Well, it has been a year since I plunked down $60 for a Magic Jack device, a cheap cordless phone, and a year’s worth of phone service.  Last week, I got a notification that it was time to renew the service.  I immediately pulled out my credit card and ponied up another $60 to extend my service for 5 more years.  Overall, I’d say that I’ve been pretty satisfied with the Magic Jack phone service, but that I did have a few issues throughout the year.

The biggest issue I had was a “you can hear me, but I can’t hear you” issue.   About three months in, the Magic Jack would ring, I could answer, the person on the other end could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them.  It was an inconsistent technical issue, that would happen from time to time.  I reinstalled the software, tried a different phone, but it would still happen from time to time.  About a month later, the problem went away…  from what I could tell it wasn’t because I fixed it, it seemed to have fixed itself.

Some of the other issues are mainly annoyances.  Remember that your computer has to be on, and connected to the Internet for the Magic Jack to work.  When you boot up your computer, the Magic Jack window will pop up and stay in front of anything else until it is completely ready to go.  Sometimes, this takes a couple of minutes and can be very annoying when you are just wanting to check email or post a blog, or log into Club Penguin, but have to wait until that darn screen goes away.  Perhaps the most annoying thing is that the Magic Jack logo that pops up tells you to be patient.

The caller id option did not work on my cheap cordless phone (but, I’ve seen that it does work on other cordless phones.)  It also is hit and miss with the answering machine that is built into the cordless phone.  I love the fact that if someone leaves me a message on the Magic Jack voice mail, it gets sent to me via email.  However, there are times when the Magic Jack voice mail doesn’t pick up fast enough (supposed to after 4 rings) and it rolls over to my answering machine.  Again, not a big deal, but can be a bit annoying.

I’m not a big phone talker, but I now have one teenage daughter, and two more waiting in the wings.  They’ve been pretty good about using the Magic Jack to talk to their friends during the day (I’m on Sprint now, so my ‘nights and weekends’ begin at 7:00 PM.)  So, it has kept me under my 1,500 shared monthly minute plan (which any of you with teenagers know that can be eaten up in no time at all!!)

I joked last year about running Magic Jack off of a 3G connection.  Well, that’s no longer a joke.  If you have a netbook or 3G card enabled computer, you can run Magic Jack off that connection. I’m still too cheap, however, to buy a 1968 Dodge Dart so I can pretend I’m Mannix.   They’ve also expanded to run the software off of Macs (Intel processor), and I just discovered that they have a Magic Jack Conference Calling option (available for anyone, not just Magic Jack users.)

So, one year into the experiment of can I continue to live without a land line, and still keep my cell phone bills under control, I’d say that it has been a pretty good experience so far.  I’ll let you know if five years if I’m still using Magic Jack or I’ve found that 1968 Dodge Dart.
[gl]

I feel like I’ve been picking on the folks at Thomson Reuters regarding the launch of WestlawNext, especially with this post last week.  I expected a quick response from Thomson Reuters on my questioning their approach to pushing this out to law firms and more specifically to law students.  The response came this morning from Anne Ellis, Senior Director of the Westlaw Library Relations team.  I thought I’d push this out on the blog as a more reasoned response than the one we got from the anonymous ‘A Westlaw Rep.’  In fact, I hope that Anne cc’d all ‘Westlaw Reps.’ on this so that they can give a better response to the specific questions we had on the roll-out. The first three paragraphs are mostly ‘corporate speak’, but Anne goes on to answer some of the questions we had on the effect that law students will have on the new search algorithm (which was my primary concern.)

There are three points I’d like to address, where it seems speculation has been incorrect and has understandably caused concern: 

Rolling out WestlawNext to law firms. Our sales team will make trials of WestlawNext available to customers based on customer needs and priorities. Customers can learn more about WestlawNext by visiting westlawnext.com. 

Rolling out WestlawNext to law schools. In a previous note, I said that we would begin showing WestlawNext to law schools in a phased rollout of trial passwords, beginning with librarians and faculty this spring, and that we were making plans for launching WestlawNext to law students, with possible introduction as early as the Fall 2010 semester. It appears that it was understood by some that this meant that WestlawNext would be in all law schools by the fall of this year. To be clear, we are still determining timing for our rollout to law schools, and will work closely with law schools and the legal profession overall with the goal of helping them make better potential lawyers as we have always done. 

Questions relating to inexperienced researchers informing the search results. This is a really interesting discussion. I talked to the technology team behind WestlawNext, and student research was never to be part of the algorithm to inform search results. It was a very good question though, and I wish we had spoken to it in our original discussion about the artificial intelligence technology.

WestlawNext is an entirely new platform, and we worked hard in the days around launch to provide the right information to the right individuals. I think we all understand now that there will be questions popping up for awhile as people ask smart questions and as strategy and planning unfold.

We will continue to scan the blogs and listservs for comments that reveal gaps in the discussion, and I will try to speak to those points on a regular basis on Legal Current, the corporate blog for Thomson Reuters, Legal. I invite your questions and comments and I appreciate being part of the discussion.

Anne Ellis
Senior Director, Librarian Relations
Thomson Reuters

Anne’s response makes me feel a little bit better, especially regarding the issues of allowing the 1L’s to affect the algorithm of the WestlawNext search results (which apparently they won’t).  As the product gets pushed out to more law firms, we’ll keep an eye on how firms react and use the new research tool.

I’m seeing some articles of how times seem to be getting better in the large law firm world.  Some associates are back up to the $160K pay range, and that those hard-hit practice areas (Capital Markets, Real Estate, and Corporate) are finally picking back up. So many of you may be thinking that we can start getting back to “normal” now that demand for legal services seems to be rebounding.  But don’t get too happy, because partners say that the best thing they did in this economic downturn was slash budgets [pdf] (politically correct term is “reduce expenses.”)  Even firms that jumped ahead of the curve and began offering alternative fee agreements to their clients seem to be having a hard time collecting on those agreements.
As I was reading through the [pdf] article written by Andrews Kurth’s Amy Sladczyk Hancock, PD Vital To The New Way Forward: Insights from Five Managing Partners (interview of Managing Partners of Andrews Kurth, Bracewell Guiliani, Dickstein Shapiro, Sutherland Asbill, and Steptoe Johnson), I got to thinking about what these BigLaw Managing Partners were seeing in their crystal balls.  As I told some of my peers in a personal note, I usually take my comments from Law Firm CEO’s like I take my eggs — with a grain of salt, but this article got me thinking if there is ‘opportunities’ within the library [KM, IT, etc.] to support professional development.  The big quote of:

“Competitive advantage in the new economy will depend entirely on having better trained lawyers who have been trained more efficiently and more quickly, and [professional development] departments and professionals are vital to helping law firms establish that advantage.” [emphasis mine]  

Seems like that knocking that many of you on the ‘administrative’ or ‘professional’ side of law firms are hearing might be opportunity.
[gl]

Google Tinnitus = When you see a constant buzzing in your Gmail, and it won’t go away, more than likely, you have Google Buzz tinnitus.

We’re usually big fans here of social media, but I don’t think that Google Buzz has won any of the three of us over yet.  So, one of the first things I saw this morning when I logged onto my social media standby (Twitter) was “How Do I Shut Off Google Buzz??”  That’s a great question in need of a “How-To” answer.





Easy Way – Scroll to the bottom of Gmail and Click “turn off Buzz”

But, if you’re just not sure you want to completely turn it off, but just want to ‘hide’ it until you think you’re ready, then you can do it this way:

Step 1:  Open Gmail and click on on the “Settings” link in the upper right-hand corner. 

Step 2: From the Setting Page, click on “Labels” at the top center.

Step 3: On the “Labels” Page, under “Systems labels”, click ‘hide’ in the Buzz row.

And, viola!!  Buzz has been removed from your Gmail (labels at least.)  

