Since we’re on the topic of Social Networks in a Law Firm…

A good friend recently asked me about my “thoughts on what social means in the context of project management?”  I replied with the following:

Social (small s) collaboration is the lifeblood of any project undertaken by human beings.   We have evolved to collaborate with our peers to achieve goals greater than any one of us could possibly achieve on our own.  We naturally band together in groups to distribute work load, to take advantage of individuals strengths and to limit the burden of individual weaknesses.  This is true whether we’re banding together to take down a mastodon with spears, building a barn, or managing a business project.  Whereas, historically, most human teams have formed for a specific purpose at a specific time and place, the modern business project team is often dispersed geographically and chronologically.  We work in different offices, we have different schedules, and we are usually working on multiple projects simultaneously.

 There are 3 key elements of group work which are easily lost in the modern environment. These are the elements that Social Collaboration tools attempt to address. 

·         Member Bonding
·         Multi-Party Communication
·         Real-time analysis and reaction                         

It’s cheesy, but if we look at these three elements in terms of a prehistoric tribe hunting big game, you can see where our modern environment breaks down.  The group of hunters leave the village together early in the morning with a single goal of bringing home protein for the entire village. They walk for miles together looking for signs of large game.  Along the way, they talk about the task at hand, but they also talk about their families, their concerns, their ideas.  When they find their prey, they kneel in the dirt and draw up their plan of attack, team members ask questions and others share stories of earlier experiences to find solutions.  When they’re ready to enact their plan, they spread out, staying within line of sight and communicating via hand signals and gestures.  If the animal responds unexpectedly, they react immediately and call out to the others to enact an alternate plan, or to improvise based on the new situation.  At the end of the day they return with their kill or they don’t, but either way they have shared experience and knowledge. When they leave the village the next morning, they will be a stronger team than they were the day before.  

Managing a legal project team should not be any more difficult than hunting a mammoth.  Unfortunately, we aren’t in the same location at the same time and we have varying degrees of interest and commitment to the task at hand.  We have very little opportunity to get to know the other team members on an extra-project basis.  We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to determine what’s being done by whom, and whether our contribution is comparable to other team members.  If the original circumstances change, we may not even be aware of the change, let alone in a position to react in a timely manner. And when the project is complete, successfully or not, we disperse to our individual careers and go about our business, until the next time we’re pulled into a new team with no experience, comprised of people we hardly know.

Social (big s) collaboration tools are a regressive technology, in that they allow us to use our instinctive social toolbox to tackle modern projects in a modern environment, and they allow an exploded project team to work as if they are in the same room at the same time, regardless of their individual locations or schedules.  Social tools will not ensure successful projects, but if used well, they should at the very least ensure efficient failures which build stronger teams to tackle future projects.

After several hours with no response, I followed up with my friend.

Me: Did I miss the point of your question?

Friend: Yes, but that would be a great blog post.

 Moral of the story:  Be careful asking me open ended questions.

Image [cc] yuan2003

Let’s face it. Social Networks work fine when you’re sharing information with your friends, or even with peers within your industry subset. Social Networks at your place of work, however, usually don’t work very well at all. There are probably a thousand reasons why this is, but I think one of the biggest reasons is that people don’t really want to expose what they are doing at work to their colleagues. I know that on its face, that sounds ridiculous, but it seems to be true. Most likely, they don’t want to feel like they have to update their work status because it might come back to bite them later in an employee review. The whole act of covering your backside creates an environment where communications conduits such as work site social networks are viewed as counter-productive, when, quite frankly, these types of communications tools would actually increase productivity. So how do you build an environment that takes advantage of the daily activities of workers in a social network-like structure? HP Labs has one idea… build an automation process that updates their employees’ status automatically and create a social network that simply builds itself.

