I’m going to share with you two little tricks that I learned many, many years ago that will hopefully save you a lot of time when dealing with large amounts of data. Both of the tips are pretty simple, and perhaps you already know them. However, I’ve found that most of the folks I run across don’t, and they spend an enormous amount of time manually entering data when they don’t need to.

Both of these tricks involve taking text from MS Word and transferring it into MS Excel. If you’re like me, you tend to do this sort of thing all the time (because for some reason, Partners really like to see the information in a spreadsheet.)

Tip #1 – Converting Carriage Returns into Tabs
The most basic elements of transferring data from Word to Excel is that the columns are essentially separated by tabs, and the rows are separated by carriage returns. The big trick is using the “Find and Replace” option in Word to help you clean up the data automatically, rather than going through line by line and doing it manually. So, let’s take a simple example of a single address:

1111 First St. Apt. 4A Houston, TX 77002

We could manually remove the carriage return at the end of each line, but why not just let Word’s “Find and Replace” function do that for us??

With the address above typed into MS Word, simple open the “Find and Replace” option by typing CTRL+H (or locate it on your toolbar/ribbon). You may also want to turn on the “Show/Hide ¶” feature (which will show the carriage returns and tabs in the document) by typing CRTL+*, or finding the button on your toolbar that has a paragraph symbol (¶) in it.

In the “Find what:” box type in ^p
In the “Replace with:” box type in ^t
Hit “Replace All”

The “^p” is Word’s code for the carriage return, and the “^t” is the code for a tab. So, all we’re doing is removing the carriage return and replacing it with a tab.

Once you’ve replaced the carriage returns with tabs, the text should now look like this:

Copy that line and go to the cell in Excel that you want to paste it… but don’t paste it yet… there’s still one more trick to do. Because I don’t like to bring in all the formatting from MS Word into my Excel spreadsheet, I use the “Paste Special” -> “Text” or “Unicode Text” feature. This will strip out all the formatting that a regular paste function would bring in. So, if you “right-click” -> “Paste Special” -> “Text”, you should get something that looks like this:

That works great if you only have one address, however, you’ll probably have an entire list of addresses that you want to move from Word to Excel. Here’s a way to to that.

Tip #2 – Moving Multiple Address from Word to Excel
I’m going to make one big assumption here, and that is that each of the addresses you have in Word is separated by two carriage returns. With that in mind, what we need to do is add a step at the beginning and end of the procedures we did with the single address so that we can move the next address to the next row in Excel.

Here are our addresses:

1111 First St. Apt. 4A Houston, TX 77002  1111 First St. Apt. 4B Houston, TX 77002  1111 First St. Apt. 4C Houston, TX 77002

Step one is to remove the double paragraphs and replace them with a “line return.” The reason is that we still need to keep the data on separate lines, and this will allow us to do so without messing up the ability to put the tabs in the right place. Now, for most of you, the carriage return and the line return look pretty much the same on MS Word, but trust me, Word knows the difference and we can take advantage of that.

Open up the “Find and Replace” function again.
In the “Find what:” box type in ^p^p
In the “Replace with:” box type in ^l
Hit “Replace All”

Just as before, the “^p” means carriage return, but the “^l” (that’s a lower-case L) is the code for a line return.

Now we repeat our previous “Find and Replace” function to remove the remaining carriage returns and convert them to tabs.

In the “Find what:” box type in ^p
In the “Replace with:” box type in ^t
Hit “Replace All”

Now, you don’t necessarily have to do this next step, but I like to do it just to keep the data clean and consistant. I like to convert the line returns back to carriage returns before I paste it over to Excel.

In the “Find what:” box type in ^l
In the “Replace with:” box type in ^p
Hit “Replace All”

You can now copy over the information from Word and do your “right-click” -> “Paste Special” -> “Text” in Excel and end up with something that looks like this:

Just as with most “tips and tricks” there are always little things that can pop up that throws the steps off a little, but most of the time you can work your way through those little hick-ups.

Hopefully, these two little tricks will help you out in the future when you have pages and pages of data that you need to move from Word to Excel. Instead of send that document over to your Secretarial Services to have them manually type it in, use this and save everyone the time and effort.

