I do a fair amount of presentations on Law Library, Knowledge Management, Records, Social Media, and Competitive Intelligence topics. When the talk is over, I usually go through the comments from the audience to see what I could have done better, or if there were things that I missed and need to include the next time around. Almost without fail, however, I see one comment every time I review those comments:

“I’ve heard all of this before, you’re not giving me anything new that will fix the issues I have at my office.”

This comment is usually tagged along with the section where I tell the audience that you need to “market” what you do; that you need to “communicate” with the key players in your firm; and, that you need to be “proactive” in your mission and not wait for someone to come to you first.

Everyone has heard that trifecta of Market, Communicate, and Being Proactive, but the primary reason you are hearing it over and over again is that without these three key elements, your goals won’t make it off the ground. Another reason that you hear these elements is that, although you may be the exception to the rule, most of the people that are in the room still struggle with actually implementing these three processes. I’ll give you one example from a webinar I moderated last week.

When asked what the Information Technology group could do better in working with the Library at a law firm, one of the answers was roughly, “IT should come talk to the library before they begin planning their projects.” The idea behind this comment was that the library has resources, experience and expertise in many areas that the IT group could leverage to approach their projects more effectively. That’s a great idea… but does anyone think that the IT group is going to amend its Standard Operating Procedure manual and add in: “Step One- Contact the library”? Probably not. So, the takeaway that I would think that you’d get from the trifecta of key processes is that you’d apply them in this order:

  1. Be Proactive – Go to the IT Group when you hear of upcoming projects that you believe your department could help with.
  2. Communicate – Talk in the language that IT understands. Build a business case that explains specifically what resources, experience and expertise the library has that would make the project more efficient. Verbal communication alone is simply not enough.
  3. Market – Upon successful implementation of the processes you’ve developed, bring that up with everyone that you want to do business with in the future. Nothing breeds success like success.
As much as I would love for one of my presentations to inspire someone go to out and solve all the issues they face back at work, I understand that it probably won’t happen like that. Presentations are more like conversation starters and idea generators. They are very general and the examples used in the presentations almost never address the specific issues that you face back at work. The best that many of us can hope for when we attend a presentation that is presented by a peer, is that we can have a few “take aways” that we can adapt to our issues. Presentations are simply that… presentations. The people that present are not consultants, they are usually your peers that are wanting to talk about some successes (or failures) that they’ve had to deal with and wanted to share those with others in order to get a conversation started. The hard work of actually continue that conversation, or building upon those ideas, is up to you.
It kind of reminds me of this story that I heard from one of my more opinionated congregational members of the Pentecostal Church I grew up in:

One morning, the Preacher was having individual prayer session with his congregation, which was made up of mostly farmers. As each farmer came in and talked with the preacher, they each gave pretty much the same request. “Brother, would you pray for me and ask God to kill off all these weeds that are choking my crops?”
After hearing this request from farmer after farmer, the Preacher welcomed in the final farmer and immediately said to him, “I suppose you want me to pray for God to help you with your weed problem?”
The farmer replied, “Oh, no Brother. I needed you to pray for my youngest child, who has been sickly lately.
The preacher was stunned, “Don’t you have a weed problem, Brother?”
“Oh, yes I do. They are terrible this year,” replied the farmer.
“Well, what are you doing about it?” asked the preacher.
The farmer looked the preacher in the eye and answered, “I get up early every morning and pray hard for the Lord to help with the weed problem. Then I get out in the field and hoe like hell.”

