There are two standard answers to questions asked in a law firm setting.

  1. Well… it depends.
  2. You have to understand, we’re unique.

Both of them drive us nuts, but we get used to them and adjust or responses over time to limit the eye-roll and shaking of the head to a minimum.

When it comes to where a law firm library falls in the structure of law firm administration, both answers tend to get applied. If you were to look at the AmLaw200 firms, you will find that the law library function falls under many different types of leaders.

  1. Library Directors who report to:
    – COO
    – CMO
    – CIO
    – CKO (non-librarian)
    – (I’ll group these as CxO from this point)
    – Managing Partner
  2. Library Managers who report to:
    – KM Directors
    – CxO
  3. CKO (librarian C-Level) who report to:
    – COO
    – Managing Partner
By my count, there are approximately 7 CKO where they are Librarians in the AmLaw 200. (Or some variation, like me, where I am a Chief Knowledge Services Officer) As you might think, I have a bias toward this style of management. I’ve stressed the ability for law librarians to direct their own fates for nearly the entire decade I’ve written this blog, and will continue to do so as I take on a President role in the American Association of Law Libraries in July, and well beyond that. 

I mentioned in a post last year that if Law Librarians don’t find themselves a seat at the table, they will find themselves on the menu. When I tell other law librarians this, they agree, but then they look at me and say, “Greg, you have to understand, we’re unique at my firm.” What this typically means is that their firm doesn’t want to challenge the status quo, and likes things to stay as they are. There are firms with Library Directors that are much more progressive and forward thinking than me, yet there is no path to a C-Level for them at their firm. That’s a shame. The Law Library and its functions of compiling, analyzing, filtering, and producing legal and other information is one of the most important administrative functions that a law firm has. It keeps attorneys practice ready and up to speed on the very functions that drive the legal industry. We do the due diligence necessary to keep our attorneys informed and prepared. In the Information Age, we are the Information Professionals.

BloombergBNA President, Scott Mozarsky, penned a recent Above the Law article where he stressed the importance of what law firm libraries and librarians do to drive business in the door at law firms. He mentions that law librarians and legal marketers are teaming up and becoming a powerhouse within the firm to help drive business development and client awareness of the firm’s abilities. He mentions that this is a great collaboration, and that he is seeing more firms adopt the Researcher/Marketer team approach. I’ve seen this exact scenario going on in law firms for nearly two decades, and I’m sure it preceded my entry into the market. Mozarsky is correct in that this makes perfect sense to team up the analytical skills of the law library researcher, and the business and marketing skills of the law firm marketer. It’s a perfect match of strategy put into action.

The one area that I have to alternate from the path with Mozarsky suggests, is that this means that it makes perfect sense to place the library under the CMO. To that, I would have to answer, well… it depends.

In my personal experience, and from the anecdotes I’ve heard from my peers over the past twenty years, it was the librarians that have been pushing for the teaming up of marketing and research, and the CMOs have been very reluctant to adopt this strategy. I know… I know… ever firm is unique, so this may not apply to you. However, I would go out on a limb here and say that most firms that have this type of collaboration, the idea was pitched by the library staff and the marketing department had to be won over to try it out. That’s not to say that CMOs are anti-library, but it does say that librarians tend to be very good and leveraging the existing tools, resources, and people to augment the overall strategy of the firm. We understand that driving new business, or expanding existing business is a strategy that all firms have, and we know that we can contribute to that goal. Because we sometimes lack the seat at the table, the idea of leveraging this wealth of resources already at the disposal of the firm may have been overlooked.

The law library at most firms contain the most credentialed staff in that firm. The fact that the most credentialed staff in the firm doesn’t have a Chief voice speaking directly for them is a lost opportunity for those firms who ignore them. I am quite proud to talk with others and tell them that they need to understand, my firm’s unique. We have a voice at the table, and we are heard.

All too often in law firms when we talk about marketing failures or look for new marketing successes, we look to see how “other industries” are doing it. We look at the marketing spend of consumer goods companies which make our budgets look like a small child’s allowance.  We bemoan not having enough money to really make a difference or we lament the time and energy spent on directory submissions for minimal tangible ROI, yet we still participate in these things marketing activities since we are bound by the street rules of the legal marketing game.  When we think about legal marketing, I think we would all agree, that despite the smaller budgets that our B2C counter parts, we have evolved beyond pricey tickets to sporting events, and are focused on content or account marketing. Yet, despite the laser  focus on true client development we still struggle.

We struggle to make the impact on our firms that we believe marketing is having in other industries.  Lately, I can’t help but think the answer (or part of it anyway, but this is a blog, so let me think big and unrealistic), lies not on the marketing communications side of the equation, not even in the traditional business development side either, but in the CRM or sales cycle part. The part with the dirty word (sales) and the acronym most people still struggle to really understand outside of “invite list” or “mailing list”.  I have written before about how I think CI is really or should really be about CRM+. More and more, I am starting to see how these two functions, that are often behind the scenes – the introverts next to their extrovert MarCom buddies, the strong silent types that comb through data, deserve more attention in the client conversion or retention conversation.  

