We prevailed in a dispute over ISCRUB.com. We won control of the domain name from Vertical Axis, Inc., located in Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea.

The WIPO arbitration panel’s ruling now ensures that we (Esquire Innovations) retain ownership of our iScrub® brand as embodied in the ISCRUB.com domain name. We are fortunate to have trade marked the name early on.

There is no way we could’ve won this dispute if it weren’t for the fortitude and expertise of Richard Gurak an attorney with Welsh & Katz (our IP firm). Seriously, Richard is one of those guys who just doesn’t give up… he is passionate in his work and great at his craft.

And a special thanks to Gene D’Aversa who is Richard’s in-house domain name technical expert. Gene you’re the man!

This is probably more than you want to know, but the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center is a substitute for a court hearing and can only transfer domain names if three criteria are met. (1) The domain name must be identical or confusingly similar to the complainant’s trademark or service mark. (2) The registrant of the domain name must have no rights or legitimate interests in the domain name. (3) The domain name must have been registered and used in bad faith. In this matter, the WIPO arbitration panel found that all three criteria had been fulfilled and ordered a transfer of the ISCRUB.com domain name.

Get all the drama here…WIPO Decision

I use Words “Word Count Toolbar” (ENA) all the time. For proper web page content the rule is at least 125 words and each paragraph should be no longer than 4 sentences (for easier on-screen reading). Word doesn’t tell you the number of sentences so I created another button on Word’s built-in toolbar that shows the number of sentences in the active paragraph. The code below does that.

Public Sub NumberOfSentences()
    Dim sNumberOfSentences As Long  
    sNumberOfSentences = Selection.Paragraphs(1).Range.Sentences.Count
    MsgBox sNumberOfSentences & ” Sentences”, _
      vbInformation, “Number of Sentences”
End Sub

Strategic Partners are very important to my company and me. They’re our advocates and support in the areas of the market we can’t reach or reach as well by ourselves. They train for us, they resell our products and can be great cigar smoking bud’s at ILTA.

One such partner is Envision. Envision is a FANTASTIC marketing company that helps us with our marketing strategy and they’re worth every penny we pay them. WOW is all I can say.

We’re a software company; we create software solutions (that we support) for our clients. As tempting as it is we don’t provide (as a business model) training and consulting services outside of our products. Envision has helped us focus on that strategy and to project that message out into the market place in some VERY creative ways.

WE DO SOFTWARE… that’s it.

About Envision

JoAnna Forshee is the CEO of Envision, and it’s a privilege to work with her and count her as a friend.

Jobst Elster is the Vice President of Envision, and the guy who we work with directly. Jobst is my brilliant friend and sounding board.

PLUS Jobst is a “running junkie”. Get this:
Jobst participated in his first Ironman Challenge in Panama City Beach, Florida last week. Ironman begins with a 2.4 mile swim, then a 112 mile bike race, followed by a 26.2 mile marathon. In addition to finishing (which is a huge accomplishment on its own), Jobst beat his goal time of 12 hours with a finish time of 11:37, and placed 5th in his group!

Who in their right mind would run, swim, and bike for 11 hours straight?! Let me tell you who… it’s Jobst Elster who’s helping Esquire Innovations succeed in our Ironman… the market place.

Thank you Envision!

He is my business sage, guru, and mentor. Tom Peters has done more to help me define our company culture than anyone has. I wonder if I can get him to come to our year end bowling party.

[Note: in the early years, Esquire Innovations was...lets say... "cash challenged" and we could only afford the local bowling alley for our year end dinner (beer, bread and chicken wings). We still do it to remind us of where we came from and its FUN! We also have the fancy eloquent dinners that spouses and significant others attend – I have to shave for that.]

Tom Peters helped me realize its ok to be way out of control and a little on the crazy side.

His blog is great too and I’ll be referring to “Tom” quite often.

“UAC sucks!” this is a quote from my lead developer. He also says, “It forces developers to be more disciplined.” Wait!!!?? Isn’t “disciplined-developer” an oxymoron?

I mean UAC is causing divorce, getting people fired and deported!

Question: Will you have UAC turned on for your implementation of Vista?

• If you have no idea what UAC is then add 3 months to your implementation of Vista… and beef up your resume.
• If you know what it is and you answered, “You don’t know” then, add 6 months to your implementation of Vista… and start professional counseling.
• If you answered “Yes” then you better add 6 months or a year for all your vendors to catch up on getting their stuff right… and invest in a commercial grade coffee maker.

Hint: leave it” On” because in a year we’ll finally “get” why Microsoft thinks it’s a good idea.

We saw this UAC pain in the ass coming a while ago and made a conscious effort to develop with it “on” (not easy) and ASSUME it’s “on” when we install our software (your investment). You’re going to be really irritated when a vendor tells you that you have to install their software with UAC turned off… seriously irritated.

Here’s a fun thing to do, Google “Vista UAC” nightmares

Great bedtime reading.