I totally missed the opportunity to chime in this week’s Elephant Post and rather than comment on everyone else’s comments, I thought – What would Greg do? The answer is axiomatic – blog about it. And so I am. From a competitive intelligence perspective, I hope legal directories never die, in print or online. But I do like the print editions there is certain gravitas that comes from seeing the best of the profession wrapped in nicely bound shiny book. But maybe that’s just me. In any event, the directories for me, are a treasure trove of information. Aside from being a terrific mechanism from which to source laterals (as mentioned in the Elephant posts), you can also source client relationships such as who acts for whom in what city, state/province, and most importantly in a given practice or industry. As my firm continues to grow internationally, legal directories are great source of general market intelligence as well. Directories describe the types of deals being done, by whom, for whom, with all kinds of additional details. All that’s left to do is bring some CI analysis to the party. Online versions make this even easier. I actually use directories so often, that I recently found myself looking for certain international directories and being upset when I came up empty handed. There are the pay-for-play vanity press type directories that are generally the domain (or pain) of Marketing Departments but to the discerning to the CI practitioner, there is value in assessing a firm’s strategy to participate (or not) in those as well. Directories make doing my job easy and despite the amount of work and questionable ROI (another post for another time), you can learn so much about a firm or market from them. I could go on, but I think you get my point. When you need them, legal directories are like neatly wrapped presents, just asking to be opened and enjoyed and I hope they live along and happy life.
image [cc] miss pupik

What is the future of legal directories?  Are they still valuable?  If so, in what form?
This question came to us from Dallas law librarian, Kevin Miles. What surprised me in this week’s answers was the fact that no legal marketing people chimed in to give an answer. Aren’t they the people that support these directories? Maybe I’m reading too much into that (frankly, it could be because they don’t read 3 Geeks), but it would seem that law firm marketing folks should have some opinions on this issue. I’m hoping that maybe we can get those marketers to give us something in the comments section (hint… hint…)

Next week’s post (see below) should also be an interesting question… one that Toby Brown and I thought of after a Jason Wilson tweet about why incoming law students are still encouraged to read Scott Turows’s One-L, even though the book was written in the mid 1970’s. My snide remark back to Jason was to ask “have law schools really changed that much since 1977?” We won’t ask you to go back that far, but we really want to know what really has changed in the structure of law schools in the past twenty or so years? Scoll down after you read this week’s answers, and chime in with your own perspective.

Sid Kaskey
Law Librarian

No future and it is not a question that keeps me up nights…but the legal digest for various states once available via Martindale now there is something still useful.

Martin Korn
Law Librarian

I believe that as firm to firm mobility increases it will become crucial for attorneys to have some sort of home base.  When an attorney moves from one firm to another much of their history is lost on the new firm’s website.  By maintaining a directory listing (and let’s face it, online is the only one that will matter) an attorney has the ability to keep her or his complete cv available.  It is also a great way to hang on to contacts from previous firms and clients, assuming the legal directories continue to evolve into social media sites.

Toby Brown
AFA/KM

I don’t see how traditional legal directories can sustain in the long-run, or even sooner than that.  The value proposition to a lawyer or firm is that clients will find you that way.  That method of finding a lawyer is fading into the sunset.  Maybe lawyers with a “retail” consumer practice will find some short-term value there, but I just can’t see it sustaining.

New breeds of directories may have a fighting chance though.  One example I recently saw is BidYourCase where clients describe their needs and subscribing lawyers bid to get the work.  Even then, the site will need very strong SEO to be found by clients.

I realize some firms will cling to these tools, since they will get some clients from then.  But as my former boss and mentor used to say, “Bus bench ads work.  With enough of them out there, you are bound to get one phone call.”  The point being, there are much better ways to spend your limited marketing dollars.

Sarah Mauldin
Law Librarian

I find directories great for hunting down possible lateral hires, but not for much else.  I think they are dead in print, but may continue to live online as long as the pricing models are changed.  Ever since the Martindale Digests stopped being provided in print, I’ve had no need for the rest of M-H in print, either.

Next Week’s Elephant Post:

What Has Really Changed In Legal Education in the Past 20 Years?

I don’t know about you, but I can’t have a meeting at work without that overused phrase “The New Normal” popping its ugly head up in the middle of every presentation. To be honest, it could probably be used in one of our previous Elephant Post Questions were we morphed the Princess Bride quote (I think you need to look up the phrase “New Normal.” I don’t think it means what you think it means.) Any amount of change equals “New Normal.” Any amount of cuts, pain, reduction in force, bonus reductions, etc., is all chalked up to “The New Normal.”

Well… what’s the “New Normal” in law schools? For many of us standing on the outside looking in, we haven’t seen a lot of changes. Are we wrong? Is there something we’re missing?

If you’re inside the law firm environment, tell us what were missing. If you’re like me, and are standing outside looking in, then let us know what you think has changed (or, what you think needs to change.)

After reading Jordan’s interesting post on Why do law firms exist?, I received my annual copy of the AmLaw 100 rankings. The two events lead me to analyze the factors driving profitability of law firms.
Jordan’s post, among other things, noted that firms: “manage production and process indifferently, and share knowledge haphazardly and grudgingly.” These comments suggest firms are all over the board in how they operate and manage their work. So I analyzed the AmLaw 100 listing with an eye towards spotting trends in what makes a firm profitable.
As I have previously noted, leverage can have a strong impact on profitability, since it is non-partners who generate the profits that go in partners’ pockets. Yet leverage amongst this list does not correlate well to profitability. Size didn’t matter either (sorry about that one). The only strong correlation I found was between “Revenue per Lawyer” and profits (be it PPEP or Profitability Index).
This tells us two things:
1) Jordan’s assessments are likely spot on. The haphazard way in which firms are managed and run is reflected in the AmLaw 100 profitability stats. How a firm is structured and run does not seem to impact profits.
2) Revenue per lawyer matters. However, this likely reflects the old way and not the new normal. Revenue per lawyer is based on billable hours, at least for now. So the old adage of more hours billed and collected equals more partner income was still in effect in 2010.
My Assessment: The new normal did not catch up to most law firms in 2010. However, Jordan’s question appears to be persistent and expanding in the market. Even with the economy doing better, clients continue to ask hard questions of their law firms and maintain pressure on reducing fees in a sustainable way. 2011 may well be an inflection point year in this process.

Although Toby Brown, Scott Preston and I will be the “lunch-time entertainment” at this year’s Private Law Libraries (PLL-SIS) Summit in Philadelphia, you may not feel that we are the kind of speakers that you could proudly go up to your firm leadership and say “I really need to go to this so I can hear these Geeks speak!” Luckily, Pamela Lipscomb sent me this promo on Esther Dyson conducting a Q&A session at the July 23rd Summit that may give you a second reason (or at least one good reason) to grab some leaders in your firm and spend the day discussing issues that are specific to law firms and their information/library centers.

Hope to see you (and a few of your colleagues) there!!

PLL-SIS Summit II:  Change as Action, Change as Opportunity

Need another reason to attend the AALL PLL Change as Action Summit?  Hear Esther Dyson, Internet legend and technology visionary, sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Law & Business!

Esther Dyson, named by Forbes as one of the most powerful women in American business, is the founder and chairman of EDventure. She is one of the most influential voices in the Internet industry and has been a board member and/or early investor in several companies that helped define tech startup success, among them Flickr, Meetup, del.icio.us, and Technorati.  She also recently finished six months of cosmonaut training in Russia and serves on the NASA Advisory Council.

Have your CEO, CIO, COO or managing partner register to hear Esther Dyson speak — her lively Q-&-A session will explore how to embrace and use change in business and technology.

Registration is now open for the Private Law Libraries Change as Action Summit held in conjunction with the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting on July 23, 2011, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.  The $145 registration fee includes all programming.  Registration is open on the AALL website.  Sign up now to take part in this exciting event!

Is Justin Changing for Selena?

As I was getting everyone ready for school this morning, I looked over at the dinning room table and noticed my eleven year-old reading the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine. I wouldn’t say that seeing my daughter read is an unusual thing, but seeing her read a magazine made me wonder if maybe there was hope for print media like this with a younger generation. After all, I remember my older sister enjoying reading Tiger Beat (I was more of a Dynamite magazine reader at that age), and thought that maybe this is one of those areas of interest where a kid prefers the feel of a glossy magazine… choke full of 8 x 11 posters of the latest teen heart throbs. So, in the interest of science, I went over and asked her a few questions.