Regardless of what CRM system a firm is using or even more to the point where there is no formal CRM system in place, there is often resistance to having contacts and related activities shared within a firm. Whether owing  to the law firm as hotel-for-lawyers mentality, privacy issues, fear that others will ruin the relationship, lack of trust among partners or some other reason lawyers generally don’t want to share their contacts and firm’s have yet to find a good way to change that behaviour en masse.  There are always exceptions to the rules, but if you talk to your friends at sales organizations, the CRM system if the life blood of the organization and those that don’t share are the exception.  Not only are contacts shared but client touches are also shared – who has had dinner with whom, who sent pricing information and when, responses to pitches are recorded and client lessons are shared on the go through the CRM system. Occasionally, I am a the target of these sales pitches and for a moment I am always surprised that a new, or new-to-me sales person knows so much about me and my relationship to the organization.  Then I remember I am but a record in the company’s CRM system and a smart sales person will look me up before making contact and will therefore intimately know my history of engagement, how I feel about a product or service, who my account reps is and so forth before even picking up a phone. They may even know some personal details about me to help break the ice. Combine this knowledge with sales training or soft skills around appropriate communication so as not to come off creepy or stalker-like and imagine what you can do.  What if you had the ability to call a client on any given day, and say something like “Hi, I see you are subscribed to our X Practice newsletter and received our most recent update on issue  Y, I know you had lunch with Partner W last week, but I still wanted to follow up to see if you had any questions and to invite you to an event we are hosting on related topic Z. I believe partner W and some of his clients you might want to meet will also be there ”  There is real value in that for clients, instead of waiting for the phone to ring with a retainer, lawyers can be proactive in providing client service that is tailored, builds the firm’s and the lawyer’s relationship, engenders trust and requires very little effort other than consistent recording and reporting on the part of the lawyers and the CRM professionals.  All you need to know who is subscribed to what, who is reading what and who is taking whom for lunch or to a golf tournament. Being able to connect those internal dots, along with knowing is what happening in the client’s organization or industry so you can help your clients avoid surprises or capitalize on market activity – including your firm’s own bespoke networking events, is client service euphoria. 
Data is driving insights across all kinds of disciplines from healthcare to retail, data is also driving revenue for all kinds of B2C companies, culture is the only thing standing in the way of making data driven client service a reality for law firms as well. Its a simple methodology that does take some data clean up and data strategy, along with a workflow assessment, but with the right people in place and a culture that supports client service above all else it can happen.  CRM and CI might not have all of the glitz and glamour you associate with legal marketing, branding and social media buzz, but I do believe that partnered together and used effectively as in the example above, these two strong silent types can effect real and tangible change for firms. 

Last post, I offered some skepticism about one conclusion–the billable hour is already dead–in the annual Report on the State of the Legal Market from The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute. I tried to be emphatic that this minor point of incredulity did not take away from the overall brilliance or usefulness of the Report. Yet I spent an entire post on the subject.

I have fallen into the same trap. I once opened a piece with the premise that the billable hour is not the sole topic worthy of discussion:

The billable hour is not the immediate cause of all that ails the legal industry. Freedom from the tyranny of the billable hour would be a fine start. But there is much more to do and discuss. For proof, look no further than law departments. Many corporate law departments suffer from the same pathologies as law firms despite having cast off the perverse incentives of compensable time sheets.

We have a culture challenge that is more than a matter of modifying a single incentive. My piece focused on the rise of legal operations and procurement. It cited massive increases in in-house staffing and technology spend, as well as tipping points in the use of metrics and RFPs. I touched on the BigLaw caste system, along with the rigidity and fragility of the traditional law-firm partner and compensation models. I used cybersecurity as an example of why law departments and law firms need to engage in data-driven dialogue on topics not taught in law school—e.g., the integration of process and technology into the delivery of legal services.

Naturally, since the thesis was that there are many topics to discuss beyond the billable hour, the comments section quickly devolved into a forum solely to debate the merits of the billable hour. It is my own fault. The billable hour is catnip to the kind of legal professional inclined to take part in an online discussion (including me). Like Antwan Rockamora, I had to expect a reaction.

Whenever I try to not talk about the billable hour, I am reminded of this take from the phenomenal Kevin Colangelo. As one of the primary forces behind Panagea3, Kevin experienced first hand the staying power of the billable hour:

Despite our best efforts to be “innovative” in terms of how we priced our services, clients and prospective clients always found shelter in the billable hour. Offers of unitized rates for drafting and negotiating contracts were always met with something like “And how many hours of work does that represent?” It quickly became clear that although we were doing what the market had asked us to do (i.e., offer fixed, unitized and other alternative fee arrangements), the only way that the market could understand the value of our pricing was to stack it against the only measure of value on which we’ve all been conditioned to rely: time.

Vince Cordo of Shell and I discussed this dynamic at length in the ACC Docket. We tired to explain why a law department that had moved exclusively to AFAs would bother with a reverse rate auction (we also tackled ‘shadow billing’ here). And that is at a company that successfully transitioned to AFAs. You get story after story from Toby and his compatriots in pricing who regularly respond to client demands for innovative fee arrangements only to find that, in the end, many clients opt for a slightly deeper discount on the traditional billable hour.

