Great post from Lisa Rohrer (actually Lisa told us it was from Carla Landry) at Hildebrandt Blog on “Is It Possible To Turn Lawyers into Project Managers? Or Will They Crash & Burn??” Toby and I have had a number of conversations on this issue and I’ve gone back and forth on this question. Lawyer know how to practice law, but do they necessarily know how much it costs to represent a matter? One answer that we got from Matt Homann, over drinks one night, was that actually if you asked a lawyer his or her “gut” feeling on how much we should charge for a matter, their gut answer usually comes out pretty close. Unfortunately, most attorneys are afraid to trust their gut, and instead ask for report after report of the ‘history’ of charges the firm has charged for similar matters, only to be overwhelmed by the data and winding up more confused, and their ‘gut’ feeling has turned into a pit in their stomach.

Rohrer Landry goes on to ask if it is possible to MAKE a lawyer a good project manager (PM)? My thoughts on the topic depended upon whether the “lawyer/PM” is a practicing member of the group, or a true project manager. If you try to pull one lawyer out of the practice group and say “Hey, you are now the Project Manager, make us efficient and tell us how much we should charge for services. Oh… and you’ll still need to keep up with your own practice at the same time.” Then this would fail. Project Management is not something that you do on the side. It has to be your primary (and sole) function.

If, on the other hand, you hire someone that happens to be a lawyer to be a Project Manager, then it could give him or her the respect from the lawyers in the group he or she is trying to manage. Of course, they’ll still need to perform a good job as a Project Manager.
If you decide to hire someone with an MBA and no legal experience and have them attempt to manage a law practice group there could be a perception from the group that the person might be a great project manager, but doesn’t know the industry. Maybe not a fair assumption, but lawyers are usually skeptical of non-lawyers trying to tell them how to do their business.
I guess in my scenario you are left with two choices for PM —
  1. Former Practicing Lawyer who is brought on to be a full-time PM
  2. PM (non-lawyer) who has some type of experience working with lawyers, or can at least speak the ‘language’ to the lawyers and prove that he or she does know how lawyers work
As firms try to wrap their heads around Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) and determining the ‘costs’ of matters vs what to ‘charge’ for a matter, Project Managers are going to become some of the most valuable people in the firm. Tackling the issues of efficiency, effectiveness, return on investment, and changing some of the basic behaviors and cultures within law firms, it may take a lawyer to point out these issues to other lawyers. Kind of the old “it takes one to know one” adage.
Rohrer Landry leaves us with this question – “is it time to hire professional project managers?”
My answer is that it is definitely time to start talking about it.

Hats off to the folks over at Law Shucks for coming up with a brilliant, yet very simple way of tracking those lateral partner moves between big law firms.

With the Lateral Tracker, people within the big law firms who are “in the know” when attorneys jump ship from one firm to another have a chance to update the Lateral Tracker in order to let everyone know. In reward, the person submitting the information gets a chance to win an iPhone 3GS (and, probably a 2-year commitment to AT&T… so, it’s a win-lose deal.) This is the sort of crowdsourcing exercise that is perfect for this type of information.
In the old days before this Lateral Tracker, we used to have to wait until a press release went out announcing that Lindsey McDonald, former Partner with Wolfram & Hart, has now joined the Denny Crane Law Firm in Boston. With tips from people within the law firms, we can now know that McDonald is leaving one firm and joining another before he actually makes his trip from Los Angeles to Boston. In an environment when “first to blog” is the new ‘breaking news’, this type of tracker can be a great resource in tracking movement between firms.
There are probably lots of other crowdsourcing information that could be gathered on big law firms. For example, how about setting something up to list the names and contact information for all of the Marketing Department personnel within big firms? Most firms do not list the flunkies administrative people in their directories, but sometimes you really want to know who is doing the business development, or marketing, or knowledge management, or research work in a firm but don’t want to have to try to Google that information and hope that you find it.
I’m very impressed that Law Shucks has made an effort to create an ongoing crowdsourcing tool and hope that it turns out to be a great resource for all of us.

On my way in to work this morning, I overheard someone say “all these new ‘hot’ areas of law that weren’t even around 10 years ago.’ It was an existential moment that got me wondering what they were talking about, and then to what are the ‘hot’ areas of law that weren’t even around ten years ago. So I did what I usually do with these type of issues, and crowd-sourced it out to the Twitterverse to see if anyone came up with suggestions of what is a ‘hot’ area of the law today that didn’t exist in January of 2000. I thought I’d start the list off by suggesting a few things off the top of my head:

  • Green Energy Practice
  • Sub-Prime & Financial Crisis Practice
  • Electronic Discovery Practice
  • Guantanamo Bay Practice
Well… no good ‘off-the-top-of-my-head’ discussion goes without someone pointing out that I am wrong…. Immediately some smarty-pants Dallas lawyer and E-Discovery expert (who happens to know a lot more about this than I do) points out that E-Discovery was a 20th Century invention, and even points out that Texas ruled on ESI way back in 1999. Although, we eventually agreed that E-Discovery became “hot” in the last 10 years. My favorite comment was that although E-Discovery became ‘hot’ in the last 10 years, here’s wishing that it wouldn’t exist in 10 more years!
My co-blogger Lisa came up with a crazy thought that ‘virtual law‘ needs to be created and become a ‘hot’ practice area, but that ‘virtually’ no one is listening to her… ‘literally’.
I thought that maybe “Gay Marriage” issues will become a ‘hot’ area, especially when it comes divorce time. And, it was suggested that ‘e-commerce‘ law has also become a ‘hot’ legal practice area in the past 10 years (although it was also a 20th century invention along with e-discovery.)
What have I missed? Any other ‘hot’ legal practice areas that have sprung up in the past decade? (Yes, you have now become my ‘crowd-sourcing’ experiment!)

When many of us took the 2009 calendar off the wall and hung up the new 2010 calendar, we said “Thank God that awful year is behind us!” I’ve been hearing that the ‘downturn in the economy’ will start to improve in the first or second quarter of 2010. Like most of us, I’m ready for things to turn around and start moving back into a positive direction. Although the law firm library model has probably been changed forever due to the ’08-’09 recession, I’m worried that many in the industry (mainly in large firms) are simply ready to get back to business as usual. As I read “Urgency for Change” from the Hildebrandt blog, my fears seemed to be verified that the ‘down’ economy didn’t go down enough to produce the necessary sense of urgency needed to motivate leaders to change their overall behavior.

Given that law firm declines in profits per partner are merely tepid, rather than dramatic, creating this sense of urgency may be the biggest challenge to law firm leaders – and the longer they wait, the harder this becomes. (In fact, in a recent conference we attended, when presented with data on industry profitability in 2009, one law firm manager remarked, “You see? I think this proves how resilient our business model is.”)

Oh great… Are we slashing budgets, cutting or flat-lining salaries, laying off people, and addressing worker productivity on the admin side of the house just so the partnership side of the house can get back to 10%+ growth in Profits Per Partner? In a time when General Counsels are standing up before conference crowds and saying “Trust levels are so low between firms and clients that if a firm is suggesting it, it must be bad for the client”, now is not the time to tout the 2007 business model.
Number six on my list of ten projections for 2010 was that large law firms would be forever changed. I still believe this, and suspect that even those that worry more about when the April edition of American Lawyer comes out with a new lists of rankings over how they can build or rebuild trust between themselves and the client will feel that change. For those that hold onto the idea that the fact that their firm rode out the recession proves that they have a resilient business model (“as is”, “status quo”), will not be happy when the AmLaw 100 list for 2011 comes out and they watch as firms who have adopted new billing methods, mended fences with old clients, and listened to and addressed the needs of new clients, begin to pass them on that all important ranking list.

One of the best stories I have from my old mainframe programmer/analyst days in college was working with my friend Ming Fan, who was a foreign student working as a Grad Assistant in the same department. One day he leaned over and shouted the following joke over the loud rumble of the big blue mainframe boxes:

Q: Hey, what do you call a person that speaks two languages? A: Bilingual
Q: What do you call a person that only speaks one?
A: An American!
I had to look at him and hang my head… guilty as charged. Although, I’m pretty good at barking out “Dos Cervezas, por favor!!” or when I was stationed in South Korea, I became pretty good at saying “Maekju hana juseyo”. So, I’m fluent in beer, but that’s about all. In my professional life, this has meant that all those articles that pop up in my RSS feed that are in French have been skipped (unless ‘biere’ appears in the title.)
Enter my old American friend “Google” to save the day. With Google Translate, combined with the Google Toolbar, I can have webpages translated on the fly, and will results that don’t make you giggle — well, usually don’t make you giggle anyway. Here is an example of an outstanding bilingual blog, Heavy Mental, that discusses technology and social issues in both English and French (but not always in both.)
(click image to enlarge)
I’ve now used the Google Translate resource a few times and have been very impressed with the results. You do get the occasional translation that makes you giggle — (such as one of my favs: “thank you @clarinette02 for drawing our atten-tion is over” — but, nothing that compared to the early days of translating text I used to get with tools like AltaVista’s (now Yahoo’s) Babel Fish. Now, I get webpages translate right on the spot, with the formatting of the page still intact, and with translations that are understandable, even by my limited American vocabulary!
Google Translate has a variety of different tools that you can use to add to your website and have it translate your site using widgets, and other resources that allow you to cut and paste, or upload documents and have them translated. My favorite so far has been the toolbar auto translate option. The only drawback so far is that I typically use Google Chrome as my web browser, and for some reason the Google Toolbar STILL DOESN’T WORK IN CHROME!! (Sorry about that… I’m still having issues of Google releasing browser add-ons that don’t work in its own browser.) If you want to use Google Translate in Chrome, you can add the extension to the browser.
So fire up your Internet Explorer or FireFox browser with the Google Toolbar and expand your reading to include all those wonderful blogs that don’t cater to those of us that only speak one language.

I was reading a Fast Company article, Universities Inc. by Anya Kamenetz, and wondered when is the online law school coming? Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE and the man with the golden touch, will be acquiring–for a mere $2M– a 12% piece of the Chancellor University System LLC, a part of the nearly bankrupt business college Myers University, in Cleveland, Ohio. His ambition? To create a reputable online MBA program. I have always wondered why education needs to be maintained in bricks and mortar business model. My other sister, a teacher,and I were just talking about this very issue just last night. Well, you know where I am going with this. Why not law schools? I mean, think about it. The only “benefit” I got from being in a classroom environment ensconced in the ivy walls of my esteemed alma mater was being terrified of being called upon for recitation. And if the school implemented do 3D streaming, it could still happen anyway. Tell me if I am wrong, but the only benefit I see are the additional “amenities”: glee club, football, fraternities. Oh, wait. This is “law school”. It could be a matter of prestige and reputation. But if some big cheese like Jack Welch were to legitimize it, it could spring up a whole new kind of law students. Like we need more lawyers, huh?

I’ve seen a lot of comments on “what is next for Web 2.0” in the past few months, but most of those jump ahead to the “Web 3.0” stage of Cyberdyne’s Skynet artificial intelligence stage. I wanted to bring the discussion back to a less scary (well, at least not “end of the world” scary) topic of the next stage in Web 2.0, which I’ll call, “Web 2.1 – The Unsolicited Interloper.”

Web 2.0’s Controlled Discussion

The 2.0 stage moved us from a one-way online discussion into a method of two-way or multi-way discussion. Blogs allow us to comment; newspapers allow people to submit comments on just about any story they publish; and social media tools allow us to chat and connect with peers in a real-time environment. One of the things with the 2.0 world is that whoever writes, or manages the content usually has some type of control over the discussion that follows within the four walls of that content-even if the only recourse is to delete the discussion, or moderate the comments before allowing others to see them. The key to 2.0 is that you can have four walls around your content. However, the 2.1 stage could tear down those walls and allow interlopers in, and you’ll have very little control over what they have to say.
Two Web 2.1 tools – Google’s Sidewiki and DotSpots’ “Distributed Objects of Thought”
Two of the leading contenders to usher in my version of Web 2.1 are Google Sidewiki (see video demo) and DotSpots (see video demo). Both of these are browser extensions that allow anyone to place unmoderated comments on any webpage and allows anyone with the same browser extensions to view those comments and add their own comments as well. Sidewiki does as its name suggests and puts comments into a sidebar, while DotSpot places the comment ‘dot’ right in the text of the blog. Now, neither of these actually does anything to the blog post itself… it is simply a feature of the browser extension that allows the modification on the side (sidewiki), or within the text of the browser page (DotSpot). If you haven’t added the extension to your browser, then you wouldn’t see the comments at all.
Free-flowing commentary versus Free-Flowing SPAM
The idea behind the Web 2.1 tools is noble. Using the wisdom of crowds, information can become free-flowing, and more informative by allowing those reading it to also add information. The DotSpot video is a prime example of what the developers of the product wish to do. Now an article can have comments pointing to additional information and the ‘crowd’ can begin interacting with each other and add additional content (maps, videos, etc.) making (or rather morphing) the original information into something dynamic. No longer is the ‘crowd’ limited by the restraints of the website’s comments section. It is this freedom that is worrisome for most of us that develop original content on the web.
In the Web 2.0 world, I can delete comments that appear on my blog. In this new 2.1 world, I cannot. Instead, according to what I’ve read in the FAQ’s for the two resources, I’d have to request that content be removed because it is SPAM or abusive in some manner. This is the part that I think most of us would find most troubling. It is one thing for another blogger to rip my posts to shreds on his or her own blog, but to essentially add any comments you want and have it show up through the extensions on my blog seems to be something that I’d rather not have to deal with. Yes, I know that it isn’t “really” on my blog… it is on Google’s Sidewiki or DotSpots databases (somewhere in the cloud), but if you have these extensions installed on your browser, it can sure look like it is.
The Benefit of the Unregulated Crowd
Maybe the inconvenience of the occasional spammer is outweighed by Web 2.1’s dynamic platform. We’ve grown accustomed to being the moderators of the conversations over our writings. Losing some of that control is not a comfortable thought for me. But, maybe it is not a bad thing to loosen some of that control. Most things I’ve read on the topic of crowds say that the ‘unregulated crowd’ creates a better result over one that is. Perhaps I should just take the good with the bad when it comes to the unsolicited interlopers that the Web 2.1 world brings.

