Doug Cornelius .com

I saw DocStoc a few weeks ago and dismissed it. It seems to gathered a little more traction since the post by Matt Homann on the [non]billable hour: A You-Tube for Legal Docs? Check out DocStock.

Matt calls it the “You-Tube of legal documents.” I think that it a correct assessment since I found it to be full of amateur information and copywritten materials.

For instance, I pulled up the Real Estate Purchase Contract. It is clearly stolen from the California Association of Realtors form of Purchase Agreement and Escrow Instructions. Copyright violation

I went on to the form Promissory Note. That one is embarrassingly bad.

Most of the posters are anonymous or an avatar. (I found the prolific FreeRealEstate person.) that does not give you any confidence in whether the agreement maybe good or bad. They are running a promotion that gives away an iPod Touch to the user who uploads the most documents each week. That is a great way to create quantity, not quality. I found an iPod winner in Farhan Khan who uploaded over 20,000 documents. It looks like he also just uploaded his hard drive. I do not know him, but I am not going assess any value to someone who uploaded that many “professional documents” and just finished his MS in computer science this year.

Document assembly is a powerful tool that we are starting to deploy across my firm. Document assembly is a wonderful and powerful knowledge management tool. We recently deployed HotDocs Server.

I found the desktop version of HotDocs to be powerful, but a pain in the neck to install, maintain and train attorneys on how to use. Going the route of the server made deployment easy. Users just need a web browser to access the templates, answers the questions and assemble the documents.

The problem with HotDocs server was that they sold it without a front end, expecting the customer to custom-build the user interface. Last year, HotDocs came out with their Template Portal product to act as the user interface for the portal. This allowed us to open the box and deploy the server in a week. Most of that time was spent changing to the colors and graphics to match our intranet.

One issue I had with the Template Portal is that it presents all of the templates in a flat list. I wanted to seamlessly integrate it with our intranet and forms library. So instead of opening the form of deed in word, you get the HotDocs interview taking you through the conveyance process. We found a workaround. We found the Template Sets feature created a distinct URL for the template, allowing us to link directly to the HotDocs interview.

Barron Henley and Blair Janis wrote an article for the Best of ABA TECHSHOW: Abracadabra: Document Creation You Can Really Use. They do a great job of taking you through the process and touting the benefits of document assembly.

The problem I have is dealing with changes to the documents and managing the client. Any good form document should change as market conditions change, the law changes and client expectations change. Inevitably, the client wants to see the changes and approve them before they get into the form, or the client wants to send a set of forms out to a potential recipient to give them a flavor of the documents. The problem is that the form is full of the document coding, making it hard to understand what is happening with the document.

To counter this, I have starting setting up the templates with a form option. This option pre-selects some of the answers and produces a form for distribution. It is kind of kludgy but is solving the problem for now.

hotdocs
document assembly
document assembly

The MIT Center for Real Estate has just released the results from the third quarter of 2007: Transactions-Based Index (TBI)

The results from the quarter are highlighted by a total return of negative 1.7%
for all properties, including a decline of 2.5% in asset prices. The demand side
of the market showed a 3.37% decrease in reservation prices, while our estimate
of growth in supply side reservation prices (property owners) was negative 1.6%.
Among individual property type sectors, price growth was strongest in apartments
(+5.9%), and weakest in industrial (-2.7%).

Connectbeam has announced the launch of version 2.0 of their social computing appliance. It looks like an interesting approach to get social bookmarking and social networking inside the enterprise. They have a 5 minute tour of the product.

It is great that the Connectbeam tagging and social bookmarking includes websites both inside and outside the firewall. We need to increasingly be aware that lots of great content and information lives outside our firewalls and should be incorporated as part of an enterprise knowledge base/search.

The problem I have with Connectbeam is getting it integrated with our document management system. Without that content most of our firm’s internal content would be missing from the Connectbeam system. They have connectors to Google’s search appliance, FAST search and Transfer’s FSP search engine. None of these have been shown to integrate well with our document management system

I do like their Live Profiles, that dynamically reflects a person’s area of interest and expertise. As you tag information, those tags get reflected in your profile. As you join groups, that group information gets shown on your profile.

