Image [cc] Dale Gillard

At the prompting of fellow geek, Scott Preston, I joined in on the #legalchat Twitter feed this morning and really enjoyed the conversation. As with most Twitter conversations, we all are smart, good looking, and can answer almost any difficult question in 140 characters or less. At least that was my interpretation (your mileage may vary.) By the time we got to Question 4: “Are you or your firm working on developing an app?”, I got pretty confident here and make a broad statement that most of the apps I’ve seen coming out of law firms don’t have a lot of substance to them, and are essentially marketing products that bring very little value to the clients they are aimed at attracting. Perhaps the biggest reason for this strategy is that the “idea” for developing an app comes from the firm’s Marketing Department.

Now, before all my Legal Marketing Association friends start balking at that statement, I think that for firms to initially buy into the idea of developing an app, it logically flowed from the Marketing Team because it can be a great marketing tool. Where most of these apps fall short, however, is that they tend to only be a marketing tool, and not an actual productivity tool that clients can benefit from using. In fact, if you look at almost any law firm app that’s hit the market, they tend to have the following resources in them:

  • Law Firm PR materials (alerts, articles and firm news feeds)
  • Office Location Trackers (advanced ones use the device’s GPS to show the nearest office)
  • Employment Information (hey, we’re hiring!!)
  • Attorney Contact Information (just in case you can’t find my number… here it is!)
What we’ve done so far is made a sophisticated mobile website. Not that there isn’t any value in that… but, really, it’s not that great of an app if it simply repackages your website data.
Off the top of my head I thought, “has anyone created a mobile app that allows clients to track their open matter information?”  Now that would be useful. Imagine that I’m a GC at one of our major clients and I can pull up billing information, contact information, docket status, and documents related to all my matters that the firm is currently managing. That would be a useful app! 
Right now, we conduct our application development process within the silo of the firm’s internal structure. All the bright minds of IT, KM, Marketing, Lawyers, etc. going into a room together and deciding what would be a cool app to build. The missing piece, however, is that it doesn’t seem that anyone is asking the client what they would like to see in a law firm mobile app. Do you really think the clients want an app that will show the closest office location? Do they want a list of current jobs available at your firm? Well… maybe, but probably not. Yet, do we take the time to actually ask them a question like: “What kind of useful information or resources could we provide you on your mobile devices that you would find valuable?” I don’t think most of us are. Perhaps we’re afraid that they’ll actually ask us to produce something that we are afraid to provide them. 
I know that a lot of people at this point are probably writing this post off because they think that firms cannot provide such products due to ethical or potential security reasons. I’d argue that if that is stopping a firm from developing a valuable mobile app that their clients would actually use, then you probably should scrap any idea you may have of developing a mobile app. Playing it safe and relying upon Marketing to come up with a design for a mobile app that regurgitates what’s already on your website will result in an app that no one will use. If you really want it to be used, you have to make it useful. If major companies like HBO, Westlaw, The New York Times, and others can produce secure products that are useful to their clients, so can law firms. It’s just a matter of stepping out from beyond the idea of “mobile app as marketing” and stepping into the idea of “mobile app as beneficial to our clients.”

