Does It Compute?

Using Worldox Categories

Worldox Categories lets you add additional metadata tabs to a document. Whereas you can only attach a single “Doc Type” to a given document, you can attach multiple categories.

Probably the most productive use of Categories is to add the status or workflow to a document: Draft, Final, Executed Copy, Filed, etc. Some people also like to use Categories as sub-doc types or substitutes for Windows folders.

There are three types of Categories: Personal, Folder and Public.

Personal Categories are just that: personal to the user; no one else can see them. You can use any system you want. One useful Personal Category would be “Needs Followup” that you can use to mark emails or documents you have to review.

Folder Categories are unique to a given folder, usually the matter, but some firms use doc type folders. For example say you have multiple depositions in a case. You could have a folder category for the depositions of different individuals. Similarly with medical records. Folder categories appear only after the matter has been selected, they are not searchable.

Public Categories lets the firm control how categories are used. In additional to the generic categories mentioned above (Draft, Executed Copy, etc.). This lets you add categories relevant to specific practice areas. Litigators, for example, can make Worldox into a Litigation Support package by adding categories such as Helps Other Side, Hurts Other Side, Needs Review, Partially Discoverable - Needs Redaction, Questions about Discovery, Expert Review, Work Product Privilege. Public Categories are fully searchable across the Worldox system.

Categories assigned to the documents in a Worldox file list appear in the Filter List and can also be accessed by putting a “Filter by Categories” button on your button bar.

Worldox Integration with Microsoft Teams

Worldox has just released the ability to integrate with Teams. The basic integration package is simple: you export a Worldox document to Teams (either by copying it or checking it out, which means that the document would not be editable in Worldox). After the document has been worked on in Teams you can then import it back to Worldox, either as a version of the original document (best practice) or copying it over the original.

There are basically two scenarios here. First, you can use Teams as a client portal to transfer documents to clients and to receive and upload client documents to Worldox. This is obviously more secure than email. When sending documents, you can also message team members with notifications, requests, etc.

Second, you can edit the documents in Teams collaboratively. With actual offices dispersed and people working from home, this may be an increasingly attractive option.

What are some of the issues with the integration?

First, obviously, the client/recipient has to have Teams. While this is increasingly common in a business/law firm environment, individual clients may not have Teams.

The Worldox integration is lacking a key feature, namely the ability to create comments about the document (who worked on it, etc.) when importing a document back into Worldox. This feature is supposed to be added in the near future.

There are no management features within Worldox to control or track the Teams users at the firm have created. Although it is quite understandable that Worldox didn’t want to get into the business of managing a sprawling Microsoft product, the end result is a chaotic free for all. Management features are available only from within Teams. There is no way for the firm to determine centrally what teams have been created in Worldox.

The two features within Teams that firms might want to implement most frequently are, first, the creation of centralized groups, so that when a Team is created, instead of each user having to manually add several people as team members in multiple operations, they could add a defined group. Groups must be created in Teams administration: end users cannot create groups. Secondly, a firm might want to restrict who has the ability to create Teams. This must also be done through Teams administration.

In short, implementing Teams will require a fair investment of IT time and training in order to optimize the Worldox integration.

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.