Does It Compute?

Worldox - Processing the Mail during Covid-19

Most firms have instituted working from home, in part or all during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some have skeleton (and/or rotating) staffs to do things that cannot be done electronically such as processing incoming mail. Worldox offers an efficient way to do this while minimizing contact.

Assume you can get the actual physical mail, either in the office, forwarded to a home, or picked up at the Post Office. The person in charge of this gets the mail and scans it into Worldox, either in the office or in a small home scanner such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap ix1500. They then save the scan to Worldox either to where it should go or to a temporary location (“incoming mail”).

Now here’s the nifty part. Create a “category” in Worldox GX4 for each attorney and staff member: atty1review; atty2review; paralegal1review, etc. These categories are searchable.

So when atty1 logs in remotely, they do a search for the category “atty1review.”This will bring up all the documents marked for review. Review the document as needed and, when done, remove the category from the document. Since you can assign more than one category to a document (unlike doctypes, where there can only be one doctype per document), the intake person could assign review categories to more than one person. You might even create a personal bookmark for “review documents” for ease of use. That way, you can check on all incoming mail that needs your review with a single click on the bookmark.

This minimizes contact and is considerably more efficient than, for example, emailing the documents to be reviewed to one or more attorneys, who then not only have to review them but process them as well.

Optimizing Workflow in Worldox

Firms considering Worldox or reviewing their configuration frequently start from a “look and feel.” Users want (or think they want) Worldox to look like the so-called “modern” systems like NetDocs or iManage (which in turn usually look like windows explorer-type folder structure).
This is a mistake. The question to ask yourself is: what do you want Worldox (or any other system) to DO? What is your standard workflow? You can then match the look and feel to the workflow, not the other way around. What is the request you most often want to make of the system? Rather than thinking of your documents as if Worldox were a glorified windows explorer system, think of it as Google for your documents. Take advantage of the indexed searches.

• Show me all the documents for a given matter.
• Show me all documents of a certain type – pleadings, agreements, retainers, etc.
• Show me all the documents I worked on in the last 7 days.
• Show me all documents containing given names, terms, etc. (very useful for conflict checking).
• Documents satisfying more advanced (boolean) critera: a certain type of document containing certain language in a given date range.

Worldox offers a variety of configuration shortcuts that let you tailor it to what you need, including on an individual user basis.

The first and most flexible is Bookmarks. Bookmarks let you bring up a pre-configured search screen and fill in what you need. This will always save you at least several clicks over the basic “search” icon. This lets you customize a search extensively and searching based on a table/index is always going to be more efficient than scrolling through a folder tree. Many people just look for all the documents in a given matter. This frequently produces more documents than can be dealt with conveniently.

Which leads to the second option: Filters. There is a “Filter” tab at the bottom left of the Worldox screen. Clicking on it lets you see all the metadata for the documents on the screen. This lets you sub-select by doc type, actual type of document (*.xlsx, *.pdf, etc.), Worldox categories, etc. You can do a quick secondary search without having to actually fire up a search request again.

One of the most common options is “Favorite Matters.” These are everything you have accessed recently at the left tab of the Worldox screen. There is a serious caveat here. These show up ONLY things that are actual directories. So if your DocTypes are not actual directories, you can see only matters, not doc types. Conversely, if your DocTypes ARE directories, you can only locate a single doc type at a time, you cannot bring up all the documents for a given matter. This is a good reason NOT to configure DocTypes as folders on your system.

Unlike some systems, Worldox does not allow users to create random sub-folders in a given matter independent of the indexed metadata. However, it does offer an equivalent in Workspaces. Workspaces lets you create collections of documents that may or may not be otherwise linked in an organized fashion. The most typical examples of this are various kinds of lists of documents: Closing Binders in real estate, lists of Exhibits or other ancillary documents, collections of the same type of documents drawn from different matters, etc. You might also use Workspaces to collect a variety of boilerplate provisions.

Lastly, there is a quick and dirty search. If you know a doc id number (many firms print them at the bottom of the page) you can just plug it in to the Search field at the top right of the display and the document will pop right up. This field also lets you do a quick search for any given word or term that occurs either in a document name or in the text of any document on your Worldox system.

Top Ten Productivity Enhancers for Worldox

When Worldox is first implemented at a firm, many users treat it as a sort of Windows Explorer on steroids. They want to “work the way they’re used to” and scroll up and down a directory structure even from within Worldox. Sure, you can do this, but why? If you think of your document store as a huge book, and you want to find something, you can scroll through the table of contents (the directory structure) or you can use the index at the back of the book (a Worldox search). Obviously the latter is faster and more reliable in terms of not missing anything. If you scroll through the directory structure you are making the assumption that no documents have ever been misfiled, dragged to the wrong directory etc. Yeah, right. Innovation, after all, means changing the way you work.

The following is a “top ten” list of ways to enhance your productivity in Worldox.

Bookmarks. Any well-designed Worldox implementation should have a number of basic bookmarks (like the bookmarks you probably have in your internet browser). These will save you 1-3 clicks every time you start any kind of search. In addition, you can easily create additional bookmarks while you are working on a specific matter, and then delete them when the matter closes.

