Roommate needed: Must like to watch anime, wake me up with a good morning, let me know if I need an umbrella for work today, text me during the day, turn on the lights as I’m coming home, and tell me good night as I drift off to sleep. I’m looking for someone with blue hair and a cute dress, and comes in her own 12 pound sealed container. I’ll pay up to  $3,000 to have you shipped from Japan, and will wait up to a year for you to arrive. Because, apparently, I’m extremely lonely.

Enter: Gatebox’s Virtual Home Robot, Azuma Hikari.

Okay… I haven’t quite decided yet whether this is cool, or creepy. It’s probably both. Actually, it’s a lot of both. But, it is probably the next phase in integrated home technology and personal interactive technology. The video below shows the lonely Japanese professional and how his day is brightened by the sweet robot’s comments, suggestions, tweets, and courteous actions throughout the day. Once you get passed the weirdness of it all, I think that you can see the attraction (both in a good way, and in a bad way) of how this type of technology will advance the likes of what we have with Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa voice response systems.

The system is being presold now (around $3,000 with shipping), and as of last week there have been over 200 units sold. A more extensive, 27 minute explanation and demonstration is available from Tokyo Otaku Mode’s Facebook page.

Creepy or not, I think this is the first of many virtual holographic personal assistants to come.

Definition of algorithm : 


noun al·go·rithm ˈal-gə-ˌri-thəm  – a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer

When I attended the WestPAC Law Librarian meeting in Jackson Hole, WY a couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to sit in on 
University of Colorado Law School’s Susan Nevelow Mart’s presentation on legal researcher’s reliance on algorithms for online legal research. Susan’s presentation discussed her SSRN Paper entitled “The Algorithm as a Human Artifact: Implications for Legal {Re}Search” where she breaks down the algorithmic affects of Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel Law, and Casetext. 
The key thing to remember, says Mart, is that we “need to remember that the algorithms that are returning results to them were designed by humans.” That includes all the “biases and assumptions” that come with the human experience. In other words a little bias and assumption on the part of the people developing the computer algorithms can cause dramatic changes in the results produced with similar content and search terms. As a researcher, Mart states that it is important that we “acquire some expertise about the technology at the meta-level.” How can you trust the results if you are not familiar with the way the tools are designed to index, search, and retrieve those results? The problem with this argument is that most legal research providers don’t want to reveal very much about the processes that go on behind the scenes to pull those top 10, 25, 50, or 1000 results. Mart is calling for more “Algorithmic Accountability” from our legal databases in order to help legal researchers better understand the biases present in the retrieved results.
Mart’s paper and research behind it attempt to test the different legal research databases on same search terms and same data content, and evaluate the results to see where results overlap and differ. The experiment wields results that are, in Mart’s words “a remarkable testament to the variability of human problem solving.” The top ten results from each resource showed very little consistency, and “hardly any overlap in the cases, and only about 7% of the cases returned were in all six database results. That low of a return rate should cause a bit of a shudder to run up the spine of legal researchers.
What is a researcher to do in this day and age of very little Algorithmic Accountability? First, researchers need to call upon these database providers to give us more detailed information about how their algorithms are set up, and the technical biases that result from these rules. Mart states that “the systems we use are black boxes,” that prevent us from understanding how these technical biases skew the results of our searches. “Algorithmic accountability will help researchers understand the best way to manipulate the input into the black box, and be more certain of the strengths and weaknesses of the output.”
Until we better understand the processes that go on in the background, researchers today should expand their searches, and use multiple databases in order to reduce the effects of technological bias. Mart explains that, “[t]he uniqueness of results may show something about the world view of each database that suggests that searching in multiple databases may be the 21st century version of making sure that multiple authorial viewpoints are highlighted in a library collection’s holdings.”
Within the SSRN paper, Susan Nevelow Mart presents the findings of her Empirical Study and breaks out the results by:
  • Uniqueness of Cases
  • Relevance
  • Relevant and Unique
  • Number of Results Returned by Each Query
  • Age of Cases
The different databases have individual strengths and weaknesses in each category, and the results, read as a whole, back up Mart’s suggestion of searching multiple databases. Until legal research providers begin to open up their black boxes and adopt more Algorithmic Accountability, researchers will need to expand our own legal information literacy with a better understanding of how each database compiles, categorizes, indexes, searches, and prioritizes the results. Hopefully, Mart’s research, and pressure from lawyers and researchers will help push these providers to shine a little more light into their algorithmic black boxes.

