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.

The Uhms enrolled in a Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit through Humana Health Plans, Inc. They enrolled, Humana took their $6.90 for two months, but apparently forgot to actually enroll them in the plan. So after weeks of trying to get Humana to make things right, the Uhms did what any red-blooded American wants to do when they are screwed over… made a Federal Case out of it and took Humana to court in the Western District of Washington. The federal court did what they do to most red-blooded Americans that take big drug companies to court… they dismissed the claim and told the Ohms (who by this time were enrolled) that they had an Administrative process for this type of action and they need to exhaust that before making a federal case out of it. The Uhms then did what a true red-blooded American should do and followed the court’s ruling and went through the administrative process….  Just kidding… they appealed, of course!

Skip ahead two and a half years and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed the lower court’s ruling. Circuit Judge Richard A. Paez lays out a “painstakingly” detailed opinion of why the Uhms don’t have standing in the federal courts. Although Judge Paez’s 9,000 word, 70 paragraph, twenty-page decision (along with 26 footnotes) could be a chapter in a first year Civil Procedure class, it is Judge Betty B. Fletcher’s short three-paragraph concurrence that should be the one taught to lawyers. It seems that Judge Fletcher asks a basic question of the Uhms and their counsel: “What have Uhms’ counsel accomplished for the Uhms, for justice, or for the law?”  Here’s the entire concurring opinion from Judge Fletcher:

B. FLETCHER, Circuit Judge, concurring.

I concur in the opinion, which carefully and painstakingly analyzes the claims. I add this concurrence simply to vent my frustration. What have Uhms’ counsel accomplished for the Uhms, for justice, or for the law?

The Uhms suffered a frustrating and bureaucratic “snafu” that temporarily cost them two months’ prescription costs. They filled out the forms to receive Part D prescription drug benefits from Humana. The process obviously enrolled them to the point where automatic deductions were made from their social security checks. But the other half of the process failed — their status as beneficiaries was denied and, as a consequence, the Uhms had to pay for their prescriptions. Frustrating indeed. But what to do? Make a federal case of it — start a class action where simply following the administrative appeal process would suffice? A class action all for the recovery of two months’ prescriptions?

Today the Uhms receive the prescription drug benefits to which they are entitled. But not as a result of this lawsuit. The cost to the court system and to the Uhms is unconscionable. A bit of common sense and attention to the available administrative remedies should have been applied. Instead we have an opinion with endless pages of legal analysis, months of study and delay, and a determination that no benefit can be awarded to the Uhms. Counsel particularly should take heed.

I’ve suddenly become a big fan of Judge Fletcher.

[NOTE: Big thanks to Washington DC Attorney @maggieesq for tweeting me about this case. Thanks Maggie!!]

While I was attempting to find an article yesterday, I stumbled upon an interesting looking search tool called Interceder (apparently a Spanish word meaning “to intercede”). This dashboard approach at search results definitely caught my eye because it had so much information strategically placed in what looks very similar to SharePoint Widgets. When I ran the search for Thomson Reuters, it produced a number of widgets ranging from basic information on the company, to the latest Tweets, to a breakdown of the latest news placed on a timeline.  I also found that you could display the results in either a basic “list” (news timeline, company info, people mentioned), or in an expanded “dashboard” format (list view, plus, spotlight, video, Twitter, Blog, and related search information.

List View
Dashboard View

It looks like Interceder uses a number of search tools and brings the results back from individual resources into its own widget box. Company information is pulled from Freebase; Videos from YouTube; Blog and News from Google News and Google Blog Search; [got an email from Interceder developer Michael Bade and he let me know that they actually pull news from the Yahoo BOSS service rather than Google News]; Semantic search and related people results from Open Calais; and, Tweets from Twitter Search. The process seems pretty simple, but the results look very professional.  The search is very basic, and no advance search functionality, such as phrase searching, date restrictions or Boolean style searches, appears to be available for more complex searching.  In fact, if you try to do any Boolean searching, it will simply take the first word and leave the rest off the search results.

