My recent series on Staying Relevant suggested bar associations as a potential source of innovation and change in the industry. On the heels of that suggestion, the bar association of clients (a.k.a. the ACC) is announcing their new Contract Advisor system, developed in partnership with KIIAC.
Most readers know the 3 Geeks are fans of KIIAC as a next-generation KM tool. Well Kingsley has really out-done himself with this partnership. This new member benefit basically brings the full power of analysis KM right in to the hands of ACC members. Starting today, members will have access to ten document templates, which are contracts and agreements that in-house counsel would use on a regular basis. Kingsley has taken volumes of sample documents for each document type, analyzed them and made standardized versions available. Not only that, members can view alternative clauses within each document, enabling them to custom build documents, utilizing any clause components they chose. Finally, members can take documents they have received and compare them against the standard document types to see if any clauses are missing or highly variable from the standard.
As I understand it, new document types will be added over time, increasing the value of the service.
This is truly a next-generation, change-enabling member benefit. This is a quantum leap ahead of how things are currently being done. These are not forms being occasionally updated by someone you don’t know. This is dynamic content based on a wealth of knowledge that evolves as it is used.
Normally I would say check it out, but you need to belong to ACC for that to happen. So maybe I should say, join the ACC. Or maybe talk to your bar association and get them to follow suit.
Well done ACC and KIIAC.

I read an interesting article in the AMA’s interview with David Edelman of McKinsey and Co. about moving away from the concept of the marketing model as a funnel.

Because of the new nature of marketing due to online commerce, Edelman proposes an alternative marketing model that they call the “Consumer Decision Journey.”

Working much like a clock, and beginning at 9 p.m., he suggests that customers:

  1. Consider
  2. Evaluate
  3. Purchase
  4. Post-purchase experience
  5. And, if it is a successful experience, they will begin a loyalty loop; if not, they will begin the “consider” stage again.
Well, I couldn’t help but think that if you considered this model in 3-D, it looks a lot like a cyclone. And the less you are considered, the more chaotic your marketing efforts must be.
So how does this model apply to as professional services providers and, specifically, law firms?
Yes, lawyers are not bought online. But, believe me, I know from first-hand experience, they are looked at online. And in this day and age, I can certainly tell you who a firm’s best marketers are just by looking at their web site.
Think of a law firm’s point of purchase to be when that firm is given an RFP. Then think about the post-purchase experience as how the potential clients react, respond, evaluate to the law firm’s response.
If a law firm is doing it right, they are in the Loyalty Loop and they are causing some serious damage in the courtrooms/boardrooms.
If not; well, all hell just broke lose.
Like Toto heard, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Are you listening?
Image [cc] HorsePunchKid

[Guest Post from Jason Wilson, VP at Jones McClure Publishing, and blogger at rethinck.]

On her blog, Dewey B. Strategic, Jean O’Grady took direct aim at large legal publishers—Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, Bloomberg, and Wolters Kluwer—and urged them to customize their database offerings at the practice-group level rather than taking a firm-wide approach to content access. She cautions that the approach—trying to be all things to all practice groups—will only lead to misery. To survive the “sole provider wars,” she says one must be willing to be flexible.

I understand her point, but it isn’t modern. Flexibility isn’t where data is headed, whether you’re a large legal publisher or a small one. Flexibility is actually just another word for siloed data.

Think of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets compared to the universe of Harry Potter writings, including fan fiction), and data isn’t supposed to be siloed any longer. All of the current thinking about the matter suggests so.

Think of Jeff Jonas’ “data finds the data” line? Siloed data makes discoverability too difficult, and we (legal researchers) don’t like difficult.

Think of WestlawNext as an example. The whole point to the system is to pour everything into one container so you can find it all; no assumption can be made that any one thing will answer your question, so the system must search it all and show it to you.

In fact, the publishers can argue that they themselves don’t know the relevancy of all data within their possession, so it only seems logical to display it all, with facets, of course, and excellent algorithms to parse the data. Lexis is headed in this direction as well, although taking an entirely different approach with HPCC. I can’t say that Bloomberg or Wolters Kluwer is, but they may be.

But let’s draw this down a bit and focus on analytical content, which is what I think O’Grady’s post was driving at.

“There are lawyers who conjure apocalyptic consequences at the thought of losing their favorite resource. I suspect that this is generational characteristic.
Older lawyers who started out conducting legal research in print treatises and then moved online tend to have a stronger sense of a legal publisher’s brand and the reputation of specific products which I don’t see in the post-Google generation of lawyers.”

