One of the big questions that rolled around in my head about WilmerHale’s centralization of their Administrative Departments into one Ohio office was “How can they afford to move all these people and relocate to a place where they don’t have an existing office??”  Well, it turns out that the State of Ohio, Montgomery County, and the city of Kettering are laying out huge cash grants and tax credits to lure WilmerHale to the Dayton suburb.  According to the Manufacturers Group Inc.:

(WilmerHale) has been awarded a 65 percent job creation tax credit for an eight-year term as a result of the company’s project in the City of Kettering (Montgomery County). The value of the tax credit is estimated at $1,456,570 over the term, and the company would be required to maintain operations at the project site for at least 11 years. WilmerHale has more than 1,000 lawyers, with offices in 12 cities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. WilmerHale provides legal representation across a comprehensive range of practice areas that are critical to the success of its clients. This $3.4 million project is expected to create 187 jobs. (emphasis added)

The Springfield News-Sun also mentioned the large cash and tax incentives that WilmerHale got for moving its folks from New York, Boston and Washington DC:

There was also a list of financial incentives, most significantly a $1.46 million job creation tax credit approved Monday, April 26, by the Ohio Tax Credit Authority.

The Montgomery County Commission approved a $250,000 economic development grant April 20, and the city of Kettering and Miami Valley Research Foundation each pledged $500,000 in support. (emphasis added)

I’ve actually got to tip my hat to the WilmerHale partners like Jay Westcott for taking advantage of a down economy and governments that are willing to pay you to move to their towns. According to the Springfield News-Sun, Westcott looked at 32 cities for the centralization and the Dayton suburb apparently struck the right deal with the firm.  Westcott said, “Of all the places we looked, this was the place we were most comfortable, that had a strong labor pool and really a very cooperative group of people who worked with us.”

In an area that has businesses like LexisNexis, NCR there has to be a great labor pool.  I’m sure that the fact that their moving into the old Deloitte Consulting offices along with a few million dollars in grants and tax incentives made the move a no-brainer.

Everyone knows that BigLaw is notorious for being a “monkey-see, monkey-do” industry. If WilmerHale shows that local governments are willing to pony up millions of dollars for a couple hundred jobs, then it can be assumed that more firms will start to centralized their operations. Firms will no longer need to house administrative employees in Class-A real estate offices in high-cost cities.  Soon you might find that many of your IT or Accounting staff is located in cities like Kettering, Ohio, or Tupelo, Mississippi, or Lincoln, Nebraska. Places where economic times are tough and the states are betting that paying millions for a few hundred jobs now can help their struggling economies rebound out of the current recession.

The WilmerHale deal is for ten years.  This makes me think of those Wal-Mart incentives that cities give for a few years, and then after they expire Wal-Mart looks to the next city for another deal and leaves the initial town with an empty building.  Perhaps firms can leverage these few hundred jobs every few years and find local governments willing to pay them to come to town. Get ready to ‘centralize’!!

I ran across a great article this morning which stresses how “Emotional intelligence is the new benchmark to a successful legal career.”  Alison Bernard and Niki Kopsidas of Fried Frank collaborated on the article “How High Is Your ‘EI’?” in the New York Law Journal’s “Special Report: Law Schools“. Bernard and Kopsidas lay out a path for law students to follow to help them traverse the additional elements that law firms are now looking for in their incoming associates. Firms are starting to look beyond a high class ranking at an Ivy League law school when looking at candidates.

To be a successful attorney in this economy, it is imperative to not only be an expert in a legal field, but to also offer superlative client service and maintain client relationships.

The article goes on to discuss what law firm recruiters need to start focusing on when interviewing candidates.  Grades and pedigree are starters, but other factors such as “social and emotional competencies… being flexible, adaptable, creative, empathetic, self-aware, optimistic, confident and self-motivated, and the ability to persevere, exert self-control, display good judgment, influence and get along with others” are critical to seeing the candidate’s potential.

Skipping over the what do to during interviews and while in law school sections, I liked how the article finished on what associates need to focus on when they actually start working. There are a number of opportunities for new lawyers to work on their ‘hard skills’ through the firm’s professional development training in order to learn the “practicing law” part of the job (although as we mentioned this week, sometimes a little ‘retraining’ needs to take place). Bernard and Kopsidas stress that new associates should also work to develop those “soft skills” that “cover how to be a professional at a client service organization.”

I’d argue that many firms don’t stress “hard” or “soft” skills enough. Many times it seems that the process of training is to push associates into the deep end of the pool and expect them to start swimming. Other professional services, such as the big four accountant firms, have training that goes on for weeks before they allow their new employees to start working on their clients’ matters. Perhaps this model should start working its way over from the BigFour to BigLaw.