At the ILTA Conference, I participated on the “Offshoring and Outsourcing: What It Means for Your Firm and Your Job” panel. First-off, I was privileged to be on the panel with Jordan Furlong and Kevin Colangelo. They are very smart, engaging and knowledgeable presenters. Per the ILTA suggestion, we went with an alternative presentation format, keeping our talking-head comments and slides to a minimum. We had prepared a number of questions just in case our audience didn’t have any. Well – they had a lot of them so we did not get to any of ours. However, we had some good questions. So I thought it would be fun to pose the questions and add my thoughts. Feel free to add your own thoughts to this list.
1. Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) isn’t only or even primarily about lower costs; it also about doing things differently. How is LPO work qualitatively different than lawyer work?
Is it? I feel this is very much a (dark) gray area. LPO web sites list services like drafting documents, writing patent opinions, and other lawyer tasks. These may be on the commodity end of the scale, but when performed by lawyers, they are lawyer work.
2. Which is the right prism through which to view outsourcing: lower costs or higher value? Can it be both?
Right now there is a tremendous focus on lower cost. In the long term there will need to be a balance. The use of standards and quality driven processes by LPOs should contribute significantly to value. Law firms would do well to emulate this approach.
3. What are the specific implications of LPOs and outsourcing on law firm IT departments?
  • A) Your jobs will be impacted, both directly (by potentially being outsourced) and indirectly (when IT systems move there too).
  • B) Your data will be involved. IT will face new challenges when data and functionality move outside your firm – whether this is in the cloud or not.
4. What are the specific implications of LPOs and outsourcing on law firm libraries?
Let’s just say “legal research” is on the list of LPO offerings. Librarian staff should have a high level of concern when LPOs enter the picture.
5. What are the specific implications of LPOs and outsourcing on law firm KM efforts?
KM already suffers from the silo effect, where knowledge is cordoned off in to various buckets. LPOs will extend your silo challenge outside the firm in systems, content and process. For example – how will enterprise search respond when data is move to an external (not cloud-based) system?
6. The front-office impact: how will LPOs impact the production, delivery and pricing of traditional “lawyer” work?
LPOs are already driving prices down. I fully expect them to expand their offerings over time, further impacting price and delivery.
7. The middle-office impact: how and to what extent should firms outsource functions like IT, KM and library services?
Firms should continually evaluate their internal services against the value of moving them to lower costs options. By doing so they can focus their limited resources on the “core” functions that truly differentiate them in the market.
8. The back-office impact: is there any reason for law firms to continue to employ full-time accounting and HR services people on site?
Again, evaluating this should be a continual effort. Obviously some functions will be better suited for out-sourcing than others. Already firms segregate basic accounting and HR functions and move them to administrative floors in their space or even lower rent locations.
9. How should firms rethink their entire talent strategies (recruitment and retention of both lawyers and non-lawyers) in light of LPOs?
I recently read an article on KM in the HR space that noted there are 4.2m unfilled jobs in the US right now. So we have a skills crisis, not a job one. I suggest any positions that are difficult to fill should be the ones a firm keeps internally since these are the generally higher value ones.
10. Outsourcing demands that firms have serious internal conversations about AFAs. How do you start those conversations, and how do they end?
All AFA conversations need to start with the client. Their needs must drive the conversation from start-to-finish.
11. AFAs, in turn, demand that firms have serious internal conversations about compensation. How do you start those conversations, and how do they end?
Profits, profits, profits. One idea firms should consider is to start shifting portions of comp to rewarding profitable behavior instead of hours and revenue. Perhaps this portion might reflect the portion of non-standard fee arrangements a firm has.
12. How do you have the outsourcing conversation with clients? Which side of the cost/value continuum do you emphasize?
Be very careful about offering a solution before you know the problem. Clients have different pains and needs. Know your out-sourcing story, but only present it when it solves a problem the client has and focus it on cost or value as appropriate.
13. How should in-house lawyers respond to this? What new skills will they have to develop in order to “right-source” their work and manage the process?
Their conversations with outside lawyers should no longer be about hours and rates. Try shifting the conversation to scope and deliverables. Clients are expecting law firms to work differently, so must they start doing the same.
14. Winning generals learn to adopt and adapt their opponents’ best strategies. What could law firms do to adapt and adopt outsourcing strategies?
Get over their ‘commodity’ fear and embrace the fact that all work contains commodity-level tasks. Then they can honestly evaluate what to keep internally and what should be out-sourced
15. What should be the law firm/LPO relationship? Partners? Collaborators? Competitors? Sworn enemies?
I’ll quote Ray Norda and suggest we need some type of “co-opetition” where we work collaboratively when appropriate, but do not let that stop us from competing aggressively when the situation calls for it.
16. What types of work, if any, should you never outsource?
This one is easy – Relationship building.

Recently there have been a few blog posting here about vendors, people who try to sell other people products and services. The postings are rants or raves, the kind of things that are well suited to the self indulgent nature of blogs. One such story was mine, recounted by another member of the 3 Geeks team. When the story was first blogged, I was horrified, afraid the vendor would fire me as a client. But then I thought, perhaps the blog has some power, some anonymous and public way of reaching vendors in a way my own direct interactions cannot.

There was the recent Bloomberg posting which was followed by a call from Bloomberg but better than that, was the proactive response to the news aggregator blog posting. Shortly after posting my comments on news aggregators, I was contacted by several of the mentioned vendors as well as a couple I had not yet heard of, such as Attensa. Each vendor had read the posting and wanted to chat. We are now evaluating several other products, products I would have not known about had I not blogged about mine and other’s attempt to find the perfect aggregator.

Blogs do have power and not just the The 3 Geeks, (though of course, we like to think it is the best blog out there). From a vendor and client interaction standpoint, the value of the blog is obvious. Blogs allow you a first person narrative account, an easy way to track clients concerns and your market space. Postings are a primary intelligence source, a way see what people are saying and what needs are not being met. How much better can a client relationship be when there is a clearly defined problem made public and a vendor who willing to address the issue without formally being asked. Reading blog postings is among the most cost effective forms of business development and rentention. Blogs can often offer an opportunity to make new contacts, forge new relationships and possibly address a new business need without having to take a client to a sporting event or a lavish dinner – don’t need no credit cards to ride this train. That’s the power of blogs.

N.B. this poster, takes no responsibility for the Hughie Lewis and News “Power of Love” now likely playing in your head.

I was in Nashville last week at the ILTA conference and Alternative Fee Arrangements were all the rage. My good friend Toby Brown, or as I like to call him Reverend Pricing, will be the first to tell you that the greatest, most brilliantly structured AFA does you no good if you can’t control costs. So there was also a lot of talk about improving efficiency through Legal Project Management, and outsourcing to non-partner track attorneys and LPOs to bring costs under control. A colleague from another firm told a story last week about a partner on a vendor spending spree. The punchline was “I don’t care what it costs, just do it!” As I kept thinking about that story, I realized that LPM and LPOs don’t necessarily address a fundamental obstacle to controlling costs, the “I don’t care what it costs” problem.
In the heat of the moment, while working on a matter, the cost is not the primary concern of the attorney, nor should it be. But it should at least be on their radar. They may be aware that controlling costs is in their long term interest, but those chickens won’t come home to roost until the end of the year and even then, their personal share of the cost will be diluted across the entire partnership. Meanwhile, they have a vendor offering to fix their client’s problem right now for a moderate price. The upside of spending the money is immediate gratification and potentially a problem solved, while the downside — the cost — is diluted and delayed.
There is a famous psychological experiment in which young children are left in a room alone with a single marshmallow and told that they can go ahead and eat the marshmallow now if they’d like, but if they can just wait until the researcher returns in one minute, then they can have two marshmallows when he gets back. Some children wait and get the greater reward, but most just eat the marshmallow as soon as the researcher leaves the room. It turns out that how long you can wait in the marshmallow experiment is a greater indicator of success later in life than IQ tests and grades. The truth is, most of us just aren’t that good at delaying gratification. Attorneys are no different, they will almost always choose immediate gratification, over future gains, which ultimately leads to the “I don’t care what it costs” phenomenon.
To return to the story about the partner on a spending spree… The partner couldn’t decide exactly what she wanted, which resulted in the vendor repeating the same service, in a slightly different variation, three times. Now, maybe these were three legitimate iterations of the process with increasingly refined results, but my colleague believed the attorney was simply ill prepared and poorly organized. She could have saved two-thirds of the vendor cost by deciding exactly what she wanted before engaging the vendor. As long as the client is willing to pay those costs, fine. However, the client will most likely balk at paying three times for one service, so the attorney will probably write off 60+% of the cost, and the firm as a whole will eat the difference. The immediate gratification of “throw it at the vendor and see what sticks” beats the delayed gratification of higher profits down the road.
What we need is a way to change the economics of the situation. Make the attorney feel a little bit of the pain at the time they spend the money, instead of delaying and diluting that pain. In other words, change the marshmallow experiment to “you can eat it now and I’m going to poke you once with a sharp stick, or you can wait for a minute until I return and then I’ll give you two marshmallows and no poke.” Enter my radical proposal. Have the attorneys pay vendor fees out of pocket!
OK, so that’s not going to happen, but I think it would work. So here’s my second suggestion, give the attorneys a vendor allowance, equal to 10% less than your average vendor expense on a similar type of matter. If the attorney spends more than their allowance then the firm picks up the extra — after all, they would be paying for it anyway — but if the vendor expenses come in under the attorney’s allowance then the attorney pockets the difference as a Completed Matter Bonus. In my scenario, the attorney is incentivized to reduce costs by more than 10 percent below the average vendor expense for each matter. I suspect, knowing that any unnecessary costs are reducing their personal income, will be enough incentive to make the attorney at least stop to think about whether the service is really necessary. And I’ll bet we never again hear, “I don’t care what it costs”.

Since the 2008 economic downturn (AKA “Great Recession”), law firms haven’t exactly been shy about cutting expenses. Most of those cuts were the low hanging fruit of processes, products and people that probably should have been trimmed back even when times were good. However, law firms are also notorious for hanging on to things that fall under that infamous category of “Sacred Cows.” Many of us have watched as some of things we have cut have creeped its way back into budgets. Or, some of those items that were on the list to be cut, never quite made it to the cutting room floor where it belonged.

We may no longer be in the dire straits that we were a couple years ago, but once firms could see that Profits Per Partner could be increased via cost cutting, it seems that some of those Sacred Cows are looking pretty tasty after all. Therefore, we asked, what do you think firms will stop buying in the next five years? We got a number of perspectives on what may find its way out of the law firm budget. Enjoy the discussion and if you didn’t get a chance to contribute, feel free to add your perspective in the comments. Also, don’t forget to look at next week’s Elephant Post question and get your answer in early… that way you don’t have to stress over it during the long Labor Day Weekend.

Greg Lambert
Library/Records/Blogging Guy
Westlaw or Lexis

Law firms are already looking at cutting out one of the major legal publishers, and right now, the only real reason that they don’t do it immediately is because there is some resistance (read: one partner doesn’t want to cut the product) and they don’t want to rock the boat at this point. However, having both products is simply not going to be a cost-effective way to run the firm’s research/library operation. There may be that one time when there is a specific product that we can’t access immediately, but firms will see that you just can’t spend that much money to facilitate the one-off products that are needed on a rare occasion.
Note: I actually wrote this before the big Bloomberg/BNA news. It may not take five years to make this happen.

Cindy Bassett
Electronic Services Librarian
Looseleaf

For the most part, we have acquired online access to most of our looseleaf sources and have ended many of our print looseleaf subscriptions so that we aren’t duplicating purchases.  We only continue to subscribe to a few in print (IMHO) because there are a few professors who are used to seeing them in a print format and don’t want to adapt. But it is too expensive to duplicate any purchases, especially when you factor in the staff hours to update them.   Plus, our students hate to file.

Shaunna Mireau
Director of KM and Libraries@FieldLaw
CD ROMs

Any content that comes on CD or DVD is (has always been and continues to be) a big pain in the neck.  Work stations are virtualized – no CD/DVD drives; IT has to load it; the DRMs are often unworkable; and the content (please God let it be so) will be moved to other formats which are more easily managed.  I sincerely hope this is a 2 rather than 5 year time span.  Content is the most important factor though, which is why my organization still maintains 2 titles. Please, 3 Geeks publisher readers, enough with the disks already.