Again, the billable hour is not the only piece of the puzzle. The value proposition Colangelo was selling was not predicated solely on the fee arrangement. Whether they are for or against alternative legal service providers, I suspect there are very few participants in the legal marketplace who would take the position that moving business from a traditional law firm to TR Legal Managed Services (what Pangea3 became) or Elevate (a subsequent Colangelo company) or [pick favored provider] has no impact unless accompanied by abandonment of the billable hour.

And that’s the topic I want to discuss: Alternative Legal Service Providers

“Oh, that’s just labor arbitrage” is sometimes deployed by people like me to sound dismissive of a particular cost-saving measure. We’re not saying the savings aren’t real. We’re just saying that it is not all that interesting. Using an alternative provider, however, can be just labor arbitrage and also the first step on the path to interesting.

To take extreme examples that some people believe have been eradicated (nope, not yet, not even close), there are too many clients out there who could quickly save millions by finding alternative means to accomplish tasks that keep (much diminished) armies of junior associates in hours. Due diligence, document review, routine contracts, low-level fact investigation and organization, etc. They could cut costs dramatically through simple substitution of hours charged at between a third and a tenth the billed law firm rate.

The substitution need not even be 1:1. With rates being a fraction of what they were, the transition costs and subsequent friction introduced by collaboration across multiple organizations can increase inefficiency, add hours, and still produce significant savings. The bottom line is that if you can get the same quality at lower cost, you should do it. Labor arbitrage is a perfectly valid path to cost savings. It is just not that intellectually interesting.

But what can become interesting is that moving work to an alternative provider is an admission that the work is not the exclusive domain of high-cost, high-status experts. Once you’ve done that, a world of possibilities opens up.

This is the thing that scares so many lawyers. Much of what we do could be handled by an ambitious high school sophomore. Much. Not all. The abstract legal insights and the articulating thereof can generate immense business value. It is also hard to replicate. But executing on those insights—i.e., converting them into concrete deliverables like contracts and motions—while absolutely necessary is often more labor intensive than skill intensive. It is the advocacy/counsel/production/content matrix that I long ago appropriated from Jeff Carr. The genuine value of the advocacy and counsel has served to excuse our awfulness at production and content.

Yet the disaggregation movement has been slow. The multi-sourcing of legal work has taken time. That it did not happen overnight was often cited as evidence that it would/could never happen, that outsourcing would remain a “gnat in an elephant’s ear.” Well, that gnat is starting to buzz awful loud.

Because alternative providers can be the harbinger of alternative methods for delivering legal services, the pace at which alternative providers are growing is an indicator (leading? lagging?) of how the market is changing. In addition to the Report, The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute also released The 2017 Alternative Legal Service Study, which pegs the alternative provider market at $8.4 billion. I remember a few years ago when it was controversial to suggest it was a $1 billion market. That’s considerable growth, especially compared to law firms that have seen flat demand this entire decade. The $8.4B looms even larger if you account for the displacement effect, i.e., law firms losing $4 for every $1 paid to alternative providers.

But the Study isn’t all about law firms losing. Law firms are setting up alternative providers. Law firms are integrating alternative providers into their own delivery of legal services. Where 60% of corporate clients are using some form of alternative provider, law firms aren’t far behind at 51%. The Study also suggests that “many firms are exploring the idea of serving as a ‘general contractor’ for matters where ALSPs are leveraged to maintain or increase margins while maintaining or expanding service offerings and staying competitive.”

The Report further explores this concept:

Opportunity for a New Focus on Supply Chain Management. In response to the growing influx of nontraditional competitors in service areas historically dominated by lawyers, many law firms – in addition to focusing on their core practices – have chosen to expand their service offerings into other related areas that complement the firms’ existing legal expertise but are beyond the scope of traditional law firm services. While these ventures currently constitute a very small part of the legal market, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of firms willing to experiment with such approaches.

One particularly intriguing opportunity for such expanded services responds to the growing client willingness to disaggregate work among many providers by reimagining a new role of the law firm as the overall coordinator for all of the services being provided to the client. In this supply chain management role, the law firm would offer not only the core services that only lawyers can provide but also the overall supervisory function that would ensure that all of the work of various vendors providing services to the client is consistent with the needs of the project, delivered in an efficient and cost-effective way, and acceptable against agreed upon standards of quality.

And here is where it gets truly interesting for me. Now we are talking about integrated systems for delivering legal services. While it can start out as just labor arbitrage, there should be returns to scale as dedicated alternative providers gain institutional experience and insights at delivering types of services that were previously doled out to a rotating cast of law firms and matriculating junior associates. Since we’ve already conceded that the work does not demand a high-skill, high-status expert, there should be opportunities to introduce automation and other forms of technology into the service delivery process. While transitioning to an alternative providers may have upfront costs and introduce some frictions, in the long run their capital structure and culture should be better suited to innovation.

It is also a replicable type of success that can build on itself and move up the value chain. The Study observes that, “the most common use of ALSPs is low-risk or standardized, high-volume tasks” but “corporate law departments were more likely than law firms to say that they would look to alternative providers in situations where specialized expertise was required, indicating some willingness to allow ALSPs to play at least some role in more bespoke tasks.”

We’re transitioning to a multi-polar world. Customers, law departments, law firms, alternative legal service providers, legal technology companies, etc. But the logic of the multi-polar world has been evident for a long time. Why do we just now seem to finally be moving in that direction? Why do clients need a general contractor or supply-chain manager? Good questions. I’ll try to tackle at least one of them in my next post.