[ed. note – Updated at 11:30 CT to include Ravel Law as part of the databases reviewed by Susan Nevelow Mart. – GL]

[Ed. Note: I asked Katie Brown, Law Library Director of the University of Charlotte School of Law, and fellow geek, to write a review of last week’s NCCSLM meeting in Boston. Please welcome guest blogger Katie Brown. – GL]

Last week (12/2/16) I had the opportunity to attend the Boston University Law School/ AALL hosted –National Conference on Copyright of State Legal Materials. This topic has seen an uptick in interest in recent years, mostly among law librarians and on legal blogs, as state copyright issues have arisen and have greatly affects both patron access to material and publisher pricing. As a self –proclaimed “IP Junkie,” was looking forward to this all-day event to further explore these musings with an audience of folks whom I knew would be just as passionate about this copyright issue as I am, and I can tell you AALL an BU did not disappoint.

The daylong event covered a host of subtopics within the state copyright arena. The agenda boasted everything, from a copyright issue overview; to a panel addressing who owns the copyright in the work of the United States Government; to how we make the content easily available to people; to journalists limited access to legal materials changing what stories find their way to print; and finally several organizations discussing aspirational examples for expansive, accurate and open access to state legal materials. I think the experience of the full day was best stated by one attendee, who after the event, shared on social media that he was now suffering from, “Gov’t info Overload.”

It is important to note his use of the word “overload” instead of overwhelmed. For me, the positive overload of content was a direct result of the wide breadth of speakers, who spoke passionately throughout the day about how they have been touched and limited by the copyright status of and access to United States law. Another wonderful take away I gleaned from the day’s event was each speaker seemed to be striving for a positive way to improve access and discussing exploring ways that this original public domain content will easily be available to all in the future.

You can always gauge if the content from your event is hitting a nerve with the speakers, audience and experts outside the forum when it gets the folks on twitter typing away. The event hashtag #NCCSLM throughout the day was aflutter with zippy one liners, links to resources, shout outs and retweets.

A few of my favorite tweets from the day are:

I encourage you to take a look at all the tweets from the day by searching #NCCSLM and listen to the day’s recording that will be made available from AALL in the near future.  ‬‬‬

I had a chance to talk with Ravel Law’s CEO, Daniel Lewis last week about Ravel’s new analytical tool for US Courts. I’ve been doing less and less product reviews lately because Bob Ambrogi and Jean O’Grady do a much better job at reviewing new products than I, but Daniel and Ravel Law have been such proponents of law librarians and legal information professionals, that I thought I’d dust off my reviewing skills and have him walk me through the new tool.

In my opinion, content is still king when it comes to legal research, but analytical tools make deciphering all the content so much better, and help researchers find the relationships between issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. Ravel is introducing a new analytics platform today which identifies patterns in millions of court decisions to access the possible outcomes, and help the litigation researcher deduce the best arguments or actions to take in his or her individual case, based upon the way specific judges or courts previously ruled on similar issues. In simpler terms, it allows you to better know your Judge or Court.

Daniel Lewis walked me through examples of the tool, ranging from specific issues in front of individual courts and judges, to much more complicated and academic research of how broader issues are handled differently over time, or regions. From what I have seen, there is a lot of potential for practicing attorneys and research academics alike with the Court Analytics tool.

The image below shows the layout of the Court Analytics platform. There’s a lot more to see from the tool, and Jean O’Grady will present a webinar later today (1 PM ET) to demonstrate it.

The press release is listed below with more information.

