Two different NYT stories caused me to start thinking about crowdsourcing: World War II Mystery Solved in a Few Hours and Identifying Looters and Lovers in Vancouver’s Riot. In both instances, photos were posted online to help identify people who held themselves out in a public manner and whose actions were memorialized by photos. In a matter of hours, people began identifying those caught in the act. So it makes me wonder: perhaps George Orwell had it wrong. There’s no one Big Brother. There are Big Brothers and Sisters. B2S, if you will. Don’t know if I like that so much. Its bad enough being a Catholic and being guilted by the possibility of Big Eye in the Sky. It’s like I’ve said before—privacy is heading out the door …     Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. George Orwell

I knew this morning that I felt a blog post coming on… (it’s a little like a cold with less sneezing)

Does everybody know this trick? Maybe I’m the last one to figure it out…either way, it’s a good one! I didn’t want to pick on anyone so I’ve redacted this, hope it still makes sense.

How to find LinkedIn names where you see only the person’s title.

 1. Search LinkedIn by title and company.

  2. Oops, not everyone’s name shows up in search results. Hm, what to do…?

 
3. Google it! Search the person’s title from LinkedIn (quotated works best) and more often than not Google will return the name that LinkedIn disguised.

 
Happy searching!

One of my favorites apps these days is my GoodReads app.

I finally broke down and bought an iPhone, I am the first of the three Geeks to own one. Don’t ask me why I waited so long. I don’t know why. Well, I do. I’m cheap and my firm wasn’t going to pay for it.

Finally deciding that, hey, I’m in charge of social media at my firm; so, doggone it, I’m getting an iPhone. Plus I was sick and tired of my Torch’s flaming out on me.

Within 3 days I was hooked. I had managed to watch a movie, a tv show, read a book and make a date all on one device. And why didn’t anyone tell me that the sound quality is FANTASTIC?!? All of my music sounds like a symphony inside my head.

Anyhow, back to GoodReads.

For those of you who don’t know, there are two major social book sites: Shelfari and GoodReads.

For a long time I was a Shelfari fan because I liked their virtual bookshelf that I could post to my personal blog. But after they upgraded to allow you integrate it with your Amazon account (they are owned by Amazon), the creep factor pushed me away.

That’s when I made the switch to GoodReads. And when I found out that GoodReads had an iPhone app, well, I was totally down with that. 

So I devoted an entire week-end of moving my Shelfari catalog to my GoodReads account. I had always had an account on both, but let the GoodReads languish. With an easy import of the Shelfari .csv file into GoodReads, the inner librarian came out in me and I was able to categorize my books to my heart’s content.

But the GoodReads app—the app!—is nothing short of amazing.

Not only does it follow your friends’ reads, reviews and status reports, you can read the great classics for free.

Right now I’m reading Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray.” The functionality of the reader is awesome—just as good as Kindle’s app.

But the best part of the app? The barcode scan.

Click the button, hold your phone up to the barcode of the latest book that you are reading and it automatically uploads the book to your catalog. OMG. The OCD in me was in heaven … I uploaded 100 books in an hour. Crazy fun.

And if you are worried that this post has nothing to do with work, there’s a whole section on law books. I added all of my tomes to that section.

[Image (CC) nhanusek]

We love looking at new products and hearing about products from our peers. This week we decided to try to urge some peers to chime in on the Elephant Post and let us know of some products they’ve been looking at, and though we should as well. We have a few, but I know there are a lot of new products out there, so if you didn’t get a chance to add it, feel free to put it in the comments (and I might even go ahead and add it to the main section if warranted!)

Enjoy this week’s Elephant Post, and don’t forget to look at next week’s question listed below. We want to get your perspective on those Social Media Consultants and see what you think about hiring them to help create your firm’s social media strategies. I’m really looking forward to seeing the different perspectives on this one!

John Gillies
KM lawyer
Kiiac

While we are essentially still in early days with the product, I can see that Kiiac is very effective in (a) taking a mass of documents of a particular type and identifying whether they have been drafted in a consistent manner, (b) producing a template document that can be used as a firm precedent, (c) reviewing the various ways that particular clauses have been drafted across the data set, (d) benchmarking specific documents against the template, and (e) keeping precedents “green.”

