3 Geeks and a Law Blog

By Jon Pallbo (Jon.Pallbo@gmail.com) (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I recently watched a TED talk by Michael Idinopulos, called Mr. Manager, tear down these (digital) walls!  It's a great talk and is well worth your while to view the entire 17 minute presentation.  The story he tells beginning at the 2 minute mark has been haunting me since I first watched it.

He tells of visiting his grandfather's stock brokerage firm when he was a child and seeing all of the desks lined up in the open office space. Then he tells of returning when he was in high school and seeing his grandfather's brand new big private office. He assumed his grandfather would be happier with the office, but the grandfather longed for the old office layout. The grandfather tells of how new information traveled in the old space.

"You could almost watch... that information as it traveled from one end of that floor to another.  One broker would tell another broker, it was overheard by a third broker, and within 2 minutes flat that information could go from the first broker to the last and we all knew what was going on as soon as any of us knew anything.  Now, we sit in our private offices. We call our clients on the phone, but really, we have no idea what's going on."

Idinopulos uses this story as a launching point to tout the benefits of a social workplace and while I wholehearted agree with his point of view (go watch the video), I'm going to use his story to make a slightly different point.  Given the right conditions human beings are pretty good at instinctively managing knowledge within an organization.

Unfortunately, our modern firms do not conform to those conditions. To compensate we have created large KM infrastructures and systems designed to deliver institutional knowledge to employees across the world at the flip of a switch or the push of a button.  We imagine these tools to be delivery mechanisms akin to plumbing or electrical wiring, but knowledge is not a utility like water or electricity.  It can not be generated at a single spot, or efficiently gathered into a reservoir before being pumped down system.  Sadly, there is no fount of ultimate wisdom from which we can siphon gallons of knowledge to be distributed to the great masses of thirsty thinkers. Instead we ask people to help us capture knowledge "for everyone's benefit".  Like asking each person to carry one bucket of water up to the rooftop tower so that we can all benefit from running water for the day. And we wonder why it doesn't always function as we would like it to.

The ultimate key to designing systems that can facilitate knowledge transfer and flow across a global enterprise is not to better incorporate our utility-like systems into existing workflows, or to make them easier to use, or to improve the quality of knowledge they capture (all perfectly fine goals), but to change the metaphors around which we design them.  KM is not a utility, it's a big open room.  We need to focus on building systems that replicate the open office layout of Michael's grandfather's brokerage on a global scale.  We need geographical representations of who is working with whom on what, updated in near real time with a point-to-click and pinch-to-zoom interface that an infant could use.  And that should be our intranet home page!  The user drills down into this slowly spinning globe to get details on individual projects, matters, groups, practice areas, attorneys bios, experience, etc. With a quick tap you can see the public profile and e-social history of each, and then send a message, email, telephone, or instantly collaborate with any individual or group across the world.  The presence and availability of all firm employees are readily visible for all to see, and those with appropriate rights can see graphical representations of Toby's profit drivers for each matter.  Another simple gesture inverts the globe to show our clients and our contacts in much the same configuration.  Drilling down on this map gets you to client history, financials, news, etc.  All relationships are graphically represented and previously hidden connections become obvious at a glance.

All of this technology and the data backing it up already exists, but it's in a hundred different unrelated, utility-like systems, each of which requires extensive training and the occasional bucket to be carried to the roof.  THE knowledge system, the KM holy grail, is the system that gives Michael's grandpa the feeling he had in the open floor plan while he's sitting at his desk behind his closed door in one regional office of his multinational firm.  Just imagine...

"You can almost watch the information as it travels from one continent to another. One lawyer tells another lawyer, it's noticed by a third lawyer, and within 20 minutes flat it goes from the first to the last. We all know exactly what is going on as soon as any of us knows anything."

As I was riding back from Austin, Texas yesterday afternoon, looking out the windows at the remains of the Bastrop fire from two years ago, I got the first news of the tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma. It brought back the thoughts of me hunkering down in the basement of the Oklahoma City University School of Law fourteen years ago. My fingers danced across my phone going back and forth between social media sites, CNN, and KFOR television’s web broadcast looking for more information on what was going on. The sickening combination of déjà vu and helplessness started drifting over me in waves.

It is strange how we are so connected these days to others around the world. Almost no place seems to be foreign to us any longer. We could track our friends through their posts on Facebook, and fear for those that hadn’t yet updated their status to let us know they were okay. We could hear from old friends who had long since moved away from Oklahoma, relive those past tornado experiences, and send prayers, best wishes, and contributions to their friends that remained and were currently affected by the latest storms. I reached out to my cousin in Boston to determine if his sister in Moore, Oklahoma had contacted him yet to let him know she was okay. The connections were both comforting, and unsettling. I felt like I could know exactly what was going on at any moment, and frustrated by the reality that I really didn’t have that power.

After 20 minutes, I received a message back from my cousin saying that his sister was fine and that the tornado went south of her existing home, and just north of the home she and her husband were building. They were thankful to have been spared, once again from the third F4 or F5 tornado (May 3, 1999; May 8, 2003, and May 20, 2013) to strike the Oklahoma City suburb in fourteen years.

In the basement of the law library stay safe people!

