Does It Compute?

Will LexisNexis Be Sold to Bloomberg?

A recent blog raised the interesting issue of whether Reed-Elsevier will spin off LexisNexis and perhaps sell it to Bloomberg. In the last year or two, Bloomberg has hired away a number of LexisNexis executives, including Lou Andreozzi.

The blog quotes a Bernstein Research report to the effect that the LexisNexis problems are “intractable.”

Another possibility would simply be to spin off Lexis Nexis and divest all the products that were acquired during the LexisNexis buying spree of five plus years or so ago. This might include TimeMatters, PCLaw, Juris, CaseMap, Interaction, Redwood, etc.  They already sold HotDocs.

Small Firm Time and Billing Programs

Ross Kodner recently had a good summary of leading time and billing programs for solo and small firms.  Click here to access it. 

Another product that has been around for a while is Bill4Time which, like many of these products has gotten considerably more full-featured over the years.

As Ross notes, the web-based programs will cost you more in the long run and generally have fewer features than standard desktop-based programs.  But if you won’t need the features, that doesn’t make a big difference. Also, these programs are adding features at a great clip.  But you should sit down and make a realistic assessment of your needs before making a selection. And be sure to take into account expansion and the increased use of email for sending out bills and electronic billing.

Windows 8 Is Coming! Windows 8 Is Coming!

Reviews of various features of Windows 8 are starting to trickle in. It seems clear that it is consumer and tablet-oriented. The main interface is a touch screen – which will no doubt give rise to a whole new category of carpal-tunnel-like injuries as people try to reach out and touch the screen from the chair in front of their desktop PC.

But if tablet-oriented users will probably like it, chances are the desktop-oriented will hate it. The start menu is gone as is the start button, there is no multi-tasking, no start menu, can’t close apps easily. It is unclear how it will deal with multiple screens. The “legacy” Windows 7 interface isn’t even available yet. Without the Windows 7 interface, Windows 8 will be essentially unusable for all those people who currently have 30-50 icons on their desktop. Will Windows 8 be another Vista?

I thought one reviewer captured the essence:  “I hate Windows 8 a lot. For the average, somewhat proficient user, Windows 8 hides all the things that makes Windows 7 so useful. Windows 8 seems to be designed specifically for tablets, for which it will be a great OS. However, for those of us who want to use computers to make documents, presentations, spreadsheets and graphic editing, Windows 8 will annoy us to no end. ”

Windows 8 is likely to be available around the end of 2012/early 2013. So my plan is to replace all my trusty XP machines with Windows 7 this spring/summer (the support plan for them is expiring about then anyway), so that I can avoid Windows 8 as long as possible.

Keystroke Shortcuts

Keystroke Shortcuts are so called because they are “shortcuts” – they save you time. Hitting a couple of keys is much more efficient than moving the mouse around.  When I use them during demos, people are always asking:  "How did you do that?"  So here are some of the ones I use most often.

Ctrl-O        Open
Ctrl-S        Save
Ctrl-P        Print

Ctrl-F4      Close document
Alt-F4       Close program

Ctrl-C        Copy selected Text
Ctrl-X        Cut selected text
Ctrl-V        Paste copied or selected text

Ctrl-N        New document (or email)

Ctrl-F        Search (Find)

New Worldox GX3 Cheat Sheet Available

With Worldox GX3 to be released any day now, I have posted my new Worldox GX3 Cheat Sheet on my web site. The new Cheat Sheet is revised and expanded (from 12 to 14 pages) to include new Worldox features, such as the Navigation Pane and the customizable toolbar. It also includes some new pointers and best practices, such as using Worldox to archive old Outlook emails and using the “Keywords” table in the Comments field.

Click here to download.

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.