The Law Planet Blog

I will admit, I have a small firm. in fact, you can't get much smaller than a law firm of one lawyer. I like to think that I am conscious of the costs of running a business and hiring a lawyer. If a document can be scanned an emailed, that's the way I send it. Unless someone requires me to do so, I will not fax something and then send it by overnight delivery service.

Today I received a discovery request from a large firm in Chicago. It was something that they previously had faxed to me. So they didn't violate my "no fax and overnight" rule. But the envelope, which was oversized, seemed heavy to me. My assistant weighed the empty envelope. It weighed an ounce.

Under the new postage rules, the envelope itself costs 83 cents. Now 83 cents is not a lot of money. But it shows how insensitive lawyers can be to expenses. If they charged this postage expense back to the client, then the client paid 83 cents before the envelope was filled. What bothers me is that noone at this law firm thought to themselves that these heavy envelopes end up costing someone more money than necessary.

I'm not suggesting wrapping stuff in cellophane and sending it. But I am suggesting that lawyers need to be more sensitive to the expenses they incur on behalf of their clients.

That's the view from The Law Planet, Jupiter, Florida.

I just read another article about how Apple is going to take over the business desktop. Maybe I'm just getting old and surly, but I'm not convinced it's an enterprise device. Here's why.

1) The iPhone keyboard sucks. That's the only word for it. If you like guessing where on the touchscreen you have to put your finger to press the letter "k", then enjoy. Me, I like a keyboard that gives me a "k" when I hit a "k".

2) The iPhone is fragile. How many manufacturers have come out with skins, condoms, buffers, and other devices to prevent your pretty little iPhone from suffering from the ravages of gravity and a pavement parking lot? Now, see how many you can find for a Blackberry. There's a reason folks. You can drop a Blackberry. Drop an iPhone and it will make a nice paperweight for your desk. (I can hear it now "That one I dropped on the way to court. That one I dropped on the way to an important meeting. My cat knocked that one off the counter.")

3) The iPhone is a phone, not an email device. See remarks re: keyboard above. Business users want email first and a pretty phone second. If they wanted a pretty phone all the time, they'd carry a RAZR. (Which I do, but not just because it's pretty).

4) The mirror slick exterior surface. What genius came up with that? Oh yeah, the people whose friends are selling the skins, condoms and other things to wrap around the pretty piece of artwork. It was really stupid to take a device that doesn't like to be dropped and wrap it in something that makes ice look like an OSHA-complaint stair tread.

Yes, my kids want iPhones. And it sure is purty. But give me a break. A business device? No way.

That's the extraordinarily crotchety view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

The broadcast television world will change on February 17, 2009, when traditional analog television will go "dark." For information on the changeover, see the NAB website DTVAnswers. How does this affect the practice of law, one might ask.

If you received a small portable television, for watching the news, weather or for emergencies, on February 18, 2009, that TV will no longer work, other than as a paperweight. Remember all those "cute" small color TVs that could be held in your hand? Well, they'll be dead, too. So will the TVs that are mounted in your car, RV or your conference room.

The one saving grace is that this applies only to over-the-air broadcasts. Most cable systems, for now, will continue to broadcast both analog and digital signals. If you've never seen an HD broadcast, which is a high definition digital signal, you are missing out on something. The picture and sound quality are better than anything that you've ever seen.

The federal government is assisting in the conversion. The government is giving away 40 dollar coupons that you can use towards the purchase of a digital converter box. You can make old TVs compatible with DTV by purchasing a converter box. The basic boxes are rumored to be priced between 50 and 70 dollars. Simply hook up the box to your antenna and your old TV and "voila" - digital TV. It is reported that even old TVs will display a better picture with digital signals.

Here in Florida, I'm thinking hurricane preparedness. If the power goes out, the cable goes out. If the cable is out, I need to receive over-the-air television. To do that, I have a couple older TVs that will need converter boxes (it's a REALLY BAD IDEA to hook up big screen TVs to a portable generator). So I'll be signing up for the coupons and getting at least one converter box.

