Does It Compute?

Worldox Webinars - Bookmarks

For some time Worldox has sponsored informational Webinars about integration and functionality with third party applications.

Since last December, there have been several Webinars with panel participation by senior Worldox consultants, including myself, on a roughly monthly basis.

These include:

• Training/Refresher Training (December)
• Best Practices for using Document Types (January)
• Workspaces/Projects (March)

The next webinar will be Friday April 23 at 2 p.m. on using Bookmarks. You can register for it by clicking here.

Even after 25 years of working with Worldox, I have to say I have picked up at least one or two new tricks from each webinar. Combined, the panelists have close to 200 years experience with Worldox and it shows in the quality of the comments and presentations.

Check out the webinars at www.worldox.com/webinars

Worldox Workspaces/Projects

Worldox Workspaces/Projects are probably one of the program’s most underused features. What exactly is a Workspace? Think of it as an iTunes playlist. It is a collection (list) of documents that may otherwise exist anywhere on the system but are gathered together into a single list, hyperlinking them to the original documents. Some examples:

• List of Exhibits to pleadings, court filings, depositions, or other similar documents.

• Closing Binders in a real estate transaction (this would be the table of contents to the binder).

• List of Court filings. This could be used to compare the filings with what is listed on line.

• List of specific boilerplate options, precedents or other resources. This lets you have them all in one place. Many firms have a “forms library” but creating a Workspace for the ones you use particularly may be more efficient.

• Client intake forms/documents.

• More generally anything that could be compared to a table of contents.

Search Tips in Worldox

Think of Worldox as Google for your documents. Like Google searches, searching in Worldox can be something of an art. Here are some tips that may make it easier.

Finding all the documents for a given matter. The easiest way to do this for a matter you have been working on recently is to click on the Favorite Matters tab at the left of the Worldox screen and then select the desired matter. You can then use the Filter tab at the left of the bottom of the screen to filter documents by doc type, author, etc. You can also type in any part of a client or matter description and Worldox will pop up the clients/matters that fit that description.

Combo Searches. If you have a good idea of what exactly you are searching for you can combine search items in different fields. For example, you can search for a specific doc type within a given matter; or specific text (say, a settlement provision, easement in a real estate document, environmental provision) in a doc type across matters.

Search in a given list. In any given list displaying in Worldox, if you just start typing (you don’t need to do anything else special), you will go to the first instance of what you type in for every document description in the list.

Find a specific document. If you know the doc id of a document (many firms print the doc id as a footer on their documents), you can type in the number (you don’t need leading zeros or the file extension) in the Search field at the top right of the file list. You can also type text in this field to find anything in a description or content of a document.

Boolean Searches. Worldox supports a full range of boolean searches: and, or, not, proximity searches (a w/x words of b). Proximity searches can be especially useful: thumb w/10 amputate was a real example for one firm. Since emails frequently overwhelm other documents in a given matter, searching for all documents in a matter but NOT Email can also be useful.

Fixing Runaway Doc Types in Worldox

A month ago I blogged about best practices when a firm is setting up doc types in Worldox.

But what do you do when your doc types have become such a mess that people stop using them and do things like typing in “xyz” in the description in order to be able to search “accurately?”

When I do a summary report for such firms, I frequently find document types that represent less than one one-hundredth of one percent of all their documents. For a firm with over half a million documents there might be a dozen or so doc types that have fewer than 10 documents assigned to them.

This is worse than mere useless clutter. It makes it more difficult for people to find out “good doc types” and makes the system harder to use. It has a direct relation to decreased productivity.

There are a number of ways to approach this issue of increasing severity, depending on committed the firm is to fixing the issue. The first, “quick and dirty” way is to make all doc types whose use is below a given threshold “inactive.” This means that users can search for those doc types but cannot save any new documents to them. Depending on how aggressive the firm wants to be, this can eliminate 25-50% of the doc types. The threshold might be up to one-tenth of one percent of all documents.