Three Geeks and a Law Blog: Do We Need 3D?
Sitting here reflecting on the week in news, I am pondering the oncoming new technology: 3D TV.

I must ask: do we really need this?

Like I want to see “Judge Judy” in 3D. Or any of the variations of “CSI” or “Law and Order”–aren’t they grizzly enough? What’s next? 3D videos of our law conferences?

I don’t think anything could enliven some of those CLEs.

Sorry, speaking for myself, I would rather have the opportunity to PhotoShop my photos rather than present myself in all of my 3Ded glory (note: I just made the first, documented use of 3D as a verb).

I mean, really? Do we need 3D TV?

Probably as much as those $300 Prada shoes that I have been keening over. I’m guessing a certain portion of our population is much more excited about the possibilities of 3D. May I interject the phrase “football fanatics”?

I daresay one thing that has yet to be considered is the impact that 3D will have on sports and the ref calls? It is going to get brutal. I can see this train wreck coming and I don’t even watch sports.

Then, of course, you know what’s following on the heels of all of this … 3D internet.

Just what we need: YouTubers 3Ding their every move. Oh, God, save me now.

NOTE: I talked with a couple of the “Project Cobalt” team members who told me that there were a number of inaccuracies in my post (such as the name of the product won’t be called “West Next” or that Boolean searching isn’t available.)
Although most of these comments came from inside West, it looks like it was a lot of “guessing” on their part. So, I’m pulling this post off the blog.
As soon as I get more information from the Project Cobalt team, I’ll post more information (more accurate information, that is!!) on the new release.
Thanks to the West Project Cobalt team for pointing out some of the errors and promising me more direct information in the next couple of weeks. So… stay tuned!!
-Greg Lambert

I mentioned in my 10 predictions for 2010 that both Westlaw and Lexis would have new interfaces for their research products by the end of the year. In reality, I was kind of hedging my bets on this one because I actually knew these changes were already coming. Last month I was talking with a consultant who casually said something like “Boy, people are going to be scrambling when Westlaw comes out with its `Project Cobalt` next year.” At that point I immediately knocked him out of the way and did a quick Google search for “Project Cobalt” AND Westlaw. I found some subtle hints about Project Cobalt in an investor’s meeting, and in a Financial Times analyst comment. So, change is afoot at Thomson Reuters!!

As I was trying to find out more, I contacted some friends and found out that Lexis is also working on a new interface for its legal research product. Not only that, but rumor has it that Lexis is also working to help firms create interactive pages within the firm’s Intranet that will help access Lexis resources without leaving the look and feel of the firm’s Intranet page. I haven’t seen the “code name” for this project yet, but I’m really hoping they go with something called “Project Diablo Rojo”!!
Jason Wilson has a very good breakdown of what information is currently available on West’s (or as Jason now calls them “Thomson Reuters Legal” or “TRL”) Project. Also, Joe Hodnicki mentioned it a few days ago. I’m also supposed to meet with Westlaw’s Andy Martens (VP of Product Development) sometime soon to discuss (and hopefully demo) the Project Cobalt product. Apparently, there was an in-house demo of the new project yesterday, and the test engineers at TR said it will be released in February, probably at LegalTech according to West’s new teaser website.
If any of you know more about Lexis’ planned changes for this year, please let me know and I’ll start pestering the Lexis folks for more information.