The Podium (Blog)

I started using Parallels 6 about a year ago with the hope that it would allow me to enjoy TheFormTool on my MacBook PRO 8GB laptop, which is my main machine. That wasn’t possible; that version was a memory hog of the first order, slow to start, inconvenient. Spending time getting familiar with our Dell laptop was the lesser bad alternative.

Happily, that’s changed! I’ve spent the past week driving Parallels 8 (Parallels.com for free trial, update or purchase). It claims to be 25% faster, but my experience has been much better than that. I’ve used Apple’s Mission Control to configure the Mac so that Windows has its own separate desktop that I can open with just a three-fingered swish. Half a second later I running TheFormTool at native speeds but with all the creature comfort (and much of the safety) intrinsic to Mac.

For the first time I can access customers’ documents submitted for service help without the extra effort of dumping them out to DropBox, uploading them onto the Dell, waiting forever for it to spin up, and then opening the document. Now, I drop it onto the Mac’s desktop, change desktops to the Windows environment,  drop the file onto the Windows virtual machine, and open it with Word 2010. Three seconds, total, max. (Even this effort is probably unnecessary, but I make a real effort to keep the Windows side of my Mac off the Internet and away from emails, just to be safe.)

To play the game, you’ll need Parallels 8, Windows, and Word 2007 or better (the Windows version). That’s not inexpensive, even if using eBay, but given the productivity boosts we’ve seen from customers using TheFormTool, the average payback is probably less than a week or two two.

While we continue to investigate a potentially even easier and less expensive workaround for our Mac friends to be able to use TheFormTool on their favorite platform, I can now recommend Parallels 8 without reservation.

We’ve reorganized the Video Support page, putting the video snippets into subject matter order and then in order of sophistication.

With these 20 videos, an average user can go from TFT novice to rocket scientist in just over an hour of attentive viewing.

Large numbers of the members of the audiences at our webinars have asked for their own copies of the forms used to illustrate TheFormTool’s features. We’ve just added a package of four “Simple Samples” to our resource list, available for downloading. They demonstrate best practices to simply and easily build:

• Master Lists
• Conditional rows in tables
• Conditional sections
• Optional blank lines

These examples are suitable for beginners and experts and are available on our Resources page.

TheFormTool, LLC  is pleased to announce that the Washington State Bar Association (http://www.wsba.org) has chosen to sponsor TheFormTool as a new benefit for its 34,000 lawyer members. TheFormTool is user-friendly and powerful productivity software for lawyers seeking to reduce document errors, improve client service and reduce costs.

TheFormTool reduces errors by eliminating “cut & paste” document assembly. It allows law firms to improve productivity and lower costs by reducing by up to 90% the time spent processing and editing paperwork. TheFormTool empowers lawyers to leverage their expertise by creating and sharing intelligent and automated documents with their staffs.

TheFormTool supports WSBA’s commitment to add value to its members and their millions of clients through advantageous pricing and specialized support.

WSBA members can learn more at http://www.theformtool.com/wsba.

A friend of mine is in the midst of acquiring a public shell company. He was referred to a law firm with substantial experience in the area that claims expertise.

By actual count there were more than 20 material errors in the “final” documentation. The firm describes them as merely typos, the kind of error that can creep into documents without becoming obvious enough to catch. Things like the name of the client and purchaser, the state domicile of the target corporation; just minor items.

How long will it be until lawyers, and their malpractice insurers, consider documentation errors unacceptable, below the threshold of professional standards?

We’re particularly sensitive to this, of course, because we’ve always regarded “cut and paste” as TheFormTool’s largest competition, a legacy practice that should have gone out with thermal paper fax machines. Even giving the matter the benefit of every doubt, I’ll wager that within five years cut and paste will be considered unprofessional and unacceptable.

Note: Welcome to visitors from Business Insider. Be sure to visit our home page to see how  you can avoid the crowd by using TheFormTool to outperform all your peers and competition. You might also enjoy our discussion of LegalZoom’s aborted public offering and how it will affect the business of law.

According to Greg Voakes, writing in Business Insider, the next five years will see the graduation of more than 200,000 new lawyers, or five times as many as two generations ago.

Of those graduates, nearly 50,000 will be unable to find work within the profession, up from 6,000 or so two years ago.

Here is a graphical representation of the changes affecting the prospects for new graduates, and for experienced hands, too.

Note that New York and California are already awash in a flood of lawyers in excess of positions available for them to fill.

The need for increased productivity will become more apparent with each passing year.

We’re going to spin off TheFormTool software distribution operations into a separate company, TheFormTool, LLC, early in 4Q 2012.

“We’ve been amazed at the world-wide enthusiasm for TheFormTool since its introduction more than a year ago,” said Bob Christensen. “As the fastest-growing, most user-friendly and powerful document assembly and forms automation software in the world, TheFormTool deserves its own company. So we have just launched TheFormTool, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Your Dollar Matters, Inc., in order to assure that it receives all the support that it deserves.

“With thousands of users world-wide, an extraordinarily strong conversion rate from its free version to TheFormTool PRO, and enthusiastic and supportive purchasers, it’s time to really put the pedal to the metal.

“We want to really focus resources on TheFormTool, to rapidly shake out as many opportunities as we can identify,” he continued. “In addition, TheFormTool has an entire suite of related new products and services scheduled for release over the next year. It’s going to be an exciting time.”

Canceling an initial public offering at the last minute, terminating a years-long process and killing insiders’ financial dreams, is incredibly painful.