That's the rabbit-eared view from The Law Planet, Jupiter, Florida.

Here at The Law Planet, we believe that profits increase by increasing revenues or decreasing expenses. If there is a suitable freeware or shareware program we can use to accomplish a task, then we use it. We just discovered GiveAwayOfTheDay. This website has a free software program every day. But you must download the software and install it on its given day.

Recently we downloaded a program called Evernote, which reminded me of an old DOS program called Sidekick. You take bits and pieces of information and file it using Evernote's system. We'll see how this works.

While we use WordPerfect as our main word processor, I also have a copy of OpenOffice on my computer for heavily formatted Word documents that open funny in WP. I have also used Google Documents, which my son swears by, and not at.

We have not installed Linux on any machine but with what I've been reading about Vista, that may be our next step if MS doesn't get its act together.

That's the penurious view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida

Our clients like us enough that they occasionally pay our bills. Most of these bills are paid by check. In fact, we receive checks on an almost daily basis, some large and some small. These checks have to get to the bank somehow.

In the old days (as in more than 3 weeks ago), our firm administrator had to go to the back on a regular basis to deposit the checks. We have an ATM card for this, but it was still a pain. We switched banks to Stonegate Bank recently and they provided us with a remote deposit terminal. This is one of the coolest devices I've seen in a while.

The remote deposit terminal is a small desktop scanner that is designed to read the magnetic strip along the bottom of each check. We scan the check and input the amount of the check. The machine places a red logo across the front of the check indicating that it has been electronically processed. And each day we upload the deposit to the bank - no ATMs, no waiting in line.

This technology is an outgrowth of the 9/11 disaster where manual check processing halted because all air travel was suspended. The bankers came up with electronic image processing and this will make our life easier. Check it out for yourself.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

A recent blurb in the ABA Journal weekly newsletter struck a chord with me. A law firm in Boston has banned billable hours. What's next, not billing for faxes and copies? How will a firm ever make money without billing its clients in 360-second increments?

I like billing. It puts food on my family's table and keeps the lights on here at the office. On the other hand, I am terrible at keeping time records. I'm not inaccurate about it, it's just that I would prefer to do things other than record my time, particularly in those 360-second increments. Flat fee billing avoids the possibility of under-billing, which is my "problem" (I should be in a "meeting" - My name is Marc and I underbill. The crowd responds - Hello, Marc.)

I have worked on flat fee "projects" in the past and have been happy with them. It really enables the client to control their legal expenses and enables the lawyer to do the work without regard to cost to the client. There are any number of hourly cases I have settled where I knew that the settlement resulted in the disappearance of piles of anticipated billable hours.

But what if we had a flat fee environment? What if we had a menu for each case where a case of a certain size and type is handled for a fixed price, regardless of the timing of its resolution, either through settlement or adversary proceeding? What if cats and dogs could live together in harmony? Maybe the world is flat?

I like flat fee billing. I'm going to see if it can work for us. And when you see a cat grooming a dog, you'll know that flat fees are taking over the world.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

We have our office email domain, labovick.com and I have a multitude of personal addresses. The most frequent non-business email address I use is my Gmail account. I use the Gmail account for my personal email and I like the web interface design. And it's handy as a backup in case my main email domain is unavailable for some reason.

I was recently co-counsel with a friend of mine who was lamenting the remote access problems he was having with his mail server. Rather than try to redesign another firm's mail server (which I am equally capable of accomplishing or screwing up) I suggested a Gmail account to him. I sent him a Gmail invite and he was online with his new Gmail account in moments.

Shortly after we parted company, disaster struck. His regular email provider had a problem and he could not access external email. I learned this because he sent me an email from his Gmail account (should we call it a gmail?). He commented that the Gmail account was going to help him through the problem they were having.

The lesson learned here, of course, is the importance of having a backup. We always think about a backup as a tape drive or removable disk. But what if your office phone system dies? Can you get the calls redirected? What if the power goes out? Do you have a battery backup on your phone system to keep it alive during power disruptions? If your main email server goes down, do you have another means of getting emails? You do synchronize your address book to your laptop or some other device, right?

