Archives for October 15, 2012

[Originally appeared 2000.]

The Word of Law Column in the last issue began to answer the questions about collaboration begun in Word of Law No. 29. In answering, “What activities must be supported when drafting documents collaboratively,” we covered the first four of a list that included, “share, compare, track, review, comment, find, model, and reuse.” This week’s column picks up from there.

COMMENT

Drafting or review of documents may be accompanied by a simple or complex conversation among collaborators. They may cite references, share their analysis, explain their changes, even criticize or disagree with the author. Microsoft Word supports these kinds of functions in its comments function, but as convenient as that format may seem, we may not want to put comments in the body of documents where they could be preserved accidentally for unauthorized view. Comments may be found in transmittal letters, cover memos or e-mail transmittals. Their disconnection from the text may limit their value in the drafting process. The newest electronic or even web-based collaboration systems support discussion threads that may be associated with document drafts.

FIND

There can be no collaboration over a document, nor can any of its inherent activities be facilitated, if the document over which collaboration is required can’t be found! Thus, to support fully document collaboration in a cooperative setting, the collaborators must share methods of access and nomenclature, be able to view the history of the document, the ownership of the document, and, most importantly, the availability of the document. Sometimes this activity requires standardization of document locale. A document can be shared effectively when stored on a Web server and access is protected, perhaps on a document management system. The altogether too common attempts to administer and maintain collaboration of documents attached to e-mail messages are likely to cause difficulties.

MODEL

In many organizations, standards should play a significant role in our document drafting. The standards include both document formatting and content. Collaboration, especially in a cooperative environment, benefits significantly from preparing and using document standards. In this column, we have emphasized repeatedly the value of a common set of document styles, stored and applied through a set of Microsoft Word templates. The identification of standard text, or text components, enables collaboration to focus on the special elements, those for which our drafting effort has the highest value.

REUSE

This function is one which can simultaneously leverage the productivity of document collaboration, and which, if performed without skill, forethought, and best practices, can unravel and defeat the productivity we seek to gain. The reuse of document content has been a prevalent practice in our industry since the advent of computer-generated paper documents, yet some of these same unsuspecting practices exercised on an electronically collaborated document may actually harm our ability to reuse existing electronic content at all. Do we have readily available content to support our current drafting requirement? If so, is it accessible from a currently supported file format or does it require conversion? If the content does not require conversion, does the formatting associated to it require touch-up, or realignment to our current model? Do we have proper tools for conversion? Are we employing proper approaches for copying, cutting and pasting content between documents? Are we skillfully inputting our content such that it can be reused in a manner that survives beyond this document’s moment? Do we make proper document construction choices: when should we use a table vs. tabs?Are we using styles to impose our general format choices, and then using manually-applied formats only for occasional format situations? Each of these speaks to the reusability of our content – and to the productivity we can gain or lose by collaboration.

How should these activities be different when the collaboration context is cooperative, and when it is reviewed by the opposing side?

While we may wish to strengthen the collaborative environment in a cooperative context, we need to be careful about the information that we expose about the drafting of documents when the document is shared with or published to others who are do not work with us. When the opposing side only received paper copy, this barrier was easy to maintain. As we pursue the practice and tools of electronic collaboration, the easiest guideline should be that those outside our organization see only the finished draft or document that we intend for them to see, and do not have access to the other information, drafts or comments that we include in our systems for collaboration. Please note that those “inside” our organization for document drafting may include persons employed by others such as attorney and client.

This 2000 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.

[Originally appeared 2000.]

The Word of Law column published in Word of Law No. 29 began a series on collaboration. As we begin answering the questions posed in that column, the discussion may seem a bit abstract. Why take two or three columns before describing any specific information about Microsoft Word or other products? The answer lies in the role of system architect described issue 4.48. To make sense of the techniques and the need for tools inside and outside of Microsoft Word, we must have a common understanding of the activities to be supported when drafting collaboratively. Some of these points may seem basic. It doesn’t hurt to remember the basics when trying to accomplish something new or sophisticated. Also, as we look at the behavior of the collaborative tools and techniques, we need to define what we could and should do with them, before we can answer whether they work properly, or what works best.

What activities must be supported when drafting documents collaboratively?

We can distill collaboration to a series of verbs: share, compare, track, review, comment, find, model, reuse. Some of these activities are simple, others subtle. Some require a disciplined community of use in order to function effectively.

SHARE

Nothing could be more basic to collaboration than the notion that more than one person takes responsibility for writing and editing a document. The collaborators may be peers, as Sherry and Bob seek to be in preparing this series. They may consist of a chain of responsibility, such as author, proofreader and editor, or, in the context of law practice, paralegal, associate and partner. Shared responsibility for drafting may also be adversarial. At times, it may appear that lawyers have substituted the printed page for the field of battle. Note that in this description, we leave out author and secretary. This discussion concentrates on shared responsibility for the substance of documents. For this purpose, we will assume that the secretarial role does not include responsibility for the substance of a document, although in real life, the opposite is so often true.

