The following Friday afternoon rant represents a bit of a diversion from our regularly scheduled legal geekiness and focuses on more general geekiness. The opinions represented here are mine alone. If you agree, or disagree, I would love to hear why in the comments.
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It kills me that we’re seeing school arts funding decimated across the country. It’s time for businesses to step up and say, “No, this is important! We want our future employees to have this experience. If the schools won’t provide it, then we’ll open the corporate coffers and fund arts organizations on our own!” Don’t think they’ll do that? No, I don’t either, but I think they need to for one reason. Nearly everything that makes me a valuable employee I learned by participating in Music or Theater. I bet if you look around your organization you’ll see Band Geeks and Theater Nerds are in a lot of the key positions that keep your firm running. Why is that?
The corporate mythos is one of sports metaphors and team building exercises. I get it. I’m a sports fan. It’s macho and manly. Nothing forges bonds of brotherhood and builds character and leadership like team sports. You know what? Bulls***.
I played football for one year in High School. And yes, I was awful. I started the season as a third string guard and by the last game I was in the starting lineup because the two guys in front of me were injured. On the first play of that game, I jumped off sides and the coach put the first string guard back in to play with a broken arm. Thus ended my football career. In one season, I had learned to hate my teammates, because I was constantly fighting with them for playing time. I had learned to hate my coaches, because they were demeaning and abusive. And I learned to hate myself, because despite my hard work, I was never going to be a very good football player. So I turned back to my first love, music.
If you want people who know how to work well in teams, hire band geeks. Oh, we had our rivalries and we tussled for chair positions, but when it came down to it, the performance was what mattered. Everyone, from the most talented to the least was focused on the final outcome. And the more talented would often take time to work with the less and bring them along.
If you want creativity and resiliency, hire a theater nerd. No amount of brain bashing on the field of combat can compare with making an ass out of yourself flubbing Shakespeare in front of a thousand people, then going out and doing it again the next night, and the next. And after you’ve flubbed those lines, you have to improvise with your fellow actors to find your way back to the script, all the while unable to discuss your plan of action, instead conveying meaning through subtle eyebrow shifts and hidden hand gestures.
If you want dedication, look for an instrumentalist. There is nothing like spending hours in musical meditation trying to get that one passage to sound just a little bit more effortless.
If you want the greatest project manager of all time, find a mediocre stage manager. Rolling out the latest desktop software is nothing compared to pulling together all of the individual pieces of a one man show.
I am a huge science fan. I make a living in technology. I greatly appreciate engineering and math. But the STEM courses are not sufficient to facilitate human flourishing. It’s absolutely true that the arts are important because they add to the beauty of the world, and they give our lives deeper meaning, and all of that other touchy feely crap. But it’s also true that the arts have taught many generations of business people how to work together toward a common goal, and after they fail, how to get back to work and do it again, better this time. We can’t all be on the sports clubs. If we allow arts funding in schools to be cut across the board, then we are not only failing our kids, we are failing ourselves and our businesses. The future belongs to the creative collaborators, the resilient failures, and the dedicated innovators. Without the arts, the future will not belong to us.

****End of rant.****

My grandmother always taught me that beauty is only skin deep. She’d always say, “pretty is as pretty does.”

Sadly, LinkedIn’s grandmother isn’t nearly as wise.

Although LinkedIn has substantially improved the looks of its iPhone app–the previous iteration was clunky and uncooperative–it is no easier to connect to new people.


One day, I hope to be able to sync my LinkedIn app with a new friend’s app so we don’t have to go through the ordeal of swapping business cards and then, at a later date, uploading them into a contact management system. Like Linked In.
Blackberry has this functionality with its BBM feature. You can scan a new friend by scanning a Blackberry generated PIN barcode. Voila! The friend is added to the BBM system.

I can foresee LI developing this kind of feature.

For right now, LI’s iphone app looks great–the updates, inbox, my profile, groups and more all load up well and are easy to use.

But with this one additional feature–which is, isn’t it, the whole point of LI?–the new LI app would be perfect.

As we heard at the ILTA 2011 conference, in order to deliver your goals effectively you must include most (if not all) of the support functions within the firm.  Now more than ever, integration between different administrative groups is essential for a firm to be agile, cost effective and client focused.  How do you achieve this?, You achieve this by understanding the stakes, gaining support of management and sharing the vision.  All of this falls under the heading of improved communication.  Without effective and constant communication within and between departments, skepticism and distrust become the enemy.  However, it also takes a shift in the mindset of all involved.  To really deliver on this, we need leaders, and not just leaders at the top.
Understanding the Stakes.  If you do not understand how your business works, you are not a leader.  Understanding how your business works includes not only how different practice areas function, but also how Library Services provides business intelligence or how Finance provides metrics on overhead allocations.  You need to understand what Professional Development and Recruiting are doing, why Human Resources is so afraid of social networking and how Marketing is working to improve your firm’s brand.  You need to understand why this is important and what happens (the stakes) if your firm doesn’t deliver.  In order to provide effective tools and changes, you need to understand the challenges each department faces.  As a leader, you need to be seen as an ombudsmen for those various functions.
Management Support.  I don’t care how effective each department is about communicating within and between departments, if your management doesn’t know about it, then for all intents and purposes it ain’t happening.  You must include firm management in your efforts.  This does not need to be a long process.  We all know that firm management has a full plate and we shouldn’t be adding to that workload, but constant and effective communication must be part of your village growth plan.
Sharing the Vision.  If you are not sharing your vision with your peers and coworkers, you are not leading.  It is healthy for an organization or department to have differing approaches, thoughts and opinions, but an effective organization must have their goals aligned.  Without this kind of alignment, much effort is spent keeping the train on the tracks.
In the end, everyone within the organization needs to act and think like a leader.  If you can achieve this, you will have employees who are engaged, excited, effective and on the constant look out for fresh opportunities to lead.
It takes a village to deliver, it takes a leader to make a difference.
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.