Technology for Lawyers

I used to work in litigation support technology when I was with Arthur Andersen in the 90s (pre-Enron, AA was a great company), so I had the opportunity to work closely with a few law firms and corporate legal departments during that time. The technology landscape is dramatically different now, so I thought I would touch on a few resources for the legal profession.

The Mac Lawyer (themaclawyer.com) is a site about using Apple’s Macintosh in the practice of law. They have a good article there called “Why We Went Mac and Have Never Looked Back” (Part One and Part Two) with an overview of the various applications and processes implemented in a law practice, including hardware, software, calendar, mail, networks and backups.

From the article by Randall A. Juip (of the Juip Richtarcik Law Firm):

The short of it is this — I can’t tell you how simple my and my practice manager’s jobs are not having to worry about the technology in the office. Our technology does what it is supposed to do — it works and lets us work to serve our clients. We don’t spend valuable time working on getting our technology to work. While there have been a few headaches, are significant only in that they are the exception, not the rule.

Some of the tools in use in Mr Juip’s practice:

• Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops
• Apple’s iMac desktops
• Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 (Word, Excel & PowerPoint)
• Apple’s iWork Suite (Pages, Numbers & Keynote)
• Sage’s Timeslips for tracking and invoicing billable time
• RealLegal’s E-Transcript Viewer (for reading PTX files)
• BusySync for calendar syncing and sharing
• Evernote
• Dropbox for cloud data sync / backup
• Apple’s TimeMachine for incremental file backup and recovery

I would also recommend a small-to-medium size law practice consider the Mac Mini Server for local file-sharing, calendars, contacts and web site hosting. It runs OS X Snow Leopard Server and offers a lot right out of the box for $999.

Personal anecdote: In 1997 I was working with a young litigation attorney on a new web-based document management system that provided an environment for lawyers, opposing counsel, outside counsel and consultants to review discovery documents, which was great because it eliminated the need to copy and ship mountains of paper among the various parties. The lawyers could review docs online, redact sensitive info, flag for privilege, create production sets, print files, annotate, etc. It helped keep costs down and there was good security built in. The young lawyers really “got it” but the senior partner on the case — the guy who wrote the checks — said there’s no way I’m putting my confidential documents on the internet. I understood the concern—he thought of the internet as a wild frontier where anything goes and there’s no security and you can’t trust technology. We finally were able to assuage his fears a bit, but he was never very comfortable with it. I hope things have changed a bit since then.

Other legal tech resources

• MacLitigator – Litigation & trial technology for the rest of us
• Apple Briefs – Improving your law practice with Macintosh
• Using the iPad in the Courts and Office
• Macs in Law Offices (MILO) at Google Groups
• U.S. Code for iPad
• Michael J Evans: Law + Technology
• TechnoLawyer Blog

PC to Mac: Making the Switch

Historically, the Windows PC has been the default computer platform for millions of people — not because it’s better technology than Apple’s Macintosh, but rather because Microsoft’s Bill Gates made some very smart business moves in the early years of the personal computing revolution.

Today however, many people are making — or considering — a switch to the Mac. There are a variety of reasons for this, the primary reason being that people are tired of dealing with viruses, spyware and security problems that are so common on Windows. Currently, the Mac operating system is not afflicted with these kinds of problems. This is not to suggest that there will never be a virus or security issue of some kind on the Mac, but today these problems are practically non-existent for Mac users. I haven’t run anti-virus software on my Macs since about 1994 because I haven’t had a need to.

In the last decade Apple has advanced the state of the art in personal computing, and they’ve done it largely through brilliant technical innovation, industrial design, and tight integrations between their hardware and software. And with the introduction of the iTunes/iPod/iPhone/iPad/App Store ecosystem, they are setting the standards for how mobile technology can evolve beyond the mainstream functions of email and telephony.

