Almost great PDF article

I don’t know how you can write a “comprehensive” article about PDF creation WITHOUT giving significant space to Nitro PDF (which I have been using basically since it appeared on the scene), but if you forgive that absence, you’ll learn a lot from Brett Burney’s Review of Nuance PDF Converter 6.

Me, I’d have liked to see the ultimate alternative: roll your own.

Choose law affirmatively

Listening now to a webinar by Carolyn Elefant of My Shingle and Susan Cartier Leibel of Solo Practice University on “going solo.”

As someone who went solo in the practice of law back in 1994, then decided that legal tech was FAR more interesting, I like their perspectives.

I’ve been watching the growth of their blogs and reading them for quite some time, and I think they’ve both hit upon a communication style and have the reach to make them worth bookmarking.

OK, what I mean is that there are blogs that are worth bookmarking, and others which you can always find through blogrolls. Bloggers run in crews, so one gateway to the crew of Elefant and Leibel really only requires one bookmark.

My suggestion is that before you bookmark (or, even better add a blog to your Morning Coffee [hmmm name changed!]), you take some time to check out the blogroll. See if another blog in their crew speaks to your issues. if so, book mark that one.

For example, I separate them into these groups because if a blogger has bookmarked something, why should I? So, I often read blogs of Kevin O’Keefe’s clients, I bookmark at source, because I can always find his clients from there.

That and LinkedIn.

OK, so one comment that really made me want to blog is the perspective that people who go solo MUST have the proper outlook on their venture.

You’re not doing it because they’re something wrong with you. You’re not doing it as a placeholder until you can get a “real job.” You’re doing it because it suits you, you’re excited about it and you want to provide great service to clients in a new way.

Right now, they’re talking about not needing a year’s savings to do it. That’s funny. Other than the independently wealthy, and certainly in my case, a few month’s savings was more like it.

A law practice doesn’t require a year’s savings, it requires a client.

The one caveat, however, is that were I straight out of law school, I would NOT suggest opening up a firm. Why? Because there are plenty of older people out there who need your help and who can give you guidance. Confederate with an older lawyer and your practice will move along much faster.

I won’t recap the entire webinar, except to say that legal technology has indeed changed everything. This is the truth behind my early criticism of the argument that legal technology would allow BigLaw to obliterate small firm practitioners.

It kinda goes against the grain to recommend this, but in this case, I think a commercial “university” might be worth doing.

So, here’s the link: http://solopracticeuniversity. com

If you’re interested in solo practice, go listen to their webinar.

And then, read Carla Harris’ book and apply what she’s telling you.

The new Sedona publication

I will have a detailed and reasoned critique of The Sedona Conference® Commentary on Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process out as soon as possible.

I think this is pretty important stuff, so I want to take the time to do it properly.

Until then, read the work done by Tobias Mayer.

It will give you a VERY good idea of why the Sedona piece doesn’t work for me and why it’s pointing decision-makers in the wrong direction for all the right reasons.

Thanks to Ralph Losey for flagging it! I might not have read it for awhile had it not been featured on his blog with all those pictures of people I do NOT want to emulate!

Cataphora…Yummy! Part I

I’m in love with H5 and not just because of their killer website and name that has more cowbell than I can handle, but I also am having special moments with Cataphora.

In the run up to the Sedona Conference, I’m taking another look at legal tech from the perspective of what lawyers really need and I’m pretty sure that the teeny weeny email application I’m writing (prototype due out at the end of the summer) is on the right track.

That being said, Cataphora really does have the right approach and are FIXING IT! “It” being the way search and retrieval of meaningful content is and ought to be done.

So, understand their mission, if you choose to accept it (and you should):

Defining principle

Cataphora’s success and very existence are based upon one defining principle. This arose from a conceptual breakthrough that was simply stated, yet proved to be radical in its practical effects. This idea was that, in order to truly understand a document, you have to know about the circumstances in which it arose. In other words, you have to understand its context.

The negative

Ok, they’re a bit … oh, I don’t know whiny and snarky,

Trustworthiness is a core value in the legal marketplace and at Cataphora. We strongly recommend examining all vendor claims carefully. One way to do that is by looking at how their website used to look. The Wayback Machine makes that easy – just go here and enter the URL for the vendor in which you are interested.

I mean, really! Who CARES what a website looked like in the Wayback Machine?! Is this really part of the E-DISCOVERY dog/pony show to which unsuspecting clients are subjected? Didn’t think so.