Assuming that you have been careful in the steps leading up to creating your template, the benchmarking tool can be of particular benefit when reviewing the first draft of an agreement. (Precedents are fine for half of the engagements where your firm is preparing the first draft, but of marginal utility if you are on the receiving end, because of the variability in how agreements are put together.)

The most important aspect, though, at least in my view, is how it can help lawyers focus on the need for organizational clarity when drafting. By aggregating the firm’s work product, it enables you to analyze the firm’s end product in a way that would be unattainable otherwise.

Steven B. Levy
Author, teacher, consultant
The Off Switch

When you’re in a meeting, turn off the Blackberry, turn off EMail, even turn off your computer unless you’re really, really taking notes on it. When you’re with family, turn off your electronic tether.

Life not only will go on… but you’ll be a part of it once again.

Toby Brown
AFA/KM
Lexis Search Advantage Matter Experience

Analysis KM IS the future.  And since I have previously mentioned Kingsley Martin’s KIIAC product on this topic numerous times, I thought I would point out the Lexis Search Advantage Matter Experience (LSA ME) system on the Elephant.  For some time the LSA product has been moving in a KM analysis direction, being able to analyze and determine document types.  This year Lexis rolled out the Matter Experience module of LSA.  The LSA ME system (in addition to having a laborious long name) takes the analysis concept a step further.  One of the biggest challenges for implementing AFAs is understanding the cost of services being provided.  To address this challenge, LSA ME analyzes time entries and documents and then provides valuable meta data about these BLOBs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLOB).

First – The system can determine matter types.  Traditionally the most popular matter type used by firms is something like “General Representation.”  When needing to analyze current and past matters for billing and cost knowledge, this lack of useful matter-type data is quite problematic.  Knowing which matters are “Single Plaintiff Employment Litigation” is a huge step in getting your arms around billing knowledge.

Second – LSA ME analyzes time entries and programatically codes them with whatever task code schema you chose.  With this metadata in place, you can begin to understand your billing knowledge with increasing levels of detail.  You will begin to see fees (a.k.a. your cost of production) by stage and task.  With this knowledge, a firm’s ability to price and maintain margins jumps.

Will this new meta data be perfect?  Of course not. More importantly it will be consistent.  In a perfect world we might expect humans to actually input this data when opening and maintaining matters.  But humans are notoriously inconsistent when it comes to data entry.  Computers are not.

LSA ME is a good example of emerging Analysis KM.   Check it out.

Lihsa
Online Marketer
LawyerUp

Okay, I don’t really like it. Nor do I need it. Truly.

I just thought it was hilariously appealing and allowed me to pay attention to a sector of lawyers with whom I usually do not engage: the criminal defense attorney.

LawyerUp is an android app–seriously, they developed the Android app before they developed either an iPhone or Blackberry app–that allows subscribers to literally have a lawyer at their fingertips in the event they are arrested.

You can get a family plan for $9.95 a month. Bear in mind that I am not sure how they define “family”.  Individual plans are also available.

LawyerUp is based in Connecticut and Rhode Island, so legal aid is limited to these states.

Lawyers and subscribers are pre-screened so that when you are in the clink and make your one phone call, you hit the app and LawyerUp dispatches an attorney to start working for you within 15 minutes.

So. Question: does a push of an app qualify as one phone call? Or can you still call your mom too?

Scott Preston
IT Guy
Yammer

I really believe it is time for law firms to start embracing social communities in a much more fluid way.  Yammer is a very simple product that allows a firm to have a private social community based on the firm’s domain name.  You can share info within your  own organization which is very useful, but Yammer also has the concept of communities that allow individuals outside of the law firm’s domain to also participate in a dialogue.  Yammer also has an ability to integrate twitter within the product simply by including the #yam tag any tweets will also show up in your yammer dialogues.

Greg Lambert
Library/Records Guy
AdvologixPM

We were having dinner with the Advologix guys last night and to watch how this company has grown to integrate Practice Management Software into law firms, big and small, and into company legal groups has been something to see. Built on the Salesforce.com platform, this cloud-based Practice Management tool is fast, scalable, and is a great resource for everything from time entry and billing, contact and client relationship management, client intake, calendaring, workflow automation, and much more.

Definitely worth a look if you are wanting to better manage your firm’s business processes, and don’t want to overload your IT staff or computer network.

Next Week’s Elephant Post

Would You Hire a Social Media Consultant (AKA “Guru”) to Advise Your Firm on SM Strategies? Why or Why Not??

I think this question pretty much stands on its own. Law firms are slowly realizing that there is “opportunity” in the social media realm, but as with many things, they just don’t know where to start, and they usually don’t believe that their existing staff has the expertise to advise them properly. Thus, enter the Social Media Guru Consultant. Some love ’em, some  hate ’em, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job of getting hired to come in and advise firms on social media policies and procedures.

So, would you hire one? Why or Why Not?? (I’m looking forward to seeing both sides of this debate.)

As the school year ended, I told my three daughters that I was going to cancel the cable subscriptions because I didn’t want them sitting in front of the TV all Summer watching The Disney Channel or Nickelodeon. However, like most of my home projects, I haven’t followed through on my promise. Instead, we’ve been addicted to the show The Voice, and we’ve been spending our “family time” discussing Christina Aguilera’s ability to look like Betty Boop characters and Ce Lo Green’s choice in sunglasses. Oh, we’ve also been discussing the talent on the show as well. The initial idea behind The Voice was to take unsigned talent and judge them by their skills as a singer, not by their looks. Although as the show has progressed, it seems that there is some judging on “showmanship,” what actually caught me off-guard last night and this morning was that “unsigned” didn’t mean “never signed.” Some of the talent is getting a “second chance” at grabbing the music industry’s brass ring. It was this “second-chance” aspect that got me thinking about projects that failed, but may still be worth giving another chance to see if maybe the time is right for a comeback. As usual, you’re going to have to stick with me for a minute as I try to draw this parallel between musicians and legal projects.

Two of the most polished singers on The Voice, Dia Frampton and Javier Colon, aren’t amateurs. Not only have they been signed by major record labels, but both have released multiple CDs, all to limited fanfare, and then they were dumped by their record labels. (See Javier’s and Dia’s work under their band names, Javier and Meg & Dia.)

It’s a common story… great talent gets you so far, but without the proper planning and support, even the best talent can go unnoticed and end up labeled as a failure. Sound eerily similar to some of the KM, IT, Library, Biz Dev, CI, and so on and so forth, projects that are given their initial chance in the law firm. Inevitably, some of these projects aren’t given the support they need (adequate funding, equipment, personnel, etc), or the planning is so poor that they fail (lack of proper environmental testing, rolled out to the wrong group, etc.) Although there are many projects that fail because they are “bad projects,” there are many “great projects” that fail because the people supporting the projects have failed in their support.

So, just like Dia and Javier, are some of these failed projects worth another chance? Perhaps some of those projects were ahead of their time (meaning your firm just wasn’t ready for them two years ago, but perhaps now they are.) Perhaps some of those projects took a hit when the great recession hit in 2007-2008, and now that business is picking back up, it is time to give those failed projects a second chance.

The biggest hurdle on giving something a second chance is overcoming the fact that they failed in the first place. Maybe, as with the premise of The Voice, you should have a little selective ignorance of what happened in the past, and listen to the value of the project in the here and now. Perhaps you’ll turn your chair around on a worthwhile project and wonder how you let it fail in the first place.

Just for a little fun, here’s a couple of videos from Dia Frampton… the first one, Monster, was a failure, and the second one, Heartless, seems to show that sometimes things are worth giving a second chance.