_______________________________________
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.

I always get so much mileage from the great data and charts in the annual Report on the State of the Legal Market from The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute. This year is no different. All praise to them. But, first, a minor quibble (it is my nature).

The headlines upon the Report’s release were clear on the main takeaway:

Billable hour pricing is effectively dead because of budget caps, report says

Death of billable hour kills of traditional law firm franchise

The billable hour is effectively dead

The Billable Hour Isn’t Dying – It’s Already Dead

The headlines were consistent with the text of the Report:

Death of Traditional Billable Hour Pricing. One of the most potentially significant, though rarely acknowledged, changes of the past decade has been the effective death of the traditional billable hour pricing model in most law firms. This isn’t to suggest that most firms have done away with billing based on hours worked; indeed the majority of matters at most firms are still billed on an “hourly basis.” But focus on that fact alone misses a fundamental shift that has occurred in the market.

This change has been overlooked principally because of a definitional problem. In much of the writing on this subject, the focus has been on so-called alternative fee arrangements or “AFAs,” pricing strategies that are based on fixed-price or cost-plus models that make no reference to billable hours in the calculation of fees. Since other pricing models typically incorporate some reference to billable hours, it has often been assumed that only AFAs are genuine non billable hour alternatives and every other approach is simply business as usual. That conclusion, however, overlooks a major shift that has occurred over the past decade: the widespread client insistence on budgets (with caps) for both transactional and litigation matters….

Although today AFAs probably account for only 15 to 20 percent of all law firm revenues, budget-based pricing is much more prevalent. Indeed, in many firms, these two methods combined may well account for 80 or 90 percent of all revenues.

Quick, someone go find Jeff Carr and tell him that Don Quixote has vanquished the windmill! I would love to interrogate this data and find it to be righteous. But it is so contrary to my personal experience that, absent more compelling evidence, I just can’t accept it despite the credibility of the source. That skepticism probably comes, in part, because of how many times I’ve read about the death of the billable hour (for fun, I rounded up 20+ instances at the bottom of the post).

I encounter a number of clients with written requirements that all matters must have a budget. I see fewer who actually enforce such requirements in any meaningful way. And it is passing few that seem to impose discipline around the budget number to the point where it functions as a cap. This is not to say that such clients do not exist—some absolutely do—it is to say that I haven’t found enough of them for that 80 to 90 percent number to be automatically assimilated into my mental models of how the world works.

That said, I’ve had reason (NBA, MLB, POTUS, NFL) to call into question my mental models. So I come at this from a place of epistemic humility.

Everything else in the Report is as fantastic as ever. I’ve already updated my slide decks with the charts on demand and realizations. The former remains flat, the latter continues to fall. But I’m sure we can square both trends with increased profits and then paint a picture of long-term sustainability, right?

It’s not that I am skeptical that we are in for some sort of reckoning. I just don’t think it will be an abrupt end, let alone that it has arrived in a final, categorical form like the death of the billable hour. For an actually balanced and nuanced parsing of the report, I recommend Mark Cohen. And for his eternally amusing (and always brilliant) foretelling of the apocalypse, I must share Ken Grady. Myself, I actually have a different TR report I want to dig into next post.

 

As promised, the many deaths of the billable hour (it’s like a terrible version of John Wick but with a few awesome cameos):

 

AI and the Legal Business Model: Why Time is Up for the Billable Hour (2020)

Law firms’ love affair with the billable hour is fading (2019)

Should There Be A Requiem For The Billable Hour? (2018)

As AI Portends the Death of the Billable Hour, Law Firms Face New Reality (2017)

Companies want lawyers to kill the billable hour (2017)
Alternative Fee Arrangements’ Challenge to the Billable Hour (2017)
Legal industry moves away from billable hour to alternative fee arrangements (2017)

Curbing those long, lucrative hours (2010)
Alternative Arrangement (2010)
Forever in Flat Fees (2010)
Law firms react to tight budgets, offer alternatives to billable hours (2010)
Billable Hours Giving Ground at Law Firms (2009)
In Corporate Counsel’s ‘Who Represents Whom’ Survey, GCs Say They’re Serious About Alternate Billing (2009)
Has the Billable Hour Met Its Tipping Point? (2008)
Kill the Billable Hour (2008)
Lawyers Ditch Billable Hour Structure (2008)
The Scourge of the Billable Hour (2008)
Killable Hour (2008)
How to kill the law firm billable hour (2008)
The Billable Hour Must Die (2007)
The Tyranny of the Billable Hour (2005)
ABA Commission on Billable Hours Report (2002)
Hourly Billing is Outdated (1994)

….Beyond the Billable Hour (1989)

And some counter programming:

The Billable Hour Just Won’t Die, Report Finds (2016)
The unkillable billable hour (2015)
Billable Hour’s Death Greatly Exaggerated (2015)
In Defense of the Billable Hour (2014)
In Defense of the Billable Hour (2014)
In Defense of the Billable Hour (2013)
Despite Stagnant Economy, Movement Toward Alternative Fees Still at a Crawl (2012)
The Billable Hour Endures (2010)
Surprise! The Billable Hour is Not Dead (2009)

_______________________________________
D. Casey Flaherty is a legal operations consultant and the founder of Procertas. 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.