I tested it with Toby, and all ‘Buzz’ alerts that normally go to my gmail inbox stopped.  However if you still end up with Buzz alerts in your inbox,  Lifehacker has a good explanation of how to remove Buzz updates from coming to your Gmail inbox.
[gl]

I was a little shocked (I think it may have raised to the level of ‘ticked-off’) yesterday when I read that WestlawNext (WLN) was being rolled out to law schools this Spring, and law students would get access to WLN as soon as the Fall 2010 semester.  While I have no issues with law librarians and faculty at law schools having access to WLN (apparently at no additional cost to the schools), I have to say that I’m extremely disappointed in the people at ThomsonReuters that decided that giving this new product to law students was a good idea.  In fact, it specifically flies in the face of what I and others who traveled to Eagan, Minnesota last month were told.  When Jason Eiseman shot the video of a group of us discussing WLN, if you move up to around the 5:05 minute mark of the video, you hear me specifically applaud the ThomsonReuters decision not to roll this out to law students.

The discussion got pretty heated one of the Private Law Libraries listservs last night and the concensus is that exposing law students to a product that hasn’t been adopted by law firms smacks of a ‘marketing ploy’ to try to force the hands of law firms to accept the new WLN platform, along with its “modest premium” price increase.  As of this posting, there was no response to the list from ThomsonReuters (though I do expect one sometime today.)

Many of the law librarians were even questioning why this new platform wasn’t just included as part of the current contracts rather than as a premium upgrade at an additional cost.  To be fair to ThomsonReuters, I jumped back in the conversation and explained the reasoning that the people on the Project Cobalt team gave me for the “modest premium” upgrade charges that your local Reps will be negotiating. Here are the reasons they gave me:

  • The WestlawNext platform is completely separated from what is now on Westlaw.com.   
  • The infrastructure is completely new, the programming is new, and the search engine is new. 
  • This project (formerly know as Project Cobalt) took about 5 years and an investment of over $1 Billion. 
  • WLN breaks down the 30,000 databases and allows you to search all of them (regardless of what your contract covers) without any extra costs (no additional costs would be incurred until you ‘opened’ or ‘downloaded’ one of the out of contract documents. 
  • In the eyes of ThomsonReuters, this is not simply an upgrade to the product, it is a major redesign of the product from the ground up. 
  • ThomsonReuters will not maintain both WLN and Westlaw.com – with the .com product eventually being discontinued (no time was mentioned)
Although I specifically told the list that these were not my words, but rather what I was told (since no one at ThomsonReuters chimed in to explain their position), I took a beating from some of the folks on the list asking if I was basically WestlawNext’s Monkey. I think that just shows how nervous those of us are that have to manage budgets and then vendors like ThomsonReuters comes along and throws a big monkey wrench into the mix and gives little to no details on the “how much” portion of a product.  And if I have to hear some lame excuse of how “we’re a big company, and sometimes things get put out without our knowledge” from the Library Relations team, I will scream!  
Now the local representatives are making their way around to the law firms, apparently each armed with enough information to scare and confuse the rest of us. (See Lisa Solomon’s blog for how negotiations are going.) Last word from those that spoke to their reps is that the WLN product will be available for use under a $60.00 transactional fee, even if you don’t roll it into your contract.  If you roll it into your contract, then you’ll only pay the “modest premium” increase in your contract rate.  And, since WLN runs on a different web address, if you don’t want your attorneys accessing the new product for the transnational fee, then you’ll need to block the WLN site.  I really hope that information is just a local rep’s opinion and not the policy of ThomsonReuters.  This just adds one more layer of confusion, anger and mistrust to the WLN situation.
I understand that ThomsonReuters is a for-profit company; that WLN is the result of a lot of money and research development; and, that the reps make money when they get firms to ‘upgrade’ rather than ‘maintain’ subscriptions.  My gripe is that when something as big as this is released without someone from the company coming out and letting everyone know when it is officially going to be released, what databases are and are not currently included, who is and who is not going to have access, and how much the darn thing is going to cost you, then it sounds like I’m dealing with a used car sales team rather than ThomsonReuters.  
Here’s my suggestion to ThomsonReuters —  WestlawNext looks like a pretty good product, and it implements some good technology. Don’t blow this thing up out of the gates by pushing out information piecemeal.  Don’t let your marketing team override the library relations and development team on who should and who should not get access.  Don’t send local sales reps out with pieces of information so that each of us is given a different story on how much this is going to cost and what is included.  Times are tough for library budgets right now.  Now is not the time to try to force firms into upgrading a product through manipulation and confusing tactics.  A damaged relationship with your clients is a very, very difficult thing to repair.
[gl]


Yesterday I received a notice about Google releasing Buzz. So I followed the link to … my Gmail account. Huh? Strike One. After going back to the release notice, I finally found a statement that said something like, “Oh yeah – you might not have it yet.”

