you order the attachments in the order you want the  recipient to read them, including setting up bookmarks in the PDF file. This is a very cool feature. If you are sending 10 files, you can create a single PDF, with the files in the correct order, and each file bookmarked in a table of contents. 

Lastly, inMailX is extremely customizable. There are many more options than I can describe here: suffice it to say that you will be able to tweak the program to match pretty much exactly how you want it to work for your firm.

InMailX is modular.  Most firms will probably want only the three basic modules, but larger firms might want additional functionality that, for example, allows them to centrally manage all the firm’s signature blocks and create email forms. InMailX is new to the United States, but has been around in Australia for a while. Like many newer programs, the makers are very aggressive: in the process of testing and evaluating inMailX I found several issues that needed to be added or fixed: corresponding new builds were available in less than a week.

InMailX is definitely on the expensive side: the three basic modules, together with the Worldox connector, are $260 per user plus 20% yearly maintenance or $312/user for the first year (software costs more in Australia). But depending on how committed the firm is to saving extra clicks and whether the additional attachment and metadata removal features are desirable, it might well be worth it. If you don’t have a metadata removal program, figure on about $80 or so per user against the cost of InMailX. You can contact them at www.inmailx.com

Richard Susskind: "Tomorrow's Lawyers"

Richard Susskind is well-known for his views on the future of the legal profession. His bottom line is that small and medium size firms will become unviable as we know them and that many of the day to day functions that lawyers perform will be replaced by a variety of computerized, computer-aided, or even artificial intelligence systems within the relatively short term (he says 3-6 years, but lets say 5-10 years to be on the safe side). He also takes a dim view of the ability of many lawyers to deal with this situation: most firms, he says, are “walking backward into the future.”

I find it hard to quarrel with his basic assumptions. The traditional lawyer provides customized, one-on-one services, what Susskind refers to “bespoke” services (like a bespoke set of clothes). But those services can be broken down into their component parts, producing a gradation of services: from Bespoke to Standardized to Systematized to Packaged to Commoditized.

Successful firms have (or should have) a “forms bank” of standard documents, from retainer agreements to a variety of court motions, forms, etc.  The next step in the process is to systematize these pieces using some variety of document assembly.  As Susskind rightly points out, if you can produce an almost final document by running through an interview with a client to elicit information, why couldn’t the client himself run through the same interview on-line without using a lawyer? 

Susskind’s approach is encapsulated in his summary of document assembly:

    “A automated drafting system of the kind I describe does not simply print out a single, standard document. Instead, based on a user’s answers to specific questions about his or her particular circumstances, the document generated will be one output of countless (often millions of) possible permutations. The end result is a tailored solution, delivered by an advanced system rather than by a human craftsman. That is the future of legal service.”

Packaged services take the above processes and make them available as “Packages” on-line. These services already exist.  LegalZoom, nolo, lawdepot, legalforms, and many other services make available a variety of forms and services for clients who may not want or need to actually hire a lawyer. For lawyers, services like the Practical Law Company offer high-level assistance, check-lists and other help in various areas of the law.

In short, any given legal engagement can be “decomposed” and large portions of the engagement performed by non-lawyers, out-sourced lawyers, contract lawyers (see Legal On Ramp), and, gasp, computers. However, as Susskind stresses over and over, most firms refuse to face these facts.  He does note that “law firms tend to be so busy serving clients and meeting their own financial targets that they allow little time for internal reform–it is not easy to change a wheel on a moving car.” But what happens when the moving car has a flat tire?  Sooner rather than later it is likely to crash.

When you add to that the rapidly expanding ability to computerize legal processes – think of how it is affecting e-discovery – Susskind’s model looks compelling.

How fast will all this happen and in what areas?  Hard to say. I think his estimate of 3 to 6 years is too low. And certainly not all the areas he discusses will happen evenly.  He aptly quotes William Gibson: “the future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” At the same time, however, as he points out: “at its core, law is information-based. And we are in the middle of an information revolution. It is not making a wild leap to suggest that the law and the work of lawyers will not emerge unchanged.” So the book’s subtitle seems apt: “An Introduction to Your Future.”

Flat Fee Billing -- It's All About Shifting the Risk

Everybody seems to agree that flat fee billing is a coming thing.  What is this really about?

As Richard Susskind has pointed out, in fact flat fee billing is a minor adjustment rather than a sea change in how law firms do business. Flat fee billing is about shifting the risk from the client to the law firm.  When you provide a client with an estimate, the client bears the risk that the engagement will turn out to be more complex, difficult, etc. than foreseen. That is why all my engagement letters including the following caveat:   “Based on past experience we believe this estimate to be accurate. However, software configuration, like the practice of law, is not an exact science. This is an estimate and you will be billed for time actually spent.” Most law firms have similar caveats. The client bears the risk that the engagement will be more expensive than projected.

When you make a flat fee arrangement with a client, you bear the risk. That is, give the client a fixed amount based on an estimate of, say, 20 hours, and it takes you 25, tough. Your actual billable rate has been reduced by 20%.  On the other hand, if you provide a fixed amount based on 20 hours and it only takes you 15, your actual billable rate has been increased by a third. That is why most people “pad” the estimate on which a fixed fee is based by 20% or so. 

In short, if you arrange your fixed fee properly, and also implement productivity tools like document assembly, you can make out like a bandit with fixed fees. While this may not be true for litigation-type practices, it is certainly true for transactional practices.

The most up-front thing to do would be to offer a fixed fee with the proviso: “I actually think I can do it for less than that. If you want me to bear the risk that something goes haywire, you can have the fixed fee. If you want to bear that risk, you will in all likelihood get the work done for less.”