Dad: “Do you like reading Tiger Beat as a magazine?”
Daughter: “Yeah… I guess.”
Dad: “Do you read it online?”
Daughter: “Yes.”
Dad: “Which do you prefer?”
Daughter: “Online. It’s much better online.”

The results of this highly selective, double-blind, super scientific survey of my eleven year-old daughter tells me that print magazines are a novelty to these kids.

I actually got to looking at the website for Tiger Beat, and noticed that there are a lot of interesting, interactive things that kids can do online. Add to that the slick looking browse feature of this month’s magazine (apparently Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber are changing each other – just in case you were wondering), latest news, videos, comment features on each story, interactive polls, and most of the same glossy posters you get in the magazine… makes you wonder why a kid would even want to pick up the magazine in the first place. Then it hit me… I think she bought the magazine because I won’t let her eat over by the computer and I won’t let her use my iPad when she’s eating breakfast. It seems that the only hope for pre-teen pop magazines is that parents all over the world making kids eat away from the computers in the house. I guess that’s something for print publishers to hang their hopes on.

The April 2011 ILTA White Paper publication on Financial Management includes an article from me on “Bringing IT and KM Value to AFAs.” I provide a synopsis here on our blog and encourage you to check out the full paper.
After laying foundation as to what an AFA (Alternative Fee Arrangement) is, the white paper explores the AFA process from a high level and then identifies opportunities for IT and KM folks to bring value to the AFA world. The AFA process includes: setting budgets, modeling for profitability, moving an AFA through an approval process, monitoring the work against the AFA and finally, post engagement review and evaluation.
The obvious first opportunity for KM and IT to support AFAs is with budget building tools and knowledge. The article outlines a number of budgeting tools, but also points out you probably already have some basic tools so you can get started now on this effort. Following from budget building, will be budgeting monitoring efforts. Again IT and KM can bring high value to AFAs with systems and a strong knowledge base for monitoring and assessing AFAs throughout the life of an engagement. The final opportunity is that of capturing AFA knowledge. From my experience, a lot of AFA effort right now is guesswork and gambles – which is OK. However, firms will need to learn from their experience (a.k.a. mistakes) and get better at AFAs over time. So knowledge repositories and systems that enable this effort will have great value.
The bottom line for the white paper is that IT and KM can play vital roles in the emerging AFA space. Now is the time to get involved in these efforts and help build the future.

As many of us gear up for a smaller Summer Associate program, we find that we need to tweak some of the basic skills (or completely teach them) for many of those Associates. I hear a lot of griping at conferences about the skills that law students have when they are fresh out of their 2nd or 3rd year, so we thought we’d give all of you a chance to step up and let us know what you think would better prep these future lawyers for the profession they just spend $100K+ to enter.

We had a number of different perspectives on the issue, and we thank each of you for contributing to this week’s Elephant Post. As is our routine every week, we post next week’s Elephant Post question below and give everyone a chance to share their perspective on the issue. So, read through this week’s perspectives, then take a couple of minutes to look over next week’s question to see if you have any insight you’d like to share.

Toby Brown
AFA/KM

#1 – The KM piece.  Law schools teach students how to look backwards.  I call this the great Paradigm of Precedence.  Although there is value in gaining and building critical thinking skills, doing so with such a past-focused lens is a recipe for failure in a world of constant change.

So law schools should stop teaching students how to look in just one direction, but should instead teach them how to look in all directions.

