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 am doing postjudgment collections on a case and I recently downloaded a form from the clerk’s office for my post judgment collection. The form has a location to enter the judgment amount, court costs, postjudgment costs, etc. Then the form (which is in Acrobat) is supposed to automatically total the numbers.

In this case, however, whoever designed the form screwed up an the form was repeating the judgment amount in the intial filing fee box. This, of course, means that I will have to handle this manually, instead of using the automatic calculations. I figure that this is not a big deal. I will just use the typewriter function in Adobe Acrobat and “type” the information I need to add.

Except of course, that whoever created the form decided (for reasons wholly unknown to anyone) to disable the typwriter function in Adobe Acrobat. Thus, I cannot use this (wonderful) feature. Let me pause just one second to point out the utter stupidity of disabling the typwirter function in Acrobat given that until just recently, these stupid forms were completed on an actual typewriter. In fact, I have no doubt that the majority of these forms are probably still being prepared on an actual typewriter.

Anyway, I have ran into this problem on court forms before. For reasons I cannot fathom, this is often disabled on court forms. I think to myself that this will not be a big problem, however, because I can just “print” the form to PDF and do with it whatever I want.

Of course, this can’t happen. The designer had secured the form, thus preventing it from being printed to PDF.

The security features in Adobe Acrobat are nice. They enable you to send electronic documents and retain some control over what the user can actually do with the documents. These are great features and are quite useful in the proper situations. Here, however, I would argue that because these forms are provided by the Clerk for me (and other attorneys) TO FILL OUT, it doesn’t make much sense to lock the form down so that I CAN’T FILL THE FORM OUT.

Complete stupidity. I just do not understand it. There are some days that I am convinced that there are people in the clerk’s office who sit around and think up ways to make our lives more difficult.

To solve my problem, I simply printed the form, scanned it in and added my own fields that work properly.

The Affinity Law Office Technology Blog has a post on a great and cheap solution for network attached storage (NAS). They suggest using an older desktop PC and the FeeNAS server operating system. I have not yet tried this software, however, this is a project that I have been considering and I am quite pleased to find a free software solution.

If you are looking for a similar solution, this may be something you want to check out.

I normally stay away from political discussions here. However, I found a recent post by Mark Cuban particually thought provoking. Mark’s conclusion is that our President (regardless of who it is) is not a role model:

I’m not trying to call out any of the candidates on this. They are all human, with the same level of problems and vices that we all have. The point is that we live under a new reality. There are no more role models. People no longer live their lives trying to be bulletproof to media scrutiny. Personally, I don’t think that is bad at all. Maybe it’s time we finally admit that Presidents specifically, and politicians unilaterally are not role models, and stick to the issues and their ability to lead.

I don’t care if our President or VP has smoked pot. I don’t care if they weren’t a good student. I do care about how well they can do their job.

I don’t have much more to say about Cuban’s post, other than to urge you to read the entire thing.

Lexbe.com has unvieled a new website called litiReviews. LitiReviews describes itsself as having:

the largest collection of free legal and litigation software reviews on the web.  All reviews (100+) are full-text, and have been published in legal magazines, journals, websites and blogs. LitiReview links to copies of reviews available on the internet, or hosted by us at the author’s request.

I haven’t yet had the chance to fully explore this site, however, I like the concept of a central location to search for reviews of legal software.

The site appears to collect reviews that are otherwise available on the internet and gather them together in a searchable format. The search function appears to work well and, on the reviews I tested, clicking on the review title either took me to the website where the review was originally published or downloaed a PDF of the original review.

This site may not answer all of the questions that you have about a particular piece of software. However, it does look like a good place to start your research on legal software.

I have a computer problem that has been giving me fits. I hope that someone here can help me with this.

I have a computer in which the power supply and part of the motherboard got fried. I would guess the problem origianated in the power supply and then killed part of the motherboard. Anyway, I pull the hard drive, pop it in an external case and fire it up. It appears to be working fine. I can access everything on the drive EXCEPT for the stuff in the My Documents folder.