Ravel Law Launches New Analytics for US Court System
First Platform to Offer Analytics for All Federal and State Courts
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – DECEMBER 5, 2016 – Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform, today announced the launch of Court Analytics, a first-of-its-kind offering that provides an unprecedented view into the caselaw and decisions of state and federal courts.
Ravel’s Court Analytics answers critical questions that litigators face in developing legal strategy. By analyzing millions of court opinions to identify patterns in language and case outcomes, Ravel empowers litigators to make data-driven decisions when comparing forums, assessing possible outcomes, and crafting briefs using the most important cases and rules. Complex projects that used to take hours or days of research can now be done in minutes, with answers that deliver richer intelligence and detail.
“Court Analytics offers law firms a truer understanding of how courts behave and how cases are tried. Attorneys can inform their strategy with objective insights about the cases, judges, rules and language that make each jurisdiction unique. The future of litigation will be different, and we’re already seeing changes – with top attorneys combining their art of lawyering with our science, to advance their arguments in the most effective way possible,” said Daniel Lewis, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ravel Law.
Court Analytics applies data science, natural language processing, and machine learning to evaluate millions of court decisions spanning hundreds of years from over 400 federal and state courts. Its features include:
·         Search and filter caselaw by court, 90+ motion types, keywords, and topics.
·         Predict possible outcomes by identifying how courts and judges have ruled on similar cases or or motion types in the past.
·         Uncover the key cases, standards, and language that make each court unique.
With Court Analytics, lawyers can take advantage of never-before-seen insights, such as:
·         Judge Susan Illston in the Northern District of California grants 60% of motions to dismiss, which makes her 14% more likely to grant than other judges in the district.
·         The Second Circuit is most likely to turn to the 9th Circuit for persuasive caselaw, and then to the 5th and 7th Circuits.
·         Measured by citations, Judge Richard Posner truly is the most influential judge on the 7th Circuit. One of Posner’s most widely cited decisions is Bjornson v. Astrue, an appeal from a district court decision affirming the denial of social security disability benefits by an adminis­trative law judge. The most important passage of that decision is on page 644, as it deals with the Administrative Law Judge’s “opaque boilerplate.”
·         The California Court of Appeals has ruled on more than 1,000 cases that deal with the right of privacy. The two most important precedential decisions the courts rely on in such cases are California Supreme Court cases: White v. Davis and Hill v. National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Court Analytics adds to Ravel’s analytical research suite, alongside the award-winning Judge Analytics tool, which identifies the rules, cases, and specific language that a judge commonly cites, and Case Analytics, which finds key passages within cases and shows how they are interpreted. Using the Ravel platform, attorneys can gain insights customized to the unique circumstances of their case at every step of their research process. All three features are available today (www.ravellaw.com) via paid subscription (for individuals and organizations).
Ravel’s subscription-based services are enhanced by the “Caselaw Access Project,” the company’s ongoing collaboration with Harvard Law School to digitize the school’s entire collection of U.S. caselaw, one of the largest collections of legal materials in the world. Through this project, millions of court decisions are being digitized and added to the Ravel platform. This database of American law serves as an underlying data set that people can search and view for free in Ravel, in addition to using Ravel’s paid technologies to derive insights.
Ravel will be hosting a launch webcast to share more details on Court Analytics on Monday, December 5, 2016, 11:00 AM PST (2 pm EST). Register here to learn more: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7457269768975514627?source=CMS
###
About Ravel Law

Ravel is a legal search, visualization, and analytics platform. Ravel empowers lawyers to do data-driven research, with analytics and interfaces that help them sift through vast amounts of legal information to find what matters. Established by lawyers in 2012, Ravel spun out of interdisciplinary work between Stanford University’s law school, computer science department, and d.school. Ravel is based in San Francisco, and is funded by New Enterprise Associates, North Bridge Venture Partners, Ulu Ventures, Experiment Fund, and Work-Bench.

The billable hour has been trashed repeatedly over how it motivates bad behavior in law firms. The reasoning goes that rewarding hours billed motivates lawyers (associates and partners) to spend more time on tasks than necessary, resulting in inefficiencies. My personal opinion is that rewarding hard work is not the problem, but instead poor management over the efforts of workers is the real problem.

For now, I will leave that argument aside and turn attention towards clients. It’s easy to toss stones at the glass house across the street, but clients should be taking a hard look at their own financial motivations first.

At a conference this fall, I posed a question on how clients reward their internal lawyers. The group involved included both clients and law firms. The question was: What financial motivations do in-house lawyers have for reducing the cost of legal services?  I figured it was a fair question, since that is the primary complaint about law firm compensation systems.

Part of the motivation for the question came from a conversation with a colleague who moved from a firm to a client over a year ago. They noted that in-house lawyers are not threatened by the emerging roles in legal departments focused on cost savings. The reason they are not concerned is that the new roles pose no threat to their own careers. In-house lawyers advanced by – being good lawyers and not by being cost focused.