It looks like the domain for Interceder was set up in 2008, but for some reason I’ve never ran across it before (nor have any of my research friends that I showed it to yesterday.) I’ve put in an email to the Interceder contact address, but it looks like it might be an Australian website (so I may not get a response until tomorrow.)

Even with the simple search capability, Interceder is a fun search tool to use, and I think you’ll find the way it displays the results to be fascinating.  So, go do what I did… search the name of your company, your college, and your kid’s school to see how Interceder structures the search results. If you’re like me, you’ll find Interceder to be a fun way to search the Internet.

[Guest Blogger Ayelette Robinson]

It continues to amaze me just how good ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) conferences are. With hundreds of truly high-quality sessions, and networking opportunities live and virtual galore, each conference is bound to give you a professional high. This year’s conference, held at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas, was no exception. Indeed, I’m still returning to earth after a week so rich with knowledge exchange that I find myself struggling with the same question I face every year:  How do I retain all I learned? How do I implement all those ideas that sound so good, in a way that really affects what I do?  I’ve come up with a few ideas that I share below, and I hope that some of these will resonate with you and help you take what you learned in Vegas and implement it back at home.
Before I get into my list, however, I would like to emphasize that under no circumstances should you attempt to implement everything you learned. Unless you have 50 clones of yourself showing up to work every day, it will simply be an impossible mission. You went to an average of 4 sessions a day over 4 days, with a conservative average of 2 speakers a session; that means over the past year it took 32 people, plus their entire teams, to implement just the ideas you heard in sessions; this doesn’t include all the sessions you didn’t attend but read about in blogs and tweets and heard about at lunch and at drinks on the strip.
As a reminder of the sheer volume of knowledge shared at the conference, click the links below:
•        Session Presentations and Handouts
•         #ILTA10 Tweets (thanks to Natalie Huha at LegalersWelcome for aggregating this list)
•        Live Interviews on ILTA TV (thanks to Shy Alter at ii3 for bringing these interviews to attendees and non-attendees alike)
With so much information shared throughout the week, how do you remember the takeaways that struck a chord with you?
Here is my personal post-conference ‘to do’ list:
1.        During morning coffee and commute the week after conference, review my notes from the conference.
2.        When I see something that makes me go “aha” write it down on a ‘Conference Aha’ list (goal: compile a list much shorter than my notes; maybe 5-10 bullets).
3.        Pick one (just one!) takeaway that I will weave into my projects this week.
4.        Put the list of 5-10 bullets into a calendar invite that repeats every Monday morning for the next few weeks, to remind me of the new things I should be thinking about as I get back into my projects.
5.        Put the same full list into a calendar invite that repeats every 3 months, as a quarterly reminder of my favorite takeaways from the conference (note: I might need to adjust the list with enhancements & modifications as I try new things and realize what will and won’t work for my organization).
6.        Attend my local ILTA Post-Conference Recap event, and share my list with attendees and non-attendees from my area.
7.        Input business cards I got into my Contacts, with notes about when I met each person and what we talked about (so I remember the colleague who can help when I can’t get system X to work!).
8.        Send LinkedIn invitations to the new people that I met, so I can stay in touch and continue to exchange knowledge and experiences with them.
9.        Start following these colleagues on Twitter, so I can see the news and topics that are affecting my industry.
10.    Set aside 30-60 minutes a week to read the blogs, news feeds, and ILTA e-group discussions that are relevant to me, to continue my education after the conference (reminder: focus on 30-60 minutes; it will get too overwhelming to try and read everything every week).
What are other ideas for retaining what you learned at the ILTA conference, and for keeping the intellectual energy going strong? Remember, what happened in Vegas shouldn’t stay in Vegas. Please share your thoughts and takeaways by commenting on this post, or by tweeting them with a reference to  #ILTA10.

When I got my iPad earlier this year, the first app I actually ponied up real money for was a song recognition app called SoundHound. It is no secret to my friends and family that I love punk bands with female lead singers. So, when I run across a new-to-me band that I like, I use the SoundHound app to help me learn more about the band, their music, tour dates, and other information like bands that may sound similar. Now, stay with me here because I’m going to talk about how I use SoundHound, and then I’m going to bring it back to law firms and how Knowledge Management could think about how we deliver content and information back to our clients and even bring in how LexisNexis for Microsoft Office may already be on the right track.