Her observation here, I think, is meant to scare publishers into customization. A sort of, “hey, if you think your analytical brand is sacred, think again, because the post-Google generation doesn’t care.” But if this is what she means to do, I think it misses the mark.

Legal publishing is counting on the post-Google generation of lawyers to free the market place of selling individual titles, jurisdictional packages, product groups, and the like. The lawyers aren’t after Chisum on Patents. They’re after “the answer,” which in their world can only come from everything (or at least a lot of different resources). Large legal publishing is moving in the direction of becoming the Comcasts, U-Verses, and Direct TVs of the world. You will be offered packages of programming, which will include things you watch and things you don’t (how else to do you fund indie titles?).

You will choose a sole provider, and it may be by region or firm size, but it will happen because the differentiator will be what I call “The Triple A’s”:

  • the applications
  • the algorithms, and 
  • the answer. 

That’s how legal publishing is going to compete for the next decade or so, because right now, there are no Hulus, Netflixes, or Google TVs that are capable of competing with them. There are no alternative channels, unless you actually start talking about how the small legal publishers (the Ganns, James Publishings, Jones McClures, and the like) do compete, and how firms should utilize them.

I look at the web now, and all the interests divvying up the properties and not letting anyone else in: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, to name a few. These aren’t companies who want to share, or if they do, it will be on their terms and the price will be steep. There is no reason to think the legal publishing market will be any different.  And why should it be? If Thomson Reuters believes it can build a better sandbox for you to play in, then it will take the risk because the upside is enormous. And it did. The post-Google generation seems to agree with the decision as well. Whether they are willing to pay for it post-graduation is, however,  a different question.

All of this sounds bad for the consumer, but I would actually argue that it isn’t, at least if it is implemented properly. Flattening analytical content and charging a single monthly or yearly rate will actually be better for the consumer in a few important ways. First, you’ll be exposed to more content and more possible answers to your questions than if you were buying by the slice. The system is designed to avoid your ignorance of sources. Sure, you may be really smart and know which one you want, but not everyone is you, and in O’Grady’s post-Google generation scenario, the lawyers don’t know or don’t care to. Second, publishers will recognize that “data” means up-to-date data, and editorial processes will evolve to make sure the content is accurate at the time you look at it. Print titles and most electronic titles don’t reflect this temporal correctness now, but they will, and it will be more than colored flags or stop signs by cases; it will be an accurate answer. Finally, publishers will recognize that a key feature of digital content is the ability to add material because there are no longer restrictions—what we used to call book bindings and PPI (pages per inch)—to limit growth of the content. And we can do this without an additional cost to the end user. Everything is geared toward more and better answers, which is really just a way of saying we want to make you feel smarter, sooner.

I wish I had a suggestion for how you might approach the future, but I don’t. The next three years are going to be ugly, particularly as large legal publishing tries to figure out how to satisfy you and the great unwashed (i.e., non-legal) masses. But that’s a subject for another post.

Yessirree. A 300-page application and $185,000 will buy you your very own “dot-brand”.

What am I talking about? The latest craze in domain names–new generic top-level domains (gTLD). So companies like Nike and Coca Cola can now own .nike, .coke, and all of their permutations.

So of course I think to myself, what crazy law firm is going buy .law or .lawfirm? Well, they aren’t of course.

According to Lisa’s Rule of Legal Technology, most law firms do not engage in any new technology until it has been implemented in Corporate America for at least 5 years.

I predict the first buyers will be someone like Thomson or Lexis. They will likely buy their own brands but may make a bid for these more generic terms.

Okay, so setting aside the immediate issue of purchasing one of the new gTLDs, let’s look at some potential legal issues.

Who exactly decides who gets what gTLD? An organization called The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)–an international non-profit organization created in 1998 to create policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers. According to their articles of incorporation, filed in California, ICANN shall

operate for the benefit of the Internet community as a whole, carrying out its activities in conformity with relevant principles of international law and applicable international conventions and local law

Well. Hmm. Call me suspicious, but let’s say an entity decides to buy “.twinkle” who decides who gets it? ICANN.

So what if 3 people want to buy “.twinkle”: a twinkle maker, a composer of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and someone who has social networking site named “twinkle.com”?

According to ICANN, the trademark owner trumps a non-trademark owner; an open network will win over a private one; and a distributor of twinkle sites to geo-specific twinkle sites will win over a private twinkle site.

So in my scenario, I anticipate a good, hard fight. And don’t get me started on potential antitrust and cyber-squatting issues!

HA! And this world will never be free of us lawyers. NEVER, I say!