Client name lookups. In Worldox GX4, you can simply type in any text into the client or matter field and it will bring up a list of client descriptions that match. You can then select the appropriate one. This is high on the “wow” factor during upgrade training.

Favorite Matters. At the left of the main Worldox screen there are a number of tabs, including “Favorite Matters.” In a standard Worldox installation, this lists all the matters you have worked on in the last 30 day. Simply clicking on one provides an instant search for all documents in that matter.

My Favs. Everyone has documents they use all the time. Many people used to keep copies of these on their desktop for ease of access. Creating a “My Favs” list lets you reproduce this in Worldox. If you click on the icon at the left of a document listing in Worldox it turns red, which means it is permanently a “Favorite.” You can make an instant search for all the files you use every day - forms, letterhead, boilerplate, time sheets, etc. by creating a bookmark called, say, “My Favs” based on the “added” category under Favorite Files. Then you can select or de-select documents to keep your list up to date.

Worldox Ribbon in Word. The Worldox ribbon in Word has been considerably enhanced to include several very useful functions: The white (or yellow) square on the QuickAccess Toolbar brings up the Worldox save screen. Within the ribbon, you can search for a DocID or Name/Content; search for all the Word documents you have used recently; create a PDF or PDF/A (required by some courts), and control your file stamping options. Take a minute to review what is available.

Combined search. At the top right of the Worldox display, there is a search field. This is normally configured to search for a doc id or any text in the Name or Text of a document. These results are now displayed as “snippets” underneath the file name. If there are multiple “hits” you can scroll through them without opening or even viewing the documents (they are listed as e.g., 1 of 4). Click on the little binoculars icon to the left of the search box to customize.

Filters. If a search turns up a very large number of documents, you can filter the results by clicking on the “Filters” tab at the bottom of the screen. This lets you select just specific document types, authors, matters, or any other criteria on the profile screen.

Viewer. The Viewer is your friend. If you select the magnifying glass at the top left of the button bar or the “View” button at the right side of the screen you can view a document without opening it. From the main viewer you can size the screen the way you want and save it so it always appears that way (for example full size on a second monitor). You can scroll through your documents and view each one without opening the program. You can also copy and paste from the viewer into the document you are working to if you want to re-use existing language, boilerplate, etc.

Copy instead of open/save as. Many times you want to reuse an old document or form as the basis for a new one. The traditional method for doing this is to open the document and do a “save as” to make the new one. Everyone has at one time or another forgotten to do the “save as” and wiped out the original. Worldox has a better way. If you right click on the document you want to use and select “copy” you can copy it to a new document BEFORE you open it. You then open it and start work. This process is not only easier and quicker, but drastically reduces errors.

Boolean Searches. Worldox has a full complement of Boolean search capabilities. One that I use all the time is the “NOT” operator. For any given client, the number of emails may overwhelm all the other documents for that matter. Therefore if you do a search for the matter, but include “NOT email” as the doc type, you will find only the documents and exclude the emails. This can yield much more efficient search results.

Copying Forms and Documents in Worldox

Many firms have “Form Banks” where they keep copies of the forms and other boilerplate that various practice areas use. (And if you don’t you should consider implementing one.)

The most common way people access these is to open a document and then do a “Save As” and save it as a new file to edit. Naturally, almost everyone has at one time or another forgotten the “Save As” step and edited the main file.

Worldox offers a better way. If you select the form on the Worldox display, right-click and select “Copy” (the first time you do this you may have to click on “More” to get the copy option) you can then copy the form to the appropriate client/matter and begin using it. This is not saves several steps compared to going through the Save As / Save as New File process but avoids error.

It also avoids an issue with the most recent builds of Word (1905 and above) which disrupt the “Save as New File” process and leave the user hanging in the middle, with the new document created but not opened.

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

Outlook update breaks Worldox integration

When firms update Outlook to version 1905 or higher, the integration with Worldox is broken. When you go to attach a document to an email, instead of attaching the Outlook address book pops up.

This is likely to happen automatically - you come in one fine morning and can’t attach anything to Outlook. Check under File | Office Account | About Outlook for the version number.

Fortunately, this is a 5-minute fix. You have to get your consultant to apply an update that is available on the Support Articles of the Worldox Knowledge Base web site: “Microsoft Outlook Version 1905 and Higher Updates Causing File Attachment Issues.” If you want to get ahead of the game, you can get ahead of the game by applying the patch BEFORE the Outlook update breaks your integration.

My Worldox Configuration

Over the years, I have come to make some standard changes to the default Worldox configuration that ships with the program. Here are some of the settings/changes I routinely implement when configuring a client.

Profile sheet. When you search for a document, the standard Worldox Profile sheet looks like this:
Name
DocID
Owner
Date Created
Date Modified
Date Accessed
Text

In the Cabinet fields, you typically have
Client
Matter
DocType
Author
Typist

There are a number of problems here. First, logically, searching for a document name or text in the document belong together, so I move “text” up under “Name.” The “Owner” field is a misnomer, since it is a system label that means the last person to have used a document. It has absolutely nothing to do with who “owns” a document. So I change this to “Last Used By.”
Usually, the three date fields are excessive. The one that counts is the last time a document was worked on, so I take out date created and date accessed.

