It almost never fails when I run into someone I used to work with. The conversation starts with “Hey… how’s the law library world? It’s gotta be tough with all those books being online now.” (The implication being “aren’t you worried about becoming irrelevant?”) I reply with “Yeah, that makes it a whole lot more difficult to manage with all that information in a dozen different places than it did when it was a book in the library.” I’m not sure who they think is managing the information which is usually behind a very expensive paywall. I would guess they either think that it is managed directly by the vendor, or worse, that the Information Technology department is now the de facto library managers.

One of the benefits I get from being the current President of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) is that I get to go to different types of meetings and engage with legal professionals who are not law librarians. These are law professors, recruiters, marketers, technology/security professionals, legal administrators, in-house counsel, and others in the legal industry. One of the questions that I’ve heard, especially from in-house and corporate lawyers is the fact that they need help managing their legal information. When I ask if they have a librarian or some type of specialized legal information professional, the answer is typically “no.” When I prod further, I find that many corporations downsized or eliminated their corporate library staff during the Great Recession period. I don’t think that is a surprise to many of us. Corporate libraries were devastated at the beginning of this decade. I think that is coming back to haunt some corporations.

This isn’t to say all corporate libraries were eliminated. There are still many out there that are around and thriving. But, more often than not, most were severely affected by the economic downturn, and seen as an easy cost reduction because the corporate management saw libraries as books and space, and librarians as keepers of books and space. In reality, librarians are managers of information, and we have more information at our disposal than ever.

It is time for the corporations to rethink how they are managing their information. My rule of thumb for law firms is that somewhere between 1% to 2% of revenue is spent on external information resources. It’s a guess on my part for corporations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that same rule of thumb applies to them. If there are no information professionals, such as a librarian, or an information analyst, managing these resources, then I would bet they are being mismanaged.

IT departments are not equipped to manage these types of vendor relations, nor are they experts at understanding what type of information best fits the corporate environment, and what alternative products are out there. Information professionals do.

Corporate lawyers may understand some of the valued resources that are needed for their departments, but do you really want your attorneys dealing with vendors, researching new products or updates to existing resources, and establishing training? Information professionals do.

Secretaries and Administrative Assistants are great people and wonderful at supporting the corporations. However, many are just not experienced in what it takes to plan and create a strategy for what the information needs are for the entire company, or even for an individual department. Information professionals do.

In this era of readily accessible information, we do not suffer from a lack of information resources, we suffer from an abundance of irrelevant information that looks on its surface to be relevant. Information professionals are your line of defense against the abundance of information, and are your due diligence agents for identifying the resources which best fit your needs and your budgets.

If you are one of those corporations who reduced your library staff because you thought “all those books are online now,” it may be time to think about reestablishing those duties. I would suggest reaching out to a local library or law library association if you have one in your area. Or, get in touch with an organization like AALL, SLA, or other specialty library associations and have them point you to someone local who could advice you on where to start. That information is not going to manage itself, so step up and get the professional help you need to get your information resources under control, and part of your overall corporate strategy.

I recently started a new job in a different building in downtown Toronto. I left law firms after working in firms for almost 15 years. Afraid I would miss law firm life, I thought binge watching Suits, would help remind me of my previous life.  As it turns out, the show is also filmed in my new office tower, so there was too much coincidence in it all to ignore the serendipity.  I am embraced Suits, and now Mike Ross (photo courtesy of usanetwork.com) and Harvey Spector occupy time in my brain alongside my daily work conversations about legal applications for artificial intelligence, how machine learning and natural language processing can be applied to legal due diligence, competitive intelligence, deal structure precedents and contract automation. I also spend time looking at research tools and platforms, those produced by Thomson Reuters for whom I work and others in the industry. I try to define use cases, articulate what I think to be the value in the market and understand how all of these products are shaping the future of both the practice and business of law.  And more often than I should, wonder if Mike Ross and/or Pearson Hardman use Practical Law checklists, Neota Logic solutions or Handshake software for example.  It  would make sense to me that a non-lawyer pretending to be a lawyer would use these or similar tools and we never actually see Mike doing anything other than research in very traditional ways.  More to the point it occurs to me very often, that regardless of where you sit on the “robots are coming for the legal profession” continuum whether you think it is happening tomorrow or never – you can’t ignore that in the face of wanting (or being forced) to increase practice efficiency, the industry has created tools that are so sophisticated that someone without a law degree might be able to practice law. Would not having a law degree count as a form of “artificial intelligence” in the practice of law? Assuming you were able to actually get away with it in real life for as long a period as it seems Mike Ross can.
We know that in most jurisdictions, there is still a ban on non-lawyer ownership of firms and we know that para-professionals are doing more and more for clients who require legal services.  Alternative providers are disrupting the industry and incremental change is happening everyday. I firmly believe there won’t be a big bang but a slow and steady change to the way law is practiced and how the services are bought and sold. If I have learned anything reading this blog, it is that the legal industry is experiencing its industrial revolution moment in every possible way.