I just saw the press release from LexisNexis announcing the addition of American Lawyer Media (aka ALM) content to the Lexis service. As a single-service shop (we only have Lexis), I have to say that I’m a bit confused. First this content was available through both Lexis and Westlaw. Then came the Westlaw “exclusive.” And now the Lexis “exclusive.” All the while, it remained available through ALM’s Law.com platform.
I used to compare the ALM access situation to my iPhone. If I wanted it bad enough, I would use the service it was on. Like AT&T, people complain about the service but didn’t have much of a choice. It was either go through Westlaw or through the google-type search engine on Law.com. Readers of my prior blog posts can guess which one I went with. I was willing to endure being inundated with results over the alternative.
ALM does have great content and I am pleased that it is available on the Lexis platform. Being able to run targeted searches on this content will be a wonderful change. However, I’m not so pleased that, after purchasing it in print and through Law.com (not to mention getting premium access to their surveys), I’ll have to pay a third time to get it from Lexis. I think the best solution would be to follow the iPhone lead and make their content available at least on both of the top two platforms.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post attempting to define KM. It was simplistic and possibly naïve, but you have to start somewhere. Since then, I’ve come to realize that beyond a conceptual understanding of KM, you shouldn’t waste too much time trying to define it. The search for a single definition that will appease all parties is a fool’s errand. So with a conceptual understanding under my belt I began to focus on KM in a legal environment. How can we use KM within a law firm?
There are a couple of books on the subject and there is a close knit group of Legal KMers that are active on Linkedin, Twitter, this blog and the blawgosphere at large. These are brilliant people, who have spent a lot of time thinking about KM in law firms and they are willing and eager to share their experience and ideas. What more could a new legal KMer possibly want, right? Well, here I go again with my naïve and simplistic approach, but it seems to me that there’s a big chunk of the conversation that’s almost completely missing – The Staff.
I don’t have the statistics at the ready (don’t hold me too closely to the numbers), but experience tells me that non-attorney staff make up approximately 50% of law firm employees, while the Legal KM literature and ongoing conversations are about 95% focused on attorney knowledge flow. I hear a lot of…
· How do we improve knowledge flow within and between practice groups?
· How do we best capture the tacit knowledge gained after the transaction has occurred?
· What technologies will best facilitate collaboration between the attorneys, and between attorneys and their clients?
I don’t mean to say that attorney knowledge flow isn’t important, just that it’s not the only knowledge flow problem we have. Most of the non-attorney staff in a law firm are also knowledge workers. If we’re taking a holistic approach to KM within a law firm, shouldn’t we also be asking…
· How can we make it easier for non-attorney staff to communicate and collaborate?
· How can we more efficiently manage incident response within IT?
· How can we transfer the tacit knowledge of a retiring 45-year veteran legal secretary to the 22-year-old replacing her?
I do not hear many of these questions bantered about in Legal KM circles. (And for those of you keeping track at home, here’s where I’m really going to step in it.) I think that’s because the people writing the books and most of the KMers within the Legal KM-iverse are currently, or were at one time, attorneys. That doesn’t make them bad people. In fact, it makes them well suited and qualified to handle the specific problems of implementing KM within a firm. Plus attorneys are much more likely to listen to another attorney talking up KM, than they are to their former IT guy. However, it also means that their perception of law firms is kind of skewed toward the attorneys. I’m not sure to what degree the non-attorney KM problems are even on the radar.
And yet, from my perspective as a non-attorney KMer with many years of support experience (and very little experience in KM), I see the problems of communication and execution amongst the support staff as the low-hanging KM fruit of law firms. Call it my “trickle-up” theory of Knowledge Management. I think we may be better served by building a culture of quality KM in the 50% of staff below the attorney level and then let the attorneys come along whenever they finally get it.
P.S. And this is a serious question. What percentage of KM leaders at the 2010 MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) winners are current or former practitioners of the company’s primary business? Engineers at IBM and GE, programmers at Google, Apple and Microsoft, accountants at Ernst and Young? Just curious.

