Does It Compute?

Six Years of Blogging

The end of April marks the sixth anniversary of Does It Compute? I am closing in on 800 posts (792 counting this one), including about 100 on Worldox and another 40 on more general document management issues.  Although I haven’t had anything much to do with Time Matters/LexisNexis in several years (except to watch its decline), there are 68 posts on Time Matters and another 42 on PCLaw. Amicus comes in last with 32 posts.

My posts have always been fed by client experience. When I see an issue at a client and say “that might be of general interest” – that’s worth a post. In the past year or two I have slowed down somewhat due to the fact that I have pretty much dropped supporting Time Matters, PCLaw and Amicus and have been more focused on Worldox.

But I think I have another couple of years left before I finally decide to retire.

In Defense of Hourly Billing (Sort Of)

The recent DLA Piper overbilling scandal highlights the invitation to abuse that hourly billing represents.  As usual, it was emails exhorting people to bill bogus hours that let the cat out of the bag: "I hear we are already 200K over our estimate — that's Team DLA Piper!" and “churn that bill, baby.”

I bill almost all my clients hourly, so how do I justify that?  Why not switch to flat-fee billing?  There is definitely a case to be made for this in basic situations: the client is happy with a standard configuration, no special security groups, ethical walls, multiple profile groups, and so on.

For larger clients, where you have had the opportunity to track their needs over six months or so, you can estimate with reasonable accuracy how many hours a month they are going to need and provide a monthly flat fee for standard work (not counting new projects). Alternatively, some consultants offer pre-paid “packages” at a discount. So if you buy 50 hours up front, you get (say) a 10% discount.

Here is where the issue gets complicated. A number of years ago I was renovating an old house in Cambridge by tearing out a wall and combining two small rooms. I got the walls torn out and went to put in new flooring, etc.  Whoops!! The old 2x4's where actually 2" by 4", not the current “nominal” 2x4's which are actually 1 ½" x 3 ½". So nothing fit right and everything had to be custom cut. In addition, the walls had side braces in them so that you could not run electrical wire through the walls between the studs without entirely tearing out the lathing (real plaster and lathing, not sheetrock). Needless to say, the project had suddenly become vastly more complicated.

Analogous issues can come up: the client wants many too many profile groups (I once turned down a job to rationalize a system where the client was starting with 40 profile groups – no thanks). Or they want a structure that is unnecessary and will only lead to problems later on (thus necessitating lengthy and frustrating discussions about why that is the case). Or they have highly complex security needs. Or their legacy documents are spread all over their system, including in local “My Documents” folders.  All this sort of thing can make an installation spiral out of control. And they there are the things that “pop up”and were never part of the original projection: “as long as we are doing this, can’t you just also...?”

As I have recently noted, flat-fee billing is about shifting the risk that billable hours will escalate for some reason from the client to the consultant. Other than that, the issue is about trust. If you trust a client/consultant then there should not be any issues about hourly billing.  So out of curiosity, I looked at my 10 most recent Worldox installations. There was only one installation that ran substantially over the maximum estimate (150%). The other nine averaged 80% of my maximum estimate and 99% of my minimum estimate.

So the conclusion is that if I simply gave clients a flat fee rate equal to my maximum estimate I would be increasing my income by 20% or so and my clients would be paying a corresponding 20% penalty.

For now, unless clients request a flat fee quote, I’ll still with hourly billing.

Worldox Announces Mac Client

Worldox officially announced a Mac client at the ABA techshow last week.  It is expected to be released some time this summer, so think early fall just to be on the save side.

Advertised as having most of the functionality of the Windows client, it obviously won’t be able to have exactly the same integration with the wide variety of programs and email that the Windows version has developed over the years. However, all the basic functionality, integration with the Microsoft Office Suite and Acrobat, searching, version control, etc. will be included.
 
The Mac version works with the Worldox back end and with the Worldox SaaS cloud product, it is not a standalone product.

