I just received an announcement from Bloomberg Law that they have just inked a deal with the 25 US offices of DLA Piper to bring Bloomberg Law to the desktop all of the 1,400 attorneys in those offices. This is by far the biggest coup that Bloomberg has had to date within the Big US Law Firms. It is actually exciting news to hear, and should cause a few wrinkles in the business of legal publishing.

Right off the top of my head I have a few questions that pop out on this deal.

  1. Who lost DLA Piper’s US business?? (I’d find it very hard to believe that a firm, even of DLA Piper’s size, would want to carry Westlaw, Lexis AND Bloomberg on their annual budgets.)
  2. If DLA Piper did dump one of the other vendors,  what resources does DLA Piper lose in the change? Does making a deal like this for the US office affect future deals with legal vendors outside the US?
  3. Did the deal with BNA come into play on the negotiations of a US office-wide agreement?
  4. How are attorneys going to adjust to the new platform? I know DLA Piper has had Bloomberg in a more limited access role for a while now (in fact they were one of the first, if not the first firms to jump on the Bloomberg trial when it rolled out.)

This announcement will make a number of firms stand up and take note. There is a lot of talk about BigLaw firms going with a single-vendor, or at least a primary vendor with another smaller deal with the other. It’s apparent that the folks at Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis are taking notes as well, and attempting to set up barriers to going down this route (such as no longer offering pay-go or credit card access for one-off research requests.) With a legitimate third party in play, it may shake up the game a bit and make for some interesting times ahead for both the law firms and the legal publishers.

I’m hoping to learn the answers to the questions above. As I do, I’ll do some follow-up posts with what I learn. I applaud DLA Piper for testing the waters on this idea, and look forward to seeing if other firms follow suit. Things just got interesting!

Here’s the press release I received:

BLOOMBERG LAW ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT WITH DLA PIPER FOR LEGAL RESEARCH
Bloomberg Law to Provide DLA Piper’s US Lawyers with Legal Research and Business Information Platform
New York – Bloomberg Law, the legal research system from the world leader in data and information services, today announced an agreement with DLA Piper, the world’s largest global business law firm, to provide high quality, cost-effective legal research for all its lawyers throughout the United States. Bloomberg Law’s integration of legal research with the Bloomberg industry and financial information relied upon by corporations and investment institutions throughout the world, provides lawyers with a competitive edge in understanding their clients’ businesses.
With DLA Piper’s enterprise-wide adoption of Bloomberg Law, the firm’s 1,400 US lawyers practicing in 25 cities will have unlimited access to Bloomberg Law from their desktops. Bloomberg Law’s legal research system integrates comprehensive legal content, company and financial information, and news all in one place, including Bloomberg’s world-class proprietary news, company and market information. Bloomberg Law’s all-inclusive, transparent and predictable pricing means that every user has the same unrestricted access to the content in the Bloomberg Law databases.
“We are deeply gratified that a firm of DLA Piper’s caliber has chosen Bloomberg Law for its lawyers throughout the United States,” said Bloomberg Law Chairman Lou Andreozzi. “We look forward to working closely with DLA Piper as we continue to develop the resources to help law firms better manage their research and costs so they can concentrate on adding value to their clients.”
Don Jaycox, DLA Piper’s Chief Information Officer, said, “Law firms need to cost effectively deliver great client service in a highly competitive environment. In addition to being experts in law, our clients have made it clear that they also want us to understand the business challenges they face on a daily basis. Bloomberg Law’s unique combination of legal research, company information, and news helps our lawyers stay abreast of a wide array of information affecting our clients.  Plus, Bloomberg’s inclusive pricing model helps us manage costs in a predictable way.”
About Bloomberg Law
Bloomberg Law is the real-time legal research system that integrates innovative search technology, comprehensive legal content, company and client 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.
CONTACT
Jill Goodkind
+1 212-617-3669
jgoodkind@bloomberg.net