Mashable reported on HP Labs’ “Collective Project” this morning, and it made me wonder how, or if, this type of automated social network could work within a law firm. Here’s the basic structure of the Collective Project, all of the processes appear to be automatically created and adapted over time base upon the project’s internal algorithm and taxonomy structure:

  • Personal Profiles are created 
  • Preferences and Expertise is automated
  • Documents are profiled
  • Employees are connected to those files
  • Employees with similar interests can be identified
  • Document permissions can be customized to prevent unauthorized access
The idea behind this is to identify connections based upon “inferred expertise” according to HP Labs Israel director, Ruth Bergman. Bergman has used the Collective Project to identify co-workers with similar experiences and interests, and seek them out at conferences they are both attending. 
There are a lot of firms looking and implementing Enterprise Search tools right now. Could the idea of an “inferred expertise” system like the Collective Project be duplicated in these enterprise search systems? Could a defacto social network be created within a firm? How would attorneys and staff view such a system… Helpful or Big Brother? 
There may be a handful of firms out there that have thriving internal social networks, but there aren’t very many. Is the idea of having some type of automated social network something that would benefit the law firm environment? Now that I think about it, you’d probably have to call it something more generic like “inferred expertise database” to quell the paranoia that surrounds the “social network” term. There seems to be potential in creating something similar to the Collective Project within an enterprise search resource, but would the culture of the firm accept it? I’d like to say yes, but my gut’s saying no.

Competitive Intelligence in law firms happens.  I know it does because for almost ten years, I have been doing it. And still, it seems CI in law firms is a mystery, an enigma to those in the legal community as much as in the CI community.  I am writing this post as I fly home from the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP)’s annual meeting. The meeting was superb, one of the best conferences I have attended recently.  The energy levels were high, people were engaged, conversations spilled out of conference rooms and networking events were packed.  And yet, when people asked me what type of organization I worked for, I got questions like “law firms have CI?” or “how do law firms do CI?” No ever questions my colleagues in the pharmaceutical, consumer goods, defense or food services industries, so why me?  Or rather, why still me?
On one panel discussion I sat in on, which looked at the first 100 days of a CI program, Mark Greene, Chief Business Development Officer at Waller, suggested that advertising in law firms is relatively new – its only been around for 35 years, as compared to the other industries.  So, arguably, the need to be “competitive” and the need for intelligence to do may also be new or newish.  It seems a plausible rationale, but given that next month, the ARK Group will be hosting a one-day conference on CI in Law Firms (check it out if you will be in the NY area, it is usually a great conference). And at its annual meeting in July, the Special Libraries Association (SLA),’s Competitive Intelligence Division will be running a session specifically about the Evolving Role of Competitive Intelligence in Law Firms, I think the industry-in-its-infancy argument is tired. 
When I walked to exhibit hall and talked to vendors, very few service providers outside of data providers such as S&P Capital IQ had law firm clients. Shift Central, and InfoNgen were two of the few intelligence product vendors in the room with existing law firm clients.  Aurora WDC was one of the only primary research and consulting firms who were willing to engage in a needs analysis for the industry and recognize the needs of the CI industry in legal. 
There seems to be a significant disconnect between what service providers and professional associations are making available, and what the industry needs.  Why?  What makes legal different?  When it comes down to it – I can identify three areas that make law firms significantly different enough that vendors are at a loss for an approach and CI people such as myself may have a bumpier ride in influencing the decisions at firms. 
1.     Despite several huge national and International firms in existence, the industry is still relatively small and insular.  So companies such as Bloomberg Law and AmLaw which do cater to the industry, won’t have a presence at bigger trade shows such as SCIP. That being said, I believe most CI service providers are wiling to work with CI practitioners to tailor solutions.  This puts the onus on the CI practitioner however to figure out what he/she needs and then work with a selected vendor to make it happen.  Not always a preferable approach.
2.     The management structure of law firms is, despite many firm’s attempts otherwise, is still primarily a partnership structure with multiple bottom lines and conflicting priorities.  Even where CI sits within the organization can be a challenge.  The operations and budget of Marketing, Library, Business Development, and/or Knowledge Management within firms will vary widely, making the “home” of CI susceptible to even more scrutiny.  The only way for the law firm CI practitioner to deal with this challenge in my mind, is to work slowly, gain small wins and manage expectations.
3.     Finally, the third difference and difficulty I see for law firm CI practitioners is the notion that CI in law firms supports both the practice and the business of law.  This is a very fundamental difference between what we do and what practitioners in other industries do.  And, this is a challenge that those outside of the industry may not understand.  It is a subtle difference but one that makes all the difference.  Law firm CI is different in that we need to focus on not just the business but also what is happening from a legislative and regulatory point of view.  This presents a unique challenge, which when coupled with the other two points above, makes legal CI seem like a daunting task for the practitioner and an industry not obviously ready for outsourced or assisted CI.
So what do we do in the face of these differences?  We carry on.  Now more than ever, I am inspired to put legal CI on the proverbial map.  I feel confident that what the legal industry is doing in CI fighting above its weight in terms of its sophistication and tactical approach. Despite the challenges and the not-so-obvious-existence, CI in law firms is alive and well, if possibly under-served.  Time will tell, but I am willing to bet it won’t take long before the CI community in law firms is setting bar the for everyone else.