Let’s say I’m listening to The Dollyrot’s awesome remake of Melanie’s 1971 novelty hit “Brand New Key” and I want to learn more. Using SoundHound, I simply tap the “What’s That Song” button, and it magically comes back with the information I need. Actually, it isn’t magic at all, it is called “Sound2Sound” (S2S) technology… it just seems like magic to those of us that benefit from the technology. Without going too deep into the S2S tech, here’s what SoundHound has to say about it:

SoundHound’s breakthrough Sound2Sound technology searches sound against sound, bypassing traditional sound to text conversion techniques even when searching text databases. Sound2Sound has resulted in numerous breakthroughs including the world’s fastest music recognition, the world’s only viable singing and humming search, and instant-response large scale speech recognition systems.

Yes, you read that right, it also allows you to sing or hum a tune and it will use that to attempt to match the song you’re looking for. Okay… putting all the ‘coolness’ of what it does to the side for a moment, let me show you the practical aspects of what I get from the SoundHound results.

  1. Picture of Album Cover
  2. Name of Song
  3. Name of Band
  4. Name of Album
  5. If this song exists on my iPod (it does!)
  6. Ability to bookmark the song
  7. Share this info (via email, twitter, or Facebook)
  8. Buy the song on iTunes
  9. See the lyrics (so I can sing along!!)
  10. See any videos from YouTube of the band
  11. See other songs for sale on iTune from the band
  12. Launch the Pandora Station of this band
  13. View the tour dates
  14. Find similar artists
  15. Find other fans of this band

    In addition to this, you can also get to information such as:

  16. Biography of the band
  17. See other albums by this band
  18. See other songs on this album
This is a lot of information available from my initial search. From a Knowledge Management point of view, this gets me the information that I didn’t know I needed. Such as, The Dollyrots were currently touring Texas with Bowling for Soup. As a result, I bought my tickets and took the whole family to the concert. And we even got to hang out and get autographs from the bands.
[Note to self… next time, leave the girls at home. A three-hour concert is a little too much for pre-teens — and that can cause 40something year old parents to also become exhausted!!]
Hopefully you’ve stuck with me here because I’m about to bring this back to Knowledge Management (KM).
Do any of our KM products give us these kinds of rich information results when we search them? Is it possible to create a “Document2Document” product that emulates what I can do with SoundHound’s Sound2Sound technology? Can I be in a document, or a web page, or an email, click a “What’s This Document?” button and get a list of related content results? Could our compiled knowledge that is stored in Document Management Systems, Internal and External Databases, Client Relationship Management Systems, Intranets, Extranets, etc., etc. give us the rich content results that would help us find useful information? As an end-user, I could benefit from this type of integrated search technology that helps me find similar documents without a lot of effort, and without having to exit the current program to do it.

As I was thinking about this, it does sound like something that LexisNexis is nibbling around with this type of Document2Document technology with their LexisNexis for Microsoft Office (L-MO). Think of L-MO in the way that I used SoundHound above. I’m in a document, I click a button, and I can learn more about what’s in this document as well as related information from external resources (LexisNexis, Martindale-Hubble) and if I have Lexis’ Total Search product, I can also discover related content within the firm’s internal information.

Read through L-MO’s description of what the product does… but think of how it is similar to the SoundHound idea of search and search results.

“Search” – A single search box for one-click access to the vast collection of legal content from LexisNexis, the open Web and the user’s desktop files. Results are displayed in a window next to the active document for easy review and management – virtually eliminating the time and effort to switch between the desktop and search sites to conduct research.

“Background” – This function scans an Outlook message or Word document for “entities” such as people, companies, organizations and cases and provides hyperlinks to relevant documents, full text case law, news and other types of information within internal, LexisNexis and Web resources. Upon clicking a hyperlink, information is displayed in a side pane within the Microsoft Office applications. The Background feature also displays Shepard’s® reports and applies Shepard’s® SignalTM indicators directly to the cases cited within the text of the document. These features benefit users by minimizing the need to go back and forth between multiple databases to collect information – speeding the process and reducing the risk of missing information when transposing it from one place to another.
“Suggest” – By manually highlighting any text in an Outlook or Word file, the user can prompt a search that will pull up relevant information from internal, LexisNexis and Web resources. The content is displayed in a side pane within the application for use and management for more productivity and efficient work.

