I had a great conversation with Darrell Huntsman, VP for New Lexis Innovation Initiatives, yesterday along with a demonstration of the new LexisNexis for Microsoft Office product.  This is ‘Phase I’ of Lexis’ two phase project to rebuild their legal research product ‘from the ground up.’  The second phase will be the ‘New Lexis’ online research product that will be launched probably early in 2011.  An interesting comment from Huntsman was that many of the changes that were announced in the WestlawNext product will be very similar to the New Lexis product.
Why LexisNexis for MS Office?
When I asked Darrell why produce a product that is so integrated with MS Office, he said that they were looking to go “where the lawyers worked.”  Lexis’ research determined that a majority of the lawyer’s work is in building documents.  Whether it is a brief, a client memo, contract or other document, lawyers spend most of their time working within MS Office.  Lexis’ idea is to build their research database information into MS Office so that lawyers are spending less time toggling between their document tools (MS Office) and their research tools (LexisNexis).  So Lexis turned to the Microsoft development team to create a seamless method of connecting the MS Office Suite (Outlook, Work and even SharePoint) to Lexis.  In case you missed the subtlety of that comment, Lexis is not programming the resource, Microsoft is.
New Version of Lexis Classic?
When I saw the look of the product, I immediately thought of the old “Lexis Classic” software that we finally weaned users off of a few years ago.  The difference being that the software was now MS Office rather than Lexis’ stand alone product. It is an interesting approach in moving from the “web” platform (which most research vendors have pushed since 1998) back to a “software” platform. 
When I asked if the ‘views’ that we see when research results are brought back from Lexis are simply an embedded version of Internet Explorer, Huntsman says that it is not.  Instead the MS Office product runs an ‘X-Link’ call to the Lexis database and pipes in the results.  Those results are then formatted by Word or Outlook or SharePoint, and are not web versions at all.  Later versions will optimize the layout for multiple-monitor viewing.  This makes me wonder if the already over bloated MS Office tools will be even slower as a result.  Huntsman says that it will not decrease the speed of MS Office or slow your computer down when making these ‘X-Link’ calls.  Of course, color me skeptical on that issue.
Built for MS Office 2010 – Backward Compatible to 2007, But Not 2003

The LN for MS Office product is specifically designed for the upcoming Office 2010 product that is releasing this summer.  Lexis is taking advantage of the MS Office ribbon feature (you know that ‘feature’ that made learning Office 2007 so hard to do?)  When pressed on how many of the LN clients that will be interested in this product already have MS Office 2007, Huntsman said that probably more than 25% of the firms already had 2007, but that there is a great amount of pressure on those running older versions of Office to move to either 2007, or upgrade to 2010 very soon.  The low percentage may not be a bad thing for LexisNexis right now because they are still working on hardware upgrades on this product, and the New Lexis product.  So a longer transition period will help LexisNexis make sure they have the capacity to handle all the new demand. Perhaps Lexis felt the pressure from the competition to roll out the announcement of LexisNexis for MS Office a little sooner than they wanted.

DMS Integration & LexisNexis Legal Taxonomy Built-In
LexisNexis for MS Office will have some interesting features that caused the Knowledge Management portion of my brain to wake up and take interest.  It will integrate with most Document Management Systems (DMS) through the indexing features (Autonomy, FAST, Recommind, etc.)  On top of that, it appears that it will include some of the LexisNexis taxonomy profiling features found in the Lexis Search Advantage product. It will also index the documents on the local hard drive and apply the same profiling features.  The taxonomy profiling will be a significant value-added piece of LexisNexis for MS Office. 
Search Lexis, DMS, Local or Web Within MS Office
I have a standard question that I usually ask anyone showing me a new product.  “What is one thing in your product that you think is really useful, but may be overlooked by the user?” When I asked this of Darrell, he had a hard time coming up with a quick answer, then finally came up with the “Search Box” function that appears in the MS Office ribbon.  This search box allows you to search “all” or “individually” the Lexis database, the firm’s DMS, your local computer, or the Web.  Not surprisingly, Bing is the default search engine (it is a Microsoft project!)  The problem with the search box isn’t that it is an advanced feature, but rather that users just aren’t used to searching directly within Office.  So it will take some getting used to.