I haven’t watched all six or seven seasons of Suits yet, so please don’t spoil it for me, but the question of who could practice and provide legal advice always seemed sacred to me, a  (qualified) lawyer had to over-see the robots, go to court, and be sworn in as a judge, but maybe that too will change?  Could fiction become reality? 

Self-reflection can easily become self-delusion. I’m either about to write something that runs counter to my own vested interests, or I’m preemptively defending those interests from unfriendly empirical evidence. I don’t know myself well enough to tell you which. Regardless, I’ve long believed most convergence initiatives waste considerable time for limited benefit despite the fact that I regularly consult on convergence initiatives.

[For those who are unfamiliar with the term, “convergence” is the prelude to a preferred provider, or panel, program. It is the consolidation process by which a law department selects their preferred providers. These initiatives can often reduce the number of firms used by 60% or more. While a few win big, hundreds of firms can lose a client in the process.]

I am saying this now because AdvanceLaw and 25 of their GC’s have forced my hand (see here, here, here, and here for more details on this fantastic undertaking; see here for my initial encounter with AdvanceLaw).

[Update: read AdvanceLaw’s Dan Currell on their findings and the takeaways. It is the best piece I’ve ever read on convergence]

AdvanceLaw is publicly conducting a study of what works and what doesn’t with respect to outside counsel management. This includes convergence initiatives, which are part of my consulting business. I therefore feel compelled to lay down a marker.

AdvanceLaw is performing a mitzvah. I could not be more in on their bringing data-driven decision making to the retention and management of outside counsel. Yet I am moderately confident that their findings will not bolster my sales pitch (another instance where I would be ecstatic to be proven wrong).

I predict that they will find little-to-no correlation between convergence initiatives and satisfaction with outside counsel. That is, when AdvanceLaw comes out with a data-supported list of the approaches that drive the most perceived value for in-house counsel, convergence initiatives will not rank near the top.

And that is because convergence initiatives, in isolation, do not accomplish much. They are a stage-setting exercise. They are a precursor. To me, a finding that convergence does not deliver high independent value is like finding that the mere purchase of home exercise equipment or gym membership does not result in physical fitness.

To be fair, convergence can, on its own, confer some immediate administrative benefits. Reductions in the number of data security audits to be performed is a straightforward example. The fewer firms you use, the fewer firms you need to expend the resources to audit. There are many similar loads to be lightened, such as annual performance reviews, obtaining diversity data, socializing changes to the invoice submission protocol, etc.

And while I am as dubious as ever about ‘discounts’, convergence remains an excellent opportunity to leverage volume to reduce unit cost. Unfortunately, that is about as far as most corporate law departments take it.

I vividly recall speaking to the head of legal ops of a massive corporation that had just completed a similarly massive convergence program. She was quite proud of the rate concessions her department had extracted from the surviving firms. I had the audacity to ask her what the law department intended to do next. Now that they had preferred providers, how were they going to use the attendant leverage and administrative surplus to drive better business outcomes, deliver better legal service, and develop better relationships with their firms? She looked at me quizzically. For her, the preferred provider panel was the end state. For me, it was just the beginning.

My opinions on this topic are not exactly shrouded in secrecy. I bring a relational view to managing a supply chain that includes law firms and alternative legal service providers. I genuinely believe continuous improvement can be woven into the fabric of every primary supplier relationship. But I don’t believe in magic. Improvement does not occur spontaneously. It is a deliberate exercise requiring sustained attention over an extended time horizon. While beneficial, on net, real improvement initiatives consume finite resources, especially time and focus.

Costs matter. But I agree with Bill Henderson that we make a mistake by framing our challenges as a cost problem. At core, we have a productivity problem. If you think in terms of costs, then a process to secure greater discounts seems like a solution. If you think in terms of productivity, then discounts present as the sideshow they are. Rather, you concern yourself with creating and enhancing systems for legal service delivery. You see the value in regular, onsite service delivery reviews as a part of an ongoing, structured dialogue.

All credit to AdvanceLaw. They get it. The headline to this article warmed my little heart:

I am not alone. There are many convergence initiatives that proceed from the right premise, including many that have followed the path I advocate without my influence, let alone my involvement (see e.g., Avis, Barclays, and 7-Eleven). Indeed, in the last year, I have reviewed more than 40 preferred provider RFPs that I did not write. Some are better than others. But almost all of them include questions about value-related aspects of service delivery such as project management, analytics, technology, ALSPs, knowledge management, or automation.

Yet the sense I get from inside and outside counsel is that, in most cases, this remains lip service. The shared assumption is that these are box-checking exercises, the responses to which are not read. Even if they are read, the responses do not factor into retention decisions. And, after retention, the topics are never revisited. In short, there are no measurable improvements in service delivery that result from most convergence initiatives.

This is not pure waste. Even lip service affects norms. Asked the same variant of a question enough times, law firms might recognize the need to formulate a cogent response. They might even see the need for the behavioral changes that would underpin that response. Still, the lost opportunity is substantial.

