Does It Compute?

To Cloud or Not To Cloud?

More and more firms are moving, or considering moving, to cloud-based applications.  Cloud-based programs make a lot of claims and quote a lot of facts (and sometimes alternative facts).

What are the basic considerations here?

The advantages to moving to a cloud application are obvious and much-trumpeted.

• You can access the program from anywhere seamlessly and usually from any device (laptop, smartphone, iPad).

• The cloud vendor takes over your IT structure: you no longer have to manage the servers involved with the application, network problems, etc.

• The cloud vendor takes care of updates: they are automatically dropped down to your devices.

• Since there is a monthly subscription fee, there is no up-front “buy-in” cost. Your costs are substantially lower at the outset.

• Disaster recovery. Assuming your vendor is set up properly, you do not have to worry about disaster recovery issues.  This can be a critical element, especially if the firm is in a flood/hurricane zone. After Hurricane Sandy on the east coast in 2012, I had one client call me and say “I don’t care what it costs, I want to move to the cloud.” Their entire office had been essentially non-functional for nearly two weeks.

But what about the disadvantages?

• First and foremost, you are tied to your internet connection.  You will NEVER get the same throughput you would get on an in-house server or even a Terminal Server (now rebaptized a Remote Desktop Server).  Internet service varies widely depending on where you live. In addition to service at your office, be sure to check your users’ home internet connections before you take the leap. You may have to upgrade your office internet connection to get acceptable performance. A cloud application does not automatically mean you will be able to work productively in a Starbuck’s.

• You will not have the same functionality as with in-house network apps. This is partly for historical reasons and partly for bandwidth considerations. Before you have a demo, make a check-list of the functions you use regularly and are critical to your practice and make sure those functions exist in your proposed cloud app.

•  Unless you go 100% internet, you will still have in-house servers, so while your in-house IT expense may be reduced, it won’t go away entirely. Calculate carefully what will go away and what in-house functions you will still need.

•  Over a longer term (3-5 years) cloud applications are almost certain to be more expensive than the in-house equivalent. Sure, you don’t have the buy-in, but you have the same monthly payment year after year after year. This is analogous to leasing a car. You don’t lease a car for three years in order to save money in the long run. This is true even when you make allowances for savings on in-house IT expenses.

Cloud applications can provide essential productivity. But in many cases the drawbacks can be a deal breaker.  Do your research thoroughly before you jump. If you are in a position to stall, there will almost certainly be better cloud options 2 or 3 years down the road.

One Size Fits All or Best of Breed?

When exploring the options for implementing Practice Management, Document Management and related software, firms are faced with choosing between One Size Fits All programs (“we’re the only software you need, we do it all”) and Best of Breed programs.

The obvious tradeoff here is that One Size Fits All does exactly that: you have one program, one consultant and don’t need to worry about compatibility, integration, etc. However, there is a downside to these programs. Historically, they developed to do one or two things (contacts, calendaring, etc.). As computers got more powerful and the programs grew, they added new features (email, document management). The problem here is that while the original core functions are usually quite good, the later add-ons such as email or document management are frequently second-rate at best. So the firm winds up being short-changed on features and functionality that could be key to its practice.

Best of Breed is also what it sounds like: you pick the programs that best meet the firm’s needs in specific areas: practice management, time & billing, document management, court scheduling, and so on. This potentially raises integration issues and dealing with multiple consultants, but on the other hand the firm has the best functionality available for specific needs.

This is not always an easy choice: if a second-rate feature of a one size fits all program is something that is not critical to the firm’s needs, then that program might be a good choice.  Obviously as a consultant for Worldox, I have a vested interest in the Best of Breed solution, but it may not always be the best option for specific firms.

There is an analogous choice when firms select consultants.

Many firms like to pass everything through their IT consultants. This is convenient, since there is always only one number to call. IT firms obviously like it because it increases their revenue.

But very often, IT firms that are hardware-oriented have only a very limited knowledge of software programs that firms are using, such as Worldox or other document management or practice management software. This frequently creates two kinds of problems.

First, the firms get incomplete or bad advice about their software. IT firms may be able to do a minimal install but it is very unusual for hardware-based IT firms to be able to optimize an installation (there are a few exceptions to this rule, but not many). The better IT firms recognize this and work closely with software consultants for specific programs. This works well for both the hardware and software companies, since they each do only what they do best.

The second problem is the delays and expense of phone tag. The firm calls the IT company. They muck around but can’t solve the issue. They call the software consultant, who calls them back and gets insufficient information. So after several back and forths, the consultant finally calls the appropriate person at the firm and resolves the issue.  This is a bad and time-consuming solution for everyone involved.

So, while I may have a vested interest, I still believe it is in a firm’s best interest to go with best of breed even at the inconvenience of multiple consultants. It will be more cost-effective and the firm will have a better configuration in the long run.

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 (about 100 feet in diameter and 22 feet high on the outside: the interior chamber is about 14 feet square and about the same height). 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 stone (the Barnhouse 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).

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"). 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.

Books I've Read This Year

Everybody seems to be doing year-end list. So here's mine:  these are the books I've read and benefited from this year.

Julian Jackson, France, the Dark Years, 1940-1944

Aldrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt’s New World

Abigail Tucker, The Lion in the Living Room

John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861

Alan Taylor, American Revolutions

Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812

Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. III (also vols. I and II)

Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: the Enigma (much better than the movie).

Sharon Nelson, et. Al, Locked Down

Siddhartha Mukerjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

Readings on American History

I’ve been doing a lot of reading in American history lately. Normally when people think of history it is as a series of isolated dots: Pilgrims 1620, 1776, War of 1812, Civil War, and so on. If you try to think about what happened in between, you generally come up blank. As yourself what happened between 1620 and 1776, you might come up with the Salem Witch Trials, but other than that, who knows?  The following books are a great way to fill in the blanks and connect the dots.

Alan Taylor, American Revolutions (2016)

Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812 (2010)

John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956 - just reissued as a paperback)

James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988)

James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire. The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982)

Is Windows 10 Really Worth It?

Despite massive (and sometimes underhanded) pressure from Microsoft to upgrade to Windows 10, there seem to be a growing number of people wondering whether it is really worth it.

Windows 10 is designed around tablet/touch screen use (hence all the oversize buttons), so if you get a Surface Pro 4 or similar, it makes sense. And of course, if you buy a new PC, Windows 10 will come with. But what if your primary use is various business applications and generating documents on a PC rather spending hours on organizing selfies on a tablet? If you do go with Windows 10, be sure to check out the Start10 menu system:  it gives you something much more useful that the Windows 10 menu.

As I have said many times, I always trust what Woody Leonhard has to say.  Here’s his conclusion:

“Is it time for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users to embrace Windows 10? It’s not a clear-cut decision. There’s no killer app, no killer service, and certain drawbacks (forced updates, snooping). Windows 10 is good and steadily improving, but not yet compelling. If you’re happy with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, and Anniversary Update’s key draws (such as Cortana and Windows Ink) don’t ring your chimes, you might as well stay put.”

A few days after that, Woody posted concerning a number of problems users have been experiencing with the anniversary update.

Look at Woody’s two posts on Windows 10: one on avoiding it entirely, and the other on avoiding the problems created by the Anniversary update.

So I now plan to wait until I upgrade my hardware to move to Windows 10.

Check out his reviews on InfoWorld.

"Locked Down" - A Review

As the current saw has it, there are two kinds of law firms: those that know they’ve been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked. The second edition of “Locked Down” by Sharon Nelson, David Ries and John Simek is a must read for anyone concerned with the security of law firm computer systems, as well as mobile and other computers.

Many lawyers just roll their eyes when you start talking about computer security and hackers. But there is no way around it: security needs are driven by the ethical requirement that lawyers be reasonably familiar with technology (as embodied in the ethics opinions of many state bar associations) and the potentially catastrophic cost of breaches, especially in terms of loss of client confidence. And those “ethical requirements” are really just a minimalist starting point in terms of effective security.

