Last week I presented for the National Organization of Bar Counsel (NOBC). This is the group that disciplines lawyers across the US. At the invitation of Bob Hawley from the State Bar of California, I have presented a number of times before this group, in what has evolved into a series of sort on going paperless.

At the NOBC meeting last year, we focused more on getting rid of paper. This year we talked about living without paper, specifically, using case and document management systems.

What struck me this year was the change in attitude of the audience. Last year some attendees were downright disagreeable, wanting to argue the futility of giving up paper. This year, it was all about ‘how.’ The questions and dialogue were very focused on getting good technology, while preserving the duties and responsibilities of discipline counsel.

At the top of this dialogue were numerous questions focused on policy. Which is where the conversation should be. One of my mantras is having policy drive technology – and not vice versa. So it was refreshing and encouraging to see such a shift in such a short time.

So in addition to having a great time in NYC, I came away encouraged and re-energized about the possibility for change in the legal profession.

I’ve always had this dream that when you die, you get a statistical profile of your life when you arrive at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter hands you a notebook (although recently he hands me an Amazon Kindle), with all the things you’ve done while you were alive. How many times did your heart beat; How many hours did you spend typing at a computer; Just how often did you really think about sex. So, you can see, that I’m kind of a numbers guy. Recently, it seems that I’m not the only one that is thinking about sex, er… statistics. I’ve been following a thread on an ILTA listserv about an Outlook plugin called Xobni (pronounced Zob-nee). The initial comments were that it was cool, but that it slowed your computer down so much that it became too burdensome to maintain. But, one post mentioned that she had huge amounts of emails, and that Xobni worked fine. So, I thought I’d give it the once over and see what all the fuss was about. I watched all the demo videos of Xobni, and downloaded the Beta plugin (free, of course) and then let it index my Outlook folders over the weekend. I’m an Outlook Administrator’s nightmare. Having about 100 subfolders and about 3 Gigs of email in my .pst file. (Sorry E-Mail Admin guy … I’m cleaning it up, I promise!!). So, what I did was install it on a Friday afternoon, and left it to index over the weekend. When I came in Monday, it was indexed and ready to test. I did notice that Outlook seemed a little slower than normal at first. But, once I shutdown Outlook and restarted it, everything seemed back to normal (only a little slow.) One of the first things I liked about Xobni, was the fact that it indexed by “FileSite” DMS folders. So, all of those files which I actually did archive were indexed. This was a cool feature, and something that I couldn’t figure out how to set up Google Desktop to do. And, the search was pretty fast, without having to open up a new window. So far, I’m impressed. Next I started looking at those statistics I love so much. Xobni has a feature called Xobni anayltics, which is supposed to tell me all the details of how I’m spending my time in Outlook. When I first try it, I can’t even get the analytics to run. However, after a couple of times of closing and reopening Outlook, I get it to work. Once I start playing around with the tool, it becomes a pretty good resource in telling me a few traits of my email personality. For example, it seems that I get a lot of vendor emails at 4:00 AM. And, it seems that my two busiest parts of the email day is 11 AM and 4 PM for outgoing emails, and 9:00 AM and 2-3 PM for incoming. Another feature of Xobni is that it uses the LinkedIn API to connect my contacts with their LinkedIn profile. This sounds like a great resource, and I email my results to some friends, and immediately, one of my 6 friends responds that her information is just flat wrong. It says she doesn’t have a LinkedIn account (which she does), and the phone number that Xobni says is hers actually belongs to someone that posted a message to a list serv a few months ago. So, it isn’t perfect. But, 5 out of 6 isn’t too shabby, so I’m not uninstalling it yet. Although Xobni allows you to correct things like the contacts’ phone number and other personal information, it does not allow you to correct a wrong LinkedIn match. I’m hoping that Xobni figures out a way to fix this part.Besides analytics and LinkedIn API’s, Xobni also tracks files you’ve shared via email to your contacts, and it also shows your contacts’ contacts. This last part is a little “iffy” sometimes, and needs a little bit of tweaking to make it better (there seems to be a lot of false contacts.) Although Xobni isn’t the do-all to end-all, it does have some pretty nice features that can help you better understand your email habits. Once you’ve played around with it a bit, I think you’d find that it can be a useful tool. On a usefulness scale of 1 to 10, I’d have to give it a solid 7.

With apologies to Thomas Friedman, I can’t help but marvel at how connected the world is by technology. As I ponder KM and its applications to the practice of law, I keep stumbling upon incredible people with intriguing ideas.

One example is the Green Chameleon blog on KM. I’m not sure how I first found this blog (information overload), but have truly enjoyed a number of posts there. I think law firms need to spend more time exploring ideas outside the legal market, and this blog gives great KM ideas well outside what law firms are doing or even thinking about.

So in addition to being our first blog review, the Green Chameleon demonstrates how the world is only a few key strokes away. A Brit living in Singapore presents ideas a recovering Utardian with Texan Citizenship applies to a global law firm who then shares them here. Which leads to …?

I should already appreciate this connectedness. But one of the wonders of life for me is the great surprise of learning what I already know. I know … sounds like another definition for KM.

Whatever …

In any event, I suggest you check out the blog.

I continue to hold out hope that alternative billing methods will gain a true foot-hold in the legal profession. Thus far, my hopes have been dashed. Yet the possibility of this type of change continues to intrigue me.

From all that I hear, more sophisticated clients will have alternative billing as a key question on their list of questions. The recent economic troubles have even driven this question to be one of cost savings. As in ‘what sort of alternative billing methods can you employ to lower our legal spend?’

So what does KM have to do with Alternative Billing (AB)?

Everything.

The reason law firms always site for why AB won’t work, is their inability to pre-determine the costs associated with a matter. “There are too many variables.” “Clients will abuse this.” “We don’t know how to deliver under that kind of budget pressure.”

KM is the tool that will answer these questions. As I ponder where KM may have its best chances at a firm, mastering alternative billing is an enticing option.

Toby, Lisa and I had a great time presenting to the National Bar Association-ABA Law Practice Managment Section Joint Technology Program. The audience was engaging and had some great questions about the issues we covered. We want to thank Delores Pegram Wilson for allowing us the pleasure of presenting, and to Beverly McQueary Smith for all of her efforts in promoting this program. And, a special thank you to Kiera Brown for all her assistance to the panel!

As promised, we are posting the slides from the presentation, and in the Blog posted earlier today, we list all of the sites mentioned in our presentation. If you have additional sites, or comments, please feel free to post them by clicking on the “comments” link below.

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by glambert9

Didn’t catch all those sites we threw at you at the National Bar Association Meeting? No problem. Here they are:

Advertise Your Business:Google AdWords
Google Custom Search Engine
Hosted Apps:Google Apps
Email Large Files:

Remote Access:

Hosted App Storage:

New PR Model:

Online Networking:

Presentations on the web:

Washable Keyboards and Mice:

Blogging:

Email Marketing Sources:

Client Extranets:

VoIP:

 Author! Author!

Event Registration Tools:

Online Conference Tools:

King Charger:

Windows Shortcut Keys:

Create Training Videos:

RSS Feeds Converter:

Big Brother:

Library Resources:

Quick & Dirty Research 2.0:

New Tools/Old Media:

Computer Date Encryption:

Expand the Traditional Tool Kit:

Legal PDF Resources:

Guess the Password:

Calendars over the Web:

Money – Pink Floyd
So just how much are your friends worth? Seriously.

This was a question posed by Gary Stein, a columnist for the The ClickZ Network, in his post Monetizing the Social Networks: “Should LinkedIn set up a system by which I could get paid to advertise a product to my social network?”

As an avid blogger and internet marketer, this is a question that I have been grappling with myself.

As Gary points out, and as I, too, had recently observed on my own LinkedIn profile, we have some great contacts. Contacts someone would be willing to pay for.

But the question is, how much integrity do I have? Am I willing to sell out my friends just to make a few bucks? Naah.

Well, maybe.

Just a few days ago, I spotted Obama advertising himself like crazy on the family-friendly social networking site, Multiply. After conferring with my good friend and colleague, Toby Brown, he said he spotted McCain on Facebook.

Which raised a question for me: just how are they buying ad space? Are the politicos’ internet marketing managers buying ad space based upon demographics of subscribers or are they just blanketing these sites? Are they marketing to areas of interest, based upon group membership? How sophisticated are the tracking mechanisms behind these social networking sites?

I am willing to wager that these sites are only in their infancy in capitalizing on their constituency. I suppose if our little blog is gaining any sort of popularity, I may be giving some of those developers out there a few ideas . . . shame on me. Selling out my friends like this . . .

I love useful tech tools, and this product is definitely useful! By using Dapper, you can turn static webpages into dynamic RSS feeds. And, it also fits my budget (that is “free”, of course). Take a tour of the video demo I created, using CamStudio – a product I’ll review in a later posting – and you might want to be a “Dapper” Dan man, too.Sample DAPP for geeklawblog:

Add to your site powered by Dapper

At the core of the law firm knowledge management (KM) challenge is the problem of unstructured data. Since KM is storing useful information such that it can be easily retrieved when needed, unstructured data presents significant challenges. To clarify, ‘unstructured’ means you don’t know what it means. For instance you don’t know if ‘brown’ is a name or a color.

So why does this matter?

Law firms have never worried much about structuring their information well, so it isn’t. This means it’s difficult to search and retrieve law firm knowledge. Thus the KM challenge. But even more challenging is getting lawyers to change what they do so that data is captured in structured form. As previously noted on this blog, lawyers resist change, especially change that competes with the billable hour.

Fortunately on the horizon are semantic search engines. These tools bring structure to unstructured data – which makes them magic. These tools can apply meaning to words based on their context and usage. But these tools only go so far.

Looking to the future – what makes sense is a balancing act between technology and humans. We need to make some efforts to get lawyers to change their processes. And at the same time we should apply new technology effectively.

I think finding this balance will be the key to successful KM for law firms.

I’m hearing some rumors that Lexis is finally going to integrate the analytical tool Redwood with their law firm competitive intelligence tool, AtVantage. If this becomes reality, then Lexis may have a chance at building a stronger CI tool in AtVantage by finally leveraging some of the internal information that a firm collects and comparing it to competitior information.

One of the most facinating things I’ve discovered in the land of the major law firms, is the fact that internal information (hours billed, client information, billable rates, expertise data, CRM, DMS… blah, blah, blah….) Is such a hodge-podge of information that is scattered all over the place, and no one seems to know how to throw a net over it and bring it to shore. That is a shame, and it really shouldn’t have come to this point.

In an earlier posting, my good friend Toby Brown attempted to define what Knowledge Management (KM) is. I offered my opinion and said that KM has kind of lost its way and has focused on product support. This has created a situation where keeping a product from crashing is the main goal of the department, rather than using products to leverage our internal experience and expertise to help us face future challenges. So, I offer this challenge to my KM, IT, Library, Marketing, BizDev, CI, Client Development friends….

Get the information out in front of the attorneys so they can have a measuring tool showing them where they stand in their firm. How? By creating dashboards.

Mason White, former VP of Lexis’ AtVantage product, said to me once that attorneys without dashboards are frustrated that they have to request the most basic of information. However, attorneys with dashboards can see where they are, and where they need to improve. It can also spur insights into their practice and create attorneys that are better prepared for the business development side of practicing law.

Dashboards can also create better opportunities for Marketing, Client Development, and BI/CI teams to approach attorneys with plans to extend business with existing clients; to show opportunities for new clients; or, even show attorneys that it is time to get rid of existing clients in order to open up opportunities for better clients.

Dashboards are like leading a horse to water. They may drink, or they may not, but I think that most of the time, you’ll see that they will stick their nose right in there and start taking big gulps (of course, some will choke on the information — that’s just a side benefit!.) So, if you are not coordinating with your KM/IT/Library/Marketing/CI/BI/BD/Client Teams to build dashboards using internal and external information, then you can’t even say that you’ve lead the horse to water.