Still nothing this morning when I checked it again. Then about 9:30 I went to check my Gmail and there it was (and my Gmail wasn’t). So I started playing with it. I could see my normal gmail ‘friends’ and had the option to add some others. Whoopee. I sent a note to Greg as one of my ‘friends’ to see if he was there. He didn’t have it yet (even though he showed on my network). Strike Two.

Although another friend of mine must have also got their Buzz going and commented on my post/message to Greg. This got me checking. By default anything you post is public. Strike Three. So I called Greg and we further explored Buzz as he had made it in. To make something private to him I had to create a ‘group’ and add his name to it. Like I’m going to do that for everyone or every group. Strike Three.

My first post/comment was “Looks like a dumbed-down Wave.” Just like Wave the message threads become very long, which is good for collaboration. However they don’t collapse, so all I can see is the thread I’m in. Strike Four.

Then I went back to Gmail. For every Buzz ‘comment’ I get an email. Back to Buzz to see how I can turn this off. No Buzz settings option found. Strike Five.

Then I looked for a way to add Buzz as a gadget in iGoogle. There are some Buzz Gadgets. Of course, not Google Buzz. Strike Six.

Ten minutes into Buzz and we have two batters out and no desire to send another to the plate. After chatting with Greg, we can’t see why anyone would switch over from everything else they use for social networking that works and start using this.

Judgment. A definite Social Media Buzzkill.

I had a great conversation with Darrell Huntsman, VP for New Lexis Innovation Initiatives, yesterday along with a demonstration of the new LexisNexis for Microsoft Office product.  This is ‘Phase I’ of Lexis’ two phase project to rebuild their legal research product ‘from the ground up.’  The second phase will be the ‘New Lexis’ online research product that will be launched probably early in 2011.  An interesting comment from Huntsman was that many of the changes that were announced in the WestlawNext product will be very similar to the New Lexis product.
Why LexisNexis for MS Office?
When I asked Darrell why produce a product that is so integrated with MS Office, he said that they were looking to go “where the lawyers worked.”  Lexis’ research determined that a majority of the lawyer’s work is in building documents.  Whether it is a brief, a client memo, contract or other document, lawyers spend most of their time working within MS Office.  Lexis’ idea is to build their research database information into MS Office so that lawyers are spending less time toggling between their document tools (MS Office) and their research tools (LexisNexis).  So Lexis turned to the Microsoft development team to create a seamless method of connecting the MS Office Suite (Outlook, Work and even SharePoint) to Lexis.  In case you missed the subtlety of that comment, Lexis is not programming the resource, Microsoft is.
New Version of Lexis Classic?
When I saw the look of the product, I immediately thought of the old “Lexis Classic” software that we finally weaned users off of a few years ago.  The difference being that the software was now MS Office rather than Lexis’ stand alone product. It is an interesting approach in moving from the “web” platform (which most research vendors have pushed since 1998) back to a “software” platform. 
When I asked if the ‘views’ that we see when research results are brought back from Lexis are simply an embedded version of Internet Explorer, Huntsman says that it is not.  Instead the MS Office product runs an ‘X-Link’ call to the Lexis database and pipes in the results.  Those results are then formatted by Word or Outlook or SharePoint, and are not web versions at all.  Later versions will optimize the layout for multiple-monitor viewing.  This makes me wonder if the already over bloated MS Office tools will be even slower as a result.  Huntsman says that it will not decrease the speed of MS Office or slow your computer down when making these ‘X-Link’ calls.  Of course, color me skeptical on that issue.
Built for MS Office 2010 – Backward Compatible to 2007, But Not 2003

