| P R O B A T E & P R O P E R T Y September/October 2007 Vol. 21 No.5 |
| Articles from other issues of Probate and Property |
Technology Property
Technology Property Editor: Gerald J. Hoenig, 8495 Caney Creek Landing, Alpharetta, GA 30005, ghoenig@mindspring.com.
Technology—Property provides information on current technology and microcomputer software of interest in the real property area. The editors of Probate & Property welcome information and suggestions from readers.
Basic Principles
In considering the subject matter to cover in this column, the author spent some time recalling the various topics covered since commencing these columns in 2002. It is difficult to believe that five years have passed. Some of the columns covered some basic and rather critical core principles in office technology. Some are so important they need to be repeated periodically. That will be done here, in addition to covering some new thoughts not previously discussed.
Back Up Your Files
A good backup system is essential for any office where documents are stored on computer hard drives, CDs, DVDs, tape, or other storage media. It is clear that enormous amounts of office space can be saved by storing documents electronically rather than in paper form. Without a good backup system, however, lawyers are subject to losing all of their essential documents. This may not only have a material adverse effect on the lawyer but also on the lawyer’s clients as well. Some might suggest that paper copies are a good backup for electronic versions of the documents, but that all depends. If documents are lost because of a bad hard drive in a computer or on a network, paper copies would be helpful if no backup had been made at all. On the other hand, if the electronic documents are destroyed because of a natural disaster such as a hurricane, tornado, flood, earthquake, or other casualty, it is likely that all paper copies will be lost as well. This writer believes the following are essential elements of a good backup system for electronic documents.
• The system must be automatic. Relying on a human to initiate the backup process each day is too risky. Lawyers and their staffs are often so pressed for time that a ministerial task such as clicking on an icon to start the backup process has the lowest priority of things to do and may easily be forgotten.
• The physical location of the backed up electronic files should be far from the office location. The backup storage location should be outside the potentially affected area of any casualty or any single or series of related natural disasters or casualties that may materially damage the office location. Ideally, as an additional safety factor, there should be at least two backup storage areas. There are companies that provide such services for a reasonable price. The computer in the author’s office is automatically backed up between 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. every morning. During each backup, only files that are new or that have been changed are backed up, and the backup service actually retains several versions of the changed documents. On the two rare occasions that files had to be retrieved, the files were located and downloaded within a couple of minutes, and the author was offered the choice of which of the last five versions of the files were desired; all five versions could have been downloaded, if preferred. The service the author uses now also provides remote access, so he can download any file that has been backed up from his office desktop onto his laptop no matter where he travels—so long as he has an Internet connection. The system does not automatically save every file on the desktop’s hard drive. The user designates which folder to save, or if an entire folder is not desired, specific files within a folder can be designated for backup.
• Although it is important to back up files containing work product documents, it is not necessary to back up application files such as Word, WordPerfect, or Excel. If those files are lost, the user can always re-install the software applications. Generally, an application cannot be re-installed simply by copying the files that were backed up. Most often, a special installation program on the original application media must be used. Consequently, backing up the application files will probably be a waste of time and money.
Leverage Your Organization’s Intellectual Capital
No matter how small or large your office is—from a solo practitioner to a firm with more than a thousand lawyers—technology can improve the office’s service to its clients, reduce its exposure to liability, and enhance its bottom line. This advice is not limited to law firms but also applies to corporate and governmental law departments as well.
• Technology has provided tools to help make the knowledge within the organization more readily available to those who need that knowledge to do their jobs more effectively to serve the organization’s clients. This knowledge transfer has always taken place, and the means of doing so have evolved over the years.
• Technology can free up the time of subject matter experts in an organization to do higher-value work.
• Tools that have been used as repositories (in paper or electronic form) include memoranda, briefs, model documents, on-the-job and formal training materials, books, educational programs, and other methods. They have been effective, but now computer software provides more effective tools to use along with such methods. The author believes that expert systems should play an important role in efficient knowledge transfer. Perhaps the easiest way to develop expert systems is through the use of document automation software. This software is relatively inexpensive compared to the software tools required in the past. To take advantage of expert systems, the organization must be willing to invest the time of its substantive legal experts in working with systems developers to incorporate their knowledge into these systems. This concept is really the same as having these experts invest their time in any of the more conventional knowledge-sharing methods. The initial investment in time to develop expert systems will most likely be greater, but the payback will dramatically outweigh the benefits of more conventional methods. In addition to facilitating knowledge transfer in the organization, the end result will be to institutionalize the expert’s knowledge and make it available when the expert is unavailable because of meetings, vacations, and even after retirement from the firm.
Even though document automation software may be used as a tool for developing an expert system, the utility of the system is not limited to those who draft documents. The same software, presented in a different format, can be used as a tool to assist a lawyer or paralegal to review documents of any type, including title policies and surveys. In fact, a document review system may be a more valuable system, because, generally, more lawyers and paralegals review a particular document than draft one in a real estate transaction. The same system used for reviewing title and survey documents and the organizational documents of a borrower also may be used by the same lawyer to facilitate the drafting of a mortgage or deed of trust, or vice versa.
