Thanks to a tip from Jim Hassett, I had the opportunity to see a demo of the new beta version of Onit Project Manager. This system fits nicely with Jim’s “low hanging fruit” approach to Legal Project Management (LPM). Eric Elfman, a founder of the company, was nice enough to come by our offices and show us this new application.
First impressions: Simple and easy to use. Per my low hanging fruit comment, this is not your overkill project management software system. Instead it’s designed to fit within the existing work-day of a lawyer. As such, it has good potential to provide the first step into LPM for a lawyer or firm.
As a SaaS application, it also has a low threshold for adoption. As a free application, it’s something even Greg would use. So if you are looking for an easy, obvious first step into LPM, take a look at Onit.
Going forward, Onit will introduce an enterprise version with more administrative capabilities. Onit will also introduce a spend management system to complement the LPM offering.
Eric, as a founder of Datacert, understands this market and appreciates the needs of lawyers, firms and corporate legal departments. The application has some room to grow, so I will definitely keep an eye on it. Per Paul Easton, Onit is also looking for input from users, if you want to dive in even deeper.

As ageing Baby Boomer law firm library directors retire, there seems to be a growing trend to eliminate the Library Director position and either run the department by committee, or move responsibility for the law library to the Chief Information Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, or to existing Directors of other departments such as Knowledge Management. So far, I’ve seen very little reaction from the associations that represent law librarians (whether it is AALL, SLA, or local associations) in protest of these moves. I now know of at least three AmLaw 100 firms that no longer have a Library Director, and have no plans to rehire those positions because they do not see the value that this position brings to their firms. So, are law firm Library Directors passé? If we don’t start doing something about this trend right now they sure as hell soon will be.

How many law schools are out there that do not have a law librarian as director (usually with an Associate Dean title) running the library? Zero! One!! Why?? Because the ABA guidelines specifically say there must be a director, and even goes further to suggest that the Director hold a law degree and a library degree. Here are the standards for Law Library Director that the ABA places on all law schools:

Standard 603. DIRECTOR OF THE LAW LIBRARY

(a) A law library shall be administered by a full-time director whose principal responsibility is the management of the law library.
(b) The selection and retention of the director of the law library shall be determined by the law school.
(c) A director of a law library should have a law degree and a degree in library or information science and shall have a sound knowledge of and experience in library administration.
(d) Except in extraordinary circumstances, a law library director shall hold a law faculty appointment with security of faculty position.
Interpretation 603-1
The director of the law library is responsible for all aspects of the management of the law library including budgeting, staff, collections, services and facilities.
Interpretation 603-2
The dean and faculty of the law school shall select the director of the law library.
Interpretation 603-3
The granting of faculty appointment to the director of the law library under this Standard normally is a tenure or tenure-track appointment. If a director is granted tenure, this tenure is not in the administrative position of director.
Interpretation 603-4
It is not a violation of Standard 603(a) for the director of the law library also to have other administrative or teaching responsibilities, provided suf cient resources and staff support are available to ensure effective management of library operations.

For law firms, even those in the AmLaw 100, 200 or NLJ 250, there is no such requirement or suggested qualifications for someone managing the firm’s law library. Therefore, law firms have absolutely no pressure put on them to place qualified professionals in charge of their libraries. The only thing that law librarians seem to have is the American Lawyer’s annual Law Librarian Survey, but that has no effect upon any of the AmLaw 100 or AmLaw 200 rankings.

The simple fact is that even large AmLaw 100 firms have absolutely no requirement to have a law library director position. And as far as I know, there is no movement within the ABA, AALL, SLA, American Lawyer, National Law Journal, or any other organization to set a requirement similar to Standard 603 for law firms. Is it time to push for such a standard for large law firms? Or did law librarians miss the opportunity to solidify their roles within law firms and are now watching as the top library positions disappear forever?

When I’m asked what I do all day, I usually answer that I monitor changes in information and relay those changes to the appropriate people, at the appropriate time. Perhaps I could put an anagram on this process and call it JITI (Just In Time Information). The key to JITI is a combination of human knowledge and creativity combined with automated resources designed to capture, filter and format the information in a way that makes clean-up, organization and dissemination easier. One of the newest resource I’ve discovered is the webpage bookmarking tool called Diphur.

For years now, I’ve been using WatchThatPage.com (WTP) as my go-to resource for monitoring changes in websites. In fact, WTP is still my favorite resource because of its simplicity, and how I can get great results compiled in a single email. However, WTP does not have the ability to set up RSS feeds of those results, and as far as I can tell, has no plans to do so in the immediate future. When I came across Diphur last week, I thought I’d give it a go to see how well it compares to WTP for monitoring changes in webpages. So far… it looks pretty promising.

Diphur allows you to bookmark webpages, and ‘tag’ those webpages with bookmarks that you define. For example, I monitor changes in AmLaw 100 firms’ client alerts and news pages, so I find the page I want, enter the URL into Diphur, and then tag it with Law Firm>>News, and now I have an ability to upload these tagged pages into an RSS feeder, or get email alerts that monitor the changes. When there is a change in one of the webpages that Diphur is monitoring, I can see those changes in one place. This morning, for example, there was a change in one of the Dechert law firm pages, and I received an update that looked like this:

Something changed on the website your bookmark is monitoring, please see the changes below.

> 7% change via dechert.com for the day Mon, May 17, 2010 

Nice and clean looking update, with the changes in the webpage clearly displayed for easy reading and dissemination. Although Diphur doesn’t compile all of the pages I’m monitoring into one update like WTP does, the RSS feed option can kind of work as a one-stop place to monitor the changes.
Diphur allows you to set the percentage of change that needs to occur. This prevents a lot of the minor changes (changes in dates, etc.) from being sent to you every day. Depending upon the page you’re monitoring, you can adjust the percentage of change that needs to occur before an update is sent to you. It will probably take some tweaking to get the page results just right, but tools like these sure make monitoring hundreds (or thousands) of webpages a whole lot easier to do.

Diphur is a brand new resource (launched on April 5, 2010), and is still working out some of the kinks. They have blog that discusses some of the issues (read: bugs) that they are dealing with, as well as following up on their ongoing philosophy “to listen to users and implement what they want”. You got to like a philosophy like that!

So, if you have to monitor changes in webpages, go give Diphur a try. Let us know what you think about it, and how it compares to resources that you may already be using.

It seems that I’m finding out lately that “the more I know… the more I know I don’t know”. Yesterday was a prime example of how I learned about two things that I probably should have know about well before yesterday.

New PACER “Look & Feel”


First up… PACER is launching a new “look and feel” for its website. You already knew this?? Well, I sure missed the memo on this change. I rechecked my RSS feeds, and sure enough… turns out that my buddy Joe Hodnicki over at the Law Librarian Blog tried to clue me in way back on April 30th! (That’s like a year in “Internet Time”). One of the things that didn’t make me feel too bad about missing this piece of information was the fact that almost everyone I talked to seemed to have missed it too. So, in case you also missed that little piece of information, you can go today and look at the preview of the new PACER site (http://pcl.uscourts.gov). You HAVE to go today to see the preview, because the new site launches tomorrow!!

Well have a review of the new PACER site early next week, but in the meantime, here’s a brief overview of some of the new changes that come with the new “Look & Feel”:

The Case Locator replaces the U.S. Party/Case Index and provides enhanced search and display capabilities including the ability to:
  – request lists of cases for a specified date range by court type;
  – conduct searches based on chapter, discharge date and dismissal date for bankruptcy cases;
  – access case information for the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation;
  -choose result formats, including HTML, delimited text, and XML which can be easily imported to other programs for analysis;
  – change the sort order of the results displayed; and
  -conduct refined searches within the results of a previous search.

CourtCall – The “Not Quite Virtual” Telephonic Court Appearance Resource

I kind of convinced myself that missing the PACER changes was forgivable… but, this next item seems to point to my being completely ignorant of a resource that has been around for over 15 years. I had someone call me asking if we had access to a product called “CourtCall“. I responded quickly with “What the Heck is CourtCall??”  Which was my not-so-intelligent way of saying “I don’t think we subscribe to that service.” Well, I had to listen for five minutes while the person on the other end of the line raved about how this service allows you to schedule a telephone appearance with a court rather than having to drive or fly to make the appearance. This sounded eerily like a low-tech version of Lisa’s virtual courts post from a couple of weeks ago. I jumped out on the web and started doing some quick research on the service and then immediately started kicking myself for not knowing about this years ago.

Here’s a brief overview of the product from CourtCall’s website:

CourtCall created the turn-key telephonic court appearance system that has become the industry standard. Our mission is to educate Judges, court staff, lawyers, and clients about the time and money saving advantages of CourtCall Appearances and provide such services with innovation, diligence, and courtesy.
The CourtCall Telephonic Appearance Program is an organized and voluntary way for lawyers to telephonically make routine civil, criminal, probate, bankruptcy and other appearances from their offices, homes or other convenient locations at no cost to the Court. Unlike common practices, neither Court staff nor lawyers are required to coordinate the time or logistics of the call. Instead, by simply paying a reasonable fixed fee and filing with CourtCall the Request for CourtCall Appearance form in advance, a lawyer may make a CourtCall Appearance.

I haven’t used this before, but the amount of coverage that CourtCall has looks to be amazing! Here’s a PDF list of the courts and judges that participate. I did do a quick check of some other blogs to see what the reviews are, and most were positive, with one posted yesterday by Cheryl Meril being a little more hesitant on giving a stamp of approval to CourtCall, but mostly on the idea that the calls are impersonal, and could cause issues of missing important visual clues that only come from actually being in the courtroom. I also found it a little interesting that CourtCall has a revenue sharing program (PDF of press release) with the courts. Perhaps I’m being a little oversensitive, but courts, private business and revenue sharing tend to raise red flags (even if everything is on the up-and-up.)

If you’ve ever used CourtCall, give me some comments of what you think about it. I’m wondering how long it could be before Lisa’s virtual courtroom could become a reality. If courts are willing to do telephone appearances, then it seems logical that with access to video communication over VoIP lines should be the next step in CourtCall’s future.

So there’s the two things I learned yesterday. I’m sure there are a bazillion other things I should know about, so I’ll keep my ears open, my RSS feed flowing, my Twitter account active, and my listserv reading up-to-date in order to learn more of what I should have already known.

We all to think we are ‘special’ and bring high value to our jobs. However, the past two years have made pretty much everyone (except maybe the Chinese) nervous about their prospects. Even lawyers are thinking about the possibility that they are not as ‘special’ as they once thought. In the words of one colleague, “The Guild has been broken.”
A recent NY Times article on this issue helped bring my thoughts into focus on this topic, especially since my dang economics background keeps creeping into my brain. The article uses an admin worker in Florida to demonstrate how some US jobs are now obsolete. In a recent conversation with Greg, I had made a an eerily similar comment about how the Great Reset has accelerated the globalization trend of moving US jobs to cheaper labor sources, be they computers or foreign laborers.
The subject of the article states: “I know I’m good at this. So how the hell did I end up here?” This is one counter example, where “good enough” is no longer good enough or more specifically, no longer cost effective. Although this worker “can anticipate people’s needs” technology has allowed people to anticipate their own needs – and do it better, faster, cheaper.
Adding 2 and 2 together – the legal profession is sailing in to the perfect storm of obsolescence. At the same time of accelerating change and a powerful recession – the guild has been broken. With the profession’s tendency to lean on precedence for decision making, we are in for one seriously rough ride.
My advice: The people who figure out to make themselves obsolete will be the winners. Think on that one for a while.

When you’ve looked at all of the great things that the web analytics tool Woopra does, you’ll probably never go back to Google Analytics again (and I really like Google Analytics). I’ve been monitoring the traffic on 3 Geeks for the past few months using Woopra, and I have to tell you that it is very addictive.

Woopra allows you to watch what visitors to your site are currently reading (yes, LIVE STATS!!), as well as how they found you, what links they clicked on while on your site, where they are from, and much, much more. Woopra also allows you to view a live map of where your visitors are from, run reports, set up filters and notifications, conduct live chat with visitors (which I haven’t tried because it sounds a little creepy), and view a calendar of visits and page views.

Woopra is free (for up to 30K page views a month), and there are subscription plans starting at $4.95 a month if you want to track >30K. I’ve embedded a great (and short) video from Trey Ratcliff over at Stuck In Customs where he goes through a few (just a few) of the great things that Woopra does to analyze your website traffic. If you have a website… you have to try Woopra!

