Does It Compute?

Suffolk/Flaherty Legal Tech Audit

I’ve blogged before about the legal technology audit that Casey Flaherty introduced for Kia Motors about a year and a half ago. Would-be outside counsel had to take a test with a variety of fairly standard formatting options for Word and Excel. All the firms that took it failed miserably. Interestingly, the relatively smaller firms did better than the very large firms.

Now the audit has been systematized and packaged in conjunction with the Suffolk University Law School and is being offered on a subscription basis to law firms. According to their web site the expected completion time for the test is 1 hour, whereas the average completion time has been 5 hours. Since the average test taker billed at $275/hour, this represents over charging clients by up to $1,100 an hour for average tasks. While the test people obviously are not releasing details, they do provide the following description:

    “The tasks are part of a series of assignments that constitute a single, continuous workflow. The test takers will finalize a redlined investors’ rights agreement (word processing). They will then be given data on dividend payments to investors to investigate whether payments were made equally to all investors (spreadsheets). Finally, they will prepare an e-filing attaching the agreement and spreadsheet (PDF).”

It will be interesting to see whether this test takes off and becomes a de-facto measuring stick for attorney computer proficiency in relation to internal advancement in large law firms, as well as an aid for corporate general counsel in selecting outside counsel.

Sony Digital Paper and Worldox

Sony recently released “Sony Digital Paper” in conjunction with Worldox. The device is “like a giant Kindle you can write on” says Scott Bassett in his extensive road test of the product. The product uses e-ink, so it is is extremely clear and has an amazing battery life (Sony claims 3 weeks if you are not linking to the web all the time). It is almost exactly the size and thickness of a standard yellow pad, with 4GB storage and room for an expansion SD memory card.

I finally broke down and bought one last week (at $1100 plus $120 for the first year of Worldox FileCloud it is fairly pricey). Digital Paper is available only through Worldox and its vendors, but will work with anything.

When you first get some documents loaded into it the results are spectacular. I loaded a PDF version (it only takes PDFs) of my Worldox in One Hour for Lawyers book and started flipping through the pages. Not only was the text extremely sharp, the graphics looked great even though they were in gray scale.

You can save multiple documents in a “workflow.” This means that you can save multiple open documents and just tap on a list to access the desired document instantly.

Stage two was taking handwritten notes. The device comes with a stylus and writing feels very close to paper (partly I suspect because the screen is plastic not glass). Sony Digital Paper stores the notes and you can synch them up with the FileCloud. Want to erase something? Just tap on the eraser icon and “erase” over your notes. The notes disappear but the underlying text does not. You can have up to 10 pages of notes in a single note file.

The Sony legal department claims that according to the terms of the ESIGN Act, signatures on a contract, lease, etc. executed on Digital Paper are as binding as those on a paper copy. So if you are going into, say, a closing, you would check out the closing documents from Worldox to Digital Paper (or copy them using the USB connector), have everyone sign them, synch them back up and check them back in to Worldox . Alternatively, if you want to take all necessary documents to a trial, you can simply copy them to the Digital Paper device and have them instantly available.

That’s the fun stuff. The WOW factor is considerable. But what are the problems? As Bob Ambrogi said in his excellent review, “this is a great device for working with documents and taking handwritten notes...It is hard to beat replacing a stack of documents with something so light, thin and readable. That said, it is a one-trick pony.” But what a trick! The first thing a savvy user will try to do (as I did) is to expand the functionality of the device. But that basically does not work. It is what it is. It would be nice to be able to email documents stored on the Digital Paper, though.

With very large documents, there can be significant pauses when swiping rapidly from page to page (there is also a slider to advance by a large amount). On my book (150 pages, 20MB), if I tapped the hyperlink to go to a particular chapter, there could then be a 4-5 second delay before I could scroll. If you are actually reading, this is not an issue, but if you are flipping rapidly through something it can be annoying. Using my book as an example again, I could swipe quickly through 4-5 pages, then there would be a several-second pause while the memory cache caught up and was ready to go again. Apparently there are tradeoffs between the excellent e-ink display and speed requirements. Similarly, there can be noticeable pauses between when you tap on a feature and the result appears.

There is a web browser, but it is s...l...o...w. You could use it to check something specific, but not open and go through, say a dozen or more emails. It took me 4 seconds to open my gmail account on my office PC and over 30 seconds on Sony Digital Paper. Response time in dealing with emails is analogous. Searches can be similarly slow.

If you are coming from an iPad, the Digital Paper device will seem pretty familiar. If not, there is a significant learning curve (translation: an hour or two of cursing). Like so many things, it is simple once you know how.

OK, it is an awesome toy, but what would you actually USE it for?  Three things, I think.

First, taking notes at meetings. There is a lot of evidence that taking notes on a pad produces a lot better reaction on the part of the people that you are meeting with than hiding behind a computer and typing. And the note taking on Digital Paper is vastly superior to using an iPad. Sony also refers to studies showing that people remember handwritten notes better than typed notes. Maybe. On the other hand, if your handwriting is as bad as mine, deciphering your notes can be a challenge and having them in digital format does not change that.

Second, to refer to large numbers of documents at a trial, real estate closing, contract negotiations, etc. Digital Paper really shines here. Although I don’t have those uses, I have loaded all my technical documents, manuals, training documents, price sheets, pro-forma engagement letters, etc. into the Digital Paper. That way, I will have instant answers to even the most obscure question. No more having to say “I’ll have to look that up.”