Steve
IT
Blackberries

It probably won’t take five years for this to happen. Firms will simply stop buying BB’s for their attorneys and staff. Instead, they may (may) give a stipend to everyone to go out and use their own devices that can be installed with protective software (security that would wipe the device in event of being lost or stolen). It’s a no-brainer. The project might pay for itself in the reduction of staff time it takes to just reconcile the bills that come in from all those firm-owned devices.

Toby Brown
AFA
Technology

We will rent it instead.   Firms are learning that buying, installing, integrating, maintaining and updating technology is expensive and best left to technology companies. The current upgrades by so many firms to Office 2010 and Windows 7 highlights the rats-nest of technology firms are trying to manage.   It’s been my experience that law firms are good at … practicing law. By getting out of the technology services business, they will be able to re-focus their energies on that core competency.

Scott Preston
Techno Adult
Smartphone/PDAs

For many years law firms have purchased, paid the monthly charges and all maintenance fees on smartphones in order to make sure the attorneys were available to their clients at all times.  At this point in time virtually everybody has their own smartphone and they are either migrating all their work traffic to their personal device or they are carrying two devices.  Given the advancement in mobile data management (MDM) it is a fairly simple process to enable most smartphones to securely connect back to the firm’s infrastructure.  This shift should save firms a lot of money in the procurement of smart devices, it will put an extra burden on support services.  So perhaps internal support for smartphones will also stop within the next 5 years.

Greg Lambert
Blogger
Summer Associates?

The whole Summer Associates program seems to be shrinking more and more every year. Since almost all of those that go through the SA program end up leaving at the end of 4-6 years of practice at the firm, why hold on to this old way of thinking? Perhaps the better approach is to hope that other firms continue the SA program, then after they’ve got them trained and ready, swoop in and steal… er, “lateral” them into your firm.

Max Kennerly
Trial Lawyer
Directory Listings

It’s old hat to say the Yellow Pages doesn’t matter for lawyers any more, but frankly I think that same obsolescence extends to lawyer-specific directories like Martindale Hubbell and, dare I say it, even Avvo and Superlawyers. These directories produce minimal client intake and even less client conversion; the question isn’t if they are the wave of the future, because they’re not, but if they’re even worth the bother once a lawyer has a modest web presence with their own professionally designed website. I’m going to plant a flag and say that, in five years, Martindale will be as bad as the Yellow Pages and Avvo will be as bad as Martindale.

Mark Gediman
Librarian/Records
Search engines with proprietary content

I think the trend will move away from purchasing multiple search engines, each with their own proprietary content (i.e. Lexis, Westlaw) to purchasing one search engine and then subscribing to the content for that engine separately.  So, for example, using the search engine on Lexis to access the web, West content, BNA content, CCH content.  This would be true enterprise search.

Next Week’s Elephant Post:

Why Do You Really Belong to a Professional Association?

I think that ILTA is one of the last of the Summer Professional Conferences, and we have a number of posts lined up from some of the folks who went to Nashville and learned something from (or about) their peers. I’m a big AALL advocate (I am on the Executive Board, you know), but there are always issues that arise with professional organizations that cause grumbling amongst the members. Instead of more grumbling, however, what we wanted to know is why do you really belong to a professional association? What are your expectations that such an organization can and cannot do? So, pick one or two of the professional associations you are a member of and what you find are the benefits you receive from that association.

As usual, we make it easy for you. Simply fill out the embedded form below and tune in next week to see what you and others had to say.

“Help Desk, this is Flo, how may I help you?”

