One of the ideas behind hiring consultants is that they bring experience and expertise into your organization and help guide you to where you need to go.  Many times, however, we end up using consultants to verify what we already know, but cannot get others within the organization to trust in our decisions.  Sometimes we come out of meeting with consultants and tell each other things like “see, we’re not that far off.”

Of course consultants also give us a view of ourselves without the veil of our internal biases.  Sometimes it is good to hear someone ask us “why are you doing that?”  If the answer is “because we’ve always done it that way” then it gives us a chance to either justify our processes, or be made aware of the bad processes so that they can either be changed or eliminated.

Consultants can also be a wall that we can throw spaghetti at and see what sticks. Sometimes the consultants are the ‘spaghetti throwers’ by making suggestions that we may not have thought of on our own.  It is this quality that exposes the previous experience and expertise that we want our consultants to bring to the table.  Many times the spaghetti slides off of the wall, but sometimes it sticks and gives us a fresh approach on how to solve a problem or accomplish a goal.

I had mentioned in my projections for 2010 that this would be a great year to be a consultant.  Because so many of us need to make changes (sometimes make dramatic changes) to how we conduct business in a recovering economy, having a consultant come in and vet our approach to achieving our goals may be money well spent.
[gl]

With all of the fuss surrounding the launch of new premium legal research tools and the increased pricing, or ‘modest premium’, that comes with these resources, it got me to thinking whether a practicing attorney really needs to use one of the Wexisberg products in order to practice law.  I’m sure there are thousands of attorneys that don’t have subscriptions to these services, but my social and professional circle doesn’t seem to cross paths with these attorneys. I think this is a serious question, and I’d love it if someone has examples of attorneys that practice without specifically subscribing to either Westlaw or LexisNexis.

As far as I know there is no State Bar requirement or ethics opinion that says specifically that not using Westlaw or LexisNexis constitutes a violation of professional responsibility.  One can still Shepardize cases the old fashion way (hopefully your county law library still subscribes to the print version.)  And, although the theory behind having Westlaw or LexisNexis is that it makes your legal research easier, there is also the perception that not having such a tool exposes you to malpractice issues.  But does that perception match up with reality?

Let’s say that instead of spending thousands of dollars for Westlaw or LexisNexis (or Bloomberg), how about if I rely solely on one of the more basic research tools?  In Texas, one of the benefits of being a member of the bar is having access to “Free Legal Research”.  Any problems with an attorney relying upon this service as his or her sole source of online legal research?  Are you already doing this??
[gl]

Two recent blog posts (when combined) make for an excellent observation (indirectly) on the ability of the legal market to compare pricing at the fee level -and not the hourly rate level. I have previously made the point about a how market transition from rate pricing to fee pricing makes sense. Clients have no market price for fees to use in evaluating pricing. But this shift to fee-level price comparison has to start somewhere. By combining the lesson of the two blog posts, you see this happening. Jay Shepherd points out that savings for a law department won’t come from discounted rates. He instead suggests “open pricing” which is another way to say “not by the hour.” His three options for saving on fees are: 1- Buy less, 2 – Buy cheaper, or 3 – Use open pricing. The point to take from this is that clients should look at the whole fee (in terms of his open price) instead of evaluating price at the hourly rate level. The second post (article really) explores how Levi Straus went to 100% AFAs. Fees for 2010 were “determined by a review of historical spending trends and planned work for 2010.” They looked at the legal work they bought last year and how much they paid. Then they projected how much work they would need in 2010. Levi Straus figured it out. They evaluated their legal spend at the fee level instead of the rate level. This is easier said than done. For one thing, you have to free yourself from the ‘hours equal value’ mindset and trust your approach. Levi Straus is not asking for hourly bills to make sure they guessed right. Instead their GC states: “My internal lawyers are the most valuable asset I have, and I felt they should be spending their time creating strategic advantages for the business instead of managing outside counsel.” Perhaps its just me seeing trends I am looking for, but I believe these two posts together demonstrate both the value and the ability to move away from the hourly rate pricing market. Clients can function in a world where they evaluate prices at the fee level. With this fee-level pricing market emerging, more and more clients will feel comfortable comparing price at this level. This will put them in a much better position to manage their legal costs going forward.