The LN for MS Office product is specifically designed for the upcoming Office 2010 product that is releasing this summer.  Lexis is taking advantage of the MS Office ribbon feature (you know that ‘feature’ that made learning Office 2007 so hard to do?)  When pressed on how many of the LN clients that will be interested in this product already have MS Office 2007, Huntsman said that probably more than 25% of the firms already had 2007, but that there is a great amount of pressure on those running older versions of Office to move to either 2007, or upgrade to 2010 very soon.  The low percentage may not be a bad thing for LexisNexis right now because they are still working on hardware upgrades on this product, and the New Lexis product.  So a longer transition period will help LexisNexis make sure they have the capacity to handle all the new demand. Perhaps Lexis felt the pressure from the competition to roll out the announcement of LexisNexis for MS Office a little sooner than they wanted.

DMS Integration & LexisNexis Legal Taxonomy Built-In
LexisNexis for MS Office will have some interesting features that caused the Knowledge Management portion of my brain to wake up and take interest.  It will integrate with most Document Management Systems (DMS) through the indexing features (Autonomy, FAST, Recommind, etc.)  On top of that, it appears that it will include some of the LexisNexis taxonomy profiling features found in the Lexis Search Advantage product. It will also index the documents on the local hard drive and apply the same profiling features.  The taxonomy profiling will be a significant value-added piece of LexisNexis for MS Office. 
Search Lexis, DMS, Local or Web Within MS Office
I have a standard question that I usually ask anyone showing me a new product.  “What is one thing in your product that you think is really useful, but may be overlooked by the user?” When I asked this of Darrell, he had a hard time coming up with a quick answer, then finally came up with the “Search Box” function that appears in the MS Office ribbon.  This search box allows you to search “all” or “individually” the Lexis database, the firm’s DMS, your local computer, or the Web.  Not surprisingly, Bing is the default search engine (it is a Microsoft project!)  The problem with the search box isn’t that it is an advanced feature, but rather that users just aren’t used to searching directly within Office.  So it will take some getting used to.

Love It or Hate It – LexisNexis & SharePoint Integration

I get a lot of mixed reactions when I mention SharePoint to IT or KM folks.  Many like the flexibility of SharePoint, while others cringe at the thought of trying to maintain the security and functionality of the product.  If you do like SharePoint, then LexisNexis is integrating webparts that will add features to SharePoint portal through the LexisNexis for MS Office product.  If you hate SharePoint, then this will probably not change your mind.
What About All Those Other Lexis Products?
For those of you that have other Lexis products, such as InterAction, atVantage, CourtLink, etc., there is discussion at Lexis to eventually begin bringing in these pieces to LexisNexis for MS Office. The CRM resources seem to be a natural fit for this product, so I assume this is high on the priority list for inclusion into the new product.  As for the others, we’ll have to see how the integration goes. 

Other Issues With LexisNexis for MS Office

LexisNexis for MS Office will begin Beta Testing later this month and the roll out will begin sometime in the Spring (Mar-Jun ’10).  I did not get into the pricing model, but have read that it could be simply an “add-in” for existing customers with an installation charge, but did not get verification.  It apparently doesn’t access all LexisNexis databases at this time, but I imagine this is something that will be added over time.  Also, in the initial version, there will not be a cost recovery module (researcher will not be able to enter client/matter numbers).  This will be added in later versions.  Also, if you use cost recovery products (Research Monitor, OneLog or LookUp Precision), these products will not work with LexisNexis for MS Office. 
There is still a way to go on getting this ready for full-blown research capability, but there will be some attorneys that will love the ability to do everything within MS Office.

