Post ILTA, I’ve been meaning to share an idea along with a practical example of how lawyers might gain efficiencies – efficiencies being one of the new, hoped-for goals of the legal profession.
At ILTA I had the opportunity to meet Ian Levit of Levit & James. In addition to being a fellow Mel Brooks fan, Ian is passionate about his product offering: Best Authority. Now you might be thinking – so what. Creating Tables of Authorities is bread and butter work for firms. Where’s the efficiency in that?
The answer: There’s not a ton, but definitely some.
We tend to look for the game changer technologies when we talk about change and efficiency. These types of technology are what Greg would call “Awesome.” They are definitely fun to think and write about.
The trouble with game changing technologies is they have a high likelihood of falling into the “InterAction Trap.” InterAction was/is a potentially game changing type of tool for law firms, but its adoption rate has been less than impressive. Why? Because game changer systems require significant change from lawyers. And we all know change is not the lawyers’ mantra.
In contrast, tools like Best Authority fit within a lawyer’s current effort work process, requiring only slight changes, and they deliver modest but measurable efficiencies.
So when looking for opportunities to enhance and expand efficiencies in the practice of law – don’t overlook the small stuff.
And if you ever meet Ian, ask him what is favorite Mel Brooks lines are.

Sometimes we think that the “grass is greener” at some other place of work. However, there are times when you look around and you just think, “if I could just be in ‘X’ department,” or “what I’d really be good at here at this firm is ‘X’.” We thought we’d give you the opportunity to express those thoughts here and let us all know what positions within your own organization you think you would want to take on. Unfortunately, I think many of you chicken-out because you were afraid that your current boss may read this and call you into his or her office for a scolding… (as I received a number of personal correspondences says specifically that.)

Luckily, we had a few brave souls that chimed in and let us know what positions they think are “hot” within their organization, and that they would like to try out (hypothetically, of course.) For those of you who contributed, we thank you. If you don’t see what job you’d like to trade for your current position, you may add that as a comment below (anonymously, if you think your boss reads 3 Geeks, too.)

Once you’ve digested this week’s contributions, scroll on down to the end and take a look at next week’s question where we ask if having enormous amounts of information at your disposal makes you more informed, or if it is actually making you less informed than you should be.

James Mullan
KM Systems Manager
Digital & Brand Marketing Manager Manager

It’s just a brilliant job title and there has to be some correlation between the number of words in your job title and pay, right?

Greg Lambert
Library/Records/Blogging Guy
Anything With Biz Dev!

We all know that law firms have cut and cut and cut over the past few years, and we’ve moved the fulcrum over so far that the only way that firms can maintain the 5% growth they have projected is to start bringing in more business. If you like the feeling of accomplishing something every day, you like a good challenge in your work life, and you have any amount of business sense (coupled with creativity and ingenuity), then Biz Dev is the place to be these days.

Toby Brown
AFA
Runner

I got my start in law firms as a runner. My job was running packages of stuff from here to there. Typically lawyers would wait until the last minute, something like 10 minutes before a document needed to be filed with the court, then hand it to me and say “Get it filed!” One time I was wearing cowboy boots (it was a local western theme day) and had to run 6 blocks wearing those boots, but still got the courts’ time stamped confirmation.  The job was great. It had a ton of variety and I was rarely sitting at a desk for too long. I even got to be outside regularly.  The downsides: 1) Pay, 2) Now this is out-sourced.  So I guess I’ll keep my current job as Director of BS.

Ayelette Robinson
KM
Innovator

Wouldn’t it be fun to have a full-time career devoted to being creative and coming up with new ideas? Being able to spend my time exclusively on brainstorming with others, thinking up new and better ways to solve problems, and figuring out which of those could be really successful, would be pretty neat. Fortunately, I get to do that as part of my current role already, but I have to admit that being dubbed Chief Innovator would be the bee’s knees.

Steve
The Man
Futurist

I would like to be paid to speculate on where the industry is going and then make recommendations on how technology can get you there faster and better.  The real key to making this job great is to be at a firm that will actually take action on new and innovative ideas.

