Does It Compute?

Worldox: Things that go CLUNK in the night.

Generally speaking, Worldox gives you a complete electronic record of all your documents, scans, emails, etc. However, there are some things that can’t readily be stored in Worldox. The most common is web pages. A web page is actually a collection of a dozen or more files - javascript, images, html pages, etc. So if you download a web page it comes across as all the individual files and is not accessible.

A similar case is MRI scans or similar imaging. Again, these are collections of images managed by a central program.

It turns out there is a simple, albeit retro lo-tech, way to access MRI scans. Copy the entire DVD including the program/viewers and all the files to a separate location on the server. I copied the entire DVD of a shoulder scan I had done a while ago to to W:\MRI\jhmri. The viewing program was called efilmlt.exe (a very common MRI viewer program) and was located in the efilmlite subdirectory on the DVD.

Then I created a batch file called “jhmri.bat” using notepad. The file contained a single line needed to run the viewer program: W:\mri\jhmri\efilmlite\efilmlt.exe. Different programs may require a slightly different script, but this should be fairly straightforward.

Then copy the batch file (in my case “jhmri.bat”) to Worldox and label it appropriately. A good practice would be the name of the MRI center, the name of the patient and the date of the MRI. Double clicking on that document will run the program.

You may need to get help creating a batch file, as it is somewhat old school (did you ever wonder why there are so many management tasks that you can easily still do in dos but not in windows?). Also, depending on your settings, the file may just open in Notepad. In that case you may need to get someone to edit the registry to fix a setting (you need to delete the
Hkey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\File
Exts\.bat). Do not try to do this if you are not sure how to do it.

Filtering Search Results in Worldox

Many people start a search by finding all the files for a given matter, either by using the “Favorite Matters” tab at the left of the Worldox screen or using a Find Template. This can be useful if there are not too many documents in the matter, but in many cases, you will need to filter the search results. There are two approaches to doing this.

First, you can enter additional information in the search template: one or more DocTypes (you can separate multiple doctypes by an “or” – Motion OR Pleading); a date range; specific terms in the description or text fields and so on.

Second, once the search is complete, you can use the “Filters” tab at the bottom left of the Worldox screen. This is an underused function that lets you filter search results by any terms contained in the documents on the screen. You can pick only the Excel files, exclude Emails (if you select an item it gets a green +: if you click on the button at the left of the entries it turns to a red -), specific authors, Categories, etc. This is doubly convenient because you see the results immediately and know whether you need to continue to add or change terms.