Just got a press release from Jill Goodkind at Bloomberg announcing that Jones Day has brought them into the fold for their legal research needs. This is the second mega firm that is using Bloomberg (DLA Piper being the other.)

We’re trying to gather more details, (such as “did Jones Day drop Westlaw or Lexis to bring in Bloomberg?”) but I thought this was big enough to push out to let everyone know the news.

Those that I’ve talked to find it interesting that there is no quote from Jones Day representatives in this press release. In looking at some of the job descriptions from previous Jones Day positions, they do ask that applicants be proficient in both Lexis and Westlaw research, so they do appear to have both services at the time of bringing in Bloomberg. It would be unusual for a firm (even one as big as Jones Day) to keep three legal research tools on the budget, so we’ll have to see if they end up dropping one of the current resources. It will be interesting to find out more information about what prompted them to bring in Bloomberg and if more mega firms are to follow.

JONES DAY SELECTS BLOOMBERG LAW FOR LEGAL RESEARCH
Seamless Combination of Legal Research and Business Information, Unlimited Access and Transparent Pricing Provide Value to Modern Legal Practice
New York — Bloomberg Law, the legal research system from the world leader in data, information and news services, today announced a firm-wide agreement with Jones Day, the global law firm, to provide high quality legal research, news and market information.  Jones Day is ranked among the world’s most respected law firms and perennially rated among the best in client service. The firm represents approximately half of the Fortune Global 500. 
Jones Day’s firm-wide adoption of Bloomberg Law will provide the firm’s approximately 1,800 U.S.-based lawyers with unlimited desktop and mobile access to any of the information in the Bloomberg Law system – from Bloomberg BNA’s legal coverage to Bloomberg’s proprietary news to dockets to primary legal research – as often as they want and whenever they want.   Bloomberg Law integrates legal research with the Bloomberg industry and financial information relied upon by corporations and investment institutions throughout the world to provide lawyers with a competitive edge in understanding their clients’ businesses.  Jones Day, which has more U.S. lawyers than any other firm, joins the growing roster of law firms that are using Bloomberg Law to meet their firm-wide legal research requirements.
“We are delighted that Jones Day, one of the largest and most respected law firms in the world, has chosen Bloomberg Law to meet its legal research needs,” said Larry Thompson, CEO of Bloomberg Law.  “Bloomberg Law has modernized the legal research industry with a truly integrated platform that, combined with our transparent and predictable pricing, provides law firms with the resources to conduct comprehensive research while managing costs.”
About Bloomberg Law
Bloomberg Law is the real-time legal research system that integrates innovative search technology, comprehensive legal content, company and market information, and proprietary news all in one place. This collaborative workspace also includes a suite of new tools for more effective legal analysis and more productive client development. For more information, visit BloombergLaw.com.
About Bloomberg
Bloomberg, the global business and financial information and news leader, gives influential decision makers a critical edge by connecting them to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas. The company’s strength – delivering data, news and analytics through innovative technology, quickly and accurately – is at the core of the Bloomberg Professional service, which provides real time financial information to more than 310,000 subscribers globally. Bloomberg’s enterprise solutions build on the company’s core strength, leveraging technology to allow customers to access, integrate, distribute and manage data and information across organizations more efficiently and effectively. Through Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Government, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Bloomberg BNA, the company provides data, news and analytics to decision makers in industries beyond finance. And Bloomberg News, delivered through the Bloomberg Professional service, television, radio, mobile, the Internet and two magazines, Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Markets,  covers the world with more than 2,300 news and multimedia professionals at 146 bureaus in 72 countries. Headquartered in New York, Bloomberg employs more than 15,000 people in 192 locations around the world.  

