3 Geeks and a Law Blog

After Greg’s post on crowdsourcing, he and I met to explore how we might push this envelope a little further. We decided to run an experiment to see how well crowdsourcing might work for a firm. We wanted to show immediate value and cost savings and to demonstrate which types of tasks might be handled this way. The Setup Tool: We (mostly Greg) decided to use MTurk from Amazon as the tool. After some research on price ranges, we chose to pay our workers 10 cents per task. That appears to be an average price based on what we saw and it’s cheap ... like Greg. Project: We know law firms love to have information about General Counsels (GCs), so we selected that as our task. Greg was able to pull a list of companies from two different markets. 50 from the mid-west and 50 from the SF Bay area. These companies are listed on the site for the project. Then we asked for the following from each company – GC first name, last name and a link to their online bio. The bio had to be from the company site. We let them know the GC may have another title like Chief Legal Officer or Corporate Secretary. The Method: To test for and insure quality we did two things. First Greg ran a report from another system so we already know the answers to our question. Second, we allowed for two people to respond for each company GC. This ‘double-blind’ approach would serve as a quality check of the information we obtained. Our budget for the experiment - $22.00. $20.00 for the task payments and $2.00 for the MTurk fee. Initial Response: Within the first hour we had 20% of our responses in at a cost of $4.24 per hour. The quality seems to be high, but a full analysis will come once we close the project. Obviously the crowdsourcing approach will have limitations as to the types of tasks and information we collect. But our initial assessment is that this idea has merit. It appears to have hit Greg’s trifecta: Cheap, Easy and Fast. More to come …

• Are there tasks/projects that law firms can ethically crowdsource?
• Assuming that the price was right, would law firms even consider crowdsourcing?

Recent posts and discussions on the de-leveraging of law firms got me thinking. The thrust of the discussion is that BigLaw (and law firms in general) will not have the same leverage on the other side of the recession. I offer my evolving thoughts on this subject. No leverage = no profit. The only ‘firms’ I have seen that are profitable selling partner time are called solos. I struggle to see how a law firm can be profitable without some sort of leverage. Partners (a.k.a. Owners) will succeed financially by having a pyramid-shaped organization (be it tall or short). This turns the discussion to “what will this leverage look like?” I foresee firms adding to the bottom of the pyramid with non-partner track people (NPTPs). I’ve never understood why every lawyer hired has to be partner-track material. If (make that when) these people don’t make partner, they leave and take business and intellectual capital with them. Going forward firms would be wise not to build this destructive mechanism into their leverage. Additionally – NPTPs don’t have to be lawyers. What would make sense for the future shape of BigLaw leverage is a cylinder in a pyramid. The cylinder would contain the partner track hires, allowing for NPTPs to fill in a pyramid around that. This is not necessarily a new idea. The BigFour accounting firms already employ a similar approach, with some modifications. So it can work. It's more an issue of whether BigLaw will figure this out --- in time. Cross your fingers.