Will it be a trifecta????
Will it be a trifecta????

My personal best is two walk through settlements at two different WCAB district offices in a single morning.  Tomorrow I am going to attempt three walk through settlements at three different WCAB district offices in a single morning.  My plan is to start my day at the San Jose WCAB at 8:00AM, hit the Oakland WCAB afterward, jet to San Francisco, and then return to the office.  Google Maps tells me that this is going to be 134 miles over 2 hours and 39 minutes.  ((If I had another walk through to do in Santa Rosa, I would be planning a different order.)) ((Photo courtesy of Matthew Armstrong))

As I mentioned before, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong – traffic, long walk through lines, a broken photocopier.  ((Or, heaven forbid, EAMS could be working tomorrow.  THAT would foul me right up.))

But, I’ve done what I can to ensure this works.  I’ve called the other parties, have a checklist of everything I need to do in the order I need to do it, my cell phone is charged up ((And a back up cell phone charged up too!)) , phone numbers for opposing counsel and my clients hand, GPS charged up, prepared Minutes of Hearing, Document Cover Sheets, Document Separator Sheets, Awards, and Orders.  ((I even sacrificed a giant sequoia sapling as an offering to EAMS.)) ((I’m even bringing two extra settlements just in case one falls through!  Although, this is really due to coincidence than meticulous planning…))

If you happen to be in San Jose, Oakland, or San Francisco today stop me and say hello.  (And – pretty please may I cut ahead of you in line?)

Lastly, I’ll be checking back here throughout the day, so how about leaving me a word of encouragement in the comments? ((I think live blogging the trip might be a bit much – but we’ll see.))

MicroSoft has no one to blame but themselves for my deleting MicroSoft Office.  Well, its partly Dell’s fault too, but that’s a long story I’ll tell some other time.  (Short version: Dell repaired a prior laptop and shipped it to a construction site in Oakland.)

Once I tried OpenOffice, I never looked back.  Its my preferred word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, office suite program.  Not only is it better than MicroSoft office in just about every way, but its also completely free.  You might be interested in trying it out because I believe it will help you tremendously with EAMS.

OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org released version 3.0 of their program on October 13, 2008.  It was so wildly popular that their website was crushed under the overwhelming demand.  The three most important things to know about OpenOffice are:

  1. Its open source, so its completely free.  So, there’s no reason not to give it a shot.
  2. It can open, edit, and save to any MS Office 2000, 2003, 2007, and WordPerfect formats.
  3. It can print or export any file to a PDF.

If you’re a Workers’ Compensation professional in California, you’re probably dealing with EAMS.  Since filing things with EAMS means working with a lot of PDF’s.  In order to keep from reinventing the wheel, it makes sense to save those PDF’s of the document cover sheets.  But what if you need to make a small change later on?  Well, OpenOffice v3.0 can help with that too.

Using an extension ((basically a small program)) OpenOffice can open and edit and re-save a PDF file. Not even Adobe, the company that promotes the PDF format ((I know that’s redundant.)) , does a good job of opening and editing PDF’s.

This is a really big deal to me because editing saved PDF’s is going to save me a lot of time editing settlement documents and various pleadings.

Update

I wrote the above about a month ago while I gave OpenOffice 3.0 a shot.  It won’t install on my Vista laptop but works great on my XP desktop.  I’ve reverted to OpenOffice 2.4 on the laptop while I wait for a fix.  OpenOffice 2.4 is still free, but it won’t open MS Office 2007 formats (which not everyone is using anyhow) and cannot edit PDFs.