Pizza and Online Document Repositories

Let's discuss a really powerful free tool that you may not yet be using. I hope this blog post will convince you that you need to set up a free online document repository.

I have been finding many interesting uses for Dropbox and have encouraged others to sign up. Dropbox offers 2 GB of online storage for free. (Although with a few referral credits from blog readers, my free Dropbox account is up to 8 GB.) Recently Box.net increased its free online storage from 1 GB to 5 GB and business accounts now start at 500 GB. Just this week SugarSync increased its free storage from 2 GB to 5 GB. Drop.io used to offer the abillity to create many free document drops. But I say "used to" because Facebook just bought Drop.io and is shutting it down. So look for the future announcement that Facebook will be offering a document repository in addition to its photo albums.

I've also had many lawyers asking me recently what "the cloud" really means. I think the possibilities are starting to become interesting to many. Let's set aside lawyers and client files and confidentiality for a minute and talk about something simple--like pizza.

I've told many people that the above services are so neat because they synchronize your documents so you know a synchronized document is the current version of the document. It also saves you the trouble of e-mailing a document home to work on it or keeping it on a flash drive. But let's say you only work on one computer ever and you've made a decision never to ever store any business or client document in the cloud.

That's where pizza comes in. Two new "pizza by the slice" places have opened in my home town. They are located not very far from me, almost facing each other across Main Street. As I was picking up some pizza from one I asked the manager a few questions, like delivery charges and such. I took a paper menu from the counter. It turned out the pizza was good and I might order from them again. I went to put the paper menu in the "paper junk drawer" in the kitchen. It was stuffed full with menus and manuals. The manuals reminded me of another plan I had not yet put into practice.

So instead I put the menu in the home scanner and scanned it to PDF. named it SandrosPizza.PDF. created a new folder c:/MyDocuments/MyDropbox/Menus and saved the file to it. I scanned a couple of other menus from the drawer and placed the files there too, just to get into the rhythm. So now those files will be available from my Dropbox subfolder on my computer or by logging into the Dropbox site from any computer. But that's not the point. I could locate it in the drawer at home and the restaurant has a website. The point is the synchronization with my iPhone (or any popular smart phone.) So now i can get to the menu whereever I am if I have my phone, whether that means calling in from work before I leave to pick up food on the way home or just not having to get up and rummage through the drawer to find it. I can, in effect, have a file cabinet's worth of documents that are easily accessible from my phone.

It's not a perfect system to read a menu from an iPhone screen, but it is doable. Of course if it was a 20 page document I had saved to my online Document Repository, i'd read it on the computer or the iPad which also has a Dropbox app. Menus are not really the best example anyway as restaurants often have websites with the menus online, often in PDF format.

You may not want your tax returns or medical records in an online repository. That's your call. But think of all of the documents you could store there that you might want to access from your phone and you'd definitely like to have out of the way. For your children, there are school directories, sports team information and schedules, special events and assignments, just for one set of examples. Every new product comes with a manual. why not just go to the web site of the manufacturer and download to the PDF of the manual for your product to your drop? Sure it will probably be still there online sixteen months from now when you need it, but why not keep it where you can grab it is seconds.

All of these documents don't even fill up your phone. Unless you specify otherwise they are just links and the document loads in a few seconds when you click on the link.

There are lots of tools you can use, but at a minimum you need one of these free online document repository accounts and a scanner. It is better if your scanner can scan in duplex (two sides at a time) mode. It is better if you own a PDF management tool like Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat reduced the size of the menu file from almost 2 megabytes to about 750 KB and would have OCR'd it if needed. But think of the fact you can get from two to five GB for free and 1024 megabytes equals one GB. That's a lot of documents! (Of course, if you start uploading lots of photos, you could fill up your alloted space pretty quickly.)

Of course if you really start scanning many documents, you might fill up your free space after a year or so and have to start paying the small fees. I assume that is what the vendors are hoping.

If you do not use your scanner much, you may want to invest the time to set up a "scan to drop" setting so you can just scan everything to a My Scans folder under the Dropbox folder on your computer. Then you could just feed things into the scanner and only periodically do the clean up work of changing them from that location to the proper location with a proper file name.

These repositories also make it easy to share documents. Basically you can copy a link to a single document that allows someone to download that one document without granting them complete access to your repository. Just recently I was tied up in a meeting so I copied the link to the document that was due that day and used my iPhone to e-mail it to my assistant wth a note to review it and suggest any changes. When I got back to my office, her edits and suggestions were in my inbox. Once you have this set up, you will find your own uses, like Grandmother asking when the next grade school basketball game is and you responding by e-mailing her the complete schedule or a lawyer keeping blank new client information sheets and other documents to easily e-mail potential clients from the smart phone outside of normal office hours.

Take some time to try this out now as it probably represents your future document filing system for your personal papers. You may fnd that you can set this up in less time than it took to read this post.

 

The Ins and Outs of Metadata Mining

"The ins and outs of metadata mining" is an article published this week in the Canadian edition of Lawyers Weekly.  I was quoted in the article, along with Canadian legal technology experts like Dominic Jaar and Dan Pinnington.

September's Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology podcast was titled Metadata – What You Can't See Can Hurt You. My podcast teammate, Sharon Nelson, and I discussed metadata. Sharon, as a principal of a computer forensics firm, has practical insights on this topic. I discussed the ethical issues of metadata mining. We hope you find this podcast enjoyable and informative.

Last month I did an Oklahoma Bar CLE webinar on Legal Ethics and Metadata. The archived version of this can be purchased and viewed for MCLE ethics credit, depending on your jurisdiction's MCLE rules, of course.

The Lawyer's Weekly article notes some metadata mining techniques and contains a lot of useful information. Some lawyers remain uniformed about the significance of metadata, but with online resources like the three listed about, there's really no reason for that.

Cool Tools - Dropbox

I've decided to create a new category today called Cool Tools. These tools will primarily be very useful and practical tools that can be used in a law practice, but I reserve the right to post about some tools just because they are cool. Even though I never do guest posts here, I'm going to kick off this new category with a guest post/reprint. (Note to PR Flacks: No, I don't want to hear from you or your CEO about another guest post.)

I have to note that Dropbox is one cool tool I have started using this year and now I keep asking myself why I took so long to try it out. The balance of this post is from Tom Mighell and is reprinted (with permission) from his publication, The Mighell Marker: A Legal Technology Weekly. It is from the August 1, 2010 edition and you can subscribe to The Mighell Marker at Tom's blog Inter-alia. I recommend it. Now on to Tom's comments on Dropbox:

"This week I want to talk about DropBox, which is quickly becoming my favorite currently-used application. DropBox is a file synchronization tool that allows you to access your most important files from any computer you use. Here's how it works.

"To get started, you'll need to install DropBox on all the computers you own/use. DropBox essentially places a new folder in your Documents or My Documents folder - you may also find the DropBox icon in your system tray. This folder is actually a portal to an online folder, which resides on DropBox's computers. Then take the files you want to use on other computers and drag them into this folder - DropBox will automatically sync all of your other folders with the newly added files. Just open your DropBox folder on another computer, and there are your files, ready to work on!

"I use DropBox to hold files that I work on regularly, whether I'm at home, at work, or on the road - I can always access these files and they are up to date. I also use DropBox instead of email - instead of mailing a file to my work email address, I'll just drag the file to DropBox, and pick it up on the other computer.

"You can also use DropBox to share files securely with other people. In fact, I just did this yesterday - I created a folder within DropBox and added the files I wanted to share. I then went to DropBox online and entered the email addresses of the people with whom I wanted to share the files. They got an email from DropBox with a link to a site with the files - they could only see those files and none of my other DropBox items, and they were able to download the files without me clogging up their email, or making extra copies of the files.

"I don't use the iPhone app very much, but when I have it's very useful - I can actually view the documents I've stored in DropBox from my iPhone - or Android phone, or iPad, if I had those. So DropBox is also great from mobile devices.

"And DropBox is secure, too - all transmission of file data occurs on an encrypted channel, and the files are also encrypted while they are stored on the DropBox servers. And when you've started using DropBox, check out these Cleverest Ways to Use DropBox that You're Not Using - interesting ways to use this great service!"

http://bit.ly/d0sHNM

http://www.dropbox.com 

P.S. from Jim -- And Dropbox says they will give both you and me some extra free space if you sign up using this link. https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTk2NDQ2NTc5

Bluebook Now Approves Citation to Internet Sources

Yesterday, I posted a link to an interview I did with University of Oklahoma professor Darin K. Fox. The interview was done a few months ago, but there were delays in posting it online. Professor Fox has informed me that there is a new, improved rule in The Bluebook. Here's the update from Professor Fox, which I think is good news for lawyers.