Even though this article was written from the perspective of a law firm Director of Attorney Development and a Director of Legal Recruitment, you could apply most of the ideas across almost any industry that provides a service to its customer.

The Official Google Blog mentioned that they are bringing one of their features out of the shadows in order to help searchers find sites that are related to those in the search result. According to the post, Google has actually:

offered a “Similar” feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible. Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently. Starting this week, for queries where similar sites are likely to be helpful, we’ll display a list of “Pages similar” at the bottom of the results page.

So when you do a search now, some of your results will now have a “Similar” link next to the handy “Cached” link.

The current search is then re-ran and sites with similar content are supposed to appear.  I tested it out briefly this morning and liked what I saw.
For those of us “advanced” searchers, we can manipulate what Google’s doing here to help in other ways.  Say for example that you want to find sites that are “Similar” to 3 Geeks…  simply type in this search:

related:geeklawblog.com

The resulting search will show you other blogs that have similar content to us. This type of searching can be helpful for Competitive Intelligence Analysts that find unique websites and want to see others that are like it… or are looking for competitors of a certain company.  For example, if I type in “related:dlapiper.com“, I get a listing of other BigLaw firms.  If I type in “related:westlaw.com“, I get a list of legal research websites… and so on, and so on.
This is a pretty useful option that Google is giving a second chance. If you’re wanting to find your website’s relations, then the “related:” option from Google is something you’ll want to test out.

Very interesting press release from WilmerHale yesterday announcing that this September they are opening a 187 employee “Business Service Center” in Dayton, Ohio. WilmerHale is moving existing employees from their current offices (along with some new hires) to handle the administrative support functions for the following areas:

  • Finance
  • Human Resources
  • Information Technology
  • Operations
  • Document Review and Management
  • Practice Management
The idea behind the centralization is to “provide improved efficiencies for administrative teams and the firm, and reduce significant operational expenses.” 
I did notice that other departments — Library, Knowledge Management, Marketing, Business Development to name a few– missed the cut to be included in this consolidation of administrative functions. At least they missed it this time around. It makes me think whether these departments could actually work under a centralized method that is outside any of the actual offices that house lawyers??  Quite frankly, I can see a strong argument for both sides. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these WilmerHale departments eventually winding up in Dayton.
I do have one suggestion for WilmerHale to rethink the name they’ve given to this centralization project…  don’t be surprised if those that you’re asking to relocate, or those attorneys that have to deal with the logistics of a remote staff end up calling the “Business Service Center”, the “BS Center”.  
[Update 4/28]
According to the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun, WilmerHale was offered a $1.46 million job creation tax credit, and there will be $1.25 in City and County “economic development grants” to support this move.
That answers the “how can they afford to move so many people” question…
The new WilmerHale Business Services Center facility is actually in Kettering and previously housed Deloitte Consulting.

After seeing and hearing too many fee discussions about discounts – a new thought clicked in my head. Clients are negotiating on discounts, not rates. The actual rates might matter with a wide a variation, but in most circumstances when clients push on law firms, it’s not on the absolute rates, but instead it’s about how big is the discount.
Upon reflection, there is a logic of sorts to this method. In-house counsel get pressure from management to cut legal fees. The simplest, most direct and seemingly logical message to bring back to management: We increased the discount by X% (which might be interpreted as – our legal fees will go down by X% this year).
The problem is – you can’t and shouldn’t make that leap of faith about savings . Even if the client/in-house lawyer keeps a close tab on hours billed (not the highest value task IMHO), then the absolute rate is what should matter – not the discount.
My suggestion to clients: If you want to maximize the return on your efforts with hourly billing, instead of talking discounts, focus your negotiations on rates.

Over lunch Greg and I were watching a new waiter be trained in how to best serve diner clients. The Mentor was giving constant feedback to the Trainee. At one point the Trainee had just walked past a table when the Mentor asked if the customers at the table needed more water. The trainee responded: “They haven’t ask for more water.”
The Mentor did his best to contain himself and very succinctly stated, “If the customer has to be the one to ask, you just lost them.” He explained that customers do not want to beg for service, they just expect it and are willing to reward it. Without this service, which the Mentor described as “reading their minds,” the customer will not be coming back.
Lesson: If your clients have to ask you for AFAs, you have already lost them. Or at a minimum you may be well down the road to losing them.

A memo (see snippet below) was sent out to all associates at one national firm last week mandating any associate that “utilizes or intends to utilize Westlaw” to attend a training session to learn the firm’s “Best Practices”. I’m actually glad to see that a firm has stepped up and created a “Best Practices” manual for using resources like Westlaw, and is using the professional staff in the library to do the training (rather than having the Westlaw rep come in and do it for them.)