Last September, Geek #2, sent me a short email asking if I knew anything about the product called Justly. His short description of how Justly had a case categorization feature, and was pulling data from the Federal Courts (not that big a deal), and thousands of State Courts (huge deal), made my ears perk up and I made an effort to find out more about the product. I went to the website and poked around a little and finally reached out to Laurent Wiesel at Justly to learn more. In the five months since initially talking with Laurent, they have given me a couple of demos, and quite frankly, it was the coolest product I saw at LegalWeek last week. I’ve seen more and more potential with Justly and have finally convinced the Justly team to let me blog about it.

So what’s the big deal behind Justly? I don’t want to bury the lead here, so let me first start off by listing what I think is the most important feature behind Justly. The large amounts of data. Specifically, the large amount of State Court data. As of the writing of this article, here are the numbers:

  • Over 15 million cases
  • 12.5 million State Court cases
  • 2.6 million Federal cases
  • 2,247 U.S. Courts

Those are numbers that other sources just don’t have. Of course, data is simply that. How does Justly put it to work? Let me give a bit of background.

Justly was founded by former BigLaw attorney Laurent Wiesel (CEO) back in 2015 and he has teamed up with Sanjay Singh (technology), and Matteo Balzarini (Marketing), and they have focused on developing Justly as a data-driven platform for corporate legal departments. In a nutshell, they give the corporate legal departments a way to create early case assessments on cases in which the corporation is involved. With that information in hand, the corporate legal departments can take the case number of their case and Justly returns a series of elements that are useful in order to take action. The three main features returning actionable insights are Matter Classification, Case Precedents and Timeline Analytics.

Classification helps you understand all the public data in better way that helps you find the elements that define your case. Through that, it connects to Precedents and those are the cases that are comparable based on the classification. You can then see what happened in the past based on the actual metrics of similar cases. This leads us to the third feature of Timeline Analytics which assists you in making informed decisions based on the metrics. These features come together as a standardized case assessment that predicts phases, major events (tasks/deliverables) and the cycle times for any U.S. litigation matter. Having this level of analysis allows those managing the matters (whether that is in-house counsel or litigation partner in a law firm) to structure Alternative Fee Arrangement (AFA) and matter-level budgets, review precedents with your internal or e-billing system, and scope your matter management processes through the use of the scoping template.

[See the embedded video below for a quick tour of performing a case assessment on a specific court case.]

Beyond the value that is found in the results that Justly brings to case management, they are undertaking a process to bring more court information into play in a useful way. Many products have great features, but not enough, or not the right kind of data behind it. Justly brings both to the table. With the demands on in-house legal departments to better manage and pay for legal services, Justly can serve as a method of leveraging court and internal data to better predict what is the proper way to manage and price the case. For law firms, Justly allows them to better scope and predict the details of a matter, and how to better staff and price the matter for the client.

From what I’ve seen from Justly, they are positioning themselves to support the legal industry that is demanding better way’s of managing cases and filling in the blanks with solid data and analytics.

Justly – Standardize Legal Business Operations from Justly on Vimeo.

The five-word phrase in the title of this post is likely the second most common five-word phrase I utter on a regular basis.  The most common being, “What a crock of sh**!”

Coincidentally, I uttered my most common five word phrase on Sunday, January 29th when I first heard about the Trump travel ban on 7 predominantly Muslim countries.  This is not a political forum and I’m not going to go into politics here, but that travel ban led to a fantastic example of  Rapid Prototyping and Iterative Design (RPID).

RPID is a concept found in Design Thinking, essentially you build a limited example of what you’re imagining and share it with stakeholders, and then take their feedback and expand or adjust your prototype.  Then you do it again.  And again.  And again.  Do this enough times and you end up with something that usually looks or acts nothing like any stakeholders originally imagined, but that meets all stakeholders needs in a much better way.

I’ve been talking about RPID for many years, going back to my days at Norton Rose Fulbright.  Going back to before I ever even heard the phrase.  This was essentially my approach to writing music, back when I did things like that. But in law firms, “Rapid Prototyping and Iterative Design” is usually seen as crazy talk.

Firms are loathe to deliver anything that isn’t ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’ and sometimes there are very good reasons for that.  ‘Imperfect’ or ‘incomplete’ legal work may lead to ‘malpractice’.  But that’s no reason to ignore the benefits of the Rapid Prototyping approach.  RPID is how you ultimately get to something approaching ‘perfect’ and ‘complete’ with software development.

Back to the Trump travel ban.  I saw reports of volunteer lawyers camping out at airports all around the country and said to myself, “Self, we have technology that can help this situation.”  Unfortunately, Legal Week started the next day in New York and I was swamped for the next few days.  On Wednesday evening, my company, Neota Logic hosted a cocktail party and I ran into my friend Joshua Lenon from Clio.  Joshua mentioned that Clio was working with a group of volunteer lawyers in Seattle headed by Greg McLawsen, and that they needed an intake and distribution system.