From a user’s perspective, the “Search”, “Background” and “Suggest” seem to relate to the “What’s That Song?”, Band/Album/Song Information, and the “Similar Artists” results you get from SoundHound.

I think that Toby saw this potential a few months ago (so call me a little slow…). I’m thinking that L-MO or some other player is going to catch on to this type of Document2Document technology searching and help KM help the attorneys discover the information and knowledge that they didn’t know they needed to know.


This week’s Elephant Post question is “When does ‘great’ get in the way of ‘good’?”

The idea behind the ‘Great v. Good’ question is whether the pursuit of perfection causes a paralysis in actually getting something accomplished, or as Scott Preston eloquently puts it – “Don’t over think it, stupid!!”

Whenever I think of this question, it reminds me of a quote from the 1993 movie, Six Degrees of Separation, where Donald Southerland’s character, Flan Kittredge, dreamt of a painter losing his ability to paint:

I remembered asking my kids’ second-grade teacher: ‘Why are all your students geniuses?
Look at the first grade – blotches of green and black. The third grade – camouflage.
But your grade, the second grade, Matisses, every one. You’ve made my child a Matisse.
Let me study with you. Let me into the second grade. What is your secret?’

[The teacher response was] ‘I don’t have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.’

Sometimes we just need to step back and understand that sometimes we lose our ability to produce great work by spending too much time and effort trying to make it, in our own minds, at least, perfect.

NOTE: Next week’s Elephant Post Question is at the bottom of this post. Take a look at it to see if you want to be a contributor to the next Elephant Post!

This week we have perspectives from Alternative Fee Arrangements, Information Technology, Knowledge Management, Information Technology, and from a Managing Attorney of an Intellectual Property firm. So, enjoy… and let us know what you think.

The Law Library Perspective
Perfection = Fossilization
As a result of a combination of our inherent nature and our academic training, we as librarians are used to being critical thinkers.  We get a problem or a question and we analyze it and research it to get to the end product or result.  When applied to research questions, these skills are essential, as they allow us to be as thorough as possible and give our users work product that they can trust.  We complete those “scorch the earth” searches with relative ease and they know that if there was something out there to be found, we have found it. However, these skills as applied to projects or new initiatives are not so helpful and, in fact, can be downright problematic.  Librarians, generally, have developed a culture of studying things to death and moving way too slow.  In order to be perceived as true leaders within our organizations, we need to realize that, sometimes, all we need to be is good, not perfect.
I attended an AALL webinar a few months back where Stephen Abram was the speaker and his talk was called Interpreting the Tea Leaves: Thinking About the Future.  He covered a lot of ground, but one of the things that resonated with me was this very topic.  He said that critical thinking professions (such as librarianship), are somewhat fatalistic and that they can devolve over time to just black and white thinking.
My favorite quote from him was that “…if we’re waiting for perfection, we’re waiting for fossilization.”  We need to move past perfection (God, I never though I would hear myself say that…) and think more about what we can do now to deliver information/content/value to our users.  It might not be perfect, but time is passing regardless and we don’t want to let it pass us by as we try to get things just right.
I will be the first to admit that it is against my nature (and training) to not strive for perfection, but I have to keep reminding myself that in doing this, I might just be missing out on some competitive advantage or strategic partnership that could end up being way more important and useful in the long run.  I think we all need to keep this in mind and, to use a very overused Nike quote, “Just Do It!”

The Alternative Fee Arrangement (AFA) Perspective

Perfection?  What’s that?
Toby Brown

From my AFA porthole – this is an easy topic.  There is no such thing as perfection in setting a price.  In other markets there exists the term “optimal” pricing, but that will be a while coming in the legal market.