Worldox will  be the first major document management system with a full-fledged Mac client. Until now Mac users have had to go through Citrix or use one or another workaround (why have a Mac if you use it primarily to run Windows on it?). So for end users who want to be able to use a Mac in an otherwise Windows environment it will be a major boon. It will also be interesting to see whether, as many people have thought, there is a pent-up demand for industrial strength legal products for a Mac.

Remembrance of Memories Past

I was struck by a recently article in the New York Times (March 31) concerning Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.).  The Times quoted new data from the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  According to the report,

"The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 53 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis."

Does this reflect a real increase or are parents and doctors just colluding to drug up kids to make them more manageable?  Before you say that sounds crazy, let me say that I know for a fact that the nursing home my mother was in for seven years with Alzheimers systematically over-medicated her to make her more manageable (after all, if you were losing your mind and control over bodily functions wouldn’t that tend to make you wild and “unmanageable” too?). So why shouldn’t they do it to rambunctious kids too?

I think it is indisputable that Nicholas Carr is right, that the way society approaches knowing things and accessing that knowledge has changed fundamentally. It used to be that to retrieve information, you had to know something about it; now, you google it or check Wikipedia.  The fact that “google” has become a verb says it all.

But the memory can be trained.  It seems to me that a significant amount of that 53% increase in the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder is linked to a lack of memory training (after you deduct for over-medication). Look at the past of how memory functioned.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were originally oral sagas.  Similarly, so-called “primitive” societies that lacked writing are notorious for prodigious oral histories. Can anyone imagine reciting such works from memory today? 

Then fast-forward to the Renaissance.  The key characteristic of “renaissance man” was encyclopedic knowledge.  People learned and absorbed vast amounts of knowledge. At the same time, they understood that this was not a path to the future: hence the projects of Leibnitz to encompass all knowledge in what we would today call a computer program (See George Dyson’s extremely interesting “Turing’s Cathedral”).

But the key fact is that memory can be trained.  One of the things I have always been grateful to my father for (although not so much at the time) was the mathematical training he inflicted on my brother and me at the dinner table.  “How much is 37 times 24?” he would say. Do it in your head. Leaving aside why anybody would want to when your cell phone has a calculator, it provided useful memory training. I can still do this, although not nearly as nimbly as at the time. Or consider the (to us at the time) infamous 3-toed sloth problems.  “There are some 3-toed sloths (with 3 toes on each paw) and some 2-toed sloths (with 2 toes on each paw) in a tree.  Taken together, the 3 toed sloths are missing 6 toes and the two-toed sloths are missing 4 toes. There are 3 more 3-toed sloths than there are 2-toed sloths. Combined, they have 66 toes. How many sloths of each type are there?”  This is basic algebra, but try doing it in your head!!

But it does provide major memory training.

In short, I suspect that in many cases of what appears to be attention deficit is simply a lack of basic memory training: kids are becoming unable to focus for extended periods of time because they haven’t been trained to do so. The use of internet searches and defaults can only contribute to this problem. That’s why my grandchildren only get books and art supplies for presents.

Must Reading

For anyone interested in the future of technology and the practice of law, here are some candidates for “must reading,” including links to my blogs about them.

Future of Technology and the Human Brain

See the two books by Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch and “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”

Carr’s basic thesis is that the way our memory functions has changed fundamentally with the advent of computers and the internet in particular.  In the not-so-distant past, if you wanted to find out about something, you had to learn about it and commit it to memory.  Now, if you want to find out about something you look it up on the Internet. The result is that peoples’ memories are not what they used to be. This is probably linked to the massive increase in the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (over 50% in the last decade).

The Practice of Law

On the practice of law, I am a big fan of Richard Susskind. See my long two part review of his “The End of Lawyers?” a couple of years ago.  Part I and Part II

Recently, see his new book which mainly recapitulates his arguments, “Tomorrow’s Lawyers”