When analyzing your security needs it helps to consider the three types of security breaches: targeted, random hacking, and user-generated/social engineering. If the firm is specifically targeted (think: major M&A accounts; lawsuits involving China or the U.S. Government/NSA) there is probably nothing you can do without spending major amounts of money. And of course, email security deserves a section all its own. As Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee have discovered, there is no such thing as secure email. If you want your email to be secure, you must encrypt it, and secure your Outlook Exchange server as well (no small task).

“Locked Down” lists a significant number of major breaches. Frequently it is the FBI that informs a firm it has been hacked. As the authors note, “It is a very interesting question as to how the FBI knows about so many breaches.”

There are two problems with making all or even most of the changes they recommend. The first is that it is expensive. The second is that it will be very disruptive to many attorneys’ routines. The more security you have, the more inconvenient it is to use the computer.

Fortunately, for people who feel overwhelmed or think that they “can’t possibly afford” all the security measures recommended (but can you afford NOT to have better security?), there is the 80/20 rule: 80% of security issues can be taken care of by implementing 20% of security options. So what would the 20% include? The bottom line is that even this is going to mean that many users, perhaps especially attorneys, are going to have to move out of/expand their current comfort zone as far as security measures are concerned.  Attempts at pure enforcement will always fail: as the authors note, “Technology is forever limping far behind the wiles of employees who are determined to do what they want–they are tech anarchists.”

Two areas that firms can do something significant about with relatively little investment are security for portable/mobile devices and end-user social engineering.

Two-factor authentication is the name of the game these days. But what if your cell phone is not welded to your hip, or you are frequently in areas where cell reception is iffy?  The new norm for passwords is 14 characters (up from the previous norm of 8). The best passwords are longer phrases, possibly mixed in with numbers and characters, like this: S1c9r2e8w3T7h4i5s!#. Laborious to enter, but easy to remember and impossible to break. In addition, set a screensaver, including password (a different one from the login password obviously).

One of the things the authors recommend is to invent spurious answers to security questions. For anyone who seriously wants to hack your account, the obvious things (date of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.) are readily available on Facebook or elsewhere on the web. But if you lie on the answer with something only you will remember (you could make yourself 10 years younger), the security question becomes secure again.

The authors refer to the latest statistics from Gartner, which indicate that a laptop is stolen somewhere in the U.S. every 53 seconds. Laptops, tablets and phones represent your greatest risk. They are easy to steal and even easier to forget or misplace.  So the bottom line is that you want full machine encryption including the ability to remote wipe the device if it is stolen. And while one of the attractions of a laptop is the ability to take data with you when visiting clients, that data should be deleted when you get back to the office so that your laptop doesn’t just become a repository of client data. Again, this is relatively easy to achieve.

Worldox is taking a major step toward ensuring the easy encryption of data on a firm’s server by releasing Worldox Encryption At Rest this fall. This will encrypt all your data on the fly, with serious encryption and security. And no back doors for the NSA.

The classic way to hack into a firm is to scatter a bunch of thumb drives in the parking lot. Someone will plug one in to their computer and load a virus or malware.  Social engineering has come a long way since the primitive Nigerian email scams. You need to make users aware of all the pitfalls out there, including false emails addresses that look like emails from firm members. Mandatory training is critical to get users to understand just how sophisticated these scams can be and to avoid them. After all the dramatic increase in Ransomware (cryptolocker in its multiple variations) is possible only due to users falling victim to social engineering traps. In addition, most users should have limited rights and be restricted from installing any software. This will certainly be inconvenient, but the security is worth it.

Locked In goes in to considerable detail about how best to deal with these various issues. You may not decide to take all the recommendations, but you owe it to yourself and your clients to give serious consideration to the authors’ recommendations.

Upgrading to Windows 10?

When Windows 10 first came out, my original plan was to upgrade my existing Windows 7 machines to Windows 10 around June or so (before the “free upgrade” ran out). This was on the assumption that it would give Microsoft time to get the bugs out and fix some of the more outrageous issues.