"After we spoke about legal citations, a new edition of The Bluebook was released in May, 2010. The Pace Law Library prepared a helpful chart indicating the changes from the 18th to the 19th Editions of The Bluebook which can be found here: http://pacelawlibrary.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-in-19th-edition-of-bluebook.html One of the key changes relates to Rule 18.2 on Internet Sources, which we discussed in the interview. The new Rule 18.2 addresses some of the issues I highlighted back in February. It is now acceptable for attorneys to cite to an Internet source as if it was the original print source in certain cases.

"Here’s the rule: 'When an authenticated, official, or exact copy of a source is available online, citation can be made as if to the original print source (without any URL information appended).'   

"An 'exact copy' refers to a PDF file (or scanned page image) that preserves pagination and other attributes of the printed work. So, this permits citing to PDF files of cases on Westlaw and scanned version of journals on HeinOnline. As I mentioned in the previous interview, there is a need for states to make online versions of their statutes 'official.' Along these lines, The Bluebook now says 'Many states have begun to discontinue printed official legal sources, instead relying on online versions as the official resource for administrative or legislative documents.' Where a state government or the federal government designates an online version of the statutes or regulations as official, those may now be cited as if they were the print."

Legal Citations: An Interview with Professor Darin K. Fox

I have a confession to make. Sometimes when I write articles for the Oklahoma Bar Journal, I'll just include a TinyURL for the citation. I don't think anyone has really noticed. After all, the point of citations is to find the original source. So if a link that can be typed into any web browser gives one the entire article, that should be good, right?  Certainly better than seeing an obscure law review article cited where you have to either physically travel to a large law library or pay for someone to get the original source content for you. (I sense the collective blood pressure of librarians rising as they read this.) Well, it was just that line of thinking that led me to do An Interview with Professor Darin K. Fox.  Professor is director of the Donald E. Pray Law Library and associate professor of law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. I hope you enjoy reading the interview.

Composing an E-Mail Without Leaving MS Word

My friend and colleague, Reba Nance of the Colorado Bar, shared a well written tip with several of us. It illustrates how to quickly type and send an e-mail without ever leaving Microsoft Word. I was going to use it as a tip here, but another colleague, David Bilinsky, appropriated it to his blog first. As much as I hate to reward David's bad behavior, (that is beating me to the post, not using the tip--which we both had permission to do) I think I'll just link to his blog post on Composing an E-Mail Without Leaving MS Word.

All kidding aside, this is a simple and great tip for when you are working on documents in Word and need to send someone a quick e-mail without opening Outlook and running the risk of being distracted by your Inbox.

How to Declare E-mail Bankruptcy

"Why is my email broken?" was the title of a blog post today by my friend, Ernie the Attorney. He begins, "Almost everyone I know who uses email extensively for work is overwhelmed by email....Some people declare 'email bankruptcy,' which means that they delete all the emails in their inbox and then start from scratch.  And these are the optimists!"

Today, I'm going to give you the step by step instructions on how to declare e-mail bankruptcy in a more positive and less drastic way. Let's call it an E-mail Chapter 13 Reorganization instead of a "straight bankruptcy."

Let's restate the problem first. It is important for all of us to recognize that we are essentially powerless over e-mail. Yes, for most lawyers, it is and will remain a problem. The reason is simple. We could probably deal with processing the e-mail we receive if all we had to do was read it and then delete it or file it. But much e-mail comes with a task-- an assignment, even if the only task is replying to the e-mail. People e-mail us trying to get us to do all sorts of things from important work assignments to watch funny YouTube videos to meeting after work for a beer. You cannot do it all! You have to triage.

But today we will discuss how to do a reasonable e-mail bankruptcy. This isn't for those of you who are a little behind in your reading. This is for those of you who have over10,000 e-mails in your inbox, those who are receiving threats from the IT Department that they will delete them for you if you cannot handle it and those who are being blamed by everyone in the office when Outlook crashes or the system is just slow.

This is not a good system for filing e-mails. But it will clear out your inbox and it is something lawyers can live with because we all have the fear of deleting that critically important e-mail. The solution requires either Adobe Acrobat (not the free Reader) or Nuance's PDF Converter Pro. The details below are for Microsoft Outlook.

Depending on your backlog and personal level of paranoia, this could take a hour hour or two.