Love It or Hate It – LexisNexis & SharePoint Integration

I get a lot of mixed reactions when I mention SharePoint to IT or KM folks.  Many like the flexibility of SharePoint, while others cringe at the thought of trying to maintain the security and functionality of the product.  If you do like SharePoint, then LexisNexis is integrating webparts that will add features to SharePoint portal through the LexisNexis for MS Office product.  If you hate SharePoint, then this will probably not change your mind.
What About All Those Other Lexis Products?
For those of you that have other Lexis products, such as InterAction, atVantage, CourtLink, etc., there is discussion at Lexis to eventually begin bringing in these pieces to LexisNexis for MS Office. The CRM resources seem to be a natural fit for this product, so I assume this is high on the priority list for inclusion into the new product.  As for the others, we’ll have to see how the integration goes. 

Other Issues With LexisNexis for MS Office

LexisNexis for MS Office will begin Beta Testing later this month and the roll out will begin sometime in the Spring (Mar-Jun ’10).  I did not get into the pricing model, but have read that it could be simply an “add-in” for existing customers with an installation charge, but did not get verification.  It apparently doesn’t access all LexisNexis databases at this time, but I imagine this is something that will be added over time.  Also, in the initial version, there will not be a cost recovery module (researcher will not be able to enter client/matter numbers).  This will be added in later versions.  Also, if you use cost recovery products (Research Monitor, OneLog or LookUp Precision), these products will not work with LexisNexis for MS Office. 
There is still a way to go on getting this ready for full-blown research capability, but there will be some attorneys that will love the ability to do everything within MS Office.

[gl]

The Financial Times reported at the end of January that “Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said software developers were working on ‘interesting hacks’ to stop any blocking by foreign governments.” Is it just me or did this bother anyone else? To me, there just seems to be something intrinsically wrong with a company essentially declaring war against a country. Basically, Evan is saying he and all of Twitterdom were going to flame China. Let me say this again: Twitter is going to flame China. Think about that. Why is that any different from someone from some former Eastern Bloc country sending a trojan horse into all of the banking firms in the United States and essentially crippling our economy? We would not tolerate it. Commerce would be screaming with outrage. The Hill would be holding forth on the dastardly deeds of these horrible hackers. So why didn’t any one step over to Mr. Williams’ office and tell him to tone it down? Maybe they did. We will never know. But this is exactly the point that I keep making over and over again: the web is a brave, new world. In this virtual world, there are no sheriffs, no boundaries, no laws. And the people that rule are the ones that can break and make the secret code the acts as the DNA that creates the protoplasm that is the base of all the organisms in this new world. So watch these tech companies. Don’t be so naive to think that their ambitions are singular. Just like Tears for Fears said not so long ago, “everybody wants to rule the world.”

I have been thinking about the new iPad.

Call me crazy, but I think it looks like a huge Etch-A-Sketch. I just want to shake it to see if it will clear the screen. Add two big round button in each of the bottom corners so I can scroll over the page. Is there an app for that?

Plus, aren’t you guys worried about that screen? Don’t you think it is going to get scratched up? And it is kind of big for when you are running down the runway to make that plane, juggling your iPad, your iPhone, your iPod and your one bag of luggage.

So you are just begging for a murse.

You do know what a murse is, right? It is the male equivalent of a purse.

All of you Apple types should be okay with that–you are a pretty liberal group, if I am any kind of judge.

Two more points about the iPad. When are they going to let us women have a go at these things? Don’t they realize how hard it is to use touch pads when you have acrylic nails? Come on you guys, let us have a seat at the testing table.

So you know what’s coming, right? a plug-in, retractable keyboard for the iPad.

And what’s this about not being Adobe-friendly (Market Place Media’s Apple Adobe at war over iPad)? I get that Stevie-o may become credited with being a visionary, swaying the tech marketplace to drink the HTML5 kool-aid. But I think that is being very David Koresh-like, Mr. Jobs. Now your messing with my shows. I like my Hulu and my Netflix.

Seems to me that you, Steven, are doing a bit of market manipulation through product design to move the economy you way … just sayin’.

So until I get a murse, a retractable keyboard and Adobe Flash, I won’t be getting an iPad.

Unless Mr. Jobs feels so inclined to give us 3 Geeks each one for testing purposes. But we are still waiting on those iPhones so I don’t guess it will be coming any time soon.