#2 – The AFA Piece.  Law schools should stop teaching law likes it’s an academic exercise not to be tainted by the evils of profits.  Instead they should give law students practical skills on how to run a profitable practice.  The reality is unprofitable practices correlate with poor client service.  If a lawyer can’t efficiently and effectively run a practice, then they really can’t practice.  Law schools would do well to better prepare future lawyers for this reality.

probatur denuo
Unemployed lawyer
Law schools should radically change, if not eliminate the third year of law school. Here are two suggestions for alternate uses of that final year:

1) Instead of silly electives that will never apply again, the third year should be a time of mandatory apprenticeship. During this time, the student can work at a law school clinic, complete a work/study cooperative with a government agency or law firm, or intern for a minimum of 20 hours a week at a company. This would help the students experience the “real” practice of law while they are under the benefit of the student practice order. The students would get genuine experience that would make them more attractive to potential employers, and they would also have a valuable chance to decide whether the practice of law is truly for them.

Schools should have an “alternative careers” department. If students decide law is not for them, an “alternative careers” department could help them identify their true interests as well as opportunities to develop other expertise outside of the straight practice of law.

2) Bar exam preparation has turned into a massive business, making a profit on the backs of desperate and frightened bar exam takers, some of whom are unable to pass the bar exam at drastic personal cost. I think a lot of this misery could be avoided if law schools implement mandatory for-credit bar review courses for the third year of law school. Ideally these courses could be structured around well established bar preparation materials (such as books published by Emanuel or Barbri), review the local law and include study skills and psychological preparation for high stakes exams. A course like this should be mandatory at all schools for the lowest-performing students, and optional for the rest. In fact, I even believe such a course can even be graded – with those students who receive a C or lower receiving further tutoring or perhaps counseling for alternative careers.

Nikki
legal marketer
Business basics

Law firms can’t just keep raising fees anymore and very few partners have any concept of how to run a business efficiently, much less grow one. This has implications not only for the health of their firm but to how they approach corporate clients.

An english major/law school graduate may not understand budgeting cycles, cashflow and other basic business practices that their clients live by  – thus they are in danger of giving wildly impractical advise or at least dangerously undersestimating its impact on clients.

Next Week’s Elephant Post

What is the future of legal directories?  Are they still valuable?  If so, in what form?

This question came to us from Dallas law librarian, Kevin Miles. Yes, that’s right, you can send us questions you’d like to see asked for our Elephant Post series!! Let us know what you think about the future of legal directories. Where are they heading? Are they going the way of the horse and buggy, or are they evolving into something that looks nothing like its current configuration??

I was talking with a partner the other day and he told the story of how he, as a young associate, was part of the first batch of lawyers to come in and open the current office. He started laughing because he remembered that the firm was pretty reluctant to open the office, but one of the biggest clients insisted that we do in order to be closer to their headquarters. “We were going back and forth about opening a new office,” he told me, “and, you know what finally made us do it? The client gave us their entire law library collection for us to put in our new office. That sealed the deal.” At that time, the law library was a show-piece of the law firm, and to land a complete collection of the National Reporters, treatises and other legal materials was quite a catch for a firm opening a brand new office.

That was back in the mid-90s. My have the times changed. Could you imagine if a client made that offer today? It could be a deal-breaker.
When I spoke on law library spaces within law firms at an Ark Conference a few months ago, I got some pretty negative comments in my review of how I conceded that library space, for books at least, was a lost battle. A Chief Operating Officer in the crowd backed me up and said that the days of the library being a showpiece of a firm are over. I asked him what is the “touchstone” of a firm these days (some central place where everyone feels connected). Is it the library? Is it the break rooms? Conference Center? Bathrooms?? I think we finally agreed that in this day and age, the touchstone of a firm isn’t something that is based on a physical space. Quite frankly, it is probably the firm’s email system that is now the touchstone of the firm.
As for those books that came over nearly twenty years ago?? Many of them are still on the shelf… like the old abandoned toys from the Toy Story movies… just hoping that someone will find them and not ship them off to the dump. I think I’ll go out and run my hand along their spines today to let them remember what it feels like to be touched.

