For those of us in large law firms, we understand that Practice Group Leaders have the following responsibilities:
- Develop a strategy for the Practice Group (PG)
- Advance the business development of the PG
- Ensure equitable distribution of work among the more junior PG attorneys
- Identify attorneys within the practice who are struggling and find mentoring and coaching opportunities for them
- Practice law at the same time
For Lathrop GPM’s Intellectual Property Group, Kate Tompkins can do all of these, except practice law. That’s because she is not a lawyer. She’s a business professional.
We’ve heard the phrase “law firms should be run more like a business.” Well, Lathrop GPM and Kate Tompkins are putting that phrase into action. Kate tells us how she landed this role, and how we may see more business operation professionals stepping up to lead the legal practice as other firms look to run more like a business.
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Information Inspirations
If you’re looking for the future of search, CaseText may have the answer with the help of BERT. In their new WeSearch product, CaseText’s Pablo Arredondo says that the conceptual search product will leverage the open-source neural network framework developed by Google called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or simply BERT, to find related results not based on keywords, but through actual concepts. Bob Ambrogi runs through a few examples in his Law Sites Blog.
The patent office in China pulled about half of 2020’s applications recently due to irregularities. Many are saying that it is downright fraud and that it may have a worldwide impact on patents.
Slack rolled out, and then quickly rolled back a new feature that allowed anyone on Slack to DM anyone else on Slack. After a swift public rebuke on the potential harassment issues that this “feature” opens up, especially against women, Slack is rethinking the changes. Perhaps Slack would benefit from listening to lawyers like K&L Gates Partner Elisa D’Amico who specialize in understanding and fighting abuse on the Internet.
Video games are expanding into what is known as Synthetic Economies where gamers’ actions have economic effects both within the games and outside the games as well.
Bonus Inspirations
In support of March being Womens’ History Month, as well as the start of baseball’s Spring Training, check out this Twelve Six Podcast interview of Yankee’s beat reporter Lindsay Adler.
Also, check out how Kelp may save us all on the How to Save a Planet.
For nearly the past twenty-five years, Jeroen Plink worked on the cutting edge of innovation in the legal market ranging from creating software to help with project management and process improvement, to being the CEO of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions. His passion for looking at issues from unique perspectives, as well as his dislike for inefficient processes and waste, has led to a number of successes in legal innovation during this time. As he moves on from the Alternative Legal Service Provider environment and begins his new journey, Jeroen sits down with us to talk about his efforts going forward in Access to Justice, commercial ideas, consulting with law firms, and in-house operations.
Karl Harris
Attorney 
Most of us in the legal industry did not think of the employment market as being anything close to stable in 2020. However, as we are witnessing from the AmLaw 100/200 firm revenue numbers being released, many firms had record revenue and profits. In fact, recent reports show that the industry actually added some 5,000 jobs recently. 
For the first time since the beginning of the year I have some quiet time to reflect and write. I feel like the end of 2020 and early into the new year, there was a deluge of stimuli on the daily. Between traditional press and social media, something was always buzzing somewhere. There were cases before the courts, nonstop talk of COVID numbers and mitigation, Tik Tok challenges and the US election. Sometimes I read what’s happening, sometimes I don’t and I when I think about why that is, it’s the same reason we read some Legal Blogs and ignore others…it’s about trust and influence. Trust is not something that comes easily, it’s earned, it’s rewarded, and in some cases, it’s very hard to achieve and sustain. But at its core it’s a point of connection.
Law360 has long been an excellent resource in covering the news when it comes to legal issues. In January, they expanded to also begin looking internally at the legal industry and the business of law. 
If you’ve listened to The Geek in Review podcast the past couple of weeks, you heard that Marlene and I are enjoying the discussions we’ve joined on Clubhouse. Well, we are going to each host a room this week, and we’d love to have the readers of 3 Geeks and the listeners of The Geek in Review join us.
I couldn’t find the original comic that I saw once upon a time, but I went to a meme generator and reproduced it to the best of my memory. If you manage employees, you have probably been in one of these management meetings where the big boss or the HR staff conduct a brainstorming session on how we can help our employees deal with stress. On the surface, these meetings are structured with the idea of our employees are struggling with some external/internal stress (currently, of course, that would be work from home and COVID). In reality, these meetings are called to help our attorneys and employees to reduce stress in order to improve their productivity at work. Happy workers are productive workers.