On Thursday, we brought a new daughter into our family. (She is the cute one in the picture).

By we, I mean my wife did all the work while I stood around taking pictures.

In my idle time, I ran a Google search on knowledge management and children. I was stunned to see all of the children’s books in Amazon on knowledge management. But that was about the extent I thought about work and knowledge management over the last few days.

As Jay Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald reports: Companies may drop home loans

The mortgage industry does not like the new mortgage regulations proposed by the Attorney General. As I posted on this summer, these new predatory lending regulations under 93A are well intentioned but vaguely drafted: (15) Lender Must Believe the Borrower Can Repay, (16) No Documentation Loans, (17) Loans Not in the Borrower’s Interest, (18) Prohibiting Discrimination.

As a result, the Attorney General announced that the regulations will not implemented this week. The new date is January 2.

As I have seen the Christmas holiday decorations starting go up already, I thought it appropriate to post about Christmas trees. The case of MacFadyen v. Maki popped up in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in a decision from the Massachusetts Appeals Court.

Ellen S. MacFadyen injured her elbow when she tripped over a snow-covered tree stump while selecting a Christmas tree at the Star of the East Christmas Tree Farm, owned and operated by Robert L. Maki. Mr. Maki cited M.G.L. c. 128, § 2E, as an affirmative defense to the plaintiff’s claims of negligence and gross negligence.

M.G.L. c. 128, § 2E states:

No owner, operator, or employee of a farm who allows any person to enter said farm for the purpose of agricultural harvesting, including the cutting of Christmas trees under a so-called “pick-your-own” agreement shall be liable for injuries or death to persons, or damage to property, resulting from the conduct of such operation in the absence of wilful, wanton, or reckless conduct on the part of said owner, operator, or employee.

Said owner or operator of said farm shall post and maintain signs which contain the warning notice specified herein. Such signs shall be placed in a location visible to persons allowed to enter said farm for the purpose of agricultural harvesting. The warning notice shall appear on a sign in black letters, with each letter to be a minimum of one inch in height and shall contain the following notice:

WARNING

Under section 2E of chapter 128 of the General Laws the owner, operator, or any employees of this farm, shall not be liable for injury or death of persons, or damage to property, resulting out of the conduct of this “pick-your-own” harvesting activity in the absence of wilful, wanton, or reckless conduct.

Unfortunately, Mr. Maki did not post a sign with that warning.

So, the Massachusetts Appeals Court held that “an owner of a tree farm must post a warning sign in accordance with G. L. c. 128, § 2E, in order to avail himself of the protection of the statute.”

If you own or operate a pick-your-own Christmas tree farm, make sure you have your warning sign posted and that the warning matches that statute.

If you are going to a pick-your-own Christmas tree farm, watch where you are walking.

Law.com’s Legal Technology section has a great article by C.C. Holland to get you thinking about the ethical limitations on a lawyer’s involvement in social media: Mind the Ethics of Online Networking. The article focuses mostly on Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn and lawyers use of these social media sites.

As a lawyer who uses these tools and other social media tools, I am always cognizant of not soliciting for business and not directly answer legal questions. As the article points out, the various state bars do not have any bright-line rules on the use of these tools. To further muddy the waters, each state has its own rules on advertising and solicitation.

I use Facebook and LinkedIn as part of my professional brand. They are places where you can find more information about me. Hopefully, the information you find there and find on my blogs will give you a better understanding of my professional background and me as a person.

There are some basic principles that I adhere to and that other attorneys need to adhere to:

Be truthful. False or misleading communication about a lawyer or the services a lawyer provides are always going to be an ethical violation.

Put up a disclaimer. At the bottom of my page there is a notice that the blog may be considered advertising and that I am not rendering legal advice.

Be careful of direct communication. Posting on a blog is just making information available. Directly communicating with someone opens the door to the creation of an attorney-client relationship, even if you did not mean to create one. I posted a few months ago about the Massachusetts position on putting emails on a website: [Problem with Email on Law Firm Websites], [Problem with Email on Law Firm Websites] and [Problem with Email on Law Firm Websites].

None of this is a reason not use social media tools. If you are an attorney, you just need to remember that you are an attorney when using them.

