Apr 29 2008
Web Worker Daily gives us four simple tips that can help you keep your public wifi sessions secure. His tips are:
Check out his entire post to see an explanation of each and how you can easily implement them.
Apr 29 2008
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.
Apr 28 2008
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
Apr 25 2008
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.
Apr 23 2008
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.
Apr 23 2008
I just read a great article by Jim Calloway. He points people to an article that he recently wrote for the Oklahoma Bar Association explaining how to answer simple questions by searching the internet. I can think of several people off the top of my head who would benefit from reading this article.
Jim explains that the genesis of his article is the fact that he often sees people publish questions to list serves that they could easily answer themselves. As Jim explains:
So today I propose an answer to a question that has troubled me for years. Why would that person send that question to hundreds of people via e-mail when they could simply find the answer online themselves?
The irony is that they probably find it themselves as quickly as they can type the question and send the e-mail. So why bother hundreds of others? I have determined that part of the answer to my question is narcissism and laziness. It doesn’t bother some people to force hundreds of others to reach for the delete key if they can get what they need.
But, I now believe that most people simply don’t know they can now get instant answers to almost anything online or they don’t know how.
Many lawyers who can do superb digital legal research for their clients seem to not know how to do other online research. They can easily find precedents and cases, but cannot easily find the flash point of kerosene. (Oh, wait, that’s in 25 Oklahoma Statutes § 34 and the Oklahoma Constitution; bad example.)
I recommend that you read the article and pass it around to “those people” who never bother to answer their own questions.
If you are curious, as I was, about why the flashpoint of kerosene is in the Oklahoma constitution, a Goggle search will lead you to the answer.
Apr 22 2008
I have a Zits calendar on my desk. For those of you not familiar with Zits, it’s a comic about a teenage boy. Really, it’s much funnier than it sounds. Anyway, yesterday’s comic from my calendar was too good not to share.
Apr 22 2008
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.
Apr 21 2008
To the extent possible, I try to make my practice as paperless as possible. The benefits of doing so are innumerable. Of course, one of the problems is that some people still require an original signature on documents.
One of the solutions to this problem is to use digital signatures. The problem, of course, is that most people do not understand digital signatures and how they work. A couple of weeks ago, I was able to get a demonstration of a company that is making digital signatures simple and secure.
The company, ConXPoint, explains that it allows you to:
In the demonstration that I received, I was looking mainly at the electronic signature aspect. Their service allows you to create documents and then upload them to your area of their servers. From there, you can have the service contact all of the people that you need to sign the document. They do this by sending an email to the party and asking the party to call you to obtain the password to access the file.
That password is assigned to individual people. Thus, as long as you give it to the person who is supposed to get it, no one else will have access to it. The recipient then signs onto the service, accesses the file, and signs it. The file is stored in PDF format. This means that the file is in a format that the recipient is likely used to working with.
Signing a document is as simple as clicking in the appropriate places. The verification comes not from the fact the the person had the proper information to access the file. The service allows you to access additional control over the signature aspect, such as requiring people to sign in a certain order or requiring a witness to be present when the document is signed.
The document remains stored on their servers, allowing you to download it again at a later time. You can also access the document and verify that the copy you have is the same as the copy on the server.
The key thing that I experienced when trying the service out was that using the service was very simple. This is something you could easily use with a client and feel confident that the client would be able to sign the document without getting confused or overwhelmed.
In addition to the digital signatures, ConXPoint also provides other services, including allowing you to use their servers to store documents. Basically, you can use their service as an extranet for your clients. You give your clients passwords to your area, and allow them to access only the documents they are entitled to access.
The services that ConXPoint provides are quite interesting and have a great potential to increase the ability of people to practice law with even less paper.
Apr 20 2008
I just finished Infected by Scott Sigler. It is a classic horror novel that gave me chills like I haven’t had since I read Misery, Thinner, Cujo, and the Shining. Infected is horror does in the classic King mold that is designed to scare you and mess with your mind.
One of the interesting twists is that Sigler approaches horror from a scientific point of view. Thus, when his characters start to itch when they become infected, you know the itch is real and that it is being cause by something natural, rather than supernatural. In one sense, that almost makes it scarier than supernatural horror.
Despite the fact that I kept wondering about every itch that I got, I loved this book and read it in about three days, because I really wanted to find out what was going on. Like a great horror book, this one has a definite well done ending, but it is certainly not an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after.
If you like horror. Check out this book.
If you want to hear Sigler talk about the book, you can download a couple of interviews here and here.