As much is Greg is hungry for free stuff, I am hungry for new technologies that will help ease my pain relative to alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) and related, emerging legal project management (LPM) challenges. So I am pleased to announce a new option on the market that may ease that pain.
Back in the Fall, I had spoken with the ERM Legal Solutions Team and gave them some input on direction their product might take. They listened.
ERM announced their updated offering heading into LegalTech. As I was otherwise committed, I did not attend LegalTech this year, so I requested a web demo after the show. What I saw gave me hope.
One of the challenges of bringing project management (PM) concepts to lawyers is carefully and diplomatically inserting these ideas in to the ways lawyers already practice. I have previously noted that imposing PM at full-force on to a practice would likely end in failure. To that end, ERM’s product is both flexible and highly integrated with other firm systems. You can build highly detailed, hour-by-hour plans, or you can easily go with a fixed fee price, decide what leverage you will use, drop in some time keepers and have a plan in place. The system also connects with your DMS, time and billing, CRM and other applications. This integration is reflective of the thinking that went in to this application. The ERM system is not another silo of knowledge.
On the AFA side, the system can be a quick, easy way to develop a budget. And it can give you a high-level profitability analysis. It also has a template feature, which I typically view as a mixed blessing. Templates are great tools – it’s just that no one ever wants to be the one who builds and maintains them. However, over time, I would at a minimum expect templates to emerge from various budget building efforts.
Admittedly I only saw a brief demo of the ERM system. However, its direction is promising. I plan to keep an eye on this offering and hope to take a more in-depth look at it in the near future.
Note: Ron Friedmann also posted a review on ERM here.

It’s axiomatic that one learns more from failure than from success.  After all, success doesn’t immediately demand reflective analysis. If you are successful, it’s clearly because you were brilliant and made all the right decisions (just ask any bailed-out investment banker).  If, however, you fail, you are likely to go through a review of your own limitations and weaknesses and be all the better for it the next time.  Failure and perseverance is a recurring pattern in many, if not all, “successful” peoples’ lives.
What is true of successful people, is also true of successful companies, departments, committees, research groups, and teams.  No group of people gets it right the first time, every time.  They fail.  A lot.  Successful groups learn from their mistakes and try again, or they realize the folly of their endeavor and move on to something more productive, where they will probably fail yet again.
My goal is not to sing the praises of perseverance in the face of ineptitude, but to strongly advocate for embracing your inner loser.  Accept the fact that you stink, that most of your ideas are drivel, and that you are going to be a failure most of the time.  It’s not Sisyphean perseverance that sets the wildly successful apart from the rest of us poor shlubs — we all know people who are persistently bad at what they do, and have no hope of ever being successful – no!, what sets the successful apart is the remarkable speed at which they fail.  You see, the problem, my friends, is not failure itself, but Epic Failure.
The relevant definition of epic being “of unusually great size or extent”, however, in this particular case, I’m going to add “duration” to the definition.  Epic Failures are failures that take too long to happen.  Quick failures, on the other hand, are merely steps on the way to success.
Take for example, the IT project. A typical IT project begins with a dozen or more people in a room to discuss “the problem”.  Everyone in the room, entered the room, with a good idea of what “the problem” was already, but the first meeting is a lengthy discussion of the intricacies and various facets of “the problem”.  Invariably, the project team leaves that first meeting with a larger problem than they had when they entered and the long slough to finding “the solution” begins.
As an alternative, imagine a Skunkworks team – a small group of no more than four, technically capable, energetic, and empowered individuals, who are handed problems and asked to find solutions.  The primary goal of this group would be to fail quickly.  Find a solution, test the solution, present the solution to those who will ultimately use it, discover why their solution is inadequate, and then start again with knowledge gained from their failure.
In a month, the Typical Team will have determined in excruciating detail, exactly what they think they need to look for in a solution, while the Skunkworks team will have understood through a series of quick failures that they actually need something else entirely.  The Typical Team may come to the same conclusion in about six months if they hurry.
There may be projects that require large groups of people performing in depth analysis of the problem and every possible solution, but let’s be honest, this approach has less to do with finding solutions, than it does with avoiding the appearance of failure for as long as possible.  

Recipe for success: 1) Fail small.  2) Fail quickly.  3) Fail often.
image [cc] Mike Licht

In Part 7 of the series we noted the backward looking nature of the legal profession and how that handicaps lawyers needing to embrace change. In this final segment of the series, a bit of hope is brought to the table in the form of bars.

