Following up on the post about The Dewey Situation, I had seen some dialog about how service partners are becoming second class citizens. First off – I define service partner as a partner with sufficient legal skills, but not one with a sufficient book of business. These are typically very good lawyers and their role is focused on overseeing major client work, but not as the one who brings the client and work in the door.

There is much information in the market that suggests that firms may have too many partners, at least for the level of work they currently service. Many times service partners are seen as a potential target for reducing the ranks of the partnerships of firms. Tied to this practical issue is concern about collegiality within partnerships, and this tier of partners therefore may become viewed as second class.

But is this viewpoint useful or credible?

Useful? I would say no. Service partners can have tremendous value to a firm. However, it is not the same value as a rainmaker and therefore comp for service partners should not be treated in the same fashion. The BIG problem is that law firm compensation systems are not designed to recognize and reward these distinctive behaviors. Instead, built for the past, they reward all partners with the same general formula.

Greg, or as I like to call him, #1, made an excellent observation over coffee (yes – we sometimes eschew beer for coffee). Other owner/operator businesses pay their owner/executives a salary. This allows the business to compensate the owner as a worker at a market competitive salary. Meanwhile, the owner also enjoys the rewards of profit for being a shareholder. He asked me to explain why law firms don’t do that. I told him I may appear to be smart, but ….

The point taken from Greg’s comment is that firms should reward workers, be they owners or not, for being valuable workers. In this light a service partner is not a second class citizen. That would be like saying the VP of a company is second class since they are not a Senior VP. A VP may one day become a Senior VP. Or they may continue to serve as a VP. All the while being a valuable resource to the company.

The partnerships of large firms in many respects are becoming myths. You want a few key decision-makers to run the business, while being held accountable to the owners. You can’t have 200 or 300 owners having a say in how the firm operates day-to-day. So even though called partnerships, big firms are really businesses in need of focused, professional management. The thought of shareholders running a business is … not a good one.

Service partners in this environment are better deployed managing legal work, removing the expectation that they are also in a sales role. So no – service partners are not second class. They can bring a clearly defined level of value to a firm. But in the same consideration, their comp should be aligned to their value proposition. Labeling service partners as second class is unproductive and avoids the real issue of addressing compensation systems.

All this has lead to me creating a new catch-phrase: All roads lead to the partner compensation system. 

Of all the things that are broken at law firms, this is likely the most serious one with the greatest need of attention.

One of the listservs I joined early in my law library career was Teknoids (way back in 1997 or 1998.) Although it is made up primarily of techies in law school libraries and IT departments, I still love the conversations that go on. The conversation on what was titled “Everybody’s Favorite Topic…” was on what law schools will do since Westlaw is no longer going to support free printing for students, but will leave the printers for the law schools as a gift, just in case they want to pick up the tab for students printing out cases. Paul Birch from the University of Richmond School of Law (at the request of my fellow AALL member, Joyce Janto) started the conversation by asking if others would share their up-to-date printing policies. Judging by the title of the email, however, it seemed that Paul knew the conversation would take on a life of its own… and it did. I especially like the idea that John Mayer throws out (half-joking/half-serious) about moving off print completely and just giving students a Kindle to send their print to via PDF and email.

You can read through the whole conversation here, but I thought I’d post a few highlights that were interesting to me:

  • Cyndi Johnson: Since I’m sure Lexis will follow suit and pull their printers too, I’m going to start discussions with the relevant parties (SBA, the Dean, etc) about our options. Our students pay a technology fee which gives them 600-pages of printing per semester with all clinic, research assistant, journals, and moot court jobs waived. Anything above that is paid at $.05/page. We are pretty firm about not crediting Westlaw/Lexis jobs that were printed on their printers unless the printers are down. I’ve talked to the faculty teaching legal research and they stress not printing every page when doing research but it happens.
  • John Mayer: 600 free pages valued at $.05 per page = $30. Times three years of law school = $90. Ergo, buy everyone a Kindle (http://cca.li/bd) when they arrive and send all print jobs to PDF and email it to their Kindle.
  • David Dickens:
  • Gary Moore: We give the students 2400 pages for an entire academic year and a number of their texts are already available on e-reader. I still have some students telling me it’s not enough pages. It’s not dead. It fact it may be undead. The print zombie and right out of a George Romero movie, it’s going to take some time before you can kill them all.
  • John Mayer: 2400 x $.05 x 3 years = $360 – you could buy them a Kindle Fire (or almost an Ipad!) Make them sign a contract that if you give them the ereader, they won’t print or charge the ereader people who print 10 cents a page.  Use the invisible hand of economics!
  • Tom Bruce: That’s a Dada-ist art thing, right? Ceci n’est pas un pipe?
  • Ken Hirsh: Wouldn’t it be more apropos for someone to bludgeon you with an Epson FX-80? Although the trail of discarded perforated paper edge would give the CSI team quite a head start.
  • Jonathan Ezor: *cue Roger Daltrey scream*
  • Gary Moore: [trying (and succeeding) to bring the conversation back from pop-culture references] If no longer allow free pages and you charge for printing, then they will ask what is the tech fee for then, which, of course,  it is for other things like labs and exam software (both heavily used by students).  Some will respond “I already use my own laptop to print and don’t use the lab”. …
    If you go completely print free, then there are other issues, like what material is allowed in an exam (that also means the exam software companies need to catch up) and lot of other administrative issues.  It also means that all materials will be e-reader accessible.  It also means do we require students to own a laptop/tablet (we don’t have a requirement now, though 95% of our students take exams on computer). …
    We, meaning IT directors, can spearhead the charge to go print free and use e-readers, or not allow “free printing” any more, but it requires a major commitment from everyone at a school (faculty, admin and students) and a full support structure, if you go the way of a required standard tablet.   Also, everyone must be willing to deal with the repercussions and be committed to not revert back.
  • Ken Hirsh: I’m not advocating going print-free.  I am saying Westlaw’s (or more accurately, TR’s) action is not a valid reason to increase either the amount of free printing or tech fees.  Students don’t want to pay more in tuition or fees.  Don’t make them.  Let them use market behavior to decide what to print.
  • Gary Moore: But John is right that the use of Kindle Fires/IPads are on the rise and a lot of the texts are available for those.  We have to seriously rethink how students access their material and actually support that use, because that is the way to go.
    However, there are a lot of things that go along with that commitment.
  • Phil Bohl: 
    MONEY?
    Our students do not pay a technology fee. … Our biggest obstacle in pushing out our printers and adopting the digital copiers has been on the cost recovery side.
    Since we own and manage the printers and the print management system we can set any price and apply any subsidy, no real dollars are involved until students use up their initial print credit.  Then they pay for every page by purchasing a block of print credit; minimum of $10.
    With the copiers [maintained by Cannon], it’s all real money and to provide a print credit to each student would require transferring funds from our account to the university’s central IT budget.  …  So about three years ago we started raising our prices and lowering the print credit amount each year to make it possible for us to eventually phase out the subsidy for student printing.
    REDUCE DEMAND?
    [W]e redoubled our efforts to make students aware of the millions of pages they were consuming.  Following a modest campaign,  print volume dropped significantly …
    With such a huge reduction in student printing, this may be less painful that we first thought. At the same time, over the past five years we have seen our library copier volume go down to nearly nothing.  I’d wager that initially part of that volume was shifted to the printers but not all of it.  With more materials born digital or digitally accessible, copiers are nearly anachronistic for most of what goes on in our library.  We have also added a KIC station which has further reduced copier volume — and adds to our list of popular services.
    All that said, I think we can (in time) gingerly transition both the lexis and westlaw print volume onto our digital copiers with students paying the freight.  I’ll really miss the paper.
  • Ben Chapman: We tried and failed to phase out our $35 per year print subsidy last year. I’m hoping that we can have better luck doing that this year. Obviously, the change in Westlaw’s print policies doesn’t help at all. Here’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about: what if we provided them with better tools to read, write, and organize the buckets of material that they get, along with tools that help faculty distribute electronic materials with less pain. I’m wondering if we can use that to justify a reduction or elimination of the print subsidy. So, maybe the discussion is not really about student printing – maybe it’s more about what are we doing to smooth the transition to a paperless law school:
  1. We need ways to make epub, PDF, and other etexts easier to distribute to students. Emory has a great ereserves system that helps with that currently; unfortunately, I hear that it’s old and no longer developed and they may retire it. That will mean that more ematerials will wind on up Blackboard, which never seems to be the students’ first choice.
  2. We have purchased a subscription to FileOpen http://www.fileopen.com/, which helps manage PDF DRM. While we are not generally fans of DRM, it’s helpful in situations where students need access to particular resources for a particular period of time (moot court briefs, for example). As a side-effect of the DRM, we can prevent (stop your snickering, Tom Ryan) most casual printing and copying.
  3. We’ve put in two DLSG KIC scanners (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UO68IT1QIE) to encourage people to make electronic copies of things.
  4. I’m considering funding the purchase of tools like Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) to help students organize digital materials more easily. We do not yet provide Microsoft Office for free to students, although there is talk of that.
  5. The University (as part of a new Internet2 initiative) is pursuing the idea of Box.net integration with 50GB per account.
  6. The University is investing in Blackboard and the 9.1 update is coming in May.
  7. We preach the gospel of Evernote and Dropbox regularly.
The conversation is still going on, and is interesting to follow, not just from the view of law school IT, but also to think about how these students are taught about the different print alternatives that are out there, and what type of experiences they will be coming to the law firms once they graduate.
Image [cc] William & Mary Law Library