Webette – Here’s a white paper I wrote that builds on what we started in 2005 to add value to our services by providing our clients with additional training on our products. Its been very successful!

Check our current Webette calendar.

Microsoft Word Styles are powerful and can help you create better documents. Documents built using styles are more stable and more easily edited than documents formatted without them. Styles also provide a faster means to format documents with a consistent look and feel. Microsoft Word Styles should be an integral part of a firm’s work product. It is also important to provide templates and training to users to leverage the power of styles.

Here’s a 10 tip white paper I wrote that gets right to the meat of Styles.

10 Tips to Demystifying the Most Powerful Feature in Microsoft Word – Styles!

In this white paper I explain the difference between merging, comparing, and blacklining, the importance of locking documents for more accurate comparisons, how to customize the appearance of Track Changes, and much more—ten proven tips in all. It pretty much contains everything you need to know but perhaps never knew to ask.

10 Proven Tips for Working around the Shortcomings of Word’s Track Changes

This white paper tells you how to use Autotext in Microsoft Word. AutoText “entries” are ready-made (boilerplate) frequently used text (or graphics) that is available for use in any document. By using Microsoft Word’s AutoText, your productivity will go through the roof, because you are able to produce the same amount of work product with less keystrokes and less hassle.

10 Tips to Increase Your Productivity with Microsoft Word’s AutoText -

Metadata has been used for years to identify, classify and manage documents in the legal environment. But even as electronic document exchange increases exponentially, and with it, awareness that most documents and files include hidden data, firm wide understanding about metadata management as a real security concern still lags.

Managing Metadata

I’ve always found it interesting that document variables are never talked about when “experts” are expounding the

risks of document metadata. Document variables store invisible information about the document and can only be accessed using Visual Basic or viewed using a metadata viewer.Here’s a white paper I wrote that tells you way more than you ever wanted to know about Document Variables – MS Office Metadata – Document Variables

If you answer “yes” to any of the following questions, then it’s most likely you have document variables in your documents.

1. Do you have a firm Template and Macro Package?
2. Does your firm use in-house automation Word macros?
3. Has your firm used an outside document conversion bureau to convert your legacy Word or WordPerfect documents in the last 10 years?

Bonus Code

If you want to check for document variables in your documents here’s some VBA code I put together. If you don’t know how to use this code then get one of your firm’s programmers to place it in your Normal.dot template and then attach it to a toolbar button. OR just skip this mess and download our metadata viewer.

Sub CheckForDocVars()
· · ·Dim sDocVars As String
· · ·Dim oThisDocVar As Variable

· · ·For Each oThisDocVar In ActiveDocument.Variables
· · · · · ·sDocVars = oThisDocVar.Name & ” = ” & oThisDocVar.Value & vbCr & sDocVars
· · ·Next

· · ·If Len(sDocVars) = 0 Then
· · · · · ·MsgBox “This document does not contain any document variables.”
· · ·Else
· · · · · ·MsgBox “The following document variables were found in this document:” & vbCr & sDocVars
· · ·End If

End Sub

Most people think of metadata as the “stuff” you need to get rid of. But…often there’s “stuff” in your documents that can identify the firm or even the Author of the document. Here’s a white paper I wrote that addresses Microsoft Word Bookmarks as metadata.

MS Office Metadata – Microsoft Bookmarks

In this white paper, I co-authored with my marketing director, Susan McClellan, we explain how the steady growth of electronic document exchange has intensified awareness that Microsoft Office files include metadata beyond their printable content. Bottom line? Unintentional disclosure can be awkward or even raise malpractice concerns.

How Firms Can Protect Themselves against Unintentional Disclosure and Misuse of Metadata

In this white paper I compare two approaches to metadata management and explain how the Microsoft Office 2007 Document Inspector is significantly lacking as an enterprise-metadata management tool.

Microsoft Office Document Inspector – Metadata Management for Microsoft Office 2007

Implementing the Document Inspector as your firm’s sole metadata management tool may be bad  for your  job/career.

Microsoft Word is the most powerful document production application on the market today. With this much power, firms must take responsibility to understand and manage document metadata risks and potential “adverse disclosure.” Word documents contain information other than the actual content that is intended for the reviewer to view and edit.

10 Proven Tips to Minimize Document Metadata in Microsoft Word

I’ve said it from day 1 – It’s not enough for a firm to implement document metadata software and leave it up to individual users to manage all the metadata elements in their documents. The firm also needs to implement a metadata management policy in and across the enterprise. A firm just can’t afford to have every attorney managing metadata differently from document to document. What a nightmare!

In the very beginning iScrub was the only metadata management product that provided the firm the ability to manage metadata the same across the enterprise using metadata management levels (Cooperator/Adversary). Currently iScrub has five levels, but in the next version it will be unlimited. Now our competitors are doing it… kind of.

Case in Point – Toby Brown wrote a nice piece in American Bar Association about how his firm (using iScrub) implemented Metadata Policy Enforcement.