I can admit it now: I was a pretty weird kid.

By the time I was twelve, I had already read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, along with George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. My mom thought that I would like them—she had read them while studying at Kent State University just a few years after the National Guard had killed four students.

And My dad had taken me and my two sisters to see The Planet of the Apes series and Soylent Green movies. Not exactly Disney.

So I knew about Ray Bradbury. I had seen The Illustrated Man–and, no, I don’t mean the book. I mean the movie. Starring Rod Steiger.

When I heard that he died today, it took me back to a rainy Sunday, stretched across the family room shag carpet in front of the TV. Hearing, again, Rod Steiger’s meandering, lisping tone as he weaved an eery tale from each of the lurid tattoos penned into his skin.

Bradbury’s binding of the technological, fantastical and psychological cast a spell that lured me into a world that I have visited again through the mirrors of Orson Scott Card and Stephen King’s writings.

Thank you, Raymond Bradbury, for introducing me to your new worlds. May we meet again in the future.

Legal Project Management (LPM) can now officially be crowned the buzz-phrase of 2012. Although not many firms have fully integrated LPM in to their practices, the need for embracing it is a foregone conclusion. Being faced with this challenge has caused me to put many brain cells on the how and why of LPM and what will drive productivity growth in law firms. Ron’s post on productivity helped bring my thinking in to the clarity of this blog post. From what I am seeing, the market is setting lower prices and now firms are trying to reduce the cost of their services, which translates in to productivity growth.

To Ron’s points on growth in productivity, law firms need to become ‘better, faster, cheaper’ (BFC). Obviously LPM plays a role in this. However, I believe LPM is necessary but not sufficient for BFC. Because in most respects (and I’m sure other bloggers may chime in here) LPM is about doing something the same way only with more discipline. It’s about defining how we do things and then institutionalizing that effort in a standardize way.

I have touched on this point before, however the BFC angle refined my thinking and I drove me to the following BFC definitions:

Better: Doing it (a task, matter, etc.) with the same or more resources but driving an improved outcome (a.k.a. higher value).
Faster: Doing it with the same resources and with the same outcome, but in a shorter period of time.
Cheaper: Doing it with fewer or cheaper resources and driving the same level of outcome.

Translated in to ‘legal’ these become:

Better: Doing it with the same or more hours, but getting a better result.
Faster: Doing it with the same hours, but in a shorter time-frame (probably with more people).
Cheaper: Doing it with fewer hours or by using people with lower rates or with technology.

There is an old engineering adage that says “Faster, better, cheaper — pick two.” This idea basically argues any system can optimize at most two factors, to the detriment of the third. Using LPM, at best you can restructure the project plan to improve one or maybe two of the factors, but only by sacrificing a reduction in the third one. Clients seem to be pushing on ‘cheaper’ with minimal attention to the other 2 factors. This begs the question of where should the focus be?

Real productivity growth comes when you change the system, which leads us to process improvement. This is where most businesses gain a competitive edge. They employ long-term process improvement techniques, along the lines of Six Sigma.

Which brings me back to my point: LPM is necessary but not sufficient to drive improvements in law firm productivity. Project management brings discipline to a process, but is not about improving a process over time. I believe growth in productivity is what clients really want, whether they see this explicitly or not. Discussions about ‘efficiency’ are too often vague with no real discussion about what that means (e.g. no first year associates on the bill). Instead the presumption is that ‘cheaper’ equals efficient.

So I’ll start my campaign now for BFC to become the heir-apparent buzz phrase for 2013. Instead of being a technique like LPM, it’s actually the desired goal.

Remember my 2011 rant on fax machines? Well, it looks like someone finally figured out an electronic solution: HelloFax.

Super-easy to set up, I was able to get an account up and running in about five minutes. The hardest part was importing a photograph of my signature. For that, I signed a piece of white paper, snapped a photo of it with my Droid, emailed it to myself, downloaded the image to my desktop then import the image to HelloFax.

Easy-peasy.

HelloFax choice 5 account tiers:

  1. Free: 5 free faxes, then $.99/fax, and 5 signature requests
  2. $4.99/Month: 50 faxes, 30-day free trial, and 10 signature requests
  3. $9.99/Month: 500 fax pages, 
    30-day free trial, fax multiple recipients, and unlimited signature requests
  4. $69.99/Month: 
    2000 fax pages,  30-day free trial, fax multiple recipients, and unlimited signature requests  

They’ve got some really nice features: a super-easy cover sheet; integration with DropBox, GoogleDrive and Box; and a way to integrate the system with your already existing fax number. HelloFax also sends a link with a  code to access a full-color, high resolution copy of the fax.

