Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      Time and Billing Musings
     
      For a while, before I began any seminar presentation, I'd ask the audience how many people used what kinds of legal technology. I don't anymore, because the race is over. Tech won, and we pretty much know the winner in each legal tech category. An obvious example: Most lawyers use Microsoft Word as their word processor. Because most of my talks are aimed at solo and small-firm practitioners, however, I still ask about time and billing software. Unlike large-firm practitioners who usually have little choice-their practice management, case management, accounting system, and time and billing programs are all part of a huge networked program-lawyers in small firms have to keep track by hand or use one of the stand-alone time and billing packages such as Sage Software's TimeSlips or LexisNexis's Time Matters and Billing Matters.
     
      I still meet people who keep time on little sheets of paper or each day's printed-out chart. And I meet a smallish percentage of lawyers using computerized time and billing packages. But the vast majority of the people who attend my lectures keep time using Microsoft Excel. In fact, some of them use Excel for nothing else, and they have no idea what the program can really do. (For an index of Excel tips plus how-tos that give a good introduction to the wonders of Excel-from ways of sorting or analyzing way too much data, to linking data and crunching numbers-see Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Ron de Bruin's www.rondebruin.nl/tips.htm.) Very few let me talk them into finding out whether billing software would save them any time. And that's too bad, because some lawyers actually do need this kind of automation.
     
      LASER-PRINT DIRECTLY ONTO YOUR CDs AND DVDS
      External peripherals are pretty much standard nowadays (thank the heavens), and in fact they are such a part of the woodwork that it's often difficult to find something incisive (not to mention interesting) to say about even the best external hard drive, CD/DVD burner, or printer.
     
      Fortunately, LaCie's d2 DVD±RW with LightScribe has enough extra features to make life interesting for several days. First, this burner writes in several different formats, as necessitated by the ongoing global corporate war against open standards: DV±R, DVD±RW, and CD-R/RW. Oh, and DVD±R DL (DL for double-layer, as in 8.5GB per special DL disc instead of 4.7GB per ordinary DVD).
     
      I must admit I'm more excited by LightScribe than by the burner's reproduction capacities. LightScribe technology laser-prints labels directly onto specially dye-coated discs. No ink to smudge or particles to clog the drive. No paper labels to curl or come loose or throw the disk off balance. Just stick the disk upside down (i.e., recording side up) into the drive's tray. Create a label in a label-maker program, then tell it to print to disk. Silently, the drive sets about burning your label into the disc's coating to produce a silk-screen quality, monotone print job. Because my discs are coated with a bronze-color dye, my labels come out with crisp black writing on a goldish background. The first label I made had grayscale (i.e., gradations of black ink) photographs, text in curves, subtext in rays, and a multitude of typefaces. It took more than 24 minutes to print. After that, I stuck with elegant designs of one or two lines of small-size type, strategically located. This drive comes bundled with Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 as well as SureThing CD/DVD Labeler SE. I couldn't get Roxio's labeler to work. SureThing's, on the other hand, worked first time, every time.
     
      As for the d2 DVD±RW drive, it is indeed as fast as advertised (48x), but some formats burn at slower speeds, all the way down to 4x. The drive comes with both Firewire and USB ports. I hooked it up both ways, and it worked the same. For the final test setup, I daisy-chained it off an external Firewire hard drive and had no problems with the hardware. Ever.
     
      The bundled Roxio Easy Media Creator is one of the two best-selling Windows disk-burning suites in the United States. (Nero Digital's Nero Ultra Edition is the other, but I think it has one of the most confusing interfaces in the industry.) Easy Media Creator's Media Manager looks friendly and steps you through each action. But Easy Media Creator itself is unforgivably slow-slow to launch, slow to switch from task to task, painfully slow to burn disks.
     
      I think manufacturers should be extremely careful about which software they bundle with their hardware. For the non-tinkering user, that software becomes the face of the hardware.
     
      On that cheery note, I commend you to LaCie's d2 DVD±RW with LightScribe. www.lacie.com.
     

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