Does It Compute?

Troubleshooting 101

When people have trouble with their cars, they tell the mechanic what needs fixing (headlight out, etc.). When people have trouble with their computers, they frequently freeze like a deer in headlights: “my computer isn’t working”.

The first rule of troubleshooting is: start with the simple things first. Is it plugged in? (I actually had a client a number of years ago that came in one morning to discover their network was down - the cleaning crew had mistakenly unplugged it during the night).

So the first step is to log out of the program(s) giving you problems and/or reboot the computer.

The next step is to ask: are you the only user with the issue or is it firm-wide? If you are the only person with the issue then the problem is likely not to be Worldox or other similar program, but something with your specific computer setup/configuration.

Are there any error messages? These can be critical in deciding what is wrong. For example, a “1460” error in Worldox means that there is a time delay in communicating with the server (especially when saving PDF’s). Is there anything else peculiar happening?

What were you doing when the error occurred? Saving a document? Opening a document? Attaching a document to an email? And does this happen every time or is it sporadic? (Much harder to troubleshoot if the issue is sporadic).

Providing this sort of information to your consultant/technician can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to solve any given issue, as well as helping prevent it from happening in the future.

Happy Winter Solstice

It’s Winter Solstice – er, holiday – time again.

The Winter Solstice has traditionally been celebrated by homo sapiens in the northern hemisphere for at least 5,000 years as marking the point where the days start getting longer. Maes Howe in Orkney (north of Scotland) is a very large chambered cairn. The 45 foot long entrance way is constructed so that the setting sun shines directly through the passageway onto the back wall of the cairn on the shortest day of the year, setting directly over a large standing stone placed a half-mile or so from the entrance. And of course a similar setup at Stonehenge is even more well-known. There are even several hundred such sites in New England (“Mystery Hill” for example) and in the Southwest.

Pre-historic/neolithic peoples were of necessity acute astronomers – their existence depended on crops and seasons. The Mayan long calender was more accurate than our current calender with its leap years every four years and "super leap years" at the turn of the century once every 400 years. Other calendars (in India and Mesopotamia – Omar Khayyam was a much better mathematician and astronomer than he was a poet) were also more accurate than our current one.

The early Puritans in New England outlawed the celebration of Christmas between 1659 and 1681 due to its pagan roots, as well as the fact that the "lower classes" used it as an excuse for "rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the thread of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes." (Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas). There was a fine of five shillings for “keeping” Christmas. Christmas as we know it, with a focus on children and gift-giving, was not celebrated until the mid-1800's.

It is well-established that some time in the fourth century the early Christians moved the date of Jesus’ birth to December so it would coincide with the Roman Saturnalia and thus avoid persecution. Other religious year-end myths are manifestly modeled on the celebration of the Winter Solstice. So during this winter holiday season, I wish you all a Happy Winter Solstice. Spring is coming.

Worldox integration with Microsoft Teams

More and more firms are using some sort of portal or file sharing application to communicate with clients working from home. The workflow for file sharing varies widely from firm to firm. I did an extensive post about this back in July. Click here to see it.

Worldox has recently released an integration with Microsoft Teams. Obviously this means that the people the firm is collaborating also have to have Teams/Office 365, but this is increasingly the case with law firms.

The integration creates a Team named with the client/matter number for the given matter. This may seem rigid, but is essential to prevent users from going wild and creating random, duplicative Teams. Within each team, users can create “Channels” to specify what exactly they are sharing with clients and define who has rights to see and manage the contents.

From within Worldox, you can then share one or more files with the defined Team/Channel (and if necessary create a new Channel for that team). Files can either be just copied from Worldox or checked out (which would mean they can no longer be edited from within Worldox). After the client has worked on them (or whatever), they can be checked back in, as a Version of the original file if necessary. Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to add a comment when creating a version, but hopefully that is in the works.

Once a file is in Teams, the Teams functionality takes over in terms of editing and collaborating on the document: Worldox no longer has anything else to do with it.

The best part of this integration, especially compared with some other offerings, is that it is free. There is no charge from Worldox, and many firms have Teams as part of Office 365.