Niki Black, Jeff Brandt and some others have been having a Twitter dialog on the extent to which computers are currently able to replace lawyer functions. Part of the discussion centers around defining what is meant by replacing lawyers, which falls in to the old debate of what exactly is the practice of law?

Niki offers up a classic criterion as “’advice’ is counsel given to client based on the facts of a case (or legal matter).” At 3 Geeks we have previously discussed some next-generation technologies that I feel fall into this category. However, Niki is looking for simpler, solo/small firm examples. The crux of the discussion is whether there truly is technological solutions to replacing lawyers. I will share my bottom-line thought here: Yes, I think there is. My main point is that the profession has never put much effort into trying to automate lawyer functions.

This discussion brought back to mind the first time I watched a computer practice law. And it was a solo/small firm example.

Back in the 80’s while in graduate school I was a librarian at a branch office of a regional firm. I was in the room when they delivered the IBM XT PC and therefore became the expert on its use (a.k.a. the beginning of my legal tech career).We had purchased the PC as we were a beta site for a document generation system for wills and trusts. A partner at the firm was involved in the start-up efforts of what would become HotDocs. And since this software ran on a PC, we had to get one.

With the program loaded up we began playing with it (which we now call QC). I answered a series of questions about my personal needs related to an estate plan, giving what was essentially ‘the facts of my legal situation.’ Well in to the questioning a yellow screen popped up and ‘gave me advice.’ I do not remember the specific advice, but the gist was that based on the my situation, I should consider changing my answer to the last question about what I thought I would want, since that did not fit with my situation. I recall distinctly sitting back and thinking – Wow. I just witnessed something unique. A computer giving me real legal advice.

So to the Twitter discussion – I repeat my assertion, we haven’t put much effort in to automating lawyers. This tells me there is likely numerous ways in which we can automate. To Niki’s point of view, there is still not much out there. This last point is well-taken. The ability for technology to perform lawyer tasks has been around now for 30 years. Isn’t about time we started using it?

Image [cc] lightsight

Although more than enough has been written about the impending demise of Dewey and the relative causes, I decided to go ahead and add my 2 cents to the dialog. 

A recent blog post on the subject caught my eye. It made the assertion that, “Whether it’s Davis’s earlier “10-to-1″ spread, the more recently reported “20-to-1,” or something in between, the income gap within equity partnerships has exploded throughout big law. That’s destabilizing.” The author goes on to say, “The gap results from and reinforces a failing a business model.”

I disagree with the assertion that a big partner comp spread is bad and argue the exact opposite. A gap is healthy, but only when properly spread. From the stories I have heard about Dewey, it did go overboard in lateral comp deals, essentially paying new partners more than they were worth. Or at a minimum, lateral partner comp was not tied to performance and value in a meaningful way, some times for 4 or 5 years.

This is not a spread problem, it’s a comp-to-value problem. 

Having some partners paid “as little as $300,000 a year, [while] other partners were pulling down $6 million or $7 million …” makes sense when partners are paid at their value level. Much like the AFA dialog going on, this is really a price-to-value problem. In a rational market, high value resolves to high price.

In my experience, a bigger problem for firms is having too narrow of a compensation spread. In these circumstances, you have partners paid at $1m who are more likely worth $500k. This scenario presents real problems for firms. Here the current $3m partner may actually be worth $5m. A firm has much more risk in losing the high-comp lawyer and her book of business, than they do losing 8 service partners being paid above their value.

Law firms need to reward their partners based in large part on their contributions to the bottom line. Partners who generate high levels of profit need to be paid at high levels of comp. Otherwise the Managing Partner’s nightmare of a partner exodus begins. And the first ones to leave are the ones you most want to keep. The last ones are the 8 noted above. 

IMHO – the Dewey lesson centers on over compensating laterals, divorcing comp from value. And it appears they did this on a significant scale, over investing in laterals as a growth strategy.

Is aligning comp-to-value a lesson the market will learn from this experience? Or will all the firms scrambling for Dewey laterals be destine to repeat history?

I saw an interesting visual of where all the Dewey & LeBoeuf partners went on a Thomson Reuters’ site earlier today. The graphic illustrates the firms that picked up the laterals, the names of the lateral partners, and their practice areas. The Dewey situation has been like watching a train slowly wreck, day after day, for about four months now. The visualization helps to see where everyone is going, and what practice areas are affected.
[Note: I got a notice from the AmLaw Daily that they are keeping an up-to-date list and visual as well.]
[Note2: Also, Law Shucks has a great Lateral Tracker to monitor more than just the Dewey defections.]

I thought I’d see if we could take the visualization a bit further and pull out a couple of handy tools to do this, and maybe get a little use out of some crowdsourcing at the same time.

  1. Google Docs – I’ve uploaded a freely editable (by anyone) spreadsheet that lists the Dewey departures, along with the practice groups, offices, date announced, and the link to a news article verifying the departure. Feel free to add or edit the Google Doc as you see fit!
  2. ManyEyes – We’ve used this before to graph out information. This is a great free resource from IBM.
Although the implosion is no laughing matter (unless you like all the puns that Above The Law has been using for the past few weeks), it does make for some interesting graphics to show how substantial the losses are.

If you’re an academic with twenty-six peer-reviewed articles sitting out there, what’s the next thing you want to do? If you are creative, you turn that into a potential twenty-seventh paper by doing an experiment on them. At least that’s what Melissa Terras from the London School of Economics and Science (LSE) did. Terras wanted to see how others would react to those open-access academic articles located on the University College of London’s (UCL) Discovery platform if she did follow-up blog posts and tweets about them. She wrote about her results in the LSE Impact of Social Science Blog, and it appears that the additional blogging and tweets made a significant difference in the number of downloads of her research.
(note: hat-tip to bespacific blog for finding the article.)

Terras didn’t do what most of us think of when it comes to promoting previous work on Blogs or Twitter (a.k.a. “blatant marketing”), instead she filled in the pieces of the research that didn’t make it into the original publications by giving the background details of what went into the process. Instead of just tweeting “go read my paper Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation,” she actually wrote a blog post where she talked about the issues surrounding why she wrote the paper and injected her personality into the blog post (which is usually lacking in those peer-reviewed academic papers.) The results were pretty good and Terras could see that there was value in taking these additional steps. After her first post and tweet about the article, she monitored the downloads to see what happened next.

She blogged about the article, then a couple days later started tweeting about the blog post. As you can see from the graph above, the results show a significant increase in downloads of her article. She then went on to test some other papers with the same process, and left one paper in the series out of the process… it’s pretty easy to see which one got left out.

Although she admits this isn’t exactly going viral, it does help in getting your work out in front of others. Terras’ advice is really two-fold and increasingly important for the academic community:

Ergo, if you want people to read your papers, make them open access, and let the community know (via blogs, twitter, etc) where to get them. Not rocket science. But worth spending time doing. Just dont develop a stats habit.

I’ve actually been thinking about how this relates to the legal community, especially in the large law firm environment that I live in. Try as I might, I can’t talk lawyers into stopping with those rigid and legalese “client alerts” that flood in-house counsel’s email boxes every time Congress passes a law, or the Supreme Court issues a ruling. However, could the approach that Terras did with her academic papers work with client alerts? Could a lawyer that wrote the client alert turn around and actually write a more personable blog post explaining the background of why he or she wrote the client alert (add in some personality, maybe a little humor??) and then tweet about it? Could the results be similar to what Terras discovered with her papers?