The Bar’s Role
Saving the best for last – bar associations are in the best position to drive change in the legal profession. Via their CLE groups, publications departments and member services options, bar associations are in a position to upend the Paradigm of Precedence. First and foremost, bars can lead by example.
Some specific examples of what a bar might do:
Actively adopt new technologies. Turn websites in to e-commerce, interactive destinations. Utilize cloud-based technologies in business operations. Enable mobile access to all services. Embrace social media platforms.
Partner with vendors who can bring technology and business knowledge to members in affordable ways. Be the one who stays on top of change on members’ behalf. Take some chances and invest money in technology relationships.
Include forward-thinking components in CLE programs and publications. Many topics can benefit by including forward looking technologies and business ideas. Ask speakers and authors to include those in their topics. Maybe require them as appropriate (e.g. Annual Conventions).
Provide CLE directly on adapting to change. With the right topics and speakers, CLE programs directed at meeting these challenges will have a strong appeal for members.
Provide practice management services to give members more direct advice and services.
Push to revamp the Bar rules. Too many rules are built on the billable hour model with a guild mind-set. Think about the innovators among the membership and make sure bar rules are not overly inhibiting them. As an example, check out the Legal Services Act in the UK. It goes so far as to allow non-lawyer equity participation in firms.
In Closing
Every facet of the legal industry is under intense pressure to change: every institution and every participant. No one is protected from the compelling market and technological forces. Surviving in this industry, let alone prospering, means shedding old ways and actively embracing new thinking.
I coined a second phrase in my 1999 presentation by applying precedence thinking to operating a ski boat. The phrase: We’re driving the boat by watching the wake. Our perfect storm presents an opportunity for the profession to turn around, look out over the bow, and face the future head-on.
So I’ll add yet another phrase to my holster: Precedence is a legal philosophy, not a business model.
My final suggestion: Become a voice for the Paradigm of Change.
Thank you all for following this series. It was fun and interesting to write. It made me think a lot about how all of the forces are coming together in a new picture. Although I can’t predict the future, this exercise gave me a less-fuzzy view of what’s in store for the legal profession.
Image [cc] Andrew Feinberg

In preparation for the ARK Group Conference on Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library, Research & Information Services, we are conducting a survey on the topic of embedded librarians. This short survey simply asks the size of your firm and if you have embedded librarians, or if you do or do not plan on using embedded librarians.

Marlene Gebauer will use the survey for her presentation on February 23rd, and we will post the results here on the blog a couple days later.

If you’re a law firm librarian, please take a minute to fill out this survey.

image [cc] Flicker Clicker

Part 6 of this series demonstrated how the pressures for change are being felt by all corners of the legal market.

The Paradigm of Precedence
The name of this series is taken from a presentation I gave back in 1999 to a group of bar leaders. At that time I coined the phrase, The Paradigm of Precedence. To illustrate this concept, I suggested lawyers are driving the boat by watching the wake. Lawyers are deeply trained in looking at the past to determine the present. The future only becomes interesting once they know today’s precedence. A running joke in the industry is that whenever an innovative concept is proposed, the first question asked is: Are other firms doing this? This paradigm, this way of seeing the world in the rear-view mirror, has become a significant handicap for the profession.
Prediction
Lawyers left to their own devices will hold to the Paradigm of Precedence. They prefer to wait and see what precedents develop in the market and then attempt to copy them. The big problem with this tendency is that new breeds of competitors will take the opposite approach, preferring to innovate ahead of the market, actually setting the new precedents. And once these providers are established in the market, it will be very difficult for lawyers to displace them. Lawyers in this scenario will be forever playing catch-up in a market that is gaining speed ahead of them.
Attempts to fight this tide with lawsuits over UPL will have little impact. Fighting in court will further expose how lawyers are not actively working to lower costs and improve their services. The public (including legislatures) will see a guild fighting to retain its monopoly when other providers have come in and met the public’s needs at lower costs. For instance in the LegalZoom example, this company is getting legal help to thousands of people who were not getting it before. Lawyers will rightly argue some people will be harmed in this environment. These lawyers will essentially be arguing that it is better to not have this access to justice than to allow any potential for harm from non-lawyers. I think the recent success of LegalZoom demonstrate the likely outcome of such fights.
A Bit of Hope
As with any community, there will be some participants who shed the Paradigm of Precedence. After one or two times of being beaten in the market, these lawyers will embrace new thinking, employing new business structures and innovative technologies. Our best hope will be encouraging and enabling these agents of change.
Although my prediction is admittedly a bit of doom-and-gloom, I hope to be proven wrong. Lawyers are the best people to provide legal services. They have a noble obligation to protect the rule of law. If the provision of legal services primarily falls to those without this duty – the rule of law will suffer.
Part 8 – the final in the series – provides some hope and ideas for how the profession can embrace change, focusing on the role of bar associations as logical and likely agents of change.

Just minutes ago, Tumblr announced its answer to Facebook’s featured stories: “Highlighted Posts”, but with one major difference.

