Balancing out my post this week on some less-than favorable news from Texas, I wanted to share some very good news from the Lone Star State.

Onit, a Houston-based legal technology company, obtained a healthy injection of capital this week. Eric Elfman, a founder and the CEO of the company, has been working tirelessly for months to secure this funding. I know this because he has cancelled lunch with me numerous times.
Onit is doing some very interesting things with technology. Their original focus on legal project management has evolved a bit to focus more on process automation. Process is something every legal department and law firm has, but are just coming to recognize. So an application that automates process is going to have significant value. If you look at the process mapping Seyfarth, Reed Smith and other firms are pursuing and the impact this is having, you will start to fully appreciate the value of such a tool.
The other unique aspect of Onit is its SaaS model. Process automation can be very painful due to the time and investment required in enterprise infrastructure. Onit removes that pain.
I’m guessing the $4.1m in funding from Austin Ventures is going to vault Onit deep into the market. Watch for great things coming from Eric and the team over the coming year.
Congratulations Onit!

A trustworthy source has informed me that TR Legal is no longer offering pay-as-you-go plans to mid-and large-sized firms. My guess is they are trying to motivate firms to subscribe to their service by contract, thereby guaranteeing a revenue stream for a fixed period of time. However, this is an extremely short-sighted move. As more firms move to a single provider model, it seems to me that the company on the losing end of that process would want to use any means at their disposal to keep a toe-hold in the firm. Remaining competitive requires that you expose as many people as possible to your product. Taking that option away effectively removes your company from competing on a go-forward basis. Those firms that chose other providers will lose any knowledge they have of your product over the length of the contract. In fact, it will result in a segment within the firm that has no history with your product. The end will result will be that contracts lost will not be likely to change providers at the end of the contract.

So what does this all mean? It means that either the market will be divided into those TR Legal and everyone else, with very little opportunity for TR to grow its market share in this space. I guess the folks in Dayton and Manhattan are thanking TR for doing them a favor. But it also means something else that disturbs me even more: TR Legal is blowing a huge raspberry to customers everywhere by showing how little they value their desire to provide TR Legal’s resources in a manner of their choosing.

Image [cc] Woody H1

Up-Front Disclosures: I volunteer for the Texas Access to Justice Commission (TAJC). Formerly, I worked with the Utah Access to Justice Planning Council and served as President of the Board of the Legal Aid Society of Salt Lake.

Crazy Times in Texas
The TAJC, in an obvious power grab, is driving an effort to offer forms to pro se litigants. In conjunction with the Uniform Forms Task Force, they want to make divorce filing documents readily available to those who cannot afford them. This is obviously an evil plan to take over the world.
In the other corner is the Family Law Section of the State Bar of Texas, “which oppose the forms and claim their use: could hurt the interest of people who use them; will not be limited to low-income Texans; could harm the livelihoods of … lawyers; and may expand to other practice areas besides family law.”
At least they were honest enough to add in the part about harming lawyers’ income. Where do I begin on the insanity of this …?
The basic argument of the Section is that it is better for people to have no access to justice, than allow for the potential of possible risk to them. Yeah – I get that they are representing the financial interests of their section membership here, but this doesn’t pass the ole smell test. Claiming to protect someone’s interest by leaving them out in the cold is just plain bad.
And why can I say this so directly? Ten years ago in Utah, a combined effort of the Court, the Bar, the legal services community AND the Family Law Section provided the exact same resource. It is an online, sophisticated document generation system available to anyone who wants to use it (including non-low income citizens). Did this result in drops in income for family lawyers? No, it did not.
At the time a good friend called me to say the Bar should sue the Court for the unauthorized practice of law. I suggested that would not happen and had a lively discussion with this older, self-proclaimed “bottom feeding” family law practitioner. I understood where he was coming from, since the system could impact his business. We had the same discussion about access to justice noted above. And what happened to him?
He started sending his clients to the forms system first, before he would meet with them. He basically out-sourced document drafting to the courts. Instead of spending his time drafting pleadings, he spent it counseling clients. His clients have very limited resources, so this new approach meant they were spending them on the highest value this lawyer had to offer. His business did not drop. He was happier and his clients were getting better value and service.
The crux of this issue actually hits the entire legal market. Lawyers will do much better to embrace change than fight it in the courts. The market will continue to progress either way. If the TAJC and Court do not meet this need, LegalZoom or someone else will. I recommend the Family Law Section reevaluate their approach to this effort and join with the TAJC. Here’s a novel idea along that line of thinking: Use the same forms as member benefit for your section. Add some additional tools and content on top of the forms and they become a high-value member benefit instead of a vague threat.
I’ll step down from my soap-box now. Having lived and breathed on the access to justice side of the profession, along with being involved in new technologies and change in general, made this a hot-button issue for me. I believe the profession is better than this and should work together to benefit clients and lawyers. This sort of public in-fighting benefits no one.

Image [cc] sjunnesson

Please welcome Guest Blogger Tony Chan

[Note: Tony left a comment on Cindy Adam’s post from last week, but I thought it was very insightful to the solo law firm librarian that I asked if I could turn it into its own post. Thanks to Tony for agreeing to sharing this with the bigger audience. – gl]

As a solo librarian managing two locations in different states, the same-floor concept [as discussed in Cindy Adam’s post] is simply not feasible.

Face time has its value but people also want convenience. They prefer getting answers and their work done without having to leave their office– unless they really want to use the paper CFRs in the library or see you in your office but only if you’re next door. Time is precious so I only attend non-virtual face-to-face meetings when I have to.

Instead, I take the “wildcard” approach to alleviate staff count, cohesiveness, proximity, or face time issues.

I build rapport through common denominators (things that EVERYONE comes in contact with). And not surprisingly the common denominators are billing and technology. Together they create an opportunity for the library to combine/leverage content delivery, user convenience, and get involved in firm business matters.

Contact opportunities:

  • Got tech skills? 

Use it on the IT front. Become an extension of web development by working with practice groups to build/enhance their websites and work through content delivery/governance issues.
IT’s more than happy to put some code-writing/content building on your plate IF they trust you to handle it. After all, librarians are the “I” in the IT. And when you’re also the “T”, you become the consummate legal technologist!

  • Got curiosity & rigor? 

Help Marketing to research business intelligence.

The CMO will be impressed with your investigative skills.

Like problem-solving? Become an automation specialist by collaborating with Accounting/Records depts. to streamline workflow and cost recovery. Faster collections and better bottom-line for the firm.

I’m on the same floor where the library is and still see people everyday in my office, hallways and the lunchroom.

Out of sight, out of mind? Not me!

Are You LinkedIn?

View more presentations from Lisa Salazar

This is a presentation that was given to the Minnesota Legal Career Professionals (MnLCP) on January 12, 2011.
I always enjoy talking about social media. It’s a huge passion of mine, right up there with movies. I once gave an entire speech comparing Social Media to the Wizard of Oz. But don’t worry, that’s not this speech!
Throughout this talk, I will be making a couple of other movie references—so keep your ears and eyes open.
First of all, how many of you have a LinkedIn account? 24
A Facebook account? 25
Good, I am speaking to the advanced class.
But for those of you who may not know or need to find good analogies to take back to your colleagues here is one straight from the horse’s mouth, LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner:
LinkedIn is a professional online networking site, as opposed to Facebook’s more social site. What does that mean?
While Facebook is in the business of helping you make connections in your personal life to facilitate social interaction, LinkedIn is focused on mapping connections between professionals, to help develop them within three degrees of connection.
By the way, anyone recognize these two folks? The one on the left is John Hodgman, he was the Father’s voice in animated movie Coraline. The other one is Justin Long, the voice for Alvin in Alvin and the Chipmunks.
And these are the real-life guys. The one on the left, for those of you who didn’t see the Facebook movie Social Network, is Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg. The one on the right is LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner.
What do I mean by degrees of connection?
I’m sure everyone’s heard of six degrees of Kevin Bacon: a game created by four Albright students after watching the movie Footloose during 1994 blizzard. The four students wrote a letter to Jon Stewart, telling him that “Kevin Bacon was the center of the entertainment universe” and that every actor could be connected to him through 5 other actors or less.
Well, this idea of six degrees of separation has its origin from an Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, who wrote a collection of short stories called “Everything is Different”. This idea influenced a great deal of early thought on social networks and LinkedIn is a spin-off of that idea.
I’ll give you some examples. Anyone that reads our blog, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, know that I am a huge admirer of Ashton Kutcher.
Well, I will have you know that I know people that know people that know Ashton Kutcher. He is only three degrees away from me.
And the same with Barack Obama. I, in fact, have a better chance of meeting the president than I do of meeting Ashton. It’s so sad.
Mr. Obama and I have a second-degree relationship while Ashton and I have a third-degree relationship—or what they call a loose connection.
Those third-degree relationships is where LinkedIn comes in and helps you to explore, build out and strengthen these more nebulous relationships.
Right now, there are 153 million people in the U.S. workforce and 3.3 billion people in the global workforce. This  is LinkedIn’s target audience. And your potential audience.
Currently, LinkedIn has 135 million members in over 200 countries, with nearly 60% outside of the U.S.
And in the Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area there are over 1,700 LinkedIn profiles that show up in a “law practice” industry search.
So, now we’ve set the stage for why we have to active on LinkedIn, let’s talk about how do you market yourself in this digital landscape?
How many of you have heard of the Four Ps of marketing?
The four Ps are a basic principal of marketing that was introduced in 1953 by Harvard Advertising Professor Neil Borden in his American Marketing Association presidential address. The concept was later published in his article, “The Concept of the Marketing Mix.” And, actually, he borrowed the term “marketing mix” from an associate, James Cullton, who developed the idea in 1948 to describe the role of a marketing manager. So if you ever wondered just what exactly a marketing manager does; well, you are about to find out.
The four Ps are:
1.                Product
2.                Placement
3.                Promotion
4.                Price

Product

So let’s talk about the 4 Ps in relationship to you. What is the product? That’s right: you. You, as an attorney, are the ultimate product in any law firm—you are the intellectual property of your firm. Only you know and have the relationships, knowledge and skills to negotiate, procure, and win business. So we know we have a great product—there is no denying that. But unless you are known you will not be retained. So how do we get you noticed? Well, that brings us to a sub-set of  the first “P” –packaging.

Packaging

What is packaging?
Well, at its most basic—it is the manner in which you present yourself. It can be as basic as your personal style, your voice, your delivery of services. But in terms of LinkedIn, it is your profile. You have got to make sure that you are taking full advantage of all of the offerings available on your LinkedIn profile.
Many people overlook the additional plug-ins and sections that are available for your profile.
These plug-ins allow you to include certifications, if you are board certified, organizations, publications, legal updates, blogs and tweets.
I would encourage you to these over after the session ends and explore some of these options as well as many other third-party apps, including Martindale’s Lawyer Ratings, Amazon’s Reading List and the hottest social network, SlideShare Presentations.
Now, I am going to assume that most of you have already built out your profile. Let’s face it, LinkedIn has been around for 10 years—as a matter of fact, it was founded in Reid Hoffman’s living room in 2002. If you haven’t built a profile, then now is the time. According to Lisa’s Rule of Law Firm Technology, if the technology has been adopted in the general culture for 10 years or more, then Law Firms can safely bring it into the walls of their firm.
So let’s move on to the next “P”.

Placement

Now placement with regards to online activity is probably the most esoteric concept for people to understand since it is has no physical reality—it is all about virtual presence. So let’s look at it another way.
We know the basic marketing principle behind placement is which shelf in the grocery store that you want your box of cereal to be—optimally, at eye-level.
Well, the same holds true for LinkedIn. So LinkedIn’s goal is to be where the eyes are.
So what is LinkedIn doing to help you make this happen? LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner (3:10) explains that “when you meet someone in a professional context for the first time, one of the first things you do is exchange business cards—you exchange professional identities. We have learned that the more our professional identity is out there, the more potential opportunities accrue to us.”
“Whereas if you were to meet someone in a personal context or in a social exchange—say that you go to a party and meet someone for the first time—it’s very rare that you would say, “here’s my home address and my cell phone number.”
“So there is a difference with regards to the context.”
“So that the more that people can put their professional identity out there—in LinkedIn’s case—it’s your profile—you update your profile. The fresher and more relevant your profile information, the more likely it is to be search-engine optimized. So when someone does a search on a major search engine for your name or someone like you, your LinkedIn profile is going to show up at or near the top of the results.
That’s an incredibly valuable piece of digital real estate because you get a chance to represent your experience, your skills and, most importantly, your ambitions. And that’s how opportunities accrue to people and the more they see these opportunities, the more engaged they become. Not only with their profile, but with their network, sharing information and knowledge within a professional network.”
So that leads us to search-engine optimization. Simply put, you want to make sure that you are on the first page of any search engine result. So, say for example, you perform a search for Minneapolis trademark attorney, you make sure that you or your firm’s name shows up in the search result.
I’ll give you an example, we at Fulbright have worked really hard to make sure that all of our attorneys show up on Google’s first page if you do a search for them.
So for instance, Ronn Kreps’ firm bio is number one, followed by his LinkedIn profile. That’s the way we like it at Fulbright and we built our web site with this purpose in mind.
So how do you make  sure that your LinkedIn profile is search-engine optimized? Make sure that you are building your profile with your target audience in mind. One common mistake that I see, is that profiles are built to an internal audience. They write things like so-and-so is a “practice head” or so-and-so “leads a department”.  
If a GC or a business owner is looking for a lawyer, they are not necessarily looking for practice heads or department leaders; they are looking for law firms, attorneys or lawyers. So make sure and use these kinds of words liberally in your profile. There are a number of locations in your LinkedIn profile to plug these words in: your summary, your experience, your organizations.
Another way to search engine optimize your profile is to update it regularly. You might want to calendar a 15-minute task once a week to make sure and update your profile with fresh content. Which leads to the next “P”: Promotion.

Promotion

Now, most attorneys don’t like to talk about promotion. They start getting nervous about advertising rules and ethics. Which they should.
But there is also this knee-jerk reaction to any form of marketing that go back to a time when lawyers could just hang out a shingle in their home town and wait for work to come in.
Well, those times are gone.
In 2011, the ABA reported that there are over 1.2M lawyers in the United States (ABA). In Minnesota, there are just over 23K—with a population of roughly 5.3M people, that’s 1 lawyer for every 227 people.
According to a 2011 New York Times article, 888 folks had passed the Minnesota bar. Legal services has become an increasingly competitive market place. I still remember when the first commercial by a lawyer came out in Texas. I was a freshman in college and was sitting in the dorm’s TV lounge when a whole room of college kids began booing at the screen.
Now, it is just a fact of life.
Plaintiff and criminal lawyers have seen the advantage of this and have plowed full steam ahead. Bigger defense firms have been much more reticent but as they get squeezed out of more and more market share by other law firms, they are beginning to take legal marketing more seriously.
So how can you use your LinkedIn profile to help promote you and your law firm without violating any ethical rules? In short—a disclaimer.
Make sure and study your ethical rules with regards to board certification and make sure that you put appropriate disclaimers to ensure that you are not creating any expectation of a attorney-client relationship. Those are the most basic of guidelines. – by the way, this particular disclaimer is pretty interesting. It is from a 2009 30-minute fan film called the Hunt for Gollum, which is based on the appendices of the Lord of the Rings.
But, in all seriousness, there is no need to fear posting on LinkedIn. My general rule of thumb—which I got, by the way, from the general counsel of the European Newspaper Financial Times—don’t put anything online that you wouldn’t put in a business email.
So let’s get back to promotion.
Do you know what the most under-rated tool is on LinkedIn?
The status update.
I bet you thought I was going to say groups. Well, as you will soon see, this will factor into this ubiquitous but under-utilized tool.
Let me give you a good example.
One of our lawyers just finished writing an article. He wants to get it published—every single lawyer that I know wants to get their article in a law review journal or a legal periodical. Fair enough; there is a merit to that desire. It legitimizes you, it gives you some street cred.
But I would argue that these publications do not get in front of your target audience. Remember, people that might retain your services may or may not be readers of these types of publications.
And in this day and age, who has time to read?
Everyone is increasingly relying upon Kindles, iPads, search engines, keyword results, scraped content, Law360 emails, other emailed newsletters and the like.
So how do you take advantage of that?
A few simple steps:

  1. If the magazine has agreed to publish the article, immediately list it on your LinkedIn profile with a link to the online publication. If the publication does not have it published online, then make sure and it get it online somewhere. Fulbright regularly post our lawyers’ reprints to our firm’s web site.
  2. Once the article is on the web, post a status update on your LinkedIn profile. This automatically sends a notice to all of your contacts that you have just written an article. This is reaching your first degree relationships.
  3. Next, post a status update on any group that you belong to. This will send a notice to all of the group members that you’ve just written an article—this is reaching your second and third degree relationships, or people you don’t know but who have similar interests and who you’d like to get to know.
  4. Next, advise the site administrator of your firm’s LinkedIn profile so that they can post it as a status update on the firm’s LinkedIn page. Faegre & Benson is doing a good job of this.
  5. Lastly, If you have access to any other social media pages like Twitter, Facebook, etc., make sure that this same information is sent out to these sites.
So, theoretically, an article written by the attorney that I mentioned to you in my earlier example has now has gotten in front of: 43,000 hard copy readers + 100 LinkedIn contacts + 250 members of LinkedIn Group 1 + 100 members of LinkedIn Group 2 + 4,000 LinkedIn Company followers + 2,000 Twitter followers.
And the biggest difference between those hard copy readers and the LinkedIn connections?
What is the likelihood that someone will tear out your print article and mail it to a colleague versus someone pushing the Forward/Retweet button? It is so much easier to do it electronically—it makes the person forwarding the article look smart and, ultimately, it makes you look smart.
There is just not enough good content out there. The web is starved, hungry for fresh content. That’s what keeps the beast going. So if you are speaking, writing, meeting, talking, going to meetings, why not get all the mileage you can get out of your activity by providing status updates?
By putting your select, well-positioned and strategic updates online, you are positioning yourself as an expert in your field.
I call it the “Cocktail Party” strategy.
We have all been at those cocktail parties where someone walks in and just seems to take over the room. They know everyone, everyone knows them and now they know that the party just got good and now, we are all in for a good time.
Well, you can be that person. But you can’t do it if you aren’t at the cocktail party. Heck, if you aren’t on LinkedIn and participating, you don’t even realize that there is a party going on.
I know of entire reputations that are made simply by being online. I have watched, first hand, entire reputations built on the web. Take 3 Geeks, for example. My friends Toby and Greg have turned themselves into Legal Technology rock stars by simply churning out their blog, tweeting good content and developing online relationships.
And the do think that the movie Julie & Julia was about cooking? No. It was about blogging. A girl decided to blog about her daily attempt to cook one Julia Child recipe a day. It was about blogging, not cooking.
And I have seen this happen over and over again in other industries: cooking, make-up, music, entertainment. And young lawyers are making their names known by simply connecting to one another online.
What don’t see are the behind the scenes interactions that aren’t on display online. Toby, Greg and I are constantly getting phone calls, emails, and lunches about going to conferences, doing product reviews and writing CLE programs.
Which leads to the final “P”—price.

Price

Now, traditionally, price is the value that customers assign to the product. Both offline and online, this is a tricky proposition.
In pricing, there is perceived value, the reference value and the differential value.
What does this have to do with LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is free, so why do you have to worry about this?
Well, I think that the better measurement for LinkedIn’s spend is not money but time.
In today’s online economy, I measure not how much money I am spending online but how much time I am spending online.
Everyone hates the onslaught of emails.
My prediction is that everyone is going to get a clue and start pulling the plug on their lives. We will see more unplugged vacations, more unplugged retreats, more unplugged spaces.
We are seeing it in movie theaters and business retreats. Vacations that are off the grid are becoming more and more desirable.
And consumers are becoming savvier about Groupon’s daily deals and walking away from these fire sales.
We are learning, one by one, how to be more thoughtful about how we spend our time online. So it is about striking that balance between how much time we want to spend online and how much of our contact’s time do we want to take? We don’t want to exhaust our contacts and wear out our welcome.
So let us consider the contact’s perceived value of your status update. Everyone is always quick to say, “I am not getting on X, Y or Z social network, why should I care what so-and-so had for lunch?”
Agreed. We don’t want to read about that sort of drivel nor do we want to contribute to it.
Our updates, then, should be meaningful and pertinent to our audience.
That means that we should be carefully selecting and culling our contacts list and providing them with meaningful content that could make a difference to their business.
So don’t think about your contact list in terms of sheer volume.  Instead, look at them as providing you with potential revenue. Now this does not mean only having relationships with GCs. It also means developing relationships with people who influence or come in contact with GCs. Do not be so single-minded to think that only lawyers know lawyers.
One of the best stories that I have about this is about one of our IT guys. Back in 2005 we were chatting when I found out that his daughter was an assistant GC at CountryWide. You know I beat a path to our subprime practice group! And don’t forget the summer interns—sure they may not have taken the job with you and may be working at a competitor. But that won’t stop them from moving to other jobs and possibly going in-house at some point in their career.
This just goes to show how your status updates can become valuable to your contacts because, they in turn, can use that information and Pay It Forward to their contacts.
The reference value is about how your status updates stack up against your competitors. If you aren’t making any updates, your competitors are winning that particular race. If you are making updates and no one else is, as Charlie Sheen would say, that’s WINNING! If you are in a competitive market, then you need to be hitting it hard and matching your competitors update for update.
The differential value is about how your updates differ from the competition. Are your updates short, forward-friendly and links easily accessible? Is the content inviting other to forward?
By the way, did you know that if you say “please forward” or in Twitterese, “please RT”, you stand an 80% chance of being retweeted than if you don’t? It just goes to show you: It never hurts to ask.
And include a link, be it a photo, an article, a video. And the link should be shortened so that it will maximize your space. There are all kinds of shortners out there: Tiny URL, Bit.ly are just two.
So in the in end, the price that your contacts pay is the time that they spend reading your updates. Make it worth their while.

Conclusion

So LinkedIn is just one tool in your online arsenal. I hope this whets your appetite and encourages to try other online tools—Twitter is another great online tool that integrates very well with LinkedIn.
In fact, you can now use #IN at the end of a tweet and it will automatically repost your tweet as a LinkedIn status update, but only if you if have your Twitter profile tied to your LinkedIn profile.
Finally, as it’s explained in the famous “ignore the blond” scene from 2001 movie, A Beautiful Mind, (2:02) real life economist John Nash says, “Adam Smith said that the best result comes from everyone doing what’s best for himself. Incomplete. Incomplete, ok? Because the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group. Governing Dynamics, gentlemen, Governing Dynamics. Adam Smith was wrong.”
This movie was based upon a 1998 Pulitzer prize-nominated book of the same name. In 1994, Nash ended up winning the Nobel prize for his revolutionary work on game theory. This game theory was the mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances that would end up playing an instrumental role in online algorithms for  games, markets, auctions and peer-to-peer systems.
All of which led to the development of sites like LinkedIn.
“The best result will come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group.”

There are times when defending your legal rights can do more harm than good. I think I saw a prime example of that this week between a creative YouTube video that was blowing up the Internet, and a company that asserted its legal copyright claim to shut it down.

A YouTube video was put out around December 30, 2011 from someone named kdynamic, where he took a recorded interview from MoBoogie in 2007 where artist Bassnectar explained the concept of Dubstep in music. The presentation was set up in Prezi, and the audio from the interview was overlayed on the presentation, and it was a thing of beauty. I don’t even like Dubstep music, but I found the presentation helped explain it in a way that I would have otherwise not cared about one little bit. The visuals, along with the audio were fascinating, and held the viewers attention in a way that separately they would not. I sent it to some of my teaching friends as an example of combining lecture with video in ways that hold their students’ attention.

When I viewed it earlier this week, it had already been viewed over 180,000 times, and websites all over the music scene were linking to it, or embedding the video on their site. The creator of the video acknowledged the artist (Bassnectar) and basically asked for forgiveness for doing this without permission first. It seems from some of the other things that I saw from Bassnectar, was that he was cool with the video, but admitted that he’s changed some of his thoughts on the music style (what it means and how it is laid out) since the interview.

The original interviewer, MoBoogie, however, was not as forgiving. Apparently, MoBoogie sent a letter demanding the removal of the video because they owned the copyright for the original interview. kdynamic attempted to keep the video up with the presentation being overdubbed by generic non-copyrighted music, but MoBoogie didn’t even want that out there, so the whole thing came down. In the music world, it made MoBoogie look like a jerk.

In reality, (or at least my version of it) MoBoogie blew a golden opportunity here. Anyone that has a website or blog knows that once content hits its one-day-old birthday, it is out-of-date. Old news. Cast off into the depths of oblivion with the occasional view from a random Google search. Here was an opportunity to get nearly 200,000 eyes back on one of their old stories. Instead, MoBoogie took the hatchet approach and cut off their own hand in the process.

It is clear that kdynamic was wrong and in copyright violation. It is clear that MoBoogie had the right to shut down the video. But being right, doesn’t always mean that you’re doing the right thing for yourself. I think that MoBoogie would have put itself in a much better position to ask kdynamic to place a link to MoBoogie’s original interview and mentioned that there were additional interviews of Bassnectar there. They could have done so in a way that would have told kdynamic not to do this again without permission, but still be able to ride the coat tails of this viral video all the way back to their website (perhaps even getting additional ad revenues as a result.) Instead, they came down hard and fast, and essentially blew a golden opportunity.

If MoBoogie was smart (and it doesn’t look like they are), I would suggest that they hunt down the person that did this Prezi presentation and hire him as a contract worker to do more of these presentations on some of their other interviews. I imagine that instead of doing something smart like that, they are instead hunting down others to quash with their legal rights. Apparently, being in the right, is better than being smart and seeing the opportunities that are out there.



“Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die”

I first saw this phrase on someone’s email signature, but sadly I can’t find the original email so I don’t know who said it.  I Googled the phrase and found this guy.  His origin story is pretty good, so I’ll go with it.  At the end of his post he sums up the problem nicely:

“… email is a knowledge cul-de-sac – a dead end for valuable ideas – a graveyard of potential. Email is where corporate IQ kicks back and has a brewski. Email also contributes to corporate amnesia; forgetfulness that costs businesses millions – perhaps billions in repeated mistakes every year.

“Email is also wasteful; threads grow with unending off-topic discussions and CC lists expand, eroding productivity in all corners of the enterprise. Indeed, email is a problem but imagine trying to do business without it. Even with the massive heat-loss from this antiquated and weak communications model, two things are clear; (i) no one has come up with a better approach that has challenged or displaced email, and (ii) it works pretty well in spite of its shortcomings.”
A fundamental problem with email is that it has made communication so cheap and easy, that we use it habitually for all types of communications that are not really appropriate to the medium.

For example, if I need you to review the attached document by the end of business tomorrow, then an email is an appropriate method of communicating that information to you.  If however, I need you to review the attached document immediately, then I should probably track you down and make sure you got the message.  Emails get lost and get caught by spam filters.  Recipients aren’t always at their desk or looking at their computer screen.  A phone call and a shared computer screen, or visit to your office with the document in hand would be more appropriate.
Similarly, if I have made lunch reservations and I want to notify you of the time and place, then an email is perfect. I don’t expect an immediate response, it’s not mission critical information. If you don’t receive it, then you’ll probably contact me to find out when and where we’re having lunch. If, however, I send you a message saying, “Where should we go to eat?” and you respond, “I don’t know.  Where do you want to go?”, then that conversation would be better had in another forum. Real-time conversations work better on the phone, in a desktop video conference, or in an instant messaging application.
Office newsletters or reminders of the upcoming Holiday Party work well in email.  Email is very good at handling “one to many” communications as long as a response is not necessary. But email breaks down when used for “many to many” communications such as a message sent to a large group of people asking, “Does anyone know how to…?”  Invariably, someone will reply and CC: another party saying, “No. But I think so-and-so does.”  At that point there are at least two different threads passing each other on the server and not every participant has access to all information. Even if you eventually find the answer, there will be a lot of emails in a lot of inboxes. How will you find the correct answer again in six months? Will those emails still be there? And how will the next person to come across that same question benefit from your previous inquiry?  They will probably need to go through the whole exercise again. “Many to many” communications belong in social networks, or on bulletin boards, or group workspaces where that kind of information can be more easily shared with a large group and stored for future reference.  

So, how can you get people to use other methods of communication when email is not the most appropriate?  

Delay delivery of all outgoing emails by 5 minutes.  

A five minute delay is long enough to be a nuisance when email is inappropriate, but not so long as to make a difference when email is the best choice.  

Looking again at our examples above, a request to review a document by the end of tomorrow would weather a 5 minute delay easily.  As would a notification for a lunchtime meeting in a couple of hours. If the invitee couldn’t make that time, then he would be be likely to pick up the phone or send an instant message, rather than try to communicate in real time with the email delay. Finally, the office newsletters and notifications would not be affected by the delay, but a group of people trying to solve a problem would quickly move that conversation to another medium like a social network or a conference call.
I believe this simple change would drastically cut down on the volume of emails, which would in turn make the emails that do end up in the inbox more visible. More importantly, this five minute delay would also make employees more conscious of their use of email.  Before habitually firing off an email, a sender would think to themselves, can the recipient survive without this information for the next 5 minutes? Can I wait 10 minutes for a reply?  If either answer is no, then email is probably not the most appropriate way to send the message.

Of course, a simple email delay alone will not solve the “Knowledge Death” problem. Alternative communication tools, like I’ve described above, would have to be made available. Information shared using all communication tools would still have to be captured, stored, and made accessible for future use and reuse. This is a huge undertaking, but getting people to use the right tool for the job is the first step to getting a handle on the problem.

Now, how to convince the powers that be to “break” email in the name of productivity?

Last night, I had the honour (that is spelled correctly, check Greg’s posting on the CLawbies for more detail) of participating in “Using KITs+1™ in Boosting Your Organization’s Analytical Fitness™ ” presented by Dr. Craig S. Fleisher, Chief Learning Officer/Aurora WDC, to a joint audience of members from the Toronto Chapters of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals and Special Library Association . This was the first time Dr. Fleisher presented this material, and I can promise you it won’t, nor should it be, his last.

The talk was about the next generation of intelligence analysis – analysis 2.0 if you will and our analytic fitness levels. I won’t recap the entire presentation because I would likely mash it up horribly, but here are five take-aways, musings and thoughts on competitive intelligence (CI) and analysis 2.0 that I am still pondering (note the italics) today. The ability to provide good CI and to really know what your clients (lawyers or otherwise) need is predicated on trust. Studies have shown that it takes 7.3 years to build the kind of trust necessary to be seen as the kind of “trusted business advisor” our clients expect. Um… I knew it took a year to get your “legs” in a firm, but 6.3 more to be trusted?? 

In the last several years, we have seen a significant increase in our data storage capabilities. I carry a 3 gig thumb drive on a key ring for example, but all this data we carry around and have access to has a very short half-life. Why are we storing it beyond its shelf life and/or not using it sooner? 

Analysis 2.0 is about dialogue and discussion – think crowd sourced analysis. This necessary means we, as CI practitioners, will have to recognize our own blind spots and prejudices, right? 

The current CI cycle, no matter how many steps you include, always involves the definition of an issue or a Key Intelligence Topic (KIT), Data Gathering, then Analysis, etc. In the next generation of analysis, we will need to provide real time analytics. Can we do various steps concurrently? Perhaps the answer to real time analysis is more in keeping with the scientific method of stating a hypothesis and then collecting the right data to prove the point – is that CI or just cheating? 

CI practitioners need to develop or maintain a sense of humility about intelligence and recognize that sometimes you will be wrong, and that’s okay. This goes hand in hand with being a trusted advisor. Think of it like the weather man (or woman). Each morning we trust our clothing choices to the forecasted weather. Often the weather person is right, sometimes not, but we rarely lose complete faith because the next morning there we are again, listening for the forecast and choosing outerwear based on what we hear. As the weather people, we have to know that we are trusted even if we are sometimes wrong. And sometimes as creators of intel, we have to realize that experience counts too. Sometimes you just have to step outside and feel the temperature yourself, right? Use your gut and be ok if you are wrong. 

Dr. Fleisher is a dynamic and exciting speaker – he encourages discussion and forces people to think about CI in ways we haven’t yet. He is pushing the envelope and creating new paradigms. Are your analysis skills ready for the workout?

It’s one of those often overlooked economic rules: If you start a company and become successful, others will notice. Especially others with capital. In this case Practical Law Company (PLC) introduced a product/service a few years back and has been doing quite well with it. So much that apparently LexisNexis saw an opportunity and has just announced their own Lexis Practice Advisor offering. They were kind enough to provide a preview demo for Geek #1 (a.k.a. Greg) and me.

The Basics
It is generally understood that most electronic legal content is of more use to litigators, so Lexis wanted to address the needs of the other side of the market. Lexis interviewed (in some fashion) over 600 lawyers on their practice needs in the transactional space. What they learned from these lawyers was A) they have definite needs for content automation and quick access to relevant content, and B) there aren’t many alternatives in the market.
Today Lexis rolls out the first phase of this the product, dubbed “Business Law,” and will add more content options over the coming months. We suggest you check it out to get an idea of what content is included in the Business Law portion along with what’s on the horizon.
Having only seen a demo, the product looks easy-to-use and has a good amount of content around each document offering. This allows the user to quickly understand what’s needed for a given transaction along with options for digging deeper as required. The screen shot shows the clean interface and content options.

Differentiators
When I asked the Lexis team what sets their offering apart, they gave me three factors. First – the step-by-step nature of the product makes it very easy for lawyers to use. Greg and I always joke about how technology needs to be very very very easy to use to be successful with lawyers. This product is. Second – The content links into the deep legal content of Lexis, making relevant statues, regulations and cases very easy to locate. Third – The type of content is unique. I gave Lexis a Fourth factor – broader appeal. Whereas PLC may appeal to the higher end of the market, Practice Advisor is a more do-it-yourself offering that most any segment of the market would use. The pricing approach reflects that with a reasonable price per lawyer per month.
If you have a transactional practice, Practice Advisor should be on your list of products to check out. It will be interesting to see how this offering competes in the market, especially as the content grows.