When Scott suggested yesterday that we “Get the Conversation Out of Email“, my first reaction was “yeah… good luck with that, buddy!” Not that Scott wasn’t correct in his assessment that Outlook is a resource hog (actually it is a ‘sounder of resource hogs’), but the fact that everyone in a law firm uses email as their primary communications tool, and their habits are so ingrained that making them change would be a monumental task.  Like the Associate pictured on the right… they all want you to change the way Outlook works for them, not vice-versa.

People use Outlook in many ways that it just shouldn’t be used. There are many of us (myself included) that use it as a “cover my ***” resource. That’s where you save all of your emails just in case someone comes back and says “Why did you not tell me that ‘X’ was going to be thrown away??” That’s when I do a little think I like to call “Advanced Find…” tool in Outlook to pull that specific email that I sent that person two years ago reminding him that we were throwing away ‘X’ and if he wants us to keep it, he needs to let us know.

Some of us use Outlook as a de facto database resource where they store strings of email messages on a certain topic, all within a sub-folder of Outlook. Say, for example, that I have a folder called “Passwords” where I put emails that contain all of the different usernames and passwords for all of those different databases I have access to (not that I do… but someone might do something like that after IT told him not to write them down on post-it notes and attach them to the underside of their keyboard.)

And, of course, some use Outlook as a file storage system. Instead of saving that attachment in the proper folder in the firm’s document management system; it is placed in a folder… just in case we need that file somewhere down the road.

All of these are bad, bad, bad habits that everyone knows are slowing down Outlook, but they are all too set in their ways to stop doing the things that are bad for them. Besides, they argue that IT doesn’t understand that it would take them days, or weeks, or months to undo all the bad things they’ve done.  Although IT might be able to start changing the ways people use Outlook and get them to be better about using the DMS, deleting unnecessary emails, or finding other resources to use for communications, but these are habits learned over many years, and won’t be unlearned without a lot of coaxing/forcing, and changes in the way that Outlook itself works.

I’m afraid that IT is just going to have to take this bull by the horns and start by changing the way that Outlook works, and then start working on the end users bad habits. Using tools like Recommind’s Decisiv Email, or a nifty little tool I saw yesterday from InfoNgen called Email Prioritization [PDF], where they tag emails and move them to more ‘appropriate’ places, such as a DMS, is a nice start. Give us some social networking tools to have conversations outside of email. Implement some rules, such as retention or deletion policies, that force us to either move files out of email or delete them… or, if necessary, do that for the user that won’t do it. Their clients already do it… it’s time they got on board with those policies as well.

The process for IT is pretty simple. First change Outlook’s behavior… then change the user’s behavior. Yeah, good luck with that, buddy!

While I was at the AALL annual meeting in Denver last month, I talked with both of the major legal publishers and asked them if they could tie their online legal research tools (Westlaw & Lexis) to the print titles that their customers also subscribe. Of course, no one could give me a “yes” or “no” on that question because of the logistics surrounding accomplishing such a feat. However, here’s my idea, and if it sounds like a good one, then approach your local rep and start asking them to look into doing it. For every title that your law library subscribes to in print, the Westlaw or Lexis databases should identify those titles whenever they come back in a search result or database lookup. In my opinion, it should do so regardless of if you also subscribe to that same title in its electronic format.

What would be the value in letting researchers know that the print version of this resource is located in the library? It would seem to me that it would be a win-win-win situation for the researcher, the librarian and the vendor. The researcher would know that he or she could walk into the library and pull the resource off of the shelf, sit down and easily flip through the resource, finding all of the related resources that are not just found in that specific book, but also from the additional topical resources that physically surround that book within its placement within the library. We’ve all browsed the shelves before where we’ve found a great resource that just happened to be shelved next to the book we were intending to use for our research.

It is a win for the library because it has the potential of bringing foot traffic back into the library. With foot traffic comes opportunities to talk with those researchers (lawyers, judges, professors, paralegals, legal assistants, etc.) and build face-to-face relationships. Those relationships bring additional opportunities to market the library, solicit feedback from the researchers, and to make yourself and your library a bigger presence within your organization. What products like West km or Lexis AtVantage do for locally created content, this could do for locally held print collections.

How about adding a “Print Version In Library” Note??

It is a win for the vendors because it finally gives them a legitimate answer to the question “why should I duplicate print and electronic resources?” As Joe Hodnicki over at the Law Librarian Blog calls the de-duping of print and electronic resources “The Shed West Era“, it is clear that library collections are cancelling as many print titles as they can… starting with any that they have access to in their electronic form.

Not enough room for text?? How about a book icon with a pop-up note?

Perhaps this idea should have been implemented five years ago. However, it doesn’t mean that it is too late to benefit from the tying of the print and electronic resources together.