After I posed my question to the group there was a long, silent pause. It appeared no one had ever asked this type of question, so people had to think about it. But even then, the response was just shrugs. Finally one person from the client-side noted that lawyers who regularly force write offs were noticed positively in some fashion.

Two thoughts:

1 – People in glass houses shouldn’t through stones. If misaligned comp systems are a problem, you might want to start with updating your own before you trash others’.

2 – After giving it some thought, the one comment made about financial motivation is actually counter-productive. If in-house lawyers show value by securing regular write offs, they are being rewarded for engaging with law firms who are habitually inefficient, or worse, padding their bills.

I have run into #2 a number of times. My best guess is that in-house lawyers feel write offs are truly driving value since management can view it as measurable cost savings. At a prior firm I had one partner suggest we preemptively write down 2% of the time on every bill to save the client the time since that was what they did. I asked if the work was being done poorly necessitating a 2% hit. He said no. So I said no – since the client would still write the time off 2% to show value to their boss.

The challenge of aligning comp with client cost goals is therefore one faced by both firms and clients. And it is one more argument for why clients and firms should work collaboratively on addressing the needs for more cost savings and efficiencies.

Otherwise, expect to the hear the sounds of more glass shattering.

It is long believed that the key to real estate
purchases is location, location location. And while I am not in the business of
flipping houses, it seems to me and my limited HGTV understanding of the world,
that location is pretty important when buying property. 

 

Recently, there have been a dearth of posts here and
elsewhere relating to changing nature of the legal market, none of which are
surprising or nor have any of the changes occurred in a vacuum. We’ve watched
the incremental change for years and perhaps now we are just reaching the
tipping point for all things legal client service delivery, AI, matter planning
& pricing, LPO, LPM and so forth. The neighbourhood is changing and we’ve
lost sight of the ideal location. 

It is not surprising that we can’t see what’s right in
front of us.  Equal to the talk of the
changing legal landscape, is talk of the information overload and how to bring
one in line to assist with the other. For example I’ve posted about the need
for better EI, UI, UX and the implementation of “design thinking” in
solving legal problems or the problems of legal service delivery. I am a huge
proponent of all these concepts. I really am, what I do, is fundamentally about
wading through reams of data to paint a pretty picture. Without empathizing
with the client and presenting my insights in a visually persuasive format, I
have nothing.  There is a lot of
discussion around data and data source integrity, around choosing the right
databases, cutting through clutter and using video or layered graphics to tell
the story. For a while now, I have been bothered by the disconnect by what
firms think they need to do, what clients say they want and what those of us
tasked with making it happen on the business side of law can actually
accomplish.   We need to bridge the gap.  For me that means we need more, better,
clearer context. 
When we teach information literacy in firms to help
our clients navigate our information warehouses from the library, KM, business
development, etc. we share what’s available, what sources have been vetted and
what process are used to share and archive. 
Rarely do we indicate how the information is used or connected to other
sources of intelligence within the firm. 
When we talk CRM strategy for example, we talk about the need to share
contacts for marketing lists not for relationship intelligence and building a
unified approach to client service.  We
talk about what tool to select, how to use the tools, refine workflows, clean
and maintain the date but rarely touch on the why. And when we implicitly know
the why, we make the assumption that everyone understands the task at hand as
fully as we do. The why part of the equation is strategic; part of a bigger
whole that not everyone will have access to or understand, but that’s the
“location” or the context we should strive to own within our
firms. 

When I look at the list of “must
have topics” at the upcoming AALL meeting for example the topics are
very important, practical, and necessary but majority of the topics tactical
and process driven.  Same could be said
when I look at the upcoming LMA conference offerings.
This makes sense, it is easier to teach someone how to do something than to
have a philosophical and often culturally sensitive conversation around the
why. Teaching context is not something we can do easily, it’s like showing your
work when you do a math problem. Sometimes you can draft a number sentence but
most of the time it just makes overt sense that 2+2 = 4, don’t make me explain
it, just take the answer as it is, and consider the task complete.  I haven’t completely worked it out yet, but solving
for and teaching context is a mash-up of design thinking,
Gail Fairhurst’s concepts of framing
against a backdrop of law firm cultural hegemony and the limited agency of
allied professionals to turn context into action (though you could draw
parallels to other industries as well). As I spend what’s left of my morning
wading through my daily tasks, I will strive to find the context in each task
as it relates to whole, and I encourage you to do the same.

