The final assignment for one of my college theory courses was to write at least 32 bars of music for 4 voices, containing 3 key and 2 time signature changes, that demonstrated 6 of 10 special techniques that we’d been taught, all while adhering to the standard rules of 4-part harmony.  And rather than simply writing it out and turning it in, we had to perform it in front of the class.

We were given the final assignment halfway through the course to ensure that we had plenty of time to complete it.  The last week of class was entirely devoted to performing our assignments. Some people played their pieces on piano.  Some dragged string or brass quartets into class. My best friend did his as a barbershop quartet.

The performances were good – most of the class were talented musicians – but the compositions were mostly ‘exercise-like’.  I hate academic exercises. I did then and I do now. I need work to have purpose and meaning beyond simply ‘that’s the assignment’. So while most students stood up and said something like, “this is my final assignment, it was really hard, I’m not a composer, please be nice to me”, I took a very different approach. I went to the front of the class and said something like this…

Our reluctant hero, a young peasant Boy, is approaching the end of his quest. He and his travel companion, an aging Wizard who has mentored the boy throughout their journey, stand on a bluff overlooking a lush green valley.  At the opposite end of the valley is the gleaming city where the Boy’s quest will finally come to an end. The Boy, eager to complete his quest, struggles to contain his excitement, but the Wizard motions for the Boy to come sit by his side.  The Wizard sings…

Continue Reading Lessons from a Former Life #4

Capture d’écran de Musescore 1.2 utilisé sous KDE

When I first moved to NY, I wrote all my music out by hand.  I’d buy staff paper with the lines pre-drawn, and I’d fill in clefs, time signatures, key signatures, measures, notes, etc.  This worked great, except that it was extremely time consuming, labor intensive, and my music notation was almost as bad as my handwriting, so even I had trouble reading it.  Thankfully, at about the same time, affordable music notation programs were coming on the market and surprise surprise, I was an early adopter.  These programs connected a PC or Mac to a keyboard using the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and frankly, there were more than a few bugs in the system.

It was not uncommon for me to spend all day, playing music into the computer, reformatting, spacing it just right, and meticulously editing lyrics, only to have the program crash right before I took a break for dinner.  Just like working in word processors of the time, I learned to save my work often, but unlike word processors, saving work was not necessarily an indication that I could actually retrieve my work later. The midi files would often become corrupted at which point, none of my work was salvageable.

The first few tens of times this happened, I was completely dejected. All of my time and effort was wasted.  My brilliant compositions were lost forever, sacrificed to the fickle and wicked gods of MIDI.  I cursed the software, the computer, the keyboard, and myself for being such a lazy composer.  Mozart never had notation software, and he seemed to do okay.  Every time this happened I would sulk for a while, have stiff drink or two, and start all over again the next day.

Over time I began to notice a pattern emerging.  The work that took me all day to do the day before, only took half a day to complete the second time around, and in the process of recreating my earlier work, I invariably streamlined, simplified, and generally created something markedly better than I had done the day before.  This was universal.  I never once ended up with a worse piece of music having lost my original to MIDI corruption. Over time I came to relish in these opportunities.  I would rock up to dinner with friends, beaming with satisfaction and when they asked why I was so happy, I’d say “I lost all the music I wrote today to corrupt MIDI files.”  Needless to say, they thought I was nuts, but in my experience lost to corruption meant that I was going to create something even better the next day.

Continue Reading Lessons from a Former Life #3

Once upon a time

In my second year of college I started an independent study course with an associate professor to learn music composition.  I’d had years of study, and I figured I knew just about everything there was to know about the theory of music by that point.  I regularly spent hours in the practice room catacombs writing through-composed rock operas that would one day fill arenas of people all singing along.  I didn’t really need composition lessons, but I figured, what the hell, I’m good at this. I’ll get an assignment day one, turn it around in an hour and spend the rest of the week writing my own stuff.  Easy A.

On day one, I showed up and the professor asked me to play some of my music, so he could understand where I was in my development as a composer.  I played a handful of my latest hits.  These were pieces that all of my friends loved.  One was raucous and loud, with a catchy melody and wild bluesy piano riffs.  One was sweet and quiet, and guaranteed to make every girl’s mother cry.  Some were upbeat and fun, and some were boisterous and stirring.  I chose these pieces to show off my range of styles and emotions.

The professor was very complimentary.  It clearly wasn’t the kind of music he wrote or listened to, but he could appreciate my passion and recognized that I had talent.  He thought about it for a moment and said, “Okay, here’s your assignment for the week, I want you to write a melody.”

“Great, yep.  Any particular style?  Time signature?  Key?”

“Nope, I don’t care about any of that. But I want it to be a single stand-alone melody of at least 32 bars.”

“Cool, uh huh.  Got it. Can do.”

“Using only two intervals.”

I swear someone in the other room pulled a needle across a record at that very moment.

