In a word, yes. If anything, Vista is worse than all of the bad things you have heard about it, at least for most users. Here is a March, 2008 story from the New York Times indicating how several Microsoft executives couldn’t get Vista to do simple things they wanted to do.

Today (June 18) is supposedly the last day you can order a Dell computer with Microsoft XP instead of Vista preloaded. That is so Dell can meet the edict of Microsoft to stop shipping computers with XP by June 30th. I’m certain they are getting lots of orders today.  But the lawyers reading this blog will be glad to learn that there are loopholes to avoid this deadline.

My new computer has Vista. I hate it. I knew it was bad, but I figured I could handle it. I also thought that in my role as tech commentator and problem solver, it would be good for me to start learning the Vista ropes. Well, folks, I was wrong and most days here the Vista rope looks like a noose. It is much more important for me to get my work done every day than to learn Vista. An operating system should just run things and you should rarely think of it. Some days, I just lose an extra 15 – 20 minutes immediately as Vista refuses to timely start. My favorite is coming back from lunch and finding that the computer refuses to wake up from its sleep and I have to reboot. If I was in the middle of an e-mail or document when I left, well that’s not really Microsoft’s problem, is it? I do get directed to a link advising me it is a known problem.

And of course, even with lots of memory, Vista is just slow. Well, actually there are three variable speeds: slow, maddeningly slow and "not responding." As the old joke goes, it picks among the speed options depending on how urgent the task at hand is.

Well, here’s the loophole. After the end of June, you can still buy a new PC with Vista Business or Ultimate and "downgrade" it to XP. Of course that means you have to pay for something you don’t really want now. But Microsoft gets your money and gets to report it as a sale to an increasingly skeptical business press. So Microsoft is happy, which is their only real corporate goal anyway. Dell will sell you the PC with XP pre-loaded and a DVD to "upgrade" to Vista when you are ready (e.g. when Vista service pack 24 finally gets good reviews or your boss angers you and you decide productity at work is really overrated.) Until January, 2009, Lenovo will sell you a Windows XP Recovery CD to use to downgrade a system you bought from them, if you are qualified.

At least, as my friend Ross Kodner noted in an e-mail, Microsoft has a great marketing opportunity ahead if they will name their next OS Microsoft NotVista.

If you have to live with Vista, for whatever reason, here’s an article from LifeHacker on How to Make Windows Vista Less Annoying. It even has a link to a step-by-step article on how to set up your machine to be a dual boot machine, where you can choose either to boot up to Vista or XP on a given day. "Hmm… Well, I don’t have much to do today but mess with Vista for a while, so let’s boot it up." 

OK, here’s the answer to a problem that you may not have had yet, but you will. Trust me.

New York Times Tech Columnist David Pogue’s column today is How to Block Cellphone Spam. You may not have experienced mobile phone spam yet, but it is coming and, as he notes, it is much worse than e-mail spam. Unlike e-mail spam, you may have to pay for this depending on your plan, you have to open it to delete it and it makes your phone beep (surely every lawyer has turned off the incoming mail sound notification of their e-mail program by now–if not, do it now.) Read David Pogue’s article. If you don’t want to make these changes now, do whatever you usually do to be able to locate it again. Print it. Save it. Bookmark it. AT&T and Verizon customers have great solutions. T-Mobile is a little less so, but good. Sprint’s needs upgrading. I’m not tell you how here. Click on the link to read the article.

Today I have a pleasant assignment. I get to write about one of my favorite people. That is because Laura Calloway has launched her new blog, The Last Word. Laura Calloway is the Director of the Practice Management Assistance Program for the Alabama State Bar. She is an intelligent and capable lawyer and I have no doubt Alabama bar members love her and her program. I’m well aware that Laura has served in her role with the Alabama Bar for eleven years as we both recall learning that the Oklahoma Bar and the Alabama Bar were starting Practice Management Advisor programs. Both were launched within a month of each other and both hired directors named Calloway. She never lets me forget that she has senority, however.

She has been named to chair ABA TECHSHOW 2009. So I am really looking forward to ABA TECHSHOW, as I do every spring. I can’t begin to list all of Laura’s accomplishments. She served as co-editor for the finance articles for Law Practice Magazine. She speaks and writes frequently. I’m sure we will all learn a lot from The Last Word.

Usually I wouldn’t feature a new blog as a Website of the Week, but this one is guaranteed to have lots of useful content. (Of course, posting may be a bit light leading up to ABA TECHSHOW 2009 next spring, but we understand that.) So check out The Last Word. In fact, one of her posts is something I was going to write about last week, but I got a little too angry. So look for my take on an important June deadline later this week.

One of the truly thought-provoking blogs in Law 21. It is produced by Canadian Jordon Furlong, who is Editor-in-Chief of National magazine at the Canadian Bar Association. But it is his project, not an official one. As he notes on the blog, "[i]n the 21st century, the practice of law is shaking loose from its traditional moorings and heading out into uncharted territory. Opportunities abound, but so do pitfalls. Most of the old rules won’t apply anymore, while some will matter more than ever." I’ve recently compiled a whole set of law practice management wisdom from Canadian sources. I may just toss them up on the blog next week. I have known Jordan for quite a while and got a chance to visit with him quite a bit at the last ABA TECHSHOW. He’s a very interesting individual. Visit Law 21. Think about the future. It will be worth your time.