Last year, I took the government’s money and traded in my old minivan for a nice new 2010 Toyota Prius. When all of the Toyota recall issues hit the news, I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that the recall for floormats, and then gas peddles did not include my Prius. But it didn’t take long for me to start seeing things pop up on Twitter about the ‘Woz’ having cruise control issues (and feeling slightly proud that the Woz got clocked doing 105 in his 2010 Prius — yes, they can go that fast.) Then the big news that a recall of the 2010 Prius was probably coming due to a braking issue. The braking issue is something that I’ve had first-hand experience with, but found it more of a ‘feature’ than a recall worthy issue. This morning I get a email from Toyota saying that Jim Lentz, President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales is going to give a live interview on Digg Dialogg:

TOYOTA
For more than 50 years, Toyota has produced safe, reliable, quality vehicles and provided first-rate service. Because your safety and confidence in Toyota is of the utmost importance to us, we want to ensure that we are providing you with the latest recall information. To get further details, please visit toyota.com. Additionally, Jim Lentz, President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., will be interviewed live on Digg Dialogg on Monday, February 8, at 2 p.m. PST to answer the top questions as voted on by the Digg community. Watch the interview here. Your safety is important to us, and we will continue to do everything we can to keep you informed.

It will be interesting to see how this ‘Digg Dialogg’ interview goes. I don’t think they will be taking only softball questions, and I was impressed to see that Jim Lentz had a generic link to other Digg conversations about the Toyota recall issues, that were not cherry-picked by someone in the PR department. Toyota has taken a black eye on all the recall talk, both in the traditional media and in the social media. For a brand that is built on quality, safety and owner loyalty, Toyota should be working hard to make sure that it also understands that today’s public not only gets its information from traditional media, but also ‘talks’ to a wider social media audience. The email I received this morning at least it makes it seems that Toyota ‘Diggs’ where we’re coming from.

After years of listening to my friends tell me why they “looooovvveee” their Macs, and how it is “sooooo” much easier to use than a PC, and that I’m an idiot (not a Mac/PC issue apparently), I think I’m finally feeling some empathy for them. Not because I’m going to rush out after 20 years of using a PC, but because I went out traded in my old Windows Mobile 6.0 phone (BlackJack I on AT&T) and bought an Android phone (Samsung Moment on Sprint).  All of those times I had to listen to “when are they going to port that to Mac?” or “but my Mac can run that 50 times faster than your PC!” or “Geez, Greg… you’re a frickin’ idiot!!” (again, apparently not a Mac/PC issue), I’m saying the same thing to them about my Android versus their iPhones.

So, in the SmartPhone world, here’s the breakdown of how phones compare to computers:

  • iPhone = MS Windows
  • Android = Mac
  • Blackberries = Mainframes
  • Palm OS = Linux
  • Windows Mobile = OS/2
It’s like the SmartPhone version of Bizzaro World!!
Now, I’m the whiny person that’s going around checking off all the reasons why an Android is so much better than an iPhone (multitasking, better camera, not locked into AT&T, more memory (and expandable), open source, yada yada).  And what do I hear back from my friends???  “Dude, we got more Apps!!” and “Greg, you’re a frickin’ idiot!!” (you know, now that I think about it, I need nicer friends!).
Apps!! Apps!! It’s all about the apps. Which ticks me off until I remember that I have been using this same argument against my Mac friends for 20 years.  “Uh, that video editing software is really cool and all, but don’t you still have to go into your PC emulator to do some ‘real’ work??”  Seems that the chickens have come home to roost.  
Some call this new era of SmartPhone App development as the “Splinternet.” Now apps will have to be developed for multiple platforms (similar to video games) and it appears that we consumers are going to demand that businesses that develop apps now have to develop them across platforms in order to reach us on our SmartPhones.  What a nightmare this is going to be!!  
I’m only hoping that the talk Android getting Adobe Flash 10.1 later this year is true and that the iPhone (and it’s larger cousin iPad) refuse to integrate Flash into their product.  Then I will feel much better as I hold up my phone to my friends while it is playing the latest episode of Family Guy on Hulu (not because I watch it, but because I know they do), and then I walk away with my hands in the air and declare victory!! Even if this scenario never comes to fruition, I still know that my Mac Android is better than their PC iPhone.  And, that apparently can keep me going for years to come (or until my contract runs out.)
[gl]


Jim Hassett’s post on Keys to New Business finally put me over the top on the whole Loss Leader thing (Jim was actually quoting a lawyer – so these were not his words). In my AFA role I have seen numerous examples of low-ball bids from law firms desperate to get the work in the door. These deals are consistently referred to in the market as Loss Leaders.

What is a Loss Leader? Originally this term applied to advertising items at a price below the actual cost (thus the loss) to ‘lead’ customers into the store and sell them other products. One example of this is the car advertised with monthly payments of $229. There’s one car on the lot that with $4000 down you can have for that payment (subject to your credit). The car you actually want (and end up purchasing) has a $500 payment. This concept was eventually renamed more appropriately as the “Bait-and-Switch.”

The Loss Leader concept then evolved to include pricing certain commodity items at a loss, with the full intent of having the customer simultaneously purchase other, high-in-profit products to offset the loss. Grocery stores do this with eggs and milk, which are placed in the back of the store, forcing customers to pass by and pick up the high margin items.

So how are law firms actually treating the Loss Leader concept? By pricing the non-commodity, high-end stuff at a loss. I would argue that M&A deals and complex, large dollar litigation cases would not technically fall into a Loss Leader category. This is akin to the car dealer selling Escalades at a loss, hoping you’ll buy … maybe some nicer wheels? Law firms using this technique are expecting the customer to be so happy they come back next year and buy another Escalade – at full price. The likelihood of this: Zero.

What law firms are actually doing is getting into price cutting wars. And they will be much better off if that see it as such and treat it accordingly. In the words of Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” We’re not going back to full rate deals. Smart firms will face up to that – dropping the whole Loss Leader charade.

Sticking to our recruiting theme for this week, I thought I’d address the issue of recruiting lateral partners.  According to Vivia Chen at The American Lawyer, during the first twelve months of the Great Recession there was a movement of “2,775 partners [who]  left or joined the biggest firms in the country.”  That’s a 10.7% increase from the previous twelve months, and a trend that many in the industry think will not slow down for some time to come.  Gone are the days where a firm brings in a first-year associate and grooms them to become a partner at the firm.  To borrow a baseball analogy, it seems that firms are bringing on partners through free-agency rather than through the farm system.  Sometimes that works out great, but many times the firms discover that this lateral partner looked a lot better on paper than he or she did in action.

I’ve been discussing this with a number of people lately and one of them said that in a market that is built upon recruiting talent from other firms, you have to be careful not to recruit the “third-stringers”.  By that, they mean that there are a number of lateral partners that are riding the coattails of others in their firm, getting their names on important matters, or assigned to important clients, but haven’t really done anything great on an individual basis.  This sort of thing happens in almost all industries.  Where you bring someone in during an interview, they look and sound great, have an impressive resume, tell you all of the people they’ve worked with and all the deals they’ve worked out, only to bring them on board and discover that they don’t quite live up to your expectations.  These third-stringers hint that they will have a number of people that will follow them to your firm and that the clients will jump ship from the previous firm and rush to bring all their legal business to your firm.  Six months after the lateral joins the firm, you look around and the only person that followed them was a secretary (whom you didn’t really need.)

So how do you avoid these third-stringers?  One answer I got said that you could cut through the smoke by asking just a few questions and watch how the potential lateral partner answers those questions.  When a potential lateral starts mentioning all the General Counsels (GC) they’ve worked with, ask this simple question – “Have you ever had [name of GC] over to your house for dinner?”  Watch to see the expression on their face.  If they answer ‘yes’, then see if they begin telling you about the experience, why they had dinner, and what their current relationship status is.  If they fumble around on this question, then perhaps their relationship isn’t as close as they are saying.

I also saw a series of questions posted on the Lateral Attorney Report back in November 2009. These are much more straight-to-the-point questions to back up the statements that the potential lateral partner has made.  Dan Binstock uses the phrase “narrow-pause” to define that period of time when the potential lateral is trying to conjure up an answer for which they were not prepared.  Questions like “How were your reviews?” or “Were you asked to leave your current firm?” and how they react to those questions can let you know if this is a quality lateral, or a third-stringer.