In the meantime, I have been following Woody Leonhard’s columns very closely. In my view, Woody is the single most reliable source about all things Microsoft and Windows. I almost always follow his advice.

I recently noticed a column Woody did back in February, called “10 Hurdles to Windows 10 adoption.” 

At that time, his “bottom line” was:   “I still think it’s smartest for Windows 7 customers to stand pat, unless they see something in Windows 10 that’s absolutely irresistible.”  

That’s enough to give me second thoughts.  Stay tuned. I am now thinking of going to Plan B and upgrading the next time I buy a new machine.

Susskind, The Future of the Professions

The two authors whose work on technology and automation I always read are Richard Susskind (Tomorrow’s Lawyers) and Nicholas Carr (The Glass Cage; The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains). So when Susskind’s new book, The Future of the Professions (co-authored with his son, Daniel Susskind), came out, I snapped it right up.

The book takes the theses developed in his earlier books specifically about the legal profession, and applies them to other professions as well: accountants and auditors, medicine, consulting firms.

The first part of their argument is self-evident: computers are serving to make various professional functions more efficient and, especially in medicine, reduce error. This ranges from e-discovery (predictive coding and Technology Assisted Review) to what he refers to as “mass customization” where knowledge is embedded in the application. Thus, in systems such as those offered by Practical Law, in response to a series of questions, the application generates a customized document.

No one seriously disputes that this is happening and will continue to happen at increasing rates. There are a number of law schools that are setting up technology institutes to train law students or develop applications, such as the Stanford Legal Design Labs, Legal RnD at Michigan State University or Vermont’s Center for Legal Innovation. In fact, some of the people associated with these institutes think that Susskind is “old hat.”

The more interesting question is what comes next. Masses of professional knowledge of various sorts are now freely available on the web. I can look up a particular medical symptom or ache and pain on the web and find out all kinds of information about it. The problem is, I do not have the knowledge and experience to decide among the possible causes of a particular symptom whether it is trivial or life-threatening.

Thus, the argument goes, computerization and automation may hold sway in transactional law, which is more open to it, but what about the areas that require the experience and practical knowledge to come to a decision?  The Susskinds’ response is that “increasingly capable machines will, in due course, be capable of generating bodies of practice expertise that can resolve the sort of problems that used to be the sole province of human experts in the professions...the machines’ ways of working are likely to bear little resemblance to that of human beings.” This trend is what is generally known as “Big Data.”

Or, to put it another way, this issue will be resolved by Watson’s grandchildren. When IBM’s Watson beat the previous top two winners at Jeopardy in 2011 it marked a turning point. In fact the “Watson Ecosystem” is already being adapted in various areas.  And, as the Susskinds note, by the early 2020s, “Watson will sit comfortably in a smartphone.” Sharon Nelson’s “2016 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide” appears to implicitly agree with this perspective by noting that “Ross”, a legal-oriented “son of Watson” “is a threat to lawyers. We see Ross–and his inevitable siblings and progeny–as a replacement for a lot of paralegals and young lawyers over time, particularly if he masters form-based lawyering and document review, which he certainly will.” There is an excellent review by Sharon Nelson and John Simiek on the Attorney at Work blog. 

This process is a social issue and is subject to a number of constraints, not least those of profit-driven industries which will fight tooth and nail against change if it is seen as threatening profits (which it does). In addition, people psychologically will probably not be willing to accept “having machines make decisions” for another generation at least.

So what can you do (aside from hoping you get to retirement before this goes very much further)?  I think the answer lies along the road of using the new technological advancements to may your practice more efficient.  Lawyers do three kinds of things: (1) gather information; (2) apply their legal experience, what the Susskinds term “practical expertise” to that information; and (3) produce documents.  If technology can be used to reduce the time spent on (1) and (3), there is still a lot of room for human “practical expertise.”

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 (about 100 feet in diameter and 22 feet high on the outside: the interior chamber is about 14 feet square and about the same height). 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 stone (the Barnhouse Stone) placed a half-mile or so from the entrance. And of course a similar setup at Stonehenge is even more well-known.

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"). 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.