Rediscovery

Well ... It's been several years since I posted here ... but Google keeps finding this page. If you haven't realized already, we are still VERY ACTIVE in document assembly, but over at our new home, http://bashasys.info.

Step 1: Old Blog Gets It

Yep, the old blog "got it" and got it hard. Unfortunately, blogspot are somewhat limited in the template department and its simply not worth it to spend the time to write an entirely new css to handle this site. Hence, it got a minor makeover and some content updates.

Well, step one is complete: no vestiges remain of Seth's undeniable stamp on this here blogspot! Seth and I agree on many things and disagree on few; for the most part, aesthetics definitely fall into the second category. I like smooth, sleek, non-violent color combinations. Seth likes...well...vibrance I guess is the way to put it.

At any rate, this blog has been updated, www.bashasys.info is up and running satisfactorily (look for a category overhaul soon!) and styled well. This blog will eventually turn into pure web udpates (like this one) and snippets of things to come.

Of course, www.bashasys.com has continued to grow and grow well. We've recently had a major structural overhaul, as it became apparent that we needed to conglomerate our document assembly content and our case management content into distinctive "portals"; yup, we had that much info. So, here they are:

document assembly
case management

Fun fun fun for everyone! Next step: Keep blogging.

Hijacked by Resident Geek

http://bashasys.blogspot.com has officially been hijacked by the geek of Basha Systems LLC.

In case you haven't noticed, we have a brand new server & domain up for the blogging efforts of Basha Systems LLC: http://bashasys.info. Yes, an entire domain dedicated to a blog. Why you may ask? Because its not really a blog per se. We are taking the CMS avenue: a Content Management System.

We are already publishing articles at a fast rate to assist the general community with document assembly & case management issues. So why not create a domain for the purpose of making this a simple process? We espouse document assembly as a streamlining process for our clients to escalate profits. We would be hypocritical indeed if we failed to streamline our own practice!

Add to this ideas and thoughts that any blogger would post, and our contributions to the HotDocs list-serve and we have become quite the publishing fanatics. So, we implemented a system to ensure we can do this efficiently, with good search facilities and a clean presentation.

In future, this blog is going to be for me to write web develpoment reports, to give the public some insight into what's been going on and what's change. Consider this a "semi-feed" for our web efforts.

PC Magazine - Top Websites - My Favorites

Bore Me (jokes)
Free Game World (games)
A9 (Amazon's metasearch engine)
Why Files (answers)
Tablet PC Post (tablet PC tools)
Sysinfo.org (registry hacks)
Process Library (understanding Task Manager)
You Send It (FTP/email engine)
Malek Tips (tips galore)
DLL-Files (missing DLL files)
DNS Stuff.com
Annoyances (Tips)
Woot.com (overstocks)
Answers That Work.com
Project Cool (web design)
En Gadget (new gadgets)
Slashdot.org (computing news)
w3 Schools (web design)
Webopedia (jargon explained)
Project Gutenberg (13,000 ebooks)
Bloomberg (financial info)
Gizmodo.com (gadgets)
Overstock.com (shopping)
Tech Bargains.com (shopping)
BBC (news)
New York Times (news)
Discovery (kids)
Pogo (kids)
Nickelodeon (kids)
Wired.com (news)

Moving soon ... to our New Home at bashasys.info

We have gotten the taste of blogging and its potential. I have found Blogger adequate for getting information out quickly from anywhere. But for my readers, those of you who I hope will return, and use this as a resource, I need to be able to categorize my posts.

For that reason, we have recently launched bashasys.info using pMachines' ExpressionEngine. It is still under construction, but polished enough for an open-house. Take a look and tell you if you like the layout and the navigation.

Click here for a Visit

Your feedback will be appreciated.

Plain English Document Assembly

Special Feature by Rose Rowland, Basha System LLC

A few years back, the SEC, in an attempt to make prospectuses and other stock offering documents intelligible to those without a financial degree, regulated that all main offering documents had to be written in "Plain English." They then created a manual to teach us all how to write in Plain English. Frightening thought, isn't it? At the time, I was a paralegal working in private securities offerings and I was rather impressed with this idea.

A few years later, I am a partner in Basha Systems LLC and I am striving to bring the concept of "Plain English" to our document assembly and case management systems. Basha Systems, as many of you know, creates wonderfully innovative and interactive document assembly systems that can pretty much create any kind of document you would like. The dilemma with complicated systems is how to make them palatable to the non-computer professional.

This is where I come in. While new to the world of programming, I feel that I bring a unique insight to Basha Systems that might well be lacking in other computer consulting companies. I have not forgotten how frightening and frustrating the learning of a new computer program or system can be. At Basha Systems, I am in charge of the Quality Control and Manuals for all of our document assembly and case management systems.

