Back in the wild cyber-space days of the early 1990s the metaphors we used to describe our online tools were thrilling. We used web-browsers called Navigator or Explorer, we found our way in the real world using MapQuest, and we searched for content along the information super-highway using engines called Magellan, AltaVista, or Northern Light.  During this time it was not uncommon to spend hours browsing the internet. But most people didn’t browse for enjoyment, they set out to find the phone number for their local pizza joint and ended up reading about the life cycle of the African Tsetse fly.  We browsed because there was no easy way to find exactly what we were looking for.  Favorites, or Bookmarks, weren’t simply reminders of something interesting to read later but electronic insurance that once we found something useful we’d be able to get back to it again.

This bizarre, illogical, exciting, spontaneous, and often frustrating world began to change in 1996 when two Stanford students had a brilliant insight. They surmised that the number of links that pointed to a particular site might be a good indicator of how popular that site was and that the popularity of the site might be a good indicator of how valuable the information contained therein might be to a searcher.  They gave their mashup of textual search and link popularity the name of a ridiculously large number (misspelled) and poof! gone were the great adventurous metaphors.  You no longer explored, navigated, or even searched or browsed the internet, you no longer spent time or worked to find what you needed, you just Googled it. And if Google didn’t find it, it probably didn’t exist.

Coincidentally, the rise of Google corresponded to the electronification of the workplace.  Files, documents, memos, and forms were all replaced by their electronic counterparts.  Rather than creating everything on paper in triplicate with copies sent to catalogers and archivists, we began to store electronic versions in document management systems, shared network drives, keychain thumb drives, email inboxes, intranets, extranets, collaboration portals, and knowledge bases. We stored at least as many different document formats as we had locations. We had faith in the promise of Google, or their in-house equivalent, to sort it all out later.

In truth, Google had it relatively easy.  They had one type of document (HTML) and one ranking metric (popularity, as calculated by PageRank).  That alone was enough to catapult them beyond their search competition. But of course they didn’t stop there. Google hired the best engineers, built the best infrastructure, and greatly expanded their computing power.  Then they built or bought internet tools that made your online life easier and they gave them away for “free” in return for your personal information.  With GMail, Google+, Google Drive, YouTube, Blogger, and many more, Google now knows darn near everything about you.  They incorporate all of that information into your own personalized search algorithm which returns unique results tailored just to you. You just type in a few moderately specific words, Google does it’s magic, and chances are pretty good you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Users have come to expect – even demand – Google simplicity, Google speed, and Google quality. Which brings us to the current state of Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search tools have more in common with pre-Google search engines than they do with Google. They don’t know very much about you and they don’t tailor your results accordingly. They rely on your own infrastructure, computing power, and IT technicians to support their product. Most importantly, they don’t have a single, simple metric, like PageRank, with which they can easily filter the results for relevance. Instead, they rely on algorithms which weigh the prevalence and proximity of search words in the indexed content to determine relevant results. This is roughly the equivalent of determining the most powerful family in town by the number of entries in the phone book with the same surname. To be fair, despite their own Enterprise Search Appliance, Google hasn’t made huge in-roads in the enterprise either.  I suspect that’s because it’s actually much harder (and less lucrative) to do Enterprise Search well than it is to index the entire internet.

Still, we need to help our users find relevant content within the enterprise, so what can we do?

First, we need to start by managing the expectations of the users.  “We’re not Google. You’ll have to be much more specific about what you’re looking for if you hope to find it. You may even need to learn (gasp!) how to perform Boolean operations, or at least take the time to use the check-box filters we’ve provided.”

Secondly, we need to admit that despite the remarkable success of Google, search is not obviously the best way to find all content.  We could probably learn a lot from those forms we used to fill out in triplicate.  Habitually sending copies of content that needs to be indexed, cataloged, and archived to people whose job it is to help us find it later isn’t a bad idea, it just got superseded by our affair with technology.  Maybe instead of search we should focus more on new ways to use technology to help those people do their jobs.

