LAW PRACTICE TIPS

Being a Low Tech Lawyer in High Tech Times

By Jim Calloway, Director OBA Management Assistance Program

Whether you love it, hate it or just sort of tolerate it, no lawyer has been untouched by changes related to law office technology. When fax machines first appeared, it was amazing how quickly they became standard equipment in every law office. When lawyers paid their secretaries to produce documents by manual typing, there was rarely any need for the court to limit the number of interrogatories.

One of the most challenging things about technology these days is that there always seems to be something new and different. Whether it is a new upgrade, a new product or just a new way to use an application, the changes just keep coming at an ever-faster rate. Just getting unbiased information on law office technology is a challenge. ("We just bought the WhizLaw 3.0 a few months ago. Do we really need the WhizLaw 3.3 ?")

It has been a good few weeks to get information on legal technology in Oklahoma. We have just finished the program "Champagne Technology on a Beer Budget- Version 3.0." This OBA CLE program, cosponsored by the OBA Law Office Management & Technology Section, featured some cutting edge information, including three speakers who appeared at this year's ABA TECHSHOW 2000. Attorney Craig Ball, of Houston, Texas, wowed the crowd with his presentations on cybersleuthing on the Internet and high tech trial presentations.

OBA Annual Meeting is just around the corner. Of particular interest to me personally is the CLE track on "How to Be a Better Lawyer." We have Wisconsin attorney Ross Kodner teaming with me and OBA member Sheryn Bruehl to do two hours of "The Oklahoma Lawyer's Technology Survival Guide." In case you don't know, Ross and Sheryn have spoken literally across the country on law office technology the last couple of years. We're excited to have Ross and Sheryn for our program. The three of us did a similar presentation at the 2000 ABA Annual Meeting this summer, and it was very well attended. (Many of you may remember Ross from the 1999 OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference.)

The OBA Annual meeting is a great time to learn, play and make valuable contacts. Thursday afternoon we intend to offer a free "Ask the Experts" booth for lawyers to have their questions answered about management or technology by Ross, Sheryn and some of our local experts. We hope to see you there.

And for your year-round technology and management questions, don't forget that you can call our Management Assistance Program hotline at (405) 416-7008 for some advice and direction. (Some lawyers have even learned to call the bar's 800 number and ask to be transferred to extension 7008.)

Lawyers tend to stop me and give me technology reports on their practices. They want to tell someone who will appreciate it that they have made an investment in improving the firm's technological capabilities. A typical comment might be that a firm has networked the computers, installed case management software or the old favorite, "Well, I've finally got a computer on my desk, but I'm not sure what to do with it."

I do appreciate that some lawyers have no interest whatsoever in law office technology. As long as you are in a position to employ people who can manage your technology for you, that may be fine at least for as long as they stay employed.

Lawyers fulfill many roles. A lawyer can serve as a trusted business advisor, a zealous advocate in court, a negotiator, a mediator, a tax planner, a shoulder to cry on, a guardian or a counselor, just to name a few.

But what do we physically do in all of these roles? We do many different things. We research legal issues. We draft documents. We handle correspondence. We try cases in court. We talk, and we write. And we talk and we write.

What is the common thread that ties all of these different activities? I would argue they all involve the processing, communicating and managing of information. Researching in old dusty law books is information processing and retrieval, even if there is no computer in sight.

So, like it or not, we lawyers are information providers and processors. We depend on our knowledge and our ability to analyze the facts and do research. We should be able to communicate complicated concepts to our clients in language that they can understand. One of the hallmarks of the Information Age is the rapid change in methods of information processing.

That is why many lawyers have determined that using the Internet and becoming computer literate is no longer an option. It is a necessity. Clients will expect to see computers in a law office, particularly sophisticated clients. If your client has learned to use a computer in his business and knows how much more efficiently he can operate, he may began to question why his attorney does not use one and how efficiently his matters are being handled.

The Information Age is changing our society. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the most successful lawyers in the future will be the ones who learn to master the tools of the Information Age.

Does this mean a lawyer has to have a computer on his or her desktop? Increasingly, the answer is yes. There are too many things that a lawyer can now do with a computer with greater efficiency. Does that mean that a lawyer who cannot type should start trying to type all of his own documents? Of course not.