Monster (Meg & Dia) – Labeled a Failure


Heartless – Worth A Second Chance?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been on iTunesU listening to Human Behavioral Biology lectures by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University. (Why, what do you listen to while jogging?) It’s a fascinating subject and Sapolsky is an incredible lecturer, I highly recommend the course if you’re interested in such things. On Saturday, I listened to the lecture on Language where he gave a brief history of the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN) and suddenly I saw the fundamental shift that we’re currently undergoing in the workplace in an entirely different light.
In the late 1970s, Nicaragua began to school deaf children in their country for the first time. Before that, each child grew up speaking primarily to their own family using a variety of unique signs and gestures. When the school brought these kids together and tried to teach them to lip-read Spanish, they made little progress. The teachers had a difficult time communicating with their students and the students just didn’t seem to learn. However, the teachers soon realized that the students were communicating fluently with each other in a language that the teachers couldn’t understand. The school called in linguists to help decipher the children’s language. Consequently, the development and evolution of this brand new language is thoroughly documented. Not only did children create it, but they continued to develop it. After three or four generations, the children who had originally created the language had trouble understanding the much more complex language developed by the younger children. Today, ISN is an internationally recognized form of sign language, with all the hallmarks of any language, including rules of grammar. Without an authority teaching them the “right” way to communicate, these children had created a communication system that worked for them. As Sapolsky said in his lecture, “New languages are created by children.”
For another, more immediate example, see textspeak. The language, again, created by children for sending messages to each other using the Short Message Service (SMS) on their mobile phones. SMS was created by the mobile carriers as an addon to their voice services. They expected people to use the service like a short version of email. “Don’t forget the milk.” The messages were limited in length and the phone keypads were difficult to type on. Most adults looked at SMS, sent a message or two and gave up, it was a pain in the butt to use, it was much easier to just call the person. It was the kids who realized you didn’t need to spell out every single word. They began to use number and symbol replacements like, “b4” and “I <3 u”, and they agreed upon abbreviations like LOL, FWIW, IMHO, ROTFL* to replace whole phrases. Today, what began as a kids language to communicate using a rudimentary SMS protocol over the phone network lives on in Twitter, where it has been further developed to include conventions like @mentions and #hashtags. This short messaging is becoming it’s own language, again largely developed by young people, if not by children.
Which brings us to a wider view of online social communication in the early 21st century. We call this Social Media, or Social Networking. By giving it a label merging concepts we understand, we can kind of comprehend it. But in reality, what we call Social Networking, is the birth of a new language, or meta-language, called Social. It’s a new way of communicating, with its own vocabulary and grammar. Just as you can learn to speak Italian at 40, you can learn Social at any age, but it takes work and a lot of you will not be willing to devote the time necessary to become conversant, let alone fluent in the language. Your children and grandchildren, however, created this language and they are developing it. They and their children will be native speakers. They will use this language in ways that we can’t even comprehend. Be assured they will live their lives online with Social as their primary language. They will raise their children with this language, and more to the point, they will conduct business in this language. If you want to conduct business in the future, you must to learn this language, and if you resist, your business will be short lived.
In my last column I advocated for Enterprise adoption of Social Networking without worrying too much about how it should be used. I suggested it would be better to let employees find their own uses and let it grow organically. In response, Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs tweeted, “I tell firms (to watch) where college students walk, then put in sidewalks where they’ve worn paths.” I think that’s wise advice, the college students are big developers of this new language, and they will be your next batch of employees. Had the teachers in Nicaragua simply persisted with their existing teaching techniques, instead of learning from their students, those poor kids would still be trying to read lips in Spanish and their contribution to their community would be limited by their ability to conform to a language that wasn’t developed with their abilities in mind. It’s time for businesses to adopt reverse mentorship programs. Let your new employees train the veterans in Social, a language they created, that their kids will develop, their grandkids will intuit, and the language in which business will be conducted for the next hundred years.
*b4 = before; I <3 U = I love you, or I “heart” you; LOL = Laughing Out Loud; FWIW = For what it’s worth; IMHO = In my humble opinion; ROTFL = Rolling on the floor laughing.

No more lengthy diatribes on NYTimes.com.

I noticed on today’s home page:

A Note to Readers

Starting today, the character limit on comments will be reduced from 5,000 to 2,000 characters. The shorter length will allow for an improved experience for commenters and readers alike. As always, we encourage you to share your opinions and reactions.