If that’s the standard, then most legal tech projects would be doomed, because when some of us were using computers in litigation, some others of us were still in high school counting spots. And, of course, some others of us were practicing law and making googobs of money (ahem!). Besides, an appearance on the Brewster Kahle show is not really an indicator of algorithmic quality. It just means you’re lucky, really smart or have your own private Tardis.

OK, so I don’t think Cataphora folks are lucky. I think they’re really, really smart. Buuuut, it’s not exactly rocket science. Maybe it was 10 years ago, but not any more. Ever looked at Digg Labs?

Two Patents? Hmmm. Gotta think about that one.

I’ve read both, but now I’d better look at the pictures, because this is one area where I’m pretty sure there’s so much out there now that these patents may not hold much water. Not a huge fan of business method patents anyway, but when they involve stuff that seems to be open-sourced to the hilt, it gives me pause.

I could be so incredibly wrong, so I’ll take another look, but at first blush, what they write about on the site seems right out of Collective Intelligence, a book I keep next to the bedside, cuz I’m that much of a dork.

Back to the Positive

But, Elizabeth Charnock, the founder of Cataphora is a much bigger dork, said with all sorts of love, so I think worship might still be in order.

Plus, she’s a girl, and that makes her AWESOME! And, a little scary.

I love Cataphora because….

they “get” the wisdom of letting computers do what they do best. And, computers don’t really care whether you have 1 or 2 terabytes. Which means that you can leave your data unculled, and the computer will keep chugging along.

Not only that, but once the data has been marked as “non-responsive,” it can still be used for all sorts of things. Like weighting. And, making your useful dataset searching smarter. Wanna know how? I bet you do!

Call me! No, really: call me.

So, let’s get real: [ bold statement ] there’s absolutely NO real reason to cull ESI ! [ /bold statement ]

I found this really HYSTERICAL presentation the other day entitled The Real Cost of Privilege Review ( and here) and all it did was make me think of lollipops. Read it and weep.

I want to know who out there is wasting soooo much money…so I can sign them up as clients, because this sort of process is so yesterday, even your 10-yr old could probably re-engineer it to get better and more cost-effective results. I mean, hasn’t anyone ever played pick up sticks???

So, why am I adamant that people stop culling? Because it’s like trying to speak French without any understanding of grammar.

To be more precise, I’m advocating that lawyers stop culling at the first tier, as if their lives depended upon a massive reduction in terabytes. I’m suggesting that culling ought to be done by the computer, and that valuable metadata (in a really, really board sense) ought to be retained until the end of the project. I’m intimating that the document corpus is a body and it’s integrity depends upon the entirety of its members.

In other words, in Cataphora-lingo:

Cataphora is the first and only provider to develop deep analytics (not mere data statistics or simple email widgets) that give insight into the facts expressed by the ESI dataset. True analytics can (among many other things) detect individual and organizational “heartbeats” and de facto organizational substructures, evaluate typical versus anomalous behavior, assess consistency and variation in an organization’s processes, and detect patterns of data deletion.

If you’ve got lawyers doing the culling and searching, here’s yer sign: you’re going about it the wrong way. It’s like taking a hachet to an old growth forest of oak with no appreciation for the vital role played by acorns.

I say, hire yourself a legally-trained person who knows about taxonomies and understands the difference between DATA, INFORMATION and ARGUMENT.

Lawyers, do not. Not unless they’ve taken “Data 101.” They usually work bass ackwards and try to squeeze everything into theory, instead of first trying to understand what they’ve got.

This is where Cataphora’s mission is key: understand the forest before you start cutting trees.

Thus, sayeth the Mighty Snarker, thereby ending-eth the lesson!

TRECing along

Found an incredible site today, the H5 site.

It’s a lot easier doing this when you have 30 industrial-strength brains to my 1 eco-friendly noggin, but OK, I’ve never been put off by a [ huge freakin' ] challenge.

[sigh]

Anyway, through their site, I found the site I’d been looking for, which talks about information retrieval from large data sets. Thank goodness I was particularly curious today, or I’d have NEVER found it! …Well, I would have, but given that I’ve been looking nearly a year, that says something about either it or me.

What was I looking for? Well, it’s the TREC site. Looking for it too? Well, here ya go!

The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) workshop series encourages research in information retrieval and related applications by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. Now in its eighteenth year, the conference has become the major experimental effort in the field. Participants in the previous TREC conferences have examined a wide variety of retrieval techniques and retrieval environments, including cross-language retrieval, retrieval of web documents, multimedia retrieval, and question answering. Details about TREC can be found at the TREC web site, http://trec.nist.gov.