Google, by the way, is now marketing "Student" and "Professional" versions of its web applications suite. I don't think we'll be doing any heavy duty word processing with the Google word processor, but the overall product sure is tempting.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

Electonic Data Discovery, and other areas relating to electronic data storage, are hot topics in litigation and arbitration, whether in the securities field or other commercial disputes. There have been many articles written about the new sections of Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. What is not often discussed is the practical advantages of reducing the amount of paper being carried around and the amount of stress (when the computers are working) that is removed through proper usage of electronic media.

Here is a recent example of how some planning and Adobe Acrobat can make your life easy. My partner and I were defending a securities client in an arbitration brought by a group of unhappy non-clients of our client. We had litigated the same underlying issue with the same law firm two years ago. We had agreed with that law firm that the documents from the prior case could be used in this case, so that we did not have to produce the same universe of documents twice. Among the documents from the prior case was a list of clients of the broker, who went to jail for what he did.

We advised the arbitrators that this list was produced in the prior case and that counsel should have a copy among the (disorganized) papers he had in his possession. He wanted proof that we had produced the document in the prior case. Before we left the office, Debra and I both used the Microsoft Windows Offline Files function to synchronize all of the documents, pleadings and discovery, to our laptops. When the issue came up, I was able to locate the subject document in seconds. But we had a problem -- we wanted to maintain confidentiality of the contents and wanted to denote on the document that it was produced in the current case, not just the prior one.

While sitting at the counsel table, I opened the document, a PDF, in Acrobat and added a footer with all of the case identifying information and the confidentiality warning. Then, using the HP portable printer that is almost always with me at hearing, I printed out the document and gave a copy to opposing counsel, all the while listening to his examination of my witness. The witness was ordered to review the document over lunch, which he did, and his testimony was over within a few minutes of returning to lunch.

Think about this story the next time you are loading up boxes and boxes of paper discovery documents into your car or onto the messenger's truck. And think about the fact that the prior case had an equally large number of documents. Yet we did not bring a single box of production documents, from either case, to the hearing, only our exhibit notebooks.

The electronic document management train is leaving the station. If you're going to compete, you need to get on, but there's no room for storage boxes of documents in the overheads!

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida

Remember VOIP from around the year 2000? It was mostly done by one computer user calling another, machine to machine. No real telephones were involved. It was useful to hobbyists and businesses with lots of remote offices and expensive leased lines. Then broadband prevalence took over and soon, for 30 bucks or so, anyone could have a fast internet connection. This enabled broadband telephone providers such as Vonage and others to market their all-you-can-eat long distance plans.

But these services really prefer higher speed lines than 1.5Mb in my experience. And once you start upgrading your Internet speeds, the providers start digging deeper into your pocket. And for a multi-line business like ours, a Vonage account won't help much. I've looked.

But here's an interesting twist. Google Maps had a functionality that enabled a user to call an establishment that displayed as a "hit." For instance, if a user searched "Dobin & Jenks" and "Jupiter, Florida", Google Maps would display a pinpoint where our office is and had a hyperlink to call the business. When the user clicked on the link, a dialog box would ask for the number to be called from and, like magic, the phone would ring. You answer the phone, say "hello" and the system says "dialing". Next thing you know, the call is ringing on the other end.

I thought this was great. Sometimes the quality was a little shaky, but we use 1.5Mb DSL in the office so I don't have tremendous expectations. It was a little cumbersome, but when I remembered, it was cool to say I was doing it and it wasn't costing a cent (or four cents, which is our current per minute long distance charge). But, alas, Google discontinued the service.

Disheartened, I looked on Google help to see what happened. A moderator of a user forum advised that Google had discontinued the service. My spirits were lifted when another user posted that Microsoft, through its Live Local service still provides phone calls. I used it twice and it seems to work better than Google's service.

