Tell me if you heard this one before… three people (two guys, one woman) working in the legal industry decide to create a group blog to discuss their diverse views on the legal world. Turns out that this isn’t me re-telling the story of how 3 Geeks got started, but rather how three folks from the Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati area decided to start their own blog called The Strategic Adviser Blog. Although the blog has only been going for a month, I’m seeing some good stuff coming out of there, and wanted to give a fellow group-style blog a shout-out and have readers of 3 Geeks head over there and see what they have to offer.

Here’s what the writers over at The Strategic Adviser Blog are focused on:

  • Jay Fossett – Leadership and Organizations
  • Maureen Donnellan – Social Media
  • Jeff Sanders – Environmental Issues
There is a fourth Adviser listed, but I haven’t seen anything posted yet from Patrick Crowley (policy and politics focus). Come on Patrick!! Get something out there!! 
I emailed Jay Fossett over the weekend to see how things are going, and he is feeling the pains that everyone who starts a blog tends to feel in the first few weeks. Jay says, “The hardest thing is finding the time because we are all busy with our jobs. The biggest issue is finding time to write something that we hope is thought-provoking yet easy to read.” Most of us have struggled with the same thing. I’ve always took the approach that if an idea is festering in my head, it is probably something that others would find thought-provoking, too. I’ve been shocked sometimes at the things that we put out that grab people’s attention, that I thought was kind of a “fluff piece,” but the readers found stimulating (I’ve also put out some things that I thought would really get a lot of feedback, only to hear the gentle sound of crickets chirping in the background.) 
The Advisers aren’t really promoting their blog yet. I actually found it through a mutual acquaintance that pointed me in their direction. Fossett talked about the fact that right now their really only promoting the blog to friends via “our Facebook page and some email recommendations.” That’s probably a great place to start.
We wish our new friends over at The Strategic Adviser Blog the best of luck with their new blog. I told Jay Fossett that he needs to keep after the others to keep contributing posts, because in the blogging world, consistency and content are what brings people to your blog, and keeps them coming back.
   

After reading NYTimes reporter David Segal’s article, “Is Law School a Losing Game?”,I thought back to the year that I graduated law school.

The earlier ’90s were not much kinder than now. Coming out of school on the heels of the energy recession, I was one of the lucky few to land a job. Most of my peers struggled to make their way: forming their own partnerships, going solo, moving back home to join the family law firm, going into legal recruiting.

I’ll never forget one day when I was being extra diligent and made my way back to my alma mater’s library when I ran into a former classmate. I was shocked when he told me that he was bird-dogging cases at the courthouse while living out of his car.

I’ll never forget the look on his face: it was a mixture of horror, shame and desperation.

I was the first in my family to become a lawyer.

When a relative decided to follow in my footsteps, I cautioned them in all the mistakes that I had made: focus on your grades, forget about class recitations, get as many clerkships as you can and start looking for a job as soon as you start school.

And, above all, don’t live off of student loans.

There were many days that I regretted that law degree. Today, I have made my peace with it. And now I know that I’m fortunate to have a job in the legal field that is personally satisfying.

Not everyone is so lucky.

For those of you familiar with SlideShare.com, the online presentation software portal recently announced the winner of their 2010 “World’s Best Presentation” contest.
A design firm in Honolulu won with “Smoke – The Convenient Truth”.
Nearly 80 slides long, it packs a graphical punch, bringing home the ravages of cigarette smoking. Strong messaging, meaningful graphics and stark lay-outs emphasize their points.
One of the judges, leadership and communications coach Carmine Gallo, compiled what he thought were the 4 winning strategies to a stellar presentation:
  1. Put your audience first
  2. Sketch the story
  3. One idea per slide
  4. Take your time to design–the winner said it takes them 60-90 hours to complete a project.

Of course, this got me to thinking about some of the law firm presentations that I’ve seen in the past and I had to cringe.Remember the goal of the presentation: educate the audience. And most people in this day and age want to be entertained when educated. Ask any teacher. A combination of personality, immediacy and valuable information is what makes a great presentation.When marketing, the presentation is just the appetizer that whets the appetite. The lawyer’s presentation is an opportunity to demonstrate his or her persuasiveness, creativity and intelligence. And if done well, the presenter will be stampeded at the end of the presentation and peppered with questions. I’ve seen it happen. A slide crammed with data is not the way to go. A wise winnowing of influential and impactful data is far more persuasive.Want to learn some lessons in persuasive presentations? Just take a gander at SlideShare’s other contenders.

