Law Practice Tips

Do the Math
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

Calculators have gotten smaller and cheaper over the years, to the point where they can be as small as a credit card and are frequent give-away items at meetings and conventions. When advising lawyers on setting up a law practice, we always advise lawyers to purchase a desktop calculator with the capability to print on a paper tape. There are many times one needs to add up a group of numbers and then staple the tape into a file for a record. In addition, if you make a mistake, it is sometimes easier to determine if you can review the tape.

But resorting to a physical calculator is done less frequently by many lawyers these days as there are now many types of "virtual"  calculators, both through software and online. We'll briefly look at some of these alternative ways to do calculations.

I have previously reviewed Legal Math-Pac in the Oklahoma Bar Journal (June 15, 2002 - Vol. 73; No.19 sidebar to "Summer Break for Law Firms") I believe it is a great product. It is not cheap, but $129 is not expensive either. (Additional licenses for the same firm are $85.) You can do many of the calculations that lawyers need very simply with this software, such as amortization schedules, present value calculations, future values, interest and date calculations. My favorite use for this was determining interest in past due child support cases where the payments had been irregular. You can learn more about Legal Math-Pac and purchase it online at www.legalmath.com  I believe that most lawyers would benefit from owning this product.

Another really nice virtual calculator is Grande Math, which is a part of the Grande Macros program, available from the OBA Management Assistance Program. We'll cover it within the child support computation section even though it does much, much more than compute child support.

Some lawyers can likely do all of their calculations within a spreadsheet program.

Spreadsheets are tools that many lawyers do not use, or do not use well, but that is changing. We receive many more sets of data from lawyers in spreadsheet format (primarily Microsoft Excel) than we used to see.

Spreadsheets are very powerful tools. There are many Web sites that make available tools and utilities to use with Excel, ranging from free downloadable macros and formulas to sophisticated add-ons available for purchase. The Open Directory Project Page with links to Excel tips, information and these downloadable formulas and add-ons is located at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Spreadsheets/Excel.

Tables within Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect are another method some lawyers use to make simple calculations. Lawyers are generally more familiar with tables than spreadsheets. If you just need to add up a column of numbers in a word processor's table, it is usually a pretty simple matter. In fact, many advanced mathematical operations can be done in a table. Consult your word processor's Help files for further instructions on formulas and calculations within tables.

Child Support Computations

Obviously a calculation that family lawyers frequently do is computation of Oklahoma child support guidelines. Oklahoma lawyers have at least four options for doing child support computations with their computers.

Doug Loudenback's Grande Macros, which are sold by the OBA Management Assistance Program (and are limited for sale to Oklahoma lawyers only,) compute child support guidelines and present the results in a completed form within WordPerfect. (Sorry, we do not provide a similar product for Microsoft Word.) The GM may be purchased for $130 and you may upgrade version 5 to 5.5 for $65. The primary function of the macros is not math, but document assembly. Many lawyers do purchase them primarily for child support computations, however. If you want to calculate several sets of guidelines with different income figures this program makes it a snap.

But version 5.5 of the Grande Macros also comes with Grande Math. It computes numbers, dates, "lawyer dates" and Qualified Domestic Relations Order dates. It comes with the handy "type" feature that allows you to do a series of math operations and then insert then directly into your WordPerfect document.

The QDRO calculation is a real time saver, allowing you to type in the beginning and ending date of employment, the marriage date and the date of valuation. It then computes a result and gives several printing options. Here's an example of the resulting text in the shortest form: "375 months employed; 232 months married; 208 months employed during marriage; 167 months employed before marriage."

Many Grande Macros users may not have tried Grande Math. If you already have Grande Macros, you should definitely give it a try. In WordPerfect, just click on Tools on the Menu Bar and Grande Math is right there under v 5.5 Grande Macros.

Legalmath.com's Oklahoma Child Support Guidelines. Yes, the folks at legalmath.com who produced Legal Math-Pac, also sell a stand alone child support calculator utilizing the Oklahoma Child Support Guidelines. It sells for $160. More information and purchase is available through their Web site at www.legalmath.com.

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services provides an "unofficial" child support calculator on its Web site. The URL for this calculator is http://www.okdhs.org/childsupport/guidelines/index.htm.

Another online child support calculator can be found at the Families in Transition Web site, http://www.familiesintransition.com.  This site is managed by Tulsa County Special Judge Charles Hogshead and also has other interesting features, including pictures of the judges who handle the domestic docket and links to each of their dockets for the current day on OSCN. If you have any family law practice and have not visited this site, you should do so at least once. If you practice in Tulsa County, it is probably already one of your regular Internet stops.

One Oklahoma lawyer apparently has created a child support calculator that works on handheld computers like Palm Pilots. But I have not seen it. I am hoping we see an upload of one of these type of programs to the OBA-NET some day soon. Calculating child support on a PDA in one's hand would be very useful.

All versions of Windows have included a simple calculator. In Windows 95 and 98, it is accessed by clicking on the Start button, then Programs, the Accessories, and Calculator. In Windows XP, it is Start, All Programs, Accessories and Calculator.

There are many online calculators for computing mortgages and amortization tables. They differ in many aspects, particularly concerning the ease of saving the information or printing the amortization table.

We will list four of these sites for you to examine initially. No warranty concerning these sites is expressed or implied.

http://www.quoteserv.com/mortgage/calculator.shtml

http://www.hsh.com/javamort.html

http://ray.met.fsu.edu/~bret/amortize.html

http://www.interest.com/calculators/

The ultimate calculator Web site remains Martindale's Calculators On-line Center with links to over 17,000 calculators. The Web address is http://www.martindalecenter.com/Calculators.html.  Whether it is a calculator for unit conversions (e.g. Fahrenheit to Celsius, pounds to kilograms), board feet, square roots or differential equations, you can locate it here.

Hopefully after this brief overview, our readers will now know of some more ways to "do the math."

Author's note: After the date of the print publication of this story on virtual calculators, the search engine Google unveiled its online virtual calculator. You just type the formula into Google and it completes the equation for you. You have to learn a few conventions [like using * for multiplication] but for most simple calculations this may be the only virtual calculator you need. It also handles units of measure and conversions, for example entering "radius of Earth in miles" returns "radius of earth = 3,958.75587 miles." See how it works and read more information at http://www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal August 16, 2003 - Vol. 74; No.22