Toby and I have talked to a lot of folks about the profits that legal research vendors (AKA Wexisberg™) make and how they are lagging indicators during a down economy.  Mostly because they have locked firms into multi-year contracts –some with built in annual increases.  It seems that our thought were verified today when LexisNexis’ parent company announced it had a “Robust” 2009.  Sales were up 14% and operating profits 13%.  Not too bad in a year that had most of its customers scrambling to slash budgets as much as possible.  Not as good as those 30% profits that ThomsonReuters are claimed to have, but not too shabby.
There were two things that caught my attention with this announcement.  First was the funny comment I saw on Twitter:

And second was the ‘corporate-ese’ that backed up Toby and my beliefs that they are lagging indicators in a down economy.  Take a look at this sentence attributed to Reed Elsevier’s Chairman, Anthony Habgood:

“The late cycle nature of some of our markets makes for a tough environment in 2010.”

How could you not love a phrase like “late cycle nature”???  I’m definitely saving up that phrase for my next contract negotiations!
[gl]

Well, it has been a year since I plunked down $60 for a Magic Jack device, a cheap cordless phone, and a year’s worth of phone service.  Last week, I got a notification that it was time to renew the service.  I immediately pulled out my credit card and ponied up another $60 to extend my service for 5 more years.  Overall, I’d say that I’ve been pretty satisfied with the Magic Jack phone service, but that I did have a few issues throughout the year.

The biggest issue I had was a “you can hear me, but I can’t hear you” issue.   About three months in, the Magic Jack would ring, I could answer, the person on the other end could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them.  It was an inconsistent technical issue, that would happen from time to time.  I reinstalled the software, tried a different phone, but it would still happen from time to time.  About a month later, the problem went away…  from what I could tell it wasn’t because I fixed it, it seemed to have fixed itself.

Some of the other issues are mainly annoyances.  Remember that your computer has to be on, and connected to the Internet for the Magic Jack to work.  When you boot up your computer, the Magic Jack window will pop up and stay in front of anything else until it is completely ready to go.  Sometimes, this takes a couple of minutes and can be very annoying when you are just wanting to check email or post a blog, or log into Club Penguin, but have to wait until that darn screen goes away.  Perhaps the most annoying thing is that the Magic Jack logo that pops up tells you to be patient.

The caller id option did not work on my cheap cordless phone (but, I’ve seen that it does work on other cordless phones.)  It also is hit and miss with the answering machine that is built into the cordless phone.  I love the fact that if someone leaves me a message on the Magic Jack voice mail, it gets sent to me via email.  However, there are times when the Magic Jack voice mail doesn’t pick up fast enough (supposed to after 4 rings) and it rolls over to my answering machine.  Again, not a big deal, but can be a bit annoying.

I’m not a big phone talker, but I now have one teenage daughter, and two more waiting in the wings.  They’ve been pretty good about using the Magic Jack to talk to their friends during the day (I’m on Sprint now, so my ‘nights and weekends’ begin at 7:00 PM.)  So, it has kept me under my 1,500 shared monthly minute plan (which any of you with teenagers know that can be eaten up in no time at all!!)

I joked last year about running Magic Jack off of a 3G connection.  Well, that’s no longer a joke.  If you have a netbook or 3G card enabled computer, you can run Magic Jack off that connection. I’m still too cheap, however, to buy a 1968 Dodge Dart so I can pretend I’m Mannix.   They’ve also expanded to run the software off of Macs (Intel processor), and I just discovered that they have a Magic Jack Conference Calling option (available for anyone, not just Magic Jack users.)