If you were like me, you probably got one of these emails this weekend from a number of companies that were exposed to a hack from their outsourced email campaign company, Epsilon Interactive.

Here’s one example I got from Robert Half Legal:

So far, I’ve received one from Robert Half, BestBuy, McKinsey & Co., and AbeBooks. However, according to Mashable, the list extends to many well know companies including, Kroger, TiVo, US Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Capital One, Citi, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, Walgreens, LL Bean, the Home Shopping Network, and many, many more.

The idea that so many well-known and respected companies were using this single-source for their email campaigns made me wonder about the risks that are involved with this type of outsourcing and how substantial the effects of a single company’s compromised information has on the multiple companies that use the services. The outsourcing of this type of service makes perfect sense when looked upon by a single company, but at what point does the risk overwhelm the benefits when an outsourcing company becomes a single point of failure for multiple companies?

This made me wonder about the outsourcing needs for law firms. On an individual law firm basis, it may make perfect sense to outsource a number of processes. However, when we stand back and look at the risks that an outsourcing company takes on for its entire customer base (multiple law firms) then the risks to the individual firm become greater. For example, if multiple law firms were to outsource their email systems to a single cloud-based system, or outsource all e-discovery to a single provider, or keep data from their client relationship management (CRM) tool on an outsourced system, the initial risk may seem very low, and the benefits very high. However, the risk may actually be much higher than you anticipate as more firms outsource their information to a single vendor.

Now, before you start thinking that I’m totally against outsourcing certain processes, there are a number of good reasons why firms outsource processes. Outsourcing, when used in the right way, can create a much more efficient process, can be overall less expensive, and can be scaled up and down according to the needs of the firm. Even the chances of someone hacking into the information can be far less likely from a well established outsourcing company’s system when compared to the chances of a law firm’s local information being hacked. So, there are substantial benefits to outsourcing that make perfect sense when looking at your firm’s individual risk/benefit analysis.

The issues that confront an outsourcing group like an Epsilon, however, bring in risk factors that perhaps firms do not contemplate initially because they tend to think of their individual risks only, and not the risks that might happen if the firm’s data is compromised and then commingled with data from a peer firm’s compromised data. Just think of the conflicts checking that would have to occur if you had to include client representation from other firms’ because their information was compromised along with your own. It would be almost impossible to clear a conflicts check in a scenario like that.

In many cases, efficiency will breed more efficiency, and in the outsourcing world, that means that fewer and fewer companies will be the “go to” companies for law firms to use. The potential for problems with putting alll those eggs in one basket could create situations similar to what happen to the major news networks during the 2000 elections when they all relied upon the Voter News Service to project exit-polling from the Florida election and projected Al Gore as President. As with that situation, there existed a single point of failure where one company influenced (embarrassed) many reputable other companies because of a single event.

The thing to remember is that when you place your eggs in a basket with other law firms through an outsourcing company, just remember that your risks have expanded beyond what is  contained within your individual egg shells. If your eggs and your competitors eggs get dropped, you are all now responsible for the resulting mess. Once those eggs are scrambled together, you won’t be able to separate your individual eggs from all the others that were in the basket. Remember to add that scenario to your next risk analysis when outsourcing your firm’s processes and information.

After years of complaining at how inefficient law firms are, we here at 3 Geeks have begun work on a business plan to open a law firm in North Carolina. Although we would rather stay here in wonderful Houston, Texas, we have it on good authority that the North Carolina legislature is set to pass the “Allow Non-attorney Ownership of PC Law Firms” bill which will allow for up to 49% ownership of a law firm by non-attorneys. Add to that, the fact that the North Carolina flag is designed very similarly to the Texas flag, we’ve decided it must be an okay place to do business.

Toby and I have been saying for years that law schools produce lawyers that are ready for the bar exam, and prepare them to “think like a lawyer,” but that their skills at running a business aren’t usually as good as their ability to cross-examine a witness. We’ve tried for some time now to dole out information, tips, hints and tricks on making the operations of running a law firm better for both the client and the lawyer, but we feel that the North Carolina option will give us a chance to really put our ideas into motion, and potentially make a hefty profit along the way. We have one of the Financial Geeks looking into the tax benefits of creating an offshore operations in Grand Cayman that may enable us to expand into the UK market as well (Geeks seem to like New Zealand for some reason.)

