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]
I just got back from ThomsonReuters HQ in Eagan, Minnesota (or as I like to call it – The Coldest Place on Earth!!) I met up with a group of great bloggers and legal publishers like Jason Wilson, Lisa Solomon, Tom Boone, Jason Eiseman, Carolyn Elefant, David Bilinsky and many more. I’m currently compiling all my notes, asking for screen shots, and drafting my response to the WestlawNext product and should have something for you tomorrow. However, there are two things that I wanted to share with you while I’m getting that post ready:
  1. My post on January 8th (the one I pulled down because they told me it was full of factual errors) wasn’t very far off the mark (and I was a little miffed that the Project Cobalt team made all of us sign a CDA and then gave “exclusive” interviews to the ABA Journal and the NY Times about the product. But, the CDA has expired and you’ll now see great things from those of us that took the trip to Eagan to talk with the Cobalt team. [Note: my apologies to Bob Ambrogi for listing him earlier, he was under the same CDA, but was notified it was lifted before he posted yesterday.]
  2. This one is actually funny. When I get back to the office this morning, I see a package from ThomsonReuters that looks a little… shall I say, weird, and a little beat-up. When I look inside the package (which was supposed to be some Louisiana resource materials) I find horseshoes. Now, I’ve gotten a lot of SWAG from the folks at ThomsonReuters in the past (see all those calendars behind the horseshoes…) but this was probably the best! Not only were they horseshoes, but they were used horseshoes to boot!! Nails and dirt and probably horse sh… er poop all ground in the grooves. I’m assuming that this ‘package’ got misdirected by the USPS, because the package had obviously been opened before it arrived at my office. So, I’m thinking this was someone’s idea of a joke… at least, I hope this wasn’t the calling card from someone up at ThomsonReuters…. or was it???

[gl]

As I like to say to my colleagues, making partner at a law firm is no longer the guaranteed “tenured-like” position. In the not so distant past, if an associate was able to make partner and through the good-old-boy network find some sizeable clients, he could count on sitting back and enjoying the fruits of his labor and get by with taking the client out to lunch every once in a while. Well, if no one has figured it out by now, those days are long gone. Now, you gotta hustle. And, I am sorry to say, most lawyers are not predisposed to hustling. First of all, they don’t dance (did anyone get this joke?).
Most lawyers go to law school because they—and I apologize for any stereotyping here but I can be semi-excused since I am a lawyer—are bookworms who either like to study and/or argue. It is the rare exception that was one of the popular kids in high school. If anything he or she was probably doing these kids’ homework for them. So here these lawyers are—in the 2000s and facing a continued recession—and their partnership is telling them not only do you have to practice law, “you have to go out and drum up business.” Or else. Well, I am sorry to say, most of these guys just don’t have it in them. It is no slight to them. It is just a personality thing. You wouldn’t want an extrovert handling your funeral or an introvert planning your wedding. And lawyers, typically the studious types who either love examining proxy disclosures or holding forth on their latest court battles, are not very skilled at up-selling their professional services. Hey, I could be wrong. I have met a few anomalies—lawyers who are great marketers. But these lawyers are usually freaks of nature. Kinda like super-models. But the pressure on these guys to be someone they are not can be excruciating and, dare I say, down-right cruel. How would you like to be told, I know I hired you to be a hair dresser and all you have ever trained to do is to be a hair dresser but now have to be a heart surgeon and I don’t care if you don’t know how, you still have to do it. I think every single one of us would be terrified. My suggestion? Hire people who are skilled business developers, people who make a living every day selling professional services, to help lawyers identify and close business deals. Let them sit at the table and be a part of the conversation. Believe me, in this market, it is going to get worse before it gets better. And since law schools are still not attracting kids with these skill sets or teaching them how to develop them, these business development skills are becoming more important than ever before.

Last week I gave a presentation to the Houston Chapter of the AMA (on a side note – legal marketers would be wise to reach outside the LMA). After the presentation a couple of marketers from the oil industry were sharing recession stories and asked how law firms were doing. The presumption was that work is down at BigLaw just as it is every where. However, as I was explaining the situation at BigLaw it occurred to me we’re in a one-two punch situation. Yes – the downturn has slowed down the amount of work. But I think a bigger impact is coming from the shift in client attitude. We’re seeing a strong shift to a buyers’ market. And that shift is magnified for a few reasons. First, in-house clients haven’t experienced power like this before. In the old days (a year ago) they would be afraid a BigLaw firm might not represent them if they pushed on price. This is no longer the case. Clients are reveling in this new found power, and in many cases taking it to the extreme. Low-ball pricing is becoming an everyday occurrence. Second – standing behind the client flexing this muscle is the Purchasing Department. They have entered the legal pricing game in full-force. And these people are paid to flex their cost-cutting muscles on a daily basis. So maybe what we really have is a one-two-two punch to the gut. The bottom-line is that on top of dealing with the recession, BigLaw is in its first heavy buyers’ market situation. And this situation looks to be one that will endure for some time. Now – you might think if you’re not in BigLaw you’re not impacted by all this. Think again. When pressures push prices down at the top of the market, those pressures filter down through-out the market. If Mercedes starts selling their cars for $30k, Ford will be forced to move its prices down too. As I laid this theory out in a ‘thinking out loud’ conversation with my oil industry friends, the impact of the one-two punch really came home. I saw it in the eye of my colleagues. I was getting that “STBY” look from them.


As many readers of the 3 Geeks know, I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to security. And due to my materials being due last week for TECHSHOW, I’ve decided to weigh in on the iPhone versus Blackberry (BB) debate. Although iPhone gets all the buzz these days (including numerous comments on its lack of security) I still think Blackberry is the smarter choice – especially for lawyers.

As I like to tell my two sons who have iPhones – “My blackberry will do any of the gee-whiz stuff your iPhones will do … only slower. And when it comes to email and calendaring (the core applications for lawyers) I’ll whip your little butts.”

After my recent research on the latest and greatest on the various smart-phone platforms, the BB comes out on top for lawyers for two primary reasons. 1 – BBs focus on the core uses for lawyers. And, 2 – As a mature technology, BBs are stable and more importantly, secure.

Although BB doesn’t have the sheer volume of apps iPhone has, it does have the ones that matter. A quick stroll through App World shows many useful tools, including legal-specific apps like time-keeping. On the versatility side, BBs come in every size, shape and form. You can chose from a flip phone Pearl to the new Storm 2 touch screen. iPhone comes in one form factor.

I will say this for iPhone, Droid, Palm and Windows Mobile; if they figure out how to live behind the firewall and polish up their security and stability, BB will be in for a real fight

So … although my boys can find the closest Starbucks much faster than I can, I’ll stay productive and secure on my BB. Perhaps the technologies reflect the relative generational perspectives. The boys want fun, blingy stuff. And I want something that’s a functional work-horse and drives the bottom line.

[OMG – that made me sound old. Well … unlike my boys I can actually afford Starbucks.]

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.