[Another Gem from Guest Blogger – Jeff Ward]

At this year’s ILTA conference, I had the honor of speaking alongside Lance Waagner,  CEO of Intelliteach, regarding what makes a good technology support center (aka help desk) system. I wanted to share with you some thoughts I’ve taken away from that session.
Before you stop reading, thinking this blog will delve into technical jargon, I want assure you this is more of a human-interest story about often unsung heroes in the legal office. You see, a good system doesn’t revolve around the technology; it’s dependent on the people, and to be effective, they have to be very, very good at what they do. Obviously, not every help desk tech can score a 10 on every problem, but I’d like you to picture what it takes to provide perfect service.
When your first-class help desk tech—let’s call her Florence—assists you, she seamlessly relies on fairly deep knowledge of just about every system, on strong customer service skills, and sometimes on common sense and wits alone. I often compare the help desk to OnStar, because usually you call when you’re lost or there’s been an accident. Unlike trainers, who are tour guides showing you the best paths to take, the help desk has to figure out where you are and get you back on the road. This means Florence has to be familiar with a much larger field of problems and solutions. (Many trainers excel at this task as well, but then they’re really acting in a help desk role, aren’t they?)
But knowledge of virtually everything technical is the easy part. When you call, what mood are you in? Do you really understand your problem? Are you able to describe it? None of this is your responsibility; after all, you’re lost or have been in an accident. Florence has the responsibility to stabilize your situation, grasp your need, and even at times determine what the problem really is. Florence takes your problem seriously, no matter how silly it may seem to your coworkers. And when Florence figures out your problem, she already knows whether to fix it for you or whether you are willing to learn something new. Florence doesn’t have all the answers, but she knows the right way to inspire confidence—she knows the right people and resources that can tackle the problem. Most importantly, your problem becomes her problem, and she will do everything possible to get you the best possible outcome, and then confirm your satisfaction at the end. And then, after all that, Florence moves right on to the next call.
Not every help desk tech can be as good as Florence on every call, but from watching our help desk crew day in and day out, I can tell you it’s their goal and their passion. Do you have any praise or good help desk experiences to tell? I’d love to hear your stories.

Over a dinner with a very smart bunch of people at the ILTA Conference in Nashville an excellent question came up: What will the AmLaw 100 look like in 2020? Everyone there gave very thoughtful and reasonable predictions. We discussed ideas like more out-sourcing of work, better use of cloud-based apps, using analysis KM tools, even a shift in the current business model. When it came to me to give an insightful answer, I instead offered – I have no idea.
I had actually been thinking a lot about this issue after hearing so many interesting ideas and thoughts from a number of ILTA sessions. It also brought to mind the various predictions and concepts put forth by Susskind. As I thought through this ocean of possibilities, what stuck in my mind were two ideas.
  • First – as change (both technical and cultural) accelerates, our ability to predict the future diminishes.
  • Second, and more importantly – we do not yet know what the needs of the AmLaw 100 will be so how can we predict the shape these firms will take.
At its base, this question implies: What will the business structure of a large law firm be in 8 or 10 years? My answer is that I truly do not know. Yes – I do see significant shifts going on in the market. I may accurately predict that firms will become a profit margin business (vs cost-plus), but that doesn’t tell me what their structural needs will be.
Instead of postulating which ideas will be embraced and what the firms of the future might look like, we may want to spend some more time in front of our customers asking them what keeps them up at night. Then we can apply the solutions that fit or even develop news ones as needed to address their pain. This does not suggest we sit and wait for them to ask. That reactive approach is currently paralyzing the legal profession.
Here’s an analogy from my analogy blender. My car is losing power, so I think I should swap out the motor and maybe put in a new transmission. These ideas make perfect sense to those contemplating and building new engines and transmissions, especially when we are looking at cars with very old engines. However, this solution makes no sense when you actually assess the situation and find out the tires are flat.
Now more than ever we need to engage with our customers (the lawyers in our firms) and make sure we are solving their problems and not just offering up the solutions we think make sense. We can use our ideas as spring-boards for discussions, but charging forward with them absent serious input from our customers is a recipe for failure.
Image [cc] rgmcfadden

[Guest Post from Jan Rivers, Competitive Intelligence Liaison]


This afternoon, I was sitting here, working away and listening to Erroll Garner, when an email alert blipped up in the corner of my computer screen. It was from a Bloomberg rep.

Hmmmm…..

Now, my firm doesn’t subscribe to Bloomberg, but we’ve looked at it off and on and we keep up-to-date with its latest developments. The rep’s name was one I didn’t recognize, but that’s not surprising given the frequency with which they seem to change (at least for our area).

I was being invited to an all-day Knowledge Forum being held in my city next month. “Cool!”, I thought. “Sounds interesting. Maybe it’s a way they’re promoting the changes they’ve just made to the Bloomberg Legal platform.” Strangely, the email didn’t say much about the Forum, though, but contained a link to the full invitation.

OK, so that was sort of irritating. Why make people go through additional steps to read something that could have/ should have been presented in the body of the email itself?

I was surprised when I clicked on the invitation link, to find that the resulting web page also had minimal information. It also, disconcertingly, referred to “financial professionals.” Multiple times. Oh, dear…..

Here, my jadedness started kicking in, along with a growing sense of déja vu. Bad habit, I know, and I’m trying to be better about that, but let’s just say that it’s hard to conquer.  I clicked on the link to the full agenda. Again, why not have the agenda as part of the invitation page instead of as a separate .pdf?

My jadedness was rewarded. The agenda was filled with topics like mortgage analytics, managing interest rates, fixed income electronic trading, etc

Sigh…..

One of the mantras of marketing is “target your communication.” Indeed…..Sorry, Bloomberg, but I’m not a “financial professional.” I’m a law librarian.

In the scheme of things, this faux pas is minor, but when a person receives hundreds of emails, she’d really like to receive ones from vendors which are actually relevant to what she does.

Suffice it to say, I will not be attending this one-day Knowledge Forum, but I would like to throw the idea out there for them to do similar ones for law librarians. Why not? As Bloomberg becomes a major player in the legal market, I would expect them to host law librarian forums and other similar events like their Big Two rivals do.  So, how about it, Bloomberg?  Will your next email invitation be targeted to me?

Image [CC] Gerard Van der Leun

I thought I’d try something different and have a philosophical post to start off the week. Bear with me as I step off my usual path of law firm administrative issues, and discuss some esoteric business management and human interaction issues for minute or two.

Google’s informal motto is the simple phrase of “Don’t Be Evil.” I like that phrase, but really… what it means to one person may not be what it means to another. I thought that Matt Rossoff’s article in the Business Insider last week did a good job of defining what Google means when it says “Don’t Be Evil,” and that is that it will not be evil to its users. Rossoff goes on to explain that Google’s executives can be cutthroat and downright evil to its competitors and those that try to game its search results, but that none of those actions should cause those who use Google as a search tool to suffer as a result.

That got me thinking of a few things I’ve been taught over the years, and how I’ve applied them to the way I do business as a law librarian; as someone who works in a law firm; as a member of a professional association; as a neighbor; as a father, and; generally as a human being. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned as a college student was an off-hand remark that a Political Science Professor made in a class right after we had a State Representative give a speech. I probably don’t remember the exact wording, but the comment went something like this:

Those people that you think are diametrically opposed to your ideals are probably not as different from you as you think… and those people you think are your allies, are probably not as close to you as you think, either.

He was talking about politics, of course, but that has stuck with me for twenty years now, and I often think of it when I’m having battles (personal or professional) with others. Regardless of how set in stone the other person is, I do attempt to try to see things from their perspective and find the themes that we both share. It doesn’t mean that the other person reciprocates (usually they won’t), but at least I can argue the point of what ideals we share and attempt to draw a path forward based on our commonalities rather than sit and scream or pout about our differences.

