Helping Lawyers with Mobile Solutions

What a day! Started off in the Microsoft Supersession with Donna Payne, Sherry Kappel, Char LaMaire, and Jeffrey Roach discussing Office 2010 Deployment.

It was clear to me that 4 things came from this session:
1. Install the 32-bit version of Office. There are too many 3rd party tools that lawyers will need that are not in 64-bit as of today. This will change! Start collecting statements from your vendors, including your DMS vendor about when they will have a 64-bit version.
2. DOCX is the clear format choice from the professionals. There should be lot of planning that goes into a conversion. They are seeing the most conversions from Office 2003 to 2010. This will need a lot of prep work to deal with users, templates, auto text, old documents, and the list goes on. Make sure that you have a good test group and that it gets fully vetted. I will follow up with Sherry about this and get more details.
3. Training – why is that most managing partners seem to think that everyone should just know how to use Outlook and Word? The experts have seen deployment training cut from 5 full days of training in the past to as little as 2 hours for Office 2010. The key to making this work, is Pre-Training. Yes, all users need to be prepared to set into a rapid learn class before they start. If it’s their first time seeing the new ribbon, they will only be frustrated from this class and walk away empty, plus they will drag the entire class down with them. Don’t let this happen to you.
4. Word Custom Interface, a big No-No. Try to avoid making sweeping changes to how Word and other Office products look. Once your user goes home and gets a copy on their new notebook or is using a different system, and they can’t function, it will lead to super frustration on their part. I will follow up with Donna on this and get more details about it.

I looked at 2 DM systems today. One from Epona www.epona.com called DMS for Legal, which is based on SharePoint. I was really impressed with what I saw! I will be setting up a trail of the system for me to use, and think this may be a great and cost effective solution. The second was M-Files www.m-files.com a cloud and on premise document management solution. I will do some more research on this one as well.

I sat in on a great panel today on e-discovery. As the need to protect privacy and privileged information in ESI via redaction from documents, this question has evolved further. Is it possible to redact natively produced documents? Is TIFF or PDF conversion the only solution when redaction is required? These are important questions and there is much confusion and debate on the issue.

Moderator:
Christine Musil, Director of Marketing, Informative Graphics Corporation.

Panelists:
Craig Ball, President, Craig D. Ball, P.C.
George Socha, President, Socha Consulting
Tom O’Connor, Director, Gulf Coast Legal Tech Center
Browning Marean, Senior Counsel, DLA Peiper San Diego

The last item of the day was a full demo from TrialPad www.trialpad.com @trialpad on Twitter. It does as promised, makes your iPad into a courtroom presenter.  I think that it will be used more as a way to review and redact documents and for depo’s myself, as it’s just so simple to use. I think they will need to add a GoogleApps and GoogleDocs interface in addition to the Dropbox interface to open it up a bit more. But overall, I really like it.