Third, and to my way of thinking this might be the biggest game changer, the ability to execute documents with legally binding signatures. Think of the current workflow at many law firms:
1. You print out a contract, agreement, lease, etc.
2. The client signs it.
3. You scan the signed document and save it back to your document repository.

With Digital Paper, you print the document to PDF and save it to Digital Paper. The client signs it and you check it back in to Worldox (or whereever). All done.

So check out the 2-minute video on the Worldox web site demonstrating the use of Sony Digital Paper. This is something that needs to be seen to be believed.

Document Footers in Worldox

Many firms like to put a document ID and version number in the footer of their documents, e.g., {00012345 v.3}. By default, this prints the doc id and version number on every page of the document. It can be set to print on the first page only, but not the last page only. The doc id stamp lets you find a document immediately simply by typing the number in the “Location” bar above the document display list.

There are a number of scenarios in which firms may want other options. One of the most common requests is to remove the curly brackets around the footer. This can be done globally if the firm desires, but the curly brackets control the position of the file stamp. If it is removed, the firm may lose some flexibility in where the footer appears. I posted a while ago about ways of positioning a doc id in a Word table in your footer (click here for this post).

Another common scenario is that sometimes you want a document stamp and sometimes not. Many firms devote a field in the profile save screen to “Stamp / No Stamp.” Depending on which one is selected, the file stamp either appears or not. Variations on this approach can let the firm stamp a document with “DRAFT” or some other annotation. This can also be done manually from the Worldox menu in Word versions 2007 and above.

Many firms email their documents as PDFs and while they are happy to have an ID stamp internally, they want to remove it when the document is sent out as a PDF. This option (and many others) is available when you open the Worldox menu on the Ribbon Bar. Select “Clear Whole Stamp” before you print the document to PDF. The document stamp in Word will reappear the next time you open the document.

Lastly, in firms without a strong management, some attorneys may insist on personal options (i.e., the firm as a whole puts a doc id on documents, but attorney X refuses to have them). Also, firms may want to omit the document stamp on certain types of documents (pleadings for example). This can be done, but opens a Pandora’s box which I personally would prefer to avoid. In a firm of any size, this can get fairly complex and messy.

New pdfDocs in Worldox Productivity Suite

DocsCorp has just come out with version 4 of pdfDocs and compareDocs, which integrate with Worldox via the Productivity suite.

pdfDocs is a major release and offers a complete Acrobat replacement. It has been completely rewritten with an Office 2013-style interface (for better or worse). Personally, I am not a fan of the Office 2013 interface, but it does offer some nice features, such as a zoom slide bar at the bottom of the window which lets you dynamically zoom to the desired size instead of having to play with percentages. It also offers a QuickAccess Toolbar, but some key features cannot be put on it. The Ribbon bar will be editable in a future update.

Worldox programmed around the klutzy Word Save/SaveAs interface to make it much smoother (i.e., one click instead of four). DocsCorp hasn’t done that yet, so the integration with Worldox requires a lot of extra clicks and does not function for some operations. But that too will be fixed in a few months.

This sort of thing is typical of a new release, these cosmetic issues should be smoothed out relatively quickly. But what about the main feature set?

About the only main feature of the full Acrobat product that pdfDocs does not offer is the ability to use electronic signatures and that is supposedly coming by the end of the year. Everything else: redaction, Bates stamping, text editing, watermarks, various stamps (approved, sign here, confidential, etc.) are built in and quite elegant, although they don’t always match the full version of Acrobat Pro.

In addition, pdfDocs features the “Organizer” which lets you select files from within Worldox and send them to the Organizer, where you can rearrange them at will, add various features such as headers and footers (for Bates stamping), Stationery, Security and Watermarks. The Organizer can contain Word and Excel documents as well as PDFs. While the Organizer does not have all the features of the Binder function contained in the full version of pdfDocs (in particular the ability to generate a table of contents), it is a pretty good alternative. Once the Organizer has been created, you can export it back into Worldox. The result is a static PDF, so if you have work-in-progress projects that are constantly being updated, you might want to create a Worldox project to monitor the documents on an ongoing basis, then export them to the pdfDocs Organizer once the project is complete, and send the result back to Worldox for circulation to other parties.

The Productivity Suite also comes with compareDocs from DocsCorp. This is an industrial strength document comparison product which also lets you compare Word documents to PDF documents.

Finally, the Productivity Suite includes the Workflow application, which lets you circulate documents for review, approval, etc. and the Task feature which lets you schedule tasks in Outlook for Worldox documents. Thus you could set yourself a task to review a given document on a given day. A link to the document is attached to the Outlook task, so that when you click on the link, the document opens.

The Productivity Suite offers major cost advantages over other options. The Productivity Suite with the DocsCorp products is available for firms of 25 or fewer users at a cost of $119 per user plus $40 annual maintenance. So for two years, the product will cost you $199/user.  Adobe has gone over to software rentals via the “Creative Cloud” (which many Adobe consultants refer to as “Captive Client”). At $19.99 per month per user, that would be about $480 for two years for Acrobat Pro. In addition, if you get another document comparison product such as market-leader Workshare ($175 /user/year), that would be an extra $350/user for two years. Together the Productivity Suite would be $199/user for two years, and the main competitors would be $830/user. Quite a difference, even though this is not completely an apples-to-apples comparison since many firms may not get the full Acrobat program or Workshare for all users, whereas the Productivity Suite licenses must match the number of Worldox licenses the firm has. Still, it makes the Productivity Suite a no-brainer. If you absolutely need digital signatures right away, even the free Acrobat reader lets you apply those.