Jaye Lapachet
Manager of Library Services (Librarian)
Attorney Development

I would like to try my hand at contributing to the development of attorneys. I don’t think they get enough training around the organization of information – I don’t mean cataloging – which hampers their work. Having a strategy when approaching a legal research problem adds confidence to the work. I think that librarians could contribute to the development side with our organizational skills as well.

Next Elephant Post Question:

Despite Access to Massive Amounts of Information… Do You Still Feel ‘Uninformed’?

This is kind of a take on our previous question of “how do you handle so much information.” However, we wanted to take a different slant on that topic and ask you if you actually feel like all of that information is making you feel like you are actually less informed than you think you should be??

I’m going to place in here a comment I got from Toby Brown when I brought this question up to him as a potential Elephant Post Question:

I mean seriously – how we can feel uninformed when we are drowning in information? So do we just feel uninformed since we are obviously missing a lot of that information? Do we feel it out of fear that we might not be getting the right information? Or are we all just ADDs now, madly in search of more, more, more information?

Jump in with your thoughts and let us know your perspective.

Image [cc] travelin’ librarian

I’m going to paraphrase an Archimedes quote – “Give me a big enough database, and I’ll forecast the world.” In a way, that is the ultimate goal for those of us in the Knowledge, Information, and Intelligence profession. We have a deep craving and expectation that if we just had all available information in a database, combined with acquired knowledge of how to interpret that information, plus an advanced algorithm to pull it all together, we could predict what is going to happen next. For those of us in the legal span, we think of it in smaller chunks of “who do we need to hire?” or, “what can we forecast as legal exposure for our clients?” However, we are not the only ones that believe that “if we could just compile all of the data, we could actually predict the future.”

According to an article on the BBC News website, that idea may not be as unobtainable as you might think. The US government, through its Open Source Centre, combined with BBC Monitoring and numerous online news resources may be blazing a trail in finding a way to predict the future through data analysis. Although it is much more complicated than this, here is the basic formula they are feeding into a supercomputer:

  Supercomputer
x 100 million articles
x automated sentiment
x geocoding            
  Predicting Trouble

The Supercomputer (Nautilus at the University of Tennessee), processed all of these articles (legally obtained through agreements, or available on the open web), added in a factor of “sentiment” (positive or negative tone), and put a geographic location on it and voilà… trouble can be predicted.

Now, at this point, I’ve got two competing ideas jumping around in my head.

  1.  Is this simply a “Monday Morning Quarterback” Issue?
  2. Could this be a huge deal and produce the next “WestlawNext 2.0”?
Let me take the Monday Morning QB issue on first. Does this simply allow us to have an “aha!!” moment by looking back on the data, and then plugging in the additional pieces of information that we didn’t have before the major event happened? Kind of like what we all did when the Enron fiasco happened, and then we all started looking back at the “signs” that something bad was about to happen. In other words, it all looks so clear when you look back on it, because you now know what happened. 
On the other hand, let’s say that this really is something significant, and we finally figured out a way to predict events with about the same accuracy as we predict the weather. If that’s the case, then think of all that information that the big publishers and news outlets like Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, McGraw-Hill, Wolters Kluwer, etc. are sitting on, and just think of the possibilities they could do with the “Predicting trouble” formula. That thought makes me concurrently excited, frightened, and discouraged. I’m excited because there is an amazing potential in helping forecast events, trends, legal issues, etc. I’m frightened because this puts a lot of potential power in the hands of these corporations. I’m disappointed because I know that none of these corporations will actually do anything with it unless they can figure a way to corner the market and profit substantially from their efforts. 
I’m actually leaning toward believing this is all a Monday Morning Quarterback issue. It just seems that without the actual information of what the “event” is, then what you’re left with is an incomplete formula that simply helps you narrow down a guess to an educated guess. As a person that still holds on to that dream that with enough information, and the right tools to process it, we really can predict the future… it would sure be cool to see if we could test this formula out on some massive information databases and test out this hypothesis.