You gotta pay for that post: one whole dollar.

Well. As of January 2012, Tumblr has 39.5 million blogs–and that’s just blogs; not posts–that’s a lot of mullah.

And, for those who are on the crafty side, you get to make a fun little customizable sticker, to boot.

Watch out, Facebook. Your big old bad IPO self is getting called out by the new kid on the block!

image [cc] WilWheaton

In Part 5 of this series we talked about next-generation technologies that have the potential for real change, but mean computers will replace lawyers.

Beyond Private Practice – Some Examples
Law Schools
“What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering,” A title from a November 19, 2011 article in the New York Times. Deeper in the article, “The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the General Counsel of FMC Technologies.”
Law Schools are under heavy attack to change as well. With student loan debt now surpassing credit card debt and with law graduates unable to actually practice law, many even within the legal industry are turning on the law schools. This debate has reached a fever-pitch. Law students are now suing their schools for not preparing them for the realities of the legal market. And law schools are suing the ABA over accrediting standards.
Law Librarians
Long held as a sacred space within a law firm, now law libraries are convenient cost cutting opportunities. Librarians are forced to defend their value and try to maintain staffing levels in order to effectively respond to lawyer research requests. Even clients have joined in this attack, specifying which time keepers are allowed on their bills, many times excluding valuable librarians.
Legal IT
Those in the legal technology space are now under an all-sides attack. Clients want to know specifically which tools a firm is using to be efficient. Firm leadership expects IT to bring every innovation to them, but then declines to fund much beyond basic upgrades. Partners want to cut what they perceive as less-utilized systems (a.k.a. the ones other partners use). Administrative leadership expects that no system will ever go down. Individual lawyers want to switch to iPhones. And IT gets to support all of this. Meanwhile, they are competing against the entire market to retain top technical talent.
Judges
While fighting with every other government agency for funding, they must stay on top of all the new technology, as every day some case is filed over its use or abuse. Meanwhile, they haven’t seen a decent raise in years.
You get the picture …
Part 7 reveals the biggest challenge facing the legal profession – its deep, traditional emphasis on precedence.
Image [cc] lemurdillo

I had the privilege of being on a panel with three amazing people at LegalTech’s CIO Forum this week to discuss how consumerization of technology is affecting the law firm technology strategy. Phillip Hoare from Wilson Sonsini really made me think differently about the topic because he came at the scenario about 180 degrees from where I assumed most CIO’s would be. His approach was to focus on the positive and downplay the negative. Although I don’t have a direct quote, his motto for dealing with the different ways in which a lawyer wants to use technology, or the different types of technology was basically this:

My job as CIO is to make sure that the attorneys are engaged in the practice of law, and we will support whatever platform or device they wish to use in order to keep them engaged in their practice.

I have to say that I was surprised to hear this type of approach because most of the time at these types of conferences the focus is on what goes wrong, rather on what goes right. In fact, I made a few comments to others that the theme that ran through most of the conference was the biggest problem with law firm technology was that lawyers didn’t stay in the “box” that the CIO or CTO designed for the firm. Issues of potential security risks, or the possibility of commingling of person and firm data, or the duplication of data into cloud servers or personal devices required shutting down the ideas of bringing in foreign technology that hadn’t been fully vetted by the firm’s IT department.

Now, I’m not living in a bubble when it comes to how technology, law firm IT Departments and law firm Partners interact. There is a delicate balance of doing what is right, what is ethical, and what is feasible… and that these three prongs are typically being challenged as new technologies are introduced. I just wanted to say that it was refreshing to hear someone look at the challenges in a way that stresses the need to just make it work in a way that is beneficial to the attorney’s ability to work in a way that he or she finds most effective, and less about drawing battle lines of what will and will not be supported by IT. I’m sure there are many challenges that face IT Departments that take on the “keep the attorney engaged” approach. However, I think that it is the better approach for IT to be flexible in supporting the way the attorney wishes to work, rather than attempting to make the attorneys work the way IT wants. As I mentioned during the panel, if IT starts throwing up roadblocks to the way attorneys want to work… you may find the attorneys have great skills in working around those roadblocks.

What resource (technological or not) would you invent to transform the legal industry?

This question isn’t about what you think will transform the industry, but rather what you would, if you were all-powerful, create to do so.
Share your thoughts. And don’t just step outside the box, get so far away from it that you can barely see it with a telescope.