The upcoming Elephant Post this week deals with the question of what do law schools need to stop teaching, and replace it with something that the profession sees as more valuable to those entering the legal profession. I have to be one of the first to admit that when I transitioned from a law school job to a law firm job, I was stunned by the extreme differences between the two jobs that were supposed to be of the same profession. Setting aside some of the obvious distinctions, such as Westlaw contracts going from five-figure dollar range to the seven-figure dollar range, there were core areas of distinction between my law school job duties and my law firm job duties. After working in the law firm environment now for nearly a decade, I am constantly reminded of the dichotomy between law schools and law firms.

As I was making my way through my reading list, I ran across Jason Wilson’s post on an upcoming paper from Lisa D. Kinzer, a law student from the University of Texas School of Law, where she discusses her survey on the utter reliance that law students have with WestlawNext. When I read a couple of the sentences explaining the thoughts behind the paper, it reminded me once again of the distinctions of “what’s important” in the law school setting may not have any importance what so ever in the law firm. Indicating that students have a significant preference of using WestlawNext, Kinzer states:

When one considers that very few practitioners even have access to WestlawNext, the implications for the effective preparation of law students for the workplace are considerable…. In this paper, I review the results of my survey and offer proposals as to how law schools can incorporate the seemingly addictive WestlawNext into their research curriculum while still ensuring that students will be effective when working with the limited resources available at the average law office.

Law schools have an almost bipolar approach to how they prepare students for the legal profession. I know, many of you may think that tri-polar or quad-polar may be more accurate, but I’ll just stick to the research approach at this time.  Just think of what the legal research and writing teams have to accomplish, and bring in the law librarians as well. First of all, there is the task of having to teach the basics of reading, writing, and researching based on the traditions of the profession. However, on the opposite end of this spectrum lies the advanced research tools, such as WestlawNext, that work to perform many of those basic tasks for the researcher.

In a way, you can think of it as teaching a teenager how to drive by having them read a book about a Ford Escort with a manual transmission, then taking them out on the road in a high-end SUV with an automatic transmission. I’m sure that the driving instructor would confidently answer that all of the students are capable of driving a manual transmission… although, almost none of the students will have actually driven one. Much like many of the R&W profs and law librarians will say that since students have access to the old “Westlaw.com” platform, they should be able to research on it if they are forced to. If you’re a teenager and you have the keys to an Escalade and an Escort… both with full-tanks of gas, and Daddy will replenish the gas tank when you bring it back… which one do you think they are going to drive?

Now, before my friends in academia start drafting hate letters to me, I want to point out that I don’t think that the problem rests with the R&W profs or the law librarians at the law schools. I think that the blame for letting students get out of law school without the proper amount of core legal research skills rests mainly on the shoulders of the law firms that recruit students without laying out the standards of what is expected of them when they show up on day one, and pass along that information back to the R&W profs and law librarians. Think about it… when is the last time that a law firm librarian went to the law school librarian and gave them a list of core skill that are needed to work at this law firm? I’m sure it happens, but not very often.

As long as we pretend that law schools and law firms don’t really need to work together to improve the skills that law students have when they transition from academics to professional setting, then this problem will persist. I’ve heard for years, from both academics and firms, that they are hoping that either the Bar or some other association will step up and work out the details of changing how law students are better prepared for entering the profession. Well, guess what. These Bars and associations are made up from the same batch of people wanting it to be someone else’s responsibility.

I think that this problem is worked out the same way that many environmentalist look at how everyone could save the world: “Think Globally, Act Locally”. If you’re really disappointed at the skills that your Summer and Fall Associates have when they come to your firm, draft up what skills you expect these associates to have, and give it to the law schools you generally hire from. At a minimum, it will get the conversation going. There’s a saying that I use a lot around the office that kind of fits the situation that many R&W profs and law librarians at law schools find themselves in. “I can create great tools that do wonderful things, but if it doesn’t fit your needs, then it is worthless.” I usually back that statement up with a call for input from those I work with to tell me what they need. I think it is high time that law firm and law school professionals start talking and telling each other what they really need.