I am absolutely brutal - as both Ian and Seth will attest. If a prompt is not absolutely crystal clear on a first reading, out it goes! If I find that any part of our system seems to be the slightest bit difficult to maneuver, back it goes for retooling. No obscure computereze is allowed in any manual written by Basha Systems. My feeling is that if you can't pick up a manual, follow the instructions and begin to use the system immediately, we have not fulfilled the standards of Basha Systems. And, our standards are very high.

Not only do we strive to create systems with all of the cool technological bells and whistles the client desires, we also strive to create systems that anyone can use with an absolute minimum of training. A document assembly or case management system that's too complicated to use is a system that won't be used.

An Interview with the DocGuru (by himself)

ABSTRACT: No one was calling me for juicy quotes. Some of you have started visiting the blog. I was getting tired of the lack of interaction in a blog (too much lecturing). So I thought I would do something fun, I would interview myself.

The DocGuru: Where does document assembly make the most sense?
Himself: Well everywhere! Anything you write, anything you type, any form you fill is a candidate for document assembly.

The DocGuru: Be real. Coding a template takes time. Should we really do everything?
Himself: Why not. It's fun. It challenges the mind. It beats billing time.

The DocGuru: Yes. You caught it: "billing time." Shouldn't we spend our time doing billable work?
Himself: Well for me, document assembly is billable work . But for you, I get the point, and the answer is NO!

The DocGuru: Who is going to pay for the office overhead? We can't hole up in a dark corner with a laptop and code.
Himself: I don't do it in a dark corner, I beg your pardon. I take the laptop out to the garden, and watch the Daffodils pushing up, hear the birds chirp. Spring is beautiful.

The DocGuru: You are avoiding the question
Himself: All right. Here is why you should "stop billing". Do an hour of billable work and you make money for an hour of billable work. There is no multiple; no extra reward for the effort, no return on investment. Yes, you make more than the typical wage laborer .... (have you talk to your plumber recently?) But say you make $400 and hour ... you need to work a lot of hours to get real rich. And then, you have to constantly justify your time. What is the "value" of your labor ... What is the value of your "workproduct"

The DocGuru: But that is what lawyers do, they bill
Himself: I disagree. You don't come to a lawyer for a few hours of his time .... Yes he may bill you for a few hours. You come for advice; you come for help out of a jam; but more often you come for a "document". It is the document you want, not the time; you want to take home a piece of paper, whether it be a partnership agreement, a lease, or a will; you want to know that it is well written and will survive the test of time.

The DocGuru: What does that have to do with document assembly?
Himself: Document assembly is all about documents; it is all about the creation of quality documents; it is all about the delivery of services. It is about workproduct. Invest 100 hours in template coding, and the return is equal to a thousand hours of billing. It allows you to bill for the document; not for the time. It is all about multiples; all about service; all about competition.

The DocGuru: You seem convinced about this? You have been doing document assembly for nearly a decade. It is easy for you; but not everyone can code.
Himself: Exactly my point; but all of you can markup documents. You markup documents day in and day out. Why not mark up your documents and send them to me to code. It will take less of your billable time to get the project done; and bring you closer to your the time you can reap the multiples from your investment.

The DocGuru: Aren't you being a little direct? This seems to be a sales pitch.
Himself: Think what you wish. Feel free to come back; I give away advice for free and tip. You will find me posting (uncompensated) on the HotDocs list and GhostFill list. Many of you have received a private email or a call when you got into sticky trouble. But I do make my money consulting and love my work. Did I mention my new document assembly and case management sections on my website?

The DocGuru: The DocuGuru: You are a hypocrite. Don't you bill by the hour?
Himself: Have you called me? You ask me to troubleshoot a template and give you "help" writ large; of course I bill by the hour. But, if you come to me with a set of documents, all marked up, and ask what will it take to turn them into a system, I will more than likely give you a fixed fee quote or a range. The quote will be based on a combination of the value of the documents to you, the complexity, and an estimate of the time it would take a typical coder to automate the documents.

The DocGuru: Well, our readers thank you for your candid comments and this opportunity to talk with you. Keep up the good work. Keep blogging.

Lawn Maintenance and Spring Cleaning (document assembly revisited)

The key to a successful implementation of document assembly is an intelligent markup. The key to an intelligent markup is a solid understanding of the subject matter which is being marked up; as well as an awareness of what "can be done" with document assembly.

Of Forests and Trees

The old "saw" goes, "can't see the forest for the trees". And the converse is "can't find the trees, all I see is forest". In document assembly, you need both the "helicopter view" and the "hiker's view". You need to see the overall lay of the land, where the document is going, how it's flowing. And then, you need to get down on the ground and start sorting and culling.

Lawn maintenance

With the coming of spring, lawn maintenance is something on my mind. The sytems I built need a spring cleaning and refresh. Over the winter of use these systems can become stale. Like a lawn, you can let everything grow will. Better to run the law mower once a week. When cut to 2 inches height, weeds and grass look a like. You can rip up the whole lawn, an reseed with fresh kentucky bluegrass. Or, you can apply fertilizer and selectively apply weedkiller to find those troublesome patches.