The next big thing needs to be a proactive approach to knowing where data lives and what it means. It needs to include tools to keep data organized and secured regardless of location. 

One of the most exciting areas in legal tech over the past several years has been the growth of intelligent software. When I talk about intelligent software, I’m talking about products that learn from information. The more information you feed the system, the ‘smarter’ it becomes. Companies like Autonomy, Recommind, StoredIQ, KIIAC and others are using sophisticated search algorithms to infer information from what would otherwise be a sea of data. And while there is high demand for this type of work, mainly in the e-discovery space, the current approach of using this technology for e-discovery seems to be a reactive approach to data management. As data continues to grow, the reactive approach is going to become more costly and less efficient. More importantly, the reactive approach does not let the company benefit from leveraging their data.

Companies need to start thinking about managing data on a proactive basis. In so doing, they will benefit greatly from efficiencies gained on:
Leveraging Data, the value proposition – Most of the data we have collected just sits waiting to be accessed by someone. Technology has done little to help except store, find and retrieve the data. Most business analytics are provided by people, not technology, but that is starting to change with some of these intelligent systems. With a proactive approach to leveraging data, much information can be inferred by looking at data in new ways. The value of information and the ability to extract meaning from this data is creating an entirely new industry of data scientists (see Fortune on topic) and the demand for these people is very high. 
Data Storage – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard,“storage is cheap, just buy more drives”. Drives are cheap, but drives alone do not equal storage (at least not in the enterprise space). When you calculate the cost of redundant drives in multiple locations (disaster recovery), the software to manage those drives, and the expertise to effectively manage that storage, the dollars add up quickly. Further, consider your document retention policy. Who is making sure that everything that should be destroyed is being destroyed?  Do you even know where all the data is stored? The idea of just throwing more storage at the problem is actually creating a bigger problem.



Smoking Guns – Wouldn’t it be nice to know about a potential problem before it happens? With proactive data management, you will have the ability to identify issues before they get out of hand. You will know if someone is stealing your intellectual property and will have an ability to thwart such events. If you take a proactive stance with data governance, you will benefit from better data management and be in a better place if and when the timecomes for e-discovery.

Many companies believe it is too costly to institute technology to be used in the proactive manner I have described. However, they will spend even more money to deal with it in a reactive manner, because they didn’t manage their data and now must weed through much more data to find the the smoking gun.

Think of it this way, proactive data management is like having your cake and eating it too.

[Guest Post – Michael Ginsborg]

Mark Gediman questions the need for an AALL Caucus on Consumer Advocacy. His comments deserve a prompt reply as we circulate our petition to gain AALL recognition. I have not had time to confirm that my reply represents the view of Caucus members. I also write with much more haste than I prefer. So I represent just my own view of the Caucus, even though I am also its chair.

Mark is President of the Southern California Association of Law Libraries (SCALL). I admire Mark for his record of leadership and his service to SCALL and the profession. I therefore find myself disappointed over his reaction to the Caucus. He appears to misunderstand our purpose. I hope that these clarifications will prove helpful.

First, in our relations with legal information sellers (LIS), Mark appears to think that we have a Hobson’s choice: we can be LIS partners or LIS adversaries. But why should we characterize our business relationships as if this charged dichotomy applies? We can instead let the facts provide any neutral characterization that we need. What are the facts? As consumers, our parent institutions buy legal information products and services with a reasonable expectation. They expect that sellers will not engage in unfair business practices, and will not use such practices to stifle competition, because such conduct, on a large scale, would significantly harm all consumers and competitors, whether directly or indirectly. The Caucus presents a sample of unfair and anti-competitive business practices in the legal information industry. We also describe some of the harmful consequences to law libraries. I am not aware that the Caucus regards any seller as a partner or as an adversary. We support sellers who engage in fair, competitive business. Some of them are our members. In fact,  we welcome participation by all sellers who are AALL members, and not just because we value transparency and inclusiveness for their own sake. Over the long-term, we hope that our transparency and inclusiveness will positively influence sellers whose business practices harm consumers. That hope may sound naive. But reformers tend to harbor hopes that, at the outset, sound naive (or worse) to their critics.

Second, while I admire Mark for his advocacy on behalf of his employer, consumers have shared interests that exemplary individual efforts like his can not advance. The Caucus proposes a simple purpose that AALL’s leadership had provisionally approved before reversing itself.  We want to recommend to AALL that it petition government entities to remedy large-scale, anti-consumer conduct in the industry. Of course, the Caucus does not propose substituting a government petition for doing what Mark rightly understands to be his job. We rather believe that legal information consumers have shared interests; that they incur significant, shared harms from anti-consumer practices; and that they deserve the full protections of consumer, copyright, and antitrust law.

Third, AALL members can reasonably disagree about whether our Caucus would answer the needs of our profession. Over 50 Caucus members believe it would. The available evidence shows that our concerns have not just a rational basis, but importance for the sustainability of our profession. The Caucus seeks to develop a robust factual record to prepare its recommendation to AALL. Mark is right that no Caucus has undertaken a comparable purpose. Industry circumstances warrant the new approach that our Caucus represents. Besides, we have important precedents. In 1969, AALL member Raymond Taylor wrote a seminal article on consumer advocacy – Law Book Consumers Need Protection, 55 A.B.A. J. 553 (1969).  His article ultimately led to the adoption of FTC Guides for the Law Book Industry. His example inspired Ken Svengalis, Joe Stephens, Jack Montgomery, and other AALL members in the 1980s and 1990s to build on his legacy.

Finally, I regret the impression Mark attributes to the Caucus or its supporters – that we insist on being right – when our fallibility should be as obvious as human nature. We just want the opportunity, as an AALL Caucus, to test our fallibility against the evidence and its implications for legal information consumers.

Recently Ron Friedmann posted an intriguing idea on his blog about having some partner (or lawyer) comp being tied to sales efforts (a.k.a closing on new business). I had the incredible fortune of attending the dinner he referenced and was able to participate in this dialogue.
One might argue all partner comp is tied to sales, since partner comp by definition is profits from sales. However, I think that perspective misses Ron’s point. The method most firms use for distributing profit is tied to ownership shares. These are re-evaluated and redistributed every year or two. So really partners are compensated on past sales and delivery performance, and not current sales performance.
The old adage – you get what you pay for – applies here. Law firms pay for hours, and the revenue tied to these hours, which is a very indirect and belated way of rewarding sales and new business. They do not reward sales efforts directly. So why not explicitly reward this behavior in a direct fashion as Ron suggests? I think this idea deserves attention. For law firms to survive in a competitive market, they will need to shift their compensation model to directly reward more behaviors then hours and revenue.
Ron highlights a practical challenge for law firms in implementing a sales commission model: The current pricing and profitability models do not account for it. Therefore a restructuring of how profit is defined or an increase in price would be required. Price increases are not an option, so the only real choice is redefining and/or redistributing costs related to profit.
Here is one possible model for addressing this challenge: Firms could hold back a portion of revenues from the traditional compensation channel and pay those out to partners who close on new business. Ron suggests a 10% level; however that may be too high IMHO, at least in the short-run. Current law firm financials are not structured to accommodate such a large portion of revenue towards a sales commission. So a gradual transition, ramping up the holdback portion over time makes sense.
Another challenge is the delay between getting work and getting paid. New client business secured on January 1st, with work beginning immediately, will not pay a full $100k (from Ron’s example) until June or even later. Paying commissions before revenue is realized will create other unintended consequences.
But these challenges should not stop a firm from experimenting with commission options. Numerous industries face the same or similar challenges and they find ways to reward the sales function with commissions. So many effective models exist and can easily be copied and modified for a law firm environment,
This approach implies a shifting of comp away from service partners towards rainmakers. Many firms are actually facing this problem as an issue already. So the sales commission approach would be a “two-birds, one-stone” solution.
Getting to the bottom-line, I think Ron’s idea definitely has merit. The legal industry should be rewarding the various types of behavior every company does, including the sales function. At least they should be if they want to motivate and incentivize profitable behavior.
Also to Ron’s question – current definitions of “profit” are already in need of revision for firms. Adjusting to a profit-margin business model presents the opportunity to address all of the issues noted above, and many more.


Why have a AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus? There seems to a lot posted lately in Law Librarian circles about this and I’ve been struggling to figure out this question for quite some time. Today’s LLB post about the petition to create this group provides a succinct summary of the arguments of the advocates. However, these arguments failed to persuade me on the following points:
Only AALL can deal with Vendors
I have been a law librarian for over 25 years. I began using Lexis on an Ubiq terminal and Westlaw on a Westmate terminal. In the course of my career, when given the responsiblity of solely representing my organization (for both law firms and a Fortune 500 company) to the vendor, I have met that resposibility. It was my job to do so. Asking AALL to do your job because you don’t like your choices is, in my mind, shirking your responsibility to your firm and not meeting a requirement of your job. Because my approach is to treat vendors as a partner instead of adversary, I have been able to cutomize the results to meet the needs of my organization. I find it to be as true today as it was 25+ years ago. When one vendor tried to use their market power to coerce our firm into an unproductive arrangement, we made contingency plans and walked away. That vendor is now attempting to get our business back. We did not need AALL to advocate for the best interests of our organization. To be blunt, that’s why I was hired.
Pricing is out of control
Librarians have been complaining about this for as long as they have had to purchase materials from publishers. To reiterate, if you can’t be an advocate for your organization, you shouldn’t be the one negotiating.
It’s part of the mission of AALL to support this caucus How? Special Interest Sections and Caucuses exist to bring librarians with common interests together and help meet their unique professional development needs. I can only think of one caucus or SIS that exists to be a go-between with the rank-and-file and another entity: The Government Relations group. Granted, that is a special case where, as librarians, we have a vested interest in the outcome of specific legislation. The CRIV committee facilitates our contacts with the vendors when individual issues arise, but the disposition is left to the two parties to work out. “My way or the highway” Attitude Lastly, I have a real problem with the tone of discourse on this subject. If you don’t agree with the proponents, it is you who must be wrong. The longer the discussion goes on, the more strident their tone gets. Not only have I seen this in the various posts (here, here and here) on the subject, but I have heard it first-hand. I am happy to have a discussion of this or any other topic on the merits, but do not appreciate being denigrated personally for having a different viewpoint. It is unfortunate that in our collegial body the rhetoric from some members is beginning reflect the state of politcal discourse in our society as a whole.

The EU made big news today by extending music recording copyright to 70 years. The BBC makes the argument that this will allow people who made a splash in their teens and early 20s to be able to support themselves well into their old age with money from their early hits.  “Performers generally start their careers young and the current term of protection of 50 years often does not protect their performances for their entire lifetime. Therefore, some performers face an income gap at the end of their lifetimes.”  I say, if you haven’t had another hit in 50 years, get a job.  But, I’m not here to quarrel with that particular decision.
I want to talk about the destructive nature of current copyright law from the point of view of a struggling artist. (Today, I would not be considered a struggling artist, except in the sense that I struggle with my art, but at various times through my life the epithet would have fit.) Art is never created in a vacuum. The best of us “borrow” from our idols, those of us who are honest steal outright. That is the nature of art, from music, to painting, to theater, to literature. The true measure of artistic talent in the modern world is not originality, but the ability to mask your intellectual theft. 
The original intention of copyright law was to allow writers and artists to profit from their work for a finite period of time, after which the work would fall into the Public Domain to be widely dispersed and re-interpreted by other artists. In the US, the original term was for 14 years.  Eventually it was extended to 28 years, with the option to renew. Today, copyright is effectively forever, as in, nothing written today will ever be in the Public Domain.  I am not anti-copyright, just anti-eternal-copyright. In the best case, the status quo ultimately leads to a dull, uninteresting art scene, in the worst case, it leads to the criminalization of art itself. The idea that these laws protect artists is a joke. These laws primarily protect large corporations with a few intellectual properties that still make them a whole lot of money. 
I’m not an anarchist. I’m not a socialist. I’m not looking to bring down the Walt Disney Corporation. Let them have their money makers.  But instead of making all copyrights indefinite, go back to the 28 year term and allow for unlimited renewals. As long as you or your heirs keep renewing the copyright to your work, then you or they have sole copyright. As long as those copyrights are making money, then you will have plenty of incentive to keep up with a simple filing every 28 years. If however, your work is a lost masterpiece after 28 or 56 years, let it go. Have it revert to the Public Domain. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone picks it up and reinterprets it and makes you famous a half century later?  For every Mickey Mouse cartoon, or Steven King novel, or Jimi Hendrix recording, there are millions of lost works languishing in libraries waiting to be rediscovered and reinterpreted by new artists. These works are consigned to the purgatory of draconian copyright. They will never again have a life because it’s too much trouble to try to track down the copyright owner of an obscure work. And as an artist, it’s not worth taking the risk that no one will come forward, because if your new recording, or derivative work has any success, you can guarantee that the owner will come out of the woodwork and demand your profits. 
Larry Lessig has written extensively about the importance of the Public Domain in his book Free Culture and other places. He is a much smarter man than I and he’s a lawyer, for those of you more likely to listen to one of those. I encourage you to read his various writings on copyright. In the meantime, if you are an artist or author, I urge you to distribute your work with a Creative Commons license. A CC license doesn’t replace copyright, but allows others to reuse and reinterpret your work as long as they meet criteria you define, like attributing the original work to you, and not using their derivative work for commercial purposes. Creative Commons is a good start. I suspect it may protect the culture of the 21st century from being completely lost to history. It’s hard to imagine now, because 20th century culture is virtually all we know, but unless we do something to return a lot of those lost works to the Public Domain, the 20th century may eventually be seen as a cultural black hole on par with the Dark Ages.
Image [cc] monozygotic.com

According to news media reports this morning, just the act of watching a few minutes of SpongeBob SquarePants can literally make kids dumber. I’ve always suspected this, and have constantly told my kids that SpongeBob was rotting their brains, but now I have actual science to back it up!! I get to show my kids the article in the journal Pediatrics and point them over to more healthy watching “edutainment” like PBS’ Calillou. Of course, now that they are all teens and pre-teens, now I have to find what the PBS “edutainment” equivalent is to shows like Ghost Hunters and America’s Got Talent.

I’d like to see this study expanded into adulthood to see what the effects of watching nine-hours of football on Sundays does to the brain of say… a 43 year-old law librarian. Or, what the effects of watching politically charged 24-hour “News” channels does to say the relatives of that same law librarian. My guess is that all of the answers will lead us back to turning the television back to something that is on the local PBS channel… or at least BBC America.

Now I’m wondering what the effects are of reading legal blogs with the “foci of 3 intrepid law geeks” has on the brains of everyday readers. I’m sure that PBS is currently talking about bringing us on as a featured blog for purely “edutainment” purposes. I’ll sit here and wait for them to call.

In the meantime, I’ll cue up one of my favorite lines from Billy Madison to help pull all of this this information you just read together for you.

Leave it up to Jean O’Grady to come up with a fascinating question to end the week. On her wonderful blog, Dewey B Strategic, she is running a quick and dirty survey on the “Best and Worst Legal Publishing Mergers.” Although, it is not a purely scientific survey, I suggest that you go over and fill out the short two-question survey and get your opinion in. I have to admit that in the “Best” category, I felt like I was picking the “least evil” of the mergers. Plus, I had a hard time pinning down which one I thought was the winner of the “Worst” category (as they have all caused a shrinking of the industry and, in my opinion at least, have contributed to the massive increase in overall costs of legal research over the past twenty or so years.

Here’s the link to Jean’s post (the survey link is there.) Go submit your winners/losers!!
I also updated the Thomson Reuters “Acquisitions” spreadsheet that Sarah Glassmeyer started a couple years ago. As you can see, the “hits” just keep coming! 
Note: These are just the mergers that I considered “Legal Publishing.” There were a number of Tax, Energy and Financial/Business News mergers as well.
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