If you like downloading e-books from the public library, it looks like you’re going to need to buy a Barnes & Noble Nook or a Sony E-Reader to do it. According to Vince Horiuchi of the Salt Lake City Tribune, the Amazon Kindle doesn’t support the digital rights management (DRM) files that public libraries use for their downloadable PDF versions.

Houriuchi interviewed Greg Near of the Salt Lake County Public Library about the reasoning behind Amazon not supporting the DRM files and Near’s reaction was that the compatibility issue was a Kindle problem and it “is entirely up to Amazon [to make] the Kindle protected-files compatible” with the library’s DRM files. It seems that Sony’s E-Reader and the Barnes & Noble Nook are already compliant with the DRM files… so why is Amazon dragging its feet on this one??  I guess only the developers at Amazon know the answer to that one, but Near has a guess that the big boys of e-readers want Kindle and iPad users to “purchase the files — hence, not making them available from their local library.”

I’ll have to test Greg Near’s assumption that the iPad doesn’t allow for public library access using the B&N Nook app (anyone had luck using Nook + Public Library??)

I agree with Horiuchi that the Kindle is the best reader out there on the market today and it would be great if Amazon expanded it to support downloads from the public library. We’ll have to see if that ever happens.

Hat tip to David Dillard from Temple for pointing out the SLC Tribune article.

This question springs from a basic question that I ask every vendor that is trying to sell me their product. I always ask “What is one of the best things that your product does, and your clients don’t seem take advantage of it?” It usually stumps them for a moment, but then a light bulb goes on and they suddenly point out a feature that is build in that would help the end user out, but they can’t seem to get the end user to take the time to use it. It also shows me if the person selling the product actually uses it. Think about what it is that you or the group you represent has a talent for, but you just can’t seem to get the rest of your firm to see that they need. Is it because it isn’t as great a service as you think, or it needs to be marketed better, or is it that it is over the heads of those that would benefit from this service?

We have answers from the Alternative Fee, Competitive Intelligence, Information Technology, Internet Marketing, and Law Library perspectives this week. Below this week’s answers is next week’s question that deals with what will be the next thing that will get “efficiencied”.
The Alternative Fee Perspective

It’s not just the thing I do very well, it’s my highest and best use
Toby Brown

Most lawyers come to me as the AFA guy asking for the “silver bullet” AFA they can put in an email and fire off to clients. I always tell them there is no magic AFA and that the real magic comes from talking to clients about fees. My highest and best use is helping them understand this magic and then assist them in sharing it with clients.

I understand lawyers’ resistance to talking with clients about fees. Talking about price is the most challenging part of any sale. And for a technician it is very intimidating, especially a technician with core skills in representing a client’s best interest and not their own. Price conversations and negotiations feel too much like representing their own interest against a client’s. In reality, discovering the right type of AFA at the right number IS representing the client’s best interest – and your own.

This resistance means lawyers will go to great lengths to avoid talking about fees. It means that instead of helping them with this task, they ask me to create spreadsheets, analyze past billings and draft RFP response language. All of these efforts have value, but nowhere near the value of talking to clients directly about fees.

To make matters worse, the clients are too often cut from the same cloth and take the same path. This is something new and different for them and outside their comfort zone.

Getting my clients to see the value in this skill remains my highest focus. So keep your fingers crossed for me.
The Competitive Intelligence Perspective

If an Unmarketed CI Analyst Falls in the Woods… Does He Make a Sound?
Mark Gediman

I find that most of the services we provide no one asks for, due mostly to the fact they don’t know we can do it. This is a key reason why we find it necessary to continually market our services. A great example of this is Competitive Intelligence (CI).

For many reasons, I find that law firm librarians are uniquely suited to CI. We know our audience (the Attorneys), which makes it easier to target the information they need and present it in a way that they are used to. We do analysis on a daily basis (“this case is on point because…”). Putting the two together should be easy, and it is.

