• Office Holiday Parties – A Thing Of The Past?

    I remember the good old days of office holiday parties, ranging from bar hopping, karaoke-swinging, dance-club macarena fests to formal-attired, horsdeouvres-passing, dj-fueled, catered black-tie events. But I have marked a noticeable decrease in these social gatherings sponsored by businesses, law firms and companies to mark the holiday season. I presumed that the apparent extinction of these fetes had its genesis in cost control. However, a primary or ancillary benefit to reduced socializing among business associates might be litigation control. Making national headlines yesterday and today is the filing of a Charge with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination ("MCAD") and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ("EEOC") by, Michelle Moor, a former associate against her former Boston law firm, Bingham McCutcheon, LLP, alleging sexual harassment and retaliation by the firm in violation of the Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws. More specifically, Ms. Moor claims that Bingham failed to protect her from and adequately investigate her claims of being drugged at a holiday party at Lucia restaurant in Boston's North End on December 14, 2007. Following the meal, the party moved to the second floor for further socializing. Her glass, however, apparently contained more than the usual Chianti Classico Reserva. After two glasses, Moor's memory failed her. She became disoriented and was taken to an emergency room, where blood tests revealed traces of an anticonvulsant drug, Tegretol, known to cause memory loss when consumed in conjunction with alcohol. Following this event, Moor alleges she learned that another Bingham associate had a similar experience culminating in a rape. Moor contends that the associate chose not to formally report the incident for fear of an adverse impact on her career path. Moor then reported the matter to her partner / mentor, who happened to co-chair the firm's labor and employment group, and the head of human resources. Bingham has responded in email that Moor's information was "fundamentally inaccurate" Slightly more than a month following the incident, Moor attended a celebratory dinner with three other Bingham lawyers and a member of Bingham's litigation support technology department. The tech support person apparently boasted at the party that he "enjoyed having sex with women ... who were unconscious." This person also indicated that he knew how to procure Rohypnol, a pharmaceutical more commonly known as the "date rape" drug. Moor brought this information to Bingham and her story of the dinner discussion was corroborated by other attendees. Moor communicated to Bingham that she feared for her safety because the tech support person worked three doors away from her office and was working on a project with her at the time. Bingham offered to move Moor to another floor, but that entailed separation from her practice group  Moor was unhappy about the move and remained insecure about her safety. Bingham advised Moor that the tech support person was no longer working for the firm in February, 2008. Still feeling unsafe, Moor left the firm that same month. Bingham's spokesperson Claire Papanastasiou has indicated the firm's belief that there is no merit to the claim and that, at all times, Bingham acted in a responsive manner with respect to Moor's complaints. There is suggestion in internal email from the firm's general counsel, William G. Southard, that Moor actually requested that Bingham delay the investigation:
    "Our initial desire was to begin an immediate investigation, however, Ms. Moor asked us to refrain because she did not want her privacy compromised and because she felt that it would be difficult to determine the identity of the offending party at such a public venue,"
    Bingham released the following public statement today:
    We took Ms. Moor’s report extremely seriously and were disappointed that she had decided to resign from the firm. . . . Ordinarily we do not comment further in connection with on-going disputes. Here, because issues of personal safety are implicated, we comment further to address only that matter. . . . The firm believes that at all times it acted diligently, responsibly and fairly in connection with information it received, including gathering relevant facts and conducting an appropriate and thorough investigation. . . . In connection with its investigation, the firm was unable to determine who had done this or whether the source of the drug was associated with the firm in any way. However, in response to the concerns raised by Ms. Moor, and in collaboration with a safety expert, we have developed and are providing personal-safety training to equip our people with practical, safety-related advice in their professional and personal lives. . . .
    Bingham also is expected to rely on Moor's employment agreement's mandatory arbitration clause to prevent her from bringing this matter to court. How is this all playing out in the hearts and minds of the general public? For an interesting read, check out the comments to the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog here. For what it is worth, I personally know of a very similar incident involving two lawyers, one of whom, interestingly enough, is an employment lawyer. What's next, lysergic acid diethylamide in the office coffee pot? Think I'll skip the after dinner drinks, thanks. For more visit http://advantageadvocates.com
     
