Get a lawyer to do it for you: Reason 1001

Fighting bronchitis has left me grumpy. I say that as an apology for what may appear to be a rant.

Lawyers exist for a reason. I say it is so real people can have real lives and not spend those lives in courthouses. Seriously, we know what are doing and that is the reason you should forget about doing something yourself. I no longer try to do anything mechanical with my car, I do not do plumbing, and I do not do whatever you, dear reader, do to make a living. I know the level of and range of my incompetencies. So why are you trying to practice law without a lawyer?

For a wonderfully written story of how two nice people screwed themselves in a bankruptcy, please read What Not to Do Before Bankruptcy. I see their blithe self-assurance in all sorts of clients in all sorts of cases. Think of any legal matter like jumping off a cliff. Or a tall building. Now think of lawyers as a bungee cord. Now think about how you would like jumping off this tall building without a bungee cord.

Thanks to the SC Bankruptcy and Consumer Law Blog for the link to the article above. Not read it, yet? You really should.

More automating the office

I wrote about automating the practice under the heading Fees, Automation and Business Clients - it is a long one. This post follows up on that post.

For almost nine years I have been trying to follow Ross Kodner's PaperLess Office concept. Every document coming into the office and every document going out becomes a scan on the computer. Where I differ from Ross Kodner's program is that I do not use Worldox. I am finding that a combination of Paperport (ver. 10) and Copernic desktop search tool handles the document management tasks. (I create a folder for each client under Paperport and I convert the scans into the Adobe Portable Document Formant - PDF - for searching under Copernic. I use Copernic since Google Desktop did not include WordPerfect files in its search parameters.) Crude but effective for a solo office, but I suggest that anyone who has not set up a system like this read everything you can Ross Kodner's site.

Frankly, I see a great benefit from scanning and not touching the hard file. I can read the documents on the computer screen while talking on the computer and not take the time to find the file while keeping a court, a client or another attorney on the line. Another benefit comes from clients who have e-mail: I can e-mail them PDF files without having to copy and send by regular mail. (I did have an odd incident where a client insisted that I had not e-mailed him all the documents but that was the concluding incident of many in a deteriorating relationship. Yes, not every client is a happy person.) Kodner's theory is we cannot eliminate paper and I still agree with that theory. However, I do think that as more clients and attorneys use e-mail that we will get closer to a no paper office (on the other hand, no one wants to hear me rant about my problems with electronic filing with the federal courts). I think this post at TechDirt is more about this future than the present.

What does this have to do with document automation? A lot. Forms received from other attorneys or form books can be can go from a scan to the word processor via Paperport. That they need cleaning up (no OCR - Optical Character Recognition - software is perfect) has less importance when they are going to converted over to HotDocs templates. (I have written a bit more about using HotDocs here on my Indiana Divorce and Family Law Blog.) The time saved by scanning and converting to a WordPerfect document beats typing directly into WordPerfect.

All this does have two weaknesses and one problem. First, making sure that everything is scanned in. I recently hired a girl to do some part-time work. I found she did not scan everything and now she is unemployed. The other weakness lies in the scanned documents being on a desktop machine. Since I acquired a laptop, I expect that problem to fade away

I think I discussed the problem before: documentation only succeeds if the work can be automated. That means in practical terms what gets processed through HotDocs are those documents for an area I practice in on a regular basis or routine work for a particular client.

The Price Of Computers

The office computer went kaput two days ago. The past two days consisted of extremes: extreme frustration, extreme aggravation. Hopefully, tomorrow finds the computer running again in its mysterious ways. I hate my dependence upon computers while simultaneously I adore the advantage provided by the computer, Computer Manage information and my “job” requires me to bend, shape, and interpret information.

Now I am cut off from easily accessing the address, telephone numbers, and even names of clients, courts, contacts and opposing attorney’s. Note that adverb easily. The raw gross information remains in the files, the telephone books, the online sources, but the time to find and use that information is now so much longer, more tedious, as I write this, some of that lost and keenly desired information is being placed into my laptop.

Poor timing on my part and on the computer’s, for otherwise I would have most - maybe all this information in place and ready to use. Tomorrow fails in bringing me total repair, of my situation, I will have enough to fight my fights next week.

Computers bring joy and terror to a lazy man. Joy comes from being able to automate those simple tasks. The terror caused by knowing the amount of work required for reaching that state of seamless use of information. Avoiding the bog of paperwork can mean landing in the bog of mucking about computers.

Such is the price of computers in the practice of law. We cannot do with them nowadays but can any business? I remember the days I practiced law before my first computer and I cannot see how we handled the volume of business that we did. Perhaps the world was a bit slower as well before 1992.

Using Indiana's Online Appellate Opinions

I do not know how long I have been aware that Indiana's appellate courts have been posting their opinions online. I seem to recall some Res Gestae article on the subject at the end of the 1990's but I am also sure that DeBruler was still on the Indiana Supreme Court. Let us just say it has been a long time. During that time there have been some changes.

The Indiana appellate courts have their own section on the Indiana government website and the Indiana Appellate Opinions page exists within those court pages. The page contains links to Current Opinions (with links to the Indiana Supreme Court, to the Indiana Court of Appeals, and to the Indiana Tax Court) and to Archived Opinions (again, from all three appellate courts).

How to use this page?

Well, you can use the link to current pages to check cases on a daily basis. (Or just check out The Indiana Law Blog daily for its listing of cases. Which is what I have been doing for the past few years.). This page offers the opportunity get cases faster than through West or Lexis.

Using the archive pages generally requires patience. I wrote generally because of how I search them: 1) I have a name of a case; 2) I go to the page; and 3) I type the name of the case into my Firefox browser and it finds all uses of the word I typed. That will not work well for Smith v. Smith.

So sounds like the page only works well for getting current opinions on the day of being issued, right? Not so fast. At the top of the page are two boxes which are preceded by the word "search" in small type. Click on the first box and there is a drop down menu. On the menu is Appellate Opinions. Click on this choice and put your search terms into the second box and then click the "Go" button. A much quicker way to find cases. You may also be able to use this search function to do an ersatz Shepardizing of cases. I have no idea why this search function remains so unobvious (there is not even any mention of this function on the main page).

In my posts, I have taken to linking to the cases on the judiciary site. Why? Because they are free unlike Westlaw and Lexis, and this makes the whole opinion available for reading.

Drawbacks and Dealing With Them

Which brings me to the drawbacks to using these opinions. They lack the headnotes of Westlaw or Lexis. They lack the official reporter pagination provided by West. The archives do not contain older cases. These opinions do not differ from the opinions we would receive if we were the attorneys on the case. So why use them besides their lack of cost?

First, I do not use the archived opinions alone. If I have the name for a case I want to read, I can use this site to read the case without paying the big research companies their fees. If I want to use the case, I can then go to law library and get the official cite and the page numbers for what I want to use of a particular case. I can do all this without leaving the office or work late night at home. Then, too, I can use cut and paste to extract text from the opinion to my brief or memo.

Secondly, recognize the site has limitations and work with them.

The current case archive has some potent uses regardless of the general drawbacks. A war story about the current case archive may illustrate its use. A friend of mine told me about a difficult case she was involved in, a few days later I am reviewing cases just handed down by the Court of Appeals, and there was a very, very good case for my friend. I e-mailed her the link to the case. She printed the case and got in front of the judge before the judge was even aware of the case. She won that case. I think that clearly suggests the use for the current case archive. Just think of using them as one would use any slip opinion.