Well, you should be thinking of Work/Life Balance regularly and not just when the summer weather reminds us of a time when school was out and your schedule was open for a few months. The May, 2008 Oklahoma Bar Journal was devoted to a Work/Life Balance theme.

My contribution to the issue was Technology & Stress: Good Tools or Bad Tools, which was an update of a piece I did several years back. But if you’ve never before read Calloway’s Rules of Technology and Stress, you’ve missed an important part of your legal education.   J

This is one issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal that should resonate with most lawyers and provide some food for thought where ever you may live or practice. It begins with Work/Life Balance Initiatives in the Legal Profession by Melanie Jester, chair of the OBA’s Work/Life Balance Committee. Melanie is a very nice person and has been an advocate of this issue for some time. Next we have Behind the Slash By Sarah Glick. The slash is a reference to Marci Alboher’s book One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success (Warner Business: 2007).

Caroline Larsen contributes Sentenced to Life, an article about health and nutrition. Lots of links to healthy information here, even if it did make me crave a Snickers bar. The article What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate: Cross-Cultural Communication 101 for Lawyers By Teresa Rendon and Michael Duggan contained my favorite question of the month, "If Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus, What Planet Are Lawyers from?"

Stress isn’t just a health issue as illustrated by Mistakes We Make under Pressure By Dr. Wenona R. Barnes.

The issue includes a substantive treatment of a legal topic with Family Responsibility Discrimination: Recognizing Unlawful Discrimination against Family Caregivers by Leah Avey and Tim Eisel.

Finally we have a set of Work/Life Balance Internet Resources. Congratulations to the OBA Journal editors and staff and the OBA’s Work/Life Balance Committee for a nice collaborative effort.

If you were to try to boil down into three words the most important thing for a law firm to focus on to succeed, you couldn’t go wrong with "superior client service." Leo Bottery did a post listing numerous Client Service blogs, which revisits a list Dan Hull published in early 2007. I’m happy my blog was on the list and inspired to do more client services postings the remainer of the year. But, the main reason I point this out to my readers is the great chance to do a little client service improvement in your own law firm. Here’s one idea. Take 90 or so uninterrupted minutes with this list of blogs and a legal pad and pen. (See, I’m really an old fashioned guy at heart who still likes a pen.) Visit several of these blogs. Read the most recent posts and click on some of the categories or past month’s archives. There are 30. So if one doesn’t speak to you, move quickly on. Make some notes. After some time for reflection, try to come up with three simple ways you can improve your client services. E-mail the other decision makers and set a quick meeting to discuss implementation. (Hat tip to Larry Bodine.)

Today we have another report of a law firm making a technology blunder that appears to arguably violate a court order on what should be sealed and could adversely impact the client’s case. According to an article originally published in the Connecticut Law Tribute, pleadings from a class action lawsuit against GE that the court ordered sealed were improperly redacted before being filed. Apparently anyone can access the pleadings through PACER, copy the redacted material and reveal the "redacted" text by pasting into a Word document. This is a class action sex discrimination suit seeking a potential $500 million recovery. Hopefully by now, the offending documents have been removed and others substituted.

Whether it is improper redaction of documents or metadata disclosure issues, the simple fact is that lawyers have to understand the technology tools that they and their staff are using. Judges are learning new technology lessons due to e-filing and electronic discovery and they will be less inclined to forgive lawyers who make these kinds of errors in the future. Don’t try to do redaction without the proper tools, which means using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 (not a prior version) if you are using Adobe to do it or one of the other redaction tools like the plug-in mentioned in the article.

Several months ago a lawyer called me expecting to be criticized, I think. They were working late on a deadline and became concerned about a few redactions they had to make. They ended up printing the documents, marking through the text with a black magic marker and then scanning/OCR’ing the marked document to create a new PDF. "I guess you think we were pretty dumb, huh?" He said. My response was that I thought they had all slept well that night, knowing that they had erred on the side of caution and were sure they hadn’t disclosed any information by accident.

Attorney Ralph Losey publishes the e-Discovery Team Blog. He has posted over 100 items there in the last 18 months. Of particular note is his most recent post where he mentions how useful the search features of his sites are and then provides summaries of his 31 "favorite" e-Discovery cases complete with links to the complete opinions. What a great resource! 

I got a kick out of Martin v. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, 2006 WL 148991 (M.D Fla. Jan. 19, 2006) where the court held ignorance of technology is no excuse for failing to comply with e-discovery requests. The District Court held that the attorney’s “claim that he is so computer illiterate that he could not comply with production is frankly ludicrous.”

Ralph Losey is also the author of e-Discovery: Current Trends and Cases. I am pleased to recognize e-Discovery Team Blog as my Website of the Week.