In the Cabinet fields, for most small and mid-size firms, there is no longer a meaningful distinction between Author and Typist (as opposed to many years ago when I first started work in a “Word Processing Pool” at a large law firm when word processing was considered an independent skill).

This leaves the client with a much cleaner setup:
Name
Text
Doc ID
Last Used By
Date Modified
Client
Matter
Doc Type
Author

Bookmarks and Custom Displays
In my view, any installation that does not seriously implement bookmarks is a poor installation. Bookmarks will save the user 2-3 clicks every time they do a search, which could be hundreds of times a day. I typically put in at least bookmarks for Client Files, Emails, Legacy, “My Favs” and items limited to certain people such as Admin. These are associated with custom displays (the “Email” search displays to and from fields in emails, whereas the others do not).

Deleting Files.

By default, Worldox offers three options: delete, shred (overwrite files according to DoD specifications) and Salvage Bin, which is like a network-based recycle bin that enables authorized users to recover files. I always eliminate the first two options. That way, there is always a way to recover from the “oh, damn, I didn’t mean to do that” when users accidentally delete a file. In addition, it prevents any malicious destruction of files.

Various Other Options.
There is an option to spell check descriptions. I turn it off, as it is too intrusive given the large number of client names, abbreviations, etc that are typically in descriptions.
I turn off the “automatically resize columns” option since it tends to interfere with saving custom displays (especially when you are showing To and From columns for emails).

Footer Stamp. Worldox offers a number of ways to put a footer in documents. Most firms opt to put in the document ID and version number, but other options are available.

Exporting Documents. This will depend on the individual firms. Various ways create “Send To” commands to export files to USB drives, local directories or other options can be implemented.

Various. There are always various other settings according to how the firm wants to work. Keep in mind, however, that the way a firm thinks it wants to accomplish certain productivity goals may not, in fact, be the best means to accomplish their goals.

Optimizing Word for Worldox

How can you make your Word integration with Worldox most efficient? There are a number of configuration and other options that are much more efficient than clicking through multiple menus.

First, if you are among the dying breed of good typists, there are the keyboard commands: Ctrl-O (Open), Ctrl-S (Save), Ctrl-P (Print) and, in Word, F12 for Save As. The basic commands tend to be available in all Windows programs, so that’s an extra advantage.

Second, the first thing to do when Word is first installed is to configure the Quick Access Toolbar. This sits above the menu items and gives you one click access to selected features. My standard configuration includes File Open, New File, Save, Save As, Print, and Exit. Worldox will also add some items to the Quick Access Toolbar.

By default, Worldox disables the Red “X” at the upper right corner of Word because using it can interfere with the Audit trail and in rare cases can cause loss of data. Many firms don’t care and just re-enable it anyway. However, if you put Exit in the Quick Access Toolbar you have the same efficiency without the potential problems.

The Worldox Ribbon bar offers a number of productivity enhancements.
• You can see your most recently used files directly from Word by clicking on “Document Favorites.”
• You can create a PDF or PDF/A (a format frequently required by courts) directly from the ribbon bar.
• If your firm typically puts a doc id or other information in a Word footer you can adjust or eliminate this (for example, when sending documents to a client).

Worldox and IT Preconceptions

With end of life Server 2008 and Windows 7 in January 2020, many firms are updating their servers and workstations. In terms of Worldox, the first place most IT firms get confused has to do with the Worldox Indexer, almost always referred to erroneously as the “Worldox Server.”

The Indexer is NOT a Server. A server “serves” other applications. Workstations log into a server to open or save files, process data, access databases, etc. No users (aside from the indexer user) ever log in to the indexer. Nothing on the indexer is accessed or processed by another user or PC.

Instead, the Indexer is a workstation (even if it runs Server software) which watches for the metadata files Worldox creates when it opens or saves documents, processes them, and updates the indexes, which reside on the file server. Typically at night and on the weekend, the Indexer updates or rebuilds the indexes. Again, the indexer is logging in to a server and doing things, it is not a server.

Why does this matter? First, the indexer is typically used for troubleshooting without having to bother end users. It has the full MS Office and Outlook installed (Worldox requires at least an Outlook profile, since it uses Outlook dlls to index emails). So you may need to reboot the indexer at various points. If you were to run the indexer on the main file server and just reboot it if needed, all hell would break loose, since you would be rebooting the main file server as well.

Second, various ancillary add-in programs such as Symphony OCR are typically run on the indexer. With the new Worldox Web 3.0, the Web Proxy Server may also run on the indexer.

In short, the indexer is a specialized workstation. It needs to be fairly robust with plenty of memory to rebuild the indexes on a weekly basis (so that they stay “clean”).

This is conceptually critical when it comes to moving Worldox to a new server. A new indexer can be rolled out independent of the Worldox installation. For a new server, worldox setting must be changed on the server itself, independent of the indexer. Updating the indexer has nothing to do with moving Worldox to a new server (although for convenience they are frequently done at the same time).

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.