  • WordPerfect v. Word

    We writers, particularly legal writers, find ourselves frequently utilizing word processing software for a wide variety of purposes. Other than my legal database software, my word processor is my busiest tool. The features and functions afforded by such software have increased exponentially in complexity and breadth, now crossing over with graphics, database and publishing programs. For most purposes, Corel's WordPerfect and Microsoft's Word are the two leading word processing software choices. After an introduction to word processing in college with WordStar (anyone remember that one?), I was a hardcore WordPerfect user for years, employing DOS versions through law school, in my first legal position in a firm and for the first several years of in-house practice. Then my IT department made the switch to Word. I was hostile to the change foisted upon me and exceedingly reluctant to use Word, which I deemed to be an inferior product at the time.  I mean, who can effectively and readily control the look and feel of one's document without the ability to reveal codes? Eventually, I have come to appreciate Word as a facile and effective word processing program that integrates well with the other Microsoft Office products in the Microsoft Windows environment. I recently had an opportunity to try out Word 2007 and was thrilled with the integrated tablet pen functions and lots of other neat features. But, is it really superior to WordPerfect or is its apparent dominance another effect of Microsoft's stranglehold on the business consumer market? Apparently I am not the only one to ponder this debate. A good explanation of the conceptual difference between the two programs is found at the Microsoft Word MVP site, as follows:
    WordPerfect considers a document to be a “type stream.” If you picture WordPerfect sitting on the end of the printer cable, sending characters one-by-one, and every now and again inserting a COMMAND to change what the printer is doing, you'll get the idea. For example, WP sends the commands for “Arial” font and “bold”. It then expects the printer to print every character that way until it tells the printer to do something else. Word, on the other hand, considers a document to be a “container.” Within this container are more containers and, within them, still more. Into each of these containers, Word inserts objects. The objects can be bits of text, or bits of pictures, or complete files created by other applications.
    Freedman Consulting, in its Law Practice Management Blog, contends that the war is over and Word has won, even if it may be in some respects the lesser of the two programs in transparency, power and maneuverability.  See, for example, this explanation of why reviewers believe WordPerfect to be the easier program to use.  Freedman attributes Word's victory in part to the needs of clients who more often than not utilize Word rather than WordPerfect. Additionally, Freedman cites the benefits of the other software in the Microsoft Office suite and Word's superior integration over WordPerfect with Access, Outlook and Excel. Some commentators also feel that the WordPerfect to Word converters are, well, less than "perfect." Thus, if you find yourself constrained to use Word, but long for the good old days, here are some suggestions from John McGhie at the Microsoft Word MVP site:
    1.  
      1. Forget reveal codes. They are not useful in Word. If you need them, click the “What's This?” button on the Help menu (or press Shift+F1), and then click the text you are interested in. That will show you most of the current properties. Also see: Is there life after "Reveal Codes"?
      2. What you see on the screen is what you are going to get. If the text on the screen does not appear bold, then it does not have the bold property, regardless of what you feel it “should” have :)
      3. As far as humanly possible, avoid direct formatting in Word. Word is designed to run on Styles. Learn to use them. It is so much easier to get one style correctly formatted than it is to get 174 paragraphs all looking the same. Ignore the format painter: it's a problem looking for a place to happen.
      4. Do not accept Word the way it came out of the box. Customise the hell out of it. That's why it was designed that way. Start with the toolbars: piss off all the rubbish that comes on the standard toolbars and add your favourite styles and tools in their place, so everything you need is only one click away. Get into macros as soon as you can: there's no point in fiddling around typing things you can simply assign to a mouse-click.
      5. Learn to use a different template for each document type. That way, you can make the template automatically set up all your styles, margins, spelling languages, etc., for the particular type of document you are making. Avoid basing documents on the “Normal” template. You can never control the contents of the Normal template, on your computer or on anyone else's. Documents attached to the Normal template will reformat themselves each time they are opened or passed to a different machine.
      6. Don't be tempted to customise Word to work like WP. You can do it, but Word will fight you every inch of the way if you do, and you will have a very frustrating time of it.
      7. Don't expect to read anything useful about Word in a paper manual. All the information is in the Help. Suffer that damned paper-clip and learn to use it: it's the fastest way to find anything. That's because there's too much information and it updates too frequently to be published on paper. I have found that anyone who has published a paper book about Word 97, for example, either hasn't understood it, or has done it at such a trivial level that it is not useful. Since I write books for a living, I can tell you that it is just not possible to describe Word in less than 1,800 pages, and it's just not possible to economically keep a book like that up-to-date.
      8. Resign yourself to the fact that it will take six months of daily use to really tame the brute, but once you have, you won't go back.
    Now that you mention it, John, the Paper Clip is godforsaken irritating.  If Microsoft could only come up with an "Assistant" that looked like George Clooney, Word's victory would be complete. For more visit http://advantageadvocates.com
     