As a librarian in Oklahoma, there is kind of a trend of living in Norman, and working in Oklahoma City. The idea is to enjoy the college-type atmosphere and more liberal settings of Norman, and actually make a living in your profession in the more populous OKC region (that is, if you absolutely can’t find a job in Norman that pays a decent wage.) The drive each day takes you up I-35 via Flood Ave or  24th Ave and you pass through Moore each morning and afternoon. I’ve been gone from the area for more than 10 years now, but can still remember taking the 25 minute drive every day from my North Norman residence to the Administrative Office of the Courts building just blocks away from the State Capitol building. Moore wasn’t a place we went to… it was a place we drove through.

As I watched update after update come in from friends, I started remembering how difficult it was to drive back home to Norman that night back in 1999. That 25 minute trip became a five-hour journey. My Oklahoma librarian friends were having to make that same journey last night.

I am going to take Sara Road down to Highway 9, then back up into Norman. If anyone knows why this won't work, let me know.

Just got the all clear to leave the basement. But there is a tornado between my work and my house so I am staying in okc for awhile.

Then the wait began to see the next post, knowing it would be hours from now, to confirm that they made it home safely. Four hours later, both had confirmed they made it. My initial reaction was relief… then I had a twinge of jealousy that they beat my travel time by an hour. I chalked that up to having a cell phone, social media and GPS to guide them around the roads they had most likely never traveled before.

Like I said earlier, it is strange at how connected we are these days. You feel empowered, yet helpless at the same time. I'm not sure if it is a good thing or bad thing, it's just a thing we all have to get used to. Now time to go back to Facebook and check in to make sure everyone else is okay.

One of the very first things you hear when you attend a Competitive Intelligence (CI) seminar is that CI is the ethical gathering of intelligence. The reason that ethics is stressed so highly when discussion CI, is that if your CI team is dabbling in unethical behavior (and that gets exposed), it reflects upon your whole organization and casts a shadow upon everything you do.

It seems that there are some reporters at Bloomberg L.P. may need to sit back in on some of those classes on ethics. The report in the New York Times states that reporters used information found through Bloomberg Terminal usage from banks and traders to break stories on certain people being fired from those companies (based upon users that suddenly "went dark" … i.e., were no longer logging into their Terminals.) That type of information, while effective, falls squarely on the unethical side of the ledger, and as a result gives all of Bloomberg a black eye.

Immediately, we all started wondering what exposure law firms had to this type of research, and if there were additional issues that were at play. According to Jean O'Grady's blog, Dewey B. Strategic, the Bloomberg Law platform was not included in this type of internal research strategy. O'Grady contacted Greg McCaffery, CEO of Bloomberg Law, and got confirmation on that point. However, as Jean also points out, many law firms have the Terminals as well as Bloomberg Law access. It brings up ligitimate questions like the one Ed Walters of Fastcase asked on Twitter yesterday:


Alledgedly, Bloomberg reporters where systematically using this type of research on a regular basis. Hundreds of reporters used the technique according to the NY Times article. It simply makes Bloomberg look bad.

In this age of instant communications, hacking, and whistle-blowers, unethical behavior is very difficult to keep covered up. This should be held up as an example to others in the world of information gathering, that if you are performing unethical practices, you should expect that eventually those practices will be exposed. When they are, you will need to spend years repairing the damage.

This same type of damage can happen with Competitive Intelligence research. Be very careful how you conduct your gathering processes, and ask yourself what would happen if those practices were exposed to the public.

I usually put some of the non-legal (but fun) things on Friday posts, but today I am leaning toward more of the "Geeks" side of the blog than the "Law" side. Last week I saw a tweet fly by that mentioned GeoGuessr, so I had a few free moments to go try it out. I've probably spend a good couple of hours playing it over the weekend with the family, and found it to be a really fun (and somewhat educational) game to play.

The concept is pretty simple, yet very challenging at the same time. The game puts you on a Google Street View somewhere in the world. You get to move around on the street view, and attempt to figure out where you are based on the landmarks and other visual clues you see. Once you think you know where you are, you zoom in on the inset map and plunk down a marker. The closer you are, the more points you score. The game lasts five places, and you combine the scores for all five guesses.

I usually have three windows open at the same time to help me along:

1. GeoGuessr
2. Google
3. Google Maps

There are times when it is really easy to figure out your location. Last night, GeoGuessr placed me between a What-A-Burger and the South Padre Island Water Tower. Other times it is very difficult to find out where you are. The Outback in Australia is pretty non-descript, and there aren't a lot of road signs to help you out either!

The game uses a lot of deductive reasoning. For example, are the cars driving on the left or right side of the road? Are the signs in English or Japanese? Is it an arid climate, or are the Royal Palm Trees lining the boulevard? You use anything you can find to help you isolate where you are. For example, there are times when all the signs are in Tamil, but the phone numbers are still Arabic, so I have Googled the prefix to isolate what area code it falls in. I've seen delivery trucks with company logos on them and found where those companies are located in order to narrow down where I am. It is like a mix of being Doctor Who stepping out of the Tardis in the wrong location, and Sherlock Holmes using visual clues to determine where I might actually be.

If you've got a few free minutes, go try out GeoGuessr for yourself. However, remember it is Monday, so you probably need to quit after one game if you plan on getting any work completed.

Image [cc] Salem State Library

Maybe I'm reading a bit much into this announcement from the Dorraine Zief Law Library at the University of San Francisco, but, the fact that Westlaw has decided to allow graduating law students access to their law school Westlaw IDs through the end of November seems to be a sign that even the folks up in Eagan, MN know it's a tough market for law grads.

Graduates that go to extend their passwords by May 30th can have access to Westlaw classic and WestlawNext through their student logon. According to the USF post: