Technically Legal

More or Fewer

No computer technology choice is right for everyone.  All depends on the problem to be solved.  Take the question of whether to have more monitors or fewer.

Some people feel their monitors give them too little screen area. They may move to to double monitors, as I use at work. That allows having, say, the text of a court decision in a research window, and the text of a brief in another, or the text of a model contract or your notes in one and a contract being drafted in another. So you can see both just by shifting your gaze, rather than shift from one pane to another. (Larger and widescreen monitors are another option. But two 4:3 LCD monitors will cost less than a single 16:9 monitor with screen area equal to the two 4:3 monitors' summed areas.)  People who work with a lot of text in multiple documents, like lawyers, often find it useful to have two or more monitors on a single PC.

Other people may keep two or more computers running at a time doing different jobs. But these people lose a lot of physical space when each computer needs its own keyboard, video monitor, and mouse. And often, the work being done on the second or additional computers doesn't need regular checking; maybe only being looked at once a day.  Many people with this issue move to KVM switches, that let them keep just one keyboard, video monitor, and mouse, for two or more computers.  Remote session control is another option for solving this kind of problem, but either way, the goal is to have fewer monitors than computers.

If you go with multiple monitors, try to keep their displays as similar as possible in brightness and contrast levels. Your eyes will feel better.

Forms, Samples, and Sharing

Document assembly is alluring. The MSBA has long provided fillable PDF forms for the statutory Uniform Conveyancing Blanks. Practicelaw.org will soon offer server-based HotDocs assembly of some forms. Exari has a demo of similar online document creation. Major legal research companies also provide forms.

But forms are not always the best practice tool.  A form says "there is one way to draft it." In fact, there are many ways to draft any complaint. Sure, the rules give some "form" complaints. But the introduction notes that the "forms are intended for illustration only." That caveat mirrors Rule 84's statement that the appendix forms are intended only "to indicate the simplicity" allowed -- far from purporting to show best practice.

Generally I prefer samples to forms. A sample says "there's more than one way." I'd rather see six samples of a complaint for some cause of action than a single form. Having varied samples allows greater appreciation for what's essential versus what's desirable.

The same goes for contracts. I have no quarrel with the services contract the Exari demo produced for me, and I liked the web interface. But that document's main value for me would still be mainly to save manual typing for a rough skeleton; not as a revelation of best clauses. Any such contract I'd draft for a client would contain significant changes.

It's valuable for a bar association to help its members with forms. But it's even better for an association to provide ways for lawyers to meet and to share ideas (and sometimes samples, appropriately redacted) directly.

Know your programs; keep good backups.

I first became interested in automation of some parts of writing when I had to build tables of authorities for appellate briefs, a couple of decades ago.  My first attempt at automating that part was nearly disastrous, and taught me two lessons.

The writing and polishing went well enough, after I learned what tags to apply to citations.  When I was finally happy with the brief's body, I started the steps to create the ToA.  When it showed the document's name already filled in for the target, I thought the program was being helpful.  It wasn't.  It was being dangerous.  Like Ourobouros, the snake swallowing itself, the program promptly blanked the document of that name to give itself a blank slate into which to write the ToA, then looked to my named source document to pull authorities from it, found no authorities (indeed, no text at all) there anymore, and created an empty table of authorities from the now-empty document.  Oops.

First lesson: learn what you can about how a program works; don't make assumptions.  I assumed that the program would pre-pend the ToA to the brief.  The program's designers were thinking "specify different source and target names," but didn't warn users when the names were the same.

Second lesson: always have a back-up.  It took 24 hours to get the IT folks to run the back-up tapes.  (It had taken two weeks of research, writing, re-writing, editing, and polishing, to get to the point where it was zapped.)

Bonus lesson: don't push filing deadlines.  Luckily, I had a few days left before the brief was due.  (I'm a big believer in the "put it in a drawer, try to read it as cold as possible" rule -- not possible with blogs, of course.)  So I could wait for the file to be restored, and still get it to the printer to file in time.  (Yes, we still used printing companies then.)  The temptation with e-filing will be to make one's internal deadline five minutes before the e-filing deadline.  Just remember, they haven't repealed Murphy's Law.

Welcome, Computer Law Section

Congratulations to the Computer Law Section of the MSBA on the launch of its blog.  As the writers note, lawyers have never taken much to web discussion fora of the newsgroup type.  Even e-mail discussion lists tend not to work for fewer than a hundred members, absent a specific task focus.  But blogs may be a winning format.  I look forward to future issues from the Section; just the minutes of their meetings are a good way to keep tabs on current developments, as most meetings include updates on significant cases and statutes.

Sleeping on it

In theory, one resolves computer problems by following reasonable decision trees to rule this or that diagnosis in or out.  In practice, there is plenty of room for age-old wisdom about problem-solving. 

I spent much of Friday trying to make someone's computer more responsive.  It's an older machine, a P3 665 MHz with 512 MB of RAM, that just changed users.  A former user often had 20 Word documents and 10 spreadsheets open at a time, and had a weakness for things like weather monitors -- and no time for computer maintenance.  But the machine had just changed hands, and the new user found it very slow.

Malware scans found nothing, and it remained extraordinarily slow.  Cleaning out stale lock files and temp files didn't much improve its speed, either.  Nor did trimming what programs and services started automatically.  Nor did doubling RAM to a gigabyte. 

Then a pass at defragmenting the drive showed that the paging file was in 268 pieces.  I'd never seen one in more than two pieces before.  So I downloaded PageDefrag from Sysinternals.  But passes running PageDefrag and cleaning out other files still left the machine's paging file in 12 pieces when I left work Friday, and still far too slow. 

I thought I had left it behind.  My conscious thinking was about raking leaves Saturday and about my daughter's and son-in-law's karate exams later that day.  But early Saturday morning the answer came to me in a dream: I didn't need to get the pagefile on that drive defragmented.  I could simply add a second hard drive and put the pagefile on it, instead.  My focus on defragmenting the page file had kept me from seeing the problem as being to get a contiguous page file.  And a page file on a separate drive would be inherently faster and less likely to fragment in the future.   

The experience is universally human.  The French say "la nuit porte conseil" ("night brings counsel").  The Czechs say "ráno je moudřejší večera" ("one will be wiser tomorrow morning than this evening").  And we say "sleep on it."  It's not magic.  It doesn't justify avoidance.  It doesn't work unless one's first put in the time trying to solve it awake.  But it's welcome when it happens.

Browser Upgrade Time?

New versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox out (IE 7 and FF 2) came out last month. I installed them both the same week, and have been using them each to pick up the court decisions that the MSBA sends to members.

If you use a browser much in your practice, upgrading is probably worthwhile.  This is especially true if you're using IE6. I see three main reasons for a lawyer to move from IE6 to 7.

First, IE7 can help you be safer than with IE 6. It warns more clearly about potential security certificate issues, for example, and tries to warn you of phishing sites. IE7's protections here help in any Microsoft program that renders HTML (provides clickable links). With IE6, you'd have to "view source" in an Outlook message to see a blatant phish like the following:

Your statement is available. Please log in to <a href="http://sd-2556.dedibox.fr/cap/lindex.html" target="_blank">www.capitalone.com</a> for Online Account Services and click the My Statement tab there.

With IE 7, Outlook 2003 displayed a tooltip to me saying "blocked" when the mouse hovered over the link above.

Second, IE7 finally will let you print without cutting off the right-hand edge of a page (or jumping through hoops in printer settings).  I often had to add the last two words of a statute or court decision to a critical paragraph's lines by pen when IE6 cut them off.

Third, IE7 now provides tabbed browsing, as Firefox and Opera have long done. If you value your time, tabbed browsing is the only way to go. With multiple tabs, you no longer need backtrack constantly to check new leads for the information you need.  Each page of your research results stays ready.

Firefox 1.5 already provided benefits 2 and 3 in the short list above, and Firefox 2 adds phishing protection, making it at least equal on all three points. In addition, Firefox 2 will run on Windows 2000.  IE7 will not install on anything less than Windows XP SP2, not even Service Pack 1.

Which one should you choose?  If you aren't on the very latest Windows, you don't have a choice.  As noted, IE7's improvements are available only if you bought into XP. But as a browser, Firefox 2 has everything IE7 does, and works on Windows 2000.

If you have a choice, I suggest you install each, though for different purposes: IE7 to fix IE 6's problems and give better security in Microsoft Office; and Firefox for most web research.  My preference is for FF because IE7 failed to display two of Microsoft's own pages correctly for me, and IE 7 "stopped responding" a couple of times, requiring re-starts; Firefox didn't.