Continue Reading Lessons from a Former Life #2

via Giphy

When I was a young man, I hated practicing the piano.  Beethoven. Haydn. Schumann. Boring. And truth be told, I was never a very good pianist, but I loved playing the piano.  I would sit and play for hours, not any written music mind you, I was just exploring the keyboard, trying different combinations, listening to the various harmonies and dissonances that I could create.  My mother tells horror stories of hours of the same 4 chords played with slight variation, over and over and over again and again and again until she would scream, “Don’t you have some MUSIC to practice?”

My piano teacher knew I was never going to be a great pianist, but in the fifth grade she made a deal with me.  For every great masterwork I learned, I could create my own.  From that moment on, I always played two pieces at each recital.  One boring piece some dead white European guy (DWEG) wrote, and one brilliant original McClead composition. Continue Reading Lessons from a Former Life #1

I’ve gotten a bit of grief from friends and colleagues for starting a series of blog posts on lessons I learned from my time as a musician and composer that I now use every day in my capacity as a legal technologist, then building to the announcement that I’m starting my own consulting company, and then immediately dropping off the face of the earth again.  I will come back to that series shortly, I promise, but as you can imagine I’ve been all consumed with the new company for the last few months.

As I write this, I am sitting on a train from New York to Boston to attend the College of Law Practice Management Futures Conference, where I and Geek #1 will be inducted as fellows.  Toby and Casey are already fellows, so we’re quickly approaching Phase 2 of 3 Geeks World Domination, (ed. – First rule of 3GWD: We don’t talk about 3GWD, Ryan!) but my 4-hour train journey gives me a bit of time to reflect, regroup, and rewrite.

The interesting thing about starting a company in the midst of a series of posts about lessons from a past life, is that it makes me think a lot about how I’ll use the lessons I’m learning today in my future endeavors. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned in recent weeks that I’m planning to keep in mind as I go forward.

1) Approach new opportunities as if you know nothing. Continue Reading Lessons for a Future Life

At present, the most universal priority for law departments is “controlling outside counsel costs” per 85% of respondents to the most recent TR Legal Department Operations Index.

I understand. I also doubt the marginal utility of simply pressing harder on the traditional levers of cost control (discounts, panels, RFPs, outside counsel guidelines, AFAs). My sometimes solicited, alternative advice:

  • Package work. Identify opportunities to enter portfolio arrangements, including integrated law relationships with New Law offerings.
  • Move work. Right source, including greater use of legal marketplaces to find the right talent at the right price.
  • Re-examine costs on autopilot. Major advances in ediscovery, ADR, court reporting, staffing, etc. present substantial, immediate spend-optimization opportunities.
  • Don’t stop investing in compliance by design. Embedding legal knowledge in business processes is the only viable, long-term approach to meeting the evolving legal needs of business in an increasingly complex operating environment.

If you want to discuss, call me, maybe.

Herein, however, I am not focused on being better. Rather, we will continue our exploration of avoiding worse. The unpalatable message remains that even when something must be done, doing nothing is superior to doing the wrong thing. Running in the wrong direction cannot be course corrected solely by redoubling our efforts.

Continue Reading Trust Fall: the limits of discounts, panels, billing guidelines, etc.

This week’s guest, HBR Consulting‘s Axelle Flemming, stresses that “Intentional Leadership” creates leaders who “own their purpose.” And a purpose is separate from a business “goal.” Axelle’s experience showed her that when a leader truly knew what their purpose was, the purpose they were trying to achieve, they went to that level of execution. In addition to being an Intentional Leader, that must be balanced with the wellness of the organization and its people. In today’s work environment, we are in 24/7 fight or flight mode and intentional leaders understands that challenge. Leaders also see beyond their own goals and purpose and see other people’s goals and purpose as well.
On Thursday, September 15th, Axelle Flemming is presenting a Keynote presentation at HBR’s Legal Information + Knowledge Services (LINKS) Conference, on this very issue. She “sprinkles” in some of the spice of her talk her on the podcast, but will bring the “secret sauce” to the LINKS Conference.
Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert, along with John DiGilio will wrap up the conference through a discussion of Axelle Flemming’s and the other presentations of the day.
Registration for the LINKS event is open all the way through the day of the conference.

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AALL Crystal Ball Answer
Our good friend, Mark Gediman of Alston & Bird, answers our Crystal Ball question by predicting how Law Schools and Law Firms will collaborate on business and competitive intelligence processes to help law students better prepare for the practice of law once they enter the profession.
Links Discussed:
Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7821‬
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: 
Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript:

Continue Reading Intentional Leadership is about Owning Your Purpose – HBR’s Axelle Flemming (TGIR Ep. 173)