  • Social Networking Site "LinkedIn" Is Neither Social Nor A Network: Discuss

     With all due apologies to Linda Richman, I thought I might take a stab at the social networking site LinkedIn, suss out its value to the business professional as source for networking, and ascertain whether it really is "MySpace for Grownups."
    As described in the Wikipedia entry for "LinkedIn":
    LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003[1] mainly used for professional networking. As of December 2007, its site traffic was 3.2 million visitors per month, growing at an annual growth rate of about 485%.[2] As of May 2008, it had more than 22 million registered users,[3] spanning 150 industries.
    It is described as a business social networking site: you sign up as a member for free, fill out information about yourself relevant to your networking aspirations and seek to make contacts with other LinkedIn members. You can search for other members based on various criteria and invite them to join your own network, building a virtual database of contact details. You also can access second and third degree contacts - persons known to your first level contacts - via your first level contacts. Theoretically, this web of contacts is intended to generate jobs and business opportunities. Employers and corporate members can list jobs and search unconnected members for likely candidates. This is where the site's profit margin comes from: recruiters or businesses that wish to be able to mine the profiles of members outside the contact network pay for the privilege. For the rest of us, LinkedIn represents a "gated access approach", intended to provide members with a sense of security regarding their information and the quality of contacts. There is also a forum called LinkedIn Answers which permits members to pose questions to the community for general discussion. LinkedIn Groups allows you to join a group based on your school, your industry or your profession. For the mobile user, LinkedIn started a stripped down mobile version in February, 2008. The value of LinkedIn and comparisons to the wildly popular social networking sites MySpace and Facebook are not new topics. Over a year ago, Seamus McCauley wrote in his blog "Virtual Economics" that the problem with LinkedIn is that it doesn't do anything. "You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then...nothing." Umair, in the blog BubbleEdge Generation, claims the real problem with LinkedIn is that there is no meaningful opportunity for interaction: LinkedIn is too clean compared to the "ugly, nasty, digital ghetto" of MySpace. In other words, LinkedIn apparently has sacrificed open dialog for gated security. The commenters on these blogs do not necessarily agree with these conclusions, describing circumstances in which LinkedIn has provided them with real value. Facebook, which also has the "gate" of requiring an email upon sign up, appears to bridge the MySpace and LinkedIn models. There does appear to be some utility in LinkedIn, however, as its growing popularity attests to. The following chart, from simplyhired.com shows an increase in jobs secured through LinkedIn, although the other sites, which have an overall numbers advantage, have shown a similar increase during the same period.
     
     
  • Pandora's Box

    Now, this one has pretty much NOTHING to do with the law. Or legal research or writing. But it does have to do with technology and I guess that qualifies as fair game for subject matter. Quite by accident and even inadvertently, while trying to find The Sopranos theme to create a ringtone for my phone (which for those who are interested, is called "The Chosen One", by Alabama 3), I stumbled across a pretty cool web application. It is called Pandora. Some of you may already know of this rather cool thang, but for the relatively uninformed like myself, you may be asking yourself "What is Pandora?" other than Hera's revenge on mankind. The Pandora People answer that question as follows:
    Pandora is a new, more personalized kind of radio - where stations only play music you like. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll create a station that explores just that part of the music universe. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project, which began in 2000 and is the most thorough analysis of popular music ever undertaken. You can listen to your Pandora stations on the web, in your home, and on the go.
    Tim Westergren, founder of the Music Genome project, describes that undertaking as follows:
    On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever. Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like. Since we started back in 2000, we've carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world. It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy - but now that we've created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe.
    Pandora is a free, streaming, customizable web-based radio. According to the site, it takes 20 to 30 minutes per song for the various Music Genome Project experts to quantify as many as 500 attributes of a song, including such characteristics as melody, harmony, instrumentation, vocals, and lyrics. You, the user, create a profile on Pandora and then generate "stations" merely by inputting a song or artist. Once the song or artist is located, the player begins endlessly playing other songs and artists within the Music Genome Project database that most closely resemble the attributes of your search term. You can create as many "stations" as you choose and can further refine them with "seeds." You also can read and participate in a pretty comprehensive music blog, tell a friend about what you have found, locate shared stations and find other listeners. For some lucky people, Pandora also can be streamed to their mobile phones (I unfortunately, am not one of those people). At one time, Pandora charged a minimal monthly fee for its service; it now offers the player for free with profits generated by advertising dollars. 'Course, you can limit your exposure to the advertising by starting your player and minimizing the screen. The Pandora gang explain the adopted name as follows:
    The name Pandora means "all gifted" in Greek. In ancient Greek mythology, Pandora received many gifts from the Gods, including the gift of music, from Apollo. She was also, as we all know, very curious. Unlike those Gods of old, however, we celebrate that virtue and have made it our mission to reward the musically curious among us with a never-ending experience of music discovery.
    This pretty much sums up the Pandora experience. Give it a try and take a break from the grind. May I humbly suggest my Frankie Valli - "You're Just Too Good To Be True" station? Everybody Dance Now!!!!!!! For more visit http://advantageadvocates.com
     
  • Look Kids … Free Oreos!

    In another marginally relevant to the law (motor vehicle violations do involve laws, don't they?) blog post, the young, the young at heart and the tragically sweet-toothed are hopping up and down southwest of Chicago today as 14 tons of spilled Oreo cookies cause a major traffic snarl on Interstate 80. The driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into the median. No charges have yet been filed but both lanes of traffic were closed, ostensibly to permit passing motorists to grab a snack. Fortunately, no one appears to have been hurt, but several motorists were sorely lacking milk. I swear I am going to get back on point in my next post. For more visit http://advantageadvocates.com