Frankly, legal technology is rather boring these days. There are few, if any, exciting new breakthroughs that quicken the pulse. On the other hand, a maturing technology base is not necessarily bad for consumers - a mature technology can be stable and cost-effective. Here are some recent products that I found highly worthwhile and that work well for me, although you might judge one or two of my approaches to be atypical, archaic or idiosyncratic, as is true for almost all law firms in some respect or other.

 

Software That Does Work:

Microsoft Office 2007: As you can see from the above, I am far from a shill for Microsoft, but they finally did one major thing very well. The newest 2007 version of Microsoft Office really is worthwhile. Overall, I found it to be a very effective, stable and easy to use set of programs. If I did not have several tens of thousands of prior WordPerfect documents on my own office network, I would convert to MS Office 2007 promptly. Unfortunately, MS Office doesn’t always properly recognize its own prior file format versions, let alone those of the competition like WP. Corel WordPerfect Office X4 is now shipping, although I have not yet had the opportunity to either try it or compare it to the latest version of MS Office. Overall, though, MS Office 2007 is a highly worthwhile product. Finally.

Dragon Naturally Speaking Legal Version 9: I have maintained for many years that voice dictation software, along with a highly compatible imaging program like Adobe Acrobat, are among the most important technologies for increasing law office efficiency and effectiveness even while reducing routine filing and typing demands upon highly trained and paid staff. The newest version of Dragon is excellent, at least if you are more comfortable or efficient dictating letters and pleadings rather than directly typing them. Recognition accuracy is even better with little or no training. Macro definition works very easily. Recognition speed, even on a relatively slow older dual-core AMD Athlon x2 computer is quite adequate. The only problem that I experienced, and I could not find a work-around, was Dragon’s inability to work correctly within WordPerfect X3. It’s supposed to work just fine but I could never find any solution. Instead, I dictated either into MS Word 2007 or into Dragon’s own “Dragon Pad” and saved the file in highly compatible Rich Text (RTF) format.

Even a few basic macros can result in a major improvement in your efficiency. The macros that I found most useful included blank form letters already addressed to a particular attorney, standard motions already formatted with a particular case caption, and document assembly using macros for each standard section in a contract. Highly recommended.

DL Drafting Libraries document assembly: Since the early 1990s, document assembly has been touted periodically as one major solution for law office efficiency yet the generic document assembly engines that required a user to code their own documents never seemed to quite catch on with the average law office. I suggest that’s because the knowledge, cost and effort required to code a law practice’s forms library was beyond the resources of most small to medium law firms and because the ultimate net economic return was dubious.

I myself had an adverse and expensive experience trying to convert my own solo law practice to document assembly procedures in the mid-1990s. I ultimately came to the conclusion that the most reasonable approach for the average small to medium sized law practice was more limited but straightforward - buy a program that included already coded substantive document assembly forms libraries and their associated questions needed to choose among alternatives. DL Drafting Libraries Version 9, published by Attorneys’s Computer Network, Inc, contains numerous substantive forms libraries customized for most states. The program is very easy to use. Answering a number of multiple choice questions, I prepared some real estate sales and conveyance documents using their Alaska real estate sales library. In about 15 minutes, as opposed to a few hours, I was able to prepare a good first working draft of complete home sales documents, including supplemental environmental agreements, promissory notes, deeds of trust and escrow instructions. The first working drafts prepared in Word Perfect by DL Drafting Libraries of course required an experienced lawyer’s revision to ensure conformance with the parameters of the specific transaction but, in order to avoid potential malpractice, that’s true of any set of transactional documents no matter how prepared. Overall, I found that the draft documents that I prepared with DL compared very favorably with similar documents prepared by hand using standard documents but that the DL output did not contain the sort of editing errors typically occurring when form documents are manually revised for a new transaction. Overall, so long as the documents that you need are contained within the DL Drafting Library document libraries, this system works very well for a small to medium sized law practice. But, as with any computer generated documentation, read it carefully and revise as needed.

CaseMap 7.5 I’ve been a big fan of CaseSoft’s CaseMap program for years. It’s one of the best programs around for handling and analyzing facts, individuals and issues, and how they relate to your case. Version 7.5 is the most useful and reliable version so far. Definitely recommended. Once you’re familiar with CaseMap, you’ll likely put it to specialized uses. It works very comfortably with Adobe Acrobat and is particularly useful in “paperless” law practices. TimeMap is a companion product which can take direct fact exports from CaseMap and turn them into a persuasive time line.

Picasa 2.7 This free digital photo developing software is surprisingly useful and even recognizes and works with most RAW formats used by advanced digital cameras. Picasa has some limitations, such as limiting maximum print size to 8.5"x11" but overall, it’s an easy to use program for light duty photo work.

Adobe Lightroom Version 2 Beta: Adobe Lightroom, which is becoming the gold standard for non-destructive digital photographic correction, is now publicly available as a highly functional and stable beta version. This is a good opportunity to test Lightroom for 30 days to ascertain whether you might be interested in purchasing this rather expensive program for long term use. I use Lightroom as my primary photographic program and find that it’s particularly useful when you need to authenticate a photographic depiction in litigation. You can get the download here.

 

To The Rescue:

Windows certainly has its foibles and it’s a bit odd that the most effective fixes are typically inexpensive or free third party utilities. Here are some that I’ve found invaluable when a Windows installation has gone sour but is not so flaky that a time-consuming re-installation is called for.