For reasons that I won’t go into, we need to recover the files from this My Documents folder. (Please note, this is not my computer and it is not my fault that there is not a good backup). The drive appears to be working fine and every other file on the drive is intact and able to be retrieved. Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to access the files within that folder?

Update: I guess I should have been a little more clear in my question. A commentor asked for clarification:

Are you going through C:\Documents and settings\[user]\My Documents?

Yes, this is how I am attempting to access the folder. I have also attempted to redefine this folder as the My Documents folder for the new computer.

Are you getting some kind of error?

Yes, I am being told that the folder is not accessible. This is the message I get anytime that I try to access the folder (even when I try to designate it as the My Documents folder for the new computer).

John Scalzi has twice had novels nominated for the Best Novel Hugo. He placed third the first time and most recently, he lost the Best Novel Hugo by 9 votes. He also won the John W. Campbell Award for the Best New Writer, largely on the strength of his first novel, Old Man’s War.

Having read all of Scalzi’s novels and enjoying them, it is not without an understanding of his accomplishments that I say that his latest book, Zoe’s Tale, is the best thing he has written. Zoe’s Tale takes place during the same time as the events in The Last Colony. However, instead of focusing on John Perry and Jane Sagan (as he did in The Last Colony), Zoe’s Tale focuses on John and Jane’s adopted teenage daughter Zoe. Because of the difference of the perspective of the main character, there is very little interaction between the events of The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale. Sure the same events are happening, however, they happen quite differently for Zoe than they did for John and Jane.

Although I have never been a teenage girl, I thought Scalzi did an excellent job of capturing her voice. Further, he expertly retold the same story found in the Last Colony without making it boring or sound like the same story again.

Not only does this book fill in some great details about Zoe and her life, it also answers some unanswered questions I had from The Last Colony, in particular, what happened to the werewolves.

Despite the fact that there not a lot of combat action (like we saw in Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, and the Last Colony), there is enough happening in the book to keep you engaged in the story. Further, I found the book more emotional than any of Scalzi’s other books (this includes The Sagan Diary). In fact, there are two chapters of the book where I was crying as I was reading it.

In sum, Zoe’s Tale, is an excellent companion to The Last Colony and is Scalzi’s finest work so far. This should be the book that gets Scalzi the Best Novel Hugo.

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.

I am a big fan of ebooks. They are certianly more portable than regular books. Although I read my ebooks on my Treo, I am always happy to see advancements in e-reader technology. engadget has a post about a new e-reader from Plastic Logic.  This device is thinner than the Kindle, plus it is flexible. Additionally, it’s display is 8 1/2 x 11. This means that it likely won’t fit in your pocket. However, it should fit just fine in a briefcase. This decision seems to make sense in that Plastic Logic is marketing this to the business market.

Of course, the downside is that it does not connect direclty to Amazon to download books over a cellular network. Instead, you connect to your computer via a USB cable, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.

Although the video below is a sales presentation, it does give a nice overview of the product.

Also, you can find some pictures of it here.

Last week I was reviewing a tract search from a title company. When I called the title company to ask about a couple of questions that I had on the search, the person I spoke with explained that it would take her a few minutes to get the information that she needed because she was working at someone else’s desk at the moment.

This was not a big deal from my perspective. However, I quickly realized that this woman narrated her work. It was a constant stream of consciousness narration of what programs she was selecting, what she was looking for, and where she should click her mouse. Although this was mildly annoying, I did not think much about it until the woman logged on to one of her company’s databases and proceeded to recite her password while entering it.

Fortunately for her, I had no malicious intent or desire to use her password. However, she did not know that.

Based upon this experience, I would suggest that if you talk to yourself, be careful and make sure that you do not say your passwords out loud. You never know who could be listening.