The Connected Lawyer

I know that I have been bagging on the Cook County Clerk’s office lately. See this, for example. It’s not that I want to pick on them. However, the reality is that they are the ones that I have problems with.

For example, after I was unable to find a complaint or answer in the file that I looked at yesterday, I had another court appearance, this time on a motion in the municipal division. For the record, I hate appearing in muni in Cook County. This division handles civil cases in which the amount in controversy is less than $30,000. There are lots of these cases filed in Cook County. Consequently, these are high volume courtrooms.

To understand the story I am about to relate, you must understand a little how Cook County operates their muni call. In an ideal world, this is how the call is supposed to work.

1. The Plaintiff files a lawsuit and sets a return date.
2. The Sheriff obtains service on the Defendant.
3. The Defendant files an appearance on or before the return date.
4. If the Defendant files an appearance, the matter is set for status at a date in the future.
5. If the Defendant files an appearance with a jury demand, the case is set for status in the jury call courtroom.
6. If the Defendant does not file an appearance, an order of default is entered and the case is set for the entry of a default judgment in the future.

Leaving the fantasy world and returning to reality, this is what actually happened in my case when I filed it.

1. I file a complaint and set a return date.
2. The Defendant timely files an appearance and a jury demand.
3. The case is transferred to the jury call courtroom for a day in the future.
4. AND an order of default is entered against the Defendant because, despite the fact that the Defendant filed a timely appearance, that information was not entered in to whatever system sends out the default notices. The case is thus set for a prove up date in the future in the original courtroom.
5. We appear in the jury call courtroom, however, the case is not on that call any more because the order of default had been entered.
6. Because no order was entered in the jury call courtroom, our case is dismissed for want of prosecution.
7. Thereafter, the judge in the original courtroom straightens everything out, vacates the default, vacates the DWP, and transfers the matter to the jury call courtroom.

This case has quite a history so far. Once in the jury call courtroom, the case is automatically set for arbitration. That date happened to conflict with my schedule. Thus I was appearing to continue the arbitration date. When I stepped up, the clerk informed the judge that a DWP had been entered in my case. The judge asked me what I knew about that. Rather than explaining everything above, I just told the judge that the prior judge had vacated the DWP and that had all been taken care of months ago.

The clerk swore that it had never been vacated. I guess that the order I have vacating the DWP means nothing because some other clerk did not properly code or key in the previous order. Anyway, as I was stepping away from the bench, the judge suggested to me that I “clear up the matter of the DWP with the Clerk’s Office.”

My only question. Just how am I supposed to do that? The whole problem with the DWP in this case started because the Clerk’s Office screwed everything up. If an order from a judge vacating the DWP is not sufficient for the Clerk’s records, I am not quite sure what I am supposed to do to convince the clerk that the DWP was vacated.

I recently traveled to St. Louis and stayed in the Westin that is across the street from Busch Stadium. Apart from Seattle’s Hotel 1000, which I loved, this has to be one of my favorite hotels. It is conveniently located across from the stadium and has easy access to the highway. Plus, the amenities are great.

The shower was beautifully appointed and contained two showerheads. The bed was very comfortable and I had a great view (as you can see in from the picture).

Additionally, this a fine hotel to be able to work from. The desk was more spacious than most and provided easy access to electrical outlets. Further, although the hotel provides wired internet access for a fee, the rooms also had wireless internet access. The WiFi had very good signal strength and worked just fine without having to pay for wired access.

Self parking is available in an open lot next to the hotel. Valet service is also available. I saw on a travel site where people were complaining about the cost of self parking. The cost is $17 and is added to your hotel bill. I don’t find that amount unreasonable. It is certainly less than what I pay in Chicago and is in line with what I have paid in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Seattle.

All in all, if you are visiting St. Louis, I would recommend the Westin as a very nice place to stay.

I know I complained a couple of days again about the difficulty in getting a file from the courthouse in Illinois. It turns out, however, that Peter Olson was right: at least I got the file I wanted.