When LegalZoom withdrew its IPO the day before its scheduled climax on August 3, the immediate waste of $3.5 million in cash was probably bearable. The likely damage to the firm’s reputation and relationships within financial circles, not so much.

The company blamed its decision on the old standby, “market conditions,” an euphemism for “things didn’t come together the way we expected and the time came to run like hell.” The real story concerns how the firm and its presumably professional financial advisors allowed the process to go so far along without pulling the pin much earlier. In this case, the fat lady’s final song was not so much a duet between LegalZoom and its underwriters but rather a trio performance that included them as well as LZ’s major institutional investor and largest selling shareholder, Polaris Venture Partners V.

PVP V, an icon of institutional venture capital, was formed in March 2006 with nearly $1 billion of cash and promised investments. In February 2007, it poured more than $35 million of its investors’ funds into the purchase of about 80% of LZ’s Series A preferred shares at a price just under $6.00 per share.

Roll the calendar forward to 2012. PVP V is facing, in VC years, middle-age. It has just four years left to wind up its investments and return its investors’ money and, presumably, their gains. It’s time for PVP V to turn its vault full of paper shares into real cash; time for its investments to undergo a “liquidation event” such as a sale or an IPO.

Thirty-six hours before the stock was to start trading, the underwriters called a “reality meeting.” The IPO could not happen on numbers the conflicted parties were demanding. On August 3, of the 8 million shares scheduled to be sold by LegalZoom’s underwriters, less than half were for the company. Strike one. Of the fifty-two percent to be sold by insiders, almost 90% were to be from PVP V, looking to get essentially all of its invested cash out. Strike two. Investors’ weren’t sufficiently hungry for the stock to support the price that the sellers were demanding. Strike three.

Partly, it was the numbers themselves. LegalZoom was already experiencing the chill of a slowing growth rate and tighter margins in its traditional market, legal forms for sale. In attempts to compensate, the firm boosted its consumer advertising by more than 40%. During the IPO it was aggressively rolling out a new subscription pricing model where consumers commit to a fixed monthly fee in return for legal forms and limited consultations with affiliated attorneys. Also, LZ began to compete in the registered agent market for small companies against the established players, such as CT Corporation. Investors don’t like it when their investments go to someone other than the company in which they are investing. They don’t like it when a company’s most sophisticated investor is taking big money out, leaving only “house money” still at risk. And after Facebook, they really don’t like any negative factors mixing with rich pricing.

LegalZoom’s agreement with its PVP V and its other Series A investors called for them to convert their preferred shares into common stock coincidentally with an IPO that would raise at least $50 million for the company with shares priced at $9.00 or more.

It tried. It failed.

Now, under those same agreements, it’s faced with a mandatory redemption to pay off the Series A investors for $71 million in less than 18 months. Or lose control of the company.

Even roses have thorns.

UPDATE: There’s an interesting and different perspective at eLawyering Blog.

(Second of three)

To be useful, new technology needs to meet three standards. It must be powerful, simple and cost-effective.

Simple

Nothing, absolutely nothing substitutes for simplicity in the use of technology; not money, not staff, not sophistication.

Only when technology is in its formative stages, when it’s still developing rapidly, short of a revolutionary pace but evolving very rapidly – when sales are made only to Moore’s innovators and early adopters, customers who are willing to make large personal investments in time and training – does simplicity not take first place.

Think back to the Motorola cell phone “bricks” of the 1980’s. They were a revolutionary advance over the “car phones” that they replaced, the hardwire-in, suitcase sized radio-telephones that required operator intervention for every call. But their audiences were limited to a select segment, much less than 1% of the whole. Then came two decades of variations of the flip phone, the most advanced of which had hidden keyboards and could send messages of various types. Then, the iPhone and everything we thought we knew about the technology and economics of mobile communications changed. Simplicity unchained, best demonstrated by the early discovery that the average iPhone user was comfortable with ten of that device’s functions, where people using the alternatives on average never mastered two. Simplicity.

Two other examples, cars and code, describe the principle and the conundrum. Have you looked at a car engine lately? Perhaps most of us can still identify to the major subsystems by sight, but not 1 in 1000 could service it beyond the most basic items, such as adding a quart of oil. Changed the points or paid for a tune-up lately? Not likely. The more powerful technology behind today’s automobiles has made their operation simpler, easier and (gasp!) even less expensive than even a generation ago. Last one: nearly every American between 2 and 90 uses HTML code every day but how many can write even a single line of this simplest of all programming languages, or even name it? Again, 1 in 1000, or less? Power breeds user simplicity ,which breeds ubiquity that drives massive markets.

Bringing the principle to our own experience, our users tell us that their first and foremost reason for using TheFormTool is… simplicity, the ability of ordinary users to use it instantly, to master it quickly. Users tell us that using TheFormTool is easier and faster, simpler (and lots more fun) than cut and paste. After that, TheFormTool’s advantages in terms of price and power are merely supporting actors.

There may be another principle at work here: If you don’t “get it” in ten minutes or less, whether it’s a new phone, camera, or a document assembly program, it may not be “gettable.”

To be useful, we believe that it’s essential that truly useful technology must have the power to be simple.™

We’ve added two more videos that will be useful to every owner of TheFormTool PRO.

Dividers shows how you can organize the Q &A Table so that anyone will be comfortable navigating the process.

Find & Paste is practically guaranteed to save you an hour or more, and a dozen errors, the first time you use this new feature in TheFormTool PRO 2.2.

Both are on our Video Support page.