This subject came up recently in a meeting with partners.  I saw this coming and was ready for it – even had fun with it.  Lawyers, being the ultimate risk avoiders, crave and cling to perfection.  This holds true especially with setting fees since the impact of setting a fee poorly falls directly on them.  They always want to base the fee/price on a very detailed budget accounting for all contingencies.  I understand their desire for this.  It’s just that this approach is unrealistic.  You can’t account for all contingencies in a legal matter and build them into the price.  Instead you define and isolate as best you can the potential factors that will impact the fee and lay them out as triggers for renegotiation.

Ultimately all prices are guesses.  Even setting the price for a candy bar is a guess, since it’s impossible to know everything that influences a buyer’s decision.  For legal services, you want to make the most educated guess you can when it comes to fees.  But spending copious and possibly unlimited amounts of time trying to build a bullet-proof (a.k.a. perfect) fee is a waste of time.

In the meeting with the partners –  I stated out-loud that all prices are ultimately guesses.  After the cumulative blood pressure in the room peaked, I let them know this was OK and we will get them to the point of making the best educated guess – without going over (so to speak).

I can admit it.  I enjoyed that.

The Knowledge Manager’s Perspective
We Are Not Contortionists, Lion Tamers, or High Wire Acts
I just returned from Le Grand Cirque ILTA, a circus-style evening at ILTA’s annual conference featuring a contortionist, a hand balancer, and an aerial ribbon performer. For these professionals, perfect balance is everything; anything shy of perfection causes them to fall and their proper execution to fail. The same goes for a variety of circus performers, lion tamers, high wire acts, and the like – it’s all or nothing, success or failure.
As an attorney-turned-knowledge-manager, I used to feel like one of these circus performers. My two options were perfection and failure. Nothing in between.
But I’ve come to realize that in the world of knowledge management, the ‘in between’ is the sweet spot. Not only because aiming for perfection takes an inordinately long time, but because in this world perfection is like a winged pig; it doesn’t exist and never will. The high wire performer can achieve perfect balance and land on the wire without the slightest bobble. Knowledge managers, on the other hand, will always have information that is out of reach and knowledge that is impossible to materialize in a productive way.
While this realization may seem frustrating to some, I hope for others it is a huge relief. It means that we no longer need to strive for perfection, and in fact doing so misses the point. Because we are not here to produce perfection; we are here to improve the business and practice of law which (here’s the kicker:) can happen incrementally. Releasing an imperfect system still makes a process better than it was before, even if it can be made even better down the road.
What better news than to find out that imperfect decisions can in fact be perfect. The perfectionists in us can finally get some sleep after all.

The Patent Attorney and Inventor Perspective

“Wait For Great and You May Be Late”
Bruce Burdick, Owner & Managing Attorney
The Burdick Law Firm, Intellectual Patent Attorney from the St. Louis area

Inventors and their patent attorneys face the question on every patent application on every invention.  Do we submit the patent application now, when the invention is still evolving and not yet perfected, or do we wait until the current “good” invention becomes “great.”  Most experienced patent attorneys know the answer is generally that good is good enough.  Great can come later.  Great may be lost to the inventor and patent attorney by waiting for good to become great.  You see, in the rest of the world (and soon to be in US as well), the first to invent under the law is the first to disclose the invention in a patent application filed with the appropriate patent office, usually the patent office of the inventor’s country of residence.  Waiting for good to become great can result in a third party filing on their good version of your good invention and preempting you.  That will result in you losing both good and great to someone who either only had good or who thought good was good enough.

There are over 7,000,000 US Patents, more than 6,000,000 issued since the famous 1843 statement by the then Commissioner of the US Patent Office that “The day is fast approaching when everything that can be invented, will have been invented” concurrent with his proposing that the Patent Office soon be shut down as new inventions would not be possible. So there will always be improvements and today’s good will be tomorrow’s bad and today’s great will be tomorrow’s good, and tomorrow’s great is as yet unknown.  So, a big part of the patent attorney’s job is to convince the inventor to file on today’s good today so the inventor won’t lose good or great.  Fortunately, the patent law and patent practice recognize this dilemma and provide for what are called “continuation”, “continuation-in-part” and “divisional” patent applications so that if the inventor files on good and then improves it to great and files on great then both may be covered.  Also, if great is not obvious to one or ordinary skill in the relevant art who knows of good, then an original patent application may be filed on “great”.