1. Note the number of e-mails in your inbox, so you can feel good about your accomplishment when you stop. Look at the oldest e-mail to see the month and year.
2. Right click on Mailbox at the top of your Mail Folders. Select New Folder and name if for the month and year of your oldest e-mails (e.g. 2007 February or February 2007)
3. Go to the bottom of your inbox and select that oldest e-mail. Then scroll up until the last e-mail of that month. While holding down the Shift key, click on that e-mail. You should now have selected all of the e-mails in the oldest month of e-mail in your inbox.
4. Move these e-mails to your new February 2007 folder. You can either drag and drop and right click on the selected list and move all of the e-mails there.
5. Now that all of your February 2007 e-mails are in one folder, here is your chance to scroll through and see if there are any important client e-mails that need to be filed elsewhere. Note: Be careful with your time here or you will kill the whole project. You can find them later if you need to do so.
6. Now create a New folder on your network somewhere on a drive that is backed up regularly. Call it Archived E-mail.
7. Here's the good part. Now click on the Adobe icon at the top of your e-mail client and create one single PDF from all of the e-mails in that folder in one easy step. This may take a while to process, but this one step can combine hundreds (or thousands) of e-mails into one single PDF file. You can glance at this PDF to see how nicely organized they are within this file.
8. Now delete your February 2007 folder.
9. Create a March 2007 folder and repeat the process. You can decide how far to take this. But your inbox will certainly have a lot less in it as you do this and the IT department will be happy.
10. If it happens that you actually do need to see or print an e-mail that you have archived through this process and you know the date you can open the correct folder and look for it. Otherwise you can use Adobe's search function or some other desktop search tool to do full text searches of your Archived E-mail folder to locate e-mails.

The next step is the hardest. You need to come up with an improved plan to review, delete and file e-mails so you don't have to file bankruptcy again. But if not, you now know how to mass-archive.

More on E-mail Management Tips for Lawyers

A lot of people seem to be considering e-mail management issues. Could it be because we are all looking at crowded inboxes? Here is a post by Allison Shields with her E-mail Management Tips for Lawyers.

Microsoft Word 2007 - Great Shortcut for Pasting Text into Documents

If you ever use Paste Special in Microsoft Word 2007, you may really love this tip.

We lawyers tend to use the “Paste Special–Unformatted Text” option often. When you copy text from Westlaw or some other online legal research tool, you use paste special to paste just the text into your document and avoid have different fonts or inadvertently hypertexted case names.

One of the improvements of Microsoft Office 2007 was to have a big Paste Button under the Office Button with a downward pointing arrow under it that lets you access Paste Special easily. Even better is to add Paste Special to the Quick Access Toolbar or use the Keyboard combination Alt + Ctrl + V to launch it.

But then you still need to go through the dialog box to click Unformatted Text and OK. Today you will learn to set up a new keystroke combination to paste unformatted text from your clipboard into a document in one action. And, since this is over 90% of my usage of Paste Special, I assigned the keystroke Alt + Ctrl + V to do this. I’ll just click the button on the Quick Access Toolbar if I need to paste special some other way.

I found these instructions in Smart Computing magazine. Even without the editors granting me free reprint rights, I’m happy to note that I love Smart Computing magazine. The September 2009 Edition where I found this tip focused on mastering your browser with lots of great info, but it also included how to set up Windows Home Server by yourself, performance enhancements for the Mac, home decoration websites and many other features. Subscribers get access to online archives of past issues of the magazine together with some sister publications.

The following is © 2009 Smart Computing and reprinted here with permission. All other rights reserved.

Paste Using A Macro

By creating a macro, you can paste unformatted text using a simple key combination instead of going through a dialog box. Although this requires opening the Visual Basic Editor, you don’t need to know Visual Basic to perform this task. We will give you the simple code to do it.

Go to the View tab and click the Macros button (not the arrow) in the Macro group. In the Name box in the Macros dialog box, type PasteSpecial (do not put a space between the words Paste and Special) and press ENTER. The Microsoft Visual Basic editor opens. Delete all of the text in the code editor and paste or type the text included between the blue lines below. (If copy/paste doesn’t work, try typing it instead.)

 ________________

Sub PasteSpecial ()

Selection. PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText

End Sub

_________________

(Blogger’s note: An image of the macro text accompanies this article, but you cannot copy from it.)

Once you’ve added that text to Visual Basic Editor, click File and Save Normal and close the Editor. You now have a macro that will paste unformatted text into a Word document. Next, you need to assign that macro to a key combination.

Click the Office button and choose Word Options. Click Customize on the left and then click the Customize button next to the words Keyboard Shortcuts. In the Categories area on the left, choose Macros. Select the PasteSpecial macro on the right. Click in the Press New Shortcut Key area. Choose a combination, such as ALT-CTRL-P. (Make sure not to choose a key combination that you already use often.) Simply press those keys to create the new command. Click Assign, Close, and OK.