What do you think?? If the vendor placed an icon, or wording next to results that said that this resource is available in your library… would that interest your researchers enough to take a trip into the library to check it out??

I was having a discussion with some attorneys recently about making everything accessible from within Outlook. Their collective spin was that they spend all of their time in Outlook, so IT needs to make everything work from within Outlook. My response to this was, “We need to get rid of Outlook. Email clients like Outlook have been the worst thing for the legal profession since we were forced to transition away from WordPerfect 5.1.” You can only imagine the reaction I received from these attorneys. I was being a bit over the top, but sometimes you need a little drama to get people’s attention.

I am not suggesting that we abandon Outlook, though the insistence that everything work from within Outlook is causing serious performance issues. The real issue is that programs like Outlook tend to thwart the sharing of knowledge.

There is a great deal of institutional knowledge in email. Many conversations begin and end in email. And although we have the ability to save those conversations into a knowledge management system, the user needs to take some action, which requires consistency and time – time that most knowledge workers do not have. The unfortunate result is that we leave a lot of institutional knowledge (your firm’s collective knowledge, intellectual property and culture) on the table, only to disappear with the retirement of your firm’s thought leaders.

I do not have the fix for this just yet. But I do know that we need to appreciate the amount of information that is lost in emails. There are technologies available today that make it much easier to collect and repurpose this information. Threaded discussions (or forums) are one way to accomplish this. Social networking tools have the necessary features to extract information from discussions, apply tags to help categorize information, and at the very least, to store information in a way that makes it easy to index by search engines. Migrating users to this approach would require change and orchestrating change is difficult. There are some very interesting search engines that can infer meaning based on context and can cluster information based on concepts. One interesting approach to this problem is Recommind’s Decisiv Email. Decisiv does a great deal of the heavy lifting necessary to get email content into a system that provides fast and easy searching. They do this by making intelligent suggestions about how email should be filed. This same approach can (and should) apply to email tagging.

We need to start fixing this now. We are in the midst of an important transition as senior members of our workforce continue to retire, taking their knowledge with them. Past generations walked down the hall and met face to face – this is how institutional knowledge was passed on before the web changed our lives. Not only do we as individuals suffer from this lack of knowledge transfer, the entire organization suffers as well.

Let me start off by saying that I support the ideas, principles and declarations made by the 33 individuals that have placed their signatures on that statement. Putting the laws that we citizens live under in a format that is freely available, in a format that is not tied to a specific vendor or physical format, and having the institutions that write these laws responsible for making sure they are immediately available is a great idea. However, when I scan down the list of signatures of those supporting these ideals, I see something missing… and that is a signature from any members of the Judiciary, Legislative or Executive branch, state or federal, that would have the power to move these ideals forward. In fact, other than Judy Meadows, the State Law Librarian of Montana, all the other signatories are either members of top tier law schools, publishers, or individuals with no direct link to the courts or government agencies that they are asking to adopt these ideals.

It reminds me of when I was with the Oklahoma Supreme Court and we adopted the Universal Citation System for all of our cases based on the AALL Citation Format Committee’s guidelines. We started the process back in 1996 and by 2001 had all 60,000+ Oklahoma Appellate Court decisions online, with the vendor-neutral citations, and freely available to everyone. When I went up to a committee member in 2001 and said that we need to get the word out about Oklahoma’s success and start talking to other State Supreme Court Justices, Bar Associations and Court Administrators to get them to follow suit, you know what I got?? Nothing. The reason? The committee was no longer focusing on cases, and was now interested in finishing the guidelines for Administrative Rulings. The “process” of establishing additional guidelines trumped the “action” of getting courts to move forward on actually adopting and implementing the already established guidelines.

I really hope that the Law.Gov folks are not following in the footsteps of the AALL citation committee.

There is a lot of clout in having the signatures of Deans, Professors, and Law Librarians from distinguished schools like Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley and others, and that should not be dismissed as not important, because it is important. However, until you start getting some signatures from State Court Administrators, State and Federal Judges, Governors, State and Federal Legislators, and State and Federal Agency Directors, it is still an exercise in academia… and will never make it pass this phase.

Getting these types of signatures won’t be easy (if it was, they’d already be on there.) But, there are states out there that are doing very well at doing a number of things that the Law.Gov principles and declarations are asking them to do. Why not go out and recruit these Judges and state officials to sign in order to show their peers that it can be done, and what benefits they have reaped from already making their laws and regulations more transparent?? A State Supreme Court Justice is going to take notice of a peer from another state before he or she will listen to a law professor from an Ivy League school. Getting one of those signatures should be Law.Gov’s current mission.