Second, there are partially redundant doc types. This is perhaps clearest in Litigation, which frequently wants to micro-manage doc types. If you have two doc types: “Motion” and “Pleading” there will inevitably be confusion and users cannot find documents reliably. Partially overlapping doc types should be fused into a single doc type and the others discontinued. When users revolt and create a single “xyz” “doc type” by typing it into the description, this is in fact what they are doing.

Lastly, there are doc types that contain no useful information whatsoever. This includes things like “pdf”, “spreadsheet”, “scan,” etc. This tells you nothing at all useful about the document. These should also be marked inactive.

The next logical (albeit very labor intensive) step is to reassign the documents listed under the now inactive doc types to something more useful. This is a lot of work and firms may not want to invest the time. A partial workaround here would be to reassign only, say, the last six months of documents. This would reduce the amount of work considerably.

Clio Worldox integration

At long last, Worldox has brought out an integration package for Clio. The integration does two basic things:

First, it lets you (if desired) synchronize your Client/Contact/Matters between the two programs.

Second, and most important, it lets you look up Worldox files from within Clio. So when you are working in Clio, you don’t have to leave what you are doing to access Worldox documents. You can now also do a full-text search of Worldox documents from within Clio.

However, it does not do one thing that many people have asked for, namely export Worldox files for use with the Clio client portal. Clio users who want a portal for their Worldox documents will have to look elsewhere. The new Teams portal for Worldox would be one option.

The link provides basic functionality at a very reasonable price ($5/user/mo., plus a significant configuration fee). It was written by GDSI, which has previously worked on other Worldox projects, including Worldox Web. 

Top Ten Worldox Customizations

Any Worldox installation needs to be customized in order to make it most efficient and the best fit for the firm culture. Here are some of the top customizations I routinely implement for my clients.

1. Bookmarks. This is clearly number one on the list. An installation without bookmarks is a bad installation. At a minimum Bookmarks save several keystrokes for every single search a user performs. They also enable users to automate frequently used searches. I generally create bookmarks for each of the firm’s Cabinets, an email bookmark (set so the display lists the To and From on the emails), a My Favs bookmark that lets users mark documents they use all the time and display them with one click (similar to how people used to have commonly used documents on their desktops). The firm may want others and of course users are free to create their own.

The next three customizations deal with the default search screen. These are critical to optimize search efficiency.

2. Name & text together at top. I change the display so that the “Name” and “Text” fields are together at the top. Much more efficient.

3. Get rid of the “Typist” field. I began my career in legal working in a Wang word processing center for a large New York law firm (guess that dates me). Today, however, “Typist” is redundant with “Author” for almost all firms. For one client, I did a search for the 10,000 most recent documents. There were less than 50 where Author and Typist were different. A field is used in only one half of one percent of documents is merely clutter and a distraction.

4. Owner inits. By default the search screen contains a field called “Owner Init[ials]”. This is a misnomer. “Owner” is a windows system term indicating simply the last person to have opened the document. It has nothing to do with who might be said to “own” the document. I change this to “Last Used By.”

5. Save Outside Worldox. Worldox GX4 now ships with a “Save Outside Worldox” button on the save screen. Many firms disable this button in order to protect the integrity of their document store, believing that all documents generated by the firm should be in Worldox. This can be adjusted on a per-user basis.

6. Turn off Spell Check Descriptions. I find that this normally causes more confusion than not, even if it does prevent some misspellings. There are simply too many abbreviations, client names, etc. for it to be useful.

7. Auto size columns. This sounds like a good idea, depending on different size, large screens, etc. However, there are some cases, particularly if you have email addresses as columns, where it doesn’t work correctly. You may want to turn it off.

8. Define column display to include desired items. This requires consultation with the firm as to what fields they want to display by default. However, including desired additional fields (such as Categories) can make a big difference.

9. Set Defaults on Save. The firm should set the default on the “Save” profile screen to auto-fill the Author field with either the person logged in to that machine (the most common) or the last user filled in (in case assistants routinely set an attorney as “Author”).

