No Option for Law Firm

I took a look yesterday at Steve Balmers keynote as Microsoft took the wraps off the newest version of Office software: Office 15 or Office 2013. I’m sure I’ll blog a bit more about it over the next few months, but here are a few bullet points of my first thoughts.

• It’s clearly designed for the tablet (but don’t worry the desktop version there too). Some of the limitations I’ve had with my iPad and Office documents (clunky cut and paste, formatting etc with fingers) have been looked at and I like the idea of the radial menu (see screenshot below) as a concept for menu selection using fingers.

Office 15 – radial menu

• Word : I love the integration with SkyDrive (SkyDrive is the default, not the C drive). It’s kind of like the Kindle Whispersync concept for books of different devices. So edit a document on PC, open it on your tablet and you can jump to the same place you were at on the PC.
• Word : All your settings, templates and recent documents etc follow you from device to device too. It’s a bit like roaming profiles for the consumer space.
• PowerPoint : The presenter view for tablets looks excellent. See your current slide, notes, next slide, a timer etc on your tablet. Whilst at the same time the tablet is displaying the presentation view on a main monitor. Apparently Apple’s KeyNote has this, well kudos for Microsoft for seeing the greate features in Apple’s products and “borrowing” them!
• Excel : There were some key “wizard” features (you can see towards the later parts of the keynote) which shortcut some complex tasks. Nothing revolutionary, but pretty neat (Flash Fill, Suggestions for visuals).
• Word : Track changes has been tweaked so that unless you’re actively reading through changes and comments, all the noise simply shows up as a bunch of red lines. Just click the line to expand the thread. So after a back-and-forth with say a client, the comments will appear in a single conversation that flows alongside the page, in the margins. Previous versions you’d see a separate comment bubble for each person’s response, even if they were all addressing the same issue.
• Word : You can edit PDFs!! Let me say that again, not only create PDFs but you can edit PDFs in Word!

There’s plenty more and I’ve added a few links below in case you want to read up on more. One thing that was hinted at in the keynote that may be useful for Legal IT vendors is that you can run “Apps” in Office, so in the keynote they show some Apps in Outlook. Now these could be the answer to deeper, more usable integration for things like HP Autonomy iManage’s FileSite and Workshare’s Protect, for example. Clearly Microsoft are really on a roll with their Metro interface and readying Office for the world where we switch between desktop, tablet and smartphone devices, I like what I see with Office 15. But for it to be successful in Legal IT the vendors need to integrate their apps well and I mean really well! The Email Management Module of your DMS (Document Management System) needs to flow and work in Outlook 15 whether on a tablet or a desktop, I need to see the DMS integrate with Word like I see SkyDrive integrate with Word 15. I think some vendors need to be radical with this version of Office and break backwards compatibility of their products with previous versions of Office to really push the integration to the next level.

It’ll also be interesting to see what the corporate version of Office 15 is like, I hope it isn’t hampered by the lake of SkyDrive etc (will SharePoint be the corporate SkyDrive?)

Links:

Great review of Office 15 on Engadget : http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-office-15-preview/

Some more screenshots on Mashable : http://mashable.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-office-15-review/

Microsoft Office 15 site : http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/officepreview

Keynote : http://mashable.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-takes-the-wraps-off-office-15-watch-live/

This coming Monday Tikit and UKDEG (UK Document Excellence Group) are holding another Word Excellence Day in London.

The event is covering how the legal industry and firms are planning the move to Office 2010 and Windows 7 and what challenges and issues could arise in that migration journey. There are speakers and panel members from firms such as Allen & Overy, Ashurst, DLA Piper, Lewis Silkin, Linklaters, SNR Denton and Veale Wasbrough Vizards and Neil Cameron, CEO of Neil Cameron Consulting Group, will be chair for the day.

I will be speaking in the morning on our plans for Office 2010 and Windows 7 and then joining a panel of other firms who are running Office 2010 projects to discuss our planning experience with questions on the issues of configuration and customisation of Word.

If you will be attending then I hope to speak to some of you then. For those that can’t attend, Tikit have been publicising a twitter hashtag for the event (#WEDMay11) so hopefully there will be plenty of people on this stream in virtual attendence also.

Law firms and house styles.

Anyone in a law firm will probably have a smile on their face reading those words or possibly they will feel a shudder, it’ll all depend on what your job is in the firm.

For those that are new to law firms a short definition may be in order, so to quote Wikipedia:

a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organisation or field. The implementation of provides uniformity in style and formatting of a document.

I have one wish when it comes to house styles. One style to rule them all!

The wish for there to be one set of styles for all legal documents whatever law firm they’re from. If forced to compromise on that wish, then at least for all law firms to at least sign up to a common set of named styles within Word and an agreement to leave all direct formatting out of documents, so if a lawyer pastes from one document to another it has a matching style in the receiving document.

I’m sure I’ve heard that in Norway there are some legal documents that the state requires in one style only (please correct me in the comments if this is not so), so how about we start in the EU? Or even just England and Wales?

It’s not going to happen though is it?

I know there are plenty of tools out there to help. Two on the market I’m aware of are Microsytems’ DocXtools, Tikit’s House Style Manager and I’m sure there are many others. There are also some great bespoke applications in many firms used to apply styles. But when a document that to-and-fro’s between law firm to client you can end up with a document that has more styles applied to it than pages, unpicking this even with tools takes some skill in Word!

So what’s the answer? Well maybe Word 2010 can help a little.

When you right click to Paste in Word 2010, you get three options (click the image to zoom in).

Paste and keep source formatting

Paste and keep source formatting (left icon). This option keeps the formatting of the original document from where you copied the text.

Paste and merge formatting

Paste and merge formatting (middle icon). This option will merge the formatting and slightly modify the style of the copied content to match the document you are creating.

Paste and keep text only

Paste and keep text only (right icon). And the most useful is saved to the end! This just puts the text into your document and doesn’t bring any of the formatting from the source document!

And another great feature of Word 2010 is the preview, so in each image above I haven’t pasted the text into the document yet. Word is just rendering the new text in place, showing me what it would look like.

Maybe not an end to style woes, but a step towards.