I’d love to run an experiment to see. So, if you’re an attorney and you are forced to write one of those lovely client alerts, how about guest posting here about what you wrote, and why you wrote it? Make sure you tell your Marketing Department first so we can get them to monitor the stats for how many downloads you get in the following days after the post and after the tweeting begins. If it works like Terras’ experiment, then maybe firms should rethink how they promote client alerts and start this three-phased process of client alerts, follow-up blog post, and Twitter.

A couple of months ago, I found myself in New York with no obligations for the night and I thought I’d go catch a band at a local club. Sounded like a simple thing to do… I assumed that I could just simply walk down the street and wander blindly into the first club I passed that had a “thump, thump, thump” sound reverberating off the walls. I walked, and I walked. I then turned to social media to help. “PLEASE tell me what bands are playing around here.” Although I did get some suggestions on where to look online or in local newspapers, I ended up going back to the hotel without any ringing in my ears from the loud music I was desiring. I swore then that this would never happen again! I would be better prepared next time, even if that meant scouring the Internets for each club’s website and carefully drafting an Excel spreadsheet of clubs, bands and music types. Luckily for me, I found something that does a much better job than I could ever hope to do. Enter the magic that is the BandsInTown app!!

I’ve fallen so in love with the app, that when I go to legal or library events and someone asks me what apps I suggest they get, BandsInTown is the first thing I mention. If they love live music, and want to know who is coming to town, or who is playing in the town they are visiting, then this is the app for them. If they don’t like live music, then I just walk away…

So what does BandsInTown do exactly? Let me walk through some of the things that I like:

  1. Scans your current music collection – once you install it on your iPhone, it takes a look at your current music list and compiles a list of all the bands you have. It then will follow these bands and let you know if any of them are coming to town in the next few months.
  2. Connects to Facebook – alright, this part I didn’t really like because I am not a big fan of being forced to connect one product to another (especially Facebook… and I’m talking to my cousins who keep inviting me to accept apps from them on Facebook!!). However, I limited BandsInTown’s access to Facebook, and opted out of any of those automatic update features. I did allow it to post if I RSVP to an event.
  3. RSVP – If you see a show that you are going to attend, you can “RSVP” that show in BandsInTown and  that information can remain private in your app, or you can allow it to update your Facebook account to let others know you are going to the show.
  4. Track Specific Bands – If you like a certain band, but don’t have them in your iPhone playlist, you can enter the band’s name and BandsInTown will start tracking them for you.

  5. Alerts when Bands Sign Up for Gigs – BandsInTown will alert you when one of the bands you are following has added a show in your town. You’ll be one of the first people to know when the band has added a date in your town.

  6. See All Concerts coming to town – BandsInTown defaults to the bands you have in your music collection, but one of the best features is that it will also just show you everything that is coming to town over the next few weeks/months. This is one of those fun serendipitous ways of finding new music that you would have never found before.
  7. Spotify, Pandora and last.fm – BandsInTown will lead you to specific band’s Spotify station, or you can link your Pandora or last.fm accounts as well. That way, when you see a band that looks like it might be of interest to you, you can go check them out right on the spot.
  8. Purchase Tickets Right From Your Phone –  If you need to buy tickets for their show, most of the venues will have a link to purchase them online and BandsInTown will direct you to the site.
  9. Roam Around, BandsInTown Will Roam With You – This gets me back to my New York experience. I took BandsInTown with me to Chicago a few weeks ago and had it find me the local shows. It does so either through entering the name of the band, or through GPS. We ended up going to see Peter and the Test Tube Babies… although, one drawback of BandsInTown is that there may be more than one good band playing and then you have to decide which you want to see more. So, I had to give up seeing The Pretty Reckless in favor of Peter… but, it’s a price I’m willing to pay over the option of not being able to find any shows at all.
Perhaps the feature I like best is that the app is free! That probably won’t surprise anyone that knows me.

If you’re a fan of live music (and you should be!!) then you’ll love the BandsInTown app. Go check it out, and perhaps I’ll see you at the Bowling for Soup concert tonight!! Or, maybe I’ll go to the Social Distortion concert… or maybe New Year’s Day… I have so many choices!!

Ernie Salazar, 1940-1984

One of my best memories of my dad was from the summer he told us he wasn’t going to fix the TV.

It had broken at the end of the school year when I was 13. The horror–it was 1975 and, in those days, all we had to look forward to was a summer full of re-runs from the 3 major TV stations.