Training is “supposed” to be an ongoing event for the firm, especially on a product like Westlaw that can be one of the biggest expenses for the firm. But, let’s be honest… how many associates attend the weekly or monthly training sessions held in the library? Probably very few. What firms are left with then are self-taught associates that probably do not understand the difference between an in-contract search versus an out-of-contract search… or how cost recovery even works. I’m sure many of us have heard someone ask “it’s all in our Westlaw contract, right? Therefore it doesn’t cost the firm for me to use it, right?” And then watch their eyes glaze over when you explain what each search costs the firm, and how the firm eats the costs of their searches that are not billable to a client.
Training is one of the areas that has been hardest hit in the library, especially after the Great Recession put the squeeze on firms. When you basically turn associates loose on expensive resources like Westlaw or Lexis without giving them the proper training, then you’re asking for trouble. But like most things in a law firm, the problem has to explode before anyone will take it seriously. Creating “Best Practices” document (it should be written down, you know!!), is a great start. However, this problem of poorly trained associates didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t be solved over a one-hour lunch program either.
I’m hoping that the associates walk away from this lunch training with a better understanding of how the firm’s contract with Westlaw works, how the client is billed (or not billed) for the work, what additional costs can be incurred through poor researching techniques, and the email and phone numbers of the folks in the library to contact the next time they have questions on how to use Westlaw properly.

Just to prove that Thomson Reuters isn’t alone in its quest to gobble up the legal publishing market, I thought that I’d put together a list of Reed Elsevier mergers (LexisNexis’ Parent Corp.)  Again, the mergers are uploaded to a Google Docs spreadsheet for anyone to download and add play with in your own spreadsheets.  Of course, I wouldn’t have thought to pull this together if it weren’t for Sarah Glassmeyer’s inspiration.  Kudos also to David Curle for his revenue perspective of legal publishing mergers.

If you’ve ever wondered if there is a program out there that can automate some of the processes you need to do through a web browser, then iMacros from iOpus is the plug-in you need. Believe it or not, I used to program web browser macros using the Visual Basic for Applications program in Microsoft Word. It was time consuming and a pain to program, but a few hours of setting up a macro saved me days of time when I had to do data entry of thousands of records that had to be type in by hand, one at a time, through a web browser. Fortunately, I don’t have to remember Visual Basic commands like “Dim htm As IHTMLDocument2” or “TextBox1.Text = WebBrowser1.LocationURL”.  Now I can use the iMacros plug-in to set up the macro for me.

So you may be thinking of why you might need to have a macro plug-in for your web browser. Let me give you a couple of examples.

  1. Those darn forms that have 15 text box fields (14 of which are generic, but still need to be filled in) and only one of them that is unique. Think of a UPS form, a new matter opening form, an InterLibrary Loan form, or a research request form that you have to fill out multiple times. Instead of typing in your name, address, blah, blah, blah… you can record a macro using iMacros (right in your browser), and then have it automate all those repetitive steps for you.  
  2. Those darn websites that you need to run a search in everyday because they don’t have an ‘alert’ feature that would do it for you. This works especially well for those databases that you access through your public library. Instead of having to re-run the same search manually, set up the iMacros to go to the sight, log you in, go to the right database, run the search and then either copy or email you the results.

The iMacros plug-in is available for IE, FireFox, and now for Chrome (my favorite!!). There is also a stand alone version that does much more complex web macros, like update from Excel or Access tables (free 30-day eval, then $49.00 – $499.00 depending upon version). There is even enterprise versions that start at $699.00 and goes up to $4999.00.

iMacros are fun to play with and create, but really can save you a lot of time on certain projects if you set them up right. Go take a look at some of the demos to see some of the features that iMacros offers.

Hats off to Sarah Glassmeyer for graphing out the shrinking legal publisher market in a way that really shows how much consolidation has been going on over the past 30+ years (see the full graph).  Glassmeyer lists out the three big publishers (Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer) and show how much of the market that these big players have gobbled up.

The list is primarily showing the actual print publishers like Banks-Baldwin (which was shut down by Thomson Reuters last week.)  I thought I’d have a little fun and add in some of the other legal products that have also been gobbled up. It was a heck of a project, so I just did the Thomson Reuters mergers and put it out on a Google Docs page so that anyone can copy and paste it into their own spreadsheets if they want.  [note: you’ll need to do some re-formatting when you put it into your own spreadsheet.]

I’m sure that I missed many of the mergers that have taken place, but it gives you a visual on how much the market is shrinking under a few umbrellas. On the other hand, there are still a lot of upstarts out there that are entering the market all the time, so maybe that will help balance things out in the end.
I hope that someone (or a crowd of people… hint, hint) will take the time to make a Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer spreadsheet and share it with the rest of us.