Since 3 Geeks is the forum for trying new things, I am going to try a live blog posting, as Toby speaks at the Business Intelligence for Law Firms Conference in New York.  It is rare that a Geek and a Geek Groupie are in the same place at the same time, so I figure why not try something new.  Bearing that in mind, I apologize in advance for any spelling errors, typos or grammatical mistakes. 

And here we go.  Note to the reader – the great nuggets of the presentation, the key-take aways if you will, are all bolded in quotations. 

The presentation kick starts with an analysis of Toby’s title “I’m the AFA guy”, and props to Greg for putting Toby’s presentation together with Prezi as an alternative to PowerPoint.  With the geek stuff out of the way, Toby turns to the real meat of the presentation.  Can you use business intelligence and analytics to demonstrate profit.  Or more simply put, are we making money yet? 

The first assertion is that we have to come up with a way to be more effective, law firms are  “built for the past”.  To move into the future rather than focusing on existing models of profitability, firms need to start looking at new models for revenue and find a definition of profitability that rewards work and equity. 

Profit comes with three levers, realization, leverage and utilization, leverage, btw is in hours, not headcount. By isolating the partner compensation, you can use that number as a factor to manipulate and analyze margins and increase profitability. 

Beware when you create a model and share it with your partners, they will “litigate the data” and scrutinize the numbers. Know that no matter what you do, this will always be the case and you need to be consistent in your data sets.  Keep it simple so that the data is “actionable and influences behaviour”.  You can use technology to help you keep the data consistent.  Play with the models, change the discounts, the rates, the realization, the leverage and you will see that “leverage is always the answer”.

Everyone in the room is engaged, asking questions and thinking about the issues surrounding profitability. It may be because Toby is wicked smart, and Greg makes great presentations. But the reality is more likely (or also likely) that analytics, profitability models, alternate pricing and how to test your firm’s profit fitness is becoming an increasingly important way for firms to be competitive.  Demand from clients for alternative fees and reduced yearly legal spend is only going to escalate.  Which leads to two questions. One tactical and one strategic.  Tactically, for firms that are already leaner and arguably more focused then in previous years, the question is how to extract and use the data they create on a regular basis to tell them something about the way they are doing business and the where they can improve margins, manage time and be strategic with their analytical thinking.  Strategically, the more difficult question is, how do you and your “firm define profitability”?

And how do you start that discussion in your own firm?  Change the conversation “from revenue to profit”, do it, start today and see what happens. 

Sad that “Houston Dads Go
Back to College” is missing

Of course the big IPO news this week is Facebook’s public launch and the latest round of estimates places its value at the IPO somewhere in the $100 Billion range. Unbelievable! No, seriously, that’s completely unbelievable, bordering on insane. At nearly 100 million users, that’s a value of $100 per user. None of those users actually pays for a subscription to Facebook, but they are all bombarded with ads (at least those not creative enough to add an “ad blocker” to their web browser), and play silly games that they may, or may not pay to play. I’m sure some have paid over $100 to play these games, and some have clicked on those ads for gout treatments, but, no one that I know of has shelled out a dime or clicked on a single ad.

