The Connected Lawyer

Google Docs and Zoho seem to be getting all of the press for online document creation and collaboration. I recently discovered an additional service Box.net. Box.net allows you to upload files and store them on their server. Additionally, you can edit these documents online as well as share them with anyone you wish.

Box.net is primarly a online storage, access, and collaboration, service. As a consequence, it uses Zoho to edit documents and Picnik to edit pictures.

Box.net offers four different plans, including a free plan with 1GB of storage as well as a paid plan at $19.95 a month for 15GB of storage.

A cool feature that I like about the service is that you can access it from a web enabled cell phone.

I have just signed up for the service and haven’t had a chance to really try it out yet. I would be curious to hear from anyone who has experience with the service.

I recnetly stumbled across a great post from David Louis Edelman titled Ten Things Computers Should All Do Flawlessly, But Generally Don’t.

He made some great points, including my favorites:

Automatic file syncing. It’s astounding how badly computers do this. Every operating system on every computer sucks at syncing files; it’s only a matter of degree. I should be able to turn on any device I own and access any file I own, and it should all happen transparently. I don’t want to have to think about where I put a particular file, or whether I can access it from my iPhone. My calendar events should automatically sync between my Blackberry, my desktop, my Google Calendar, and my websites. Perhaps the key is to have everything save to “the cloud” and sync locally for offline access; I don’t know. I just want it to work.

and

Useful battery life. I am sick to death of power cords. If I never saw another power cord in my life, it would be too soon. But I could deal with power cords if they only led to docking stations that charged up my appliances enough to make them usable for an entire day. But right now, my laptop barely survives three or four hours untethered; my Blackberry struggles to get through the day with the WiFi switched on all the time. Fer the love o’ Christ, people, I need at least a day’s worth of juice for every machine I own. Please.

Go to his post to see his entire list. He addresses some other favorites of mine such as everything wireless and true plug and play.

PC Magazine has a great article on extending your laptop’s battery life. The article contains suggestions that we are all familiar with such as dimming your screen and not using the DVD drive. However the article also contains more substantive tips.

Some of these include:

Turn off ports. Disabling unused ports and components, such as VGA, Ethernet, PCMCIA, USB, and yes, your wireless, too. You can do this through the Device Manager or by configuring a separate hardware profile (see next step).

Create Power-Saving Hardware Profiles. Configure your laptop for the various scenarios in which you use it (on a plane, at the coffee shop, at the office, and so on). You can do this through the Hardware Profiles menu by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Preferences or by using a freeware utility such as SparkleXP (for Windows XP users).

Configure your display to turn off when not in use. This is different from just using a screensaver, because in many cases a screensaver still requires the display’s backlight to be on. You can set the interval to turn the display off in Windows’ Power Options—found in the Control Panel.

The article contains several more tips, all of which will help you extend your laptop’s battery life. i urge you to check it out.

Spam is the bane of our email existence. Recently David Pogue wrote about how to stop cell phone spam. He explained the problem as:

OK, now I’m really, REALLY annoyed. Within a week, my wife and I have both started getting spam text messages on our Verizon cellphones. I know that this is nothing new, but it’s new for us, and it’s apparently getting worse.

David explains that blocking the cell phone spam is relatively easy. He provides instructions on how to do this for all of the major cell phone services. For example, to block text spam if you have Verizion Wireless:

Verizon Wireless: Log in at vtext.com. Under Text Messaging, click Preferences. Click Text Blocking. You’re offered choices to block text messages from e-mail or from the Web. Here again, you can block specific addresses or Web sites. (Here’s where you set up your aliases, too.)

If you are having a problem with cell phone spam, you definitely want to read this article.

A tip of the hat to Jim Calloway to pointing me in the direction of this article.

Over the past few weeks I have enjoyed an interesting series of posts from both Dennis Kennedy and Ernie the Attorney. Dennis has posted a three part series in which he explains the process that he went through in deciding to purchase an iPod Touch as his new laptop computer.

At the same time, Ernie the Attorney was posting a series of entries about his trip to Panama during which he left his laptop at home and took only his iPhone. After his experience, he concluded:

As you recall, last week when I went to Panama I didn’t bring a computer. I mentioned that I relied heavily on my iPhone, and that I was able to do a lot of work with just that device. But, I pointed out, that the trip was for pleasure so I didn’t really need a computer. If I had been away longer, or if I had been required to do more work on the trip, I would most certainly have brought my laptop. But, for a short trip that doesn’t involve a lot of work, I can say that an iPhone works just fine. In fact, I would venture to say that the iPod Touch would work fine. My daughter had one and was able to check email and do most of the things that I did on my iPhone.

Although his phone service did not work in Panama, he was still able to make calls using his iPhone.

I thought my iPhone would be able to work on the local phone network here in Panama. It did last time I was here, but not this time. AT&T assured me it would when I checked right before I left on my trip. “”Yes sir, you’re signed up for the Intenational option at $3.99 a month,” the representative told me.

That turned out not to be true. But doesn’t matter because I have the TruPhone app for my iPhone which lets me make low cost calls using the free Wi-Fi at my brother’s beach paradise.

I found both of these series of posts quite intriguing. It certainly sounds attractive to be able to travel without a laptop and still be able to get some work done. However, I doubt that I will be traveling down either Dennis or Ernie’s path in the near future. First, as I have mentioned before, I hate iTunes, and I would be tied to it to use either product effectively. Second, with respect to the iPhone, I hate AT&T’s service (which is your only real option with an iPhone). My wife and I both have Treos. She has AT&T service, I have Verizon. Often I will have better reception than her. Also, when traveling to the less populated areas of the country (where we have family), she often has no reception, while my phone works just fine.