Also of note, back in April when GoogleDrive launched, HelloFax was its most installed app. I’m a little late to the launch party but that doesn’t dilute my enthusiasm!


The Consumerization of IT.  Bring Your Own Device. Personal Cloud Storage.  These buzzwords have sent IT departments the world over into a tizzy.  In fact, 37% of all IT related articles written in the last 2 years have been about one of these three concepts.  (I totally made that stat up.) We, as IT people, are obsessed with the consequences of allowing consumer devices and personal software behind the corporate firewall and well we should be.  The idea raises many questions:

  •  How can we support all of these various devices? 
  •  How will we keep our networks secure? 
  •  If they’re using their own software and hardware, do they really need us at all? 

These questions, and their many variations, are important and must be answered.  However, in the midst of our flesh rending and teeth gnashing, I think we have completely missed the biggest problem introduced by Consumer Technology in the Enterprise, it has given rise to the RETEs.

Recently Empowered Technology Enthusiasts are proto-geeks who have come to believe that they have a savant-like way with technology, because in recent years the technology they used to struggle so hard to use, now just comes to them naturally.  Most RETEs are harmless, sweet even.  Your mother became a RETE the first time she texted you from her new iPhone.  But there is a certain brand of RETE who is very dangerous, specifically for IT Departments dealing with Consumer Technology issues, the RETE in charge.
 
This person used to fight with their Blackberry daily.  They would get stuck in the menu tree and call IT to help them find their way out.  They bought a netbook because it was tiny and shiny and cool-looking, but they threw it out a window because it was too slow and would drop the wireless network every 5 minutes.  Then they discovered the iPhone, the iPad, and the App store.  The heavens opened and Steve Jobs in the guise of Prometheus bent toward them with the flame of all technical knowledge, passing it slowly in front of their face.  The scales of ignorance fell from their eyes and suddenly everything made sense.  Technology was easy!  Apps could do everything!  And that’s the moment when the question that strikes fear in the heart of every IT Guy first occurs to the RETE.  “Why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?”

It’s a perfectly valid question, but there are many obstacles to making technology at work as easy to use as commercially available consumer technology.  We have long term contracts and agreements with enterprise software makers.  We have security and support issues that consumer app makers don’t even consider, and we have industry and company specific requirements that they aren’t interested in addressing.  The RETE in charge doesn’t care, “Why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?”
Consumer software makers have spent the last few years building apps that aren’t just solving a particular problem for the user, but also doing it in a way that is intuitive and simple, that conforms to the user’s workflow instead of requiring the user to conform to the software.  The software learns the user instead of the other way around.  Intelligence is built into the back end of these apps so that users don’t even see it, let alone have to use their own.  “So… why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?”
Many enterprise software makers are just now hiring their first User Experience Engineer. They’re half a decade or more behind the consumer software developers.  The big guys, the one’s we’ve all been paying exorbitant licensing fees for the last 20 years, they’re going to struggle and many of them will fail in the coming years.  They’ll be replaced by little guys who have been building consumer apps and have been focused on the user experience all along.  These little guys will eventually nail the security and support issues too, and their focus on user experience and their lower overhead costs (read: lower licensing fees), will lead to enterprise level, intuitive, user-centric software in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, the question is still hanging in the air, waiting for a simple answer. “Why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?” 
If you come up with a good answer, drop me a line.  
Please…

One of my absolute favorite websites for learning about new products, or how to enhance my use of existing products is MakeUseOf. Unfortunately, they post dozens of updates each day and it can be a bit overwhelming to find updates that fall specifically into my wheelhouse. Yesterday, however, I did find a nice juicy nugget of information on LinkedIn that I wanted to point out to everyone. In the post 10 Little Known LinkedIn Features That Make It More Fun To Professionally Network, author Saikat Basu taught me a few new things about LinkedIn that I didn’t know. 

