Blaming IT

I saw this late last night, a post by Ron over at Strategic Legal Technology in response to a LexisNexis survey:

Inside Counsel (April 2008) reports on a LexisNexis survey on information overload by professionals: ?77% of legal professionals? cite a clack of sufficient information technology tools to cope with the ever-increasing information burden."

Law firms and legal market vendors undoubtedly can do better in creating, deploying, and training on tools. But it irks me to see surveys point fingers at IT professionals. I?ve run IT at a law firm and hosted widely publicized internal seminars to create awareness of or training on new tools. Often, literally not a single lawyer shows up. And many lawyers who complain have almost no patience to learn new software or new features. So many lawyers have only themselves to blame.

Now, of course, as an IT guy, I completely agree with Ron. There are much better ways to cope with information that many people, not just lawyers, simply don't take the time to learn. RSS is a great example of this, I would tell you that the number of percentage of people I know using RSS readers is probably in the single digits, and I know a lot of people who work in tech and blog, so I'm betting my experience is on the higher end compared to most. Instead, most people are still hitting websites every day looking for the latest news items, or worse, subscribing to dozens and dozens of email newsletters that they just let sit in their inbox along with hundreds of other emails, never to be read.

There are better ways to handle information, but you have to learn to use the tools, and adapt them to whatever suits your style best.

That being said, now that I work in Litigation Support, I find myself more frequently in a different role. Instead of supporting the tools we roll out for other people to use, some of my time is now spent using those tools to get certain things done. Sometimes, the tools I have, as many and varied as they are, simply aren't that good.

Lately, I've found myself longing for a different tool than what I have because I've needed to cross-reference financial information by querying across numerous spreadsheets, which isn't difficult to do if I bring those sheets into Access, but then I have to export the results of my query back out in order to use formulas to get my bottom-line numbers. It's frustrating that the tools I have limit me like this, but I also know I can't really expect to have an unlimited budget for tools, so I deal with it. I make do because I have to. (This is lesson #1 for those of you who want to work in Lit Support, learn how to make do however you can to get things done!)

On the other hand, maybe this is exactly what Ron was talking about. I probably could do this easier if I knew VB or something, but I don't, and I don't really have time to learn it on the fly either. Hmm....

How do you resolve the competing need to bill hours, or get work done in any organization, versus spending the time to learn the tech tools that can help you do that work? There are no easy answers, that's for sure.

 

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Ethics Revisited

I know, I know, it was just a few days ago that I wondered if I could go back to just working at the help desk after sitting in the session about ethics in e-discovery.

Truth is, even there, I was subject to more stringent ethical rules simply by virtue of working at a law firm. I was reminded of that today, while certainly handling ESI gives me more opportunity to screw up in a big way, every single person at the firm is responsible for handling some client data, and is charged with even keeping our client's confidentiality. That's just part of the job, and something that has pretty severe consequences for not adhering to.

So, while there's certainly a lot of responsibility when collecting or processing ESI, or building a Summation database with the client's documents, those ethical responsibilities have always been in place. You simply have to do what you know is right in every case, no matter what. You know it's wrong to talk about your clients outside the office, you know it's wrong to offer advice when you're not a lawyer, and you know it's wrong to be careless and end up with possible spoliation of ESI, so you don't do it. It's pretty clear what you're not supposed to do, so be careful to do things the right way, and you won't have to worry too much about the sanctions that comes from ethics violations.

Still, I get a little jittery every time I have to sign a chain of custody form. :)

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Techshow Day 3 Session 2

Automated Documents

Barron Henley and Allan MacKenzie

Barron: Quit using copy/paste and search replace to create documents! You copy over errors into all your documents. Most of the people, who consider themselves power users, don't use word processing software effectively at all. Movement away from per hour billing to flat fee means you need to work quicker and get more done!

Allan: Within Word you can use fields to simply fill in a letter, or other common docs, you can even set up the template to use fill in questions to fill in those fields. You can use styles to reuse what is typed in one field in another field. Use Autotext, not just globally, but specific to a template as well, makes it easier to find and use in that template. So, you can create a clauses folder with autotext entries and simply enter the clauses that are relevant to only that template. If you use links to a template your letter will update any time you change the autotext library for that template, say if you make part of it underlined, then you hit Ctrl-Shift-F9 to close links before saving. Minor programming in 2003 will allow you to automate that as well. (Note, need to research exactly how these sorts of macros are written and how we could use them.)

Autotext in 2007 is different, you need to add it to the quick access toolbar to reach it...

Commercial Drafting Systems: Can be a nice option if you don't have time to design these yourself. Lexis has forms, ABA, and your local Bar Association have good forms. This helps to keep up with law changes, because they send you updated forms, and usually have listserv to help communicate with other users of the form set, who also happen to be in the same practice area as you. On the other hand, they can be expensive, and are charged SAAS, so it's ongoing, may not include all you need or every state, some are difficult to learn, or maybe don't work very well. Biggest complaint Barron hears is complexity of system in some cases.

Document Assembly Products:

HotDocs
DealBuilder
Rapidocs
Qshift
Pathagoras
Perfectus
Activedocs
Exari
AmazingDocs
Dynamic Document Drafting

HotDocs (a Lexis Nexis Product) is the market leader. HotDocs has a web-based component as well. Barron is showing off doing a letter in Hot Docs by answering questions. Simplified training, want to do a letter, "open the letter template". You program the one template and everyone shares that so you know every letter is going to have the correct stuff in it.

What documents to automate: create chart, two axis how frequently you use them, and how difficult they are to do. Start easy when you're learning how to program templates! If you start with the hardest document you handle, you'll never get anywhere, start with things like fax cover sheets, and grow from there. You can still save lots of time with these simple documents being automated, maybe 5 minutes at a time.

Barron is on office.microsoft.com talking about training videos that are on there. Also suggests the Word MVP site. He wishes he could give every law office the simple understanding of how to really use their word processing software. He actually got applause with that one..:)

OK, this will be the last post for today, not going to try to blog 60 sites in 60 minutes, it goes too fast, and then I'm off to spend the afternoon with the wife before flying home. I'll have more to say about the event overall soon.

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Tech

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ABA Techshow

I had just started to see some mentions of the American Bar Association's TechShow 2008 in Chicago in March this week, and on Thursday I found out that I was being sent there myself, which is pretty cool. I didn't know how cool until I came across a partial listing of bloggers who will be speaking there. I'm pretty jazzed about getting to mingle in such a distinguished crowd. :)

Anyway, if you're going to be there, be sure to look me up and say hello!

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Personal

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Double Billing

I haven't worked in the legal industry for very long, but I am familiar with the ethical practice of not double billing your time. For example, if you are typing an email to one client, while one the phone with another, you can't bill them both for that time. Naturally, that's to encourage you to stop and pay all of your attention to the client you are billing for that time, which is a good practice. Typically, the ethical line extends down to paralegals and others, but it's unclear if it extends to litigation support. Here's why:

It's very, very common for me to have one process, such a Summation load, running, while I'm working on something else. Would it be ethical for me to bill both clients? Now, we get around the ethical question easily enough, we don't bill for "machine time". So, even though that load file may take an hour or two to finish loading, I typically only the bill the amount of time I spent setting it up and starting the process.

On the other hand, one of the folks I talked to at the E-Discovery conference in New York suggested that as the very reason he doesn't recommend law firms process electronic discovery in-house. His argument was, if you only bill your time, and not machine time, then you end up giving away the resources. So, while it may take the better part of the day, and over night, to process discovery documents through a program like IPro's E-ScanIt, you can't use that machine for anything else, and all that processing is only a cost, not a revenue generator. I haven't even mentioned the cost of data storage either, which is getting larger and larger every day. His argument was, for large cases, ship all of that to a vendor and have them host it, then simply turn around and pass that cost directly to the client.

That conversation got me thinking, that we really do "give away" quite a lot of our resources (and that's even assuming all the hours we bill actually gets billed to the client, and not written off by the attorney), but is that a bad thing, or does it keep costs lower for our clients, which we also kind of like to do whenever possible?

Any way you look at it, there's no easy answer. What we do now, seems to work for us, but I'm not sure it always will, in every case. We'll need to be flexible on this and see where each case takes us.

I'd love to hear from some law bloggers, lawyers, or other folks working in the legal industry about how they handle this. Comment away!

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Oops on the upgrade

I think I've mentioned before that I use the free version of Evernote at work, because I don't have access to Onenote like I do at home. I've even talked about the time tracking template that someone had built that I have been using to make quick notes of work that I need to bill later. (Yes, I'm not an attorney, but I bill time like one..*L*)

Recently, my copy of Evernote has been informing me that there's an upgrade available. For the most part, I've been ignoring it, becasue I haven't really had much time to mess with it, but this past Friday, I was looking at a relatively calm day, so I went ahead and said yes, go ahead and upgrade me.

You'll note, of course, that I didn't do any research on the upgrade. I didn't check out the user forums for possible problems, etc. I just agreed, like a typical user. (For shame!)

After restarting the program, I discovered that the time tracker template, didn't work at all. Yes, the one thing that I use the most, and is most valuable to me in the program, was broken. Worse, once I went to look at the forums, I discovered that, oh yeah, there was information about how the upgrade would break custom templates!

Luckily, there were instructions on how to tweak the XML to fix the template, and after an hour or so of messing with the code I had a usable template again, albeit one that doesn't really look as good as it did, before. Given that I also had a huge headache after looking at XML code for that long as well, I decided to cut my losses and work with the somewhat ugly, but functional, template.

If you use Evernote and have trouble getting your weekly time tracker template working, drop me a line, or if you want to take what I have and make it look pretty again, I'll be glad to send you what I have!

Labels: LawFirms, Tech

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E-Discovery for Dummies

You may recall me talking about getting a free copy of this short book earlier this month.

Today, I finally had some free time to read it at work. It didn't take long, it's only about 41 pages long, but I thought I'd share my observations about it.

My initial thought was that the book might be a resource for attorneys, but I don't know about that. It covers a lot of the Federal Rules and other areas of e-discovery they should already be quite familiar with. There's some small mention of some of the technical aspects, and I think the book could help them understand how to think about e-discovery from the standpoint of how data is stored, and all the various places it could be stored.

The thing I think this little book would be great for though, is with IT managers. Those are the folks who are usually too busy to think about something like e-discovery until their company in the midst of litigation. Those are the people who this is written for. Those are the folks who could save themselves a whole lot of trouble if they familiarized themselves with the concepts early on!

On the other hand, I think there are some links over at this post on ediscoveryinfo.com on explaining computer forensics to lawyers, that may be a great resource to keep around!

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Tech

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FUD, but not entirely

Joe Wilcox does a good job of finding the FUD in Microsoft's 10 reasons not to use Google Apps. I'd have to agree with him that Microsoft's reasons are pretty dumb.

One thing that does jump out at me though, is number 7:

Enterprise companies have to constantly think about government regulations and standards?while Google can store a lot of data for enterprises on Google servers, there is no easy-to-use, automated way for enterprises to regularly delete data, issue a legal hold for specific docs or bring copies into the corp

Joe, rightfully, points out that Microsoft has plenty of it's own hosted services, including email that would suffer from the same problem. So, it's a bit disingenuous of them to make it a reason not to use Google. The truth is, it is a pretty valid reason to think twice about using any hosted services.

The more I learn about legal holds, and e-discovery, the more I realize just how much trouble can be caused by your organization's data being spread all over the place. When it comes time to produce these documents, having them hosted on-line as part of a collaboration project just adds one more place, and one more cost, to the discovery process.

In fact, just the other day when I was in a meeting where a desktop sharing product was being demonstrated, the chief concern of the attorney present was whether or not the site stored any information on the documents as they were being changed. (It doesn't) This is a major concern for any legal situation. You want to have control over what information, and metadata, is in any documents you are sending out, or that may have to be produced as part of discovery in the future. The more places you have documents being stored, the harder that is to do.

Personally, I know that any e-discovery process is going to be more complicated when any of the information custodians is using web-based services as part of their job. Like PDA's or home computers, it just adds one more place that needs to be searched for relevant information. Any organization that wants to utilize on-line apps has to at least consider that and have a plan to deal with it.

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Microsoft

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Personal Use of the Internet

Neville Hobson posted something interesting over the weekend, and Shel Holtz added some further thoughts to the discussion today, about the number of companies who have simply blocked access to Facebook and other social networking sites.

I think they cover some of the objections to this pretty clearly, but I want to focus on a couple of areas, specifically around the area of law firms, since that's where I work. :)

I'm also going to broaden the discussion to sites beyond Facebook, to the general idea of employee personal use of the web.

I've run into these sorts of objections in regards to my own blog, and to various tech blogs, and forums that I visit regularly. For your web-savvy employees, the line between personal use and professional use is so blurred as to almost be non-existent. I spend a fair amount of time reading tech blogs, participating in tech discussions, answering questions in forums and mail lists. In many places, I'd be forbidden to do that during work hours. Since the blogs in question, or the interactions I'm having, are not directly related to a specific work task I'm trying to accomplish, according to policy, they are "personal", and therefore a violation.

Never mind that I'm making professional contacts, sharing and learning from the greater community at large by being an active part of it, and that the employer gets the benefits of that work every day, it's still not allowed.

For law firms, these sorts of rules are even more counter productive. Lawyers, practice development experts, and even staff, are all an important part of making connections with clients, getting the word out about the firm and the work we do, turning up new business from people we have contact with, sharing information with experts, etc.

There are more sites than I could possibly count that include communities built around the practice of law, a specific industry that our clients may be working in, marketing law firms, litigation support technology, general tech, human resources, web design, etc. Some of them are going to be located on sites like Facebook, or MySpace. Some of these connections are going to be made on LinkedIn, in message boards, on on our own blogs.

The Web gives your employees the opportunity to be plugged into these sorts of communities, and contacts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from anywhere. Many of the most web-savvy employees will be contributing to these communities during the work day, at night, and on weekends.

Given that, and given the benefit the firm sees from these activities, why would you block them, either with blocking technology or policy? And, given the time these folks spend away from the office as part of these communities, why do you begrudge them taking a few minutes to read ESPN,  send a personal email, check the show times at the local movie theater, or even read the latest gossip?

