Zeke, Hunk & Hickory: The Evolution of the Farmhand

Do the names Zeke, Hunk and Hickory ring a bell? They were the three affable farmhands in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. These workers, employed at the Gale’s farm in Kansas, were transformed in Dorothy’s dream into (respectively) the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. At Nextpoint, we have named three of our farmhands in honor of these hard-working laborers. Our laptop farm employs these ‘Farmhands’ which do a lot of the heavy lifting around here.

The story of the the Farmhands and how their duties have changed over the years is an interesting one, a parable for our work in legal technology. The Farmhands started their careers at Nextpoint hooked up to high-speed scanners, where their job was to take large volumes of paper and turn them into electronic images. But then law firms got copy machines that generated pdfs, and copy companies started imaging documents and batch printing them as their core businesses evolved. The Farmhands were soon unhooked from our still mothballed scanners. But then they found new life. The Farmhands were reconfigured to take videotaped depositions, digitize them, and then synchronize the video with the deposition transcript. So you could play the deposition with scrolling text, or find segments of video quickly. But alas, once again, the Farmhands were victims of the proliferation of technology. As court reporting firms started synchronizing video as a matter of course and delivered the video digitally instead of analog (MPEG not VOB please!), the Farmhands once again were – ahem, put out to pasture so to speak. But do not underestimate the resilience of the Farmhands. Just like Farmhands of yesteryear, they have learned to operate machinery, find a new purpose and keep themselves valuable. They jumped on the TrialManager bandwagon as soon as our patent application was inked. Since then, they have been uploading in the millions of pages to TrialManager. Because of their remote login capabilities, our Los Angeles office is able to utilize the Farmhands in Chicago and upload zip files full of document productions at all hours of the day and night.

But before you cry unfair labor practices, these Farmhands aren’t all hard work and no play…just two weeks ago they let us borrow their capabilities to sit in the virtual waiting room for hours-on-end to purchase single-game Cubs tickets. Although these Farmhands hail from Kansas, they are Cubs fans at heart…