Worldox in One Hour for Lawyers

The third edition of my book, Worldox in One Hour for Lawyers, published by the ABA’s Law Practice Division, covers the numerous changes to Worldox GX4 since the program was first released in 2015. These include notably:
• The new Outlook integration which allows users to drag and drop emails to Outlook folders and have them filed directly to Worldox with no further user intervention. Note that while this and other changes do not involve any additional cost, there is significant setup and configuration time involved. This will be particularly attractive to high volume smartphone users, since they can now file emails to Worldox from their phone without needing to have Outlook open on their office computer.
• The new Web 3.1 internet access module replaces the old version (which had involved significant additional cost) and is significantly more robust. It is now actually feasible to “work from home” and to access Worldox with a Mac over the internet. In addition, an add-in provides internet access directly from Word or other programs. When you open or save a file in Word, the Web 3.1 module opens and takes you directly to your document store.
• New Indexer as a Service. Although this is not immediately relevant to end users, it does provide more reliable indexing as well as better reporting.
• Various other improvements, such as the ability to drag files directly from inside a zip file to Worldox without un-zipping the file first.
It can be ordered from the ABA bookstore.

Evaluating Cloud Hosting Companies

Working from home, a necessity during the COVID pandemic, will no doubt increase on a permanent basis in the future. And with it pressure to “go to the cloud” to facilitate working from home and in many cases to escape the burden of managing an on-premises network.

It is important to understand what this means. When people talk about “the cloud” they generally mean one of two things. First, SaaS (“Service as a Software”), pure cloud-based programs. These are programs that run directly from the cloud to whatever local machine you are using (e.g., Clio, NetDocuments, Cosmolex). Worldox also has a cloud version. They take one item at a time off your desktop. But the rest of a firm’s infrastructure and the need for local PCs, servers, etc., remains intact. A single cloud-based program changes the firm’s infrastructure needs only incrementally.

The second, Cloud Hosting, essentially takes your entire local infrastructure, both servers and desktops, and puts it in the cloud. Once you log in you have what looks just like your local desktop, but everything is operating inside the cloud. This has many advantages, including the fact that you are still using your “on-premise” software, but the “premise” is now located in the cloud. This will typically result in a much faster response time, since there is a lot less internet traffic that SaaS programs. It can also eliminate the need for your on-premises network.

How do you evaluate the various Cloud Hosting companies? Worldox has been hosting a series of webinars with companies that offer these services: ProCirrus, BoxTop, Rekall Technologies, BMC Networks (located in Canada). There are three main areas to consider.

Basic Hardware and Structure
At this point in time, the basic structure various vendors are offering is roughly equivalent. They all offer security certifications, geographically separated backup locations (e.g., East Coast and Midwest), anti-virus and other security, anti-phishing and ransomware protection software etc. One thing to ask is whether a company owns its own infrastructure (which would require being of a certain size to get economies of scale) or whether it piggy-backs on one of the giants, Azure, Amazon or Rackspace. A second question is whether it offers security software only within their own system, or also on users’ laptops, PCs, etc. Will the system be accessible by Macs, iPads, etc. in addition to PCs? Are there direct web-based workarounds if you don’t have access to your personal laptop?

What desktop interface does the company offer? Most offer an interface that looks like your local desktop (whether through Microsoft’s Remote Desktop or a dedicated virtual desktop), but some offer a funky dashboard with your various apps. Various claims to the contrary notwithstanding I don’t see a qualitative difference among these options, but some people may.

Services Offered
With that in mind, what services and software are included in the base price of Cloud Hosting? With the goal of eliminating the need to manage an on-premise network, most companies include basic backup, anti-virus, ransomware protection and other security software. But some companies also include Office and Outlook in their base price, which is obviously an advantage. The hosting company should ideally include all updates/upgrades as part of its service.

Does the hosting company just set up within their own system, or include protection for local PCs/Laptops etc. While the Cloud system may be secure, what if a local laptop or iPhone is hacked and then used to gain access to the system?