One thing you should probably keep in mind during this era of ‘free-agency recruiting’ is that all of those partners that you’ve managed to push out of your firm because they either didn’t fit the personality of the firm or didn’t create the book of business that he or she should have given their position, they usually wind up somewhere.  So, for all the times you thought “thank goodness we off loaded that partner”, or chuckled when you read on law.com that a peer firm “raided” one of your third-string partners, someone else might be chuckling and saying the same thing about that third-string partner you just brought in to your firm.
[gl]

I remember reading Thurgood Marshall’s comment of sitting in his first day of law school and hearing Charles Hamilton Houston tell the class “Look at the man on your right, took at the man on your left, and at this time next year, two of you won’t be here.”  This was an extreme version of the Harvard Law School (HLS) model of “Look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won’t be here by the end of the year.” Of course law schools, even Harvard Law School, no longer takes this extreme approach to teaching law school.  Now, it is a matter of doing well as an undergraduate, doing well on the LSAT, and having the funds to go to law school.  Law School administrations determined some time ago that raising the bar to get into law school creates an environment where there is no longer a need to dismiss one-third or two-thirds of your students in order to have graduates ready to enter the profession.  Not only that, but let’s face it, if law schools kicked out a third of its students most of them would go out of business.
When I read Toby’s post from yesterday on hiring the ‘C’ students, it got me to thinking about the type of first-year associates that firms hire and whether we should bring back the old HLS model for first years.  Imagine the situation where on the first day of starting a firm the associates were told by the Managing Partner that a third of you will not be here this time next year.  That would be a scary thought for most associates, perhaps preventing many from even taking a job with a firm if they knew that they might be cut after a year. It might, however, be the best thing that a law firm could do.  It could also open opportunities for graduates that would never be on a law firm’s radar. Perhaps the firm refers to this first year as a ‘clerkship’ thus creating a way for even those that get laid off to spin this as ‘experience’ rather than not making the cut at a firm.
My thoughts behind implementing the HLS system in first-year associate hires would go something like this:

  1. Cut your current associate wages by at least one-third.
  2. Hire one-third more associates than you planned. (This could get you some of those ‘C’ students that Toby mentioned.)
  3. Assign the associates to a group of partners that will mentor and monitor them throughout the first year.
  4. Set specific goals for the first year’s.  The goals should surround all facets of law firm life… traditional legal work (hours or projects worked), training (both mandatory and voluntary), research and writing skills, and pro-bono work, just to name a few.
  5. All first year attorneys would be ‘staff attorneys’, and would not be called ‘associates’, or put on ‘partnership’ track until after they make the cut at the end of the first year.  
  6. At the end of the first year, make a decision on who stays and who goes.
This is a harsh system, but one that would give more law school graduates a chance at not only landing a job right out of school, but would expose more potential associates to the firm, including some of those ‘C’ students that would have never been looked at before.  By letting the first year associates know that they are on a one-year probationary period, then they know they have to make an impression that first year or they will be finding themselves looking elsewhere.  Perhaps there would still be room for them as staff attorneys and not associates, or perhaps you just send them along their little way to seek employment elsewhere with a full year’s worth of experience and training that they may not have gotten anywhere else. In the end, the firm should have a better level of second year associates through the attrition of those that just didn’t match up to their competition.  
[gl]

A chance conversation with my AFA counter-part lead to a dialogue on the suitability of lawyer personalities to a successful law practice. In part, this was out an outcome of Lisa’s post on the sales skills of lawyers. In our conversation, we decided that to be truly successful these days a lawyer needs 1) Technical skills, 2) Leadership/Business skills and 3) Relationship (a.k.a. sales) skills. Without too much thinking, it’s obvious these are typically three distinct and mutually exclusive skill-sets. Finding a lawyer who has all three of these is rare at best (think Lisa’s super-model). Then our conversation turned to law schools and the types of personalities and skills they are designed to attract and build. One of my favorite quotes on this subject is from a law school dean, “We are academic institutions, not vocational schools.” Which is to say, law schools focus exclusively on technical skills. And even then, it’s more on the academic side of technical skills – and not much of hands-on, practical skills. And what’s worse, when law firms recruit from law schools, they want only the best … technicians. As we talked through this subject it became apparent this is yet another aspect of the profession that needs to change. In the past, legal technical skills were all that was needed to succeed. But now in the days of price competition and utilizing what everyone else calls a “business model,” firms need broader skill-sets from their partners. Harry S. Truman said “The ‘C’ students run the world.” The gist of that statement in our context is that C students are the ones with the relationship skills. For them school wasn’t about getting the best grade. Beyond learning, it was about enjoying the people you met. These C students are the ones that make business happen It’s their relationship skills that get and keep clients and make the business a success. Firms recruiting at law schools might want to keep this concept in mind. The Law Review students may make the best technical lawyers, but they likely won’t be the ones that will drive the success of your firm. Perhaps George W. Bush said it best. “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.”

