Does It Compute?

Quick Access Toolbar in MS Office

I have always found the ribbon bar in Word 2007/10 annoying and hard to find anything on. In addition, when you are using Worldox, the red “X” in the upper right corner is disabled in order to maintain the integrity of the audit trail.

So I always customize the Quick Access toolbar and encourage my clients to do the same. At present, I have the following little icons on my Quick Access Bar:
    New document
    File Open
    Save
    Save As
    Revert
    Go forward
    Exit
    Paste Special (with no formatting)
    Print

I’ve seen power users at clients with 20 or more icons on their Quick Access bar. It will make you much more efficient.

Now for the good part. I recently discovered, almost by accident, that the Quick Access Toolbar also exists in Outlook AND that you can put items from custom Tabs on it, in particular, Copy to Worldox or Save to Worldox. So instead of having to open up the Worldox Ribbon, I can save several clicks and do it right from the Quick Access Toolbar.

To add items to the Quick Access Toolbar, right-click on “File” and select “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.” The items you want may not be there, so select “All Commands”to find what you need.

Technolawyer Legal Billing Buyer's Guide

Technolawyer recently released 20+ page “Buyer’s Guide to Legal Billing Software.” The most useful aspect of this report is a discussion of the various criteria you might want to use in order to select a program, including on the merits of cloud-based vs. network-based (which they call “native”) software. It also examines at some time and billing length features that many law firms may need: Timers, Time Entry procedures, billing features (PDF/email generation), support for LEDES billing, Consolidated and Split billing, Trust Accounting (a deal-breaker feature), various productivity reports, and so on. This should let someone new to legal billing make a check-list of features they will need for their practice before trying to evaluate specific software.
   
The Guide lists 22 software programs, 12 network-based and 10 cloud-based, which shows the inroads cloud-based software has made. With so many programs it is obviously impossible to deal with any particular program substantively, although in some cases the report refers to reviews published elsewhere by Technolawyer.

The main omission is that these programs may or may not include accounting capabilities which are obviously closely related to time and billing. Thus there is virtually no mention of the 800 lb. Gorilla, QuickBooks. Bottom line is: QuickBooks is bad choice for legal accounting needs. Firms need a time & billing program that will do accounting as well.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the report is an attempt to estimate the cost of the various programs for 1, 5 and 25 lawyers over a 3-year period. Since Technolawyer relied on vendors for pricing, some of the prices listed are almost certainly too low, in some cases much too low. Further, since they took a three-year time frame and pro-rated it backwards, the price for the first year is lower than what your upfront cost will be. Lastly, the price is just for software, it does not include any associated hardware costs. But it does give you a good ballpark. It also validates what I have always said: over a three-year period, cloud-based software is likely to be more expensive than network-based software. Thus of the major programs the report lists with which I have some familiarity, the most expensive would be Houdini, Esq. (cloud), followed by Amicus Billing (network), Clio (cloud), Time Matters (network), Rocket Matter (cloud) and PCLaw (network) with the estimated cost ranging from $11,520 for Houdini to $4,361 for PCLaw.

In short, this report is a useful starting point, but you will have to examine specific programs separately once you have prepared your “wish list” of features you (a) absolutely must have, (b) need, and (c) would be nice to have.

You can get a copy of the report at http://www.technolawyer.com/tll/legal-billing-software.asp
You have to join Technolawyer to get the report, but that is free and Technolawyer is well worth joining anyway.

Six Years of Blogging

The end of April marks the sixth anniversary of Does It Compute? I am closing in on 800 posts (792 counting this one), including about 100 on Worldox and another 40 on more general document management issues.  Although I haven’t had anything much to do with Time Matters/LexisNexis in several years (except to watch its decline), there are 68 posts on Time Matters and another 42 on PCLaw. Amicus comes in last with 32 posts.

My posts have always been fed by client experience. When I see an issue at a client and say “that might be of general interest” – that’s worth a post. In the past year or two I have slowed down somewhat due to the fact that I have pretty much dropped supporting Time Matters, PCLaw and Amicus and have been more focused on Worldox.

But I think I have another couple of years left before I finally decide to retire.