Although the details need to be tweaked a bit, we’re looking at a bevy of names for the firm:

  • Geek, Geek & Geek, PC
  • Geek³, PC
  • 3 Geeks and a Law Firm, PC

We’ll have to check on the actual naming rules of North Carolina, but we’re pretty sure we couldn’t go with one of the suggested firm names of “We’re better because non-attorneys are managing this firm, PC”

“It’s a win-win situation,” commented one of the Geeks in a recent conversation over margaritas. “Lawyers can focus on winning cases and bringing in new business, while we work on Alternative Fees, improving efficiencies, and coaching the attorneys on better business models that will attract more clients.”

The initial idea for the firm is that 3 Geeks would recruit a core group of attorneys in the initial stages, and grow to a size of 51 attorneys, each as equity owners of the firm, each with a 1% stake. Although the Geeks would not have to vote as a block… let’s face it, we’d be pretty stupid not to. So, although technically the Geeks would be minority owners, the idea is that we’d still run the show.

If the North Carolina project works out as well as we think, we would hire lobbyists to start pressuring other state legislatures to enact either a 49% non-attorney ownership rule, or even better, just do away with the majority ownership requirements altogether. In the end, we think that we’ve launched on this April Fool’s Day an announcement that will be the future of how law firms are managed.

[Image (CC) by xxrobot]

In last week’s Elephant Post, we asked what software you hated to use at work. So, this week we modified the question a bit and asked what software would you like to use at work, but for multiple reasons (most of which probably begin with the initials IT), cannot use.

The consistent answer was “something that makes my life easier.” Now, really, is that too much to ask for?? (Apparently, it is.)

Take a look at what the contributors had to offer, and if you didn’t have a chance to chime in with your favorite “non-authorized” software/hardware that you’d love to use at work.

Elaine Knecht
Librarian
Smart Software

As my friend the software developer says… … I want to use the software that does what I MEAN instead of what I tell it do do!
Jennifer Stephens
Librarian & Geek
Movie editing software, MacBook Pro, iPad

Movie editing software – wouldn’t it be great to make short “how to” videos for new associates/summer associates?
MacBook Pro – lots of power, battery life, simple OS. My newer MBP also has Windows 7 installed inside of Fusion (virtualization software).
iPad – wouldn’t it be great to have a lightweight tablet to carry with me, to field reference questions or show services on the fly? I could go to the attorneys’ offices to say, “look at the new…” (No, I don’t own an iPad. Just two MacBook Pros, an iPod, and an iPhone 4.)
Cyndy M
Law Firm Marketing Technologist
Roboform

The much ballyhooed “single Sign-on” concept was a unicorn, a myth.
With every application and website requiring a login, I need a handy way to automate the process. This tool manages my passwords, logins and form fields.  Thank you, Roboform.
Greg Lambert
Library/Records Guy
Something Google-Doc-ish

I’d love to have some type of collaborative software that works as well as Google Docs, but is securely behind the firewall of the firm. I’ve worked an a number of projects with external folks using Google Docs and found it to be amazing in getting everyone on the same page (literally) and usually while discussing it on a conference call, we’ve been able to get hours of work accomplished in a matter of minutes. If we had something behind the firewall, I could get those inside the organization to collaborate in an easy and SECURE way.
Megan Wiseman
Law Librarian
Meebo

I admit my academic side is showing in this opinion but I felt I had to answer this week’s question after sharing my software woes last week.
In a nutshell: I miss having chat reference.
Currently I’d estimate that about half the emails I send back and forth and maybe a third of the calls I get regarding reference requests could easily be replaced by a quick IM.  I know of companies that use “chat” software to facilitate communication when e-mail is just plain overkill, so it is possible to roll something like this out in a corporate setting…  but I’m just not sure how well it would work in my firm.  I can see drawbacks and benefits productivity-wise as well as the problem of having one more piece of technology to fold into people’s work style.  But I miss not having to say “now can you spell that?” and being able to instead just copy and paste the name/citation/address/whatnot into my Google bar right from the chat window.
Saskia Mehlhorn
F&I Librarian
Camtasia