My statement earlier about the AdvanceLaw data potentially hurting my sales pitch wasn’t quite accurate. My pitch already includes the observation that what follows the convergence initiative is far more important than the initiative itself (though the initiative should be designed to support the program that follows). Admittedly, you will still have to work really hard is not a great pitch. But it is an honest one. My real concern is that the AdvanceLaw data will result in fewer pitch opportunities.

That’s not a bad thing. We could use more discipline. Most law departments are interested in progress rather than committed to change. Progress is incremental. Change is transformative. Interest means you do it when it is convenient. Commitment means you do it even when it is hard. Too many precious hours are being wasted chasing headline-grabbing shiny objects like convergence or comprehensive AI solutions. AdvanceLaw’s data will not be the final word on what works. But it could prove to be the best first words: “Start Here”*

A personal anecdote to close: Many lives ago, I assisted a large corporation navigate state-level statutes that governed incentive payments to their retailers. The corporation ran national incentive programs that had to satisfy every idiosyncratic state-level law. Always too precocious for my own good, I once asked a VP why not do some A/B testing to determine what worked—i.e., run different incentive programs in different states to understand which approach drove the most incremental sales. He responded, “Son, I’ve been in this business 30 years, I know what works.”

As it happened, later that day, I was speaking to one of the VP’s direct reports. He could not help but express his incredulity at the utter stupidity of the way the company’s incentive program was designed. Apparently, he had advocated for a different approach. I asked him how he knew his alternative approach was superior. He replied, “Son, I’ve been in this business 30 years, I know what works.”

As stated, I could not be more supportive of what AdvanceLaw is attempting to do regardless of where the data comes out.

* I lifted the Start Here concept from a great new collaboration involving my friend John Grant and several other innovators.

______________________________________
D. Casey Flaherty is a legal operations consultant and the founder of Procertas. He is Of Counsel and Director of Client Value at Haight Brown & Bonesteel. He serves on the advisory board of Nextlaw Labs. He is the primary author of Unless You Ask: A Guide for Law Departments to Get More from External Relationships, written and published in partnership with the ACC Legal Operations Section. Find more of his writing here. Connect with Casey on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or email casey@procertas.com.

[Ed. Note: Please welcome guest blogger, Ravi Soni, data scientist from Casetext. I was introduced to Ravi by Casetext’s Vice-President, Pablo Arredondo, and asked to publish Ravi’s discussion on how he uses analytics at Casetext to determine if “the holding in a case is more procedural or more substantive,” and how to leverage that information to potentially predict outcomes. – GL]

___________________

One of the biggest constraints to innovation in legal research is how hard it is to scalably classify and quantify information without significant human intervention. At Casetext we’ve made real progress using advanced analytics to better leverage the wealth of content within the law to predict certain outcomes with more precision. The applications for this can range from anything between practice management, case strategy, or in my case, legal research. There is one such challenge I’m particularly interested in, namely, how to quantifiably determine whether the holding in a case is more procedural or more substantive.

I started with a collection of 47,464 briefs written by top law firms in the country. Using the citations and nature of suit (NOS) code associated with each brief, I was able to determine how many unique NOS codes were associated with each case. I defined this as how “polytopic” a case is. In other words, I counted all the unique NOS codes from the briefs that cited to each case and assigned that number as the polytopic score for each case. Ultimately, my goal was to use polytopicness as a proxy to measure proceduralness.

The idea behind using polytopicness to measure proceduralness comes from a simple concept. Let’s say we have a lawyer at an AmLaw 50 firm working on a massive M&A, a public defender in a small county appealing a death penalty verdict, and a boutique immigration firm working on a deportation case, and they all cite to the same case. What does this case have that all three of these attorneys found useful? The short answer is probably nothing substantive. What is more likely is that they are all citing to this case because it is a foundational case that sets the framework for some common motion that transcends practice area.

Let’s look at a concrete example. If I ask a roomful of lawyers if they know about A to Z Maintenance Corp. v. Dole 710 F. Supp. 853 (D.D.C. 1989), it’s quite unlikely that any of them would be able to tell me much, or anything at all. If I asked about a case like Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly 550 U.S. 544 (2007), any attorney in the room should be able to tell me how it changed the standards for dismissal. Looking at Figure 1, we can see how there is a difference in citation count and polytopic score between these two procedurally distinct cases.

In this example comparing these two metrics clearly show a difference between the procedural and substantive case – but does this hold for all cases in the data set? 
To find the answer, I first looked at the average number of citations per distinct polytopic score, as seen in Figure 2. To clarify what that means, I’ll use the point at roughly (50, 2500) as an example. This point can be translated to the following: Cases that have a polytopic score of 50 will on average be cited for a total of 2500 times in the briefs data set. The fact that it is a positive slope is intuitive and somewhat trivial; since a case that has a polytopic score of 5, must have been cited at least 5 times. The interesting piece here is the exponential growth, which means that proportionally, the cases that have a higher polytopic score will have a higher citation count. This finding was the first bit of evidence used to confirm our initial assumptions.