In Defense of Hourly Billing (Sort Of)

The recent DLA Piper overbilling scandal highlights the invitation to abuse that hourly billing represents.  As usual, it was emails exhorting people to bill bogus hours that let the cat out of the bag: "I hear we are already 200K over our estimate — that's Team DLA Piper!" and “churn that bill, baby.”

I bill almost all my clients hourly, so how do I justify that?  Why not switch to flat-fee billing?  There is definitely a case to be made for this in basic situations: the client is happy with a standard configuration, no special security groups, ethical walls, multiple profile groups, and so on.

For larger clients, where you have had the opportunity to track their needs over six months or so, you can estimate with reasonable accuracy how many hours a month they are going to need and provide a monthly flat fee for standard work (not counting new projects). Alternatively, some consultants offer pre-paid “packages” at a discount. So if you buy 50 hours up front, you get (say) a 10% discount.

Here is where the issue gets complicated. A number of years ago I was renovating an old house in Cambridge by tearing out a wall and combining two small rooms. I got the walls torn out and went to put in new flooring, etc.  Whoops!! The old 2x4's where actually 2" by 4", not the current “nominal” 2x4's which are actually 1 ½" x 3 ½". So nothing fit right and everything had to be custom cut. In addition, the walls had side braces in them so that you could not run electrical wire through the walls between the studs without entirely tearing out the lathing (real plaster and lathing, not sheetrock). Needless to say, the project had suddenly become vastly more complicated.

Analogous issues can come up: the client wants many too many profile groups (I once turned down a job to rationalize a system where the client was starting with 40 profile groups – no thanks). Or they want a structure that is unnecessary and will only lead to problems later on (thus necessitating lengthy and frustrating discussions about why that is the case). Or they have highly complex security needs. Or their legacy documents are spread all over their system, including in local “My Documents” folders.  All this sort of thing can make an installation spiral out of control. And they there are the things that “pop up”and were never part of the original projection: “as long as we are doing this, can’t you just also...?”

As I have recently noted, flat-fee billing is about shifting the risk that billable hours will escalate for some reason from the client to the consultant. Other than that, the issue is about trust. If you trust a client/consultant then there should not be any issues about hourly billing.  So out of curiosity, I looked at my 10 most recent Worldox installations. There was only one installation that ran substantially over the maximum estimate (150%). The other nine averaged 80% of my maximum estimate and 99% of my minimum estimate.

So the conclusion is that if I simply gave clients a flat fee rate equal to my maximum estimate I would be increasing my income by 20% or so and my clients would be paying a corresponding 20% penalty.

For now, unless clients request a flat fee quote, I’ll still with hourly billing.

Worldox Announces Mac Client

Worldox officially announced a Mac client at the ABA techshow last week.  It is expected to be released some time this summer, so think early fall just to be on the save side.

Advertised as having most of the functionality of the Windows client, it obviously won’t be able to have exactly the same integration with the wide variety of programs and email that the Windows version has developed over the years. However, all the basic functionality, integration with the Microsoft Office Suite and Acrobat, searching, version control, etc. will be included.
 
The Mac version works with the Worldox back end and with the Worldox SaaS cloud product, it is not a standalone product.

Worldox will  be the first major document management system with a full-fledged Mac client. Until now Mac users have had to go through Citrix or use one or another workaround (why have a Mac if you use it primarily to run Windows on it?). So for end users who want to be able to use a Mac in an otherwise Windows environment it will be a major boon. It will also be interesting to see whether, as many people have thought, there is a pent-up demand for industrial strength legal products for a Mac.

Remembrance of Memories Past

I was struck by a recently article in the New York Times (March 31) concerning Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.).  The Times quoted new data from the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  According to the report,

"The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 53 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis."

Does this reflect a real increase or are parents and doctors just colluding to drug up kids to make them more manageable?  Before you say that sounds crazy, let me say that I know for a fact that the nursing home my mother was in for seven years with Alzheimers systematically over-medicated her to make her more manageable (after all, if you were losing your mind and control over bodily functions wouldn’t that tend to make you wild and “unmanageable” too?). So why shouldn’t they do it to rambunctious kids too?

I think it is indisputable that Nicholas Carr is right, that the way society approaches knowing things and accessing that knowledge has changed fundamentally. It used to be that to retrieve information, you had to know something about it; now, you google it or check Wikipedia.  The fact that “google” has become a verb says it all.

