Standing Committee
on Legal Technology
May 2000 Vol. 7, No. 2
Statements or expressions of opinion or comments appearing herein are those of the editors or contributors, and not necessarily those of the association or committee.
Contents
* Worthwhile Web sites for Illinois lawyers, Part II
* Icalendar, the new interchange format for scheduling vcard, format for contacts
Opinions about the products discussed in this issue are strictly those of the authors. Their opinions do not constitute endorsement or recommendation by the Illinois State Bar Association.
Worthwhile Web sites for Illinois lawyers, Part II
By Chuck Bingaman, Executive Director, Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education, Cbingaman@iicle.com
This is the second in a series of articles in this year's CoLT newsletter highlighting worthwhile Web sites for practicing lawyers. While there are thousands of Web sites of potential value, it takes an exploration of any given site to determine whether it will be of actual use to any given practitioner.
Here are five sites you might want to check out . . .
1. www.legalethics.com. Sponsored by the consulting firm Internet Legal Services, this useful site was named one of the Top 50 Legal Research Sites of 1999 by Law Office Computing Magazine. It offers a wide array of legal ethics-related news, valuable articles and excerpts from CLE materials from around the country, links to other sites, and new ethics opinions from around the USA. It seems to highlight ethics opinions related to technology issues. If you have a legal ethics question, it is very likely that you can find useful information on this site.
2. http://truth.idbsu.edu/jcaawp/default.html. If you can manage to type that entire URL errorlessly, you will call up the site of the Journal of Credibility Assessment and Witness Psychology published since February, 1997 by the Department of Psychology at Boise State University. The Journal reports scholarly research on psychological credibility assessment, statement analysis, malingering, eyewitness memory, traumatic memory, child witness issues, confusion phenomena, and related legal issues. Any lawyer who deals with witnesses in litigation settings must develop some expertise in these areas. Here is a valuable and developing source of research material. A recent article set out in full text, for instance, is titled "The Effect of Attorneys' Non-Verbal Communication on Perceived Credibility" by Rockwell and Hubbard in the 1999 vol. 1, no. 2. Do you want to know how people are inclined to perceive your non-verbal communication in court? Here is detailed information. Check it out!
3. http://Thomas.loc.gov. This is the research service of the Library of Congress developed, as they say, "in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson." Thomas provides everything you might want to know about what Congress is doing, including full text of current and pending legislative pieces, schedules, membership and agenda of congressional committees, and a wide range of congressional documents. Moreover, it offers comprehensive links to other federal government sites. If you are researching federal law, particularly legislative matters, this may be the best place to begin.
4. www.law.cornell.edu. Created and maintained by the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell Law School, this is the award-wining "granddaddy" of reputable Web sites devoted to legal matters, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court. In or attached to the site is a vast compilation of legal materials all easily located through useful search engines, menus and linkages. While the keynote of the site is its U.S. Supreme Court coverage, one can also quickly move into a wide range of primary resources sorted by state and by subject area. I suggest that you explore this site, and Thomas noted above, soon so that you know the range of available material and are ready to search it as soon as the need arises. (Incidentally, Cornell offers an "honor roll" of states that offer particularly good sources for their legal materials. Illinois doesn't make their honor roll!)
5. www.state.il.us This growing site is the primary site of Illinois state government. While it is largely a disappointment so far, it may develop further in the future. A sub-site, www.state.il.us/court, offers the official online versions of opinions of the Illinois Supreme Court filed since May 23, 1996 and appellate court opinions filed since September 1, 1996. Because it only goes back four years, the site is somewhat limited. Moreover, its search engine sometimes is extremely slow. However, the site is developing and improving, and it should be a substantial resource for Illinois lawyers in the near future.
The author welcomes any comments from practitioners on other sites for lawyers that should be highlighted in future articles.
Icalendar, the new interchange format for scheduling vcard, format for contacts
By Adrienne Albrecht
Have you upgraded your calendar or docketing program lately? If you are one of the savvy small business owners who have frustrated the software industry by deciding to upgrade only when there is a good reason to do so, you should look into upgrading now. The reason is that some of these programs are including a feature that enables it to export and import in an interchange format for calendars called "icalendar." My client contact data also successfully converted between these two programs using the vcard format.
By upgrading my Lotus Organizer calendar to Lotus 6.0, and with Outlook 2000, I was able to successfully import my Organizer calendar seamlessly into Outlook, which we use in our office for e-mail and contact management. Finally, I can export my schedule to my client database and use the link features of both of them. The ability to transfer data between applications and platforms makes this feature an essential element of any docketing, case management, or contact management software.
These two formats were specifically designed to provide interchangeability between information management programs over the internet to allow users to exchange their data over the Web across platforms by a consortium of companies in the industry called Versit. Versit members include Apple, Lucent, IBM and Siemens. They have transferred the ownership and responsibility for maintenance of standards and protocol to a group called the Internet Mail Consortium. Its biggest members include Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett Packard, America Online, Lotus and Sun Microsystems. They describe the purpose of the software as "Personal Data Interchange."