One of the comments that I hear tossed around these days is how those entering the workforce now (AKA “new associates”, “new paralegals”, “new project assistants”) will be “computer savvy” or “better equipped” for things like online research, Web 2.0, or the virtual workplace. I try to chime in with my opinion that those that believe this are mistaking “comfort and familiarity” with “skill”. For example, a new associate may have great skills when it comes to driving a six-speed Ferrari on the mean streets of “Need for Speed”, but can he or she transfer those skills to an actual Ferrari on the mean streets of Los Angeles? The skills are not automatically transferable, and you’d probably end up with either a few scratches and dents or a blown transmission than someone that can parallel park the car by sliding it in with a 180 degree slide.

Andrea DiMaio over at the Gartner Blog Network penned a great post on “Why Digital Immigrants May Be Better Off Than Digital Natives” where she eloquently states:

The common wisdom says that they [Digital Natives] are better at socializing and crowdsourcing, but are they? Do they gather their collective intelligence when they realize that they cannot solve problems alone, or do they just do so, outsourcing their individual efforts to the power of the collective, living the dream of a world where nobody is really accountable because everybody else is?
I think that we [Digital Immigrants] have been celebrating and cocooning digital natives for too long. What lies ahead of us are very uncertain times, where the ability, willingness and courage to tackle problems individually is as important as the ability to engage others (the “collective”).

Well said! DiMaio goes on to point out one of the biggest differences between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives is the fact that we grew up with the understanding that even in the computer and online worlds, there was a scarcity of resources and we had to adapt and deal with the limited resources we had at our disposal. Digital Natives on the other hand do not have the same insights into the scarcity of resources. Digital Natives do not seem to see the shadow of the future where success is determined by what they know and how well they socialize and crowdsource their way to a solution, rather than by the coolness of “how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers they have.”

President Obama deflated the egos of the tech savvy graduates at the University of Virginia when he pointed out skills learned through entertainment do not always transfer to skills needed in the workforce today:

‘With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.’

 I should point out that Digital Immigrants were told by President Reagan that their PacMan skills could transfer into usable work skills:

‘I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.’ (Aug 8, 1983)

We soon learned that just because we could storm the castle and save Princess Zelda from her dragon captor all day long, but those skills weren’t very useful when learning to fly a jet. It’s nice that the current President doesn’t seem to be confusing technology and entertainment with knowledge and work skills.

I am thinking about social networking. I know. You say, aren’t you always thinking about social networking, Lisa? Well, no. I also think about fashion, friends and my latest celebrity crush. (BTW, did you know that there are only 4 degrees of separation between me and @aplusk??? My apologies; I digress. I wonder if he’s on LinkedIn??) But all of that aside, I was wondering: can you cause a mood to pass along a social network? Like trending topics, can we start an online social swell of emotion? For, as you know, the underpinning of any good marketing campaign is the evocation of an emotion, be it fear, covetousness or admiration. Just think iPad and you get what I mean. So just how do you accomplish that feat in a social network? If what Nicholas Christakis says is true during his TedTalk, then we are highly influenced by our social network’s level of happiness, anger, sadness or depression. We saw it happen when Facebook announced its new terms. Angry networks buzzed. We saw it when Michael Jackson died. Memorials were held online. So how can legal marketers manufacture a feeling over an online social network? How can I get that wave going? Say for instance, I want to impress upon my law firm clients and professional colleagues that they should call my firm when the long arm of the law reaches out for them. I must impress upon them long before that event happens that I am ever-ready and ever-vigilant to come to their aid. I want to invoke a feeling of trustworthiness and safety; in a word, Rambo (a nod to my Greek friend, Chris). So for me, it means sending a steady stream of useful information on a daily basis across all social networking channels. It means being engaged in the stream of things, writing strong copy, being responsive. It means re-tweeting info that I might think is helpful to my followers. In these small ways, I am hoping to engender positive feelings. Its not easy; law firms (and I) are natural outliers. So to inject them into a social networking setting is awkward, at best. And lawyers, by the very nature of our business, are reactive so we cannot create legally-charged situations. But as any lawyer knows, a lawyer and his firm become important when the authorities start asking hard questions. They are designed to take the heat for everyone. We can become subject matter authorities, speaking on relevant topics. So law firms may seem like the strong, silent types. But we serve a good purpose. You wouldn’t want your lawyer to act like they are at the law-law-pa-loosa, would ya?