But the memory can be trained.  It seems to me that a significant amount of that 53% increase in the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder is linked to a lack of memory training (after you deduct for over-medication). Look at the past of how memory functioned.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were originally oral sagas.  Similarly, so-called “primitive” societies that lacked writing are notorious for prodigious oral histories. Can anyone imagine reciting such works from memory today? 

Then fast-forward to the Renaissance.  The key characteristic of “renaissance man” was encyclopedic knowledge.  People learned and absorbed vast amounts of knowledge. At the same time, they understood that this was not a path to the future: hence the projects of Leibnitz to encompass all knowledge in what we would today call a computer program (See George Dyson’s extremely interesting “Turing’s Cathedral”).

But the key fact is that memory can be trained.  One of the things I have always been grateful to my father for (although not so much at the time) was the mathematical training he inflicted on my brother and me at the dinner table.  “How much is 37 times 24?” he would say. Do it in your head. Leaving aside why anybody would want to when your cell phone has a calculator, it provided useful memory training. I can still do this, although not nearly as nimbly as at the time. Or consider the (to us at the time) infamous 3-toed sloth problems.  “There are some 3-toed sloths (with 3 toes on each paw) and some 2-toed sloths (with 2 toes on each paw) in a tree.  Taken together, the 3 toed sloths are missing 6 toes and the two-toed sloths are missing 4 toes. There are 3 more 3-toed sloths than there are 2-toed sloths. Combined, they have 66 toes. How many sloths of each type are there?”  This is basic algebra, but try doing it in your head!!

But it does provide major memory training.

In short, I suspect that in many cases of what appears to be attention deficit is simply a lack of basic memory training: kids are becoming unable to focus for extended periods of time because they haven’t been trained to do so. The use of internet searches and defaults can only contribute to this problem. That’s why my grandchildren only get books and art supplies for presents.

Must Reading

For anyone interested in the future of technology and the practice of law, here are some candidates for “must reading,” including links to my blogs about them.

Future of Technology and the Human Brain

See the two books by Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch and “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”

Carr’s basic thesis is that the way our memory functions has changed fundamentally with the advent of computers and the internet in particular.  In the not-so-distant past, if you wanted to find out about something, you had to learn about it and commit it to memory.  Now, if you want to find out about something you look it up on the Internet. The result is that peoples’ memories are not what they used to be. This is probably linked to the massive increase in the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (over 50% in the last decade).

The Practice of Law

On the practice of law, I am a big fan of Richard Susskind. See my long two part review of his “The End of Lawyers?” a couple of years ago.  Part I and Part II

Recently, see his new book which mainly recapitulates his arguments, “Tomorrow’s Lawyers”

The Dog Ate My Homework

That was the old excuse when I was in school.  Then it graduated to “The computer ate my document.”  Today the excuse is “your email must have been gobbled up by the junk mail filter.”

Plus ça change...

InMailX for Worldox

InMail X is a new product from Australia that aims to improve email integration with Worldox (it also works with SharePoint, Worksite and some other products). In addition to basic Worldox integration it also has some other, in my view even more useful, functions.

When you click the “Send and File” button that is added to Outlook, InMailX pops up a list of recently used client/matters together with their description. If this for a matter not previously used, you can also pop up the Worldox dialog to select it, and it is then automatically added to your “Favorites.” InMailX also lets you define a tag to be added automatically to the subject line so that you have more information than the Re:Re:Re:Re: that may or may not have anything to do with the actual email. So for example, you could add the client/matter number or name to the subject lines. If you copy rather than move an email to Worldox, inMailX adds a column to Outlook showing what file it has been copied to, including the description, not just the client/matter number.

You can also save copies of a given email to multiple client/matters – a bad practice, but one that is frequently demanded by clients. This does save copies, however, so you have more than one copy of the same email.

One of the more nifty features allows you to truncate the back and forth “conversations” when you print an email, so that you can specify how much of the email you want to print (e.g., only the actual email, or the email and what it is responding to) without have to print pages and pages that you just throw out.

But another feature is even more important. InMailX lets you remove metadata from Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files. If desired, you can add something to the file name to indicate it has been cleaned (e.g., “Cleaned”).  Thus InMailX takes the place of other metadata removal programs such as Payne Consulting’s popular MetaData Assistant.

Furthermore, if you email multiple attachments, inMailX will convert them all to a single PDF file AND let you order the attachments in the order you want the  recipient to read them, including setting up bookmarks in the PDF file. This is a very cool feature. If you are sending 10 files, you can create a single PDF, with the files in the correct order, and each file bookmarked in a table of contents. 

Lastly, inMailX is extremely customizable. There are many more options than I can describe here: suffice it to say that you will be able to tweak the program to match pretty much exactly how you want it to work for your firm.

InMailX is modular.  Most firms will probably want only the three basic modules, but larger firms might want additional functionality that, for example, allows them to centrally manage all the firm’s signature blocks and create email forms. InMailX is new to the United States, but has been around in Australia for a while. Like many newer programs, the makers are very aggressive: in the process of testing and evaluating inMailX I found several issues that needed to be added or fixed: corresponding new builds were available in less than a week.

InMailX is definitely on the expensive side: the three basic modules, together with the Worldox connector, are $260 per user plus 20% yearly maintenance or $312/user for the first year (software costs more in Australia). But depending on how committed the firm is to saving extra clicks and whether the additional attachment and metadata removal features are desirable, it might well be worth it. If you don’t have a metadata removal program, figure on about $80 or so per user against the cost of InMailX. You can contact them at www.inmailx.com

Richard Susskind: "Tomorrow's Lawyers"

Richard Susskind is well-known for his views on the future of the legal profession. His bottom line is that small and medium size firms will become unviable as we know them and that many of the day to day functions that lawyers perform will be replaced by a variety of computerized, computer-aided, or even artificial intelligence systems within the relatively short term (he says 3-6 years, but lets say 5-10 years to be on the safe side). He also takes a dim view of the ability of many lawyers to deal with this situation: most firms, he says, are “walking backward into the future.”

I find it hard to quarrel with his basic assumptions. The traditional lawyer provides customized, one-on-one services, what Susskind refers to “bespoke” services (like a bespoke set of clothes). But those services can be broken down into their component parts, producing a gradation of services: from Bespoke to Standardized to Systematized to Packaged to Commoditized.

Successful firms have (or should have) a “forms bank” of standard documents, from retainer agreements to a variety of court motions, forms, etc.  The next step in the process is to systematize these pieces using some variety of document assembly.  As Susskind rightly points out, if you can produce an almost final document by running through an interview with a client to elicit information, why couldn’t the client himself run through the same interview on-line without using a lawyer? 

Susskind’s approach is encapsulated in his summary of document assembly:

    “A automated drafting system of the kind I describe does not simply print out a single, standard document. Instead, based on a user’s answers to specific questions about his or her particular circumstances, the document generated will be one output of countless (often millions of) possible permutations. The end result is a tailored solution, delivered by an advanced system rather than by a human craftsman. That is the future of legal service.”

Packaged services take the above processes and make them available as “Packages” on-line. These services already exist.  LegalZoom, nolo, lawdepot, legalforms, and many other services make available a variety of forms and services for clients who may not want or need to actually hire a lawyer. For lawyers, services like the Practical Law Company offer high-level assistance, check-lists and other help in various areas of the law.

In short, any given legal engagement can be “decomposed” and large portions of the engagement performed by non-lawyers, out-sourced lawyers, contract lawyers (see Legal On Ramp), and, gasp, computers. However, as Susskind stresses over and over, most firms refuse to face these facts.  He does note that “law firms tend to be so busy serving clients and meeting their own financial targets that they allow little time for internal reform–it is not easy to change a wheel on a moving car.” But what happens when the moving car has a flat tire?  Sooner rather than later it is likely to crash.

When you add to that the rapidly expanding ability to computerize legal processes – think of how it is affecting e-discovery – Susskind’s model looks compelling.

How fast will all this happen and in what areas?  Hard to say. I think his estimate of 3 to 6 years is too low. And certainly not all the areas he discusses will happen evenly.  He aptly quotes William Gibson: “the future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” At the same time, however, as he points out: “at its core, law is information-based. And we are in the middle of an information revolution. It is not making a wild leap to suggest that the law and the work of lawyers will not emerge unchanged.” So the book’s subtitle seems apt: “An Introduction to Your Future.”