Instead, he said, we were going to play outside, play games or match wits with him. Ack! A major nerd, he wore a pocket protector, horn-rimmed glasses and had a master’s in math. Heck, he did programming before programming was even invented.

He ended up teaching us gin, gin rummy, poker and endless brain teasers. God, he could aggravate me!

Well, following in my geeky father’s footsteps, I own no less than 3 laptops, 1 computer, 1 tablet and 2 mobile phones. But in true girly fashion, all are on the fritz, save for 1 mobile phone.

So in honor of my father and the upcoming summer season, I have forsworn fixing any of these electronic devices until the fall. Instead, I shall read books. So far, I have read 5 in 7 days. See–I really am a nerd!

No Hulu. No Netflix. No cable. No surfing. A summer of respite.

I wonder how long I can last?

This one’s for you Daddy …

The more I read of Andy Hines’ post on “Some thoughts on narcissistic leaders,” the more I smiled at what he was writing, and started thinking of connections between leadership, values, personality and generations. Andy is a Lecturer and Executive-in-Residence at the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Futures Studies, and is the author of ConsumerShift, which focuses on values as a key driver of modern leadership. He was asked by a student in his program to look at an alternative to his book by Michael Maccoby call Narcissist Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails. You could almost feel him cringe when he writes out the definition of narcissist, and how closely it fell in line with what his program was teaching.

First, a narcissist is “the kind of person who (1) doesn’t listen to anyone else when he believes in doing something and (2) has a precise vision of how things should be.” (p.9) Yikes, that’s not exactly the message we want to send to our students. 

Andy quickly starts pointing out the differences between his program and the definition of a narcissist, but also steps back to openly wonder if does take “someone with a narcissistic personality to stand firm with their vision in the face of detractors holding on to the status quo.” He acknowledges that approach may be very successful when push comes to shove, but he expands upon that thought and asks “whether this is the only way to do so – can one stand firm and be a non-narcissist?”

Narcissistic leaders can be very effective in implementing change in the face of resistance to change. Much like Stalin taking a ruler and drawing a straight line across a map and telling his railway engineers that this is the route of the Northern Trans-Siberian Railway, narcissists can be very good at getting everyone to fall in line and reject the status quo, but such rigid approaches can be disastrous in the long run. So what alternatives does Andy have for us in a modern and postmodern organization? Simple, place leadership values over personality.

I would put greater emphasis on the values of the leader as a key driver of their goals and style, with personality a secondary influence… I think it is valuable to look at issues from different “centers,” whether values, personality, generations – though I still come out with the view that values makes the most sense at the center.

Andy points out that the narcissist still has some shelf life, even (or maybe especially) with Gen Y’s. My take away from Andy’s post is that it seems that today’s (and perhaps even tomorrow’s) leadership strategy focuses on challenging the status quo without immediately rejecting it, and on having a determined vision of how things should be without being solidly locked in to that vision when alternatives arise. And, if that still doesn’t work, then pull out your inner-narcissist.

If only I had an “empty shelves” photo to submit. But alas, in this regard my law firm  library is way ahead of the curve, as we shed hundreds of books several years ago, and I did not take pictures of those empty shelves.

 I agree with the suggestion in the Shed West Era Photo Wins AALL’s Day in the Life Contest (and a call for more empty stacks photos) Law Librarian Blog post that the trend to “eliminate out-of-plan licensing without adding lightly used out-of-plan resources to in-plan only licenses to escalate” is likely to occur.

My library continues to make plans to downsize our rather small print collection with the hope of bringing those titles into our Lexis or Westlaw in-plan contract and saving money or at least not costing us more only to find that the cost to do so seems to significantly exceed what we’ve been paying for print! Thus no cost savings there!

Maybe I should do as our IT Director suggested and just cancel the print without adding it to an in-plan contract and see if they even miss it!! Aside from the currency factor why does online cost more than print? After all, the publisher does not have costly print production issues.

Is anyone else dealing with these same issues? What solutions have worked? What has not? Can we actually get away with canceling the print and add them to our in-plan contracts? How long until the other big vendors shed the in-plan versus out-of-plan pricing models as Bloomberg Law has done? And do so at a reasonable per attorney, per month cost?

Cheryl Niemeier, Guest Blogger

[NOTE: if you do have a picture of empty shelves, please email a copy to Greg]