Heads up to all you Westlaw users out there… you’re about to face “change” dead in the face!

ThomsonReuters is rolling out a change in its password system and require everyone to roll over to their “OnePass System” by the end of January 2010. This, in and of itself, is not a big issue, but how they’ve started rolling out the change is. Seems that some of the Westlaw reps knew about this months ago and gave their folks the heads up. While others either didn’t know, or didn’t pass the message along until a mass email went out last Thursday — announcing the change that was rolling out two days later.
Needless to say, there are some folks in the law library world that aren’t happy with the way this was handled.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes we librarians can get a little freaked out on small issues, but I think this is one situation that should have been handled with a little more forethought on the side of West. Librarians tend to be the ones that have to pass along these changes to the attorneys, and in some firms, the librarian to attorney ratio can be 1:100 or more. Although theoretically we have until January 31, 2010 (nearly 3 months) before the roll out is finalized and the Westlaw sign on page goes away forever to be replaced by the OnePass sign on page, the process has already begun and now librarians are having to play catch up.
It would have been a lot better for West to announce this through the local reps at least a month before the OnePass registration process began. This would have given the librarians enough time to ask questions, prepare FAQ’s, and work with other vendors that may be affected by the change (such as those Monitoring Software packages I talked about a few weeks ago.) Now librarians have to deal with many issues all at once rather than how to implement the changes in an orderly fashion.
We’ll all survive this change, and probably be stronger as a result. But, next time, let’s all work together to make sure we don’t have to scramble to achieve the changes just because there is a lack of communication between the vendor and the clients. An ounce of communication can prevent a pound of complaints later!!

I have been thinking about the cult of personality lately. As geeks, we always like to think we are so nouveau, so cutting-edge in our attempts to lasso technology. Especially in the social media arena. Our pink-haired, horn-rimmed nerdy selves keep trying to out-tweet, out-blog and out-optimize one another in an effort to be ahead of the next big thing. But the truth of it is that the compulsion to create the cult of personality has been around for ages. What brought this all to head for me was watching Michael Jackson’s This Is It this week-end (shameless plug for my movie review site inserted here). Talk about personality–he had it in spades. Whether you thought he was talented, weird, the King of Pop or whatever, this guy made and lost more money than most of us will ever see in our own lifetime. The man was a genius at making a spectacle of himself–intentionally or otherwise. The movie got me to thinking: just how does one achieve that kind of larger-than-life status? I think that is a question that all marketers, especially legal marketers, struggle with. Just how do you achieve cult status for a law firm? I mean, seriously, who has ever gone to a party and just started randomly raving about what a great lawyer they have because they helped them evade a $10 million fine for tax evasion? Or avoid an ugly trial that would cover the desperate allegations against drug company? Or how do you post a blog about how your law firm successfully negotiated a settlement for an undisclosed amount for an issue that cannot be discussed outside of the realm of attorney-client privilege? So we fall back on the cult of personality, where lawyers have to cultivate public personas to establish themselves as thought leaders in their given practice, which goes against most lawyers’ academic inclinations and most large law firms mantras that “the whole is greater than the sum of our partners.” The only lawyers that succeed at the cult of personality are those that are on their own, on tv or are judges–or some mix thereof. The most popular ones that come to mind are Judge Judy, Greta Van Susteran, Geraldo Rivera, the Supremes (a/k/a Ginsberg, Scalia, et al.) and Texas cowboy litigators, Percy Foreman, the DeGuerin brothers, Joe Jamail, and the late, great Texas lawyer John O’Quinn. All of this got me to thinking about one of the most influential of our early Americans, Benjamin Franklin. An uneducated man by any academic standards (he only completed 2 years of education) he developed his own cult of personality. I mean, how else can you account for him singlehandedly convincing 13 colonies, in the midst of a revolution, to move their clocks back one hour? How in the heck did he persuade everyone to do that without sending one single e-mail? And let’s not forget all of his lady-friends. Now that’s personality! NOTE: please don’t hold me to the historical accuracy of the creation of day light savings–I am aware that this was a long, legislative effort conceived and compelled by other men–I am merely taking some poetic license to make a point.
Twitter has come out with a great idea of allowing you to create “lists” of your favorite people and seeing what all of them are saying within a single view. Twitter is calling this the (unoriginal) “Twitter Lists“. The list idea is great, but for some reason they left out one feature that might make this idea “great”. Right now, you cannot directly create an RSS feed out of the Twitter list. I’m not sure why Twitter didn’t build that into the initial release, but luckily for you, we’ve found a way around that little issue.
Enter one of our old friends, “Dapper Dapp Factory“. One of my first blog posts was a review of the Dapp Factory, and it is still a jewel when you need it. Until Twitter wises up and figures out how great a resource the RSS feed of the Twitter Lists can be, here’s what you need to do.
1. Find the feed you want to turn into an RSS feed:

For our example, we’ll take Nicole Black’s list of “legal-must-follows“

2. Copy the URL for the list and go to Dapper’s Dapp Factory (create a free account if you don’t already have one.) Select “RSS Feed”, then click “Next”

3. On the next page, click “Add to Basket”, then “Next Step” (ignore the message, as we are just going to upload this one web page.)
4. Highlight and click the Twitter Name, then save it as “TwitterName”
5. Highlight and click the “Tweet” portion, then save it as “Tweet”
6. Highlight and click the “Time” portion, then save it as “Date”
7. The results will look like this:
8. Name your “Dapp” and save it
9. Create the RSS feed following this format:
10. Copy and paste the RSS feed into your Google Reader or other RSS resource:
This is not a perfect RSS feed, but this will work nicely until Twitter realizes that creating RSS feeds of the Twitter Lists is a needed resource.
NOTE: Nicole Black also pointed me toward another Twitter List To RSS resource (although it is having some issues, Niki says to keep trying it and it does eventually work. Thanks Niki!!

I’m a big fan of “lists” – whether they are “Top 10” lists, or “Must Follow” lists or “To Do” lists… (actually, I’m not a big fan of the “To Do” list.) But, I do not like it when someone posts a “list” on their blog that is basically a cut and paste job from other’s work. I ran across one such list today and it immediately made me think that someone didn’t do their own work.

The list was compiled by a “Lawyer Coach” and is called “50 Lawyers and Legal Professionals You Should Follow.” I’m not going to link to it, but you can do a Twitter search to find some of the tweets and re-tweets that point to it, or you can Google it!
I saw this tweeted by a couple of very reputable people I follow and so I checked it out to see who the “best of the best” were. When I got there, I saw what looked like the great list of people that Lance Goddard and Adrian Lurssen compiled, and to the blogger’s credit, they were credited. However, once I started looking at the list, I noticed that there were links to people:
  1. Who don’t exist
  2. Who don’t write anything
  3. Who died over a year ago
It reminded me of some attorneys I’ve known over the years that blindly cut and paste sections from someone else’s brief only to have a judge point out to them that the quote or citation from the original brief was wrong. Doing things like this show that you are sloppy in your research, and if you aren’t willing to put in the effort to at least verify the people that you claim others should follow, then why would anyone want to follow (or hire) you??
So please… if you put a list on your blog that you want me to take seriously; DON’T COPY & PASTE SOMEONE ELSE’S LIST!! And, if you feel that you must copy and paste someone else’s list, please do some research to make sure the information is still accurate. Otherwise, you just end up looking like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

They say that “practice makes perfect”… so, I guess that means I need more practice.

Last Friday, the Special Libraries Association Texas Chapter (SLA-TX) hosted an all day conference at the University of Texas campus. We had a packed house, and I decided to also stream the conference in order to allow those that could not attend a chance to sit in ‘virtually.’ We used UStream as our free streaming provider, a new Logitech QuickCam Orbit MP Webcam, and Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder 3 to take advantage of the high quality camera functions through UStream.
Although things went pretty well, there were a few mistakes on my part that I’d like to share with you in case you decide to stream a presentation.
1 – If you have a chance to “hard wire” your Internet connection, do it!!

The night before the conference, I tested the streaming capabilities at the SLA-TX board meeting so that we could talk to board members that couldn’t make the trip to Austin. We used the WiFi through the hotel, and quickly discovered that weak WiFi causes bad streaming. The slowness in the WiFi connection caused the audio to chatter, and the lag time in the video became huge (around a 10 minute lag time.) When I got to the conference room the next day, I quickly found the network plug and hard wired my Internet connection.