I think it is an excellent tool to bring training sessions  to the student and faculty (and anyone else who uses our website) so they can use it when they have a need for it and not just when we are physically available.
We could use it for all types of scenarios, going from “How to use the catalog” (followed after explaining to them that we actually do have a catalog), to the usage of the different databases, on how to perform legislative research up to international case search. The possibilities are endless.
Ryan McClead
KM
Microblogging Software

“Email is where knowledge goes to die.”  – Bill French
I love this quote.  It makes me laugh and it’s true.  Taken together with another truism, Lawyers live in Outlook, you can begin to see the problem.  All of that work, all of the knowledge disappears along with the regular IT data purge.  I dream of persistent, searchable, conversations which can be copied, pasted, linked to and generally re-purposed indefinitely.  I dream of group project discussions continuing throughout the week, rather than only happening once a week for an hour.  I dream of real-time spontaneous collaborations.  I dream of a flattened organization where the newest, most junior member of the company can easily converse with the CEO/COO/CIO and everyone else can share in their joint discoveries.  It’s a lot to put on microblogging, but I think that’s a good place to start.

Next Week’s Elephant Post:

Tell us your favorite PowerPoint presentation story (good or bad… but, preferably bad!)

Toby’s post on not using PowerPoint in a recent presentation garnered a lot of comments and traffic this week. Therefore, we thought we’d give everyone an opportunity to talk about some of the presentations that they’ve seen or given and what you’ve learned from that experience. Did you give too much information on the slide? Did an old version of your presentation get saved to your thumb drive? Or better yet, a completely different presentation? Go ahead and give us the dirt on what went wrong… or if you nailed a presentation because of PowerPoint, let us know that as well.

Google just announced its answer to Facebook’s “Like” button: the “+1” button.
What will happen is that the “+1” will display on your search results as long as you are logged in to your Google account and have opted to participate in the Google +1 Experiment.
I’m not so “like”-ing it. While investigating, I found out that I had to publicize my private Google account. And that all private Google accounts would be deleted by 7/31/2011. 🙁
As a suspicious, neurotic female, I am loathe to publicize my location information. Call me crazy, but even frumpy old me has had my share of quasi-stalking incidents: old boyfriends looming from the past, penal residents. You get my drift.
(As a side note, as a new female lawyer, I got my share of handwritten appeals mailed to my home address from Texas prisoners begging me to represent them. I quickly learned to unlist myself. As a newbie attorney, tho, it was quite a shocker.)
But I needed to check out this whole +1 craze for my job. I’m diligent that way. So I go check out my profile to make sure everything is copasetic. That’s when I realize that Google is going to make me go public.
Google states, “If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.”
WHAT?!?
I gotta come out of my nice, cozy, private world in order to play with +1? Heck, even Facebook let’s me lock down my account.
So you know what I did, right? Fake data. I’m ageless, virtual and able to not just bilocate but multilocate.
Some tips to stay quasi-private:
  1. Don’t use your real name
  2. Use a generic phrase to describe your business rather than giving a business names or school names
  3. Limit who can see your e-mail, home and business addresses. I set mine to contacts and family.
  4. Don’t display the year of your birthday. You can limit display to only family and contacts.
  5. Don’t specify your gender.
  6. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, do not display your customized URL. It shows your e-mail address.
OMG. I like Google, in a generic, gotta-have-it kind of way. And I know their mission is “do good”. But just kinda have this itch in the back of my cranium that says in 100 years, Google is gonna be Hal.
You know, Hal for 2001 a Space Odyssey?
Ugh.