Today I had the “pleasure” of retrieving a file from the clerk’s office in Cook County. When I got the file, I flipped through it looking for a couple of key documents: the Complaint and the Answer, both of which were filed in 2005.

I found lots of orders, and other miscellaneous documents, including the summons. Strangely, however, there was no complaint or answer? I could be wrong here, but I had always believed that the Complaint was the document that started the file making process in the clerk’s office. It appears that I am wrong.

On the bright side, I did find two documents from unrelated files that were included in my file. Maybe I should have checked those files for for the Complaint.

I have no doubt that efiling will not solve all of the problems in the court system. However, it would certainly go a long way toward doing so.

I am a true crime junkie. Thus, I jumped on the chance to read Defending Gary, a book about the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, written by one of his attorneys, Mark Prothero.

This is not your typical true crime book. If you want the details of the investigation or how forensic evidence finally solved the case, this is not the book for you. Fortunately, there are plenty of other books on the Green River Killer for you to choose from.

Instead, this book focuses on the legal aspect of the case, including how to best represent the most prolific serial killer in America. The first part of the book details the relationship between Ridgway and his attorneys and how they planned to defend him at trial. The second part, details the plea negotiations between the defense and the prosecutors for Ridgway to exchange information on the killings in exchange for not being sentenced to death. The second half also details the extreme difficulty faced by the investigators in trying to get all of the information from Ridgway.

This is not a suspenseful book, nor is it intended to be so. However, it is a fascinating look into the entire process of defending a serial killer. In a nice twist, the book also points out the public relations risks that Norm Maleng, the prosecutor, took in accepting a plea and not pursuing the death penalty against someone who has pleaded guilty to killing 48 people.

If you enjoy true crime books, and want to get a behind the scenes look at the legal machinations rather than the investigative portion, then I would recommend this book.

I am still fuming from an experience that I had in a local court clerk’s office yesterday. I had a meeting outside of the office. While I was out, one of my partners contacted me and asked me if I was near the courthouse. It seemed that one of his divorce clients had another case pending against her. He wanted copies of the important documents in the file, as it appeared that she would be hiring us to represent her in that matter as well.

Given that I was near the courthouse, I figured that it would be no problem for me to stop by and check things out. Despite the fact that I have been wrong before (cue snarky comment from wife), I have rarely been more wrong than I was in this situation.

First, it’s ridiculous that I have to go to the courthouse to find out basic useful information about a case. Nevertheless, it is the only option. So off to the courthouse I went. Unfortunately, it turns out that the one person who can order up files from the file room was otherwise occupied. Thus, I had to wait approximately 20 minutes before anyone bothered to order my file. After that, I had another 20 minute wait before I finally got my file. After getting the file, I had to review it, identify the documents that I wanted copies of, and then have them copied.

Finally, after almost an hour in the courthouse, I finally had paper copies of my documents. The kicker of course, is that when I got my copies, the clerk did not copy the physical document from the court file. Instead, she simply printed it from the electronic version on the computer system.

I then took my paper copies (which had been printed from electronic versions, which had been scanned from paper documents) back to my office and gave them to my assistant, who promptly scanned them back into electronic documents so that I could actually work with them.

People often complain about the amount of time that litigation takes as well as the high cost of legal services. Here is one reason for that time and cost: Institutionalized inefficiencies. The reality is that I performed this task in the most efficient manner possible, yet it was horribly inefficient.

Further, the process is no better for the clerk’s office than it is for me. With a proper efiling and electronic access to documents, the clerk would no longer need to take the paper documents and scan them in. Also, the clerk would not have to allocate employee time to scanning documents, making documents available to the public, or making copies of the documents. Changing the system benefits both the attorneys and the clerk’s office. Yet, because of the institutionalized inefficiencies that were currently face in Illinois, I see little hope for meaningful change in the near future.

As I have noted before, people from outside Illinois are dumbfounded at the fact that we have no electronic access to court files.

The reality is that I should have been able to access the court documents from my desk and obtain an electronic copy of the ones that I needed. At least in this county, the hard work as been done. All of the documents exist electronically. The fact that I am prohibited from accessing them or obtaining copies of them unless I drive to the courthouse is simply asinine.