Ace Utilities: Ace Utilities is a reliable compact program that’s much less expensive than Norton, with lower system demands. Except for hard disk optimization, it performs basically the same diagnostics and Windows Registry clearing as Norton Utilities but only on demand rather than as a potentially intrusive background process that runs continuously. I’ll typically run Ace Utilities as a first response whenever a computer system seems to be balky or slightly unstable. You can download a 30 day trial version here.

Free RAM Optimizer: Ace also provides, as a free download to its customers, a Windows memory optimizer. I’ve installed it on a home computer with 2GB RAM, a computer that’s often used to edit photo files that may be several hundred megabytes each. This system often slowed nearly to a halt as a result of RAM overloads and resultant hard disk data swapping. Ace’s RAM Optimizer seems to have reduced such performance bottlenecks to a tolerable level without any noticeable adverse effects. Programs like this will make a difference when available RAM is low as a result of many programs loaded simultaneously or when you are intensively processing very large files, such as OCR’s a multi-hundred page Acrobat document or sharpening a massive photographic file.

Diskeeper Professional: Tests that I’ve done over the years suggests that hard disk performance probably makes more difference to your overall system performance than the processor in your computer system, especially when a hard disk’s file system becomes badly fragmented. Microsoft’s disk defragmenting utility doesn’t run continuoussly but rather only when manually commanded and doesn’t do a very thorough job. Diskeeper, especially the more expensive “Professional” version is much better. My own impression is that installing and running the full panoply of Diskeeper optimizations can make as much difference to overall system performance as upgrading to the next generation CPU but keeping the same hard disk. Other useful programs for detecting bottlenecks and tuning hard disk performance are HD Tune and Performance Test.

AVG Anti-virus: The new AVG Anti-Virus version 8 is a substantial improvement that also directly blocks spyware, root-kits and other mal-ware programs. It’s a free upgrade to users with current licenses. Since we started using AVG at the office and home, even with a teen-age daughter who’s on-line much of the time to web sites that are probably not the safest, we have not detected any malicious attacks.

Belarc Advisor: Windows handles security and other issues by applying a series of “patches” to fix specific portions of the operating system code. Sometimes, though, patches are not properly applied and various portions of your operating system can become mismatched and potentially even more unstable. BelArc Advisor, a free download available from checks your operating system for vulnerabilities, installed software and its status, and Windows components. If one or more Windows components or patches are not as they should be, such items are flagged and you will be directed to the specific part of Microsoft’s web site where a corrective download and/or more information are available. This program is invaluable when you need it. It certainly beats reinstalling Windows and all of your programs and data, not to mention relicensing hassles.

Dial-a-Fix: The other free Windows repair utility that’s occasionally worked wonders on an unstable system is “Dial-a-Fix”, which I’ve found available from a number of sites on the Web. Dial-a-Fix has resurrected systems that otherwise seemed destined for a hard disk reformat and complete reinstallation of Windows. I have never found its use to damage a Windows installation. In addition to first menu options, try some of the various options in the Tools button but avoid any of the reinstallation options unless absolutely necessary.

Hard disk failures: The old hard disk test and resurrection standby, Spinrite, has fallen out of favor. I have found a lot of useful hard disk resurrection and repair information here. This site links to some potentially useful open-source programs but I have not personally tested them.

Hot or Not Operating Systems? Hot is certainly not Windows Vista, which has acquired a bad reputation among the cognoscenti as being very demanding of hardware resources even while slower and less compatible. You know that the new OS is in trouble when Microsoft PR machine starts touting the “new next thing”, Windows 7, even though “7" is a few years off and Vista has only been shipping for a little more than a year. Vista Service Pack 1 helps a little but not enough. Microsoft seems to have done what they could to kill off (finally) reliable old XP but pressure by corporate customers to continue shipping and improving 32-bit XP (which first shipped in 2001) seems to have reached a critical mass. MS now indicates that they will reconsider current plans to drop XP from their product lineup. Were I starting over and had no Windows-only legal software constraints, I’d go with the excellent Mac OS 10 or some form of Linux, both of which are based upon the powerful Unix operating systems that have been constantly improved and refined since the late 1960s, an when Bill Gates had not yet dropped out of Harvard. Unfortunately, most legal professionals don’t have the luxury of changing operating systems because we are tied to Windows-only legal software.

I suggest an interim solution: Microsoft should update and refresh the current 64 bit version of Windows XP, generally known as Windows XP x64. This product has been shipping since early 2005 without a refresh but it looks like the regular Windows XP to which we’re accustomed while using the full capacity of current 64 bit processors. Windows XP x64 is faster and more reliable than either Vista, with which it shares much of its core software code, or 32 bit Windows XP. Forget about grafting a splashy, resource-hogging interface - just give users a stable, fast, familiar operating system that works in 64 bits. The only problem that I have experienced with XP x64 is the paucity of 64-bit scanner drivers. Unfortunately, that can be a deal-breaker problem for most modern law offices that need to scan documents but it’s a problem that would resolve rapidly if Microsoft encouraged hardware vendors to write the necessary software. 32 bit CPUs are not even manufactured anymore. Limiting our operating systems to 32-bit operation is archaic to say the least while the Vista alternative seems to have fogged over.