Just in case my word isn’t good enough to make you link over to the post, here are the 10 items that Basu highlights:

  1. Network with Cloak of Security (force LinkedIn to use https connections… good for public WiFi or shared computers.)
  2. Your Own LinkedIn News Daily (a very eloquent display of top LinkedIn headlines found under that “news” tab that I’ve never clicked on before.
  3. Go Text To Speech With LinkedIn News (not my cup of tea, but the SpeechIn might be something others would use.)
  4. Make Contact Without Making a Connection (initially connect with someone that may not be willing to click the old accept button from your request.)
  5. Browse In Stealth Mode (when you don’t want people to see you on their Who’s Viewed Your Profile screen.)
  6. Set Up A LinkedIn Search (Email) Alert (have your search results emailed to you periodically)
  7. Find The Right Group To Join (by using a Group Statistics feature, you could narrow down your choices of groups significantly.)
  8. Map Your LinkedIn Professional Network (very cool function from the LinkedInLabs apps.)
  9. Export Your Connections (nothing is better than an Excel spreadsheet full of contacts.)
  10. Waste Time With Tetris (AKA DropIn) (between this, Cubeduel and Snake & Ladders, you’ll waste a lot of your professional time.)
There a lots more interesting things coming out of the LinkedInLabs site, so you’ll want to go check it out right after you read the MakeUseOf post.

If you have a service that gets 20 million unique users a month, and you have personal information on those users, what could you do with it? For the staffers at music streaming site, Grooveshark, the answer was to build a free tool that shows the demographics, culture and lifestyles, habits, and product preferences of those users that listen to particular artist. This morning, Grooveshark launched a data analytics resource called Beluga. This resource allows you to type in the name of a musical artist and find out information about the fans that listen to their music. The press release that Grooveshark wrote this morning says that the information is designed to help artist better position themselves to their fanbase (it could also be related to the fact that all four major record labels are suing Grooveshark… but, we’ll stick to what Beluga does for this post.)

Grooveshark’s co-founder, Josh Greenberg believes that by exposing these analytics, artists can “learn about their fans, route their tours, sell merchandise, work on building a following, and take their careers to the next level.” He thinks there is also value from the sales and marketing aspects of the record label as well since they can position themselves “to partner with artists who connect with their target audience, presenting endless opportunities.”

If you’ve used Grooveshark in the past, you know that from time to time they ask you to fill out a quick survey. It seems that we are seeing the first of the results of those surveys, and it makes for some interesting information when looking at musical groups. Here’s a sample of results I got when I searched on Eric Clapton:

  • 55+year old females are moderately over-represented (and yes, they look Wonderful Tonight)…
  • Fans of Clapton seemed to have retired in the past year (remembering Days of Old)…
  • Israelis seem to love themselves some slow-hand…
  • Clapton users seem to show some Old Love and rent their movies from Blockbuster online…
  • Poor people don’t really like to listen to Clapton (no Hard Times for Clapton fans)…
  • Clapton listeners tend to bank at Citibank (cause, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out)…
  • Apparently, Clapton sounds best when you’re driving and Traveling Alone.
What is the accuracy of these survey results?? I’m not sure. I guess the case could be made for not giving too much faith in the results you get from a voluntary web survey. However, I did look at the survey results for some smaller named bands that I like, and the surveys seemed to fall about where I’d expect for these bands, although the geography preferences tended to trend outside the US (maybe because Americans are less likely to fill out the survey??)
Regardless of whether or not you trust the results, if you love to see examples of what can be done with large amounts of data, then you’ll find yourself having some fun looking at Beluga.

When Dewey & LeBouef filed for Chapter 11 protection, the firm listed the unsecured creditors, and three of the biggest losers on the list were Thomson Reuters (owed $2.3 million), LexisNexis (owed $1.4 million.), and CCH (owed $650K.)

Although the total amount of legal research to debt is something like 1.7% of the total, it still shows the amount of money that firms pay year in and year out for legal research products. I hadn’t thought about the fact that Westlaw/Lexis/CCH, etc. contracts are unsecured debts before, but I guess there’s not really a lot that Wexis can get from the firms they serve to secure the services they provide.

Does the exposure of this information give us any “insider” information on Dewey’s existing contracts with their legal vendors? Could we make some broad assumptions and say that if we calculate out the remaining amount owed by the number of months left in the year, does this come out to mean that Dewey was paying $3.45 million a year for Westlaw (or roughly $260 per month per lawyer… assuming 1100 lawyers)?? Let’s keep on making these “very assumptive” mathematical calculations:

Lexis — $2.1 million annual – $175 per month per lawyer
CCH — $975,000 – $74 per month per lawyer

In an industry where we are always trying to figure out where we are on our contracts versus our peers, there could be some interesting information coming out in the Dewey bankruptcy. Perhaps those Competitive Intelligence experts could find some even more interesting tidbits.

[NOTE: My friend Don Cruse reminded me that “rest of the year” payments would be avoided in bankruptcy, so my calculations are most likely inaccurate. If Dewey just owes, say the five months of this year, then the totals for subscription costs would jump up about 38% higher than these numbers. Of course, I haven’t seen anything specific, so this is just me applying assumptions to come up with these amounts!! – GL (added @11:47 AM]

New Orleans’ based newspaper, The Times-Picayune, announced that it is shifting its print publications to a three day a week schedule instead of its traditional seven days a week model. The focus of the paper will shift to its free online content and will attempt to look at ways of making online advertising more profitable. In addition to the Times-Picayune, the Birmingham News the Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama, and The Huntsville (Alabama) Times will also shift to a 3 day print schedule.
[note: see Ted Jackson’s gut-wrenching photo of the T-P staff hearing the announcement.]

Print newspaper subscriptions have suffered significantly in the age of the Internet. Although no one is saying that reporting is becoming obsolete, many of us are thinking that “print” reporting is becoming obsolete and the shift is to online or mobile app platforms. In fact, in today’s Houston Chronicle (print edition) an ad was run right next to this story saying that “Sunday Circulation” was up 2.8% for the Chronicle. Notice how the ad shows the iPhone, iPad, online, and print editions?? We librarians have felt the pains of a shift in how our consumers use our services, but I’d be the first to admit that I would much rather deal with the change in library industry than be a reporter today.

The whole issue of “Print vs. Online” has been raging for years now, with print being a consistent loser. The one element in this battle, however, has been the idea that advertising revenues are what will keep these news resources going (be they in print, online, app, whatever….) However, I just got off the phone with Toby Brown and asked how the heck can advertising dollars be spread over such a large number of resources in a way that can keep them afloat?? I just don’t see how current advertising structures will be sustainable over the next few years. In fact, Fox and NBC-Universal just sued DirecTV because they’ve developed an “ad hopper” which allows DirecTV customers to automatically skip over advertising.

It is a bizarre time in the news and media world these days. As we shift more and more away from traditional sources of news and entertainment, and we go online, streaming or app our way into the future of information access, the economics of the industry will constantly shift in order to try to support the industry. I thought that Vince Gill hit something on the head when he tossed out the fact that music singles today cost 99¢. A single in 1960 cost… 99¢. The prima facie economics of the news and media industry just don’t add up to profits. Consumers don’t want to pay more, pay walls don’t seem to be the answer, and advertisers are being more selective on where they place their ads. I, for one, would hate to be an advertising director in a major corporation right now.

Where will it all lead?? Here’s some of my (random) thoughts on the subject:

  • More “app-based” access. Apps would give the media provider more control over making sure ads aren’t skipped, and that ads are targeted at appropriate users (no Cadillac ads sent to 12 year old girls.) App platforms will include iOS devices, Android (mostly Kindle Fire), and gaming devices like XBox360.
  • More online access. Similar to the app-based, media providers will push their wears to where the eyes are. I’m sure that more attempts will be made to push ads to the right people, and prevent them from skipping over the ads… however, the success rate will be much lower than the app-based platforms.
  • More “subscribe to play” access. Many providers will shift to collaborative efforts and prevent their products from entering into homes that don’t have access to their product in another way. Initially this will mean you need a Cable TV subscription in order to use their online service. I think, just like the pay wall, this will fail. It is already being floated out there to keep Hulu-Plus subscribers from having access to certain shows, if they do not have a cable tv subscription.
  • More “crowd-funded” access. You’ll see more efforts like KickStarter on media projects. I could imagine a newspaper having a KickStarter project that funds their business for a three-month period of time, and in return gives something back to their supporters. People are eager to fund projects that they feel strongly about. Imagine that instead of a subscription, a newspaper says that for $50.00 you support our paper, and in return we dedicate a section of the paper to you or to a cause you support?? For $100 you get your name printed at the top of the first page for one day, etc. May sound silly, but one musician raised $450,000 from her fans. Media outlets do have fans, perhaps there is an opportunity here for them as well??

Everything is going to change. How will it end up?? No one knows. The only thing that seems to be understood at this point in the game is that it will take some clever thinking to come to that answer.

Sometimes private conversations just need to be shared. Ron Friedmann and I thought as much on some of the recent conversations we had regarding the best way to get information to people with all of the different resources now at our disposal. Of course, the first thing we asked was “how do we get everyone out of email and on to these other sources?”

So, as any blogger worth their salt would do, we figured out a way to spin this into a blog post. Ron is actually a blogger worth his weight in gold, because he suggested that we do this as a simultaneous post on his Strategic Technology Blog and my 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. That way we would expose our conversations to the different groups that follow each of us. Ron and Toby Brown did something similar a year ago on “Bet the Farm” versus “Law Factory.” We are hoping to spur some additional conversations, just as Ron and Toby did.

For reference: Greg’s Post; Ron’s Post

RON

I am struck by how many people still rely on e-mail for news, as opposed to Twitter or RSS. When Jeff Brandt features my blog post in his daily PinHawk Legal Technology e-mail, I see a noticeable traffic spike on my blog.

That got me thinking about two ideas. First, why are so many people still so reliant on e-mail? Not sure I am up for tackling that. Second, is there a tool that turns Tweets into an e-mail. Both your Tweet feed and mine focus mainly on news items. I wonder if some folks who are not interested in Twitter would subscribe to a weekly digest of Tweets from one or more Twitters.

I was looking around for a tool and see that Twitter will soon enable sending Tweets by e-mail. What I have in mind, however, would be a bit more curated, maybe using the Twitter favorite feature to tag my own and other Tweets. Then the tool would automatically mail those weekly to subscribers. I assume Twitter API would allow this but I’m not that techie.

Do you think that would appeal to anyone? Do you know if there is such a tool?

GREG

I was just thinking last week about why we are still so reliant upon email when there are so many better options out there, especially social media tools (whether Twitter, Google+, Yammer, or the 1000’s of other options.) I came to a similar conclusion of wonder if social media could somehow be embedded into the email systems and mimic email, while bringing in the best pieces of what makes social media so valuable.

My thoughts trended, however, to Twitters Direct Message option when it came to online discussions. [Tweets are public; a Twitter DM is private, to a single person.] I’d love it if I could embed a Twitter DM to a group of people, and have a structured conversation in Outlook (or gmail) and the familiarity of those interfaces, but using DMs as the conduit. I could keep the conversation short and clean, without the clutter of all the old message threads showing up in each response.

I also like the idea of a curated resource as well. People are always looking for well structured, curated information, and since we seem to be stuck in an email-centric world, this type of newsletter might be something that would appeal to those that want the benefits of a social media world, without having to actually go visit that social media world themselves.

RON

Greg, it was fun to connect with you “synchronously” after the exchange above so that we could test a Google+ Hangout. [A hangout allows real time video conferencing and text messaging among multiple people.] It’s too bad that Hangout requires video and seems inherently focused on real-time, synchronous communication. So it’s not the answer to an easy-to-use, persistent discussion area or forum.

Returning to your comments above, I have two concerns with your proposed approach. First, Twitter DM seems inherently “point to point” or “one to one”. I suspect a lot of engineering would be required to convert it to a forum or bulletin board feature. Moreover, Twitter users might be unhappy with such a change. I find an increasing number of my contacts use Twitter DM in lieu of e-mail. They probably would not want to clutter this clean, private, and uncluttered channel with discussions threads.

Second, do we want to take steps that encourage lawyers and staff to have even more reasons to stay in Outlook? I know it is the application where “lawyers live”. My hope, however, is that eventually there will be a better or different interface for working together as a group. I am not optimistic though. Even in the early 1990s, when I first evaluated discussion forums in a law firm, lawyers liked the concept but were too wed to their inboxes to use it.

We’ve now identified two unmet requirements. One is what I started with – converting Tweets (mine and those I follow) to a periodic e-mail to which non-Twitter-users could subscribe. I will leave this one to entrepreneurs in the Twitter ecosystem. The other requirement is your idea for better tools / interface for group discussion. I’m not sure I see answers. Moreover, I am not sure if the question is “do we need a new collaboration or communication tool” or “are existing tools fine, they have all the features anyone could ever want, and the question is just change management”. Your views?

