The last time I wrote a blog post for Three Geeks was in 2021. It was the height of COVID, and I had just hosted my first (and only) Clubhouse session. We were talking about the Billable Hour.
Clubhouse has since faded into the recesses of memory. COVID, thankfully, has too. But the billable hour
Last night (April 13th, 2021) I had the privilege of being on the “stage” for a Clubhouse discussion around the Billable Hour. Is it alive and well? Yes. It is COVID resistant. Is it ever going to change? Hopefully! What do in house counsel think about the billable hour? Some hate it, some
For the first time since the beginning of the year I have some quiet time to reflect and write. I feel like the end of 2020 and early into the new year, there was a deluge of stimuli on the daily. Between traditional press and social media, something was always buzzing somewhere. There were cases
Yesterday (4, 21,20), while I was putting the finishing touches on this post, the AmLaw 100 was released. As always upon release there was lots of analysis, conjecture and even some predictions about the future of the legal industry post pandemic. This post as you will read is not a prediction about the economic
The past week I had the pleasure of presenting at the 13th Annual Ark Conference Competitive Intelligence in the Modern Law Firm. I am totally blown away that this one day conference is in its 13th year and still going strong. The quality of the presentations was outstanding. There were new and
Late last month, on behalf of Thomson Reuters, I had the privilege of facilitating a mini Hack-A-
Thon with 30ish lawyers from Cassels Brock at their annual Lawyers Retreat. The idea was to take lawyers who are already out of the office and give them some time to reflect on their workflows, their technology
Should law firms invest in more competitive intelligence? Asks Ron Friedmann. Um. Yes. Always 
yes. And not just law firms but every business should invest more in CI. Investing in knowing what you know, knowing what you don’t know and knowing what the market knows – about you and otherwise – is an investment every business should make. In the above mentioned article, CI is described as “The deeper the insight, the better. Competitive intelligence serves that purpose. It helps win business and improve service delivery.” The article goes on to talk about the ways CI can help law firm business development and marketing efforts, this post was expertly timed to come out in advance of the Legal Marketing Associations annual conference being held in Atlanta this coming week. The revisiting a February 2019 survey and calling for more CI is a great start, CI can help with business development.
But positioning CI only as BD and Marketing support sells CI short. CI can and should drive business development efforts but CI is much more. CI should be embedded in practice planning, strategic firm growth discussions, lateral hire diligence, office or practice expansion proposals. To borrow and expand on the SCIP.org definition of CI, it is a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing external and internal information that can affects your business. There are a few key elements to that definition that get lost when we think of CI as only competitive research to support BD and marketing efforts. Namely, the idea of CI being based on analysis, and a combination of internal and external information gathering. The aforementioned competitive research leaves out rigorous analysis and negates internal data, which firms are producing in mass quantities and not leveraging very well beyond pricing or resource planning. We need to bring the outside in. if we are going to truly do meaningful CI for our firms. CI needs to be systematic, it needs to be ongoing not only tied to a specific RFP or a moment in time, it should evolve with the firm and inform any business decision that requires both avoiding surprises (the fall of a competitor firm, the exit of an entire practice of lawyers from your firm to a competitor) and forecasting for the future (did we see e-sports coming as a burgeoning area of law?).
Continue Reading More CI? That’s Axiomatic
I was recently approached by the ARK Group to write a chapter for their forthcoming book about How Intelligence Functions within Law Firms Can and Should Support One Another. For years, and most recently in a series of ILTA webinars on CI, I have been advocating for collaborative intelligence. I may have even blogged about it here once or twice too. While writing my chapter, with the same title as this post, I was able to articulate a few concepts that I thought were worth sharing and reiterating, even if they all seem obvious.
Data Doesn’t Make Decisions it seems obvious, but I think in all the AI, RoboLawyer hype we need to be reminded. People are still central to decision making, data in its various forms and all the ranges of analysis from SWOT (simple) to AI algorithms (complex) still does require human intelligence and interaction to get at the nuance and understand sometimes complex emotional context.
Continue Reading Data Doesn’t Make Decisions
Last week, I had the opportunity to sit with 15 members of a large law firm’s administrative team for about 2 hours as I facilitated a Design Thinking workshop. Design Thinking is thoughtful as well as free flowing, a bit different for law firms. Once the domain of software development, it has been appropriated by
Over the past month I have given about a dozen talks in large conference settings with hundred of people, or at smaller intimate partner/ counsel lunches, or for people spanning the globe via webinar. The discussions have ranged in content and theme but all were legal industry favourites including: