My prior musings on search tools started from a discussion on how keyword searching has reached its limits. Courts and lawyers are struggling with the immense amount of information involved in discovery and hoping for more cost effective ways of finding relevant case information without breaking the bank.

The effort to improve search goes well beyond any legal discovery issues and straight into the heart of knowledge management (KM). KM’s sister struggle works from two angles. First there is an effort to better structure information as it is captured. Second, there are efforts to create structure out of chaotic information (a.k.a. BLOBs), which is where next-generation search tools come into play.

Previously I lumped concept and semantic search into the same broad category. This time I will differentiate between the two and take the discussion another step. For now I will break search into three categories: Keyword, Concept and Semantic.

Keyword or word searching, for this discussion, is that of searching for exact word matches. This can be a complete word, such as Nation, or an extension of the root word into variations such as National, Nations or Nationalistic. The main technical feature of keyword search is that the computer is looking for binary code matches to a search query. This method has been extended and improved by adding search by data type (in a structured database) or search for multiple words within a defined proximity (e.g. within 10 words, etc.) and with known connectors (e.g. and, or, not …). The keyword method has been very useful to-date, especially when searching within large structured databases. It allows users to search by date, location, category, etc., to come up with useful results.

The problem with keyword searching is the expanding mass of unstructured information we now have. Keyword searching has become inadequate and at times counter productive to finding the right information quickly and affordably.

Concept search is one method for solving this problem. My definition: The ability to extract structure from unstructured data. In English, this means the tool can evaluate text and break it down into its component parts and ascertain their structure. As an example, feeding this article into a concept search engine, would result in defining paragraphs, sentences, nouns, phrases and perhaps even proper names and dates and numbers. This allows a database-like search, where the user can search for Name = Brown (and not get color references) or Date = December 25 and get back useful results. Concept searching is just coming into the market, with players like Recommind, Autonomy and Collexis. As an emerging technology, the challenge is good implementation. Companies and firms are attacking this problem now, so I would expect this challenge to diminish over time.

Semantic search is truly Web 3.0. Sir Tim suggested this concept over a decade ago and now efforts are under way to make it a reality. My definition: Attach meaning to each piece of data. In practice this means describing each piece of information by its relationship to another piece. In the geek world this is referred to as “subject, predicate, object” and is defined with a standard called RDF (more on that in another post). To give a very simple example: Mary has son Dave. This is referred to as a “triple.” In our semantic world we will move away from structured databases to a store of these triples. Extending our example with another triple: Dave has spouse Judy. Combining these two triples, a computer can determine that Judy has mother-in-law Mary. The result is that the machine can understand the data. In fact in this environment the machine can discover knowledge. By connecting all the triples via their relationships, the machine will answer questions we never ask. This is a quantum leap ahead of keyword searching.

Semantic search currently lives mostly in the minds of geeks and venture capitalists (with some exceptions). Still, it is a viable and growing world. What it needs are more standards and some time to develop. Its potential is tremendous, but as yet undefined.

Well … that’s my attempt to capture the past, present and future of search technology in a blog post. Future posts will delve deeper into this, as it is such a critical aspect of KM and will define KM’s future.

I get to look at hundreds of client alerts and articles written by attorneys each week, and I usually come across some pretty good articles that discuss law and technology issues.  Rather than keeping those hidden in my own brain, I thought that it would be a good service of the 3 Geeks & a Law Blog to share what we think is the best article for the week.  

This week’s winner comes from Fried Frank’s New York office.   
Janice MacAvoy, Litigation Partner, and Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, Litigation Associate (with additional credit to former associate Sherita Walton and summer associate Steven Star) penned an article entitled Think Twice Before You Hit The Send Button!  Practical Considerations In the Use of Email.  
They kick off the article with a variation of a quote that I use a lot when talking to audiences about using the Internet:

Don’t send an email unless you would be happy to see it on the front page of a newspaper — or all over the Internet.

Excellent advice.  By the way, my variation is “don’t post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t want your Managing Partner or your Grandmother to see.”  Basically a variation of what should be called “The Golden Rule of Internet Communications.”

We all have heard anecdotal stories of how email has landed employees in hot water, but this article backs up those anecdotes with some citations to actual cases where lawyers violated client confidentiality, employees were fired for inappropriate emails, and where inadvertent “reply-all” clicks landed the email on the front pages of major newspapers.  The citations will help prove the issues surrounding lax email policies to attorneys that don’t believe anything has actually happened until and appellate court has written about it.
Mac Avoy and Espinoza-Madrigal lay out ten steps that every law firm should teach its attorneys and staff:
  1. Take Steps to Protect Confidential Information
  2. Preserve Client Privilege in Emails
  3. Treat Every Email Like a Substantive Memo to Client
  4. Review All of Your Emails Before Sending Them
  5. Think About the Timing of Your Email
  6. Maintain an Accurate Record in Email
  7. Consider Whether a Phone Call Would be More Appropriate
  8. Take Care Regarding Your Recipient
  9. Maintain Appropriate Record Retention Practices with Email
  10. Use Good Email Etiquette
All of these are common sense items that we should all remember, but tend to forget because we become too comfortable with shooting off an email without thinking of which of these 10 rules have we broken.
I suggest that you pass this article along to your training staff and have them use it as an outline for training (and re-training) attorneys and staff on the practical use of email.
NOTE:  If you run across any good articles that discuss law & technology and you think we should discuss here, please either shoot me an email at 3geeksblog@gmail.com (after reading the 10 Rules above, of course), or Twitter it to me.

Monday, I was looking over a list of online legal directories: Martindale, Findlaw, Legal500, BestLawyers, Chambers. I could go on and on . . .

Well, you know, my cohorts in crime here, Toby and Greg, have been talking a lot about the new way in which Martindale has hooked up with LinkedIn. Martindale is going where no legal directory has gone before: web 2.0–definitely a leg up in the competition.

Then I started thinking about the legal directories marketplace. Martindale, owned by LexisNexis, is the gorilla in this group. Lexis’ parent company is Reed Elselvier, acquires legal technology just like any other technology: they grow by acquisition.

My prediction? Reed’s going to starting snapping up international law directories. Dare I say Chambers? Stay tuned . . .

Well, doggone: just googled it. Here’s the release:

No, this isn’t about turning Twitter into an online dating service.  This is about finding that special “business” contact on Twitter by using Twellow to help guide you in the right direction.  Why Twellow??  Because it indexes the biographical information that Twitter users and allows you to find people by who they say they are.  

Twellow has some good functions built into their site, but I have found that their categorization is “good” but not “great.”  So, use that if you want, but I’m going to let you in on a secret that will allow you to do some really good searching of Twellow, right from the search text box.
Let’s say you want to find a list of all the CEO’s that have Twitter accounts.  You could easily enter CEO into the search screen and come back with a list of 1,300+ Twitter accounts (of which you can actually view the top 1,000.)  But, I’ve discovered that Twellow has a couple of hidden “features” in its search function.  Using these features can really help narrow, or expand your results list.
Search Functions:
  1. “&”  = AND function.  So, you can look for CEO & Zappos
  2. “|”   = OR function.  You can search for CTO | CKO
  3. ” ”    = [quotes]  Exact String Search.  Find “Law Librarian”
  4. “-”  = NOT function.  Find Lawyer -blogger
  5. “( term )” = Group Function.  Find (lawyer | attorney) California
Still with me??
Good.  Let’s put this to use and start finding some contacts that we can build upon!!
CFO OR CMO OR CIO OR CTO OR CKO “C-Level” Twitters (500+)
As you can see from these searches, you can narrow or expand your searches within Twellow to help find that special someone.
Contact me via Twitter, if you need help constructing your searches.  Good luck!  I only ask for a 10% commission on any new business you bring in!!  (just kidding…)
NOTE:  If you don’t put meaningful information in your bio, then people won’t be able to find you.  So, if you’re one of those that likes metaphysical descriptions of themselves (like – “I’m a caffeine addicted maniac located somewhere on the Internet), I hope you weren’t planning on using Twitter as a networking tool to help your business.  You can still be cute, but at least put the basic keywords in your bio that you’d like people to find.
  