As I mentioned yesterday, a group of bloggers traveled to ThomsonReuters (TR) in Eagan, Minnesota earlier this week to get a first-hand look at WestlawNext (WLN) and talk with the Project Cobalt team, meet briefly with TR’s CEO of Legal, Peter Warwick, and discuss the the functionality of WLN with Westlaw’s Reference Attorney staff. There are a number of articles that are out from other bloggers that a range of issues from Lisa Solomon’s discussion of Product & Pricing; Jason Eiseman’s video interview of myself me, Tom Boone and Jason Wilson; Robert Ambrogi’s discussion of West Search functionality; Betsy McKenzie’s view of WLN from an academic perspective; Ken Adam’s survey on CALR value in contract drafting; David Bilinsky’s Top 10 list about WLN, and; Simon Chester’s discussion of WLR from a Canadian perspective. I wanted to take a different approach and talk about the back-end structure of the new West Search Engine and how they have used Knowledge Management theories to create an algorithm that looks to be much better than the current Westlaw.com search results.
WestSearch – Leveraging 100+ Years of Knowledge
Westlaw has compiled millions of pieces of value-added information through editorial analysis of its research attorneys, but that information has been compartmentalized into individual databases and has had a slow transition from the traditional print uses of this information to the computer database search engines. Even when West created KeyCite as a competitor to Shepard’s, it was pretty much still a stand-alone citation system that added-value to the individual cases and statutes, but not really a great enhancement to how searchers retrieved results from their searches.
WestSearch
Now WLN has finally seen the value of four distinct products/processes that not only help as individual value-added products, but actually determine search results rankings, pushing better results to the top based on past knowledge rather than by simple algorithms of term location or dates. Here are the four products/processes that now affect the ranking of search results:
1. West’s Key Number System
2. KeyCite Citation System
3. West’s Secondary Catalog
4. User Searches & Resulting Actions
The first three categories are really no brainers when it comes to leveraging related pieces of ‘information’ on a similar topic. Now, instead of just getting results that have a term frequency that matches the words in my search query, WLN literally runs an algorithm of over 60 queries that determine alternative words that may apply to my search, top cited resources on that topic, and resources that are deemed to be authoritative through secondary resources. I like the fact that the Project Cobalt team stuck to the term “algorithm” and shied away from “artificial intelligence” (although Peter Warwick did let the AI term slip in his talk.)
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the change in algorithm of WestSearch is number four – “User Searches & Resulting Actions.” This is something that those of us interested in improving Knowledge Management resources see as the holy grail of KM. If we could create a system that leveraged the experience of everyone in our firm in a way that allows our KM tool to become “smarter” we’d jump at that chance. From what I saw, it looks as if WestSearch is making a strong run at making their search algorithm smarter through adapting results based on previous users key actions. In a way this is crowdsourcing on a very high level.
Crowdsourcing the Researchers
I’m a fan of crowdsourcing, and of knowledge management. Combining the two is like putting peanut butter and chocolate together and coming up with a two great things that work well together. WestSearch crowdsources the WLN users by monitoring key actions after the search results are returned. WestSearch takes actions like ‘print’, ‘save’, ‘folder’, and ‘view’ that a searcher performs and logs that information for future reference. If another researcher runs a similar search later, the actions from the previous users is taken into account and the results are influenced by those previous user actions to potentially rank items higher or lower in the results list. The thoughts behind leveraging previous user actions against search results is that the ‘crowd’ will tend to identify and use the same documents when searching specific legal issues. When pressed on this, the Cobalt team said that actions like ‘print all’ or ‘save all’ are not logged because they are looking for specificity over generality. Also, because it is a ‘crowd’ based view, the law student that doesn’t understand the issue and picks less valuable documents will have little influence because the majority of the crowd will choose the ‘best’ documents over and over again, thus improving the algorithm.
What’s the Future?
It will be interesting to watch as this rolls out and WLN adds more and more databases to the system. I will be really interested to see what happens when the “news” portion is integrated and how that will affect the WestSearch algorithm on ‘new’ or ‘hot’ topics that pop up from time to time. I look forward to watching this approach of leveraging existing knowledge in an advanced algorithm to see if it does get ‘smarter’ over time. I’ll also be interested in seeing if WLN can improve its existing West km product (which will still work with WLN), and the ‘foldering’ features that could actually make WLN an additional in-house KM resource.
[gl]