Next, I wanted to see what the distribution of polytopic scores look like in order to better understand how many cases are monotopic, bi-topic, etc. To do this, I aggregated the count of cases based on polytopic score (see Figure 3). Easily we can see that most cases in our brief data set are mono or bi-topic. However, when looking closer at the NOS codes (there are 102 in total) it seemed like some of the NOS codes could have been clustered together to make larger groups. For instance, there were codes like Personal Injury: Other, Personal Injury: Marine, Personal Injury: Automotive, etc. that could have been grouped together to make our groups more distinct from one another. As such, after grouping it seemed like any case that is associated with a polytopic score of 6 or more could be considered more procedural.
Although looking at polytopic score is useful, there are some corner cases where this metric would fail in measuring proceduralness. For instance, if a case has a polytopic score of 7, and it has only been cited 7 times ever, then to say it is procedural may not be correct. This is due to the fact that such a small number of citations may not be enough to give us an accurate polytopic score. As such, we need to account for how often cases are cited and adjust the polytopic score accordingly. Looking to Figure 4 we can see the overall distribution of case citations to better understand how often cases are cited. Figure 4 specifically looks at cases that have been cited at least once. 
Here, we can see that roughly half of all cited cases are cited less than 20 times. (In the same light, of the 8.99 million total cases that make up the common law, 5.65 million or about 63% have never been cited at all.) Using this citation information and the polytopic score for each case, I was able to distill an updated polytopic score that accounted for the number of times a case is cited. 
With the help of lawyers, I was able to manually go through 10% of cases that were most procedural and 10% of cases that were most substantive based on our polytopic scoring. I used this to determine whether or not this measurement was accurate in determining if a case is procedural or not. Overall, our assumptions were verified and we can say with some confidence that using polytopicness is a reliable measure of proceduralness for a case. For reference, here are the 10 cases that were shown to be the most procedural. 

ASHCROFT V. IQBAL 556 U.S. 662 (2009)
BELL ATL. CORP. V. TWOMBLY 550 U.S. 544 (2007)
CELOTEX CORP. V. CATRETT 477 U.S. 317 (1986)
ANDERSON V. LIBERTY LOBBY, INC 477 U.S. 242 (1986)
MATSUSHITA ELEC. INDUSTRIAL CO. V. ZENITH RADIO 475 U.S. 574 (1986)
LUJAN V. DEFENDERS OF WILDLIFE 504 U.S. 555 (1992)
CONLEY V. GIBSON 355 U.S. 41 (1957)
DAUBERT V. MERRELL DOW PHARMACEUTICALS, INC 509 U.S. 579 (1993)
KOKKONEN V. GUARDIAN LIFE INS. CO. OF AMER 511 U.S. 375 (1994)
FOMAN V. DAVIS 371 U.S. 178 (1962)

While this analysis has shown a strong relationship between polytopicness and procedurality, there is still some fine tuning needed to address the small subset of corner cases. The next step in continuing forward with this would be to see how clustering of NOS codes could be used to further refine the polytopic score. In the same light, this analysis has also opened up different avenues to explore. Some of which include, looking at different relationships between a brief and the cases they cite, how citation counts for cases differ in briefs and court opinions, or if we can predict what a case is about using substantive citations in the case documents. 
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to send me an email at ravi@casetext.com.

_________________________________________
Ravi Soni is a recent University of California, Berkeley graduate with a degree in Applied Mathematics. He is currently working as a Data Scientist at Casetext Inc., a legal technology company using AI to enhance legal research. Prior to joining Casetext, Ravi spent some time at other legal technology companies and worked as a legal assistant at a boutique IP firm where he focused on trademarks.

One of the highlights of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) conference in Austin this year was the Innovation Tournament which pitted three librarians’ tech innovations against each other. With two prizes, each worth $2,500, up for grabs, the competition was pretty tough. There was a scanning project management innovation, a Virtual Reality presentation preparedness tool, and an innovative ChatBot for legal information assistance. The ChatBot really caught my attention as something that I would love to test out on a local level.

We’ve all probably seen ChatBots either on Facebook, or when we go to ask for customer service with our favorite online retailers. The idea is pretty simple in that it basically automates many of your frequently asked questions (FAQs) into an interactive chat session. From requesting a maintenance man out to fix your dishwasher to ordering a pizza, ChatBots are out there to handle repetitive tasks.

Imagine the FAQs for law libraries that a ChatBot could help answer.