Those who share responsibility for drafting a document must explicitly or implicitly agree on the methods and responsibilities. This used to be much easier. The author (with appropriate secretarial or printing assistance) typed and copied the draft or galleys and distributed them physically to the collaborators. The collaborators made changes by hand markup, or a combination of markup and correspondence suggesting revisions. The author accumulated the suggested or directed changes to produce a revised draft. Today’s electronic document sharing imposes new issues in the sharing process.

Although the concept of sharing is not limited to this meaning, it can be helpful in contrasting “review” activities by thinking about collaboration prior to publication or distribution of a draft document to “third” parties. Prior to distribution, the comments must be assembled into a single complete draft. At this point, the decisions about the methods and extent of markup and other document drafting information must be determined.

COMPARE

For many users, we could complete the story of collaboration at “share and compare.” In a drafting process that requires a series of revisions, the author must display to the rest of the collaborators the changes made between drafts. Text may have been inserted, deleted or moved. Sometimes formatting changes need to be highlighted, particularly if they indicate a change in the structure of a document. Document comparison may also be used forensically. A reviewer or adversary may receive a series of drafts of a document that have not been marked by the author, and wish to determine whether and what changes have been made.

In prehistoric times (sorry, we meant before widespread use of personal computers and contemporary word processing), document comparison required that drafts be marked by hand to show changes. Typically, inserted text was underlined and the locations of deleted text were marked with a carat (^) or other distinctive symbol. The use of red pen for the original markup led to the term “redline” for a document marked in this way, although the lack of color copiers led many of us to call these “blacklined” instead.

Word processing and especially the third party comparison programs have brought us computer generated markup to facilitate document comparison. We will examine these functions thoroughly in this series. For now, let’s focus on what document comparison should accomplish, both from the perspective of the collaborators and the computer. The collaborators need the markup to indicate to each other whether a change has been made in the text and the substance of the change. The markup need to be complete, neither missing the occurrence of changes nor marking unchanged text falsely as changed.

An aspect of this comparison process that receives little discussion might best be called “legibility.” The collaborators must be able to read both current and prior versions of a document clearly, able to follow its substance before and after the changes. The blacklined copy itself can easily lose legibility. If a paragraph includes several insertions and deletions, marked, for instance, in a series of brackets, double underlines and strikeouts, the effort to read either the current version straight through, or the prior version, can take significant mental effort. In Bob’s legal practice, when collaborating with others on the drafting of complex documents, he often distributed both changed pages, marked by manual or machine blacklining, and a clean revised copy of the document. The collaborators or reviewers were assumed to have the prior clean copy of the document. If the drafting were critical enough, the reviewer might work with all three of the blackline, the prior copy and the current copy arrayed on their desk. Microsoft Word offers some of this capability in the options available in its Track Changes feature. We will share concerns about the use of that feature, however, later in this series. DeltaView, the newest of the third party document comparison tools, supports a three pane view of the original document and revised document in their unmarked form, linked on the screen to the blacklined copy.

The issue of legibility helps demonstrate that there is no “perfect” document comparison. The “perfect” text lies in the old and new versions. The comparison, manual or machine, is only a tool for locating and indicating the changes.

TRACK

Word processing, aided and abetted by e-mail and other connectivity, have promoted an expansion and intensification of collaboration, whether in paper distribution and review of drafts or directly in electronic formats As the number of parties involved in a document’s collaboration grows and the expectations for turnaround time of drafts shrink, it has become necessary to manage the tasks and status of collaboration from a work flow perspective. Fully tracking these activities may involve designating a person as an overall sponsor of the document and performing the recordkeeping tasks associated to the parties involved in the documents’ creation, revision and distribution cycles. This function informs, monitors, and generates status surrounding the collective pursuit. Tracking, then, involves all activities associated to managing the document from its project perspective: who has responsibility for what section of the document, what timeframes must be met and what distribution mechanisms must be accommodated.

Conscious decisions need to be made about the level of detail that should be maintained of the document drafting process. The Track Changes feature of Microsoft Word records within the document the time and date on which each change was made and the name Word assigns to the “user” when the editing was made. This may or may not be desirable information to maintain within the document, especially when the electronic form of the document is distributed to adverse persons. It may be desirable to maintain an “audit history” of the document, recording who made what changes at what times.

A key issue in document drafting is when to save a file as a new version. Version control is key to performing document comparisons accurately and to maintaining the integrity of the audit history. At the very least, new versions are required for documents each time they are published and distributed.

REVIEW

It can be valuable to distinguish the review of a distributed or published draft from cooperative editing. A person defined as a reviewer generally will not have responsibility for making or affirming the changes to the proposed draft, especially if there are multiple reviewers. That responsibility will be kept with the document’s author or sponsor. It may be desirable to deliver a document to a reviewer in a form that does not permit them to edit the text, but only to annotate it. While distribution of paper copy without electronic versions suffices, in the electronic world, a similar approach can be accomplished by publishing documents to a non-editable form, such as Adobe Acrobat.

This may not be the best point to pause this discussion, but it has taken up the week’s worth of column space. We will pick up the trail with the Comment activity in the next issue.

This 2000 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.