Nevertheless, if you are considering trying to lighten your load while traveling, check out these posts from Ernie and Dennis and consider leaving the laptop at home.

One of my favorite programs is Mobiliti which is now owned by Packeteer, Inc. When I first started using the program it was called Network Ungplugged. I actually prefer that name, because it is a great description of what it does. The program allows me to synchronize my network files to my laptop so that I can work on the files when I am away from the network. Not only is this program easy to use, but it also preserves the file paths of the files, so that working on the files on my laptop is just like working on the files on my network.

Mobiliti is a great program and one I recommend for anyone often has to work when disconnected from the network.

Recently, I had some files on our network that were deleted. I had local copies of the files on my laptop and I needed to synchronize them back to the network. The way that the synchronization is set up, if a file is deleted from either the network or the local drive, the other file is deleted upon synchronization. In this case, I did not want that to happen. Instead, I wanted certain local files to be copied back to the network.

I looked in the configuration settings and did not find a way to do that. I checked the online Knowledge Base and still found no solution. So I contacted customer support via email and got my answer. I am posting it here in case others need the info and so that I can find it again.

1. Go to File\Synchronization settings\synchronization tab and set it to fully interactive mode. Save changes by clicking OK.
2. Sync.
3. At the preview, select the file that you don’t want to be deleted from the real network. Right click and choose “Change sync action”
4. Set the sync action to the new desired action and proceed with sync.

I recently received an email from the Southern District of Illinois announcing that they will have a wireless network available for attorneys in all court buildings in East St. Louis and Benton. To use the service, you have to obtain login credentials from the Intake desk. I think that this is great news.

My only question in when is Cook County going to join the 21st century and add WiFi in the Daley Center, or at least in its library.

If you have questions about the differences between Google Docs and Office Live Workspace check out this post from Inter-Alia, which compares the two. It looks like there are some significant differences between the two. For example,

First, unlike Google Docs, you aren’t actually working on documents inside the browser — you are using the Microsoft Office products installed on your computer. So when you log into your workspace and click New Word Document, MS Word opens up a new document. When you save it, the document is automatically deposited on your workspace online. Because you aren’t working on documents online, that means you can’t work on a document at the same time as others with whom you are sharing it — for them, the document will appear as “checked out.”

I have not played around with Office Live Workspace at all and I have played around with Google Docs only a little bit. However, I can say that I was up and running with Google Docs in about 30 seconds. Plus, Google Docs, just like everything else that Google makes, worked simply and without any problems. I can’t remember the last time anyone said that about any Microsoft Product.

I believe that Adobe Acrobat is one of the most under used programs that attorneys have. Many, if not most, attorneys have a copy of it on their computer. Yet, almost all of them use it for only two purposes: creating a PDF and reading a PDF that someone else sent them. Acrobat is much more powerful than that, however. I have written before about some of my favorite Acrobat tools.  You can also find several other posts relating to Acrobat by clicking the Acrobat category in the sidebar.

Today I want to point you toward a post from Ernie the Attorney on his PDF for Lawyers Blog. In the post, Ernie explains that he does not use paper in his depositions and that, instead, he refers to his electronic copies of the documents. He explains:

I have my deposition notes set up in an outline on my computer.  When I get to a place that calls for me to talk about a certain document I inform my opposing counsel what the document bates-number is, and ask him to show it to the witness.  I have all the documents bookmarked in Acrobat.  It takes me about 3 seconds to get to the document, and I make good use of the time it takes my opponent to pull the document and show it to the witness.  I have notes superimposed on the PDF and I examine those and get ready to frame my questions.  At the end of the deposition I don’t offer any documents as exhibits.  If opposing counsel asks me why I’m not doing that I tell him that the bates-numbers (which I announced on the record before starting my questions about each document) constitute sufficient reference.

If I’m attending a deposition it’s even easier.  When a document is offered I ask what the bates-number is and I just pull it up, much more quickly than if I were to wait for it to be handed over.  Plus I have my PDF notes superimposed on my copy which helps me quickly figure out the relevance of the document to my theory of the case.   And of course I can add more notes on the fly if I want to.  I also bookmark the document and indent it under a main bookmark labelled for the deposition in question.  So when the deposition is over I have a listing of all the documents that were referenced in that meeting.

I think that this is a great way to use Acrobat. Not only does it allow you to access your documents easily and quickly. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, it also keeps all of your notes with respect to a particular document in one location. As an added benefit, all of those notes are fully searchable.

Although I have not entirely abandoned paper at my depositions, I do use Acrobat to keep notes on my documents and to organize them. I have found that the PDF Package available in Acrobat 8 is a great way to package all of my deposition exhibits together in a single location.

If you are are using Acrobat only to read or create PDFs, I urge you to start exploring the other options that are available to you.

I agree with the Greatest American Lawyer about the Power of a Good Vacation. Taking GAL’s words to heart, the family and I are spending the week in Tennessee at the Kickback Kottage. The cabin is very nice and has several amenities, including a hot tub and, most importantly, high speed internet access. The high speed access means that I can spend 30 minutes or so in the morning while the others are rising or in the evening after they go to bed to check my email.

Being able to check my email as I go along means that I can assign tasks to my assistant to handle while I am gone, or create a task list for items to deal with when I return. One of the hallmarks of leveraging technology is being able to work where ever I am. This does not mean that I want to work all of the time. Instead, it means that I want to be able to leave the office and do so without worrying that things are falling apart.

This is just another example of how technology can free you from the office and still allow you to effectively practice law.