2 – Bring an extension cord and a long network cable!

I actually did bring an extension cord with me, but the network cable I brought was only 12 feet long. Because the network plug was in the corner of the room, this meant I had to shoot the video at an angle. It would have been much better to have shot the video from the audience perspective with a straight on shot. Next time, I’m bringing at least 50 feet of networking cable, and 50 feet of extension cord… just to be safe.

3 – If you want to show both the speaker and the presentation, darken the room!

Apparently, a well-lit room and a bright projector screen are not a good combination. I noticed in the Internet Librarian live stream, that you can see the speaker and presentation just fine if the room is darker. Next time, we’re turning off some lights in the conference room!

4- Understand that the “Chat” function may be blocked by some workplace networks!

This problem I actually knew about before I started streaming on Friday (since my workplace blocks ‘Chat’ functions for security reasons.) Your audience will not be able to ‘talk’ to you, so the only way the can ask questions is to either sign in on the chat function (if they can), or you can set up a Twitter hashtag (we used #slatx09), and monitor that via the UStream widget. If all of that fails, give your audience an email address to send their questions and monitor that during the presentation.

5 – Want to record the presentation? Then read the instructions!!

I know, I know… this goes against the guy code and Toby has asked for my man card for even suggesting reading instructions but I really screwed the pooch on this one. We had a great keynote presenter in Gary Hoover who I promised I would record the presentation and send him a copy. Now I have to send an apology note to Gary that explains that, while I did press the “record” button, apparently, it was the wrong “record” button. Now, I have nothing for him but excuses. Turns out that I needed to use the record function through the UStream dashboard rather than the record function through the Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder.

I’m sure there are many, many more mistakes that I made while live streaming the SLA-TX conference last Friday, but these are all I’m admitting to at this time.
Despite the fact that I didn’t record the conference, I’d still say that the live stream was an overall success. At one point in the conference (while discussing the hot topic of the SLA name change and alignment project), we had more people watching the live stream than we had at the conference. We handled questions from the remote viewers, and were able to expand our audience beyond those that could travel to Austin. That, my friends, is a win-win for everyone. I hope that some of you reading this are now inspired to live stream your conferences and seminars. If you do, please let me know so I can tune in and see if you’ve learned from my mistakes.

Remember my blog where I compared legal marketing to dating?
I stand by my previous metaphor and I add yet more: social networking is true test of your commitment to your law firm. Yes, the big “C” word: commitment.
For social networking to truly sing, you can’t just be friends with your social networking sites. You can’t just drop by when you feel like spending time with them. Sending them make-up flowers won’t work. And big, glorious, dramatic scenes will get you nowhere.
Just like marriage, social networking is hard. You have to be present every single day with a commitment to add something of value. Your words may fall on deaf ears. The objects of your affection may spurn you or take no notice.
But it doesn’t matter whether anyone notices your efforts to demonstrate your commitment, nay, your love for your law firm. It doesn’t matter whether anyone re-tweets you. It doesn’t matter whether your blog gets picked up by some national blog-monger.
Because at the end of the day, you just have to be committed and true to who you love and to who you are.
What can I say? Nice guys do finish last. And marriages can last a lifetime.
Look around. There are lots of happy bloggers, Twitterers, Facebookers and LinkedInners. They are just doing their thing, making copy, meeting folks and enjoying their days. And hardly any of them are famous.
But they all seem to be pretty darned happy.
See? Sometimes commitments do pay off.

We will stream the SLA Texas Chapter seminar live on 3 Geeks beginning at 9:00 AM Central Standard Time on Friday October 23rd. You can follow the Twitter stream through the hashtag “#slatx09“. The agenda and discussion topics are listed below.

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

Agenda (Times are CST)

8:15 Registration, breakfast, and networking
9:00 Welcome by Greg Lambert, Texas Chapter President
9:15 New Web Search Technologies and Social Media Strategies Panel
10:15 Break
10:30 Creative Problem Solving Case Studies Panel
11:30 Lunch
12:30 How an Entrepreneur sees Information: The Importance of Information, including dusty tomes, in the 21st Century – keynote speaker, Gary Hoover
2:00 Break
2:15 Align in ’09 – Tom Rink, Northeastern State University, SLA Division Cabinet Chair
3:00 Break
3:15 Chapter Business & Wrap Up
4:00 Happy Hour: Join us for a glass of wine


Presentations

How an Entrepreneur sees Information: The Importance of Information, including dusty tomes, in the 21st Century Featuring keynote speaker – Gary Hoover, visionary, businessman and entrepreneur, travels the world speaking to Fortune 500 executives, trade associations, entrepreneurs and students about how enterprises are built and how they stand the test of time. Hoover founded BOOKSTOP, Inc. which was purchased by Barnes & Noble and Hoover’s, Inc which was purchased by Dun & Bradstreet. Align in ’09 SLA National is undergoing an Alignment Project. Tom Rink the SLA Division Cabinet Chair will enlighten the Texas Chapter about the process and gather our input. New Web Search Technologies and Social Media Strategies Panel – featuring SLA Texas Chapter Members · Social Media Policy and Facebook Pages o Mary Ann Huslig, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center · Triple Letter Score: Wolfram|Alpha, Bing, And Google Squared for Business Research o Laura Young, Austin Ventures o April Kessler, University of Texas Libraries · Social Media Search Strategies o Joel Thornton, Texas A&M University Creative Problem Solving Case Studies Panel – featuring SLA Texas Chapter Members · E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) o Melinda Guthrie, Tarleton State University · Microgrants: Fostering Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston Libraries o Robin Dasler, University of Houston · Prioritizing Your Work Schedule o Michael Zimmerman, Bain & Company

Computing in the Cloud (f.k.a. SaaS, Hosted Applications, ASP, Thin Client computing, etc.) is all the rage these days. And it incites a high level of emotion amongst both its supporters and detractors. Those holding back against the Cloud trend point to security of information (for lawyers this is your clients’ information) as the reason not to move into the Cloud. Supporters note that 1) moving into the Cloud adds levels of collaborative functionality and service that client/server tools can’t match, and 2) the Cloud can be much more secure than self-hosted and maintained information.

The problem is that both sides are right. Moving client information into unknown and ill-defined Clouds can lead to bad consequences. Meanwhile, trying to stay up on fast changing and conflicting security concerns on your own is daunting, at a minimum. And on top of that, just try to keep up with collaborative technology innovations.

What is needed is a highly trusted Cloud that will host client information in a well-defined and known set of locations. Ideally this will be a provider with years of experience hosting mission critical information. You know … something like case law or numerous other sources of legal content. The challenge with that type of vendor would be their willingness to host applications from third parties.

I had the opportunity recently to hear a ‘Cloud’ presentation from Lexis. My expectations were low, looking forward to an hour of Buzzword bingo. However, I was more than pleasantly surprised. Terry Williams, VP Managed Technology Solutions, talked at length about how Lexis has seen this coming and actually DONE something about it. They are already hosting third party applications in the e-discovery arena and are moving out beyond that realm into other legal applications. And get this – they are even exploring hosting general (non-legal specific) applications. When I asked him my $64 Dollar Cloud question (what about hosting MS Exchange?) he didn’t flinch. Although they are not quite willing to answer this question yet, they have at least asked it. The potential result would be an option for law firms to eventually move all of their software and data into a trusted Cloud. When it comes to securing your data in this scenario, Lexis will even give you the option of naming both your primary and secondary data center locations (insuring your data stays on-shore).

Someone pinch me – I must be dreaming.

Terry said to expect more information and announcements in the coming months. Their intention is to move fast, since nimbleness counts for so much these days.

My wife always loves it when I tell people what I do for a living. When I say I’m a “law librarian” I usually get a confused look back from the other party. Then I say “I’m a librarian that also happens to have a law degree.” I usually get the same blank look, but they tend to say “ohhhh,” and quickly change the topic. People have certain stereotypes of librarians, and most of those I don’t fit. One universal comment I get from my non-librarian professional colleagues is this:

If you want to move up in the world (i.e., get that “Chief” position)… drop the librarian title.