Image [cc] mastermaq

Yesterday, the Special Libraries Association, Competitive Intelligence Division hosted a free webinar on how to give a Pecha Kucha (PK) presentation. The webinar, sponsored by AuroraWDC, was entitled: Pecha Kucha: Learning the PK Presentation Method to Maximize PowerPoint Effectiveness and can be viewed here for those that missed it.

The presentations are all related in some way to competitive intelligence, but the real message is in the medium – I couldn’t resist the need to invoke Marshall McLuhan and get some Canadian content in this post. The basis of the PK presentation, is 20 slides in 20 seconds, heavy on the images and light on the text. The idea is that you can say all you need to say about a given topic in roughly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. It is a quick, fun and entertaining way to present a topic.

The PK, or other similar formats like Ignite are a great way to avoid the traditional death by Powerpoint presentations.

As a panelist in yesterday’s webinar (my first PK presentation ever, by the way), here a few tips in how to put a PK together:

  1. first and foremost, have fun with it; 
  2. choose a topic you know something about so it will be easy for you to chat about it; 
  3. keep a script, but don’t be wedded to it; 
  4. find a series of images you would like to look at; and 
  5. tell a story, have a beginning, a middle and an end in the
  6. 40 Lawyers as we well know, are busy people.

They like to get their information in quick easily digestible pieces, sound bites and bullet points. The PK format does exactly that. It is an ideal format for delivering client current awareness, or even for associate/articling student training. I think it is a brilliant format and one I will certainly use going forward.

There has been a ton of buzz on the latest social web site, Pinterest, and a number of folks have been asking me if this is a viable site for law firm marketing.

I say “yes”.

After studying the site and reading Jessica Roy’s “5 News Organizations To Follow On Pinterest”on MediaBistro.com, I think law firms–particularly large law firms–are in a prime position to take advantage of the site.

Here the basic features of Pinterest:

  1. Pins: any image or video can be pinned and descriptions can be added. For law firms, one way to use this feature would be to post images of your attorneys.
  2. Boards: virtual pin boards are collections of pins. 
  3. Following: you can follow the boards. For law firms, follow your clients, law schools, bar associations and legal periodicals.
  4. Repinning: the equivalent of retweeting or recommending, capture your firm’s mentions on others’ boards under your own. I could foresee this happening if a bar association posts a video of one of our lawyers’ speaking or receiving an award.
  5. Likes: similar to “liking” on Facebook, there is no capture on your virtual pinboard, just a notification that you recognized the posting. Again, if a colleague, client or recruit has an image that has achieved a success, it is an easy way to acknowledge them.
Are you ready to get started? Here are a few ideas to get you going:
  1. Showcase your task-force teams
  2. Put together a collection of case study stats and infographs
  3. Create a virtual pinboard of your offices, scenic views, amenities and art.

Have some other ones? Let us know in the comments below.

In my recent series on Staying Relevant, I coined a new phrase: Precedence is a legal philosophy, not a business model. The thrust of this phrase is that lawyering skills are better aimed at practicing law instead of running a business. In recent conversations this same thought was being discussed around a different problem.
I occasionally will rib Greg about ‘running lists.’ He receives requests like this all the time at his firm. One of my golden rules is beware the request to run a list. Lawyers seem to think they need to find completely defensible high-ground before they make any decisions. This is manifest in the list request. Before they start calling clients to talk about fees, they need one more list of clients, industries, fees, fee types, realization rates, leverage, …. You get the idea. Often in these situations, these lawyers never pick up the phone and call the clients. Instead they keep requesting lists until the reason for running the lists becomes moot.
Now – this behavior on its own represents lawyers being lawyers instead of business owners. Admittedly you do need reasonable information before making business decisions, but you will never find the high-ground lawyers crave. But the subject of this post is actually about an extension of the ‘running lists’ model of business development.
Recently a colleague at another firm had run yet another list and shared it with a law firm partner. The partner, in typical fashion, found an anomaly on the list. It was one record that didn’t make sense to him. “Why is this on the list?” was his response. “If this record is on the list, then the entire list must be flawed in some way and entirely suspect.”
Spotting flaws and exploiting them is a basic lawyer skill. It is how they attack both litigation and deal terms. Lawyers who are good at this skill are usually the successful ones in court and at the deal table.
However … in the list world, firms will always have anomalies for two reasons. One – you want to be over-inclusive in creating lists many times to make sure the high-value records are not missed. And, two – law firm data sucks. The old days of an endless flow of work encouraged very poor data capture habits. Therefore all firms suffer from severe GIGO syndrome (garbage in – garbage out).
So – here comes the analogy – finding a suspect record on one of these lists and dubbing the list worthless is like spotting a broken twig on a tree branch and declaring the tree dead.
My advice to lawyers running firms and building books of business: Look past the broken twig. Find the healthiest branches of the tree and focus your energy there. Instead of trying to eliminate risk, focus your business energy on opportunities with the highest ROI. Stop focusing on the trivial outliers.
Socrates may have made a great lawyer, but I wouldn’t want him running my firm.

Image [cc] noluck

[We are very happy to have Guest-Blogger, Jeffrey Brandt, who gives us the CIO perspective on the relationship between Law Firm Libraries and Law Firm CIO’s.]

After my highlight of his post “The Law Firm Library & CIO Relationship” in the PinHawk Technology Digest Greg, was kind enough to reach out and ask me to write a guest post rebuttal.  Who can refuse an offer to guest post on 3 Geeks?

Greg said a few things in his post that I took exception to. First he said that “It isn’t that CIOs are purposely antagonistic toward the library….”  Then he said that the CIO’s approach to dealing with the library (and other law firm administrative units) is “Lead, Follow or Get the Hell Out of the Way.”  I would like to think that those descriptors describe very few of my fellow CIOs.

It is only natural that Greg would be biased from the librarian point of view.  As a veteran CIO I suppose it is quite safe to say my bias is from the opposite direction.  But I was also one of the first CIOs to have the law library report to me in the early 1990s, and as such, maybe I have a special affinity for the library.  What I said in my brief highlight was that Greg had missed something – the part about the library being antagonistic toward IT.

I first want to say that I have been very fortunate in my CIO roles to work with some very great librarians in my 25+ years in legal.  They’re smart, professional and I’d work with all of them again in a heartbeat.  And since I am sure Greg will make some comment on who holds the power, I want to note that I’ve worked with librarians as peers, almost/semi peers and as direct reports.  A good relationship isn’t a function of direct reporting.

I can recall the days when many librarians wanted little to do with electronics.  When the library began to report to me, I was shocked by how little was known about the new CD-ROM and online technologies.  I would think and say, “How can you not be interested in these things that will fundamentally change the way you work?”  Over generalizing some, I could say they were a very insular group, their only care and concerns were for the books and the center-of-the-firm, showcase space.

I can still recall a rather hostile crowd of librarians at the beginning of a presentation I gave for the AALL way back in 1995, and the many librarians who warmed up during the presentation and came up to talk to me and ask me questions.  Greg’s point, “there are many firms out there, big and mid-sized, where the library leadership simply doesn’t have a good relationship with their CIO” rings an old bell with me.  But I would have thought we would have progressed a bit further in 16 years.

I always appreciated my relationship with the librarian.  The last thing I want them to do is remain insular.  In my last role, one of the first things I did was bring the librarian into my weekly meetings with my IT and eDiscovery reports.  I have worked with the librarians at my firms to successfully launch KM programs, to improve the document management systems, and to help consult on various aspect of information management.

There is a lot more in common between IT and the library than you might think.  Let me take just two examples.

Let’s take the library itself.  A showcase place that, rightly so, librarians take a lot of pride in.  The physical books being purchased are lessening, losing out to on-line research.  Many administrations want to reclaim the space and repurpose it for non-library uses.  On the IT side, how many firms still have computer rooms?  Many of those showcase computing facilities have been placed in secondary space in secondary cities or completely outsourced to a co-lo provider.

What about billings?  It used to be that some libraries turned a small profit.  At a minimum, hard-working librarians were able to make sure billable revenue covered the non-billable research that was conducted. Most all of that has vanished as clients today refuse to pay for any electronic research.  On the IT side it was telephone charges.  Complex billing and cost recovery systems used to be the norm, capturing every phone call made and placing them on bills.  One of the first things clients refused to pay was telephone charges, and many firms were forced to take it as pure overhead.

Too many librarians remain insular today.  They do their “library thing” and not much more than that.  But this is not 1995.  Not even 2005.  No group can remain insular and isolated.  Improved process and technology have pulled all the groups closer together.  Look at the evolution of finance and records.  A few librarians have stepped out to work with knowledge management teams, marketing and other areas of the firm.  More need to do this.

Greg says CIOs are interested in Security/Privacy, Mobile Technology and a whole laundry list of other things.  That is true, those certainly are topics that a CIO needs to be interested in.  Some, I might argue, should consume more of the IT Directors time, not the CIOs.  But I think a good CIO is really all about advocacy, enablement and forwarding the business strategies.  That advocacy and enablement is across all practices – administrative and legal.

Greg’s views and mine converge when he talks about engagement and education.  But again, it should be a two-way street.  As librarians you need to be aware of what changes are happening around you.  So if you’ve got a CIO who is antagonistic (purposefully or not) toward the library and are not sure how to proceed, send him or her to me and we’ll talk.  The library, the librarians and the services you provide are too important to waste in a hostile relationship – whoever’s fault it might be.

Image [cc] publik16

As the former access to justice / pro bono guy for Utah, I have a long term view on issues surrounding legal services for the poor. So it is with sadness and a bit of frustration I write this post.

Funding for access to justice generally comes from a handful of sources. The first is federal funding – with some state funding mixed in here and there, the second is from IOLTA (Interest On Lawyers’ Trust Accounts), the third is from foundations and the fourth is from individuals, primarily those in the legal market.
If any one of these sources is compromised, then competition for the other sources greatly increases. One source already greatly reduced has been IOLTA, since interest rates have been pushed very low by the Fed over the past 5 or so years as an economic stimulus tactic. Foundations suffered a bit from low rates and the downturn as well. So legal services for the poor was already in a struggle for survival.
And now the coup de grace – Congress cuts legal services funding by 14%. The WSJ reports that cuts will result in predicted losses of 1,226 people for legal services agencies.
The usual thinking from politicians is that the legal profession bears the responsibility of serving the legal needs of the poor. So the answer is more pro bono hours. Unfortunately, pro bono hours have also suffered at the hands of the downturn.
I suppose if one searches, they can find a logic to the legal services segment suffering with the rest of the legal market. The problem with that thinking is that the ranks of the poor are swelling now. So it’s not a lack of demand driving a reduction in supply.
In the end I am not sure where to take this post. I could appeal to a sense of justice to get people invigorated to take action. But given the dire situation, I am not sure where one would point such enthusiasm.
Thoughts?
Image [cc] USDAgov

Later this month, I will presenting with Scott Preston (lovingly referred to around here as “Geek #4”) at the ARK Group Conference focusing on law firm libraries and information services. Initially we were going to discuss the CIO/Library relations, but after discussing it for a while, we decided to go a bit broader and bring it back to an IT/Library relations. The change, however, left me with some of my preparatory notes on the initial topic, and not wanting anything to go to waste, I decided to use these as a basis for a blog post. After going to the CIO Forum at LegalTech a few days ago, it was clear to me that most of the CIOs there are focused on the issues of:

  • Security/Privacy
  • Mobile Technology
  • Legal Project Management
  • Keeping e-mail and the network up
  • Industry Trends (mainly Cloud Storage)
  • Consumerization of Technology
  • Training Users on New Technology
  • Dealing with Legacy Data Systems
  • Technology that can be Outsourced

On the surface, you would think that the CIO is just too overwhelmed to think about the library, but you’d be wrong. CIO’s do think about the library… and many think that the library needs to be refocused. The anecdotal stories I hear from CIO’s when they talk about the library tend to run in these categories:

  • The Library is a space (that can be better allocated)
  • The Library is about books
  • I rarely talk to the librarians
  • When I do talk to the librarians, all I hear is “blah, blah, blah, library catalog, blah, blah, blah.”

It isn’t that CIOs are purposely antagonistic toward the library, it’s more that the library just isn’t on their radar. On the rare occasion the library does surface to them, it is usually with a problem the library has that the technology team needs to fix. It would seem that the CIO’s approach to dealing with others on the Administrative side of the house falls into that theme of “Lead, Follow or Get the Hell Out of the Way.” This isn’t just the approach CIOs take with the library, it is the approach they take with all law firm administrative departments. Of course, I’m sure many of you reading this will counter that you have a great relationship with your CIO, and maybe you do… if so, congratulations, and thank you for making the library profession look good… but there are many firms out there, big and mid-sized, where the library leadership simply doesn’t have a good relationship with their CIO… some of which don’t realize how bad their relationships are because the CIO has dismissed them and they haven’t realized it yet. This type of relationship makes the library profession look bad. For those that have this type of relationship between CIO and Library Services, how do you fix the relationship? I would think that one way to approach situations like this is to: Engage the CIO and educate him or her on the high levels of work performed by the library in a way that explains both the talent level needed to perform these jobs, and in a way that plays off of the pain-points that the CIO addresses (managing risk for the firm, managing projects, dealing with the consumerization of information, training, etc.) In many ways, the pain-points of running a library and all of its subsidiary divisions (records, conflicts, CI, BD, etc.) parallels the pain-points of a CIO. The library is more than just a place. There is value in the services provided, but that value has to be displayed in a way that others understand it. Once a CIO understands that value, and can relate to it based on their own experiences, then the relationship can grow. It is up to the leadership within the Library to educate the CIO of that value, because a CIO that thinks your department has limited value is very dangerous thing to your career as a leader of a law firm library.