[gl]

The Financial Times reported at the end of January that “Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said software developers were working on ‘interesting hacks’ to stop any blocking by foreign governments.” Is it just me or did this bother anyone else? To me, there just seems to be something intrinsically wrong with a company essentially declaring war against a country. Basically, Evan is saying he and all of Twitterdom were going to flame China. Let me say this again: Twitter is going to flame China. Think about that. Why is that any different from someone from some former Eastern Bloc country sending a trojan horse into all of the banking firms in the United States and essentially crippling our economy? We would not tolerate it. Commerce would be screaming with outrage. The Hill would be holding forth on the dastardly deeds of these horrible hackers. So why didn’t any one step over to Mr. Williams’ office and tell him to tone it down? Maybe they did. We will never know. But this is exactly the point that I keep making over and over again: the web is a brave, new world. In this virtual world, there are no sheriffs, no boundaries, no laws. And the people that rule are the ones that can break and make the secret code the acts as the DNA that creates the protoplasm that is the base of all the organisms in this new world. So watch these tech companies. Don’t be so naive to think that their ambitions are singular. Just like Tears for Fears said not so long ago, “everybody wants to rule the world.”

I have been thinking about the new iPad.

Call me crazy, but I think it looks like a huge Etch-A-Sketch. I just want to shake it to see if it will clear the screen. Add two big round button in each of the bottom corners so I can scroll over the page. Is there an app for that?

Plus, aren’t you guys worried about that screen? Don’t you think it is going to get scratched up? And it is kind of big for when you are running down the runway to make that plane, juggling your iPad, your iPhone, your iPod and your one bag of luggage.

So you are just begging for a murse.

You do know what a murse is, right? It is the male equivalent of a purse.

All of you Apple types should be okay with that–you are a pretty liberal group, if I am any kind of judge.

Two more points about the iPad. When are they going to let us women have a go at these things? Don’t they realize how hard it is to use touch pads when you have acrylic nails? Come on you guys, let us have a seat at the testing table.

So you know what’s coming, right? a plug-in, retractable keyboard for the iPad.

And what’s this about not being Adobe-friendly (Market Place Media’s Apple Adobe at war over iPad)? I get that Stevie-o may become credited with being a visionary, swaying the tech marketplace to drink the HTML5 kool-aid. But I think that is being very David Koresh-like, Mr. Jobs. Now your messing with my shows. I like my Hulu and my Netflix.

Seems to me that you, Steven, are doing a bit of market manipulation through product design to move the economy you way … just sayin’.

So until I get a murse, a retractable keyboard and Adobe Flash, I won’t be getting an iPad.

Unless Mr. Jobs feels so inclined to give us 3 Geeks each one for testing purposes. But we are still waiting on those iPhones so I don’t guess it will be coming any time soon.

Last year, I took the government’s money and traded in my old minivan for a nice new 2010 Toyota Prius. When all of the Toyota recall issues hit the news, I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that the recall for floormats, and then gas peddles did not include my Prius. But it didn’t take long for me to start seeing things pop up on Twitter about the ‘Woz’ having cruise control issues (and feeling slightly proud that the Woz got clocked doing 105 in his 2010 Prius — yes, they can go that fast.) Then the big news that a recall of the 2010 Prius was probably coming due to a braking issue. The braking issue is something that I’ve had first-hand experience with, but found it more of a ‘feature’ than a recall worthy issue. This morning I get a email from Toyota saying that Jim Lentz, President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales is going to give a live interview on Digg Dialogg:

TOYOTA
For more than 50 years, Toyota has produced safe, reliable, quality vehicles and provided first-rate service. Because your safety and confidence in Toyota is of the utmost importance to us, we want to ensure that we are providing you with the latest recall information. To get further details, please visit toyota.com. Additionally, Jim Lentz, President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., will be interviewed live on Digg Dialogg on Monday, February 8, at 2 p.m. PST to answer the top questions as voted on by the Digg community. Watch the interview here. Your safety is important to us, and we will continue to do everything we can to keep you informed.

It will be interesting to see how this ‘Digg Dialogg’ interview goes. I don’t think they will be taking only softball questions, and I was impressed to see that Jim Lentz had a generic link to other Digg conversations about the Toyota recall issues, that were not cherry-picked by someone in the PR department. Toyota has taken a black eye on all the recall talk, both in the traditional media and in the social media. For a brand that is built on quality, safety and owner loyalty, Toyota should be working hard to make sure that it also understands that today’s public not only gets its information from traditional media, but also ‘talks’ to a wider social media audience. The email I received this morning at least it makes it seems that Toyota ‘Diggs’ where we’re coming from.