In truth of fact, nearly every invention is an improvement on someone else’s “good” or “great” invention, often brought about by new technology, new thinking, or new problems.  So, we patent attorneys know by experience that good is often good enough.  Apart from the patent law and inventors, experience tells us that we can get too complex seeking to get great rather than good.  I have had numerous software upgrades to the latest greatest thing only to find out peripherals no longer work.  The appeal of Linux is that it is simple and good and very, very reliable.  Windows keeps getting better and better, but is always fraught with peril due to hackers and internal glitches.  Open Office is “good” not “great” but it is very reliable and versatile and does nearly everything MS Office does, but in a less sophisticated way. My swimming pool cleaner, a robotic Aqua Jet marvel, is merely “good” in comparison to some of the computerized wonders such as used on Olympic swimming pools, but it is so effective and reliable and trouble free and easy to use that to me “good” is better at 30% of the cost of “great.”

We all have similar stories where we look for the complex when the simple will suffice.  I see it with my inventor clients every day.  Good inventors think out of the box and sometimes that involves not taking a more and more complex approach, but stepping outside the norm and thinking “Hey, I know a simpler way to do that.”   Thomas Edison was such an inventor. He was not the first to make an electric light bulb nor did he make a great light bulb, but he made the first one that was good enough (had a filament that lasted long enough) to be commercially viable and set up the company that made electric lighting a reality, and which  today is General Electric Co.  Likewise, Bill Gates didn’t invent the user interface that became Windows.  Xerox did.  Bill Gates did not have the best version, Apple did.  But, Gates had a “good” operating system (DOS and later Windows) and it was good enough to take over the world despite Apple’s OS being superior by all reasonable measurements.  Bottom line, great may be late.  Or, often as regards implementation of good, “You snooze, You lose!”

The Information Technology Perspective

Don’t let the perfection monster eat your lunch
Scott Preston

In a perfect world, the question of great versus good would be a non-issue.  We would have all the goals and objectives of a project perfectly conceived, communicated and shared.  We would have plenty of time to organize our thoughts, play with concepts and formalize our ideas.  We would have an abundance of users willing to work with IT to refine the process and those users would be more than happy to spend their precious time testing, revising and improving the project.  We would have all the necessary resources (both financial and human) and we would have management that understood the value of the project and supported the investment of time and money.

Even in a perfect world where we have most everything stated above, great will still get in the way of good.  It takes a lot of time to conceive, design and implement a good solution.

“The incremental benefit of making a solution great is more often offset by the time it takes to implement it. “

I have seen software development projects go off track because the development team spent so much time trying to develop the perfect plan that the client loses the competitive advantage it had.  The value of speed is offset by the desire for great.

Your best bet is to keep your eye on the ball, deliver a project that meets the needs and deliver it on time.  You will have time in the future to improve the project if there is value in those improvements, but often times good enough is good enough.

What’s Next for the Elephant Post?

The purpose of the Elephant Posts is to ask the same question to professionals from different legal fields, and to encourage guest bloggers to come on 3 Geeks and contribute with a short answer. These “short & sweet” answers give the readers an opportunity to fill in the blanks, or continue the conversation in the comment’s section.

Next week’s Elephant Post Question:


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

The idea behind this post is to ask “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’d love to get your thoughts on this topic. If you want to contribute to the Rightsize During the Downturn post, send me an email. We know that this specific topic may be a little tough to answer, so if you want to take a shot at it, but remain anonymous, we’re okay with that.

In the UK, based on the Legal Services Act, investors can buy lawsuits from clients being sued. They then turn around and hire lawyers to handled the suit, typically on some sort of discount / success fee arrangement. This allows them to spread the risk of losing the law suit (and investment) partially to the law firms while generating strong returns on the cases they win.
Something similar, but on a grander scale, has emerged in the US. This new middle man is looking to buy complete portfolios of litigation from clients, then turn around and sell the management of these in whole or in large segments to law firms. This style of vendor is essentially forcing the hand of both clients and their outside counsel. Why wait for clients or law firms to figure the AFA / cost reduction thing out? Instead, turn it into an investment, hedge on your money and turn a profit as the new middle man.
In this scenario, the clients can more easily quantify savings for their CEO/CFOs and outsource the worry of an entire segment of legal needs in one fell swoop. So the value proposition is strong and clear.
But what about the law firms? The Good News: If they are able to win the work from the broker, they will see a serious volume of work come in. The Bad News: Pricing moves further from their control (and/or participation) and they are now moved one step further away from the client relationship.
So … who is this vendor? DryStone Capital. From their web site (which needs serious marketing attention) it appears they are backed by strong capital and an institutional player. So they have the makings of being a real player in the market.
They present clients with a very simple proposition:
Five Steps in Engaging DryStone Capital

  1. Your corporation works with DryStone to select a litigation portfolio for outsourcing and to project the total cost – defense and liability – your corporation expects to spend.
  2. DryStone purchases excess insurance that protects your corporation from adverse development.
  3. DryStone retains a leading law firm, approved by your corporation, to manage the litigation portfolio.
  4. Your corporation outsources the portfolio to DryStone Capital at a fixed price 10% less than your projected total cost.
  5. DryStone collateralizes the 10% discount with a dedicated capital reserve.
It’s probably too early to call this one, but the concept is VERY interesting. DryStone saw a market need and developed a novel approach to meeting it.

There were two articles yesterday that mentioned how when those in their twenties and thirties take over the Information Technology (IT) departments, that things are going to change… and change for the better. You have to be impressed with the outlook that future IT managers have, but you also have to wonder if they are singing Kumbaya’s around the camp fire and not really seeing the details of what it takes to run an IT department from start to finish.

On CIO.Com’s “How IT Will Change When Gen Y Runs the Show“, 27 year-old Gen Y’er Kristine Harper says that the key to running an effective IT department is through management allowing IT to be “a little bit more fun, encouraging, flexible, positive. There’ll be fewer meetings, more networking, more teams.”
I’m going to throw out a few more quotes from Harper, and you can stop reading them when it brings you back to the ideas that Gen X’ers had during the Dot.Com boom along with a pinch of Twitter and Facebook tossed in:

  • I would focus on increasing motivation and community in the workplace
  • I would try to emphasize the importance of employee get-togethers outside of [work] to promote a stronger sense of community and friendship. 
  • I think when you feel strongly about the workplace and the people involved, there is a sense of motivation that comes with that.
  • We want to be successful in our jobs, but just in a different way. 
  • It doesn’t mean being in our office every day 9 to 5, it means getting your job done, whatever your job is.
Enough already? Moreover, that was just the quotes off of page one of a three page article.
Kristine Harper isn’t alone in her ideas of how IT departments should be run in the future. In an unrelated article from ITWorldCanada.com, an IBM survey of university and graduate students back up what Harper is saying. “There has to be re-invention of how companies work and how groups work to take advantage of the fact that social networking can be a very productive and effective way to share knowledge and work today,” said Bernard Courtois, president and CEO with Ottawa-based Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC).
I’m being a little rough on the up and coming IT managers. A lot of what they are saying makes sense from 30,000 feet, but is sure hard to implement on the ground. We’d all like to make work less stressful, reduce meetings, and take advantage of the “brain power” we have regardless of physical location. Yes, we’d all like that, but the pressures on IT are so great, that it will be very, very, very hard to implement all of these ideas, while expecting to pay attention to all of the details that is needed from the IT departments to make sure that programs work, networks are connected, and that those workers that IT supports are able to do their jobs without any noticeable down time.
Although the Gen Y’s see the future as Organizations needing “to start looking at the world as if they were standing on the moon”, they also need to remember that the work being conducted by those IT departments are supporting are still performed on Earth. As Casey Kasum used to say, “keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.” (If you don’t know who Kasum is, think of him as the Baby Boomer’s version of Ryan Seacrest… and vice-versa if you don’t know who Seacrest is!)