Does It Compute?

Using Worldox to Archive Email

Many attorneys have Outlook email In Boxes that can contain 10,000 emails or even more. More often than not, these are completely unsorted, and not even a rudimentary client structure of folders is available. In essence, these attorneys are using email as a substitute for a document management system: at least they know that everything is there, even if they can never find anything (ever try using Outlook search?).

Worldox offers a relatively easy solution. Create a “client” called “email” and then a “matter” for each attorney. Then create “doc types” called, e.g., 2008email, 2009email, 2010email, etc. You can go back as far as necessary.

Then sort the email inbox by date and batch move all the emails for a given year to the “doc type” for that year. Leave only, for example the last year or two of emails in the Outlook In Box.

Since the emails are all full text indexed, the emails for a given attorney, and/or a given year can be searched for any text in them, who they are addressed to, who they are from, etc.  For example: all the emails for Atty Smith in the year 2008 addressed to Jones and containing the word “spoliation.”

As an additional benefit, this will make your IT people happy.

Word 2010 Settings in Worldox

Some time ago, Worldox GX2 introduced a significant number of extra configuration settings for Word 2007 and 2010. I have to admit that I blithly continued pretty much as before. But it is worth taking a look at the extra options that are available and reviewing your settings to see if you want to take advantage of them.

• Clear file stamp before creating a PDF. This is off by default. However, many firms do want to clear the footer before sending a PDF to a client or filing it to court. This is worth revisiting to see if it would be a good option.

• Stamp first page only. This has actually be available for a while, but again, it is worth thinking about. And no, stamp only last page is still not available.

• Show recent files. By default, this is eliminated from Word, since an equivalent is available using Worldox. However, especially for firms that are new to the program, users may feel more comfortable re-enabling them for Word or Excel.

• Default to PDF/A format when converting a document. Now that courts are increasingly requiring PDF/A format, this might be worth enabling. Note, however, that you may lose functionality in the PDF file if this is implemented.

• Hide Curly Braces. Many firms find the curly braces around the file stamp in the footer annoying (they are there to help in searching and updating the file stamp). They can be hidden if you prefer.

Search Strategies and Paradigms

How do you find information, documents, emails, etc. that is stored on your system?  Interestingly, although many attorneys have become proficient in using Google, LexisNexis, Westlaw and similar tools, they are at a near-total loss when it comes to finding information stored on their firm’s servers in a document management system such as Worldox. Why is this and what can you do about it?

First consider various search paradigms. If you think of your document store as a huge book, how do you find information?  You could read everything – much too slow and not practical. You could scroll through the table of contents represented by the directory structure(s) in which documents are stored. This is better, but still very slow and the structures created by different users may be wildly inconsistent. Lastly, you could use an index of your documents and the text in them. This is obviously the best approach and is the solution that document management systems provide.

Proponents of a “do it yourself” approach to document management argue that a well-defined directory structure, typically organized by client, matter and type of document, with document names starting with a date in the format 2012-02-07 can provide an adequate substitute for a “costly” document management system. Even without a conscious rationale, many users substitute for an index by creating extensive systems of directories and subdirectories. This is useful for an individual user, but may be more or less impenetrable to anyone else who needs to find a document. Further, this sort of system will not scale very well. It will rapidly become cumbersome for hundreds of clients, not to mention thousands.

A document management system such as Worldox takes the equivalent of a directory structure (client/matter/document type and sometimes other information) and organizes it into an index. When combined with the ability to full-text search documents, this provides more reliable, faster and much more powerful searching to a degree that is simply not possible when based on a directory structure. To take just a couple of examples:

• Search across all clients for pleadings containing certain words (e.g., “thumb within 10 words of amputate”)
• Search for documents done within a given time span.
• Search for all documents for a given client except for emails. In an era where emails can overwhelm people, this can be critical. For example, I have 726 documents in my system for one long-standing client. Not very useful in terms of a search. But if I search for all documents but NOT emails, I am down to 105, which is much more manageable.
• Search for all emails To John Doe containing certain terms.