[Note: See Ed Walter’s follow-up to this post – “Why .Gov is at the *End* of Law.Gov“]

I was at a party the other night and this guy was showing me his Android.

I really would like to have one but I was telling him that the touch screen gets in the way of my long nails. It is bad enough using the Blackberry keyboard with these nails.

Well, this guy showed me an app he uses: Swype.

With the touch of a finger, you can swipe out 40 words per minute. It is a QWERTY keyboard that is also smart enough to automatically identify blanks, capitalizations and misspellings. It also learns new words and adds it to its 65,000 word dictionary. and supports a number of foreign languages.

It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned anything about Wolfram Alpha’s “computational knowledge engine”, but they released a neat little tool to create your own widgets. The widget builder makes it very easy to set up your own widget where you set up your input and allow that input to be manipulated.

For example, I set up a simple widget to pull the nutritional value of something:

 I still haven’t found a lot of use for Wolfram Alpha when it comes to “legal research”, but it is still an outstanding resource for more technical type searching. Here are some good examples of other widgets that Wolfram Alpha featured on its blog today:

Very cool stuff!!  If you find a way to make this relevant to legal research, please share that with us!!

Two things jumped out at me in yesterday’s discussion on the PLL Listserv regarding paid online services:

  1. Firms are in the midst of a major debate on Cost Recovery
  2. Librarians are worried about the subscription services of the future

For #1, I have made clear my positions on cost recovery in both a blog post here and an article on the subject in Spectrum [pdf]. These lay out what I feel is a reasonable way to recover costs that is reasonable to both the client and firm. These costs are so onerous that Firms have to be able to recover them to stay in business. Whether it get’s built into rates, fees or remains a separate line item, doesn’t make a difference. The important thing is offsetting these huge expenses as much as possible to remain profitable.

As for #2, the future User Interface (UI for short), needs to be able to:

1) Search across all of my subscription resources

Our firms purchase content from multiple vendors and it is becoming more and more challenging for our attorneys to find the materials they need. They would be able to work better if they can access the online materials in the same way they do on the shelf. On the shelf, West materials sit in the same section as Lexis and so on. We have built a UI (Full Disclosure: our UI is hosted by LexisNexis) that allows attorneys to find materials based on how they work, not who publishes them. A tab is set aside for each practice and links to online materials are grouped in ways that mirror the way their workflow. For example, under the Litigation Tab you would have items grouped by Civil Pretrial/Discovery, Civil Trials & CiviL Appeals, not by West or Matthew Bender.

This is where I think WestlawNext tripped up. I have been involved in contracts for Lexis and Westlaw for over 20 years and every one of them was content-based. Over that period, we have seen some major evolution in both of these products, not the least of which was the shift from a software- to a web-based search platform. Not once during this time have I been charged extra for the changed UI. Now, if this allowed me to search across multiple platforms I might consider it worth the premium. But I can’t see justifying the extra expense to search just the same resources that I have been able to search for years without trouble.

2) Allow me to set the per search charge to meet my unique requirements (See the Spectrum Article referenced above)

3) Make research more efficient

There has been a lot of fuss this year made over WestlawNext, CCH IntelliConnect, FastCase and now Lexis Advance. At AALL in Denver, a distinguished panel of executives from West, FastCase & Lexis discussed how they developed their respective UIs. While the conversation was interesting (despite being sidetracked at one point into a debate over treatises vs. primary resources), what I found fascinating was the fact that none of the panelists addressed how they were designing their UI to make the attorney work more efficiently. They seem to have missed an important factor in crafting their products: What is important to Law Firms is not how the service finds the answer for the attorney/researcher but what allows him/her to do so in the least amount of time at the least cost. “Googlizing” legal research is not the answer. Having to go through reams of hits actually makes the user less efficient.

I think that vendors are not seeing the direction that Law Firm legal research UIs are headed. We want to organize our content our way, using a single point of access. And we want the systems to make the user a better researcher.

It sounds like Wylie is pouncing on the opportunity made available by Amazon’s announcement of its new Kindle to make a finer point on his battle over e-book digital rights.

Coupled with Kindle CEO Bezos’ prediction that e-books will outpace paperbacks by 2012, Wylie is now threatening to expand his negotiations from a 20-book deal with Amazon to now 2,000-book deal if publishers don’t get a handle on digital royalties.

This goes back to a post I wrote two days ago. Last week Wylie set up a publishing house called Odyssey Editions, and negotiated e-rights with Amazon for a two-year period on 20 classics.

Wylies says he is “only trying to make a point” so that the two revenue streams will be addressed together in all publishing deals.

Prior to the mid-’90s, publishing deals did not address digital rights. Any agents holding rights to books written prior to that time retain all rights, both print and digital.