The end result will be higher-quality due diligence and document drafting in a significantly reduced time frame.
Some New Topics
Virus Protection
A very basic and important principle that has not been touched on by earlier editions of this column is the protection of your computer against viruses and spyware. A number of software packages are available. Recommended are those that check out all e-mail that arrives in the user’s inbox as well as all documents as they are downloaded or opened. The more advanced solutions are automatically updated on a daily basis, assuming the computer is turned on every day. In addition to using such software, a policy of not opening any e-mail attachments or clicking on e-mail links unless the user knows that the source of the e-mail is safe and reliable should be followed. Also, do not rely on the sender if you see that the e-mail was merely being forwarded to you.
Counterfeit Sites
If you receive an e-mail from a financial institution requesting that you update your information on its website, do not use the link in the e-mail to access that site. Too often this leads to a counterfeit site that looks remarkably like the real one, with logos and all. This is an easy way for an identity thief to steal your ID and password to the financial institution.
Remote Access to the Office
During the last six months, the author has successfully used GoToMyPC, one of the methods available for remotely accessing an office computer while traveling. Obviously, to use such a program, the office computer needs to be on full time and connected to the Internet while the user is away from the office. At a hotel with a high-speed Internet connection, the user goes to the GoToMyPC website and signs in with an ID and password. After signing in, the user is presented with a list of computers to which he or she has access. (The author only has access to his office computer so his list has only one item.) The link to that computer is clicked, and, as an extra measure of security, the user must then enter an access code. The first time the author tried this, he forgot about the need to bring his access code and was quite disappointed when he realized that his ID and password were insufficient to use the system. There was no way to obtain the access code without physically being at the office computer. The next time he remembered. After correctly entering the access code, the user sees the same display on his or her laptop screen as would be seen if the user were physically present in front of the office computer. The keyboard and mouse from the remote laptop then can be used to run applications or do anything else that could be done by the user if the user were at the office (except for such physical acts as inserting a DVD into the office desktop DVD player—although a DVD can be inserted in the remote laptop and files can be copied from the DVD directly to the office desktop computer). Although the user can run applications on the office computer from the remote laptop computer, the office computer’s response time will not be as fast as it would be if the user were physically working on the office computer. This is not because the office computer is working any slower. It is because it takes some time to transmit the images of the desktop’s screen over the Internet. The response time, however, is reasonably good and was improved when advice from the GoToMyPC website was followed to reduce the number of colors displayed from thousands to 256.
It is very easy to transfer files in either direction between the remote and office computers. This can be done by using the simple-to-use file transfer module easily accessible from an on-screen menu. File transfer, however, also can be done by dragging a file or group of files with the mouse pointer from a folder on one computer to a folder on the other computer.
One challenge the author experienced relates to the fact that his office computer has two monitors connected to it, while his laptop only has one. GoToMyPC handles this very well. If the user is looking at a document on the office’s right-hand monitor but wants to see what is on the left-hand monitor, all the user has to do is move the cursor to the left margin of the screen and the laptop screen will then pan over to the left-hand screen. It is very easy to move back and forth between the screens, although that is obviously not as useful as having both screens in view at the same time.
The author had one more opportunity to challenge GoToMyPC. His laptop is able to use a second monitor in addition to the built-in screen. After hooking up the additional monitor, he found that GoToMyPC was designed to take advantage of a two-monitor office setup with a two-monitor remote setup. It was very easy after viewing the help file (because there is no direct selection for this feature from one of the menus) to have both screens in the office display on the appropriate screens of the laptop computer. The only slight glitch was that the office computer has two standard-dimensioned 19-inch monitors hooked up to it, while the remote laptop has a built-in 17-inch wide-screen monitor with the additional monitor having a 20-inch wide-screen. This caused the right part of the left office monitor to display on the left side of the right monitor hooked up to the laptop. This was a little awkward, but not a problem.
One additional problem that detracted from the experience was that while traveling, a thunderstorm knocked out the power at the office. Even though the office computer was hooked up to a backup power supply, the electricity was out longer than the backup power supply could remain powered on. As a result, when only about five minutes of power remained, the backup power supply safely shut down the office computer. Once shut down, the computer could no longer be accessed by GoToMyPC because it was no longer connected to the Internet. Remote access is possible after power is restored, even if the office computer requires a user to sign in with a password, because the user can sign on remotely. Of course, someone must be available to restart the office computer, unless the user can and does set up his or her computer to automatically start up at a set time each day, which is possible on some Windows-based computers.
Try Out Wikipedia
During the past year, the author has used the on-line encyclopedia “Wikipedia” with amazing results. For example, its coverage is astonishingly current and extensive. A number of the items reviewed had been obviously updated within the previous day or two of viewing. Wikipedia describes itself as a “multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world.” Accordingly, the user should not assume it is a definitive source. The author suggests, however, that it may be a useful source of information you should review and consider.