And finally, I want to challenge any potential young Larry Pages out there to come up with a simple idea like PageRank for enterprise content. It will probably seem extremely obvious in retrospect and I promise it will make you fabulously wealthy.

Unless I think of it first.

Image [cc] dground

One of my biggest pet peeves about working in a law firm is that we are completely reactive in our operations, and we are quick to jump on the next project without reviewing what we have just finished. Toby touched on the reactive process of our business model yesterday, so I’ll focus on the lack of process review today. When I was in the Army, we called this an “After Action Review.” The idea is pretty simple and can be summed up by asking five open-ended questions:

  1. What was our mission? 
  2. What actually happened?
  3. Why was there a difference?
  4. What have we learned?
  5. What will we do about it?
The key to this whole process is to extract the things that went right (and why they went right) and the things that didn’t go as planned (and why they went wrong), and memorialize that information so that we continue to do the right things, and we adjust our processes on the things that didn’t go as planned. In the Army, it can literally mean the difference between life and death… luckily for law firms, it doesn’t go to that extreme.
There are two obvious stumbling blocks that are present in the law firm environment regarding these types of post-matter or post-project reviews:
  • The need to assign blame if something went wrong
  • The fact that you can’t charge a client for the time you spend on these reviews
As for the first issue, these reviews cannot turn into gripe sessions. The purpose of the review is to take a very cold, calculated look at the situation, the timeline, the people, the processes, and the results. I like to refer to it as an autopsy without blame. The results of the review (and you need to keep everyone’s eye on this goal throughout the process) is to identify what we learned, and what we will do next time to create an equal or greater outcome. Period. 

Now, for the “but, we can’t bill our time” issue. A law firm is a business, run it as such. If you think that you cannot afford to take the time to do a review of your previous matter or project, then you are doing a disservice to those people you lead, your clients, and to yourself. The time you take to work out what went wrong in the prior matter can help prevent you from making that same mistake in the next.

Image [cc] J. Paxon Reyes

Dear Client,

 You have been pretty clear about wanting to save money. AFAs, bigger discounts and all sorts of ‘cost savings’ messages are being sent to firms. Law firms have responded with an array of pricing proposals, which are often set aside in favor of bigger discounts. Whether this saves you money or not, no one is sure. But at least you are being specific about what you want and accepting nothing less.

 As an extension of those cost savings messages, you have also talked about wanting more efficiency. Here’s where we are running into a problem. What do you mean by efficiency? Law firms assume you generally mean doing things with less hours. But you could also want firms doing things with cheaper hours. Or doing things with technology instead of humans. Or maybe even to stop doing certain things. Which is it? Or is it some combination? Are there certain approaches on the list you don’t want firms to employ?

 You are starting to see the problem here.

 Absent specific instructions to your law firms, they are not sure what to do. Most firms believe they are already being efficient. From their perspective, they do things with the least amount of hours they can. There you go. Efficiency achieved.

 But its likely you are not satisfied with this answer. Which leaves law firms a bit confused or at a minimum ignorant of your needs. So, as a favor to your firms, be a bit more specific about what it is you want exactly the next time you ask for more efficiency. 

 Signed,
Waiting For More Guidance

UPDATE: To our good fortune, John Wallbillich over at WiredGC, was gracious enough to respond with “My Lawyer, He Wrote Me a Letter.” If only more clients would respond like this.

Sound crazy? Yes and No. Yes – in that a provider of a service isn’t already laser-focused on efficiency  No – in that this reactive approach is the mantra of the legal profession.

Lawyers are really responsive. They are great at doing whatever the client asks. But not until the client asks. Law firms don’t show up on the client’s door and suggest they need to sue some other company  They wait until the client calls them with a lawsuit and asks them to represent them before they do anything. That’s the paradigm of the profession. Unfortunately, this mind-set has put law firms in a passive, reactive relationship with their clients on many other fronts, including efficiency.