Now Wylie’s got a stable full of some of the best modern literature on the planet.

Sounds more to me like he is trying to force Random House’s hand. And make a lot of money.

A recent article from electronista notes that “23% of IT managers may already use iPads.” First off – I am happy to report that my CIO is among this group.
Why is this stat important?
Although we tend to think of IT people as advanced thinking geeks, a good number of them over the years have become more like Mordac – The Preventer of Information Services from Dilbert. This is the case for very good reasons. I recall a frustrating conversation with the Director of IT at a former firm. He was adamant about stability of the network taking absolute priority over any technology innovations. When pressed on this, he noted that partners didn’t call and yell at him for not upgrading the office suite in a more timely fashion Much more frequently he received calls when things didn’t work right. What I learned from this experience is that IT was becoming and eventually became a force for status quo over innovation. It’s not that geeks don’t like cool new IT stuff. They just don’t want to support it for a bunch of impatient lawyers.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see IT managers embracing the iPad as a new technology. This suggests a shift in The Force. IT managers are seeing that more and more their customers (lawyers) are calling to ask why they can’t have an iPhone. They expect stability, and are now trying to keep pace with technology at their own level. And they are bringing this pain to the IT department.
Even more encouraging in the article was the comment that an additional 18% of IT managers plan to buy an iPad in the next year. I’m not suggesting the iPad is necessarily the next wave of tech for law firms. But these stats do represent a new trend for how IT is approaching technology in the enterprise.
My CIO is truly embracing this new paradigm for IT: “I can say from experience, that I was not particularly interested in the iPad. I had a mild curiosity, but would not lay down the ducats to play with one. However, having spent the better part of two months with one, I would not want to go without. The iPad truly is a transformative technology.”

Baker Botts announced yesterday that are moving into their next phase of “Associate Attributes Model [pdf]“, established in 2008, through the implementation of the “Talent Management Program“. The idea is to move Associates off of the lock-step model that has been prevalent in law firms, and toward more of a merit-based system that evaluates the talent and performance of the Associate to determine his or her “level” within the Associate ranks. So, old Army guys like myself can think of it as a pseudo-military officer ranking:

  • “Junior Associate” = 2nd Lieutenant
  • “Mid Associate” = 1st Lieutenant
  • “Senior Associate” = Captain

Just like in the military, the people you graduated with at the Academy (these are top firms… so no ROTC’ies) wouldn’t automatically get promoted at the same time. Three factors are used to determine the skills of the Associates, including “Core Attributes”, “Professional Skills” and “Interpersonal Skills”, and those go through a rigorous five step process by established individual and committees of supervising lawyers. Here’s a list of the five steps:

Step 1: Associates Are Requested to Identify Supervising Lawyers
Step 2: Departments Form Evaluation Committees Interview supervising lawyers
Step 3: Evaluation Committee Interviews Supervising Lawyers
Step 4: Data Compilation and Evaluation
Step 5: Associates’ Formal Evaluation Meetings

The overall purpose of this evaluation and three-levels of Associates is to respond to requests from the “clients for a clear demonstration that lawyers’ experience and capabilities correlate to their billing rates.” Of course, Baker Botts adds that they will still be paying their entry-level associates $160,000 a year.

It’s this last part (the salary) that makes me wonder why Baker Botts is going to all this trouble to look like they are breaking away from the old “business as usual” only to fall right back into the trappings of BigLaw version 2007 all over again? I won’t even get into the logistical nightmare of trying to get partners to sit in and effectively work on “evaluation committees.

I could be off base here, but it seems right now that it is a buyer’s market when it comes to hiring talent out of law schools, and it doesn’t seem like any firms are taking advantage of this. Why is a Texas-based firm that is hovering in the middle-40’s of the AmLaw 100 paying the same salaries for Associates as a top-5 firm? The talent pool isn’t shrinking, but the amount of talent that is being pulled out of that pool is. So, there is a lot more talent available for the picking… and many of them are not going to wind up in a big firm. Add to that the huge amount of talented 3rd, 4th and 5th year associates that are still looking for work, and you’d think that firms would be sitting pretty in getting talent at salaries closer to 1997 levels than at 2007 levels. My co-blogger Toby is the one with the Masters in Economics, but even I seem to understand a little about supply and demand (which seems to have alluded some firms out there.)

It just seems that adding levels and evaluating the talent of Associates is a good start, but if you’re just going to continue the same recruiting, hiring techniques used in the past, coupled with the “pay whatever the top guys are paying and we’ll get equal talent” idea, that you’re just not dealing with the reality of how to manage talent, manage salaries, manage billing rates, and manage client expectations. Perhaps these steps are coming in the next phase of the Associates Attributes Model?