Although there are people out there that are psychopaths — I didn’t always believe that, but many life lessons have proved that there are simply highly functional crazy people in every profession/neighborhood/family — these folks are usually rare, or are well-known and people attempt to stay away from them or discredit them eventually. As a general rule, I found that most of the people I work with, those I consider my professional peers, friends, etc. are people that also have a motto similar to Google’s “Don’t Be Evil.” Most of them have positive outlooks, want to succeed, and help others succeed.

That doesn’t mean that good people always act good, however. Just as Google defines “Evil” in its own way, it is surprising sometimes to watch good people do bad things because they think that the results of their actions justify the means in which they accomplish their goals. If your ideas are good, but your tactics are “evil,” then your results tend to be tainted. What’s worse is that those people you just ran roughshod over tend to never want to work with you again. You may not realize it, but even those that are your allies understand what you did, and may justify it by saying something like “Well, he’s a jerk, but at least he’s my jerk.” That’s like having a fighting dog and justifying it by saying “well, he’s never bitten one of my kids… yet.” You just never know when that dog (or that person) will turn on you.

So, I go off to face another week and attempt to follow the philosophy of “people are usually good,” that “those who disagree with me aren’t enemies,” and that hopefully at the end of the week I can look back and said “hey, I wasn’t evil this week — but, I dealt successfully with a few people that were!!” So, good luck this week, and remember… “Don’t Be Evil!”

I’ve been thinking all day about what the Bloomberg acquisition of BNA will eventually mean in the legal publishing world. I first thought of what it would mean to Westlaw and Lexis, and whether Bloomberg Law would now truly bring some competition to the duopoly we’ve all come to accept (and loathe.) However, what really kept popping into my mind was another vendor, CCH… actually CCH’s parent, Wolters Kluwer. In a way, Bloomberg is becoming what CCH “should have become” years ago but never got its act together to be a true competitor. Wolter Kluwer had all the pieces to be competitive, but persisted in the business model of being a holding company for all of these pieces rather than integrating them into a single platform. Sure, the whole IntelliConnect platform was supposed to work toward integration, but it never really recovered after its initial stumbling out of the gate (although, they have given a lot of effort to rectify that blunder over the past couple of years.)

With Bloomberg now having all cases/statutes/regs plus Dockets, a citator system, and now quality secondary resources, it “should” become a major player in the market. Whether or not it can break into that market is still yet to be determined. WestlawNext and Lexis Advance are still relatively new products, and the whole WestlawNext launch fiasco is finally seeming to settle down (although statistics on the adoption of WLN by current Westlaw subscribers is still a little iffy, in my opinion.)

The biggest mistake that Bloomberg can make right now is assuming that they can be competitive simply because they are not Westlaw or Lexis. They bombed at that approach with the whole BLAW launch a few years ago (along with that awful interface.) Bloomberg better come in with some serious pricing deals for firms willing to take them on. Bloomberg needs to get “in the door” of these firms and be on the desktop, laptop, and or iPadtop of attorneys, paralegals and librarians. Right now, Bloomberg needs to learn to speak the language of those in charge of buying law firm research products… “price sells!”

The second biggest mistake that Bloomberg could make is screwing with existing BNA contracts and access points. If they want to see customers bolt for BNA’s competitors, simply tell them that they’ll have to move off of the current platform and onto Bloomberg’s black-and-orange platform. Now is the time to lure customers into the whole Bloomberg Law platform (now improved with BNA!!) It is not the time to bring in ultimatums of move over or lose access.

Although many of us are sad to see an employee-owned organization like BNA go away and merge into the one-employee owned Bloomberg product, I think this may eventually fill all those empty spots that Bloomberg currently has in content, and even make the BNA materials better over time. At least we can be happy that Thomson Reuters or Reed Elsevier didn’t get their hands on BNA.

After a little thinking, I think this acquisition will turn out okay and will finally give Wexis some real competition in the legal publishing and financial news market. I’ve been harping that Bloomberg was too narrowly focused (mainly at big law firms in Manhattan). Now, they step out of NYC and try to take over the (legal publishing) world!