The index that is provided here is in what is known as a “silo.” That is, you have to specify certain criteria before you do the search. Silos are somewhat in ill-favor by those in the “knowledge management” world. Some programs, such as Worksite, claim to offer an over-all search of all information on your system (for a fee). And it would appear that Google does the same thing – you just put in more or less free-flowing search information and get results back.

But in fact, Google constructs a personalized “silo” for each user without telling you, based on the location of your IP address, the Cookies on your computer, your past history, etc. A truly free-form search would return much too much information (like those 15,000,000 hits that pop up in Google, of which you only ever look at the first page or two). In fact, Google has publicly integrated this into its “privacy settings” so that starting March 1, it keeps all your information from all your sources – Google email and documents, Picassa, Google +, YouTube, Google Maps, etc.  and applies it to all other sources. And, unless the uproar dies down and Google retracts, there is no way to opt out. Google will control you.

In addition, Google will now sort new searches based on old searches. This strikes me as an extremely backward approach, since it will likely result in having access to an ever-more restricted set of information. You will be searching on a shrinking amount of data, not an expanding one that will find new things you had not considered before.

So most document management systems, one way or another, employ silos: you have to minimally define what it is you are looking for in order to construct a search. However, I do not see this as an issue, since most attorneys have some idea of what they are looking for – certain terms in a documents, certain types of documents, a date range when they were done, etc. 

Many users want a document management system to mimic their prior directory-based “table of contents” approach. And many DMS’s respond to this desire by mirroring it with topics such as “My Matters.”  While this can be useful in the context of an index-based search, ultimately it just builds old inefficiencies into a new system. Making optimum use of a document management system such as Worldox involves getting your head around using an index, not relying on paradigms you used before such a system existed.

PDF/A (Archiving) Format for Court Submission

As courts are increasingly requiring the PDF/A (for “Archiving”) format for submission of documents, the question arises: what exactly does this format entail? Should documents be conformed to PDF/A as a matter of course?

PDF/A is a subset of the features available through Acrobat. It includes/requires:
• No security is applied to document
• No embedded multi-media allowed
• No javascript allowed
• All fonts must be embedded
• No attachments allowed
• Transparency and Layers not allowed
• Portfolios not allowed.
• Must be text searchable.

Some features may not work in PDF/A documents. For example, if you want insert pages in a PDF/A document, PDF/A View mode will prevent the change. Similarly, firms that currently assemble documents into Binders or Portfolios (which is increasingly common) will find they are not PDF/A compatible.

So it may not be a good idea to always use PDF/A mode. The solution most consultants recommend is to use a “near PDF/A” mode that can easily be converted when you need to. Rick Bornstein has detailed instructions for doing this on his Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog.

A useful White Paper called PDF for Archiving is also available from docsCorp.

Lastly, if you are using Worldox, you can set Word 2010 to default to the PDF/A format when using the Microsoft add-in (although as noted above, that may not always be a desirable solution).

Worldox GX3 -- SaaS and Enterprise versions

The SaaS and Enterprise versions of Worldox GX3 will be out later this summer. The interface will be identical to the standard networked version of GX3.

The SaaS (Cloud) version will be a hosted version of Worldox GX3 using the Microsoft Published App Technology, with a monthly per user charge. As such, it will compete with NetDocuments. What is unique about this version, however, is the way it will integrate with your desktop. Your desktop version of Word, Outlook, etc. will integrate directly with your documents in the cloud using a method that World Software is in the process of patenting.

The Enterprise version will be a combination of the two. It will be hosted on the firm’s servers and have both network and SaaS capability. Thus, when you are plugged in to the firm’s network, you will be using the standard version of Worldox. If you take your laptop on the road, the Worldox client will sense that the network is not available and will connect to the SaaS version, which will be run as a private cloud on the firm’s servers. Since the interfaces are identical, the transition between one and the other will be seamless to the end user. If you have a laptop and the internet is not available (on a plane for example), the local client will load and documents will be uploaded when you reconnect to the network, as they are now.

Thus the Enterprise version will be ideal for larger firms and firms with multiple offices.