Got something to say about it? We encourage your mellifluous, sesquipedalian musings here.

Image [CC] by Mr. Ush

You’ve probably heard the saying that “Youth is wasted on the young.” After seeing the list of participants in the program, “The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now?” put on by Harvard Law School’s John Palfrey on June 16th, the thought of “Idea generation and future planning of law libraries is wasted on the Academics,” crossed my mind. Now, before Academics get their noses bent out of shape, bear with me for a minute because I’m going to take the law firm librarians out behind the woodshed as well.

Take a look at the participants for this collaboration who were there to “discuss and critique blueprints for the next iterations of our future.”

  • Academic librarians: 107
  • Gov’t/Court libraries: 13 
  • Vendors/Stakeholders: 10
  • Firm Librarians: 7
  • Corporate Librarians: 1
These were the participants. When it came to Firm Librarians actually sitting on panels or presenting at the meeting, that number drops to zero. That is a serious shortcoming of the meeting, and causes the end results of such a meeting to be unfairly skewed away from an important subset of the profession.
As someone that has worked in the Academic setting (twice), the state court and county system, and at an AmLaw 100 firm, here’s my take on what each of these subsets of the law librarian field brings to the party:
  • Courts – “Where the story begins”
  • Academics – “Where the ideas roam”
  • Private Law Firms – “Where the money is”
Each piece is important, but as many of us know, it is the Academics that really are designed to think about the process of law librarianship and develop theories about how to improve processes and procedures so that the profession continues to thrive and be relevant over a long period of time. The academics are truly those that like to toss out ideas, develop theories, and predict the future, and debate all of these among each other to see which of them hold water as judged by their peers. The only problem is that they are predicting the future using a formula that is missing a significant variable … the Private Law Firm Librarian’s perspective.

It is not totally the Academics’ fault for this missing variable, however. At least half (probably more than half) of the blame rests on the shoulders of the law firm librarians. Here the Private Law Librarians have a chance to really participate and leverage the strengths of their Academic brethren, yet without fail, I usually hear one or more of the following excuses on why they won’t participate in these types of future planning meetings:
  1. My firm won’t pay for it, therefore I can’t attend
  2. I’m too busy billing work and can’t afford to take time off
  3. The ideas that come out of these meetings don’t work in my specific situation
The first two excuses I can somewhat forgive… that last one really pisses me off when I hear it. And I hear it a lot! One of the biggest problems I’ve run across in the Private Law Librarian field is that there are those that believe that when they go to a conference or meeting that they have to come away with a specific answer to a specific problem that addresses their specific need. If they don’t get that specific answer, then they gripe about what a waste of time and money it is and how it “failed” them by not giving them the answer they need to take back to their boss. I think I’ve written this before… what these people are wanting is a consultant, not a conversation. These types of meetings/conferences are set up to bounce ideas off of one another and to debate the validity of the ideas within the three major subsets of the law librarian profession. If you don’t participate, then you’re causing the results to shift toward the subsets of the profession that do participate.

Now, back to the Harvard meeting.
These types of meetings need to continue, but they need to be better balanced when it comes to the subsets that make up the law library profession. Academics talking to Academics is not the way to define the future of the profession. I’m going to challenge John Palfrey that when he sets up 2012 edition of  “The Future of Law Libraries” that one in five (20%) of the speakers be from law firms. I’m also going to challenge the Private Law Firm Librarians, especially those in Chief or Director levels of large and mid-sized firms, to answer the call when Palfrey asks you to participate. If you really care about the profession, then find a way to contribute to meetings like this so that Private Law Firm Librarians aren’t left out of the equation.

Short quiz: what’s the difference between -, –, and —?

If you said length, well, yeah, size does matter. Kinda. But it is more about how you use it, of course!

The dash [ – ], which is created by typing the “minus” key, is used in compound words. Like in the sentence, “Toby is quite good-looking.” Or “Greg is awe-mazing”. You get my drift.

The ndash [ – ], which is created by typing the CTRL + number – or ASCII code “&#150” (ALT+0150 on number pad) or HTML code “&ndash;”, is used between a range of numbers, values or distances. For instance, “Lihsa could easily pass for 30–40 years old!”