Some resources for planning the switch

Switch 101 – Migrate to Mac (Apple Support site)

The Great Migration

How to Switch from PC to Mac (CIO.com)

Windows Geeks Warm to Macs (CIO.com)

A few things to know

• You can run Windows on the Mac. Some people may be reluctant to change because they have certain applications they need to use that are only available on Windows, but this is no longer a barrier. I use VMware Fusion (a ‘virtual machine’ technology), which provides the environment to run Windows on the Mac. I have a post here with more info about this. Mac OS X comes out-of-the-box with a technology called Boot Camp that supports the installation of Windows.
• Stability and reliability. The Mac operating system is built on the Unix technology foundation, which has long been known for solid performance and reliability. Like any other technology it’s not perfect, but it’s very good. Application crashes and system freezes are rare, so there’s less of a need for tech support.
• Installing and Removing Programs is simple. You want to install a program? Drag it to your Applications folder. Want to remove it? Drag it to the trash. That’s it.
• Microsoft Office PC files work on the Mac, and vice-versa. Microsoft makes a Mac version of their Office suite. If you receive a Microsoft Office file (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) from someone using a PC, you can open, edit and exchange these files with the PC user. The file formats are fully compatible across both systems.

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Business Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are the kinds of things nobody really wants to work on. Planning for the unlikely seems like a waste of time, until the unlikely happens. What we’re looking at here is just the technology side of things, but there are larger business concerns as well, such as personnel, facilities and communications.

If you rely heavily on technology for work or play, it’s a good idea to spend some time thinking about—and planning—what you will do in the event of a disruption. At the bottom of this post I have provided links to some other resources that may be helpful in your planning.

BCP involves figuring out how to keep your operations running in the event of a disruptive incident: a fire, earthquake, hurricane—or even something relatively minor, like a computer hard drive failure, an extended loss of your network connection, or theft of critical equipment.

DR is a subset of BCP and deals with protecting the business in the event that all or part of its systems become unavailable for an extended period, or entirely unusable.

Control Measures as part of a BCP

• Preventive Measures (anti-virus, physical security, passwords)
• Detective Measures (system diagnostics programs, audit trails)
• Corrective Measures (data backups, redundant systems, spare equipment)

Here are a few checklist items that might help in thinking through various scenarios:

• Computer
  • keep a current bootable clone on hand (system restore)
  • spare computer to boot from
  • spare hard drive on hand
  • daily/hourly file backups (file restore)
  • consider using laptops for remote working
• File sharing access
  • server with a backup to restore from
  • online file service (redundant copy)
• Email Service
  • personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, ISP)
  • have more than one account, most are free
• Data network
  • redundant secondary internet connection (DSL, cable)
  • home network for remote option
  • wireless access cards for the computer (Sprint, Verizon)
• Voice network
  • cell phones

Some questions to consider when making your plans:

• If my computer crashes, how will I continue working?
• If my shared file access/server becomes unavailable, what will I do?
• If our office is inaccessible (flood, fire) where will my team work, and will they have the tools they need to conduct business?
• If my data network goes down, what’s my backup connectivity option?
• How will we communicate our alternative plans to customers and business partners?

BCP and DR Resources

Free Disaster Recovery Planning templates
(www.securityprocedure.com/14-free-disaster-recovery-plan-drp-template)

Disaster Recovery Guide (www.disaster-recovery-guide.com)

DR Planning (www.drplanning.org/portal)

Disaster Recovery World (www.disasterrecoveryworld.com)

Refurbished Macs

In September 2007 I was due for a new laptop, and I didn’t want to settle for something less than what I wanted but I needed to keep costs to a minimum. I wanted a MacBook Pro and the new ones were selling for $2,000, so I decided to check out Apple’s Refurbished models to see if I could save a few bucks and still get the laptop I really wanted.

Apple’s refurbished machines are typically ones that have been returned for some minor issue–Apple makes a repair or replaces a part, cleans it up, runs it through some quality control checks and sells it with a nice discount. Refurbs are all tested and certified, and come with a 1-year warranty. You can extend the warranty with an AppleCare Protection Plan, just as you can with a new model. (I always buy the AppleCare plan–problems are rare, but when they happen Apple is very good about handling them quickly. I’ve found it to be a good investment. $349 covers a MacBook Pro for three years from purchase date.)

For $1,700 (15% discount) I got what looked to me like a brand new, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. No scratches or blemishes, nothing at all to suggest it had ever been used. I’ve had it now for 2½ years and the only issue has been a failing battery that needed replacing. I reported it to Apple and they had a new battery delivered to me in a couple of days.

So if you’re in the market for a Mac and need to watch the budget, check out Apple’s refurbished offerings. The listings change as new items become available, so check back frequently if you don’t see what you’re looking for. There are some good deals to be found.

iPad Review

Got my iPad a couple of weeks ago. It’s the 16 GB wi-fi model (no 3G).

John Patrick, former VP at IBM:

When we introduced the ThinkPad in 1992 it seemed like a huge deal just to get everyone at IBM to agree with the name. No one, certainly not me as VP of marketing at the time, had any idea that more than 30 million ThinkPads would be sold. The iPad will surely sell multiple times that number but more important the iPad will change the model of personal computing — not immediately and not for everyone, but for many millions of people the PC will begin to look like a dinosaur.

I don’t know yet if the iPad is a revolution in computing, but it’s certainly a step forward for people who just want a simple device to do some basic tasks — and for a lot of people, that’s all that’s needed. If we see competitors offering similar tablet devices in the coming months, we’ll know that Apple has figured out something important. It happened exactly that way with the iPhone — now everyone is making touchscreen phones with apps.

Performance

For a 1Ghz device with limited memory, the iPad is fast. Responsiveness on launching apps is very quick and smooth. Only one app runs at a time (no multi-tasking yet, but this will be coming) so the system resources are dedicated to running what’s in front of you. With the A4 chip it’s about 2× as fast as the iPhone 3GS, and it doesn’t get hot like a laptop or PC so there’s no fan (or fan noise).

Capacity

16 gigabytes is not a lot of storage space compared to modern desktop or laptop computers, but depending on your needs it could be more than enough for this class of device. (It also comes in 32 GB and 64 GB configurations, so there’s more if you need it.) I have several hundred songs synced over from my laptop, and over 12,000 photos on the iPad, and it still has about 5 GB of free space. I don’t imagine I will run up against space limitations any time soon.

Battery Life

Apple claims 10 hours of battery life. David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, got more than 12 hours of continuous video playback in his testing. The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg got 11.5 hours before the battery drained. I find that I can leave the iPad laying around for several days of use before I need to think about plugging it into the charger.

No Flash

Adobe’s Flash animation technology has never been supported on the iPhone, and it doesn’t run on the iPad either. Apple has already sold over 45 million iPhone & iPod Touch devices combined, so I don’t see this as too much of an issue with the buying public.

Flash has been a de facto standard on the web for years, but it’s always been a bit buggy and, more important, it requires a lot of memory and processor power to run. This is fine if you’re using a desktop computer plugged into a power supply, or a laptop with a good battery charge. But technology is going mobile, and smaller devices just can’t deliver enough power to handle inefficient processes like Flash without quickly depleting the battery. Something has to give, and Apple has taken a hard stance on this by not supporting Flash on the iPhone and iPad. It’s controversial, but I understand their reasoning and agree with the position. They’re forcing a move to better technologies by abandoning current ones. Apple did this before when they excluded floppy drives from the original iMac in 1998 and introduced the USB connection. A few years later, nobody was shipping computers with floppy drives and everyone was including USB ports.

With the newer HTML5 technology spec there are better ways of handling animation without taxing mobile systems as much. And the leading web operations that have relied on Flash for video, like YouTube and major news and sports sites, are already on board with the transition from Flash to HTML5. This is a major step, and it’s the right thing to do for mobile device performance and user experience.

Apps

The iPad will run the iPhone apps you already have, but unless the app is optimized for the iPad’s larger display it will play in a smaller, iPhone-sized window in the middle of the screen rather than a full-screen view (photo below). You can enlarge the app onscreen by clicking the 2× button at the bottom, but the resolution may look a little jagged/pixelated since it’s just stretching the graphics. Some applications are already on the App Store in iPad-optimized formats, and many of the other developers are already working on doing the same thing for their applications. A non-optimized iPhone app running on the iPad looks like this:
One thing to remember is that the iPad is not ‘just a big iPhone or iPod Touch’ as some critics have claimed. The larger display on the iPad allows software developers much more room to build out their apps, to include more features and improve upon the user interface. When you’re limited by the dimensions of a small screen, there’s only so much you can do with a mobile app — a larger screen allows developers to create more and deliver more, thereby increasing the quality and value of their work and the appeal of the platform as a whole.

Books

Apple’s iBooks app isn’t preloaded on the iPad, but you can download it for free on the App Store. The app comes with one book already loaded – Winnie the Pooh. It’s a nice example of what the iBooks app can do. Personally, I like real books made with paper and I like the experience of physically turning pages – maybe that’s old school but I love to read and for me the experience is maybe as important as the content. But I can see the appeal of reading with a tablet device, especially for travelers — it’s just not practical to carry a lot of books around, so the electronic book idea has a lot going for it. I’m still buying ‘real’ books though.

One little detail I really like about iBooks is the built-in dictionary (image below). If you want to look something up while reading, just touch a word and hold for a couple of seconds, and a little menu will pop up with a dictionary option (also a bookmark option to highlight the word so you can come back to that spot later). Very handy, and an easy way to encourage kids to look things up while they’re reading and expand their vocabulary.

Summary

We usually leave the iPad lying around the kitchen or living room, and we’ll grab it to do a quick email, find something on the web, update our Netflix queue, check the weather forecast or look at some photos or video. As a practical matter it seems like just another appliance in the house — something convenient and within reach, there to accomplish little tasks and then put aside. But I find that I’m going upstairs to open my laptop less frequently. This is interesting to me because it suggests that many of the commonplace tasks that we do every day are easily handled by a new class of machine, something smaller and cheaper and far simpler to use (and much better than a smartphone in some ways), especially for people who dislike the complexity of ‘computers’ as we know them today. (I’m reminded here of Edward R. Tufte‘s great quote: “Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information.”) The tablet is not a new idea in itself, but its potential hasn’t really been developed up to now. As a techie I’m excited to see where this new wave of innovation will take us. There are huge opportunities here with publishing, education, health care and other fields.

One thing that’s clear is that the iPad is not for everyone, nor is it intended to be, at least not as a primary device. People like myself who do technical work still need the power and flexibility of a full-featured machine. I need memory and processing power for editing RAW images and high definition video, the ability to run a variety of applications of my choosing and to move data among different devices and the web, for parsing data and writing code. The iPad, in its current form, doesn’t support these things well enough to be my primary machine. But people like me are in the minority, and the iPad is aimed at a broader section of customers who don’t need as many options. For what it does, and considering that this is a first generation device, I think Apple has executed very well on their strategy. I expect that future models of the iPad will deliver more flexibility, greater processing power and more quality applications to further build on the nascent mobile computing industry.

iPad & Cloud 2

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com in an article on TechCrunch:

The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

Major changes are underway in how we use computers and the internet, and they’re good. Flash animation is dying (as it should); HTML5 is gaining adoption; new, smarter software is being written with better user interfaces that make sense; desktops and laptops are becoming smartphones and tablets; magazines and newspapers are moving from the dead tree model to a more sustainable digital medium (I still want real books, though). Much of our data (music, video, email) will be stored in the cloud, and we will be able to sync multiple devices to a single consistent data source.

The best development to come over the next few years might be the disappearance (for most people) of file systems. Instead of dealing with individual files and folder structures, we will have apps and data. The operating system will deal with storing and organizing files and presenting them to the user in the context of how they will be used. This is an evolutionary step that will make computers much easier for non-technical people to use. It’s pretty much the way smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry, etc) work now, and I expect that this model will eventually extend to most consumer-level devices.

DriveSavers Data Recovery

I have used DriveSavers Data Recovery once to recover data from a hard drive that appeared to be totally fried. They’re expensive, but very good at what they do. We spent around $2,000 for the work but every byte was recovered and returned.

I just noticed that they’ve published an iPhone app that educates users a bit about the causes of hard drive failures, and offers some data protection strategies you can use to prevent them. Pretty generous considering they make a living from people not doing these things. They also have a web-based (Flash) version of the app on their web site here. You can take a look into their ISO-5 Certified cleanroom environment where they do their work.

Direct link to the iTunes App Store page here (will launch iTunes).

They can recover data from a variety of sources:

• Laptop & desktop drives
• Digital cameras
• Tape
• MP3 players & iPods
• iPhones & iPads
• Removable media
• RAID / NAS / SAN environments

And if you think data recovery isn’t sometimes a very serious matter, they also have a suicide-prevention counsellor on staff. This underscores a very simple but often-neglected practice: data backups. If your data is even remotely important to you, have a backup strategy and stick to it.

Also check out their Museum of Bizarre Disk-asters.

Square: Mobile Credit Card Processing

Interesting development on the mobile front. A company called Square has introduced a device that plugs into your mobile phone earphone jack and lets you swipe a credit card to process a transaction on the spot.

Product demo: squareup.com/intro

Main web site: squareup.com

WIth regard to security, something really interesting about this is that you can confirm cardholder identity via photo verification. Clever.

Once the transaction is complete you can have it email the buyer a receipt, so the whole thing is totally paperless. They also offer to donate a penny from every transaction to a cause of your choice.

Very interesting, although I wonder about the back-end technologies and how your personal banking information is being secured across the network, and whether Square is capturing any data beyond some basic transaction identifiers for tracking purposes. The Terms of Service page is lengthy and full of disclaimers, and I lack the attention span to read it all today, but it looks like they process through the VISA and MasterCard networks, and possibly others. The user interface on the mobile application looks fantastic.

Tonido Plug = Private Cloud

Cloud computing is getting a lot of play these days, and like everything else it has pros and cons. Perhaps the biggest downside is that you are trusting your data to a third party — their service could go offline for a while, or your data could be lost or otherwise compromised. Probably not likely with a reputable service since they have much to lose in that scenario as well, but it’s an obvious risk.

The Tonido Plug is a small $99 appliance that provides a way to set up a private server that you can share among others in your home or office, and also access over the internet (access is secured via password). The device plugs into your internet router via standard Ethernet cable, and also has a USB port for attaching an external hard drive (or even a small thumb drive). This is the NAS (Network Attached Storage) concept.

I like this approach for a home or small office that doesn’t want to invest in (or really need) a full-scale server machine for sharing files among a family or work team.

It comes with built-in software for:

• File-sharing
• Music streaming of your MP3s from your browser
• Blog / Journal
• Photo-sharing
• Search (your computer)
• Money Management

So the real upshot of this device seems to be that you can store your files and access them from any computer on the internet, as well as share files out selectively with others. Attach an external USB drive and you have your own private cloud on the internet.

The Gadget Disappears

Recently I saw one of the best comments I’ve seen about technology done well. It was by David Carr, business columnist for the New York Times, speaking with Charlie Rose about his experience with Apple’s new iPad:

“One thing you have to understand about this gadget is that the gadget disappears pretty quickly. You’re looking into pure software.”

This is true for any good technology that’s been designed with the customer in mind: the technology gets out of the way. The same could be said for a well-designed automobile or refrigerator or violin or potato peeler. Thoughtful design and development is hard work, and it succeeds most when the gadget is marginalized in favor of the experience and the purpose of the thing. Design isn’t just about how it looks, it’s about how it works.

Many people are intimidated by technology (hi mom), confused by the complexity involved with doing simple things like email, word processing, photos, music, video, navigating the internet. It’s not their fault. The challenge is that the tools have not been designed with the average person in mind. It doesn’t need to be over-simplified, it just needs to make sense and work like you expect it to.

Those of us who work in technology understand how it all works (mostly), and we’ve enjoyed a Merlin-like status — we know the extra mouse click that nobody else knew about, the special cable you didn’t know you needed, the invisible folder where your document mysteriously went, the hidden menu command, the secret handshake.

But it shouldn’t work like that. People have mostly succeeded with technology in spite of the technology, while they’ve become accustomed to viruses and crashes and annoying pop-up windows and such. Why? Because nobody has cared enough to fix these problems. And they can be fixed.

Frasier Speirs articulated the idea well in his article Future Shock:

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

I don’t know if the iPad is a harbinger of simpler and more elegant technology to come, but the ease-of-use designed into the multi-touch screen — introduced two years ago on the iPhone — suggests that Apple may be on to something important. I expect that people will like using computers this way because it works in ways that are obvious.