I have a couple service providers that don't have toll-free customer service. But they are listed in directories like Google Maps and Live Local. So I just look them up, enter my number and let the Internet carry the call. If a lawyer, or any business, is just starting out, this may be an excellent way to keep long distance bills down. LD is not a huge item in our office, but every little bit helps.

This is just another example of how the Internet and technology has changed the way we live and do business.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

My sister, a bankruptcy lawyer in New Jersey, just called me to give me a follow-up on my prior technology blog.

She told me the following story:

She received an email from a secretary to an opposing lawyer. It had an attachment. As she was opening the attachment, someone from her office walked in to hand her a fax. The attachment and the fax WERE THE SAME LETTER!!!. To make matters worse, this luddite was also sending a hard copy of the letter.

This was not a pleading, it was correspondence. This lack of understanding is the stuff that Dilbert cartoons are made of. Did the lawyer have a tough time licking the stamp to send the email? Does he wonder how the little people get into the fax machine to read the document to the little people in the machine in the other lawyer's office? And how do telephones work anyway? Perhaps he stays awake at night wondering if the light in the refrigerator really goes off when he closes the door.

Get with the program folks. If email is not fast enough, you have a problem. If the fax confirmation states that the fax has been sent and the correct number of pages are listed, and you still don't believe it, you have a problem. When you drop a letter into a mailbox, do you open the door again to see if it really went in? If so, you have a problem. Don't make your problems someone else's.

That's the curmudgeonly view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

With the announcement and release of Apple's iPhone, I got to thinking about how we got here. This is a phone, with internet and a music/video player. We now have $100 fax machines, cellular telephones with internet access and refrigerators with built-in screens and Web browsers. Now, I'm not sure why one would want to surf the net while getting a pint of cookies n' cream, but I'm not a technology designer either.

My kids have never owned a vinyl record. My son's first music device played cassettes. They both have had portable CD players and now iPods. My daughter donated her "old" iPod shuffle to me. I can play MP3s on any audio system in my house thanks to wireless music streaming on my home network. I still eat my meals the old-fashioned way, though, at a table with silverware on plates. But I'm sure Apple's working on the iMeal that will have everyone salivating.

I was talking to my new friend, Kerri, recently and told her that my first computer modem was 2400 baud, which is 2.4K for most folks. And my employer paid around $600 for it. Kerri asked me if I had to insert the phone handset into the modem for it to work. I told her that we had advanced past that technology at that point. To see an example of an acoustic coupler at work, get a copy of War Games with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.

I then asked Kerri if she had ever heard of a Qwip machine. Qwip was among the first, if not the first, fax machines that I ever had an experience with. My father's firm (he is also a lawyer) had at least two. They used special silver-colored paper and a rotating drum. You could only fax or receive one page at a time. No way would opposing counsel send you that 100 page motion at 5:00 on a Friday with one of these babies. The fax wouldn't finish until Monday morning. It used an acoustic coupler. Now, a $400 laptop has a 56K fax/modem, and no need for an acoustic coupler.

These technology advances were designed, and sold to us, to make our lives easier. When was the last time you were happy that your fax machine rang? And let's not forget that people now send faxes and then send the same thing via FedEx (because it "absolutely, positively" had to get there overnight). Recently, a secretary from a large firm in New York called to confirm receipt of a fax. I asked her, "Why, did you get an error message on your end?" She said that no, she didn't, but her boss insisted that she call to make sure it was received. So this lawyer thought that his secretary and my office had nothing better to do than to verify what his technology already told him, that the fax went through. He's probably the kind of person who re-opens the mailbox to make sure his letter dropped in.

Here at The Law Planet, we try to use the technology to make us more efficient and save our clients money. It is much cheaper for our clients to have us burn a CD with 5,000 pages on it than it is to copy 5,000 pages and send them by carrier pigeon. We are supposed to rule the technology, the technology is not supposed to rule us. So please, don't call to confirm receipt of a fax. And whatever you do, don't send us a fax and then FedEx the same documents that night. One or the other will suffice, thanks.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.