  1. Point to practice groups specific materials
  2. Pull cases 
  3. Reset passwords 
  4. Identify book locations on a shelf in the office 
  5. [fill in the blank]
I would guess that pretty much anything that you have on your library portal page as a frequently answered question could be leveraged into a ChatBot.
There has to be a good role that vendors could play in helping law librarians out with some of these features. I can see where a citation pull could go directly into a Westlaw, Lexis, Fastcase, etc. citation box and retrieve the material automatically. Passwords could be reset through an API connection either directly from the vendor, or if you are using a content management system (CMS) like Research Monitor or OneLog, you could verify the person’s identity and recover the password from your CMS. The ChatBot could interface with the library catalog and use the wealth of content knowledge contained there to quickly isolate materials the attorney needs. It could even point out that obscure print material that you’ve kept updated for just this specific occasion. 
There is a great opportunity for a collaboration on the local level for the IT departments and the Law Library to create ChatBots which highlight the functionality of the organization’s web portal. There is also an opportunity for law librarian and legal information vendor collaboration for quickly pointing people to the right resources at the right moment. I understand that there are a number of logistical issues regarding whether ChatBots are locally hosted or cloud-based; is it only available on the local network, or can it be an app on the lawyers’ phones; and how do we work with the different variations of ChatBot platforms that are out there? Even with all these issues, I still think there is a great opportunity here for those willing to blaze a trail with using ChatBots in their law libraries. 

If there’s one thing that legal information professionals such as myself love, it’s a nicely curated newsletter of relevant information. There are a couple of new newsletters out there right now that I think the readers of the blog would be interested in subscribing. These are both very well curated newsletters which point out current awareness for legal information, and they are both free. That’s a win-win in my book.

The first one is something that all American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) members have been getting for months now, but is now available to non-members. The KnowItAALL newsletter is maintained by the staff at AALL and identifies current articles of interest to law librarians, and pretty much any others in the legal industry who are wanting to keep up on current events in legal information.

I am a little biased, but I really like this newsletter and find it to be very relevant to my current awareness needs. The other thing that I really like about it is the fact that it identifies articles written by members, or the article features an AALL member. It’s amazing the number of articles out there where law librarians and legal information professionals are involved in one way or another.

The other newsletter is from law professor and overall legal innovation guru, Gabe Teninbaum. Teninbaum has created the Lawtomatic Newsletter which covers article that he finds interesting and thought provoking. The newsletter has four issues as of today and is sent out sporadically, as the right type of content is uncovered. Believe me, if Gabe finds the articles thought provoking, then they are worth a read.

Both the KnowItAALL and Lawtomatic Newsletters are free to subscribe, and contain very relevant information for the legal information professional, and pretty much anyone in the legal industry. I highly recommend signing up for both.

Photo by Charlz Gutiérrez De Piñeres on Unsplash

What I am about to write is completely anecdotal, but I think is relevant to the current disruption that we are seeing in the legal industry when it comes to automation of legal tasks. I know, most of you are asking, “how does that vary from all your other posts, Greg?” Quite frankly, it doesn’t, but I wanted to warn the readers that this one is my experience, and your mileage may vary.

I want to paraphrase something that I heard last week from a guest speaker at the AALL conference in Austin.

Lawyers don’t like automation of tasks because it cuts into their billable hours, and thus it costs them money.

This is a good line to say to a bunch of law librarians and legal tech professionals, but it’s kind of a cheap line, and in my experience, not all that accurate. It’s a line that has been said in different forms for the twenty years or more that Knowledge Management processes have been hailed as best practices for law firms. Add to that the history of business process improvements, Six-Sigma implementation, and now Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and you’ve got a new platform to tell the story of “the attorneys won’t adopt these ideas because it will cut the time they charge their clients.”

I have to say that I have yet to talk with an attorney that hinted that this was a serious barrier for efficiency. Oh, I am positive that some of you have run into these attorneys, I’m just saying that it has not been my personal experience.

What I have seen, however, is the challenge of implementing these processes and tools into the workflow of the attorney without causing a major disruption, at least initially, in their ability to do the work. Sometimes this disruption lasts for months. Again, I’ll give you another anecdote.

When I was at ILTA last year, I watched an amazing presentation from some very forward thinking lawyers who created automation tools and machine learning techniques to process a type of transactional documents. The outcome was pretty amazing, and reduced the time to process documents down from dozens of hours down to a few minutes or hours. Plunk in the data… press the “go” button, and watch the machines do the work. The idea was to make the lawyers focus on what they are really good at, and that is dealing with the highest risks the clients face, and not waste time on no-risk, or low-risk items in the portfolio. Lawyers could then charge an alternative fee deal that still made them a nice profit, but at the same time, reduced the clients overall spend. On top of all of that, it also sped up the time spent on the matter.

Now, you might read that last part and say, “I can see why lawyers would refuse to do that. It cuts their own throats by making less revenue.” That sounds like a solid interpretation. However, let me add in one more detail to the story which I got after the presentation when I asked the presenters this question. “How long did it take you to automate this one type of deal, and how many people did it take to get it operational?”

The answer was that it took six to eight months, four or five consultants and programmers, and two or three attorneys who could test the system as it was being created, and give feedback. That was for one type of deal. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb here to say that the cost of this was probably in the mid six-figure range or higher.

Granted, the first item brought to market is the most expensive, and it is very possible that the next type of deal would only take a few weeks to bring online, and a diminishing amount of time for the next deal type, and the next deal type. How many law firms are going to take this risk with the upfront costs in the hopes that eventually they will get a return on their investment?