In document assembly, you need to do a bit of everything.

Regular Mowing: Like the lawnmower, you need to sweep through the document, getting all the obvious issues and gaps. Run assemblies (if you have done partial automating) and identify what is missing.

Apply Fertilizer Go through you document on a regular basis and apply enhancements. Each time a new issues arises look where you could have addressed an issue better, applied more nuances.

Remove the Weeds There are portions of your document that will just not work. You try to tweak the code, a little here and little there. But there are some blocks of code that just don't work. They create eyesores that you are constantly deleting in the finished document. Remove these items, from the document, from the interview.

Reseeding a Patch Sometimes, an Article in a Contract just needs to be rewritten. The language is stale. There are too many codes in the paragraph for one to figure what the hell you ever meant. In these circumstances, it is better to start from scratch.

Extending the Lawn Look at your current systems. Did you go far enough. You are gathering data on a lease, but how come you haven't created a term sheet generator or an abstract generator. Take the next step and build on what you created. What is the next logical document to automate. There are economies of scale in document assembly, and there is the "marginal cost of production". The marginal cost of building the next document in a practice set is much less than the initial document cost.

Planting Garden Lawns are well and good. They are fun for croquet and games of catch. But gardens are what bring "fruits and vegetables" to the dinner table or "flowers" that bring value to the house. Consider taking what you have built and planting a garden. Let your clients know what you have done with these systems so they will want to give you more work and refer you to their clients as a lawyer who "gets it."

A Tool To Consider - DealBuilder

I have written extensively about HotDocs and GhostFill, but not said too much about DealBuilder. DealBuilder, as a webhosted platform, which ships with a product called DealBuilder Author and DealBuilder Express. These are the authoring environments for the DealBuilder Server. Until DealBuilder or one of its resellers offers DealBuilder on an ASP model, you will need to get a full license to DealBuilder Server and have the infrastructure and IT department to support it. Once you do, you will find that DealBuilder lets you do your infrastructure redesign right in the template. The Author engine validates the document, and renders conditional scripted dialogs on the basis of the nesting and scripting in the template. It also offers you the ability to "drop in" a data dictionary of terms, so that variables can be easilly reused across templates. As we evaluate DealBuilder more closely, we will post further information in the DealBuilder section (http://www.bashasys.com/dealbuilder/index.html) of Basha System's main site,

How to THINK Case Management

Case Management is at its core ... management. It is management of information, management of resources, management of people. It is well and good to build a hundred custom fields. Anyone can do that. But it is far better to build to build 10 customs fields that are used all the time, than to build 100 custom fields that are never used.

There is a saying: garbage in ... garbage out. In database lingo, if you build a system with hundreds of fields for intaking case information, the users will rebel. And you will find that you are worse off than before, some users will have judiciously filled in the case management profiles, but many others will not. The result will be "bad data" ... the inability to actually get a report across all your cases based on the information in the case management profile.

So ... to THINK Case Management

In planning a case management system, ideas must be tempered by hard reality. Every field you change will be used hundreds or thousands of times. This means, the fields must be carefully laid out in a logical format. Related information must be grouped together. Good design makes use of drop-down lists to help the user put in a consistent answer that will produce valid aggregate data. And it also means "less is more".

In a case management system like Time Matters, the initial focus should be to get the information entered in memo fields (free form) and then properly profiled. To do this, extensive use of classification codes that have real meaning is the best place to start. From there, you can branch out. Some legal practice areas have specific data that is required in multiple form documents, or may be useful for negotiations or planning purposes. If these items need to be reviewed on an agregate basis, but them into the custom form. On the other hand, if they need to be used for a single document, which, once created, is never needed again, put them into a memo field, anecdotals style.

K.I.S.S. - Keep It Silly Simple ....

This is a system that real people use everyday. Count each second that it takes to get the process flowing. What can be reasonably expected from someone answering a potential client inquiry. Are you going to do a "social service worker" style intake that requires a 30 minute interview just to get someones name in the database. Or, are you going to get the essentials, and let the file build over time. Where do you want to take this system? Plan it out K.I.S.S. Test it out on the users. You will find they have an opinion ... Boy do they have opinions, opinions that you better listen to.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

It is very easy to build complex systems. You just start. Every time you think of an idea, you add to it. In time, the system grows beyond the original creator's ability to grasp the whole system and maintain it. And then, welll.... you know the story, strange things start happening. The solution is to build modular, test, and then grow. Solve the small problems. Don't try to engineer triggers for an entire case; take each element, one step at a time and automate it. Triggers, chains, and autoentry forms in Time Matters form the building blocks of a sophisticated workflow system. Since there is no wizard for visually laying out a workflow process in Time Matters, it is recommended that you use a tool like Visio to plan out your flow and the steps to reach it.