So … my guess is that until clients specifically ask for some type of efficiency  law firms will continue to wait for more direction. Lawyers do know how to file motions and write great contracts. Efficiency? Not so much.

Of course the smart lawyers will shed their passive, reactive ways and go engage in efficiency conversations with clients. But equally likely, there won’t be enough of that. Thus the letter to clients.

Geek #1 and I had the opportunity to get a preview of the new Lexis Practice Advisor (LPA) Corporate Counsel Module. Now you might wonder why the two of us would care about such a product, given our roles in large firms. Well … it’s precisely those roles that make this new tool an interesting development.

We have previously reviewed LPA versions on 3 Geeks and found the product platform to be useful. We especially appreciate how the product targets segments of the legal market versus trying to be all things to all people. Given the name – Corporate Counsel – this version is obviously focused on in-house lawyers.

However, in-house lawyers are actually a diverse group. So Lexis took this a step further in to the segment and targeted a general business practice for in-house counsel. So the product is focused on meeting the day-to-day demands of a general transactional in-house lawyer.

And it does it well. The content and tools are on target for this segment. The content is centered on hundreds of legal forms, such as agreements, contracts and other transactional instruments that include checklists and related content. This material allows in-house counsel to respond to the needs of their internal business unit clients quickly and effectively. In addition to rich content, the service includes a human element – for questions related to the content and its use.

Does this type of tool take business from lawyers? Probably – but that’s a good thing. When I hear lawyers refer to legal work as ‘commodity’ this is really what that mean. This is a relatively low-value type of service, but it meets immediate and pressing needs and solves very real problems for clients.

My bottom-line: It is both interesting and refreshing to see Lexis developing a service like this and targeting the client side of the market with it. I think this service will definitely benefit in-house lawyers. Part of the interesting aspect of this will be seeing if (or more likely when) other providers will start selling legal-related products directly to clients. This product has the potential to validate that market approach. I could see other players taking advantage of similar high-pain, price sensitive markets that lawyers have essentially abandoned.

Many believed that Canadian leverage was too high compared to US and UK firms, but the Canadian economy is stable, our lawyers are talented and the merger announcements keep coming. Until recently, the Canadian market has been relatively sheltered from major international mergers. Until Norton Rose merged with Ogilvy Renault as of June 1, 2011, and with long standing Alberta based MacLeod Dixon as of January 1, 2012. 
Just last week, on November 7th 2012,  SNR Denton, Salans and Canadian firm Fraser Milner Casgrain announced a three way merger, to create a new global law firm with about 2,500 lawyers and 79 offices. And today, another announcement, effective June 1, 2013 involves Norton Rose again, but this time with Fulbright and Jaworski.  The combined firm will be a global legal practice that will include 3,800 lawyers in 55 offices across the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.  Can you imagine the conflicts that had to be cleared for that one? 
These recent mergers are game changers for US, UK, Canadian and all International firms.  To deny its impact and influence, whether the future brings success or failure would be inane.  It will have an impact and all I can hear is  R.E.M. playing in my head…. “it’s the end…..”

In a news day full of law firm mergers, there is a smaller merger that just happened that will cause some adjustment for those of us that deal with court filings. CaseFileXpress and LexisNexis File & Serve were spun off and now are a brand new company called File & ServeXpress.

Here’s the announcement I just received:

Dear Valued CaseFileXpress Client,
We have exciting news to share with you!
Today, CaseFileXpress® and LexisNexis’ File & Serve® were acquired by a newly formed company, File & ServeXpress, becoming the leading provider of e-Filing and stand-alone e-Service solutions to the legal industry—servicing over 165,000 users across 275 jurisdictions and processing more than 45 million documents annually.