But, we lawyers have traditionally invested in extensive law libraries. The Internet now functions as the greatest library-type resource that can be imagined. Even a two-finger typist can handle the slight typing involved in using the Internet. As previously noted in prior columns here, the information that you can find on the Internet is already amazing and the content grows every day. Those of us who watched Craig Ball do his cybersleuthing presentation are even more sure of that now.

Many lawyers cheerfully admit to a computer phobia. They have computers in their offices, and they know that the staff can make them perform magic. Their attempts to learn about computers in the past were stymied by cryptic language like "just hit Control F7 to do that."

Of course, many of these same lawyers have no problem with learning every detail of the human nervous system for a medical malpractice case or learning obscure details of metallurgy or chemistry if it is required to represent a client effectively. That's we refer to this as a phobia and not a learning disability. These lawyers clearly have the ability. Learning about operating computers now is much more simple than it was seven or eight years ago.

So What's a Low Tech Lawyer to Do?

Oklahoma City attorney Ulf "Ron" Heller and I have discussed compiling a list of certain minimum standards that every lawyer should know about technology. We've never done so for several reasons. Mainly it is because this theoretical list keeps changing, like all things related to technology. Another problem is that minimum standards sounds like an standard for litigating something. For the record, I do not believe that there are universal minimum standards of tech competency for lawyers.

But there are certain basic skills that a lawyer can pick up relatively easily and every lawyer should understand.

So, our focus here is to outline a basic Road Map for a Low Tech Lawyer who wants to move in the direction of becoming a high tech lawyer.

1. Learn to use the World Wide Web. One young lawyer recently told a distinguished group of lawyers that he believes that they should spend a hour per day, several days a week just playing around on the World Wide Web. Business activity is increasing on the Internet. Even net veterans are surprised at continuing new developments online. Understanding the resources there allows you to access the resources when you need them.

What are your three favorite Internet search engines? What types of searches send you to one versus another? Right now, without asking anyone, how quickly could you locate things like a zip code, a certain bill pending before the state legislature, an attorney general's opinion issued last week, a downloadable federal tax form, a telephone area code for a city, a Tulsa municipal ordinance, the Declaration on Independence, one of 59 Oklahoma newspapers with web pages? (Endnote 1) Many lawyers could find many of the above in less than minute each. That is simply because they have taken the time to become aware of what's online. This one does not require experience or expertise, just an investment of time.

2. Use your e-mail effectively, including handling file attachments. We've previously published entire articles extolling e-mail. ("Saving Time and Money the E-way" Oklahoma Bar Journal (June 10, 2000) Online at http://www.okbar.org/ barjournal/featurestories/fs061000calloway1.htm) E-mail is the most popular and often-used function of the Internet. It is an incredible time-saver. I've personally witnessed so many lawyers become heavy e-mail users. It is just too convenient.

Certainly there are legitimate concerns about the remote possibility of a breach of client confidentiality with unencrypted e-mail, but the vast majority of communications are very routine. There is a special benefit for communications between several parties when you use e-mail. If you have ever scheduled a meeting involving five or six people the old fashioned way and then have scheduled a meeting with multi-party e-mail, you will be a true believer.

Transferring documents as e-mail attachments is something that every lawyer should be able to do easily. Assuming you understand how your computer's folders are organized, learning to attach a file to an e-mail and how to handle a file when you receive it should take no more than half an hour. Sharing documents with others across the country or the state by attaching them to e-mail is an incredible time and expense saving practice. There will still be times when a true hard copy delivery is required or a fax might be preferable, but for the most part, e-mail will serve a huge amount of your document transfer needs.

Using e-mail as a business tool means regularly checking it, almost every day. It means learning how to screen your e-mail messages to separate the jokes and "spam" from the business correspondence. It means being comfortable with file attachments and your virus protection measures so that you can open e-mail with confidence. At least once or twice a month, we hear someone tell us that they deleted an e-mail because they were not expecting it or just wholesale deleted many unread e-mails. Recently we received a phone call from someone because they had not received their Grande Macro update. When we told them it had been e-mailed to them directly by the author, the response was "Oh, yeah, I got an e-mail from him, but I didn't recognize the name so I deleted it without opening it."

E-mail gotta have it!

3. High Speed Internet access at work. Cable modem, DSL, T-1 lines or whatever. Law firms need high speed Internet access. If you think that others are exaggerating the important of the Internet in their practices, it is probably because they are accessing it with a few mouse clicks to get an answer and then returning to their main project while you are having your modem dial another modem and waiting for the answer and log-on process to begin. Broadband access makes the Internet a true tool, ready to be used at any moment.

Signing up for broadband access is not a skill to be practiced, but it will be a revolution in your net use when those of you who do not have it finally do get it installed.

Many of us now view high speed Internet access at home to be a necessity as well.

4. Understand your office digital file storage system. Your best client calls you at home on the weekend and just has to have one sentence added to an important document you thought was finished. The client is leaving town Monday morning. Can you easily go to the office, turn on the computer network and locate the client document on your system to add the one sentence?

This is another aspect of law offices that used to be more simple, at least in theory. You either had an alphabetical or numeric filing system. The client file was either in the proper file drawer or not.

There are many ways to organize client files on the computer. Imaging the entire file, including everything received from opposing counsel is being used by more and more law firms. But, it is just silly for a lawyer not to know how word processing files are organized in his or her own office.

A particular problem is the law office where everyone does it a different way. Some have their word processing stored in client folders, some have everything under "My Documents, " and some organize their saved work by month and year. If someone is sick or disabled, it just makes the situation more miserable if no one else in the office knows how the word processing files are organized. Your system can have different aspects. Years ago in private practice, I set my standard template in Word Perfect where the last line on a document was the path and filename listings. So every document had something at the bottom like C:\client files\smithbl\petition.wpd. You can also have the signature block macro add the path and filename below every signature. The nice thing about this type of system is that every document has the directions to locate it on the final page.

Most offices already have a system. The question is whether the attorneys understand it or not.

If you are in one of those offices that has no clear system or lets everyone "do their own thing," it is time now to plan for a New Year's resolution that with the first file opened in 2001, everyone will have a uniform system for storing word processing and other digital client files.

5. Understand your office document naming conventions and computer file names in general. This is related to the file storage aspect. Not only should your documents be stored on your computer according to a system, but the document names should be assigned based on a systematic approach.

During the DOS and Windows 3.1 era, naming your computer files often involved a bit of creativity. All files names had to conform to the "eight dot three" naming system. Most of us can remember trying to decipher those cryptic names. Files had names like motsumj.doc, smith12.rel, calloway.pet and other creative names.

With the introduction of Windows 95, came the ability to use long file names. Many law firms, mainstays of tradition and precedence, were slow to embrace the longer file name structure at first. Now everyone should appreciate that files can have descriptive names like Jones, Fred Brief in Support of MFSJ.wpd or White foreclosure petition.doc.

Your office still needs to adopt a standard file naming convention, but the availability of long file names allows more flexibility and detail.

Understanding computer file names in general now relates to an understanding of how file name extensions operate. File name extensions are the last three letters of a file name after the period.. The "dot three" of eight dot three is still with us. The file name extension is how the computer recognizes what type of file it is. You should always use a proper file name extension when naming a file. (For most of you, the computer will default to a proper extension.) Every now and then I receive files from other attorneys where the name is still set up with a descriptive file name extension rather than a standard one. For example, a release in the White case might be named white.rel. This is, of course, immediately apparent because when I receive it via e-mail and click on the file attachment to open it, the computer immediately whines that it has no idea what type of file this is and therefore cannot open it without more information.

Use standard file name extensions and understand what they mean.

Here are a few of the more common examples:

.wpd WordPerfect file

.doc Microsoft Word File

.exe Computer program file (These are the ones to examine with care when coming from unknown sources. They could literally make the computer do anything, including reformatting your hard drive.)

.jpg Graphic file, i.e. a picture of something (verbally this is called a "jay peg" file. This is the most common graphic file format these days.)

.gif, .tif Other types of graphic file

.bmp Another type of graphic file. This type is used for your wallpaper or background.

.mpg Video or audio file

.pdf Adobe Acrobat portable document format file

.zip A file that has been compressed using a utility program and must be uncompressed before it can be used.

.wav, .mp3  Sound files

.htm or .html Hyper Text Markup - Language - i.e. a web page file

6. Know enough word processing to edit documents. Obviously, it does not do you much good to be able to find your digital files by location and name, if you cannot do anything with them. You do not have to be able to type at 100 words per minute to edit a draft of a document into a final product. A lawyer should have a basic understanding of how word processing software works and what word processing software the lawyer's office uses.

Help files, pull down menus and other innovations make it much easier to learn to use your word processing software if you invest the time to try. Many lawyers are now producing many of their own documents just because macros, templates and other automation procedures make it easy to prove simple documents quickly.

7. If you do not have a digital brief bank, start one. In the days before computers and word processors, we kept our knowledge on paper, whether in form files or bound in books. These days it is hard to imagine a law office that does not use computerized forms to prepare documents.

But our brief banks have historically been, of necessity, on paper in file folders in file drawers. So, just as we now keep our forms for probate or divorce or a name change on our computer in a digital form to avoid retyping of standard provisions, shouldn't we also have our brief bank files on our computer? Well, of course, we should and we do. Unless you typed a document on a typewriter, there is a digital copy somewhere on a floppy disk or a computer hard drive.

So shouldn't those be saved in a central location on your computer network just like lawyers have always kept their brief banks in folders and filing cabinets, perhaps a folder named "Brief Bank" accessible to everyone over the network? But then it would perhaps be better to be a bit more organized, with labels like "Brief Bank- Probate" and "Brief Bank- Domestic." And then we probably should have a brief description of each brief somewhere to organize them and to let us find what we are looking for. And then......

The problem with most of the brief bank systems is in the indexing. The lawyers already have enough things to do. So if you toss every real estate brief in a folder in the filing cabinet named "Real Estate," you will likely accumulate over the years a massive file that soon becomes difficult to inspect. Your information retrieval process is then limited to manually going through the piles of briefs looking for the right one.

If you substantively break down the topics to be better organized (e.g. Real Estate - Adverse Possession, Real Estate - Zoning, etc.), you can retrieve documents much more effectively. The problems here are investing the time in indexing, relying on others to index for you and the fact that many briefs cover more than one issue, often issues that have no logical relationship other than being tied together by the fact patterns of that one particular case. So one brief may have to be indexed in several ways, taking more staff time.

The result may be that the more important work gets done and the indexing of the brief bank is put off until another day a day which likely may never come.

So for your beginning digital brief bank at least do this:

1)  Make a new folder somewhere on the office computer network called "Brief Bank."

2)  Direct the staff to save a copy of every brief after it is completed in that folder.

3)  Encourage them to save the same document there twice under different file names like "Betty Jones custody brief.wpd" and "Best Interest of child standard.wpd."

If you want to prepare a searchable index for this folder, you are encouraged to do so.

If you don't prepare an index, try this when you want to find something there, try the following:

1)  Click on the start button on your Windows 95, 98 or 2000 desktop.

2)  Select Find, then Files or Folders.

3)  Browse to (or otherwise select) the "Brief Bank" folder.

4)  Enter a word that should be in the brief in the "Containing Text" Window and use the Find Now button.

5)  You will get a list of all of the briefs in the bank containing that word.

Obviously the more unique the word, the shorter the list will be. If your staff has done a good job saving the briefs by descriptive names ("Best Interest of child standard.wpd."), the brief you seek may just jump out at you. Even if you have to open several of the documents on the list to find it, it still beating pawing through hundreds of folders and pages in a file drawer.

Hopefully the preceding is enough to get you started.

There is just one little problem now — having mastered all of the above, you cannot really call yourself a low tech lawyer anymore.

1. Just to avoid a huge inflow of telephone calls, I'll direct you to a class project from OBA member Terri Calloway that should lead you to all of the above at http://home.mmcable.com/thecalloways/Oklahoma_lawyers_Dashboard.htm

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal November 4, 2000 - Vol. 71; No.32