I was discussing some of the issues raised by Craig Ball in his article “Are We Paying Five times too Much for E-Discovery” with some friends of mine when I realized how lucky I was to be in the law firm’s Library/Research department rather than attempting to manage an E-Discovery department. Listening to some of the stories and reading blog posts discussing the reactive strategies that firms adopt when addressing e-discovery projects made my head start to spin (actually, it was more of a slow shaking of disbelief.) Electronic Discovery is not exactly a new phenomenon in the legal industry, but while listening to some of the stories, it was like every attorney that found themselves with an e-discovery case had no idea how to handle it, yet was determined that he or she knew better than the e-discovery experts that were employed by their firm.

Now, I’m sure there are folks out there that have outstanding e-discovery programs, great relationships with their attorneys and clients, and a stable of proficient third-party e-discovery partners they can depend upon for consistent pricing and accurate results. However, from the folks I’ve been talking to, that sounds like the exception and not the rule. What I’m hearing is issues of attorneys submitting data in a hodge-podge fashion; attorneys and clients working out deals with e-discovery vendors on matters without discussing it with those in the firm that are supposed to be the go-to people for e-discovery; vendors charging one price on Monday, and a different price on Tuesday for the same work; pressure to conduct in-house e-discovery work with unobtainable deadlines using inadequate resources, and; the only consistent questions being asked is “how much is this going to cost?” quickly followed by “why does it cost that much?”  It would be like me trying to run a law library and having each attorney negotiate separate Westlaw or Lexis contracts on a per-matter basis.

In fact, just like with research, e-discovery really fits that definition of an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. When legal research is conducted using improper search queries, or wrong databases, or even wrong research tools, it results in extra costs that are either passed along to the client or eaten by the firm. The same results happen with e-discovery processes. Heading down the wrong path on e-discovery processes results in backtracking and having to start the process over and all the time and money spent turns out to have been wasted. When I conduct orientation for new associates, I stress to them that the research staff in the library has a wealth of knowledge and experience that they need to leverage when conducting research on issues that  the associates are unfamiliar. Same applies with e-discovery experts. It’s not saying that the attorney can’t understand how to do the work… it’s just that we’ve hired experts that can make sure that they are focused on doing what they do best, and that is working as a lawyer and finding legal issues surrounding discovery… not working as a technologist and attempting to figure out the best manner to extract data from hard drives.

I went back and re-read Toby’s post last week on reducing price and cost, where he presses for a “business goal” when it comes to handling e-discovery. However, this exercise seems to assume that there is some sort of stability in how firms handle their e-discovery matters. The only way to fight the “Wild West” effect, and move toward a stable e-discovery process is through the establishment of best practices. Law firms have to create best practices for their e-discovery processes that:

  • specifically that lay out how  matters are handled each and every time;
  • define exactly who is in charge of processing the data;
  • that clarify to the attorneys and clients the cost involved, and;
  • identify what can be handled in-house versus what has to go to predetermined third-party vendors for processing.  

My suggestion was that regardless of how long the E-Discovery Best Practices guide turns out, that there should be a one to two-page cheat sheet that is distributed to every attorney that works on matters that involve e-discovery. The faster you can get everyone on the same page, the faster you can get away from the Wild West approach and start working toward those e-discovery business goals.

Continuing my exploration of the economics of the practice of law, I listened in on a presentation that included a segment on how law firms may be moving to single providers for primary law access. Although a perennial topic previously noted on 3 Geeks, the rising pressure from clients not to pass on these types of costs is making this decision more of a real option.
Going through a mental exercise of what it likely costs per year, per lawyer for primary law access, I suggest the following math (This excludes the ‘free’ access providers such as Casemaker or Fastcase since they are only available in certain states):

$500 / month: average cost per lawyer for online research services.
$250 / month: 50% of that, to glean out all the high cost, practice specific stuff.
$125 / month: 50% of that, to filter out the secondary resources and editorial content attached to primary law.

The Solution: $125 x 12 months = $1500 in savings per year per lawyer per system for access to primary law.

My experience is that most legal research centers on primary law, so 25% should be a pretty conservative estimate. For a law firm, you could take that number and multiply it by the number of primary law access services you have (minus the one you keep) to come up with the ultimate savings of going to a single provider.
Yes – there are issues with going to a single provider, such as the links between secondary and primary law in a given setting. However, many of those issues can be resolved in negotiations. There will likely be some practice groups who need to retain access to certain primary law services, but it won’t be something the entire firm needs. So a decision to go to a single primary law access service will include a bit of work, but could lead to significant savings.
The real question: How much would your firm save?