10. End user customizations. Part of training should include settings that end users can customize for themselves, including the left had Tabs, the “dividers” by date in the display (if you turn off “Sort by Grouping” you may find you have a lot cleaner display), screen colors and fonts, etc. I’ve seen some pretty peculiar displays (pink, green and purple) and some people with poor eyesight may want to have the display set to a larger font.

Optimizing Doc Types in Worldox

Doc Types are one of the most important features in Worldox, helping users locate documents quickly and efficiently. There are several governing principles to consider when optimizing this feature.

When configuring Worldox, a firm needs to consider what results it wants to achieve in order to decide how to configure a particular feature. In the case of Doc Types, you want to be able to have them structured so as to return perhaps 20 or so documents (with some exceptions such as email). That is, if you do a search that returns about one screen’s worth of documents it is easy to review them visually and quickly. Too many, and the Doc Type just becomes a catch-all (such as “misc”). Too few, and the Doc Type is essentially just clutter that makes you less efficient.

Generally speaking for a small to medium size firm, around 30-50 doc types is the right number.

Firms are frequently tempted to have many more than that because users think of them as a substitute for folders that they might create in Windows Explorer in the absence of any serious search capacity. I was once reviewing the Doc Types for a client that had well over 100 Doc Types. Being the suspicious type I did some searches for ones that seemed unlikely. Sure enough there were several Doc Types that were assigned to less than a dozen documents across a total document store of some 800,000 documents. Clutter that makes the firm less efficient.

A second important principle is that the creation of Doc Types should be centralized. Users should not be able to create their “own” Doc Types. I had one small client that absolutely insisted that users be able to create their own Doc Types. After some discussion I capitulated. Sure enough, less than a week later, the office admin called and said “We now have 2 Doc Types, engagement letter and retainer. That’s the same thing. How do we fix this?” Obviously if you have two or more doc types for the same thing, searches become unreliable and increases the likelihood of error when assigning a Doc Type. This also applies to firms that want separate Doc Types for a dozen or so different types of motions. It just increases error makes searches less efficient, not more.

Fusing two Doc Type is reasonably simple. First, find all the documents assigned to the Doc Type you want to eliminate. Then move them to the Doc Type you want to keep. After checking that there are no remaining documents under the old Doc Type, delete it.

Securing Workspaces in Worldox

A client recently asked me if they could secure a Workspace/Project in Worldox to prevent other people from seeing it. I’d never thought of that one before. Fortunately the answer is pretty simple.

If the Workspace exists in a location restricted by an Ethical Wall, then it inherits the security of the Ethical Wall.

Otherwise, the documents listed in a Workspace are actually organized in a special type of document with the same name as the name of the Workspace and a *.wdl extension. So if the Workspace is, say, “Jones depo documents,” then locate the file “jones depo documents.wdl” and apply security to it the same way you would to any other document.

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 - Fastest Way to See All Documents in a Matter

People are constantly trying to find ways to do things more efficiently (i.e., quickly) in Worldox. A common requirement is to find all the documents in a given matter. I recently participated in a webinar on training hosted by Worldox where I learned a new way to do this (thanks Peter Brannigan).

Note that quick ways of finding “all the documents in a matter” bypass an indexed search (which is why they are quicker). However, this means that if the firm has defined DocType as a folder, the following will apply only to finding all the files assigned to a given DocType in a matter not the matter itself.

• The traditional way of doing this is to use Direct Access. If you are a keystroke person, Ctrl+O will bring up the Direct Access information for the document your cursor is on. Click OK and you will see all your documents. There is probably also a Direct Access button on your button bar.

• Within the Worldox Ribbon Bar in Word, you have options to find all documents with the Same Profile as the one you are working on or all your recently used documents (Favorites).

• Traditionally, the most efficient way to do this is to Bookmark a given matter. This gives you one-click access to all documents in the given matter.

• The “new” way (as in you learn something new everyday – this option has been available for quite a while) is to right-click on a document in the Worldox display screen and select “Open File Location.” This will find all the documents for a given matter. Since the description is somewhat confusing, you might want to customize it to read “Open Matter.”

To watch the webinar, click here