So let’s get back to the idea that lawyers don’t like automation because it costs them billable hours. I think that the real answer is that most lawyers don’t like automation because the change is too costly, both in time and money. High risk can mean high reward, but it is still a high risk.

Perhaps the story I’m using here is a situation where we attempt to do too much all at once. I’m a big believer that law firms don’t lack for resources which improve overall efficiency. What they actually lack is actually applying the existing resources they have. Instead of looking at the latest bleeding-edge technology that promises reducing months of time to seconds, look to the tools you’ve already bought that will reduce ten minutes off an hour of work. It’s not as cool, but it is more likely to work.

I’m finally back in my office in Houston today after taking a week to visit Austin and attend the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual meeting. Looking back on the last week, all I can do is take a deep breath and say… “WOW!!”

Here are just a handful of highlights:

  • AALL announced that it is removing Texas from consideration for future conference location due to the Texas Legislature, Lt. Governor, and Governor’s anti-LGBTQ stances and laws. (I got to be on local TV and in Texas newspapers.)
  • Bryan Stevenson gave perhaps the best keynote that I’ve ever seen, and inspired everyone in the audience to get proximate, change the narrative, stay hopeful, and make a conscious decision to do uncomfortable things. (AALL members can see a recording of the talk, here.)
  • AALL’s inaugural Innovations Tournament was held, and BakerHostetler’s Katherine Lowry, and University of North Texas’ Jen Wondracek, each won the $2,500.00 prize for their innovations. Georgetown’s Tom Boone and Matt Zimmerman were a close third. The fact that the top two winners were both women tech leaders speaks volumes for the Association, and is something that makes me very, very proud.
  • Speaking of AALL and technology, Bob Ambrogi had a wonderful write up of how AALL isn’t just a great conference for legal information professionals to discuss legal content and research, but that it is also a great legal technology conference. I want to quote Gabe Teninbaum (who gave a wonderful presentation at the PLLIP-Summit):
    “It’s [AALL Conference] got nearly as much legaltech as any conference branded as legaltech, but a fraction of the push toward selling products.”
    High praise, indeed!
  • John Waters…  yes, that John Waters, is going to be the 2018 AALL Conference Keynote speaker in Baltimore. I mean, it’s Baltimore. He was my immediate choice!!
  • About a million other things happened. (Please post some of your favorites in the comments, if you’d like to share.)
  • I officially became the AALL President for 2017-2018.
On Monday, at the AALL Business Meeting, I gave a talk on what my plans are for the upcoming year. The Baltimore conference theme is “From Knowledge To Action,” and I wanted to highlight some of the actions I would like to take. Now I have to get back to work!!
Here is the speech:
I am excited about the upcoming year, and proud to serve as your president. In the past 20 years, I have gone from academic, to government, to outsourced consultant, and to private law firm occupations. The constant throughout that change has been AALL, and I am honored to have the opportunity to lead an organization that has given me so much.
The Association has endured many challenges over the past decade. A global recession which decimated parts of our profession, especially in the corporate, private law, and government library sectors, and a retiring baby-boomer population which made up a large percentage of our overall membership. 
We face competition from other associations for roles which are traditional or law librarian created functions.  Now we face a legal educational market in retraction after decades of expansion. 
AALL faced these challenges and we have adapted to become a leaner association. Staffing levels are down, and we have adjusted how the Association spends money to ensure we are fiscally responsible and providing stability for the future of the Association. 
We are still losing more members than we are gaining. That is a situation we must address, and the long-term strategy of the Association must adapt to this trend. We have held off most of the losses through cuts. However, I am a big believer that you cannot cut your way to prosperity. 
The Association must look at new revenue sources, and I believe that there are many opportunities out there to find ways of increasing the numbers of new members, finding options for retiring members who want to stay engaged with the profession, inform stakeholders about the value of professional development for our members, and providing programs to attract those who do not think of themselves as law librarians or legal information professionals, either into the Association as members, or through other revenue generating offerings. 
We have so much knowledge and expertise in this Association that is of considerable value to the industry. We need to leverage that and put it into action. 
I have written many times in my blog that the law librarian, or however you refer to yourself on an individual or department basis, is one of the most valuable and most credentialed members in your work place.
We all work tirelessly for our organizations to support the overall strategic goals of our employers. Our voices should be heard, our leadership and expertise recognized, and our contribution to the success of our organizations acknowledged. 
Our professional Association should assist us in these efforts through leadership training, professional development opportunities, and promoting the overall value of law librarianship to our direct stakeholders, and others in the legal profession.
AALL is stepping up on this front to make the law librarians’ voices heard beyond our inner circles. This year we are working with a public relations firm to increase our reach and highlight the critical role we play within the legal community.  
Most importantly, we will begin to share all the content created by our members broadly with the media, both legal and non-legal.  We are confident these efforts will position us as the only national association committed to championing the essential role law librarians play in the legal profession. 
We have a wealth of knowledge within AALL, and we will put into action processes to expose that knowledge.
We are currently working to develop a knowledge management system which will capture, share and use content in support of members.  We are currently overhauling the AALL website, which will have more intuitive navigation, Boolean search, and taxonomic functionality.  We will expand the site’s Knowledge Center so information and work product can be easily shared across AALL entities. 
This will produce an evergreen process for identifying current and emerging competencies that will translate into knowledge points to apply to all or our education, publications, and programs. 
We are also expanding our education programs, and this October and holding a one-day Competitive Intelligence program in Chicago, facilitated by Zena Applebaum, a well-known expert in the field. 
The theme for is the 2018 Annual Meeting & Conference in Baltimore is, “From Knowledge to Action.” 
As I mentioned earlier, law librarians and others in the legal information profession are some of the smartest and most credentialed members of their organizations. However, this does very little when you’re not part of the decision-making team. We need to find ways of exposing the powers-that-be in our organizations to the power of people in their law libraries and knowledge resources departments. 
I want to see our members producing more White Papers, placing articles in journals and other publications that are read by those decision makers, and finding opportunities for members to engage with industry leaders. 
We need to have more interactions with our own stakeholders and others in the legal profession in ways that presses the question of why aren’t they leveraging this talent in better ways to benefit the law firms, law schools, government institutions, and other businesses which have law librarians and legal information professionals on staff.
A local Houston politician once told me, “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” She is right. It is time to go beyond being smart, and credentialed, and helpful, and nice. It is time we take action and create success for ourselves, our profession, our Association, our work place, and the entire legal profession. 
It is my goal for AALL to work alongside you providing the tools and support to make that leap from knowledge to action.
As much as I have enjoyed having you all here in my home state of Texas, I’m excited to be in Baltimore next year. The AMPC committee, led by Kim Serna, is already in action, and will be reaching out to all of you to put your knowledge into action in Baltimore.
We have a lot to do between now and then. Please feel free to reach out to me with your ideas, and let me know of your own successes. I look forward to representing AALL and all of you this year. 
Thank you.