GREG

Ron, I’ve thought about the limitations that happen when using the Twitter DM function and I was kind of hoping that the way it would show up in Outlook or gmail would be modified by an API or some type of intermediary program that would allow one-to-many communications (as long as you are connected to each of the Twitter accounts) and could go beyond the 140 character limit (although there is some benefit to keeping communications short.) Perhaps the Twitter DM function isn’t really the best method, but there should be some improvements in communications beyond the awful email threads that we live with now. I have heard of firms that use Outlook’s “To-Do” list, but I don’t think that it really is the answer here. Google’s gmail is kind of working around the problem by limiting the repeating thread information, but it is still not really as clean a communications tool as some of the social media tools are.

As for trying to move lawyers out of Outlook… that’s a big shift in culture for them and won’t be easy. I’ve mentioned that email is now the touchstone of the law firm. No longer do lawyers collaborate face-to-face (only when they have to), instead the collaboration is virtual, and unfortunately, via email chains. We all know of the problems associated with working as if Outlook is your common database. Even making the emails ‘better’ by shifting social media type content into email newsfeeds just reinforces the idea of Outlook being the best collaborative resource. The biggest problem is that Outlook is not a true collaborate tool, or at least not a very good one. Efforts should be made to move collaboration efforts off of Outlook, but that’s obviously easier said than done. It would make for an easier transition if we could create tools that allow the lawyers to believe they are still in Outlook, but that rewards them for inefficient and potentially risky work habits. The better approach would be to wean them off of Outlook, but that’s a project that would take years to accomplish.

Note: A few weeks ago I saw that the law library at the law firm of Bryan Cave had a Twitter account and was actively tweeting. The concept of a large law firm tweeting isn’t that unusual, but the idea of a library within the firm publicly tweeting did sound a little foreign to me. So, I contacted the two librarians behind the Twitter account and asked if they would guest-post here on 3 Geeks and let us know what the goals were for having a Twitter account, who follows them and who do they follow. Karen Lasnick (Santa Monica, CA office) and Joan Thomas (Kansas City, MO office) took me up on the offer and explained their reasoning for creating the @BryanCaveLib account. My thanks to Karen and Joan for sharing their experiences with us.

Tweeting At The Cave

Joan Thomas and I started our Twitter feed @BryanCaveLib last year. I was interested because I had just personally started Tweeting and wanted to jump on the Library Twitter bandwagon. Our first Library tweet was on September 8, 2011: “Welcome to the Bryan Cave Library and Research Services Twitter. We would love to have you follow us as we Tweet all things legal and more!” Now 365 tweets and retweets later, I find that I enjoy Twitter even more than Angry Birds.

Our goals?
One of them is to establish a presence where our attorneys are. We follow 108 twitter accounts including several Bryan Cave LLP accounts and individual Bryan Cave attorneys. We often retweet (RT) tweets from the people we follow. This helps develop a rapport by sharing good information while giving credit for the good stuff we read in our stream. A little more than one third of our tweets are RT’s.

Who follows us?
All kinds of people: attorneys, including our own (several of our practice groups also Tweet) and others outside of the firm, legal publications, social media gurus, individuals who find us interesting and the occasional misguided soul trying to tell us we have won a free iPad. We have 93 followers as of this writing.

Who do we follow?
The same kind of people that follow us: whatever or whoever strikes us as interesting or relevant. Some of our tweets come from our own personal Twitter feeds that we think our followers would enjoy. So far, we have not duplicated each other’s Tweets!

We recently started marketing @BryanCaveLib. Every three weeks, our research librarians compile our newsletter, “in the KNOW”, which is distributed firmwide. We added this blurb at the beginning of each issue to market @BryanCaveLib: Bryan Cave Library & Research Services is now on Twitter. We tweet about general research and legal news. Follow @BryanCaveLib ! We also have a “Follow us on Twitter” link on eCave2, the firm’s intranet. Our email signature’s marketing tagline for this month is @BryanCaveLib . We noticed that these small marketing efforts have increased our in-house followers.

Twitter is a subtle way to develop relationships with attorneys by giving us an opportunity to casually interact with attorneys from all of our offices. Our Bryan Cave followers are starting to visit us when they happen to be in the Kansas City or Santa Monica offices. Joan and I communicate more with each other via Twitter. We often tweet at each other over the weekend or way too late at night. Twitter is proving to be worth the small amount of time we devote to it. We encourage other law firm libraries to start tweeting. You may discover that it can help build relationships with your attorneys and co-workers!