Try the macro by copying some formatted text. Click in the Word document where you want to insert the text and press the key combination you assigned (such as ALT-CTRL-P). The unformatted text is copied into the document.

Having the option to quickly paste unformatted text into a document makes performing a fundamental operation in Word that much easier.

Tips on Using Outlook Tasks to Clear Your Inbox

I returned from the ABA Annual Meeting resolved to try to make better use of Outlook Tasks to improve my life. A tip about Task due dates from Michael Linenberger, author of Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook, is a part of that strategy. So far the results are mixed, but I haven't bought the book yet.

I have a hard time writing about e-mail management because I don't feel I have a handle on it, but most people tell me they don't either. I should note I use Outlook 2007, which is much improved over Outlook 2003. With Outlook 2003 you have to customize the view to see your task list when you view your inbox.

As Mr. Linenberger noted, your Outlook inbox should be like the inbox on your desk in the pre-digital world. It is where people send you memos, requests and assignments. You wouldn't let that one fill up several hundred deep as you might miss something important. So why do our inboxes get so clogged? Simple. Many e-mails require your action. It may be you need to respond. Or it may be a project, an assignment, a great opportunity, a or any number of things. But if it was just reading or deleting e-mail, we could probably keep up with that. But, no, it is stuff to do! To wit, it is a task.

So if an e-mail only needs a short reply or if you can forward it to someone else who then has to do the task, it is easy to do right then. But so many of these require time for research, reflection, contemplation, a decision or other "processing" that you cannot do right now. So the natural tendancy is to leave it in your inbox, so you do not forget about it.

Well, of course that is totally bogus, right? If your e-mail is anything like mine it will take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or so for the new incoming e-mails to shove that one down so it is no longer visible on your monitor. Then it becomes part of the "out of sight, out of mind" group. Hopefully you will remember or scroll down and be reminded, but who knows?

So if an e-mail is being retained because it is really a task, save it as a task! Drag it from the inbox to Tasks on the lower left hand corner of display in Outlook 2007. A new Task appears with the subject line and contents of the e-mail. Then do three quick things: edit the subject line to whatever it is you need to do, give it today's date and determine what the due date should be. It there is a hard due date, add it here. It you need to start on it several days in advance, then give that date as the due date and chance the task(subject) line to "do X by Y date."

But Mr. Linenberger states that for most of these e-mails dragged into tasks, set no due date! Now I recognize that goes against the way we lawyers work. If we don't docket, it we might drop the ball. But, here is what may be a liberating thought for you. We get more requests to do stuff in our inbox than we can possibily do. Most of us could spend all day responding to the requests that people toss into our inboxes and never get them all done. Surely you have noticed how many people can write a few short sentences in an e-mail with tasks that would take you hours to fully complete.

If the e-mail is an important assignment from a supervisor or on a client file, give it a due date on your task list. If it is an old classmate wanting you to search your records for contact info for these 20 people so she can contact them about the reunion, that's a "No Due Date" task. Bear with me.

The next step is to get that e-mail out of your inbox. If you made it a task, usually you can delete it. All of the text in that e-mail is now stored in your Tasks so it is fine to delete it from your inbox. Sometimes you have to file it, as when it is e-mail on a client file. If you aren't using another e-mail filing method (like practice management software) then drag it to an Outlook folder. You should have lots of these folders set up, including one for very major project you are working on. But you should also have general folders just so you can clear your inbox, like Friends, Recreation, Hold, Unsure, 2009 Junk or WhenBored. The point is to move everything out of your inbox, either to a task or file it in a folder.

OK, back to those No Due Date Tasks. You want to collapse the view so they are not in the way for your day-to-day work and then at least weekly check them to see if any now should be assigned a due date or now have passed and can be deleted. A good review time would be Monday, Friday or anytime you seem to be getting caught up on your tasks. The No Due Tasks serves as your triage system. You just hope no salvagable patients die. But it may be that you can't save them all.

So let's end this discussion with a couple of time management clichés.

OHIO- Only Handle it Once. After you open an e-mail, either delete it, file it, handle it quickly or make it a task. But don't just close it and leave it in the inbox to be handled later. Again you should feel free to make a folder that is named DontKnow or Unsure if you are having trouble filing all e-mails in folders.

The pros refer to the Four D's: Do, Delete, Delegate or Defer. But you cannot defer by leaving it to get buried in your inbox. So you Defer by either making it a task (which you will likely get to) or filing it in a folder, which you might get to at some time, but probably won't.