Some representatives of Interwoven gave my group a look at the new searching tools that are coming out in their 8.3 release in December. These upcoming changes look like they will transform their document management system into a powerful knowledge management tool.

We use Interwoven Worksite as our document management system, with the Desksite client application and Filesite Outlook integration. We are lawyers. We write lots of agreements, memos and briefs. So, the document management system has always been our largest knowledge repository.

It has worked well to store and manage the document, but it has never worked well at retrieving the knowledge from the system. As I mentioned in earlier posts, a document management system typically is great on the management side and less on the knowledge side. The key role of the document management system is controlling the drafting of documents. It makes it easier to identify particular documents, fetch them back from the system, and edit them. A document management system works great to recall particular sets of documents back from the system using profiled metadata, like client and matter designations.

The document management system usually comes up short in searching for a precedent or research. Interwoven is particularly hampered because the search engine in the product seemed to be underpowered for the multi-million number of documents in our system. The other problem was the scattering of information across the profile fields for a document. For example, I am looking for a purchase and sale agreement used by ABC Corp. to buy the Blackacre Shopping Center. The key terms in the search “purchase and sale agreement”, “ABC Corp.” and “Blackacre Shopping Center” may be in any number of metadata fields: the client name field, the matter name field, the document name field or the full text of the document itself. You would have to run multiple searches to deal with the multiple combinations of which fields may contain the search criteria.

Interwoven is planning to improve its performance in these types of searches with its new 8.3 release. The big change is adding in the Vivisimo Velocity search engine under the hood. This appears to give searches in the system a big boost in speed and responsiveness. This 8.3 release is separate from the Universal Search web-based product but uses some of the same hardware and indexing technology.

The first great change is Interwoven’s goal to give the user a single textbox to search. (Just like Google.) In giving the user one box to search, Interwoven combines that across all (or at least many) of the metadata fields. This new version should allow you to find my earlier example of the “purchase and sale agreement used by ABC Corp. to buy the Blackacre Shopping Center” just by typing into a single search box. The search will query the various metadata fields instead of the user having to guess which field may contain the information you need.

The next great change is that search results now come back based on relevancy, which is a huge boost to the usability of Interwoven for a research type of search. In its current version, Interwoven presents documents in a grid, sorted by one of the columns: title, last edit, date, document number, etc. That is useless when you are trying to find information on a subject. You want the deepest treatment presented first on the list, not the documents starting with the letter “A.”

We have been pouring our documents into the document management system for decades. We have been looking for better ways to better pull that information out and utilize it. This new release may finally allow us to release that.

National Real Estate Investor has an article by Beth Mattson-Teig: Why Green Building Has Staying Power.

I found it interesting that 84% of corporate users expect to own or lease a green building five years from now with only 52% currently owning or leasing a green building with corporate users expecting the amount of green facilities they own or lease to more than double from 9% to 21%.

For green building to stay, two factors need to come into play: costs and market demand.

As long as green building is more expensive than conventional building, developers and operators will stay with conventional methods. Tax breaks and financial incentives can reduce the price differential and encourage green building.

Once there is more market demand, then developers and operators will pay more attention. If tenants are willing to pay more for a green building, then the price differential will be affected as well. A developer and operator will be more more willing to take on the premium cost of green building if the tenants will also carry part of the burden. The survey mentioned in the article indicates that the market demand is there and is growing.

The big problem with green building is that it is hard to retrofit existing buildings to green standards. Building a brand new building, instead of rehabilitating an existing building leads to a greater consumption of resources. It is hard to turn any existing tower building into a green building. But by being in a central business district close to public transportation and encouraging the use of public transportation you can reduce the environmental impact of the building. I have not seen any studies, but I would guess that more resources are consumed driving to a building than the building itself.

Putting up a new building in the suburbs means tearing down the trees and biomass that was on the site. The parking lot leads to more runoff and damage to aquifers. The new materials need to be harvested, manufactured and transported. That means more mining and more energy consumption.

I am all for green building and assessing the impact on the environment. I think more resources need to be focused on retrofitting existing, centrally-located buildings, with an emphasis on public transportation, biking and lower impact means of commuting.