Worldox GX3 Officially Announced

World Software is officially announcing Worldox GX3 today at LegalTech NY. The really big news will be about Worldox GX3 Cloud (an SaaS product) and Worldox GX3 Enterprise, both coming later this summer.

But let’s look at the traditional version of Worldox, now GX3. As usual, there are a number of “under the hood” improvements, including a new set of viewers and significantly greater speed (in an already fast program). But what are the things that affect the end user more immediately?

The new set of viewers means that Worldox can now view PDF Portfolios and Binders, which wasn’t possible previously. With more firms using these functions, this is important. For example, I have a series of PDFs I compiled out of jpeg images that GX2 viewers could not display. Now they do. Some Word 2010 tables also display more accurately in the new viewers.

The new Legal Hold function could be a very big deal for certain firms, especially those involved in litigation. You mark documents as “Legal Hold” and they are moved to a separate area where they can be searched for and viewed but not changed in any way. This can be done en masse (by people with appropriate rights). When the Hold is released, the documents can be returned to the main document store.

The toolbar at the top of the Worldox screen can now be edited by users. You can change the icon, the description, move them around, etc. So you can get rid of things you never use and make the toolbar more functional.

The entire left side, formerly the “Folder Tree,” has been reorganized along the lines of the Outlook Navigation Pane, with buttons at the bottom selecting various functions. A new function is “Favorite Matters” (which reflects a “My Matters” function available in other programs). This lists the matters you have most recently accessed. No need to open up a search screen, they pop right up. It does involve a certain amount of scrolling up and down, but many people will find this extremely useful. Various functions in the Navigation Pane can be sorted and reorganized depending on how you work.

Projects, a very powerful but somewhat clumsy and underused feature of GX2 has been placed here and made much easier to use. People already using projects will really like this.

Finally, there are the usual number of small but very nice improvements. In general, the messages on pop up windows are improved and more obvious. One of my favorite improvements is the “Same Profile As” button on the save screen. This is very useful when you email someone a document and they send it back with revisions. You want to save this as a version, but how?  It was always possible, although a couple of screens deep. Now that function is right there staring you in the face.

Similarly, the “8th field” has been make more obvious. There was always a button in the comments field called “table.” This was a drop-down list that allowed users to select comments from a list, such as keywords in documents involved in litigation. Since comments are searchable as part of the profile, this was powerful, but again, under-used. Now it is much more obvious and should be very useful to litigation firms in particular.

All in all, a nice upgrade – and as Worldox users know, with the very inexpensive Worldox maintenance, upgrades are free.

iPads, Sweatshops and American Capitalism

Two recent massive articles in the New York Times (Jan 22 and 26) have documented the sweatshop conditions in the Chinese factories manufacturing Apple’s iPad and iPhone. To be fair, the article notes that similar conditions apply in factories run for Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

This should really come as no surprise. American industry has been outsourcing manufacturing as a way of increasing profits by lowering the cost of labor for years. Sweatshops and deadly conditions are merely the logical consequence of this trend. That this goes into great detail is clearly demonstrated by the article. In one case over a hundred employees were injured by being forced to use a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis to clean iPhone screens. Why?  Because it evaporated three times as fast as regular alcohol, so workers could process more screens in the same amount of time. In fact, “outsourcing” is beginning to happen even within Asia, with companies moving from previously low-wage countries to ones with even lower wages.

Nor could Apple fix this, even if it wanted to. Apple is tied to its largest supplier, Foxconn, which is one of the few companies big enough to build enough iPads and iPhones (with 1.2 million workers, it makes an estimated 40% of the world’s consumer electronics). Apple has virtually no leverage to make Foxconn fix conditions once contracts are signed. As Steve Jobs retorted to President Obama when asked about bringing jobs back to the US, “those jobs are not coming back.”