Anyone that has ever tried a “Natural Language” search… whether using something as generic as Google, or searching a more focused databases like Westlaw or Lexis… knows that it is a hit or miss type searching strategy. The nuances of the English language make a sentence like “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas” nearly unintelligible for computers. (How did that elephant get in your pajamas, anyway??) Legal research providers have always dreamed of establishing an algorithm that can take a normal sentence that a human can interpret fairly easily… understanding that the person was wearing pajamas, not that the elephant was in the pajamas… by using their experiences, knowledge and intuition to understand exactly what the sentence means, thus being able to give an appropriate response to the sentence. It is this ability – this insight – that humans have, that computers simply have not been able to accomplish so far.

Enter IBM’s “Next Grand Challenge” where the scientists at IBM accept this challenge, and attempt to create a computer system that can not only handle natural language, but can understand the nuances that are found in the game show Jeopardy!

The IBM Jeopardy! Challenge poses a specific question with very real business implications: Can a system be designed that applies advanced data management and analytics to natural language in order to uncover a single, reliable insight – in a fraction of a second?

The IBMers are calling the project “Watson,” named after the company’s founder, Thomas J. Watson (not Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick like I initially assumed.) Sam Palmisano, IBM Chairman and CEO, says that , like its big brother, Big Blue (the computer Chess Master), or Blue Gene (Human Genome Project) Watson is attempting to do something that many people believe is impossible for technology to accomplish – “the ability of a computer to do something that’s far more challenging than chess: to understand natural human speech about a limitless range of topics, and to make informed judgments about them.”

Here are some videos that explain the Jeopardy! challenge, and the glitches, and accomplishments that Watson has shown so far. If you are a legal researcher, you should watch these videos from that angle, and think about the possibilities that can come from applying the techniques that IBM is using to answer the scope of questions presented on the game show, and start wondering how that could apply to a more narrow set of legal topics and questions that we face on a day-to-day basis.

The Next Grand Challenge

The part on “Open Question Answering,” that Dr. Katharine Frase discusses around the 2:00 mark the issues and differences between “searching” and “keywords,” and the issues of understanding and interacting in “the way normal humans communicate.”

What is Watson? Why Jeopardy?

Because you have to really understand the complexity of the English language, not just the pieces of information, the nature of the game Jeopardy! presents a very good challenge for Watson to not only extract knowledge, but to interpret that knowledge. Watson has to understand the nuances of the “answer” that is presented by the Jeopardy! host, and not only answer it quickly and accurately, but also to understand when not to answer if it is wrong (risk factors.) That’s a very complex idea, and one that made for some funny answers at first, but over time, Watson started getting the “questions” right… 15% of the time, 50% of the time, then 60% (average player level), then 70% (average Champion level), 80% (3x Champion level), then 90% (Grand Champion level). What was a little scary, was the speed at which the increase occurred… in less than a year, it went from 15% accuracy, to over 80%.

In 2011, IBM’s Watson is supposed to compete on an actual show of Jeopardy! It will be interesting to see how the technology advances of “Open Question Answering” work not only in the areas of answering game show hosts… but how this type of advancement in natural language in computer databases can work to improve the way those of us conduct what we call “search” today.

One interesting issue that I saw on another video that goes into depth of what Watson can do, one of the first questions that Watson was asked, was answered incorrectly (according to a comment, and the answer I got from WolframAlpha.) Watson answered that “ln((12546798*pi)^2)/34567.46” was 0.00885, and the answer according to other sources is actually 0.001011917. Will one of you with a degree in Mathematics (or at least a good calculator) double check that, please? If Watson answered this incorrectly, then IBM may want to look at Watson’s math algorithms one more time before going on to face the Jeopardy! Challenge.

[Note: seems that Watson wasn’t wrong after all… see the comment below that explains the issues with the parens placement.]

Watson’s Question
Watson’s Answer
WolframAlpha’s Answer

I had some fun over at the SLA Future Ready 365 blog this weekend when my post “Re-embracing the “Shush”–Can the Library be a Quiet Place in the Age of Social?” went up on Sunday. There is a lot of talk about how the library should be a place for social gathering, sharing ideas, and being a place similar to a Barnes & Noble or a Starbucks. I thought I’d take the other extreme and suggest that instead of pretending to be a business (something we are not), why not re-embrace what we traditionally think of when we think of libraries – a quite place to go to study, research and get things done.

The idea came from the following three things that I’ve recently read, watched and prepared:

  1. Ark Group’s February 2011 conference on Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library & Information Service Centers – At this meeting, I will be co-presenting with WilmerHale’s Library Director, Matthew J. Todd, on the issue of reconsidering the physical space of a law firm library from a “Social Engineering” perspective. In other words, using the physical library as conduit for actually talking and sharing ideas with your peers in real face-to-face interactions.
  2. Jason Fried’s TEDx Talk on Why work doesn’t happen at work – The e-Discovery manager in my office sent this video to me a couple weeks ago and found it interesting the amount of time, money and effort that law firms spend on work space, only to find out that real work may be going on elsewhere.
  3. The University of Arizona’s law library got some interesting press in the student paper saying that the law library refuses undergraduates. It seems that one of the best kept secrets at the University of Arizona is that if you want a place where you can study and actually get something done without interruption, the law library is the place to go. 
If you think that the library is a place to get work accomplished, then instead of running away from the stereotypical ideas of what a library is, perhaps we should re-embrace those ideas rather than attempt to be some type of quasi-bookstore, coffee shop, or social gathering place, and return to being a place where you go to obtain information and work in a quiet atmosphere. 
Go over and check out the SLA Future Ready 365 blog, where you’ll find my post, and daily updates from other librarians that work in specialized fields. Perhaps you’ll even be motivated to contribute your own post.

As part of a series on law firm profitability, I explored reducing the number of hours it takes to deliver a legal service. In Part 2 of this section, I explore the concept of reducing the cost of the time involved in delivering the same service. Per a prior post in the series, I suggest three different ways this might be accomplished, “a) paying people less, b) giving people less resources to do their jobs, or c) pushing work to lower cost labor sources (a.k.a. leverage).”
Part 2 – Paying Less Per Hour
Or … Paying People Less
The first option for this topic could also be called hiring people who cost less. This approach suggests a different staffing model; hiring lower paid lawyers, not necessarily on the partnership track. Call them staff lawyers, counsel or whatever makes sense; these lawyers will be technician, work-horses. They can have high expertise, but no expectation to bill 2000 hours a year or bring in work. Another option is out-sourced lawyers, either local contract types or even off-shore lawyers. The overall concept is having a broader range of lawyers, with an equally broad range of hourly costs to meet various needs.
Next up – theoretically, law firms could pay associates less, or at least wait until they demonstrate value before over-paying them. As noted on a prior post, 1 and 2 year associates are not generally profitable, since their cost is greater than the revenue they generate. An overall problem with associates and other non-partner lawyers is that their billing rates tend to be more a function of their comp and not their value. In any event, in the short to mid-term, it appears highly unlikely firms will change their approach for compensating associates.
Give People Less Resources to Do Their Jobs
Over the last two years, too many firms have taken this approach too far. People without the right and best tools take longer to get their jobs done. So even though this idea may sound appealing to law firm partners, the results are counter-productive.
Push Work to Lower Cost Sources (a.k.a. leverage)
This concept has the most potential for lowering the cost per hour of legal work, since it can utilize existing resources and have an immediate, measurable impact on the cost. The big problem is that this behavior runs counter to what compensation systems reward. Current compensation systems reward the hoarding of hours, such that work tends to be pushed to its highest cost source, which means paralegals are typically the first ones to know when the workload has gone down at a firm. This may have been profitable behavior in a cost-plus world, however, in a margin world it … lowers the margin.
Putting a finer point to this point, below is an analysis of hourly costs at various levels of leverage. I am using a leverage of ‘2 to 1’ as a basis, since that is a relatively typical matter leverage. ‘2 to 1’ leverage is defined as 2 non-partner hours to every 1 partner hour worked on a matter. I’m also using $100 as the baseline cost per hour to simplify the math. These metrics are taken from industry standards. Of course the numbers will vary with different firms and practices. This is just intended to give an average example of the impact of leverage.
This graph is a nice demonstration of the power of leverage on profitability. By moving just 8% of the work from partners to non-partners (going from ‘2 to 1’ to ‘3 to 1’), partner income will rise 8% ($14 on the graph). If you make a bigger shift of 24% (going from ‘2 to 1’ to ‘10 to 1’), profits go up 26% ($43). These profit margins were calculated using a rule of three approach.
Being able to increase profits by 8% with virtually no investment is unheard of in most business environments. This makes a strong case for law firms to improve their leverage on all types of matters.
On one level this might appear to be turning back the clock to the days of the “pyramid of leverage.” However, that is not what I am suggesting. The pyramid was an unsustainable scheme meant to drive up partner incomes by continually adding to the base of the pyramid. Instead, this approach is about having workers do the work and getting partners to act like owners. I’m guessing that the partners at Big Four Accounting firms don’t actually do audit work. Whereas senior partners at BigLaw still conduct run-of-the-mill depositions. This behavior needs to change.
Bottom-line
Better leverage, non-partner track attorneys, LPM, process improvement: there are a number of well-defined paths firms can take for reducing the cost of delivering legal services in order to remain price competitive and maintain profit margins. Some of them are very cheap, if not free. The big hurdle is getting firms to make these investments of time and money. In a industry based on precedence thinking, embracing this change is no small challenge.
My 2 cents: Any firm that wants to head down this path should shift its internal economic dialogue away from billable hours to profitability. That one thing will initiate the conversations about reducing the cost of services, embracing process innovation, and ultimately, improving the value of client services.

As I was sitting down for my Saturday morning coffee and news roundup, I came across a story from the Muskogee Phoenix that told the tale of trailer parks, sewer lines, town ordinances, and law libraries. What more could you want in a news story? Reporter Keith Purtell’s report titled “Mobile disagreement: Okay resident says city officials are treating her unfairly,” covers the dispute between the town officials of Okay, Oklahoma and mobile home park owner, Melisa Robinson.

Many of us talk about the difficulty of the public finding Federal or State statutes in order to know and understand the laws that govern them… well, as difficult as those laws are to find, it seems that the local laws may even be harder to find. Just take a look at this part of the story:

During the course of the dispute, Robinson said she discovered Okay has not published their ordinances or placed a copy in the Wagoner County law library, which she says is required by state law. Robinson said she checked at the county courthouse three times.
Okay Vice Mayor Deborah Morrow said that law may not apply to Okay.
“It’s also a matter of public record in the general sense. We’re not a city, we’re a town, and there are some differences in rules, and that would just have to do more with the laws in such regards,” Morrow said, noting the town does what it has to do to obey laws. 

I’m sure that most of the citizens of Okay, Oklahoma also do what they have to do to obey the laws, too. However, if there’s no record of what those laws are, how can they be enforced?

Just where are the ordinances of Okay, Oklahoma? According to Janet Fielding, secretary/bailiff for Wagoner County District Judge Darrell Shepherd (and I’m assuming the de facto law library clerk), she has a copy of the 1985 Okay ordinances in her office. As for the set that is supposed to be in the law library? Probably stolen.

If you ever saw that impressive video of how Google Wave worked when it was released, you might remember that it “looked” amazing. Everything about Wave after that release, however, left a little to be desired… so much so, that it was finally abandoned (actually split into pieces) and labeled a (marketing) failure.

Now, I could be wrong here, but I think I just watched something that looks very “Wave-like” in the presentation. At TechCrunch yesterday, there was a video of what a few animators did with Google Docs’ Presentation app. I’m a big-time user of Google Docs, and love using the presentation app for collaborative work and actual presentations. So when I saw this video of what could be done to animate the presentation, I was seriously impressed. Unfortunately, when I found the actual presentation, and tried to run it the way it (at least looked like it) was done in the video… I was reminded of the false-hopes that the hype surrounding Google Wave gave us. The short 1 1/2 minute video presentation took over 20 minutes to actually run (and that was after I waited for all of the slides to download… and I tested it multiple times, only to get the same slow results.)

I have a joke I like to tell about the difference between “theory” and “reality” that kind of matches this situation… when you see me at a conference, buy me a beer, and I’ll tell you the joke.

To be fair, I did see in the comments that in order to get the presentation to run the way that it shows in the video, you can click on the “next” button in Google Docs at a rate of 7 times per second and replicate what was done in the video. I got through about 10 seconds of that before my hand gave out.

Take a look for yourself and see what 1:30 of what was presented, versus 1:30 of what I could replicate. You’ll see that it doesn’t exactly match the hype.

Here is what I was able to view in that same amount of time. 

Doesn’t quite match up to the hype.

As Megan Wiseman tells us, we all  make personal goals where we want to lose weight, workout more and be better people – but what kind of New Year’s Resolutions can we make for our professions? That is the subject of this week’s Elephant Post Question. Enjoy the contributions, and let us know if you have any New Year’s Resolutions that you’ve made!

Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of this post to see next week’s Elephant Post question… one with “Heroic” stature.

Law Librarian Perspective
Megan Wiseman
Popular New Year’s Resolutions…

I admit that I researched popular resolutions before coming up with my answer.  As a law librarian I had to, of course, vet the source.  Here’s Usa.gov’s list.

So I say we go with the trendy answers this year:

Get a Better Education:  One of the core values of librarianship promoted by the ALA is “”education and lifelong learning”” – we should embrace that.

Get fit:  Weed those collections!

Lose weight:  Technology is changing so fast that perhaps it is time to lose some of the weight and embrace the e-trend in publishing.  (Still waiting for Santa to being me an iPad though, hint hint)  🙂

Take a trip:  Member of a professional organization?  Plan on attending a local meeting even if you’re not able to make it to a national conference.

Volunteer to help others:  When I was fresh out of school and looking for a job, I volunteered at a public library.  One of my best moves yet.  Or, if you’re set for life professionally, perhaps consider bringing in a practicum student – be a mentor.

Manage stress: You’re on your own for this one… but if you’re reading the 3 Geeks Blog, you’re well on your way to recovery…

Happy New Year, all!!

Knowledge Management Perspective
Sean Luman
Year of the cloud??  maybe

Am I a late adopter if I haven’t yet used the cloud to: …create a document? …share pictures? …post a blog??  2011 would have to be the year I leverage Google Apps and/or other web collaboration tools to a greater extent.

Now that I’ve succumbed to peer pressure and bought an iPad, it’d be nice to take that next big step and become completely untethered from any specific physical location to be electronically productive.

Law Librarian Perspective
Sarah Glassmeyer
Welcome To My Early Mid-Life Crisis

Here’s the thing, Gentle Reader…I have no plans or goals for 2011.

I’m now entering my fifth year of professional employment as a librarian. I don’t want to say that the bloom has come off the rose, because I still love my job and my profession. It’s just that after five years of searching and working hard and struggling, I finally landed in a job and location that I love (Valpo, Indiana), have figured out what I’m passionate about professionally (OA and free law and emerging tech) and I’ve pretty much hit all of the professional goals that I wanted to hit (I present and write, served on national committees, have no interest in running for office…)

So now what? Just keep on keeping on? I actually found myself considering having a baby, but fortunately I remembered that I don’t like children before I started looking for a turkey baster.   I guess the one benefit to this profession is that the landscape is ever changing and so something new will come along and I’ll have something to work towards.  Until then, my resolution is to enjoy my day to day.

Law Librarian/Knowledge Management Perspective
Greg Lambert
Focus On Those Willing To Make Generate & Share Ideas

This is the year that I give up on those unwilling to see that we are living in the 21st Century, and that 20th (or even 19th) Century ideas should no longer be blindly followed. I will focus my energy on those in my profession that are able to generate ideas, and are willing to share them with others. There is a hunger for information, knowledge, intelligence, and analysis that Library/KM/CI/BizDev/Information Professionals can satisfy, and if you do not believe that to be true, then I have no time for you this year. If you’re one of those who are willing to generate and share ideas on how to feed that hunger, then I want to be your ally in 2011.

AFA Perspective
Toby Brown
Focus on the Client

My real clients are the lawyers in my firm.  This year I want to increase my focus on serving them.  It’s too easy to view the firm’s clients as a proper focus, when in reality, the client I serve sits down the hall from me.

So – I resolve to spend more of my time and resources in 2011 helping my clients understand AFAs and how they can positively impact their practices and the firm’s future.  This will mean more time in front of them and on the phone with them.  It will mean more and better internal communications about AFAs and building out more complete AFA resources for them to use.

If I want them to succeed, I’ll really need to practice what I preach.

Here’s to a killer 2011!

Legal Marketing Perspective
Sophia Lisa Salazar
Publish or Perish

Publish more.

I write a lot. I mean, I write everyday. But most of it is squirreled away and never shared: essays, short stories, how-to’s, op-eds, poetry.

I am going to try different vehicles outside of blogs and put my big toe in the pool of hard print.

So this year I have decided it is time: either publish or perish!

Knowledge Management Perspective
Ayelette Robinson
Make a Difference… Thoughtfully

KM is just beginning to get noticed by legal practitioners, and we need to keep that momentum going. But we need to do it carefully and thoughtfully. Making changes in systems and processes is meaningless if it’s not for the better, and self-destructive if it’s for the worse. We have the advantage of our reputation almost being a blank slate — attorneys don’t know what we do, so they don’t have much of an impression of us yet.

Designing a good reputation is so much easier than overturning a negative one, so let’s get it right. Let’s think about how they really practice and how they really want to practice, and not about the coolness of the tool; let’s think about how they want to develop their skills, and what they want to have time for in their day, and not about the number of features we can fit in. So let’s make a difference: let’s build new systems, upgrade existing ones, and work with legal practitioners to make their lives easier. But let’s just remember to do it… thoughtfully.

Information Technologist Perspective
Scott Preston
Embracing Social Media

I resolve to connect with more people, make new friends and learn more about leadership.  I resolve to get to know my clients better, spend more time talking about technology and attending more conferences.  I resolve to further open lines of communication within my IT organization as well as outside the Firm.  I resolve to find new ways to reduce the amount of e-mail traffic I create and consume.

I resolve to do all of this by further adopting social media.  Not just adopting it for my own benefit, but figuring out how to leverage this powerful set of tools to the benefit of my Firm.

Next Week’s Elephant Post:

Who Is Your Professional Hero? Tell Us Why.

We’ve all got our heroes…Mom, Dad, a teacher in High School are traditional ones, but how about in your profession? Who are the heroes in your profession that have changed how you look at your profession? Perhaps it isn’t even a person, but maybe some event or act from a group of people that makes you proud to call your self a professional. Share with us your perspective by going to the easy-to-fill-out Google Docs form.

It’s easy, fast and fun… you know you’ve always wanted to contribute to an Elephant Post… so just go and do it!!

Are you thinking about launching a law firm web site or redesigning your current one?Let me impart one tiny bit of wisdom that I have learned over the last 15 years in this business–wait, it’s been that long?! Oh, my. I am old …Anywhoo, back to my sage self: whether you are the designer, the project manager, the approving attorney or the outside consultant, please remember one very important thing.You are designing your law firm site for site visitors.Yes, this may seem like a no-brainer and should go without saying.But I cannot over-emphasize this point. Because there always comes a time when you are designing a site when you begin designing to please those who are approving the site rather than those who are visiting the site.Please remember, the law firm is not the client. The client is the client. Too many times I have seen law firm sites built to satisfy lawyers’ needs, ambitions and desires rather than considering what the site visitor needs.Think of it this way: what if you went on a hardware web site like Lowes or Home Depot and you were looking for latex paint. So you drill down to the paint category and there are all the paints listed in alphabetical order. Not by type, not by brand, not by size. Just in a huge list of paint numbers all jumbled together.You wouldn’t stay on that site for more than 5 seconds before you went on to the next hardware web site.Site visitors feel the same way when they go to a law firm web site and see befuddling lists, endless columns and streams of bullet points. I know it may sometimes seem easier to just please the approver but who really suffers in the end? That’s right: your business and your web traffic.So do the right thing and design it right. It is, in fact, what they are paying you to do.