So, one year into the experiment of can I continue to live without a land line, and still keep my cell phone bills under control, I’d say that it has been a pretty good experience so far.  I’ll let you know if five years if I’m still using Magic Jack or I’ve found that 1968 Dodge Dart.
[gl]

I feel like I’ve been picking on the folks at Thomson Reuters regarding the launch of WestlawNext, especially with this post last week.  I expected a quick response from Thomson Reuters on my questioning their approach to pushing this out to law firms and more specifically to law students.  The response came this morning from Anne Ellis, Senior Director of the Westlaw Library Relations team.  I thought I’d push this out on the blog as a more reasoned response than the one we got from the anonymous ‘A Westlaw Rep.’  In fact, I hope that Anne cc’d all ‘Westlaw Reps.’ on this so that they can give a better response to the specific questions we had on the roll-out. The first three paragraphs are mostly ‘corporate speak’, but Anne goes on to answer some of the questions we had on the effect that law students will have on the new search algorithm (which was my primary concern.)

There are three points I’d like to address, where it seems speculation has been incorrect and has understandably caused concern: 

Rolling out WestlawNext to law firms. Our sales team will make trials of WestlawNext available to customers based on customer needs and priorities. Customers can learn more about WestlawNext by visiting westlawnext.com. 

Rolling out WestlawNext to law schools. In a previous note, I said that we would begin showing WestlawNext to law schools in a phased rollout of trial passwords, beginning with librarians and faculty this spring, and that we were making plans for launching WestlawNext to law students, with possible introduction as early as the Fall 2010 semester. It appears that it was understood by some that this meant that WestlawNext would be in all law schools by the fall of this year. To be clear, we are still determining timing for our rollout to law schools, and will work closely with law schools and the legal profession overall with the goal of helping them make better potential lawyers as we have always done. 

Questions relating to inexperienced researchers informing the search results. This is a really interesting discussion. I talked to the technology team behind WestlawNext, and student research was never to be part of the algorithm to inform search results. It was a very good question though, and I wish we had spoken to it in our original discussion about the artificial intelligence technology.

WestlawNext is an entirely new platform, and we worked hard in the days around launch to provide the right information to the right individuals. I think we all understand now that there will be questions popping up for awhile as people ask smart questions and as strategy and planning unfold.

We will continue to scan the blogs and listservs for comments that reveal gaps in the discussion, and I will try to speak to those points on a regular basis on Legal Current, the corporate blog for Thomson Reuters, Legal. I invite your questions and comments and I appreciate being part of the discussion.

Anne Ellis
Senior Director, Librarian Relations
Thomson Reuters

Anne’s response makes me feel a little bit better, especially regarding the issues of allowing the 1L’s to affect the algorithm of the WestlawNext search results (which apparently they won’t).  As the product gets pushed out to more law firms, we’ll keep an eye on how firms react and use the new research tool.

I’m seeing some articles of how times seem to be getting better in the large law firm world.  Some associates are back up to the $160K pay range, and that those hard-hit practice areas (Capital Markets, Real Estate, and Corporate) are finally picking back up. So many of you may be thinking that we can start getting back to “normal” now that demand for legal services seems to be rebounding.  But don’t get too happy, because partners say that the best thing they did in this economic downturn was slash budgets [pdf] (politically correct term is “reduce expenses.”)  Even firms that jumped ahead of the curve and began offering alternative fee agreements to their clients seem to be having a hard time collecting on those agreements.
As I was reading through the [pdf] article written by Andrews Kurth’s Amy Sladczyk Hancock, PD Vital To The New Way Forward: Insights from Five Managing Partners (interview of Managing Partners of Andrews Kurth, Bracewell Guiliani, Dickstein Shapiro, Sutherland Asbill, and Steptoe Johnson), I got to thinking about what these BigLaw Managing Partners were seeing in their crystal balls.  As I told some of my peers in a personal note, I usually take my comments from Law Firm CEO’s like I take my eggs — with a grain of salt, but this article got me thinking if there is ‘opportunities’ within the library [KM, IT, etc.] to support professional development.  The big quote of:

“Competitive advantage in the new economy will depend entirely on having better trained lawyers who have been trained more efficiently and more quickly, and [professional development] departments and professionals are vital to helping law firms establish that advantage.” [emphasis mine]  

Seems like that knocking that many of you on the ‘administrative’ or ‘professional’ side of law firms are hearing might be opportunity.
[gl]

Google Tinnitus = When you see a constant buzzing in your Gmail, and it won’t go away, more than likely, you have Google Buzz tinnitus.

We’re usually big fans here of social media, but I don’t think that Google Buzz has won any of the three of us over yet.  So, one of the first things I saw this morning when I logged onto my social media standby (Twitter) was “How Do I Shut Off Google Buzz??”  That’s a great question in need of a “How-To” answer.





Easy Way – Scroll to the bottom of Gmail and Click “turn off Buzz”

But, if you’re just not sure you want to completely turn it off, but just want to ‘hide’ it until you think you’re ready, then you can do it this way:

Step 1:  Open Gmail and click on on the “Settings” link in the upper right-hand corner. 

Step 2: From the Setting Page, click on “Labels” at the top center.

Step 3: On the “Labels” Page, under “Systems labels”, click ‘hide’ in the Buzz row.

And, viola!!  Buzz has been removed from your Gmail (labels at least.)  

I tested it with Toby, and all ‘Buzz’ alerts that normally go to my gmail inbox stopped.  However if you still end up with Buzz alerts in your inbox,  Lifehacker has a good explanation of how to remove Buzz updates from coming to your Gmail inbox.
[gl]

I was a little shocked (I think it may have raised to the level of ‘ticked-off’) yesterday when I read that WestlawNext (WLN) was being rolled out to law schools this Spring, and law students would get access to WLN as soon as the Fall 2010 semester.  While I have no issues with law librarians and faculty at law schools having access to WLN (apparently at no additional cost to the schools), I have to say that I’m extremely disappointed in the people at ThomsonReuters that decided that giving this new product to law students was a good idea.  In fact, it specifically flies in the face of what I and others who traveled to Eagan, Minnesota last month were told.  When Jason Eiseman shot the video of a group of us discussing WLN, if you move up to around the 5:05 minute mark of the video, you hear me specifically applaud the ThomsonReuters decision not to roll this out to law students.

The discussion got pretty heated one of the Private Law Libraries listservs last night and the concensus is that exposing law students to a product that hasn’t been adopted by law firms smacks of a ‘marketing ploy’ to try to force the hands of law firms to accept the new WLN platform, along with its “modest premium” price increase.  As of this posting, there was no response to the list from ThomsonReuters (though I do expect one sometime today.)

Many of the law librarians were even questioning why this new platform wasn’t just included as part of the current contracts rather than as a premium upgrade at an additional cost.  To be fair to ThomsonReuters, I jumped back in the conversation and explained the reasoning that the people on the Project Cobalt team gave me for the “modest premium” upgrade charges that your local Reps will be negotiating. Here are the reasons they gave me:

  • The WestlawNext platform is completely separated from what is now on Westlaw.com.   
  • The infrastructure is completely new, the programming is new, and the search engine is new. 
  • This project (formerly know as Project Cobalt) took about 5 years and an investment of over $1 Billion. 
  • WLN breaks down the 30,000 databases and allows you to search all of them (regardless of what your contract covers) without any extra costs (no additional costs would be incurred until you ‘opened’ or ‘downloaded’ one of the out of contract documents. 
  • In the eyes of ThomsonReuters, this is not simply an upgrade to the product, it is a major redesign of the product from the ground up. 
  • ThomsonReuters will not maintain both WLN and Westlaw.com – with the .com product eventually being discontinued (no time was mentioned)
Although I specifically told the list that these were not my words, but rather what I was told (since no one at ThomsonReuters chimed in to explain their position), I took a beating from some of the folks on the list asking if I was basically WestlawNext’s Monkey. I think that just shows how nervous those of us are that have to manage budgets and then vendors like ThomsonReuters comes along and throws a big monkey wrench into the mix and gives little to no details on the “how much” portion of a product.  And if I have to hear some lame excuse of how “we’re a big company, and sometimes things get put out without our knowledge” from the Library Relations team, I will scream!  
Now the local representatives are making their way around to the law firms, apparently each armed with enough information to scare and confuse the rest of us. (See Lisa Solomon’s blog for how negotiations are going.) Last word from those that spoke to their reps is that the WLN product will be available for use under a $60.00 transactional fee, even if you don’t roll it into your contract.  If you roll it into your contract, then you’ll only pay the “modest premium” increase in your contract rate.  And, since WLN runs on a different web address, if you don’t want your attorneys accessing the new product for the transnational fee, then you’ll need to block the WLN site.  I really hope that information is just a local rep’s opinion and not the policy of ThomsonReuters.  This just adds one more layer of confusion, anger and mistrust to the WLN situation.
I understand that ThomsonReuters is a for-profit company; that WLN is the result of a lot of money and research development; and, that the reps make money when they get firms to ‘upgrade’ rather than ‘maintain’ subscriptions.  My gripe is that when something as big as this is released without someone from the company coming out and letting everyone know when it is officially going to be released, what databases are and are not currently included, who is and who is not going to have access, and how much the darn thing is going to cost you, then it sounds like I’m dealing with a used car sales team rather than ThomsonReuters.  
Here’s my suggestion to ThomsonReuters —  WestlawNext looks like a pretty good product, and it implements some good technology. Don’t blow this thing up out of the gates by pushing out information piecemeal.  Don’t let your marketing team override the library relations and development team on who should and who should not get access.  Don’t send local sales reps out with pieces of information so that each of us is given a different story on how much this is going to cost and what is included.  Times are tough for library budgets right now.  Now is not the time to try to force firms into upgrading a product through manipulation and confusing tactics.  A damaged relationship with your clients is a very, very difficult thing to repair.
[gl]


Yesterday I received a notice about Google releasing Buzz. So I followed the link to … my Gmail account. Huh? Strike One. After going back to the release notice, I finally found a statement that said something like, “Oh yeah – you might not have it yet.”

Still nothing this morning when I checked it again. Then about 9:30 I went to check my Gmail and there it was (and my Gmail wasn’t). So I started playing with it. I could see my normal gmail ‘friends’ and had the option to add some others. Whoopee. I sent a note to Greg as one of my ‘friends’ to see if he was there. He didn’t have it yet (even though he showed on my network). Strike Two.

Although another friend of mine must have also got their Buzz going and commented on my post/message to Greg. This got me checking. By default anything you post is public. Strike Three. So I called Greg and we further explored Buzz as he had made it in. To make something private to him I had to create a ‘group’ and add his name to it. Like I’m going to do that for everyone or every group. Strike Three.

My first post/comment was “Looks like a dumbed-down Wave.” Just like Wave the message threads become very long, which is good for collaboration. However they don’t collapse, so all I can see is the thread I’m in. Strike Four.

Then I went back to Gmail. For every Buzz ‘comment’ I get an email. Back to Buzz to see how I can turn this off. No Buzz settings option found. Strike Five.

Then I looked for a way to add Buzz as a gadget in iGoogle. There are some Buzz Gadgets. Of course, not Google Buzz. Strike Six.

Ten minutes into Buzz and we have two batters out and no desire to send another to the plate. After chatting with Greg, we can’t see why anyone would switch over from everything else they use for social networking that works and start using this.

Judgment. A definite Social Media Buzzkill.