The mdash [ — ], which is created by typing ASCII code “&#151” (ALT+0151 on number pad) or HTML code “&mdash;”, is used to set off a phrase or paranthetical—instead of actually using a nerdy pair of parantheses.

Note: you can use two ndashes––or two dashes–in place of the mdash.

But, please, leave out the spaces before and after the mdash. Otherwise, you lose all grammar-street cred if you don’t.

Have a fantabulous grammarous Friday!

Image (CC) by ecreyes 

Almost without fail, whenever I bring up the issue of Client Relationship Management (CRM) tools with others in the legal industry, the conversation ends up talking about what an overall failure the CRM resource ended up being, but because the firm invested so much time, money and people into the project, they aren’t willing to admit   that they need to cut their losses and move on to something else.

The whole internal CRM tool project is a lesson in insanity – doing the same thing over and over, yet somehow expecting a different result this time around. Lawyers don’t like sharing their information (contacts), they don’t like doing administrative tasks (entering contact information into the CRM), and most will fight you if you want to set up something to automate those tasks. Most law firms with CRM tools have gone down the path of “Data Stewards” to try to make sense of all of the mis-matched CRM information (multiple entries, misspellings, company names entered twenty different ways, etc.), but after a couple of years, these Data Stewards are usually let go or reassigned to other work because the CRM tools are just too unwieldy and the data is just too disorganized.

So why are firms still hanging on to these money pits? Should we jettison the idea of building an internal CRM tool and start leveraging external products such as LinkedIn to help us better understand the relationships between our lawyers and our clients? That’s the questions we posed this week. Although we only received a couple perspectives this time around, you can still chime in with your comments on where you stand on the whole CRM issue.

For the next Elephant Post, we ask you to let us know what legal product (database, legal platform, collaboration tool, book, etc.) over the past year or two do you think is something others should check out.) Scroll on down and let us know what you think is worth a look.

Simon Ellison-Bunce
IT

I think it’s undeniable that the rise of social networking will significantly change how firms approach CRM – but there are some fundamental tensions at the heart of the issue.

One is the difference between the interests of the firm as a whole and the interests of individual lawyers. LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for individuals, but from the enterprise perspective it presents a number of challenges currently, in areas such as brand management and relationship risk for example.

Another tension is around control of the data on social networking platforms. To start with, not everyone who a firm might want to engage with is on LinkedIn; and of those that are, not all of them will be actively using it or keeping their information up to date. Of course there’s no way to add or “correct” someone else’s profile because that information isn’t in your control! Also, there’s no obvious way currently to combine information from your LinkedIn network with other information you might have about those people or their companies in your own systems, which rather limits it’s usefulness for business development.

This is clearly an ongoing debate. I believe the way forward is a new approach that combines the best of both worlds, effectively putting a social networking wrapper around a more traditional CRM core. If you’ll forgive the plug, look about for more about this on our blog at http://blog.fellsoft.com or follow us @fellsoft.

Law Librarian
CRM’s are a waste of time and money (at least the way most are set up.)
I’m able to pull more relevant information from my LinkedIn connections than I am from the CRM on almost all of our contacts. I would rather the lawyers connect via LinkedIn (or something that ties into LinkedIn) and allow us to monitor any changes in the contact’s profile. The CRM data is almost always ‘dirty’ and many times is so out-of-date that it is not only useless, sometimes it actually causes more problems than if we didn’t have the data in there at all.

What New Legal Industry Product Do You Think Others Should Take a Look At?

We’ve touted a few products on 3 Geeks over the past couple of years, but we’re always looking for other perspectives on great products released for the legal industry that we should check out. Just off the top of my head I can think of a few products that I think are worthwhile… Kiiac is a great product (and one that we’ve talked about a lot), the book Typography for Lawyers is one of those rare products that takes a basic process (writing legal documents) and explains it in a way that helps you understand why certain writing and typographical processes are the way they are. 
So, think about something you’ve started using in the past year or two and let us know why you like it, and why we should take a look at it. Fill out the form below and share your perspective.