You are invited to participate in TREC 2009. TREC 2009 will consist of a set of tasks known as “tracks”. Each track focuses on a particular subproblem or variant of the retrieval task as described below. Organizations may choose to participate in any or all of the tracks. Training and test materials are available from NIST for some tracks; other tracks will use special collections that are available from other organizations for a fee.

Might be a way to get invited to Sedona…can I get a proposal together for the Legal Track in like 4 days? Hmmmmmm…

Checklist Mentality

Pilots think using checklists and mechanics don’t. Pilots need perfection, mechanics solve problems creatively.
This marks a fundamental difference in the way they process information and a reason why intercession is often necessary to make sure that the plane gets into the air and stays there until the time it’s supposed to land. And then, of course, it needs to land safely.

Following the theme of different thinking about the law, I wonder if we can also learn from a movement to get doctors to do the same thing:

A new study has found that hospitals could cut surgery complications by about 30 percent and resulting deaths by 40 percent if doctors and nurses follow a checklist of safety rules before, during and after performing surgery.

The checklist, issued by the World Health Organization last year in response to soaring reports of hospital errors, lists 19 steps that surgical teams should follow, starting with making sure that the right patient is on the operating table, the site of incision has been located, and that the proper procedure is about to be performed. “In this era of highly intense and sophisticated technology, sometimes a very simple technology, which only takes a few minutes, can have a very positive impact,” says Richard Reznick, head of surgery at the University of Toronto in Canada and co-author of the study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

It’s not going to work to simply give doctors a list of things after which they yell “check!” I would suggest that the doctor calls out the item and the techs around him or her get to answer “check!” This would instill some quality control over doctors who are notoriously imperious in the operating route.

Either that, –or force hospitals to send doctors to semi-annual trainings to ensure that they comply with the established operating procedures…

Oxo as a Model for Law 3.0

I was thinking today about the prospect for a program that refits the homes of the elderly (while they’re off visiting the grands or something) so that they can be self-sufficient longer.

A very good reason to move to Florida.
But, then I started thinking about Oxo products (which I use and love). Since I think they had a great, simple idea, I decided to look at their mission statement, as a way to take a working-break from devising the mission statements for my own projects. This is what I learned:

OXO is based on the concept of Universal Design. But what is Universal Design and how does it benefit users? In simplest terms, Universal Design means the design of products usable by as many people as possible. In the case of OXO, it means designing products for young and old, male and female, left- and right- handed and many with special needs.

“Universal Design“? Cool. This phrase deftly encapsulates my dreams of master-minding a revolution from the perspective of legal technological innovation. Wish I had thought of it myself. Here’s one articulation of the Principles of universal design:

PRINCIPLE ONE: Equitable Use

PRINCIPLE TWO: Flexibility in Use

PRINCIPLE THREE: Simple and Intuitive Use

PRINCIPLE FOUR: Perceptible Information

PRINCIPLE FIVE: Tolerance for Error

PRINCIPLE SIX: Low Physical Effort

PRINCIPLE SEVEN: Size and Space for Approach and Use

BWAAAHHHAHHHAAA~!

Here’s what one path looks like:

Step One: learn something about the law. Check!
Step Two: impatience with the inanity of legal practice becomes intolerable. Check!
Step Three: understand that my highest use is NOT chasing clients. Check!
Step Four: Battle with middle-class demons for 15 years. Check!
Step Five: Say, what the hell! I gotta be meeeeee! Check.

So, when Ron Gruner asks, as he did in his White paper, “What’s Holding You back?” I can sum up the answer in 4 words: A Team To Execute

That’s all and that’s it.

Now, in solving that problem there is a major dependency, called “money.” But, money is not the first consideration when it comes to “getting stuff done.” The Amish don’t need money to build barns, they need people.

The dirty little secret of capitalism is that there are a LOT of people who are not money-motivated. Most of them work long hours for other people. They’re not motivated by money,–they’re motivated by the things money can buy, their own limitations and their fears.

People aho are not money motivated are usually people with experience having lots of it. They know money doesn’t buy happiness and having “enough” money is relative to one’s perceived needs. That’s one of the lessons that allows our veterans to survive on the street,–the military taught them that survival isn’t about money, it’s about resourcefulness.