The vast number of posts and articles on alternative billing focus on what law firms should be doing. Law firms need to figure out alternative billing. They need to figure out how to make money and save clients’ money at the same time. Especially large firms (a.k.a. BigLaw) need to offer this up to clients and just solve the big problems of hourly billing and perceived high billing rates.

But where are the clients in this discussion? For years I’ve been waiting for clients to force the issue with their firms and get this ball rolling. My prior post talked about the ACC starting this dialogue. This may well drive alternative billing options, but still doesn’t address the role of the client in this process.

Let’s take a hypothetical. A client instructs its law firm providers to fix-fee bill a matter or set of matters. After the panic settles, law firms are faced with a long list of questions, none of which the client would have addressed. If this is litigation: How many plaintiffs are there? How many jurisdictions? How many experts are involved? How many witnesses are expected. What is the potential exposure in terms of settlement? What level of settlement would the client accept?

A related trend in the market is that of running law firms through the purchasing department of a client, at least to qualify them as accepted vendors. If you take this approach one step further, then you run into the answers our hypothetical law firms have posed. For most categories of purchasing for larger clients an RFP is a necessary part of the process. This is where the specifications for a purchase are outlined. This is where in-house counsel would list their requirements for the parameters of the matter(s) under bid.

Just like their outside counsel counterparts – in-house counsels have a learning curve when it comes to alternative billing. Both groups have been splashing in the shallow end of this pool, creating budgets and breaking matters down into segments or phases, but they really haven’t applied a rigorous discipline that will draw them to the deeper waters in the pool.

Of course there are always exceptions to the rule. Some firms, or more likely some practice groups in some firms have tackled this issue along with their clients. But overall I am guessing this number is low. As the dialogue continues watch for discussions on how clients will have to change to handle alternative billing. This will be a strong indicator that alternative billing’s time has come.

One of my first product evaluations (way back in July!!) was a web RSS creator called Dapper.  And I still use it from time to time, but this week I’ve been playing with a similar product from Yahoo called Yahoo Pipes.  I’m just beginning to scratch the surface with Pipes, but I can tell this is something that I wished I would have been learning a long time ago.  

The basic idea behind Yahoo Pipes is that is gives you “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.  And, I love mashups!!  Since I spent last week listing out a whole bunch of Blogs from NLJ 250 firms, I thought that Yahoo Pipes would be a great resource to use to actually start pulling the different blogs together, based on their common themes.  I decided to pull all of the “Environomental” blogs together to create a mashup that listed all of the recently published postings from those blogs.  
I found eight workable (those that had working RSS feeds) environmental blogs on my list:
Akin Gump ClimateIntel
Baker & Daniels Climate News Live
Holland & Hart Climate Change Law Blog
Saul Ewing Climate Change
Thompson & Knight Law and the Environment
Yahoo Pipes allows you to combine these into one result and filter those results how you like them.  Following the instructions, I ended up with a Yahoo Pipes diagram that looked like this:

If you’re comfortable with RSS or XML (or even setting up a Google Reader gadget), then it isn’t rocket science to set up Yahoo Pipes to do the same thing for you (plus, give you some additional options.)
So, voila!  Here is the output of my very basic, but still effective Yahoo Pipes NLJ 250 Environmental Law Blogs:

Law firms and clients for years have treated alternative billing (a.k.a. NOT hourly billing) much like a junior high school dance. At the Junior High Dance the boys stand on one side of the room and the girls on the other. Each side talks about how they would like to dance, but when it comes to stepping up and asking someone to actually dance, they shy away.

In this instance, the law firms might be likened to the boys at the dance, bragging about how they can provide alternative billing, but never crossing the room to initiate a dance. Meanwhile the in-house counsel are like the girls, wanting to utilize alternative billing but standing and waiting for someone to ask them. Perhaps both sides have just been waiting for the right song to come on.

Well … maybe that song just started and it’s called The Cost Cutting Hop.

Like the Junior High Dance, I figure it will be one or a group of the girls who actually force the issue and cross the room to get people dancing. That group in this case is the ACC. In September the ACC initiated the Value Challenge.

The Value Challenge states the Problem as:

ACC believes that many traditional law firm business models and many of the approaches to lawyer training and cost management are not aligned with what corporate clients want and need: value-driven, high-quality legal services that deliver solutions for a reasonable cost and develop lawyers as counselors (not just content-providers), advocates (not just process-doers) and professional partners.

At another time this kind of effort might be written off as more talk about “dancing.” But this time the music has changed. The Recession (now official) has brought tremendous pressure on GCs to control and cut costs. And guess where they will go to do this? Across the dance floor to their outside counsel is my guess.

Like the school Principal who has been waiting with anticipation for the students to get going, this will be a relief to finally witness. Alternative / Value Billing has the potential to help clients control costs AND help law firms improve their profitability. In future posts, I’ll start covering various alternative billing approaches, their pros and cons, and the how firms and clients might embrace them.

I was read that Weil, Gotshal was going to be opening a new Middle East office in January. It got me wondering: how many of the top 50 AmLaw Firms have Middle East Offices?
11.
Oddly, top ranking Skadden does not.
The most popular location is Dubai, with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi tying for second place.
I speculate this because the ones that do have ME offices are heavily invested in their energy and project finance practices. Although some may be handling corporate work, I would hazard to guess that the work is so specialized that it would require solid ME legal expertise, which is very hard to come by.
Also, setting up office in the Middle East is complicated: it requires assocations with local firms. And don’t forget integrating into the rest of the firm’s technology.
Recently the NY Times was advocating that employment-challenged lawyers may consider looking to the Middle East for their next gig. Apparently, there is a wealth of vacancies if you are willing to adopt a new culture.
If you are interested in the full list, shoot me an e-mail.

[For those who arrived here from the bit.ly shortcut, sorry for the confusion. Twitter and other sites truncate the link and brought you here. If you’re interested in great discussion on legal technology, then welcome. We’d love to have you subscribe to the blog and the podcast. – GL]

This week, we’ve been listing all the large law firms that we could find that publicize the fact that they have attorney written blogs. We broke it down into those that were proud of their blogs vs. those that seem to be luke-warm to the fact that these blogs exists.  There are a few more categories we could also cover, such as those firms that would ban blogging by their attorneys, or attorneys that have stealth blogs that either haven’t been discovered by their firms Marketing Department or Senior Partners, or are just plain ignored by the firm’s upper echelon. These would be interesting (but difficult) lists to compile, but what interests me the most is the attorneys that have blogs, but don’t necessarily want the firm to have anything to do with them.

There were a few comments on the previous posts that said that they actually wanted to keep their personal blogs, well… “personal.” And, they had a number of reasons to keep the firm from taking ownership of the blog:
  1. Personal blogs do not have to be “screened” by anyone in the firm before being posted. This allows for attorneys to post quickly to breaking news, or just whenever the mood hits them.
  2. If I move to another firm, I can take my personal blog with me. It would tragic to have to leave something that you feel is your own and turn it over to others to manage (or destroy) when you move on to another firm.
I’ve also been thinking of what are the benefits of having your firm taking ownership (or at least promoting and supporting) a blog.  So, I came up with this list:
  1. I have a multi-million dollar organization with thousands of clients and a global (or at least national) reach supporting my efforts.
  2. Others in my firm can team with me to work on a specific legal topic blog.  Spread the effort of maintaining an up-to-date blog across the Practice Group, thus making the blog more diverse and current.
  3. I feel somewhat less guilty if I blog between the hours of 8-5.  Hey, it’s for the Firm!!
  4. Hopefully there is someone in Marketing that can help promote the blog.  A kind of built in Search Engine Optimizer and editor right on staff.
  5. My blog can lead to me being asked to speak at conferences on specific topics and the firm will see it as professional development, not just personal gratification.
I’m sure there’s more, but I thought I’d leave a little something for all of you to leave in the comments section below.
To spruce this post up a little bit, I thought it would be interesting to survey the readership to see what they think about the relationship between a law firm and their attorney blogs.

What Type of Relationship Would You Want Between Your Blog and Your Firm?