File & ServeXpress, based in Irving, Texas, will continue to offer e-Filing and e-Service solutions that fit all types and sizes of courts, cases and practice areas and universally compatible e-Filing systems that connect directly to existing court document and case management systems.
As a client of CaseFileXpress, you will receive the same delivery team and 24×7 support and service that we have provided for the last nine years. This transfer of ownership will have no impact to your account and all of the following will remain the same:
…
As we work to combine the two companies, our focus will be to continue implementing requests from clients including, but not limited to, technology improvements, access to more jurisdictions, additional service offerings, and expanded customer support. We will continue to communicate with you as changes occur.

Thank you for your business, and we look forward to continuing our relationship as your business partner.

Sincerely,
Tamerlane Carter

Tamerlane Carter
File & ServeXpress
Image [cc] jessamyn

There is a theme that I hear from interviews of today’s struggling musicians, “I really wish we had been making music in the 90’s.” The idea behind that, although it might be like that Utopian 1950’s United States that never really existed, is that there was a time when people bought music, record companies supported bands through promotion and concert funding, and that if you were a good band that had a following, you could make a lot of money in the process. It seems that those of us in the Library, Information and Research profession think along the same lines as those musicians. There was a golden age where information was scarce, people needed our assistance in collecting that information, and we were there to support those in need of obtaining the information. Now, just like musicians, we wished there was a way to get back to those golden years, but we know that it is gone forever, and we struggle to define what it is that we can do that will still fill our desires to succeed in our professions.

The problem with both the music world and the information world is that anyone can now cut a song or directly obtain information without going through the tradition processes of a music studio or a library. The once scarce resources are now so common that there seems to be almost no barriers to obtaining these resources. A five-dollar app on my iPad can produce high-quality music, and an Internet connection can bring in amazing amounts of high-quality information. No longer are music studios or libraries the only place to go to get what you need. That has caused an enormous amount of upheaval in both of these industries, and the professionals that work in these industries, but at the same time, the consumers of these industries have more options than ever. So, how do we, at least on the library and information side of this situation, adapt?

The record industry is still trying to catch up with the paradigm shift, and they misfired on many occasions in adjusting to the shift by continually trying to find ways of getting their industry back to a model that simply didn’t exist any longer. Instead of looking at the needs of the consumer, they looked at the needs of the industry. The same might be said of the library industry. We look at ways that technology and services can be modified to give a better version of the same service instead of stepping back and creating new technologies and new services that fit the changing demands of the customers. In fact, we’ve probably spent too many years attempting to satisfy the needs of customers that will never, ever use us again because they can simply obtain what they want from a cheaper, faster resource (read: Google).

Syracuse University’s professor and Dean’s Scholar for the New Librarianship, David Lankes, discusses these changes in those that use information, and how those of us that believe we provide relevant information are not on the same page. A very good article on this topic is in this month’s Information Today, Inc. where Lankes comes right out and says that where we, as a profession, are going, is not where our customers are heading. To paraphrase Lankes, our customers are dreaming of the things they want to do, while the librarians are attempting to make them give up those dreams in order to follow the guidelines and rules we set up to make our own jobs easier. If we continue to try to make our customers fit into our defined services, we are destined to fail. Instead, we need to define our services based on those dreams of our customers. Since we are not the only game in town any longer, the customers will simply leave and go to those services that fulfill their dreams.

For today’s musician as well as today’s librarian, there are amazing opportunities to serve a community in a way that makes you more valued by a smaller group of people. The same technology and shifts in the way customers access music/information that has caused us all headaches can also be leveraged in ways that expand our reach beyond our traditional customer base. For musicians, it is exposing the styles of your trade to groups of potential customers through self-promotion and understanding the different potential communities that are out there that desire to hear you, but just don’t know you exist. For the library, it is slightly different, but the idea is that you find out where your community wants to go, and for you to set up your services to help get them there and then partner with that community to help them get to the next place they want to go.

Pinterest announced a new feature last Friday–secret boards.