When you go out of your way to block these things, or make an overly-stringent policy about personal Internet use, here's the message you are sending to these folks, "We don't trust you to get your work done".

Maybe you don't trust them. Just remember that the next time your secretary has to deal with your biggest client, or write up a letter for them. Remember that the next time you ask your IS team to handle electronic evidence from a large case, or the next time you have someone put together a PowerPoint presentation for you. You trust them to do an awful lot for the firm and your clients. You trust them to not break confidentiality every single day, which is a huge deal for a law firm. But you don't trust them to use Facebook or other sites without it interfering with work. Doesn't that seem a bit out of whack?

Unproductive employees are unproductive employees. The way to fix that is not to block websites. They'll find another way to avoid getting work done. The real policy should be to find people you can trust, and trust them.

Labels: Blogging, LawFirms, Tech

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Should small business be scared?

That seems to be the message being sent by court decisions as mentioned on Future Lawyer today. They point to an article by Roger Matus where he talks about the increasing number of cases where the "We don't have enough resources" defense for not meeting a discovery request just doesn't cut it.

As a guy who used to be the one IT guy for a small business, that scares the heck out of me. I was involved in some litigation, as well as an unemployment arbitration in my time there and I can't even imagine the amount of work I would have had to put in if either of those things had fallen under the current federal rules for e-discovery. I would have spent a lot of time doing keyword searches, tracking down locally stored .pst files, searching across the network, restoring stuff from backup tapes, etc. and we had a really small, simple network. You throw in something like Exchange, or maybe a couple of file servers, or firewall logs and this gets really huge, really quick!

It's no wonder e-discovery vendors are popping up all over the place. There's some serious money to be made helping organizations that don't have the resources or expertise to comply with  electronic discovery requests.

I also happen to think there's a pretty good opportunity for a law firm with the internal resources to take on some of this work on behalf of their clients to become a major player. Of course, that requires having the expertise on staff and making a commitment to keeping it. I haven't worked at a law firm that long, but I'm betting that's easier said than done. Ultimately, a law firm is about the attorneys, not the e-discovery team, so you do have to weigh going outside the core competencies of your organization and how dedicated you want to be to doing that. I can't imagine it's an easy call, but certainly I think a firm with some e-discovery technical expertise can have a leg up in certain situations.

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Blackberry risks

So do Blackberry users put others at risk? I don't know about that, like I've already said, it's not so much the device as it's the person who can't put it down that is the risk.

However, I do know that in a law firm, having a blackberry not work can be a hazard! Lawyers really don't like when their Blackberries don't work. I also know I was a hazard to other people during the 2 hours I spent today trying to get a new Blackberry to authorize on the BES server! Somehow after many unsuccessful attempts at Enterprise Activation, it suddenly just activated and started working. I have no idea why, unless I managed to move into an area with better wireless coverage going from the attorney's office down to my desk and in to the server room and that caused it to connect.

All I do know, is that if this becomes a regular feature of my weeks, I'm going to become dangerous to be around..:)

At least the week is over and we have a weekend to enjoy!

Labels: LawFirms

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Lawyer Meme

I stumbled across a meme today that I found interesting. Now, you know how much I normally hate memes, but this one intrigued me because it was making it's way around the law blogosphere, and I do happen to work at a law firm. Basically the idea was to complete the sentence "Lawyers appreciate...."

The interesting thing to me was that of the 20 blogs listed as having posted a response as of this writing, not one of them mentioned any appreciation for their staff. Not one mention of a legal secretary, paralegal or assistant, let alone an IT person.

Now, let's get one thing straight, I'm not about to go bashing lawyers on here. I do, however, want to point out something that I do believe is true about law firms. This industry is not one to get into if you need constant praise. I work at a firm that prides itself on it's collegiality, and it's rare that the attorneys who work here go out of their way to praise you. There's usually a thank you when you help them with something, (which is much more than you get in other firms from what I hear) but there's also simply an expectation that when you help them, you're doing what they pay you to do.

That's not to say there's never any appreciation shown to staff. It just tends to be more in a material sense. Good benefits, a nice Christmas party or summer party, small birthday gifts, etc. are all things I've enjoyed in my time here, and they all show me that the firm appreciates what I do, I just don't tend to hear it from lawyers often. I'm not sure why that is, maybe there's a certain mindset that it takes to get through law school, or the practice of law requires a focus or personality that is less likely to consider their staff first when they think of what helps them be successful. I don't really know, but I accept it.

At the end of the day I'd rather work for lawyers who pay me well, look out for my benefits and offer me the little extras than ones who tell me how good I am at my job but never back it up.

Update: Andrew Flusche was kind enough to point out one late post that does, in fact mention staff. I'm glad to see it!

Labels: LawFirms

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