  • On Friday evening last Greg started a Slack channel devoted to this project.  
  • On Saturday afternoon we had our first prototype. 
  • On Sunday afternoon we had our third prototype and a website.  
  • On Monday the website and Neota Logic application went live servicing one airport.  
  • Today, Tuesday, we sent out a press release, got covered by the Seattle Times, and now have 7 airports being serviced with more coming in hourly.

The tool is evolving quickly with new functionality being added every day.  The video below was published an hour ago, but I just changed the way the lookup feature works for supervisors during my lunch hour.

This is Rapid Prototyping and Iterative Design in practice.  The applications I built are simply gathering and distributing data.  There is no legal advice being given. But with a concerted effort and a passionate team, we went from idea to product that is actually making a difference in a few short days.

With committed people, the right technology, and most importantly, the right approach (RPID) you can accomplish incredible things very quickly.

The next step for AirportLawyer.org is to build a triage tool to help volunteer lawyers who are not familiar with immigration law to triage the needs of incoming immigrants.

We gotta have something to do tomorrow.

Watch the video below and check out AirportLawyer.org for more information or to get involved.

[ED. NOTE: Please welcome guest blogger, Michael J. Robak, Associate Director/Director of Information Technologies, Leon E. Bloch Law Library, University of Missouri – Kansas City. -GL]

Such great news! – thanks to 2017 TECHSHOW Chair Adriana Linares (Viva Adriana!) and
University of Illinois Jenner Law Library Director, Faye
Jones, the first ever Academic Track will
be part of this year’s TECHSHOW which will be held March 15 – 18, 2017.  The groundwork for the track was developed
last year at the direction of 2016 TECHSHOW Chair, Steve Best and has been
many months in the making.
Here’s the skinny – the Academic track will be a conference
within TECHSHOW.  Faye, and the
University Illinois College of Law, are generously sponsoring a series of
panels and sessions that will occur on Thursday March 16 and Friday March 17.  These are designed to allow those from the
Academy to move between the TECHSHOW and the Academic track.  In fact, that was the concept behind the
conference within the conference, maximize the opportunity for practitioners,
and particularly members of the ABA Law Practice
Division, to help inform the Academy on what’s needed in the curriculum.  The schedule is designed for faculty,
administration and (we hope) students to move between TECHSHOW and the track
and to bring ideas and people into the track conversation.  And we’ve designed the track to create
working takeaways that can help expand and supplement conversation at the 2017 AALL Annual meeting with the Teaching
Legal Technology Caucus as well as add to CALI’s page supporting
the caucus.  In addition we will create follow
up opportunities for the AALS Section
on Technology, Law and Education.
With Greg’s permission, I’ll provide additional posts about
TECHSHOW’s Academic track to give updates and provide ideas about how to
maximize what I know will be an amazing event.
To register for the Academic track you register for
TECHSHOW, which provides full access to TECHSHOW and the vendor hall.  There is a reduced rate for academics and
even more reduced rate for student attendance. 
Early registration closes January
30 – so sign up
ASAP!
One final note for this post – the Incubator
Consortium’s 4th Annual Conference will be held at the same time
at Texas A&M and hosted by Professor of Law and Associate Dean for
Experiential Education Luz
Herrera.  There is quite a bit of
crossover with the Consortium’s focus on technology for Incubators.  So we’ve decided to link the two conferences
and we will have a virtual panel on Friday, March 17, 2017 at 9:00 a.m. that
will be a technology plenary at both conferences and which will talk, in part,
about how Law Schools can build Lawyer Referral Service platforms and the
opportunities for data analytics with such a platform. 

More to come…. Please sign up today!

In about 10 days, I will be presenting as part of a panel at the Thomson Reuters 24th Annual Marketing Partner Forum. The session I will be presenting will be focused on differentiation in a highly competitive market. Aside from being a hugely important topic at this moment in time generally as we usher in 2017, the topic is a reaction to the 2017 State of the Legal Market Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report which is now available. The report tracks firm financial and other performance metrics in the US over the course of the last decade since the “Great Recession”. Not surprisingly, the report paints a somewhat bleak picture of the current state of legal services – from an operational point of view. I will leave you to read the report, but the Coles Notes (Cliff’s Notes) version indicates that:

  • demand growth is flat;
  •  there is declining productivity;
  • firms are experiencing growth in expenses, and
  •  increasing cost of leverage; despite
  •  ability to raise rates 2 to 3 percent a year, which is countered by;
  • steadily declining realization rates. 
Much of which can be attributed (in whole or in part) to:
  •  a buyer’s market;
  •  death of the billable hour pricing;
  •  erosion of the traditional law firm franchise;
  •  declining effectiveness of traditional leverage; and
  •  growing segmentation within the market for law firm services

It’s a bleak and scary picture, one that in my mind doesn’t even take into account the effects and affects of technology on the profession, in practice and in operation. 

 
The report, does offer a couple of rays of sunshine – the silver linings if you will for those of us not on the practicing side of the equation. The first quote that animated me was this:
 
“If the large firms in the middle cannot offer sufficient differentiation for their services, clients will have little incentive to change this behavior.”
 
Differentiation is largely the work of marketing to articulate, even if KM, Pricing, Library, and others are doing the executing. This provides huge opportunities for marketing departments and agencies who work in this space. It is getting harder and harder for firms to differentiate themselves in any meaningful way, but we know that each firm is special or unique in some way. The challenge is in figuring out how to illustrate each firm’s unique value proposition in RFP responses, pitches, branding efforts and pricing mechanisms. The crucial bit for people like me, is how do we use this statement as a catalyst to bring about the cultural and operational changes required for firms to make a discerning mark. Defining what a firm does differently is a hugely difficult and exciting task, one that requires those in firms who are not necessarily practicing law to break silos and work together to shape a new reality to law firms (see the last 3 Geeks post on libraries-marketing-money-credit). Which brings me to the second point in the report that buoyed me. 
 
“broader reimagining of the overall model for legal service delivery, one that includes paraprofessionals, technologists, information specialists, process managers, and others – in addition to lawyers – as part of an integrated system for the delivery of legal services“
 
 Law firms, much like many other businesses from insurance to retail, education to food services are being forced to rethink their way of earning profits. The industry is under pressure from clients, suppliers, and staff to meet technological, social, financial and other impacts head on. Law firms have been long insulated by established protocols and relationships, both of which are now vulnerable to market conditions. Its time, as the report says to lean on others in a truly collaborative partnership to boost client service and in turn, revenue/profit. There are all these fabulously smart people in firms who are limited in their ability to contribute by virtue of their non lawyerlyness. Imagine the impact a firm could have with all of its intellectual capital playing a more active role, that could (should!) be the new road to competitive differentiation.
 
So while growth is relatively flat, and realization rates may be low, the opportunity to find new roads, and new open spaces to drive the legal business in 2017 are endless.

Perhaps I’m one of the lucky few that has always had a good relationship with the Marketing Department. Although I am the incoming President of the American Association of Law Libraries, I am also a member of the Legal Marketing Association, and I find value in both. I have leveraged the relationships built by the Marketing teams to advance my own ideas and projects, and have partnered with Marketing when they need resources and research to advance their own processes and projects. It just makes sense, and there is a mutual benefit for all when there is a trust and partnership between the two groups. After all, we are on the same team, and we can do more together than we can individually.

This is why I am amazed when I see dysfunction between these two departments. And when I have run across firms where the relationships between the two groups exist, it usually comes from the following issues:

  1. Money
  2. Credit
  3. People
When I was still a newbie in the law firm environment, I made an effort to determine how the individual components of a large law firm administration functioned. I saw the power of interaction with the Partners that the Marketing team had versus the Library’s operation which tended to be more service oriented and low-keyed. Both serve important functions, but the “attitude” of each group was different. Although Marketing had influence and the ear of the partners, the Library held the power of the purse strings, products, and relationships with the vendors that provide those products. Marketing had their MBAs, and the Library had their JDs/MLIS’. Marketing was a three-year revolving door of talent, and the Library had members that did orientation when the Managing Partner was a first-year Associate. The two departments have their different structures, but again, played for the same team.
Where I’ve seen the divisions between the two come to a head when it comes to money, is typically the Marketing Department needs a resource, and wants the Library to pay for it. In a good environment, this means that the two heads of the departments meet and work out a plan to evaluate, test, and determine what the correct product is that solves the problems faced by the Marketing team (and by proxy, the firm.) In a bad situation, the Library determines that they will not work with Marketing because the library staff will not be the ones using the product. Or, Marketing goes out and buys the product without working with the Library, and then sends the Library the invoice. These two latter situations are more common than they should be, and completely unnecessary if there is a good relationship between the groups. When it comes to money, I have a very over-simplistic approach that I take. First – It’s not my money, it’s the partnership’s. As long as the powers-that-be approve this, it’s fine. It doesn’t affect the money I take home at the end or the month, it affects the money that the partners take home at the end of the month. Second, I make sure that these types of increases to my budget are made apparent to those that monitor my budget, and I show where it was approved by those powers-that-be. If the money hawks are concerned…  I point them to those that approved it, but also point out that the expense was something that will help leverage our firm for the future and (hopefully) bring in new clients and revenue. We’re all on the same team, so don’t throw your team-mate under the bus.
When it comes to credit, this is where feelings tend to get hurt, and power trumps cooperation. The typical story is that the Library conducts research and analysis for a Marketing Business Development or Client Development project. The work is compiled and sent to Marketing, and then it is restructured (sometimes) and sent to the Partner for action. When the project is successful, Marketing gets the credit, and the library gets ignored. Again, when the two groups work cooperatively, this happens less. However, I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that when it comes to credit, the last person to handle it, tends to get the credit. This happens when reports are turned over to Accounting to add in “the numbers,” or IT to add in the tech specifications, and with Marketing when it comes to analysis and action items. The best way to solve this situation is to have a conversation with the other department to make sure that the value your team put in is made clear to the other department, and when appropriate, to the partners that use the final product. It is also important to have a thick skin and sometimes understand that, while what you did was very important, credit doesn’t always come back as you would like. It’s okay. Put it down for your “wins” list in your annual evaluation and take credit for it then. If you’re running Marketing, make an effort to credit the Library when appropriate. 
This brings me to the people part of the process. Leaders that deem their value by the size of their departments are not leaders at all. (Insert [in]appropriate joke here.) 
Librarians are visionaries. We tend to see trends before others and position ourselves to handle those trends. I’ve written many posts before where I argued that giving the “Information” title to the computer networking department was probably the biggest defeat in the Library world. We were the leaders when it came to information technology, we were the leaders when it came to knowledge management, we were the leaders when it came to competitive intelligence. We’ve been in the forefront of artificial intelligence and analytics. Unfortunately, we also tend to start these programs, and watch them be pulled out of our departments and sent to others, or spun off and created in a different department altogether. I am perfectly okay with that (well… mostly okay with that.) What I don’t appreciate is when the Library creates a successful group, typically these days, a Competitive or Business Intelligence group, and then the Marketing department comes along and snags it away from us with the perception that this should have never been in the Library in the first place, and that it belongs in Marketing. If that is true, then why did it have to originate in the Library to begin with? Why didn’t it begin in Marketing? The biggest reason is that the Library has the external relationships with the vendors and industry to build these departments. If there comes a time when it makes sense to spin them off and move them, then it’s a blessing for the department that takes it over. Unfortunately, it tends to become a turf war where the acquiring department somehow belittles the Library for taking this on in the first place. That is such a silly concept an doesn’t have to happen when there is a good relationship between the departments. I mentioned earlier that Librarians should not throw their team-mates under the bus. That also goes for other department leaders that leverage the Library’s work to make themselves look better, or increase the size of their departments. Quite frankly, if you grab a group from within the Library to make your own, you should increase the Library Director’s bonus to include a recruitment stipend.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again:
ALL PROBLEMS ARE COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS!!!

If you work for the same law firm, you are on the same team. You don’t have to like each other, but you cannot be successful as a firm if you are undermining each other, or you are so sensitive that you think other leaders are out to get you. Administrative departments of law firms are the grease that makes the organization run smoothly. Find ways to talk to one another. Understand the strategic goals of the firm. Fix problems that the firm is facing (the firm’s problems, not your department’s problems.) And, realize that when you look good, we all look good. We are all allies here. Let’s act like it.
  

[Ed. Note: Please welcome back guest blogger, Marcia Burris, Research & Information Services Consultant for HBR. – GL]

A lot of attention has been given lately to the trend of law firms cancelling subscriptions to expensive online resources. This is often referred to as going “Sole Provider” since it has long been assumed (for a few decades, at least) that “good” law firms subscribe to both of the Big Two legal research providers, Lexis and Westlaw. In recent years however, many firms have decided they no longer need both. In an effort to measure the trend, law library surveys, including the one administered by HBR Consulting, routinely ask about whether firms are planning to (or already have) cut Westlaw or Lexis. However, while the term Sole Provider is easy to say and generally understood in the law library community as cancelling one or the other of these two services, it really isn’t the best way to describe current practices in the world of legal information, and in fact can cause harm to the conversation. So here’s why Sole Provider isn’t really a thing, and why I’m not going to say it any more.

  1. First of all, it isn’t true. Certainly not in Big or Medium Law, and probably not even in the vast majority of Small Law. No firm uses only one source for all its legal research needs. Cancelling one of the historical duopoly providers doesn’t mean attorneys will be limited to just one single source for all their legal research questions (although some attorneys may by choice return to the same well over and over again.) Law firms will continue to offer a variety of information resources – and formats – to meet their attorneys’ practice needs.
  2. Using the term “Sole Provider” needlessly reinforces the expectation of legal research Duopoly by implying that firms are choosing one and cancelling one, and fails to adequately describe the variety of different choices firms are making today. In doing so, it devalues the contributions of numerous providers beyond the traditional duopoly, whose innovations are creating new ways to think about and use legal information. This can cause real harm, as holding to the outdated duopoly concept hamstrings the decision process, limiting creative thinking about what resources firms should be offering to their attorneys and distracting from important discussions about new opportunities to evolve and modernize research services.
  3. In addition to reinforcing the idea of duopoly, the Sole Provider concept is often associated with cost reduction efforts, and this creates a value judgment which critics can leverage against firms (and librarians), no matter which way they go with the decision. Firms which keep both traditional major providers can be criticized for overspending, while firms which cancel a major service are criticized for prioritizing cost reduction over efficiency and service. (This reminds me of the working mom vs stay-at-home mom controversy – truly a debate with no winners.) Just as the duopoly concept narrows thinking about options beyond the Big Two, the question of Cut vs Keep limits the discussion to an either/or which fails to address the nuanced resource needs of individual firms, which ultimately drive their purchasing decisions.
  4. By referring to only a single facet of resource selection, the term devalues the important work law librarians do in carefully curating information collections to best meet their firms’ needs, and distracts from the question we should really be asking: What is the best mix of resources to meet our firm’s needs now and into the future?

It’s time to reframe the discussion. Instead of referring to “Sole Provider” decisions, let’s start talking about *Legal Research Optimization*. The discussion should include subpoints related to content (primary & secondary), efficiency of use and administration, attorney support, resource interrelatedness and content integration, cost, practice-specific needs, business needs, evolving technology, and client demands. Rather than allowing the status quo to set the tone of our discussions, let’s ask what should we include as we build the law library of the future for our firms. Firm needs and information resources continue to evolve, and libraries today have the opportunity to do more than ever before to support attorney practice needs. With the baggage of the sole provider conversation left behind, we can move forward and continue working to align information resources with firm needs, with freedom to explore the best fit for the future.