Does It Compute?

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

Training Options for Worldox

Most firms, when they install Worldox (or any other major program) do some initial training. After that, refresher/update/new hire training tends to be a crapshoot.

No matter how you analyze it, the ROI of training is very significant. When I do refresher training, I frequently get repeated “gee, I didn’t know you could do that” responses. If training takes one hour, and a user saves 3-5 minutes a day through increased productivity, then their time savings over a year is 10-15 hours a year. Not to mention lower levels of frustration. Click here to a more detailed consideration I posted a couple of years ago. For an extended analysis of refresher training, click here.

What sort of training is best/available? There is little doubt that the best training comes from an in-house classroom setup. But even before COVID, hardly anybody did that any more. There are two other main options.

First, “in person” Zoom/Webex type setup. In this setup, the trainer and students are live and there is the critical ability for users to ask questions. One critical differentiator here is whether to Worldox configuration used for training is a “canned” demo data set or whether the training uses the firm’s actual data. The latter is much more effective, because users can relate to their actual clients.

The second form of training comes in self-paced modules. Frequently these are little 3-5 snippets each dealing with a particular function, sometimes up to 20 minutes or so. Again, these are canned demo data with no chance for feedback. Worldox has a set of these available under https://www.worldox.com/support/how-to-videos/.

Other major vendors of Worldox training include Dox Advisors’ Worldox Academy (https://www.doxadvisors.com/worldoxtraining). Affinity Consulting’s “Affinity University” also offers a large selection of Worldox courses https://affinityuniversity.com/course/worldox/

Lastly, there are two schools of thought regarding content. Traditionally, training has been a half day or full day and has tried to cover every feature, frequently with a detailed manual/training book. In my view, this tends to overwhelm users and is, I think, counter-productive. On a good day, with a very good instructor, users may recall 70% of the material - and that percentage drops off sharply as the day/session goes on.

I prefer a shorter training session with a followup 3-4 weeks later, after users have gotten used to the program. This allows for reinforcement and lets users ask specific questions based on their workflow. I try also to have a third “admin” session for administrators to cover some advanced and administrative features that not everyone will have rights to use.

I use a “Cheat Sheet” documentation rather than a step-by-step training manual because users can then refer to it later. This, together with a “Frequently Asked Questions” document, are available on my web site at www.heckmanco.com.

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.

New Worldox Features

For most firms, Worldox is “set it and forget it.” Users are trained on features that exist when the program is installed but then never revisit available functionality until it comes time to update the entire program. This has two drawbacks. First, it leads to a slow degeneration of skills and Worldox use becomes less efficient over time. Equally important, it ignores any new features that may have been added to the program. Recently Worldox has been rolling out substantial new features without calling it a “new version.” What are some of these features?

Web 3.1. Worldox released Web 3.0/3.1 almost a year ago. This is a pure browser based link to the Worldox document store that makes it practical to access Worldox without having to log in to an office PC remotely or set up a Citrix/Terminal Server configuration. When a Word document is opened or saved, the browser pops up and opens or saves directly from your network server. Outlook can now also be integrated with Web 3.1. This can be a life-saver for Mac/iPad users since it now lets them access Worldox natively.

Email Agent. The email agent provides two very powerful new features. First, it allows users to file emails in Worldox from their smart phone. You used to be able to do that only if your office PC was on and Outlook open. This is no longer necessary. Second, it lets you tag folders in your Outlook inbox so that emails dragged to them are automatically copied/moved (depending on the option you select) to Worldox in a single step with no further intervention.

Teams integration. Worldox is now offering a Teams-based client portal. You can send files to Teams, edit them collaboratively through Teams and then re-import them back to Worldox, as a version of the original file if desired. Teams does not provide the same email security that many other portals do, but it is free if you have current versions of Microsoft Office.

Clio link. Worldox is now offering a third-party link with Clio. This lets you look up Worldox documents from within Clio. It does not, however, let you export Worldox documents to the Clio client portal. Thus it provides an extremely useful link to Worldox, but short of full-fledged portal functionality. After the initial setup, it is inexpensive at $5/user/mo for every Clio license.

For all of these options, make sure you are upgraded to the latest Worldox build.