[Ed. Note: Please welcome back guest blogger, Keith Lipman, President at Prosperoware. Keith is a long-time friend of the Geeks, and well-known leader in the information management field of the legal industry. –GL]

Double-edged Sword: Protect & Deliver
2016 was a banner year for cyber incidents as records breaches increased by 556% with more than four billion records leaked. The regulatory and client response has been significant. The regulatory side brought the introduction of the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYS DFS) cybersecurity regulation, in addition to pending other regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which also mandate security requirements. From the clients, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) released their Model Information Protection and Security Controls for Outside Counsel Possessing Company Confidential Information. The provisions of all these effectively create a standard of care for handling and protecting client data; that standard is fairly clear that firms must lock down access to only those who require it. This means that only those who clients authorize to have access to their matters can have it; this is commonly referred to as ‘need to know’ access.

Historically, firms have operated open access environments under the guise of knowledge sharing and collaboration. They must now fundamentally change an entrenched practice that has generally allowed everyone inside the firm access to clients’ sensitive documents. The challenge is that lawyers rely upon prior work product as the basis for new work product.

As firms scramble to comply with these new mandates, they’re concerned that locking down and limiting access to data repositories will impede knowledge sharing. They fear that cutting-off access to valuable work product will diminish operational efficiency, and that need to know access will destroy knowledge management. For those firms already thinking about the bigger picture and finding other ways to leverage their valuable data, need to know security may be an opportunity, not a hindrance.

Need to Know Access May Limit the Value of Prior Work
According to most indicators, electronic information is doubling every two years and will exceed 44 zettabytes by 2020.  The amount of data firms manage has been growing, exponentially. Disappointingly, firms seem to have struggled to properly collect, maintain, and harness the vast array of data they process, or even make use of that which they already manage.

To enable their professionals to benefit from the wealth of experience learned from prior matters, firms allow lawyers to search for prior work product. It makes little sense to reinvent the wheel for every new, yet similar matter when lawyers can rather improve service delivery in terms of time and quality by re-using others’ prior work.

Logic dictates that implementing need to know access will throw a wrench in the works by limiting the pool of prior work product any one lawyer can search or access; specifically, it would limit them to re-using only the work product for certain clients from other lawyers who provide services as a team.
Many law firms’ document repositories already exceed tens of millions of documents; contrary to what some might assume, this actually may improve efficiency. This is because the more limited dataset being searched could ensure a greater relevance of results, making it easier to locate specific items that lawyers need, especially when searches are being conducted on such a regular basis. Nevertheless, this alone is not the answer.

The Solution for Efficiently Locating Prior Work: Matter Profiles and Experiential Data
The problem that needs to be solved is how to enable lawyers to find work product they don’t know exists and for which the firm does not yet have any published template. Firms need to enable their lawyers to find others’ work product. Thankfully, there is a solution.

If firms properly tracked and organized the correct metadata around their engagements and used it to create matter profiles, this challenge would be solved – and the firm would be positioned to improve numerous other aspects of its operation. Matter profiles are also beneficial to business development, marketing, and knowledge management. Having robust matter profiles makes searching far more powerful.