Now, I know you are wondering: why in the world would a law firm care about Pinterest? Well, as I suggested in an earlier post, Pinterest is law firm-friendly. You just need to be creative!

So what can a law firm do with secret boards? Well, for one, keep track of competitors and clients, of course!

Another nice feature is that it you can invite folks to a private board to view your photos. I find Pinterest to be a great place to look at very large graphics, particularly infographs and charts. So if you had to showcase a large number of graphics to  a disparate group, this would  be a perfect spot to do so. They can leave comments and mark items as favorites.

Secret boards are also a perfect way to build your boards and test-drive them before a launch. We all know how lawyers want everything to be perfect before we push send. So this is a way for us marketers to set up a board, pick just the right images and arrange the lay-out before it goes live.

And, as always, make sure that you have rights to post the images that you are using–we don’t want to run afoul of the law.

Just a few thoughts on how to use my new favorite social media site!

I’ve heard this this latest James Bond movie, Skyfall, is to be the best one yet. Spy extraordinaire, man-about-town, and basically the alpha-est of the alpha males, every male that I know wants to be him.

So how can you let your inner spy out when doing your super-sleuthing?

Here are a couple of tips for those of you who have never thought to use social media for research purposes:

  1. Anonymity. Don’t do what James Bond does, being all tuxedoed out and gorgeous looking. Down play yourself. Turn on your privacy settings. If you are going on LinkedIn, make sure your broadcast activity settings, status update settings and “what do others see when you view their page” settings are off.
  2. Look at everything. Many people stop at doing a simple people search on LinkedIn, looking for connections. Dig deeper. Look at LinkedIn company sites, job postings; Google+; Twitter streams, followers and followings; blog scrapings.
  3. Connect the dots. Speculate, put two and two together. If someone is asking for information about one specific issue, pull back and try to get a view of the bigger picture and how your client’s request might fit into the bigger scheme of things going on in their industry. That will open doors to new avenues to investigate. This is where you can really shine and show off your knowledge about an industry.
Now this all sounds really vague but, as I have said before about marketing, it is an art, not a science. It is about knowing your industry, the market and your client to deliver the crown jewels. 
Be part James Bond, part Nancy Drew and part Cat Woman. Hey, that’s what I strive for!

Image [cc] s_falkow

While reading Businessweek’s article called Yammer, Chatter, Hot Water, there was a part of the article that really grabbed my attention. We’ve discussed getting away from using email as an internal communications tool before, but according to Yammer’s CEO and a Deloitte Digital research study, the benefits don’t just stop at an uncluttered email inbox, they go straight to the moral of the employees that use the products:

“E-mail requires an active response,” says David Sacks, chief executive officer of Yammer, a three-year-old startup in San Francisco that says it provides social-networking software to 100,000 companies. When using Yammer or its rivals, “you don’t have to wait for someone to send you something. You can find it on your own.” Sacks touts the applications as a way to foster camaraderie and loyalty, citing research by tech consultancy Deloitte Digital that showed almost no turnover among its employees who use Yammer frequently. [emphasis added] 

These types of internal social networks are becoming the equivalent of “engineers’ notebooks” where employees “discuss new ideas and then track how they become actual products, producing a stream of information the company could use to claim ownership of an invention.”

Of course, the article itself goes on to discuss the risks of these internal social networks, and how the ‘informal’ nature of these networks might cause employees to act inappropriately (as in, discussing ideas that break laws or regulations.) However, with most processes that have high returns, there involves an amount of risk as well. The good news is that there are companies, like Belkin, that are willing to take those risks in order to create an environment that encourages collaboration, idea sharing, and the serendipity moments that arise from a free flow of communications. Companies are balancing the informal communications platform by also reminding and advising their employees to not to write things that violate laws, regulations or other company policies. Belkin’s CIO, Deanna Johnston understands that the risks of encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit will eventually cause a problem, and they’ll adjust their policies as needed. Johnston sums it up nicely by saying, “You have to get on the train… It is not going away.”