Does the hosting company also offer to physically support your local PCs/laptops, including rolling out new machines? This may be geographically dependent on how close they are physically, but would be a definite advantage.

You may or may not want to keep your current IT vendor. An all-encompassing Cloud Hosting vendor may eliminate the need for local IT. If that is not what you need, is the company flexible enough to accommodate working with your current IT vendor?

Software Support
While IT companies are good at what they do, their knowledge of the legal specific software they are supporting is typically minimal at best. When it comes to configuring your software to be most productive and efficient chances are they will be at a complete loss. When working with Cloud Hosting companies, I generally try to arrange it so that I will take care of all but the very most basic Worldox issues, and they deal with the hardware. Best of both worlds.

How Do You Choose?
Unless there is substantial difference in pricing and hardware configuration, my feeling that services and support are the key issues here. What services is the company actually willing/able to take over? This also depends on whether you want to keep your current IT provider in some capacity or not. What kind of connectivity and software support does the company offer? Can it actually support the software you are using in any meaningful manner? If not, does it have certified consultants for the various programs on call?

Answers to those questions will point in the direction of a good solution for your firm.

The 2020 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide (a Review)

Why should you read this book, the thirteenth edition of The Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide by Nelson, Simek and Maschke? There are two reasons. If you are starting up a small firm or considering upgrades it provides invaluable advice. There is a second reason, perhaps even more important. Since the ABA revised its Model Rules to require that lawyers be competent with the technology tools they use, 38 states have adopted similar rules (interestingly, California is not among them). If you sometimes wonder whether the technology you use is actually productive for your firm or if you are losing ground to competing firms, reading this book will bring you up to speed and give you a pretty good idea of where your firm stands from a technology point of view, even if you choose not to make changes. Increasingly, the argument “I’m a lawyer, not a techie” (in whatever version it is formulated) is simply not going to be ethically acceptable. Even if some topics just leave you scratching your head, at least they give you something to ask your consultant about.

You do have a consultant, don’t you? The authors touch on this frequently (“consult an expert”) but the bottom line is simple: If you think hiring a professional is expensive, try hiring an amateur! A consultant will save the firm substantial money in the near term.

The thing I have always appreciated about this book is that the authors actually have opinions and are not afraid to express them. They generally do not simply regurgitate a vendor’s “feature lists” without examining how well, or indeed whether or not, they work. Of course, it also helps that by and large I agree with them, although with the occasional caveat. They rightly note that they can’t cover everything and have tried to provide “best of breed” advice. If you follow their recommendations you may not make the best decision possible, but you won’t make a bad one. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

They are particularly outraged by vendors who refuse to publish their pricing so that they can get your information, push a demo and sell you something you may or may not want. Software vendors as used car salesmen!

The book covers three sorts of topics: hardware, software, and security, security, security.

Hardware

Their small firm hardware would include Dell workstations and servers, Fujitsu desktop scanners, HP printers and Samsung smartphones (NOT iPhones). Funny, that’s exactly what I have. One useful point is that they specify 16GB memory for the desktops, as well as Solid State Drives. Good idea — most people aren’t doing the memory part, although Solid State Drives are coming to be the new standard. As for more exotic topics like wiring, network switches, and other connectivity hardware, look at the book and ask your consultant.

Software

There are obviously a lot more options here. As a document management consultant, I would note that one question to ask of the “document management” functions of practice management or other programs is: do they give you “Google for your documents,” as well as appropriate security, ethical walls, legal holds, and other advanced features?

One issue they don’t address is the question of integrating the various software options a firm chooses. This is at least in part because there are simply too many parameters among multiple options. However, it is critical to address. If you are leaning toward Option A and Option B, how do the two integrate together? For example, if you want to select a practice management or time and billing program, how will it integrate with your document management program so that new client matter numbers will automatically be transferred to the document management program? The integration between their “top choice”programs, Practice Master/Tabs3 and Worldox, is among the best there is.

Security

The security information the authors offer is extremely detailed (and likely beyond most users) but it can be boiled down to two points: encrypt everything and use Multi-Factor Authentication and good passwords.

Security is a hard sell where lawyers are concerned. Although some things are easy (encrypting your hard drives), added security almost always means extra steps. Lawyers want to access their web sites with one click, not three separate and time-consuming steps (click, put in the password, wait to receive a text message and put in the 2-factor authentication code).

If you follow their suggestions, especially when out of the office or traveling, you will almost certainly be secure, but your normal workflow will be seriously disrupted. Many, if not most, lawyers are not willing to accept that tradeoff.

But probably the most serious security issue today is the increased sophistication of crypto attacks. They address this briefly in a section on “catfishing,” but here’s an example. I recently received an email purporting to be a reply to an email I had sent to one of my clients. It was “from” the managing partner of the firm, and included the subject line and text of an actual email I had sent, and raised a question about a billing issue, including an attachment. Fake!! And I have recently gotten similar emails (although not as sophisticated as that one) from people at two other consulting firms I have dealt with.

The authors explicitly focus on core issues and do not try to cover “everything” (superficially), which is one of the main strengths of the book. Nevertheless, I thought some things were missing. I would have liked to see a discussion of password managers, which is totally absent except for a passing reference to Last Pass as a free add-on with a LogMeIn subscription.

The OCR section doesn’t take into account integrating scanned documents with a document management system, although OmniPage does integrate with Worldox, for example. For this I generally use Symphony OCR from Trumpet, which does a great job for only $50/user/year and automatically OCR’s all the PDFs on your system.

There is no discussion of e-discovery or similar issues, but that might be something that primarily affects larger firms.

Lastly, there is no organized discussion of e-signatures, although that functionality is available in Acrobat.

But all in all, a must read for a small firm or startup to decide what they need, review their current options or upgrade to something new, such as hosted/cloud solutions.

The book is available from Amazon or the ABA BookStore

Happy Winter Solstice

It’s Winter Solstice – er, holiday – time again.

The Winter Solstice has traditionally been celebrated by homo sapiens in the northern hemisphere for at least 5,000 years as marking the point where the days start getting longer. Maes Howe in Orkney (north of Scotland) is a very large chambered cairn. The 45 foot long entrance way is constructed so that the setting sun shines directly through the passageway onto the back wall of the cairn on the shortest day of the year, setting directly over a large standing stone placed a half-mile or so from the entrance. And of course a similar setup at Stonehenge is even more well-known. There are even several hundred such sites in New England (“Mystery Hill” for example) and in the Southwest.

Pre-historic/neolithic peoples were of necessity acute astronomers – their existence depended on crops and seasons. The Mayan long calender was more accurate than our current calender with its leap years every four years and "super leap years" at the turn of the century once every 400 years. Other calendars (in India and Mesopotamia – Omar Khayyam was a much better mathematician and astronomer than he was a poet) were also more accurate than our current one.

The early Puritans in New England outlawed the celebration of Christmas between 1659 and 1681 due to its pagan roots, as well as the fact that the "lower classes" used it as an excuse for "rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the thread of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes." (Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas). There was a fine of five shillings for “keeping” Christmas. Christmas as we know it, with a focus on children and gift-giving, was not celebrated until the mid-1800's.

It is well-established that some time in the fourth century the early Christians moved the date of Jesus’ birth to December so it would coincide with the Roman Saturnalia and thus avoid persecution. Other religious year-end myths are manifestly modeled on the celebration of the Winter Solstice. So during this winter holiday season, I wish you all a Happy Winter Solstice. Spring is coming.

1000 Posts!

Last week’s blog post was my 1,000th post! I started this blog 12 years ago, in April 2007. Originally, it was much more wide ranging, including favorite quotes (“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” - Boswell, Life of Johnson, April 7, 1775; or “Justice without strength is helpless, strength without justice is tyrannical...Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.” – Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662) and entries on the variety of software programs I supported at the time - Amicus Attorney, Time Matters, PCLaw and others.

For the last several years, I have parted ways with those other programs in order to focus almost exclusively on Worldox, including writing Worldox in One Hour for Lawyers, published by the American Bar Association. Many of my posts formed the basis for elements in the book. Just a matter of stringing them together and connecting the dots.

Some other tidbits: total of 400,000 lifetime page views (scary!), for an average of about 93 per day.

Some people have asked me how I think up things to blog about. The main answer is simple: my clients let me know. Every time I get an interesting question from a client, or deal with an issue a client is having, I figure that question will also be of interest to other people, and I blog about it. So keep the questions coming!

Happy Winter Solstice!

It’s Winter Solstice – er, holiday – time again.

The Winter Solstice has traditionally been celebrated by homo sapiens in the northern hemisphere for at least 5,000 years as marking the point where the days start getting longer. Maes Howe in Orkney (north of Scotland) is a very large chambered cairn. The 45 foot long entrance way is constructed so that the setting sun shines directly through the passageway onto the back wall of the cairn on the shortest day of the year, setting directly over a large standing stone placed a half-mile or so from the entrance. And of course a similar setup at Stonehenge is even more well-known. There are even several hundred such sites in New England (“Mystery Hill” for example) and in the Southwest.

Pre-historic/neolithic peoples were of necessity acute astronomers – their existence depended on crops and seasons. The Mayan long calender was more accurate than our current calender with its leap years every four years and "super leap years" at the turn of the century once every 400 years. Other calendars (in India and Mesopotamia – Omar Khayyam was a much better mathematician and astronomer than he was a poet) were also more accurate than our current one.

The early Puritans in New England outlawed the celebration of Christmas between 1659 and 1681 due to its pagan roots, as well as the fact that the "lower classes" used it as an excuse for "rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the thread of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes." (Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas). There was a fine of five shillings for “keeping” Christmas. Christmas as we know it, with a focus on children and gift-giving, was not celebrated until the mid-1800's.

It is well-established that some time in the fourth century the early Christians moved the date of Jesus’ birth to December so it would coincide with the Roman Saturnalia and thus avoid persecution. Other religious year-end myths are manifestly modeled on the celebration of the Winter Solstice. So during this winter holiday season, I wish you all a Happy Winter Solstice. Spring is coming.

The ROI of Additional Training

Most firms, when they install new software, so some sort of training. The results of which are frequently abysmal, as Casey Flaherty demonstrated with his “Legal Tech Audit” several years ago. Add to this the new Bar Association requirements in many states that attorneys be more or less computer literate, and you have a training issue. My experience is mainly with Worldox, but the following is applicable to most software programs.

After the initial training, most firms don’t do any follow-up training or refresher training after a period of time. New hires frequently have to "muddle through" with ad hoc assistance from other users. Refresher training generally serves three purposes:

1) It lets users ask specific questions they might have and customize the program to meet their particular needs.
2) It helps establish a minimum level of competency and bring users up to speed. It will also fill in the gaps for new users without much formal training.
3) It allows for the introduction of new and/or advanced features that may not have been covered initially.

So why don’t more firms do this? Aside from simple inertia, objections to refresher training tend to invoke two main arguments.

The first is: we’re too busy. Aside from periods of peak activity, this argument is oxymoronic, since it boils down to the following statement: “we’re too busy to do anything that will increase efficiency and productivity and consequently become less busy.”

The second argument is: it’s too expensive. This is much more interesting, if equally fallacious. Most smaller firms don’t do a lot of ROI (Return On Investment) analysis, but consider the following: An hour or two of training for, say, 6 people, will cost $200-400. If each of those 6 people save 6 minutes a day, or 30 minutes a week, the total time savings for the firm is 25 hours per year per person, or 150 hours. If you assume a conservative pro forma billing rate for assistants and paralegals of $50/hour, then the time savings per year is $7,500. Cut the time savings in half and you still have a substantial gain.

Equally important is the decrease in frustration and aggravation that better training accomplishes. Many studies show that happier people are more productive.

So in reality the question is not: what does it cost to do refresher training, but what does it cost a firm NOT to train. Firms need to be proactive in this area.