The fact of the matter is that outsourced sweatshop manufacturing conditions, like the use of illegal immigrants in the US, are integral to the profitability of American capitalism. Alabama found that out last summer when it passed its anti-immigrant law and then no one could be found to pick crops, which rotted on the vine. Certainly, it is no longer politically possible in the US to return to the conditions that caused the Triangle Shirtwaist fire just over 100 years ago, in which 146 garment workers, mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women, died because managers locked the exits to stairwells so workers could not leave. However, recent union-busting “right to work” efforts in states like Wisconsin and Indiana certainly demonstrate that American industry would like to move backwards in that direction. In short, sweatshops are as American as Apple Pie.

And after all, it takes a special kind of chutzpah for people in Mitt Romney’s income bracket to claim that American workers are paid too much money!

.doc and .docx - It's a Dual-Format World

I recently downloaded an extremely informative and useful white paper by Ross Kodner’s microsystems entitled “.doc & .docx – It’s a Dual-Format World.”

The white paper details the issues involved in converting from one format to the other, including the loss of numbering schemes and formatting and pagination changes. Further, the “compatibility tool” that lets people still using Word 2003 access documents from 2007 and 2010 has a number of known issues.

But most firms just plowed blindly ahead, converting or not converting with no real plan. Many users got little or no training in the new versions, not even a minimal instruction in customizing the labor-saving Quick Access Toolbar. (See my February 2010 blog entry)

Firms owe it to themselves to systematize their practices in this area. Ross’s white paper is really a must read.

iPad Revisited

We went out to visit my 91-year-old father-in-law in Phoenix in early January. I decided to take my iPad instead of a computer, since all I planned to do was check e-mail and Google.

The basic principle, not to have to schlepp a full-size laptop around, worked great. After that it was all down-hill.  My web-based e-mail didn’t work with the iPad (or vice-versa). I could look at the e-mail, but could not reply to it because I couldn’t type a message. So in order to reply to an e-mail I had to forward it to my gmail account and then reply from there. And of course trying to type on the iPad is still an adventure. Fortunately it was just a long weekend, so it was not too bad.

Since the iPad has no “back” function, using Google or Google maps was also a pain. I constantly had to exit out and start over.  Very clumsy to manipulate.  And for directions I could just as easily use the navigation app on my Droid phone.

So was it better than a laptop?  For this very limited purpose, yes. This iPad was a gift. Would I ever actually buy an iPad?  No.

If I needed certain legal-specific apps for the iPad, such as the Worldox app that lets you access the document store in your office from the iPad, it might be different. But without those add-ons, the iPad is little more than a convenient toy.

Biggest Cloud Outages in 2011

I recently saw an article on the biggest Cloud outages in 2011. Since outages (loss of connectivity) are typically one of the reservations that many people have about moving to the cloud, I was curious.

The biggie of course was the 5+ day Amazon outage in April that affected a large number of major companies.  Microsoft cloud services – Office 365 and the Business Productivity Suite – suffered 5 outages (4 in the month of May), perhaps enough to raise doubts about the reliability of those offerings.

Other than that, there were two outages caused by a major lightning storm in Ireland. Google Docs and related apps went down for about an hour in September, and Gmail lost some 150,000 mailboxes in February. Other of the “10 biggest” were in fact pretty minor – half hour to an hour, or simply multi-hour delays in delivering email.

What this all means is that cloud-based services are pretty reliable, almost certainly more reliable than the systems in the average law firm (or Comcast cable). The lightning-storm outage is noteworthy because the backup power systems failed to kick in.

This of course is no consolation if you DO get hit with an outage.  Which raises the question of what sort of reimbursement do you get from the cloud service if you get hit with an outage? Most contracts provide for reimbursement as a percentage of the monthly fee – if you are out for 1 day, you get 1/30th of your monthly fee returned. This is essentially worthless to a firm.

Software vendors long ago faced this issue and most agreements limit liability to the price of the software.  However, cloud-based services are in a slightly different category. One could reasonably make the argument that if a 10-attorney firm suffers a 1-hour outage, and half the attorneys might have been unable to do billable work during that time, then at $300 an hour the firm has lost $1,500 in billables. Obviously no vendor is going to give this sort of guarantee, but you might be able to improve your agreement over the standard chump change for outages.