Matter profile search can readily drive key knowledge sharing needs. Profiles deliver a more holistic method for readily identifying the most appropriate work product, even when the lawyer already has access to the documents. Matter profiles provide better context as to the purpose of each document.

Some examples of the data that should be tracked in such profiles include:

  • Matter type, sub-type
  • Area of law
  • Qualifiers or tags
  • Deal / Demand / settlement amount
  • Court / Location
  • Industry

Lawyers can track and easily find an appropriate matter and then request access to the data, without falling foul of maintaining need to know security. This ability to ‘pierce the veil’ allows a combination of need to know security while offering a method to enable awareness of the wealth of experience and prior work that exists within a firm.

These same matter profiles would also empower business development and resourcing decisions. Firms can make more intelligent decisions about where to invest and focus resources and marketing programs to improve pitch success rates. In this regard, that same metadata can drive:

  • Opportunity Management for firms to track and forecast pipelines
  • Proposal Generation to streamline and reduce costs and improve results
  • Matter, Client, Lawyer, Staff, Vendor, and Other Profiles for better search capability; and,
  • Comprehensive Firm Directory with integrated Experience Scoring to more quickly locate and identify appropriate personnel

Need to Know Security Doesn’t Apply to Public Data
The requirement to apply need to know security is not applicable to public data. As such, that data is easier to handle from a knowledge management standpoint. A significant portion of the data that law firms work with is or eventually becomes public. Examples of this type of data include pleadings filed in court (except for matters under seal, which are rare) and documents filed with most government agencies such as the SEC or UK Companies House. This data is still important to and plays and integral part of the broader firm knowledge management initiative. Although today it can be readily automated, prior to everything being made available in electronic format, lawyers manually created indexes to track this type of data; this included pleading indexes, closing indexes, bundles, and other various indexes.

Streamlining the creation of pleading and closing indexes is ‘low hanging fruit’ for process re-engineering. Ensuring the data is ordered in an optimal format is valuable to clients and lawyers for sharing and future re-use; almost all the valuable matter profile information is contained in these documents. Information such as closing dates or key court dates and transaction amounts are typically included in the closing index. A trained person can easily extract and capture such valuable metadata during preparation of an index.

Better Investments in Templates 

In today’s competitive market for legal services, firms must be able to demonstrate expertise, understand cost structure, price competitively, manage a pipeline of work, and recognize opportunitites for cross-selling. Core to all of these processes is leveraging the firm’s data, and it goes well beyond knowledge sharing.

In the age of need to know security, the argument asserting the inherent value of sharing prior work product without any limitations can no longer eclipse the security needs and demands of clients. Rather, firm leaders should take the opportunity to invest in the right technology to complement the new processes. This includes better data collection and management as well as automation of processes such as creation of forms for volume practices. This is an opportunity to improve data practices overall. Everything firms do today is related and can be tied-together with the same core data—and the mandates of need to know security just provide another opportunity for improvement.

There are a few things that have happened in this decade that I look at and think, “Man, I’ve gotten old.” Things like trying to figure out why Kendrick Lamar is so popular, and hearing that OK Computer turns 20 years old this week are just natural progressions on life moving on, and newer things taking over. One thing that I still don’t understand is how RSS feeds have fallen out of favor in the technology and information world. When Google Reader shutdown in 2013, that still makes me shake my head. RSS feeds and readers are such an easy and effective method of distributing information. But, apparently, I’m old, and can’t see the future in the social media distributed content world. I feel like going out on to my porch and yelling at this concept to get off my lawn and bring back my wonderful RSS distribution processes!!

It may be a post-RSS world, but I’m not going out without a fight. There are many times where I’ve gone to websites that distribute information, but do not give you an option for using RSS to let you see new information as it is created. Luckily, I came across a handy tool that allows me to create RSS feeds myself.

Feed43 is a straightforward tool to create a free RSS feed out of almost any website. It takes a little bit of HTML or XML knowledge, but once you’ve set up a couple of feeds, it really isn’t all that hard to master. They even have an advance interface to use to create the output template.

The way that Feed43 works is that it extracts the data via “HTML scraping” and looks for patterns within the code to pull back the relevant content. The content is then organized and the information is pulled together using output templates and forms a user-friendly feed. That feed is converted into a valid RSS feed on the fly and can be placed into your RSS reader application. In my case, it is placed within SharePoint pages to update current awareness tools. We also augment our news aggregator with these RSS feeds for sites that may normally be outside the scope of our aggregation system. Some news aggregators may do that for you, but even those that scrape webpages for new content, may benefit from this type of RSS creation because it limits the scope of the content it is processing. In other words, you’re more in control of what is important on those pages.

I was thinking of drafting out a step-by-step instruction showing how to create your own RSS feed from a website, but luckily for both of us, Feed43 already did this for us. Here are some links that will help you understand how to create your own feeds:

Again, Feed43 takes a bit of playing around with to understand how it works, but once you’ve done a couple of feeds, it becomes much easier to set up new feeds.
If you have other RSS feed creators that you are using, please let me know.