This comment was taken to heart by one of my “library” organizations, SLA (originally Special Libraries Association). This week the SLA leadership announced a proposed change in the name of the organization. The new name? “Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals” or … wait for it… wait for it…. “ASKPro.”
Needless to say, the comments have been, shall we say, interesting.
  • “Find myself asking, What is a librarian? What is an info pro? What is a strategic knowledge professional? I can answer the first 2!” – @iBraryGuy
  • “The most controversial part of my guest lecture today was when I mentioned [ASKPro]. The course coordinator didn’t hear the K…” – @librariankt (now say ASKPro, but leave off the “K”)
  • “Vote NO on ASKPro. SLA it’s time to take back “library”, not run for the hills and a silly contrived name. We are librarians!” – @dapmcc
  • “Sounds like a duck should be saying it” – @dchochrek

Reece Dano (@r33c3) did an informal survey of his office and came back with some more positive reactions:
(1) Doing an informal survey around the office about the proposed ASKPro name. Some interesting observations. (2) Mostly positive. Some people who think of us primarily as librarians don’t understand the meaning of ‘strategic.’ (3) But those are people who don’t often directly receive our research deliverables. (4) People definitely understand “knowledge professional” immediately. (5) Unexpected finding: Men almost unanimously like it — immediately. Women have to think about for a minute, but usually like it. (6) A few women find the name slightly pretentious. (7) EVERYONE likes it much better than “Special Libraries Association.” Again, this was not a scientific survey. 🙂
Name changes are always interesting to follow. I’ve always had the belief that if you think you can change all your problems by changing your name, then the name is not your problem. On that topic, my friend Jan Rivers had a great comment:

[How our organizational] leaders value what we do isn’t based on what we’re called, it’s based on our actions. – @jriversmn

I’ll discuss this next week in Austin at the SLA-Texas Chapter meeting (which I happen to be President of this year). It will be very interesting to see what the comments the membership has regarding the proposed name change.

With all of the actual layoffs that are occurring in the BigLaw world, it is pretty easy for sites like Above the Law and Law Shucks to have great fodder on how scary things are for BigLaw associates and staff. Don’t get me wrong, I monitor both of these sites from time to time, and find that they identify a lot of issues out there that many of the legal publications wouldn’t touch. However, I spotted a story last week that made me wonder if there might be a little more “hype” than “fact.” The story called “Nationwide (Stealth) Layoff Watch: Nixon Peabody” was in Above the Law last Friday – and mentioned in Law Shuck’s “This Week in Lawyoffs – 10/9/09“. Although I don’t doubt that ATL was given information on the details surrounding layoffs, I thought I’d check something first before taking this information at face value.
Back in February, when the big round of layoffs were taking place, I took it upon myself to take a snapshot of most of the AmLaw 100 rosters via their websites. Nixon Peabody, of course, was one of these. So, I thought I’d dust off that list and compare it to today’s roster of employees. What I found was pretty interesting, but didn’t seem to be as dire as I’ve been reading in ATL or Law Shucks. I identified who was new to the roster, and who was no longer on the roster. This is not a scientific comparison, so please take into account that there could be a number of reasons for the “new” and “missing” roster members, such as name changes from marriage or divorce, and things like partners that have moved to different firms rather than being laid off. So, don’t take this as a perfect list…. With that being said, here’s what I found:
Associates 26 New Associates vs. 32 Not on Roster

Partners 8 New Partners vs. 15 Not on Roster

Others (Counsel, Staff Atty, Advisors, etc) 6 New Others vs. 12 Not on Roster
Paralegals 12 New Paralegals vs. 6 Not on Roster
So, there does seem to be a net loss of 19 attorneys since the February snapshot. However, there has been an increase of 6 paralegals, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t been hearing anything about hiring at BigLaw firms. What I’m seeing from these raw numbers is that there is still movement within the firms (at least this single one I unscientifically surveyed), but I’d be cautious to buy too much into the hype of secret layoffs without digging a little deeper into the facts surrounding the comings and goings of these attorneys. Below are the lists I’ve worked from. Take a look and see if you find that the facts might be more interesting than the hype.