One thing I know is that there is a deep pool of people who have passion and who would gladly trade a Lamborghini and 100-hour work weeks for a satisfying 60-hour work week (let’s be realistic). Those are the people I need to find.

I find them, then I find someone with money to pay them to execute the visions.

That’s it and that’s all.

Bono, The Lawyer

This news is bit old, but it’s never too late for good cheer!

welcome to the profession, Boyo!

From the press release:

21 May, 2008
Bono, U2 lead singer and anti-poverty activist to receive Honorary Doctorate from Keio University

Bono will also deliver a lecture to Keio students

Keio University will confer the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Law, honoris causa, upon Mr. Paul David Hewson, who is known as Bono, in recognition for his work in the fight against poverty and AIDS in Africa. The Ceremony and a lecture will be held on Tuesday 27 May from 16:20. Please cover this story. Please note that this release is embargoed at 6 pm 27 May 2008. (Japan standard time).

1. Conferring the Honorary Doctorate of Law Bono has been involved in the fight against poverty for more than twenty years. Both as a musician with U2 and in his lobbying of international leaders, he has worked to raise awareness and promote effective political action to eliminate extreme poverty and disease, especially in Africa. Through his music and his activism Bono has helped to deliver results for the poorest people in the world. He will continue that work during his visit to Japan during Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) conference and in the lead-up to the G8 in July. Bono is co-founder of the ONE Campaign, which has more than 2.4 million members engaged in the fight against poverty. Keio University, which was established 150 years ago in 1858 under the principal of dokuritsu jison (independence and self-respect), has aspired to establish a true “ public realm” of civil society, independent of the bureaucracy. Keio has continuously nurtured leaders of civil society. In recognition of Bono’s outstanding leadership as an activist who appeals to our human conscience in the fight against global poverty, Keio University confers on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Law.

I’m not sure if grade inflation is responsible, but I’m pretty sure that a history of 20-plus years as a rock star, social networking genius and entrepreneur won’t help on the Multi-State.

Too bad every video of his acceptance speech seems to have been pulled from the web!

Anyway, the legal profession (even if it’s just honorary) is all the better for the addition of one more … eh… member.

))

Have You Seen This?

Google has a fantastic (dare I suggest Tufte-inspired) way of presenting geographic data. Ok, so it’snot all that new, –but it just showing up in my searches, so it’s new to me. I love it!

The implications of Google’s multiple representations of data along a time line suggest gorgeous ways of presenting legal data. Learn more at the hysterically named Google Operating System blog.

Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for noting that to get this feature up front, add view:timeline” to any query. I tried “Kumamoto Castle” and it had stuff! Not a lot of stuff, but stuff.

What stumps me, however, is that the timelines only show up about 1/2 down the page. They should be at the very top of the organic search results. I think it’s a fair assumption that people interested in the Bay of Pigs, for example, aren’t likely as interested in going there so much as learning the history. Even if the assumption is travel, there’s plenty of real estate left for ads.

There’s a bit of wizardry there,–probably something to do with Gears, because the images load dynamically,–and fast!

Google is sure making it harder and harder NOT to adopt their invasive-but-free technology.

User Fatigue and Indices

Today, “The Mighty Snarker” ( as I have recently been dubbed )..:o))…went back to the Michigan Bar website and with an abundance of curiosity started clicking around to see what was new.

What I found was a section on “Practice Management Resource Center.” Again, with an amount of curiosity that directly contradicts my list of objectives for the day, I started clicking.

It took a long time to find anything.

Now, were I not obsessed with taxonomies and findability these days, I might continue clicking for quite a while, happily doing my lipsticked-pig-rooting-for-truffles act and wondering what my $350 plus pays for every year.

But, what I found was an outdated site that still uses cold fusion pages.

COLD FUSION PAGES!

Lawyers are busy. Their staff are busy. So, it shouldn’t take 6 (and yes, I counted) clicks to get to a PDF of the Business Plan Outline, with three of those clicks on a teeny tiny little plus sign.

I know why I can’t take cold fusion pages: they’re relics. But, I have a fondness for the State Bar of Michigan. So this isn’t a snark, so much as a plea on behalf of my brethern and sistern: fix it!

Here’s what I’d do in three acts:

• Give the user a choice on how to view the content, –then just give it to them in 3-clicks or less by replacing the Russian doll model with visible lists. Pull out the Checklists and Guidelines, List and Articles. Make them top level items.
• Combine the downloads section together with the lending library and legal software sections
• Add the “latest content” to the home page and/or text it out to the people who use it