Web Worker Daily gives us four simple tips that can help you keep your public wifi sessions secure. His tips are:

1. Use a VPN
2. Don’t forget the firewall
3. Avoid using Internet Explorer
4. Keep your logins secure

Check out his entire post to see an explanation of each and how you can easily implement them.

Here’s a great tip from Affinity Law Office Technology Blog about a free plugin from Microsoft to create PDFs from Office 2007.

I am a firm believer in using Adobe Acrobat. If you haven’t bought my argument yet, however, and you are using Office 2007, you should install this plugin.

Last week I had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Larry Port from Rocket Matter. Rocket Matter is a web based practice management and time and billing solution. In the interview, Larry tells us about Rocket Matter and a little about how it works.

If you are thinking of trying a web based practice management solution, you may want to take a look at Rocket Matter.

What is Rocket Matter?

Rocket Matter is an easy-to-use web-based legal practice management and time and billing solution. It’s designed from the ground up to facilitate the practice of law in small and solo firms. Rocket Matter is also referred to as Software as a Service, or SaaS, since it is a web-based, hosted application.

Specifically, Rocket Matter allows law firms to manage calendars, to-do lists, contacts, matters, and time and billing in one integrated and simple solution. We created a technology we call “Bill as you Work”, which traps billable time as lawyers and paralegals go about their day. The net result is a product that allows firms to operate more efficiently and reduces the amount of time that gets lost for invoicing.

Since we host Rocket Matter on our servers and it’s accessed via the Internet, users have ubiquitous access to their information while never having to spend money or time on software installations or upgrades.

Tell me more about Bill as you Work. How does it work? What does it capture?

The whole idea behind “Bill as you Work” is to capture time as you go about your day to day activities, so that at the end of the month when it comes time to bill you don’t end up losing all of your precious hours. For example, when you schedule a deposition in your calendar, you can choose to bill for the time spent when you create the appointment. Likewise, your to-do items can be instantly converted from simple reminders into billable items that can end up on your invoice. The application also contains its own stopwatch, so you can time any activity you work on and funnel that directly into billing.

As time goes on, we will look to incorporate “Bill as you Work” into new features as well.

The rest of the interview continues below the break

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I am not sure how he does it, but Rick is able to figure out what problems I am encountering in Acrobat and tell me the solutions. All without me having to bug him by email. Earlier this week, Rick posted on his blog an answer to the question of how to extract nonsequential pages from a document.

Acrobat allows you to easily extract sequential pages, however, there was no easy way to extract nonsequential pages. Or at least I thought there wasn’t. Rick, however, comes to the rescue with his explanation of how to do so. He explains:

Yes, it’s true that you cannot select and extract a discontinuous range of pages using the Extract Pages option and the Pages Panel.

However, you can drag and drop a non-sequential bunch of pages between two PDFs using the Pages Panel:

Go read the entire post, however, because not only does he give you step by step instructions on how to do is, he also includes a video showing it being done.

This is another excellent post from Rick and another example of why his blog’s feed should be in your RSS reader.

Chuck Newton addresses our fear of getting rid of paper. Chuck has some great thoughts here and it is a post that anyone who is moving to a paperless practice should read. Chuck describes this fear as:

So fear fits.  You want to scan and destroy the document, but you cannot because of lingering doubts that something bad is going to happen because of it.  But, we have to remember that FEAR is just an acrostic which means False Impressions Appearing Real.

Despite knowing this, I understand this fear.  I have experienced it myself.

Chuck concludes, however:

I have just decided to live with the guilt and any small risk that might exist and to destroy the paper. I scan it and maintain it on my computer, on a DVD and/or on Basecamp after the file is closed. I still make sure I do not take or give original documents back that the client provides to me, with the exception of those, like fee agreements, which I draft and the signatures on which I maintain.  Of these I  scan and then destroy the originals of these documents.  To do otherwise, would be to seriously defeat the purpose of that I am trying to achieve.

Chuck raises some great points in his post. If you are looking to reduce the paper in your office, you should check out his entire post here.