Toby Brown

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The Auto Mechanic's Guide to Building Trust

By Toby Brown on October 18, 2011

Consider the degree of trust you should have in your auto mechanic. You will probably never know the quality of work before, during and even after you receive it. You have to trust your mechanic’s diagnosis and then trust the quality of service you receive in the repair. It is difficult-to-impossible to truly know anything

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Q&A with Jim McGann on Litigation Readiness

By Toby Brown on October 17, 2011

Yet another 2011 ILTA Conference chance meeting lead to an interesting Q&A with Jim McGann VP of Information Discovery at Index Engines. In my prior role at Fulbright, I worked with the e-discovery practice group on developing ideas for building client relationships. As part of this we offered a “Litigation Readiness Audit” to help

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Native Format and Redaction Requests – Give Them What They’re Entitled to and No More

By Toby Brown on October 7, 2011

At the 2011 ILTA Annual Conference I had the opportunity to refresh some of my e-discovery knowledge. A few years back I was in that market and like to stay up on developments. To this end I met with Christine Musil, Director of Marketing for Informative Graphics Corp. She gave me the run-down on

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Assessing Your Value Proposition

By Toby Brown on October 7, 2011

All this talk of Value related to legal services brought back a value lesson I recall from a few years back. The methodology I saw provides a direct way of assessing any value proposition. In its most basic form the measurement is: If you removed “X,” what will the impact be on “Y.”

For instance

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A New Tech Low

By Toby Brown on September 29, 2011

Greg and I decided to try something new. These “new thing” efforts typically occur during a three-beer solution, brainstorming session. This time we may have actually doubled our efforts, since the outcome has been … tragic.

We decided to try an affordable approach to tablets. With all the tablet hype and market growth going on,

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Growing Chorus on the Deregulation of the Practice of Law?

By Toby Brown on September 25, 2011

Since the post on “Is Practice of Law Already Deregulated?” I have seen numerous other books, articles and posts on this topic. Also since this post, I have challenged colleagues from a variety of roles, on whether I was off-base in my analysis. I wanted people to challenge my assertion that the practice

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Document Analysis & Generation with Google Docs – Say What?

By Toby Brown on September 20, 2011

Kingsley Martin has done it again. We have previously mentioned his next-generation, analysis KM system on 3 Geeks before, but recently he crossed another threshold: Document Generation with Google Docs.

In a prior dot-com life, I used to sign NDAs at least once a week. I always wondered why they were so different, but

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Using River Logic to Build AFAs

By Toby Brown on September 19, 2011

A recent post on Slaw highlighted an interesting tool called eGanges which employs the Ishikawa Fishbone approach to solving legal problems. This approach uses river logic in contrast to a decision tree approach. Beyond the wonderful ‘Ishikawa Fishbone’ name, I see some potential applications in the AFA world for a tool like this and river

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Want Efficiency? Look to the Little Things

By Toby Brown on September 16, 2011

Post ILTA, I’ve been meaning to share an idea along with a practical example of how lawyers might gain efficiencies – efficiencies being one of the new, hoped-for goals of the legal profession.

At ILTA I had the opportunity to meet Ian Levit of Levit & James. In addition to being a fellow Mel

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Rewarding Sales Efforts by Lawyers: A Response

By Toby Brown on September 13, 2011

Recently Ron Friedmann posted an intriguing idea on his blog about having some partner (or lawyer) comp being tied to sales efforts (a.k.a closing on new business). I had the incredible fortune of attending the dinner he referenced and was able to participate in this dialogue.

One might argue all partner comp is tied to

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