Now, my evidence is purely anecdotal, but I’ve been trained that if something sounds too good to be true, that’s usually because it is. Whether it is believing that your house will increase 10% a year in value, every year, year in, year out… or, that having a law degree will guarantee you an awesome job once you graduate… or, e-discovery will be a law firm cash cow forever… if something doesn’t pass the smell test, it’s probably because something is rotting inside it.

I’ve put the actual ad that popped up on the side of my Facebook page this morning. Usually I get some hipster-looking “Houston Dads Go Back to College” ad, but that was missing this morning. Is there anything listed here that someone would actually click on?? (Granted 61K apparently like that Gout Study!) General Motors has already pulled out of Facebook ads, can the site rely upon “class B” advertisers to keep revenue growing forever?

Don’t get me wrong. I am a Facebook fan. I jump on there and update my status almost everyday… sometimes multiple times a day. I know there is significant value in this product, and that having 100 million users makes it a multi-billion dollar product. However, $100 Billion? sniff-sniff… no, I don’t think so. However, there seem to be bankers out there and investment brokers that will pump that amount of cash into the company in return for stock with the idea that it will continue to grow at some double-digit amount forever. sniff-sniff… that just doesn’t smell right.

According to Facebook IPO math, we should go public with this blog and Toby, Lisa and I could split the $250K ($100 x 2500 RSS feed subscribers.) It wouldn’t be enough to retire, but we could bank-roll the 3 Geeks Bar & Grill that I’ve always wanted to open. This would lead to Toby and I having our infamous 3-beer solutions every night, night in, night out, forever… eventually, we would take over the world. sniff-sniff… actually, that smells pretty good.

Image [cc] neonbubble

When reading a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article by James Allworth called “Empathy: The Most Valuable Thing They Teach at HBS,” there was a line at the end that really stood out to me:

…this story seems to repeat itself over and over for disrupted companies: they go out of business wanting to sell to customers what they want to sell to customers, rather than what customers want to buy.

Allworth was discussing the false perception that Blockbuster convinced itself of when dealing with the disruptive technology that Netflix brought in during the early 2000’s. Blockbuster failed to look at the market from the customer’s point of view, and instead bounced ideas off the insular community of its internal perspective and thought that its two options were:

  1. create its own disruptive service (with all the risks that come with it); or,
  2. continue business as normal
As Allworth puts it, they failed to see the world as it was becoming, but rather as a snapshot of how it existed at that moment. In reality, option number two was not an option at all, it was a path that led them to failure and eventual bankruptcy. 
We focus mainly on the administrative side of law firms on this blog, with me primarily looking at libraries, records and knowledge management. Reading this HBR article made me think about whether we are providing the services that we want to provide, or if we are providing the services that our customers actually want to receive? It brought me back to the post I wrote last month on thinking like a startup. Are we surrounding ourselves with others that think like us, especially those in our professional association ranks, or are we bringing in smart people that challenge our traditional thinking and make us look at what we do from a different perspective? Are we empathetic toward our core customers as well as thinking of ways to change what we do in order to bring in the next generation of customers?

Allworth’s article lead me to this great 8 minute video of Clay Christensen (embedded below) where he describes what disruptive innovation means. I especially like the discussion around the 3-minute mark where Christensen discusses the dilemma that GM and Ford faced when Japanese car makers challenged their market share and how now the Japanese are facing a similar challenge from the Korean car market. Change seems to be the only constant in today’s business world and continuing to give more of the same (whether it is services or products) will only lead to someone else pushing you out of the market because they have brought in the disruptive innovation and replaced you.

I like Allworth’s topic of being surrounded by smart people that challenge your way of thinking; of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and viewing what you do, and see it from other perspectives. We may find that what we consider to be valuable services to us, are no longer valued by those that we think we serve. Eventually, we may find that the most valuable services we should provide do not exist at the moment, and those we should be providing that service to are not even our current customers. Sounds like disruptive innovation starts by disrupting our own beliefs first.

Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and the world’s most influential management guru according to the Thinkers50, lays out his landmark theory.