Before we rolled this out as formal Library service, I offered it to our marketing director and any attorney I could. When asked to do a background or news search on a prospective client, I would ask if the attorney would like a briefing pack done. When they gave me a blank stare, I would show them a sample briefing pack. 6 times out of 10, they would opt for the pack. Then, over time, I would start to get calls from Attorneys who wanted what I gave to So-and-so. I also would bring it up whenever I was found myself with the elevator with a partner or presenting in an new attorney orientation. After the requests reached a certain critical mass, I met with our Executive Committee about making this a formal institutional process. I still present on this at practice group retreats. I reinforced this with regular reports on the types of requests coming in and the success rate for new clients we assisted with.

No matter how well you do something, no one will ask you to do it if they don’t know about it. This is a principle firms live by and is equally applicable to your clients inside the firm. Market yourself and market your department’s services if you want people to see the value in what you do. They will never “just know.”
The IT Perspective

Dancing Geek to Geek!
Scott Preston

One thing that provides value to the firm but is rarely utilized is having the firm’s IT leaders sit down with the client or potential client’s IT leaders to discuss how best to leverage technology.

Looking for opportunities to differentiate one law firm from another is becoming more important as we see continued pressure on pricing and we hear more and more about the commoditization of many types of legal work.

“Being able to demonstrate efficiencies like improving work flows, streamlining processes, better leveraging institutional knowledge and demonstrating to the client that your firm has the technical prowess to bring this all together in an effective manner is going to become a key differentiator among law firms.”

What better way to demonstrate such prowess than to have your IT leaders sit with the client’s IT leaders to discuss how technology can be used to improve the relationship? I have had the privilege to do this on a few occasions and it has always been very enlightening and useful to both sides of the conversation. Generally speaking, most of the clients are very impressed with the level of detail and understanding that law firm IT leaders (and their organizations) possess. In the e-discovery practice, we do this quite frequently as we help guide the client through the hurdles and pitfalls of e-discovery, but those are limited engagements and usually very targeted on collecting information.

“By aligning the law firm’s IT leaders with a client’s IT leaders you are building a bridge by which the two entities become more closely tied, creating a more effective relationship.”

We have known for a long time that attorneys do not feel comfortable talking about technology with their clients. We know that clients are focused on improving legal processes or at the very least controlling their legal spending. And we know how much Geeks like to be Geeks, so why not bring this full circle and let the Geeks demonstrate how in tune they really are to the business needs. Your client will thank you, the attorney will thank you and hopefully you will learn something along the way.

The Internet Marketing Perspective

Surfing on the Edge
Lisa Salazar

Internet marketing can do a whiz-bang job at competitive intelligence. With handy little web tools and savvy spreadsheet skills, we can make short work of analyzing our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

And because we spend so much time surveying the webscape, we are experts at developing strong User Experience Design. In the business since its inception, we know what works and doesn’t work on the web and are always looking for the next new thing. It was funny–yesterday Google had a fun, playful logo that swung around with the movement of your mouse. None of my Facebook friends knew what to make of it until I explained how HTML5 worked.

The web has grown so fast and so hard over the last fifteen years that it is a constant challenge to stay out front. One of our team’s strengths as leaders in technology is to educate others on all the cool tools that can be adapted for business purposes.

The Law Library Perspective

In Need of a Search Expert? Who You Gonna Call?
Greg Lambert
It may sound obvious, but one of the best things that librarians and legal researchers are good at is effective search strategies. We really own anything related to Boolean searching, and understand proximity searching perhaps better than any other profession. We know how to adjust words and phrases based on the information provided, and tend to notice when results don’t look ‘quite right’, and adjust the search strategy to fit the structure of the data we are culling. Despite all of this expertise, where is the librarian or legal researcher when lawyers, clients and electronic discovery professionals are meeting to discuss how they are going to find those “smoking gun” documents? Usually sitting in the library blue-booking a brief.

Until someone waves an “e-discovery magic wand” and designs a better way to search documents, we’re still relying upon text and phrase searching to help identify potential documents to be used in litigation. Although the attorneys may understand the legal concepts — the clients may understand the business language involved — and the e-discovery consultants may understand the process of getting everything ready for review — none of them bring the understanding of effective search strategies like a librarian researcher does.

When it comes to searching for needles in haystacks, no one beats the skill of a librarian researcher. So the next time you’re going through your third strategy session on how to cull those documents… why not give that librarian or legal research down the hall a call?

Next Week’s Elephant Question:

What do you think is going to be the next legal work process that will get ‘efficiencied’?

Meaning as we look to make thing more efficient (in the aspirations of making them effective…), are there certain things that you just know are in the cross hairs of the efficiency rifle?

We are “borrowing” this question from a comment that Ayelette Robinson made on a last week’s elephant post (she was warned we were doing it!!) 
 
Do you think you’re up for the challenge? If you want to contribute to next week’s post, just shoot me an email and we’ll work out the arrangements.

Ron Baker left one of his usual insightful comments on the 3 Geeks blog this week, so I wanted to address some of the issues he raised in relation to the concept of Efficiency.

Ron notes: “There’s a fundamental problem with this relentless focus on efficiency. A business isn’t paid to be efficient; it’s paid to create wealth for its customers.” He goes on: “Excellent customer service is not efficient–ask Nordstrom or Disney. These companies sacrifice efficiency for effectiveness, the true source of all competitive advantage …”

Ron’s point is that efficiency is doing the same thing better, which is not a true source of competitive advantage. Effectiveness is a better goal to have for remaining competitive.
In essence, I agreed with Ron’s comment via my post on Legal Project Management. I feel this approach is truly doing things the same way only better, and will only get you so far. All that being said, I still see significant value in a focus on efficiency, especially in the short-run.
  1. For Clients. They serve up repeated messages on wanting to see efficiency gains. For them this means getting the same service at a lower price. Having engaged in direct conversations with GCs, my attempts to redirect the dialogue to value and effectiveness fall on deaf ears. So for now, efficiency is perceived as a differentiator by the customer.
  2. For Law Firms. With market prices dropping, efficiency means profits. In the short-run, cutting the cost of delivering the same service means maintaining profit margins. From the law firm perspective this is not about competitive advantage, but plain ole being competitive.
Back to Ron’s point – every business should have an on-going and “relentless focus on efficiency.” As Ron points out, “Any efficiency gain will be copied rapidly by all players.” This means that market players who don’t maintain this focus, drop out. I believe the reason efficiency is such a compelling topic in the legal market today is that it is a relatively new concept. In turn this means there are likely numerous inefficiencies that currently exist in the business model. So significant reductions in cost (for clients) and measurable gains and/or maintenance of profit margins for law firms will result from new efficiencies.
In the long-run, Ron’s view must rule. Competitive markets drive down margins which incentivizes innovative behavior.
Which brings us back to the value of KIIAC and technologies like it. These technologies are about being more effective. Lawyer time is not spent reviewing and regurgitating content. Instead, time is spent on higher-value efforts.
I understand and fully appreciate Ron’s POV and frustration with this short-term thinking. However given our market’s upheaval and transition, this short-term behavior will drive a more rapid movement to understanding and ultimately embracing the concept of Effectiveness.

I’ve been using Sunlight Labs’ “Congress” app for the Android phone for a couple of months now and still enjoy the amount of information I am able to get from it. The idea is simple, but extremely useful if you want to track what your federal representative or Senator is doing back in D.C.

QR Code for Congress

With this one app, you can track the following information on any member of the U.S. Congress:

  • Read the latest bills, laws, and see what bills were recently voted on.
  • Find members of Congress by using your phone’s location, a zipcode, a last name, or a state.
  • Read tweets and watch videos from members’ Twitter and YouTube accounts.
  • Reply to a member of Congress on Twitter from within the app, using your own account.
  • Read the latest news about them, using the Yahoo News API.
I took the liberty of taking some screenshots on my local congressman, John Culberson, of Texas. I quickly learned that Rep. Culberson needs to update his Twitter status, as he hasn’t updated it in over four months now (come on John… you got 13,000+ followers!!  Keep ’em updated!!)  Although, to be fair, Rep. Culberson does a pretty good job of keeping his Facebook activity updated. Perhaps the Congress App could add that little feature in the future?
Here are some screenshots of the free Android Phone app, Congress. I think it does a great job of tracking information on members of Congress and think it is definitely worth a look.  
Basic Info on Representative Culberson
Latest Bills by Rep. Culberson
Twitter Information
Latest Voting Information

You have to admire the punishment that Judge Diane Druzinski handed down to a juror that updated her Facebook status to say that it was “gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re GUILTY.” Apparently, Judge Druzinski doesn’t like it when a juror posts a verdict on a case that was STILL BEING TRIED.  The son of the defendant’s attorney found the post (kids are always good to have around for these things.) Unfortunately, the defendant was still found GUILTY and I assume all the rest of the jurors had fun telling her that…. (just an assumption on my part.)

So, although all her friends “liked” Ms. Hadley Jons updated status to her stint as a juror, the little post got Ms. Jons a lecture from the judge about violating her oath as a juror, asked to leave a check in the amount of $250.00 at the Court Clerk’s office, and told to go home and write a five-page essay on the importance of the Sixth Amendment and bring it back to Judge Druzinski by October 1st.

Although Ms. Jons hasn’t commented on how her essay is coming along, her lawyer stated that everyone seemed to think the punishment was appropriate and let it go at that.

If Ms. Jons wants to publish her essay here on 3 Geeks, she has an open offer. We’re always looking for interesting guest bloggers.

At ILTA, my “aha” session was “How KM Supports AFAs.” During this session, Peter Krakaur, CKO for Orrick, showed some screen shots from the KIIAC application. I have previously commented on this application and how it rests in the ‘analysis’ layer of KM.
Before I get to the “aha” moment, here’s some background on the ILTA Conference.
At the ILTA Conference THE topics were AFAs and Legal Project Management. A theme tied up in all of the presentations on these topics was: Efficiency. As in, how can lawyers drive down the cost of their service through more efficient service methods? A great number of ideas and systems were shown that offered incremental efficiencies in the legal service delivery model. And of course these increments can add up to measurable gains.
However, the efficiency gains demonstrated by Peter were a qualitative leap. Peter showed a model agreement which was generated in just 2 days and 45 minutes – something that takes weeks or months for humans to accomplish. There was a noticeable gasp in the room as people reacted to what he had just said. Mary Abraham interrupted the presentation and asked for a moment of silence for all the PSLs who had just been put out of work. What followed was a lively discussion on the value of this approach and its impact on the profession. At the end of the dialog everyone in the room turned to Kingsley Martin, the founder and CEO of KIIAC, and gave him a round of applause. Not something you typically see during a presentation.
KIIAC, through its analysis of large volumes of content, is a nice example of the next generation of KM that goes beyond search and collaboration. This truly disruptive technology is (IMHO) the vanguard of what’s next.
With systems like KIIAC entering the legal profession, significant segments of the practice of law are queuing up in the obsolescence line. Where will you be in this line?

This Week’s Elephant Post is:

Did the downturn in the economy give you an opportunity to ‘Rightsize’?

Why do we continue to tolerate slackers or unproductive processes? Come on admit it, you have some products, processes, employees, administrators, associates, partners, etc. that are sacred cows and do not carry their weight. Why do we keep them? In these times, we should be stacking the deck not slacking it. Did the downturn in the economy finally give you the ability to jettison the underachieving processes/workers, or are you still carrying them on your firm’s balance sheet?

We have one brave guest blogger that gives us an great perspective as a former law firm CFO about tolerating slackers in a down economy. We also have an Alternative Fee, Information Technology, Internet Marketing, and Law Library perspective of how the downturn enabled some rightsizing within the structure of each of these areas.

Next week’s Elephant Post question is listed at the end. Let me know if you’d like to try your hand at being a guest blogger (come on… you know you do!!)

Alternative Fee Arrangements Perspective

Size Doesn’t Matter – Shape Does
Toby Brown

From an AFA/KM perspective, success in the future is much less about having your firm resize (a.k.a. fire a bunch of people) than it is about re-shaping.  For me the term ‘Right-sizing’ implies cutting unnecessary people and services to correspond to a lower volume of work (brought to us by The Recession).  I feel the bigger opportunity here is to re-shape and restructure a firm to survive under new conditions.  As Darwin aptly stated, it’s not the fittest who survive change, it’s the most adaptable.

So for me the real question is: Are law firms adapting?  Are they reshaping to address a new environment?  The short answer: No.

At an ILTA session last week on KM and AFAs, one attendee asked the question to those in the room: How many firms have altered their compensation system to encourage and motivate new behaviors?  (Insert sound of crickets chirping.)  Finally someone mentioned firms going away from lock-step associate pay systems.  However this was dismissed (at least by me), since these new approaches primarily reward billable hours.

The Elephant in the Room on this issue is law firm compensation.  The response from the ILTA crowd is indicative of the profession, as I have heard of zero firms making bold modifications to their compensation, such that entirely new behavior is rewarded.  Absent a move like that: The Size diminishes, but the Shape remains the same.

It’s Not About the “New Thing”… It’s About Getting Rid of the “Old Thing”

Information Technology Perspective
Scott Preston



The economic downturn certainly spurred a lot of attention on improving processes, realigning resources and putting greater focus on projects that support the firm’s direction.  It also put a lot of pressure on resources.  Like everyone else, IT is being asked to do more with less.  Doing more work with less (resources, funding, time) makes it difficult to deliver the level of service already established.  When doing more includes introducing new technology, you are greatly increasing the workload for those involved in implementing the change.  And, you are also taking resources away from implementations already in place.




“The challenge of introducing the next “new thing” is not the new technology; the challenge is getting rid of old technology.”


Before implementing the next new thing, IT must consider whether we have the right resources to deliver it.  Can IT re-purpose our current workforce to support the new thing?   Yes, with time to learn new technologies and patience from our users, we can reshape IT as needed.  However, re-purposing IT resources assumes that IT is able to do away with older technologies.  This turns out to be one of the most difficult challenges.  How do you stop working on and supporting the current tools in order to design, deploy and support the new thing?  While we receive a lot of support for the movement toward the new thing, we struggle with the maintenance of our old systems, which has a negative impact on the entire enterprise.

“The cost of supporting old systems while introducing new systems with the same amount of resources is the cost of time.”

Most IT shops were already running lean before the economic downturn.  The downturn gave us an opportunity to educate ourselves and management on process improvement.  It has given us an opportunity to re-purpose IT resources for better business alignment.  Along the way, we have found a few IT personnel that did not want to be part of the new process.  For those few, time is limited (if they are even still with us).  With some patience, communication, support and opportunity, I am encouraged to report that IT is moving in the right direction.  It is a slow process, mainly because we need to continue to support the care and feeding of systems that are being replaced but have not yet been retired.  In this case the elephant in the room is not the new thing, it’s the old thing that we cannot seem to jettison.


Internet Marketing Perspective


Show Me the Money!
Lisa Salazar

For IMM, the essential response always “is _X_ driving traffic to our site”?

A huge proponent of measuring results, if  a product is not driving traffic to the site I am going to want to cut it.

Yes, there is some value in brand awareness, but when you are slashing to save, any activity that doesn’t give me some tangible return on my investment is not going to make it during these kinds of times.

Law Library Perspective
Greg Lambert

Tell Me… Is It Nice, Needed, or Necessary?

When the downturn in the economy hit the legal market, many looked at what we were doing and immediately started categorizing people, places and procedures in order to determine if they were really worth keeping.  Of course, even during good times, everyone says that they keep a close eye on their budgets to make sure they aren’t wasting money on programs, books, subscriptions, people, etc., but it takes a recession to really determine which of those is really necessary, or if it is merely another sacred cow that we keep around because we’ve always had it around.

For libraries, everything we spent money on fell into three categories:

  1. Nice – These were the things we have that are great to have around, but as the saying goes… “nice guys finish last.” Or, in this case, nice things get cut first.
  2. Needed – These were the things that would cause some pain to cut. Generally these products or people are favored by someone within the firm and get their protection. However, the longer the tough times persist, the weaker the protection becomes.
  3. Necessary – Here we have the products, procedures and people that fill a core purpose of the firm. Unless the recession turns into a depression, or the group that is supported collapses, these items are usually pretty safe.

When it comes time to defend items that you spend money on, you quickly find out that there are a lot of ‘nice’ things… quite a few ‘needed’ things… and not nearly as many ‘necessary’ things as you thought there were.

The bad new is that you know that you have to be honest and determine what can be thrown out. The good news is that everyone (at least the powers-that-be) also knows that overhead is going to be cut, and that anything remaining has to be defended. So, if I say that the alternative version of a  treatise on commercial litigation that we bought for a lateral partner because he or she didn’t want to learn how to use the version we already had has to go… it is up to that Partner to defend the product. Eventually, the Partner determines that it was nice to have this product, but not necessary.

The process of cutting overhead is not fun, but quite frankly, if we made everyone categorize products, procedures and people that we bring on during the good times as nice, needed, or necessary then we wouldn’t be in as tough a position when the bad times roll in. Recessions give us a chance to grow the backbone that we should have all the time. However, I’m afraid that once things turn around, you’ll find that having a backbone will turn back to being a ‘nice’ thing to have.

The “Reformed” Chief Financial Officer Perspective
The Biggest Elephant in the Room…
Michael White, Reformed CFO… Reborn as a CRM Guy
VP CRM Strategy, Client Profiles

“Why do we continue to tolerate slackers or unproductive processes?”
Non-Productive Partners…  Yes, we are going there.  From my experience as a former Controller and CFO for three AmLaw 150 firms, on every occasion “right sizing” or “belt tightening” was discussed the following occurred:
Each Administrative Department Head was asked to review:
  1. All key vendor relationships with opportunities to renegotiate additional agreement benefits; and 
  2. Most importantly, put forth their “sacrificial staff lambs”.  
Key Vendor Relationships:  Efficient organizations had already milked the final drop from these agreements, I know I did…  So, additional cost savings typically led to focusing on those vendors with variable costs associated with their delivery (Outsourcing groups typically.)  In general, these cuts led to known cuts in service to the firm and insignificant bottom line savings.
Staff Downsizing: The lambs identified were typically at the low end of the salary scale, playing a key fundamental administrative duty, which was right sized for their pay grade.  We would all offer up our team members to be made redundant with a plan to reallocate tasks, identify potential service cuts to the law firm and announce the “new” cutting edge Staff to Attorney ratios the firm would enjoy… with a heavy sigh, the partners would agree that these were difficult decisions, but nonetheless, cuts that needed to be made to run more efficiently… Hallway discussions among the Partners would go something like “finally the Administration Team was aligning with Partners” or “Finally, we are putting a dent in our overhead”
What was not discussed was the impact on the Admin Teams ability to serve their clients, The Partners… Having already cut their teams to the bone, redefined tasks, doing more with less, stretched to the point of breaking, the ultimate result was, great surprise here, less service to the firm and inefficiencies in supporting the lawyers to service their clients.  Leading to guess what, key staff exodus… but that’s another posting worthy of discussion.
So, finally getting to my point…  Non-Productive Partners.  All of the cuts mentioned above, would have been unnecessary, if the partners focused their attention on their brethren in the corner or near-corner offices.  The economics associated with moving out 1 or 2 Non-Productive Partners (and their associated team overhead) down the road would have had a much more significant impact on the bottom line.  Most importantly, without reducing the core services provided to the Firm in support of our greatest asset, the Clients…
Some Firms today are doing just that, focusing in on more granular financial analysis of the Firm at the Practice Group, Partner and Client/Matter levels of profitability, with very interesting findings.  Other “Strategically Managed” firms are taking action by investing financial resources in the Firm to make processes more efficient and providing tools to the lawyers to focus on growing the practice and, in turn, client revenue.  While investing, these firms continue to separate themselves from the competition and meet the financial expectations of their Partners; strengthening the foundation of the firm in the process, not tearing it away chunk by chunk.
In closing, from my experience, to “stack the deck” you need to flip the conversation to a top down review, starting with the Partners, looking the Elephant in the Room in the eyeballs.

Next Week’s Elephant Post Question:

“What is one of the things that you or your group does very well, but no one seems to ask for that service?”

This question springs from a basic question that I ask every vendor that is trying to sell me their product. I always ask “What is one of the best things that your product do, that your clients don’t take advantage of?”  It usually stumps them for a moment, but then a light bulb goes on and they suddenly point out a feature that is build in that would help the end user out, but they can’t seem to get the end user to take the time to use it.

Think about what it is that you or the group you represent has a talent for, but you just can’t seem to get the rest of your firm to see that they need. Is it because it isn’t as great a service as you think, or is it that it is over the heads of those that would benefit from this service?

We’ll do this all again next Thursday.  Email me and let me know if you’d like to take a shot at being one of our guest bloggers for next week.

As my good friend Jason Wilson told me a few minutes ago, “it is a sad day for legal publishing.” As we mentioned back in April, Thomson Reuters was shutting down its Banks Baldwin operations in Ohio and “after it closes, the work will be shifted to New York, Minnesota, the Philippines and India.”  Well, today, it seems that you can cross off New York and Minnesota from that list.

The TwinCities Pioneer Press reports that Thomson Reuters is buying out another 130 workers (“publishing specialists”) from the Rochester, New York, and Eagan, Minnesota offices. Since the Rochester office only had about 100 employees (AKA “publishing specialists”), it smells like the days of having editor staff in Rochester are numbered. What would really stink is if any of the Ohio folks that got moved to Rochester or Eagan this summer were on this current buy out list.

I guess the writing is on the wall for any of the legal editor staff for Thomson Reuters. Your job will soon be sent to Hyderabad or Manila. Thomson Reuters is getting more and more comfortable sending skilled legal editor jobs to India and The Philippines. I hope everyone that depends upon the quality (and pays a premium for that service) is just as comfortable as the decision makers at Thomson Reuters are… because it seems that eventually we are all going to have to rely upon that quality.

[Note to those visiting 3 Geeks for the first time: Check out this week’s Elephant Post on ‘Rightsizing‘]

There have been a number of us in the law library field that have taken an “Inside Look” at the Westlaw facility in Eagan, Minnesota. We get to see the facility, talk with the research attorneys, and marvel at the engineering and technology involved in making sure that Westlaw is functioning at peak performance. However, it wasn’t until today that I really got an “inside look” at what some of the contractors at Westlaw are doing. I can see why the folks at West left this part off of the tour.

According to one of the contractor’s personal blog, “watching TV, You-tubing, and Facebooking” are the main events of the day. Add this with watching three seasons of Friday Night Lights and surfing e-bay for deals. Seems that priorities for at least one contractor are clear… personal time trumps checking data:

I watched three seasons of Friday Night Lights and bought and sold hundreds of dollars of ebay merchandise while all the Novus data I was supposed to be checking went un-checked in front of me. [editor’s note – if you’re a Westlaw subscriber and your database isn’t displaying properly…sorry…It was because I was on Hulu.com during external release testing.]

It makes for great reading if you’re a Westlaw subscriber. Take a look at some of the other posts presented by the contractor about his work at Westlaw:

Findlaw, Thomson Reuters, Lame Jim and Hot Elena
Caroline, Findlaw and Spyhouse Coffee
1st Day at Thomson Reuters. High Hopes…Quickly Dashed

My personal favorite from this blogger is his introduction of his writings through a quick video. What’s not to love about a man, a blog, an amp, and a cold can of Bud.