The Lawyerist has revived the dialog on the ethics of lawyers using free email services like Gmail. It’s good to see this debate continue, and I’ll state up-front that the Lawyerist disagrees with my opinion on the subject. I still hold the position that a lawyer using an e-mail system that includes granting “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence” of the e-mail content to a third party is a problem. One of the Geeks recently shared this language with ethics counsel who laughed out-loud. His response was essentially that any lawyer who uses e-mail under this arrangement is crossing the line.
I realize bars and courts are still treating e-mail like it’s mail. To demonstrate this thinking I suggest you ask them the ethics question a bit differently. I like to turn these questions around and direct them at a paper process to see how they sound. In this case: Would it be OK to grant FedEx an irrevocable license to the content in all of a lawyer’s documents and letters it transports? I’m guessing you will get a different answer since Rule 1.6 is pretty clear on this issue: A lawyer shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent. FedEx agreeing not to show this content to other people would be irrelevant, since the act of ‘revealing’ has already occurred.
I’ll reiterate my prior advice to lawyers (and the Bar): if you want to hold yourself out as a profession with higher duties of care – then act like one.

You know that irritatingly fuzzy words that you have to enter before you get those oh so desired NCAA tickets? You know, those “Captcha” words?
What if I told you that you are participating in an actual job–that you were, in fact, working for Google? Yup. In yet another brilliant crowdsourcing scheme, similar to their Goog-411 project (remember calling 1-800-GOOG-411 for free information? they were using your voice to teach their search engine how to perform search by voice), Google has us, the unsuspecting common man, to decipher inscrutible text in the Google Books project.
According to a New York Time’s article, “Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time,” Captchas was a project developed by a computer scientist Luis von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon University.
The now ubitquituous reCaptchas program was created after the New York Times asked von Ahn’s group to digitize their archives. Now, any of you who ever scanned a document know, it is an imperfect science. When I worked in records early in my legal career, I learned the hard way how difficult it is to OCR docs. There are always drunken looking words that hang in the inner margins, stamps that are difficult to read, old typewriter ribbons that smudged.
So von Ahn (don’t you like that name? It think it rhymes with “Ah-Hah!”), converted the unreadable to a bitmap image, convert it to OCR (optical character recognition), then converted it to a Captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart (Turing being the British computer pioneer)). Then it is a simple matter for a human to look at the text and decipher.
The only catch is that there are gazillions of these words stretched across time. So von Ahn figured a way to do it. An extremely profitable way. ReCaptcha is the go-to authentication service for web sites.
Von Ahn figures that 200 million Captchas are figured out each day, at a rate of 1 Captcha decoded every 10 seconds. He started his little project in 2006. He sold the little start-up in 2009. To Google. For an undisclosed amount.
Yeah, baby.
Maybe our own smarty-pants in legal land can figure out how to Captcha our own OCRs by our unwitting staff. Hmmm. The mind boggles.
All I want to know is can I get Google to give me back pay for all of this?

[Please welcome Guest Blogger Colleen Cable from Cable&Clark, and blogger with Law Firm Bottom_Line]

Oftentimes we get stuck in a rut and just don’t know how to get out. I sometimes feel this way about the current status of law librarianship and how we communicate with firm management. This is especially true these days as we try to defend our budgets and perhaps our very existence in the organization.

So what should we do? Since most of us are in the same rut, I’m always a big fan of looking outside our profession or industry for inspiration and new ideas. Recently, I came across this video (also embedded below) on Twitter and it immediately resonated. The basic message from Laura Patterson is: impact not output. While the video and the topic might be geared toward redoing a marketing budget, the general message applies perfectly to law librarians. Like many, we typically think about the ‘numbers’ from an output perspective. For example, how many reference requests did we have during the month of February? How many new titles were added to the catalog this month? But I wonder if this is enough? Is this meaningful to anyone? Does it show value? It hasn’t worked, so how do we change the message?
In the video, Laura recommends focusing instead on these three things:

  • Acquiring new customers
  • Customer retention
  • Customer growth

This could be a real game-changer for librarians. Instead of the number of reference requests, what if we focused on increasing the number of new attorney users to a recently purchased product? How can we grow the customer base? You could then measure the cost of the subscription on per attorney basis and watch the value increase month over month. Another opportunity: We know that only a fraction of the potential customer base uses the library, so how can we acquire new customers and retain them? How can we expand our services to existing customers? How can we increase the IMPACT of the library on the organization?
Bottom line: stop measuring the ‘stuff’ we do and start measuring the outcomes we achieve.