One of my favorite lines from the Roast of Larry the Cable Guy came from Greg Giraldo when he asked “How the #*^% are you so popular???” There are a lot of folks out there asking the same thing about Twitter. Especially after, as one blogger put it, “Twitter’s Spectacularly Awful 24 Hours.”

You can read about all the screw-ups that Twitter’s executives made yesterday, and their apology for all the mess in any of the other of thousand’s of blogs talking about it today. I wanted to touch on why it is that:
1) Why people care so much about the “TWawful TWednsday” and
2) Why it is that 99.44% of the users of the service will forgive and forget.

Why Do We Care??
Let’s face it… Twitter is run like it is a couple of kids in the basement of their parent’s house with a computer and a programming manual. But, in a way, that is one of the things that people love about it. It isn’t flashy, it isn’t complicated, and in fact, it may be one of the simplest forms of communication in the history of modern communication tools. When I started using Twitter, I said to a group of librarians in Dallas that “Twitter is the dumbest thing I’ve ever become totally dependent upon.” And that is still true today. Everyone is Tweeting about how Twitter is run so poorly, and how terrible the service is…. just look at the #TwitterFail tweets. I can only imagine that there were some people just frustrated yesterday that they had to wait until Twitter’s mid-day service shutdown was over before they could tweet about it.
Why Will We Forgive?
Twitter has built up some “Political Capital” with its users and it is going to spend some of it over the next couple of days to make up for yesterday. Evan and Biz have done a great job of embedding their personalities into Twitter. And, both have made hundreds of thousands of virtual friends. And, we’re more willing to forgive our friends of their faults than we would be of a “business.” So, just like Larry the Cable Guy movies (Delta Farce, Witless Protection), they make some pretty awful decisions (i.e., mid-day service shutdown, removal of @replies without telling anyone), yet the fan base still loves ’em.
What Can We Learn From Evan & Biz??
First of all, just because you are really really good at what you do, whether it be creating Internet communication tools, or practicing law… doesn’t mean you are automatically good at running the business. It’s okay to put your personal brand on your product (in fact, it is encouraged), but when it comes to handling complex business issues you need to find some experts in that area that can work behind the scenes. If Evan and Biz can’t do that, then it is really time to start thinking of selling off Twitter and start working on creating their next great invention.
“Political Capital” is a good thing to have, and a terrible thing to waste on bad decisions. Twitter has build a loyal customer base (excluding the post-Oprah crowd that is now disappearing), and this base is pretty forgiving. But, try not to be careless or take for granted that this base is always forgiving. You screw up enough where you’ve tarnished your image, then that’s when some competitor swoops in and takes advantage of your mistakes and starts bleeding your customers away.
The Key Takeaway — “Political Capital” takes a long time to build up, and a short time to destroy. So, don’t waste it!!

Carolyn Elefant posted an interesting comment to Part 2 of our Crowdsourcing dialogue. She noted that “managing a crowd sourcing project can be difficult.” This brings us to explore our methodology and the art of crowdsourcing.

In a nutshell what we’ve learned is that managing crowdsourcing staff is unique. In crowdsourcing you pay for very discreet tasks performed by anonymous workers. We envision the emergence of crowdsourcing staffing companies to meet this challenge. Their role will be packaging and structuring projects in the most effective and efficient ways. In this new environment ‘employers’ will have to be quick on their feet to adjust to new worker behaviors and keep projects profitable.

Adjusting our Methodology

Ron Friedmann in his comment to Part 1 suggests “recognition” as a motivator for our crowdsourced staff. Unfortunately, we don’t have much opportunity for that with an anonymous staff (although we’re open to creative ideas). However, we can make adjustments to our compensation method. In requesting researched information, we had three main categories of responses: 1) Obviously right, 2) Possibly right (or wrong), and 3) Obviously wrong. Our new approach will allow us to differentiate between these and pay the right amount for each type.

Instead of just a blanket ‘double-blind’ approach where we pay for two responses to all requests, we will only allow one response per request. Category 1 responses will be accepted and paid (almost half from our 1st experiment). Category 2 responses can be accepted, paid and re-posted for verification. Category 3 responses can be rejected and re-posted as many times as needed. This revised approach will give us better returns on our investment (such as it is).

Under Consideration

We think this adjustment to our compensation model will produce better results at lower costs. The next layer of modifications to our method will come through how we design our requests (tasks). One thought is to take unanswered requests and reformulate the question for re-posting. Perhaps campaigns of follow-on, modified requests will bring us our desired results. In our current experiment the request for a contact with the title GC could be modified to include broader terms or even out-sourced options. We might have to increase the payment amount in this situation (reflecting greater effort or knowledge), but that would make sense if the response information carried enough value.

Whichever direction this experiment takes it is proving quite intriguing. We feel we’re on to something and will keep exploring the crowdsourcing idea to see what we learn.

After turning the MTurk crowdsourcing world loose on our project for about 30 hours, we decided that we’d stop and take a look at our results of the experiment, and see what we’ve learned so far. We’ll start out with the statistics, then we’ll follow up this post with an overview of our methodology and the things we learned on this initial test. Recap We took a list of 100 companies and asked if our MTurk workers could find the Last Name, First Name, Suffix, and link to a bio of the company’s General Counsel. We asked that the user only look on the company’s website to find the information, and we would not accept answers from external resources like ZoomInfo, etc. The question was answered in a “double-blind” method where each question was given to two different people to answer.Here’s what the actual MTurk questionnaire looked like:

The Statistics

  • Actual hours used to answer questions – 6.3 hours This meant that each answer took about 2 ½ minutes to answer. Some of the questions were handled within a few seconds, while others took a five minutes or more.
  • Average Pay Per Hour – $1.51 (+ 15¢ surcharge for MTurk per hour) When I looked at this, I immediately thought that I’d make a very good slum lord.
  • Total amount paid – $9.50 to workers + 95¢ to MTurk ($10.45 Total) Again, not a lot of money, but from my research on the topic, the MTurk workers aren’t looking to make a lot of money, they are taking on these projects in their spare time. So, although I’d make a great slum lord, I guess I shouldn’t feel too guilty about it.
  • Over 330 individuals accepted the tasks, but only 161 (48.8%) returned an answer Since we were only paying 10¢ a question, it is apparent that some decided it wasn’t worth the work, while others probably couldn’t find the answer and gave up.
  • Questions Answered – 161 of 200 (80.5%) Initially, I was floored by the fact that over 80% of the questions were answered. Once I started diving into the answers, it became apparent that not all of the answers were what we were looking for.
  • Total number of Answers that were “acceptable” – 95 of 161 (59%) Of the 161 answers we received, only 95 were deemed as correctly identifying the General Counsel of the company.
  • Companies with at least one answer – 86 of 100 (86%) Although there was an 86% return rate, not all of these companies had correct answers (more below.)
  • Companies that received a double-blind entry – 72 of 86 (83.7%) These were companies that had two different individuals return answers.
  • Companies that received only one answer – 14 of 86 (16.3%) However, out of the 14, only about two were correct. The rest were either pointing to the Chief Executive Officer as the GC, or were just plain guesses at the answer.
  • Double-Blind Answers where both answers matched – 46 of 72 (64.0%) These were answers where both individuals found the same name and url. Generally this is a good indicator that the information is correct. But, we found out that this isn’t always true (more below.)
  • Companies where the General Counsel information was found – 52 of 86 (60.5%) We looked at the answers individually and discovered that 34 (39.5%) of the companies where we received some type of data back from the MTurk worker had incorrectly identified the wrong person as the General Counsel. Most of the incorrect answers identified the Chief Executive Officer as the General Counsel. In one case, the person answered “none” (which was technically correct, but wasn’t included in the stats above.)

When the test was over, we ended up with solid answers for 52 of the 100 companies, and a good guess that 20-25 companies probably didn’t have a GC on staff. That is a great result for something we’ve spent $10.45 to get. We’ll discuss more of the methodology and some of the surprises we found while conducting this test in later posts.

After Greg’s post on crowdsourcing, he and I met to explore how we might push this envelope a little further. We decided to run an experiment to see how well crowdsourcing might work for a firm. We wanted to show immediate value and cost savings and to demonstrate which types of tasks might be handled this way.

The Setup

Tool: We (mostly Greg) decided to use MTurk from Amazon as the tool. After some research on price ranges, we chose to pay our workers 10 cents per task. That appears to be an average price based on what we saw and it’s cheap … like Greg.

Project: We know law firms love to have information about General Counsels (GCs), so we selected that as our task. Greg was able to pull a list of companies from two different markets. 50 from the mid-west and 50 from the SF Bay area. These companies are listed on the site for the project. Then we asked for the following from each company – GC first name, last name and a link to their online bio. The bio had to be from the company site. We let them know the GC may have another title like Chief Legal Officer or Corporate Secretary.

The Method: To test for and insure quality we did two things. First Greg ran a report from another system so we already know the answers to our question. Second, we allowed for two people to respond for each company GC. This ‘double-blind’ approach would serve as a quality check of the information we obtained. Our budget for the experiment – $22.00. $20.00 for the task payments and $2.00 for the MTurk fee.

Initial Response: Within the first hour we had 20% of our responses in at a cost of $4.24 per hour. The quality seems to be high, but a full analysis will come once we close the project.

Obviously the crowdsourcing approach will have limitations as to the types of tasks and information we collect. But our initial assessment is that this idea has merit. It appears to have hit Greg’s trifecta: Cheap, Easy and Fast.

More to come …

In the age of “doing more with less” there have been numerous things that we’ve just had to stop doing because the costs outweighed the benefits. For example, staff members may have tagged news articles by certain internal taxonomies in order to build daily newsletters that get sent to the attorneys in your firm. Or, you may have had data stewards that reviewed information that went into your CRM databases. Unfortunately, when the staff was cut, or ratios were reduced, these tasks could no longer be supported.
Almost all law firm administrative departments, ranging from KM, Library, IT, and even Secretarial Services, have all had to cut projects and tasks because there simply wasn’t enough time, people or money to complete the tasks.
Perhaps you’d like to outsource these projects, but even outsourcing can become too costly for simple tasks, and nearly impossible for ad hoc tasks that may only take a few hours of time to complete, but you just cannot take your staff off of current projects to work on these smaller ones.
There are businesses have been using the crowdsourcing techniques to help them proof-read documents, identify best photographs for a specific topic, suggest an improvement on an existing product, and even help create new templates for their sneakers. But, can a law firm leverage crowdsourcing? Are there specific information databases out there that we’d like to have at our disposal, but do not have the staff to compile, or we do not want to spend thousands of dollars to buy the information from one of the big legal vendors?
There are opportunities with law firms and crowdsourcing, whether it is tagging documents with legal topics, data steward work, or data compilation. I’m currently looking at some outsourcing and crowdsourcing projects that are out there (to be blogged about at a later date) — but, I thought I’d pose some quick questions out there for the reader:
  • Are there tasks/projects that law firms can ethically crowdsource?
  • Assuming that the price was right, would law firms even consider crowdsourcing?
I think law firms can take advantage of crowdsourcing…. now, whether they actually will or not remains to be seen.

Recent posts and discussions on the de-leveraging of law firms got me thinking. The thrust of the discussion is that BigLaw (and law firms in general) will not have the same leverage on the other side of the recession. I offer my evolving thoughts on this subject.

No leverage = no profit. The only ‘firms’ I have seen that are profitable selling partner time are called solos. I struggle to see how a law firm can be profitable without some sort of leverage. Partners (a.k.a. Owners) will succeed financially by having a pyramid-shaped organization (be it tall or short). This turns the discussion to “what will this leverage look like?”

I foresee firms adding to the bottom of the pyramid with non-partner track people (NPTPs). I’ve never understood why every lawyer hired has to be partner-track material. If (make that when) these people don’t make partner, they leave and take business and intellectual capital with them. Going forward firms would be wise not to build this destructive mechanism into their leverage. Additionally – NPTPs don’t have to be lawyers.

What would make sense for the future shape of BigLaw leverage is a cylinder in a pyramid. The cylinder would contain the partner track hires, allowing for NPTPs to fill in a pyramid around that.

This is not necessarily a new idea. The BigFour accounting firms already employ a similar approach, with some modifications. So it can work. It’s more an issue of whether BigLaw will figure this out — in time.

Cross your fingers.

Small Firm Success blog discussed the new Black’s Law Dictionary (8th Edition) that Thomson/West is selling for $49.99. At first, I thought this was a really great idea, and even though most iPhone apps are in the 99¢ to $1.99 price range, the $49.99 price didn’t phase me.

Then someone reminded me of something:

“Most lawyers have a BlackBerry, not an iPhone!”

According to this February Legal Techonology survey article, 95% of respondents said they issued their attorneys BlackBerries. If you watch the video below, you’ll see the excitement in the eyes of Dan Bennett and Jay Peyer about the product they’ve created. But, they clearly miss where their market is. They did make something cool, but if their customers aren’t on iPhones, then their customers can’t use it!!

I even got caught up in the whole “cool factor” of having Black’s on my mobile device, that I dared (even double-dog dared) Thomson/West into making a $9.99 version for the Amazon Kindle. By the way, that dare is still on!!

This is the sort of thing that happens when you let your “Techies” create something that they think is cool and cutting edge, while you’re business and sales people sit on the sidelines. What you end up with is a product that is cool and cutting edge, but on a platform that most of your clients can’t use!
My hope is that Thomson/West can take the effort that they’ve put into creating this create app, and push it over to the BlackBerry App World. And, I’ll pass along some words of wisdom that I learned many years ago when working between a brilliant technology staff, and a public that used our service — When you create a new product, you should constantly ask yourself this question: “Will my customer be able to use this?” — If at any point you question if the answer is a firm “yes”, you need to rethink what you are attempting to do. The coolest product in the world is useless if it cannot be used by your customers.

I spent the weekend presenting at Lexis’ Advance Management in Private Law Libraries (AMPLL 2009). Even though the weekend started out by my missing the flight to Dallas, and then having to scramble to make the 5 hour drive (I did it in a little over 4) to make it to the conference center in Plano, I had one of the most enjoyable experiences of my professional career.

The AMPLL conference brings together law firm library managers and directors to discuss current processes within their profession, and to discuss best practices. But, just like most conferences, the real information is found around the dinner table, or discussing issues over a glass (or, two) of wine.

In 2005, I was a participant in the AMPLL conference, and discovered that the best part of the conference wasn’t necessarily the presentations, or the wonderful presenters. It was the people sitting right next to you. It was a relief to find out that the problems you were facing back in the office weren’t unique. Granted, you assumed others were fighting these issues just like you were, but it really makes it a lot better when you have the opportunity to talk about it with someone that really understands.
This year’s AMPLL conference was kicked off by a COO from a Chicago law firm. We all listened as he gave us the C-Suite point of view. And we appreciated getting honest and frank answers. In return, I noticed that after the presentation, the COO remained at the conference to listen to what we had to say. He could have been on the golf course, or getting a massage, but instead he stuck around and continued to contribute. I even heard (second-hand) that he was amazed that “Best Practices” were being discussed, and that the attendees were getting actual “take-aways” that they could use when they returned to work on Monday.
At the end of the sessions, we all shared what we were going to do differently when we returned to work on Monday. Going individually through the 38 law librarians, it was apparent that we’d all had a rough time over the past 6-8 months, but we felt that we could turn the challenges into opportunities. Being able to bounce ideas off of each other, and getting the feedback we just cannot get within our own departments proved to be valuable to everyone in attendance. We’ve all learned from each other that we’re not facing impossible tasks. In fact we all walked away with tips, tricks, suggestions, and contacts that we didn’t have last week.
I’d like to thank the folks at Lexis for sponsoring the AMPLL conference. In this year of cutting Administrative Development costs, this conference (which the participants only had to cover travel costs) was extremely timely. I know that the batteries of a few of us were recharged over the weekend.
If you’re a law library manager/director in a law firm, I highly suggest that you apply in 2011 when the program cycles through again.

I have a real-life success story with Twitter: I actually called a lawyer that I met on Twitter to discuss a legal issue. Really.

The back story: @kentnewsome and I go back a ways. He, along with another partner, were the final word on all web decisions. After a few years, he decided to leave the firm for greener pastures.

Fast forward a couple of years.

I am bouncing around on Twitter, look at friends and followers. Who do I spot but @kentnewsome. Of course, we hook up. We tweet back and forth, I write a post about his technology blog, he updates me on his kids.

Then trouble hits.

As some of you may know, I am in the midst of buying a house. My first house. A custom-built house. Of course, as many of you more experienced home-buyers may know, pandemonium strikes: questions arise, trust is tested, integrity is challenged.

I need a real estate lawyer!

I am unsure if my issue merits hiring an attorney. So I need to talk to someone that I can trust to give me a fair assessment of my real estate issue.

Ah-ha! I remember that @kentnewsome is a real estate lawyer. And not just any real estate lawyer, but the head of the real estate department at a well-respected law firm. And not just the head of the real estate department but someone that I trust to have sound judgment and integrity.

So I call @kentnewsome. He was ever so kind to me. He allayed my fears, gave me reasonable legal advice and a common-sense solution.

So, you see, Twitter can lead to real legal business.

Its just in this case, @kentnewsome was kind enough to give me some free advice.

By the way, it’s all good. I’m getting the house 🙂

I stumbled across the Gartner Blog Network this morning while searching for legal news. For some reason I’ve never visited the Gartner blog before, but I was immediately impressed by what I saw, and the underlying concept of the network.
There are 69 Gartner analysts that contribute to the blog network, and according to Gartner, all of their analysts can contribute if they so desire. What an amazing concept!!
I dug into the FAQ section and was also amazed that they lay out the template of the Gartner Blog Network, and even include the guidelines they give their analysts. The FAQ lists the rules for posting’ what are appropriate topics; policies on posting comments; where blogs fit within their analysis reports; republication or quoting guidelines; and how complaints are handled. Basically they give you a template to take to your attorneys and administrative officials showing them how a firm-wide blog can be handled.
They even give you a canned disclaimer:

Comments or opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual contributors only, and do not necessarily represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management. Readers may copy and redistribute blog postings on other blogs, or otherwise for private, non-commercial or journalistic purposes. This content may not be used for any other purposes in any other formats or media. The content on this blog is provided on an “as-is” basis. Gartner shall not be liable for any damages whatsoever arising out of the content or use of this blog.
With some minor changes, you can even present the guidelines for your firm on what is appropriate material to post on a blog:

1. All [insert law firm name here] policies apply: Know and follow [law firm] policies. 2. Think before you post: Use sound judgment and think about reactions to your post before you post it. 3. Respect your audience: Avoid negative personal comments or inflammatory subjects. 4. Have productive conversations: For [law firm] and its associates, the primary benefits of Web participation are for others to learn about [law firm] and for [law firm] to learn from others. 5. Don’t “give away the farm”: Avoid posting the kind of information and advice for which clients pay [law firm]. 6. Protect and enhance the value of the [law firm] brand: Present [law firm] in a positive light and avoid making derogatory comments about [law firm], our products, services, management, employees, or systems. 7. Protect confidential information: Protect [law firm’s] and our clients’ confidential information. 8. Be personable and have fun: Web participation is about enjoying personal interactions, not delivering corporate communications.

Check out the full explanation of the Gartner participation guidelines to see the details behind the guidelines.
Again, I was amazed and thoroughly impressed with how Gartner enables, trusts, but still guides its analysts in its blogging network. Perhaps you can leverage this information within your own firm to “enable”, “trust” and “guide” your attorneys to create and participate in its own firm-wide blogging network.