Image [cc] lorzzzzzzz

When I get up in the morning, I usually look over the day’s news feed via Google News, and my wife will occasionally chime in with the question “So, is the world going to Hell in a hand basket again this morning?” Which I usually reply, “yep…” then I laugh (because otherwise I’d have to cry.)

Whether it is Scott Thompson lying on his resume, Dewey LeBoeuf fudging its AmLaw 100 revenues and profits, or some college student downloading a paper off the Internet and putting her name on it, it all points to an attitude of lack of ethics/morals, or simply an idea that the past won’t catch up to us, or that if it does, we’ll be given a pass on our previous actions because we can show that we’re successful and that those lapses in judgement are offset by the end results we’ve achieved. The sad thing is… that attitude probably wins out more than it loses. Kind of like my earlier post on The Values-Based Narcissist – without the values-based part.

It is stunning to see how successful people seem to live in a bubble of thinking that the ends justifies the means in what they do. When they are caught lying, cheating or fudging, they tend to react as if they can’t believe you are calling them on their actions, then they deflect as if it were someone else’s fault (“hey, it was the headhunter” or “hey, everyone fudges the numbers, we were just playing the game.”) Then comes the apology, which usually comes in the form very close to “hey, I’m sorry that I got caught.”

All of this ranting is really just to set up a conversation that a college professor friend of mine had with one of her students. The student copied a paper off the Internet, added her name to the top and turned it in as her own. What most of us (but not the student) would call plagiarism. I turned the conversation into a video (and she confirmed that this is very close to the original conversation.)

I know that not everyone lies, cheats and fudges their way in life… but, I do seem to find enough examples of it to fill my Google News feed each morning. I’m going to go take a walk and start laughing now… otherwise I’ll just sit here and cry (and my co-workers hate it when I do that.)

Image [cc] estudioquimbya

Last weeks’s post from Toby on “The First Time I Saw a Computer Practice Law” jogged my mind of my recent trip to Georgetown Law School and talking to Roger Skalbeck about assigning his class called “Technology, Innovation and Law Practice.” The major assignment for the class was to create an application that could be used in the practice of law. At the end of the course, there was a competition called “The Iron Tech Lawyer” where the students displayed their creations to a panel of judges and explained how the technology worked to assist (or replace) the lawyer in making practical decisions in the practice of law.

I’ve embedded the video of the Nightly Business Report’s coverage of the competition, and as you watch it, you might notice a couple of the same things that I did:

  1. The technology is available now to replace some of the functions that we have thought only lawyers could do properly.
  2. Watch the excitement on the faces of the students. They are not thinking of technology of killing off the practice of law, but rather enhancing it and making it available to the masses.
  3. The law professor did notice that the technology may lead to a reduction in overall work for lawyers, but that the trade off is that lawyers can make up for this by servicing the legal needs of those that might not have been able to get access before.
Whenever someone talks about tech replacing lawyers, the initial reaction of the establishment, especially bar associations, is to circle the wagons and fight against it. Watching how a few law students could come up with practical applications for the practice of law for a classroom project should put everyone on notice that this is the wave of the future, and fight it though you might, it will eventually become a reality. Better to start facing it now and begin understanding ways of using it to supplement the practice of law, or one day the wave of new technology will simply drown those that think they can fight to keep it from changing the way they practice law.

I was recently discussing with someone what exactly makes a blog a blog.

Is it the interactivity, the commenting, the archiving? Perhaps the cloud tags, the permalinks or the reverse-chronological order?

In my mind, all of these elements are not only optional but also secondary to the most critical aspect of a blog: RSS.

Most of you know what RSS means: real simple syndication. This is code that is embedded into a web page and not apparent on the page but is picked up by search engines and RSS readers when a page has been updated with new content.

I think that folks mistakenly believe that blogging is a style of writing, a design template or a body of work.

I see a blog is a technological invention that ensures that search engines have the most current and most popular information. In fact, it is well known that search engines give preferential treatment to blog content over regular web pages.

Ergo, all remaining elements of a blog are just window dressing.

Ergo? Did I just really say that?