Five years ago, Dr. Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and co-founder, Gardner & Co, wrote the book, “Smart Collaboration” where she laid out the “why” behind smart collaboration efforts. In her upcoming sequel, “Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work,” Dr. Gardner explains the “who” and the “how” behind collaboration. The issues that law firms face today are incredibly complex and multifaceted. And in an industry famous for “going it alone,” that approach exposes firms to much greater risk than those who find ways of implementing “smarter collaboration” techniques. 
Smarter Collaboration helps increase revenues, profits, and efficiencies while reducing risks and improving client relationships and positive outcomes. While the idea of collaboration may sound like a “soft topic” for law firm leaders, Dr. Gardner points out that there is empirical data behind this and if firms are not engaging in smarter collaboration when doing the “real work” then they are either doing something that is pretty low value, or that falls into the realm of commodity work.  
In addition to data driven analysis, Smarter Collaboration also includes a number of examples of how companies and law firms thrive through the use of Smarter Collaboration. Plus, there is a test on determining behavioral tendencies when it comes to collaboration. This psychometric tool helps identify seven different dimensions which can lead to great collaboration within the organization, or may be barriers to collaboration. And, as strange as it may sound to those of us in the legal industry, law firms are not unique when it comes to collaborative behaviors. In fact, Dr. Gardner says law firms are more different from each other than they are from other professional services industries or large corporations.
Listen in for more details on the upcoming book, Smarter Collaboration.

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AALL Crystal Ball Question
This week we have John Beatty from the University of Buffalo Law School answer our crystal ball question where he points out that the pipeline of traditional law librarians for law schools may be running dry.
Links Mentioned:
Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Transcript

 

Continue Reading Increased Revenue, Profits, and Efficiencies through “Smarter Collaboration” – Dr. Heidi Gardner (TGIR Ep. 169)

HyperDraft’s Tony Thai knew he could produce a better method of practicing law and producing legal documents. He viewed processes more like an engineer than a lawyer and understood that there were more efficient ways to do the work, not for the sake of efficiency, but because like any good engineer, he was lazy. Or, as he describes himself, “aggressively lazy.” Not lazy in the traditional sense, but rather lazy in the way that many of us understand that the current way of working is just wasting everyone’s time, and there has to be an easier/better/faster way of doing it. The good kind of lazy.
So after months and years of waiting for the industry to find ways of creating a better process, and failing to actually do it, he jumped in and just did it himself. The idea that he’d been working on and developing to make his own corporate law work better, became his full-time gig and the launch of HyperDraft. This year his fellow BigLaw colleague, Sean Greaney joined HyperDraft as its first General Counsel.
We talk about their journey to create a commercial product. Along the way we ask if creativity, innovation, and producing viable commercial products like HyperDraft means that lawyers at firms have to split off from that firm? The answer is a mix of yes, no, and maybe. One thing that both point out is that while the idea may be viable, a young associate really doesn’t have the legal experience needed to understand the nuances involved in creating a deliverable that scales and fits the overall needs of the lawyer and the client. That’s why Tony and Sean stuck around for a few more years to learn the in’s and out’s of the processes before leaving to launch HyperDraft. It’s a lesson that many entrepreneur/lawyers may want to learn before launching their own startups.

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AALL Crystal Ball Questions:
We recorded a number of crystal ball answers at this year’s American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual conference in Denver. This week, Susan DeMaine from Indiana University Maurer School of Law looks at the effect that inflation is having on law schools and how she and other law school professors and administrators are needing to do to stay ahead of those effects.
Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Listener Perk:
HyperDraft is providing Geek in Review podcast listeners with a complimentary month free of its document automation software.
Save 90% of the time drafting legal documents. Click here to try HyperDraft for free.
Transcript:

Continue Reading HyperDraft’s Tony Thai and Sean Greaney – The Compatibility of BigLaw and Innovative Lawyers (TGIR Ep.167)

For those of us who went to law school, a large percentage probably assumed we’d graduate, take the bar, and practice law. But, sometimes life takes you in a different direction. Today’s guest fits that mold, and also decided to talk with 15 other law school grads who also found careers outside the traditional legal practice. Adam Pascarella is the Founder of Second Order Capital Management, and the author of the new book, Reversed in Part: 15 Law School Grads on Pursuing Non-Traditional Careers. Within the book, you’ll also find two former TGIR guests, Ayelette Robinson and Richard Hsu.

Reversed in Part is designed to give inspiration and some practical insights from professionals who followed their passions and how their legal career experiences helped them along the way. Adam tells us how he essentially used the interviews to help guide himself into a career outside of BigLaw and take the risk to start his own business.

LegalWeek Crystal Ball Question

This week we hear from Michael Burns, Chief Revenue Officer at Steno on what he sees for the legal industry when he peers into his crystal ball. For the industry to improve, it’s going to take the help of allied professionals, automation, and even API integration to make it a reality.

Congrats to Marlene

For those who haven’t seen yet, Marlene was included in the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center’s Women of Legal Tech 2022Such a great list of leaders, including five former guests. It was nice of the ABA’s LTRC to give us an additional list of eleven more leaders who we need to get on the podcast!!

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Contact Us

Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert

Voicemail: 713-487-7270

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: Jerry David DeCicca

Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 154 – Adam Pascarella’s “Reversed in Part” – 15 Stories of Non-Traditional Careers After Law School