The software and the specifications are available free over the Internet. There is also a list of applications incorporating this technology on the Website of the Internet mail consortium at www.imc.org. Most major commercial personal information management programs are listed as employing this interchange format. In addition to Lotus and Microsoft Office, the Website lists Groupwise by Novell, Goldmine, and PalmIII as programs employing this interface. However, I could find no evidence that any legal specific software has incorporated icalendar or vcard on either the ITM Website or on any of the literature put out by the legal software vendors. The closest I could find was Time and Chaos, which is not a legal specific program.
This format has been in the public domain since December of 1996. Therefore, it should be an essential component of any new purchase or upgrade.
By Jerry Gorman, Chair, Standing Committee on Legal Technology
April 27 was a beautiful day in Chicago. And despite my concerns about ineptitude and an always-present desire to be playing golf on such days, I made my way to the Chicago Regional Office of the ISBA to report for boot camp. There I joined 74 other rookies for training on law office applications of the Microsoft office suite-- Word, PowerPoint and Excel along with explanations of the Windows operating system and e-mail in Internet usage. This was the initial training program sponsored by the Committee on Legal Technology with MacAcademy/ WindowsAcademy to train lawyers on basic computer operation. While there was no heading shaving or "yes, sir" requirements, the training was intense for the attorneys, paralegals, and support staff in attendance.
Our drill instructors were Robert Thell of Windows Academy, and David Yavitz and Todd Flaming of CoLT. Robert Thell, who has been in computer training since 1984 and has trained over 15,000 former rookies, started the day on Windows management. He showed attendees how to launch applications, use taskbars, common Windows 98 settings, locate documents, manage files, manage print jobs, maintain the system, and optimize the user's computer. The next session explored how Word can be used to create, edit, file, and manage document production. Real examples were demonstrated on how to set up templates and macros designed for legal applications such as a repetitive production of documents and pleadings.
Since I have been a Windows and Word user for some time, I had a false sense of security over my fellow enlistees during these sessions, but soon discover that I was learning new tricks and enhanced uses of Word. My imagined arrogance quickly diminished and I started taking notes on matters I thought I knew and useful options I never imagined.
The next presentation was on PowerPoint, a program I'd only tinkered with--rather unsuccessfully. Perhaps because my job entails a good deal of seminar and other presentation work, I was especially interested in learning to use PowerPoint. Robert let us know up-front that if we could master five icons, we could successfully produce a PowerPoint presentation within our brief class period. Much to my amazement, we did master those five icons and as a class produced a simple PowerPoint slide show. This tool is becoming more widely used by trial and other attorneys for presentations to juries, judges, administrative hearing officers as well as to clients. Using the Wizard in the program and our basic Word skills that we learned earlier, it was really quite easy to put together a simple presentation. We were also shown more sophisticated animation concepts and the logic behind enhancing our presentations with clip art, pictures, graphs, etc. I'm sure that with a little guidance from my kids, I can now put together a fairly sophisticated PowerPoint presentation rather than just click the mouse to make the next slide appear (as I've been doing for the past few years).
Our next session dealt with the basic aspects of creating an Excel spreadsheet. During the Word session, we had looked at that program's capability to create columns, tables, and do some simple math. However, it became quite obvious that Excel is far superior for the entry, storage compilation, and manipulation of various data. Our instructor put together a basic law office expense chart as one example of how Excel works.
David Yavitz and Todd Flaming, two of CoLT's "senior officers" discussed and demonstrated the practical side of the e-mail and Internet usage. E-mail has become the dominant communications tool in the computer/ Internet age. I would be lost without it in communications to fellow staff members and ATG's attorney/members. The ISBA is also moving to make e-mail the basic tool for communicating with its members. The timeliness and cost saving of communicating to large groups via e-mail is simply too significant to ignore. It's also well suited for immediate delivery of information and documents to clients. If you're not a daily, proficient e-mail user, you're truly behind your competition.
David discussed various e-mail software such as Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Outlook Express. Basic concepts such as preparing and sending e-mail along with receipt and file organization were discussed. David also demonstrated how to send attachments via e-mail--a tremendous time and expense saver over snail mail.
Finally, Todd Flaming put us on the Internet. He described the basic concept behind the Internet and then focused on how browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator work. Whether navigating or exploring, the attorney now has a worldwide wealth of information, including legal research, available in the remotest offices. Getting a little more daring, Todd even showed us how easy it is with current tools to create a law firm homepage on the Internet.
As with all boot camp trainees we finished the day tired, maybe even a little sore; but better off; and on our way to earning our computer stripes. This is the first of what will be an ongoing series of seminars presented jointly by the Illinois State Bar Association's Committee on Legal Technology in cooperation with Mac/Windows Academy. This program will be repeated in Springfield in the fall. More advanced programs will follow as part of the series. Stay tuned. Dismissed.
P.S. I prepared this article using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Pro. I could tell you about that, but I'll save that for another day. The sun is out on a beautiful weekend day and I'm heading elsewhere. I wonder if anyone has perfected a voice recognition golf ball?
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