 

 

Ron Friedman recently posted the following video to twitter.

Ron and I have talked about this a lot, going back to my AI posts last December when
I suggested that we stop using the term Artificial Intelligence in
legal because it causes more confusion, consternation, and general
trouble than it’s worth.

First, to answer Ron’s
question, why all the AI hype in the legal market?  The AI hype isn’t
happening in the legal market.  It’s happening throughout the world. 
It’s now in our homes with Nest Thermostats and Hue light bulbs.  It’s in
our pockets with Siri, and in our offices with Alexa. It’s the basis of
one of the most engrossing shows on HBO right now, Westworld.  And we
still have brilliant people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warning
that AI will likely kill us if we don’t take precautions. What we’re
seeing in the legal market is just bleeding-through from the massive
hype happening in the rest of the world.  And I think it’s all about to
come crashing down.  We will shortly enter into the great Trough of
Disillusionment for AI.

I don’t say that because I
think AI will fail to live up to its promise.  On the contrary, I think
AI will way outstrip our current expectations.  However, we humans are
fickle.  Our expectations shift quickly. Louis C.K. explains it best in
his routine about Airplane WiFi. 
In the AI space, this same fickle attitude leads to an interesting
phenomenon, over time we adjust what we believe qualifies as AI.  The
more common a technology becomes the less we believe it to be Artificial
Intelligence. 

Google isn’t considered AI, but it
‘knows’ what you’re typing as you type, and then it filters a large
portion of the web to give you the most relevant pages.  It would have
easily been seen as AI twenty years ago.  Siri and Alexa personal
assistants respond to voice commands and can return information
instantly or actually perform tasks online, but they are considered
borderline AI at best these days. Completely self-driving automobiles
are still seen as Science Fiction and therefore are solidly in the AI
column, but I predict they will NOT widely be considered AI by the time
they are commercially available.  AI is a moving target. By the time a
technology is commercialized it’s no longer considered Artificial
Intelligence.  Consequently, we fickle humans are consistently
underwhelmed by the promise of AI even as AI fundamentally changes the
world around us.

The same is happening in legal right
now.  AI is all over the place from e-discovery to contract review, due
diligence, and data extraction, to my own company’s expert system platform.  (Oh, BTW.  I’ve got another new job since
last I wrote.) But the more we see of it, the less we believe it to
truly represent Artificial Intelligence.  AI is always just beyond the
horizon.  Just on the other side of the next technological
breakthrough.  It’s always something just slightly better than what we
can do right now.

So I say, “Don’t buy into the
AI hype!”  Not because AI is not real, but because hyperbolic
expectations for AI lead to a belief in ‘magical technology’. And
expectations of ‘magic yet to come’ will prevent you from taking
advantage of the remarkable and capable technology that is absolutely available
today. 

It’s not ‘Artificial’ Intelligence, it’s Your Intelligence: Augmented, Enhanced, and Multiplied.

[Ed. Note: Please welcome guest-blogger, and fellow law-librarian, Marcia Burris. Marcia is currently a Senior Consultant with HBR Consulting. – GL]

 While the rate of change in the legal industry seems to be accelerating, change is not new to law librarians. In fact, those of us who have been around long enough have been hearing for the past 20 years or so that the days of the law library are numbered. It is certainly true that the use of books has declined in recent years, and the focus of librarians has shifted away from traditional print maintenance roles toward supporting attorneys through the delivery of information in increasingly digital environments. However, this article is not about the decline of print. We’ve already been there, done that, and it’s time to move on to a new topic.

But change continues, and so do concerns about the role of law librarians. In recent years, the “new” role of librarians as expert online researchers and content managers seems to be threatened again, this time by the trend toward creation of self-service research environments in which content is served up so conveniently and intuitively, that even the busiest attorneys (who necessarily have other things to do besides learn new search platforms) can find useful, on-point information without the guidance of an expert to lead them through the digital maze. The well-recognized expertise of librarians in organizing and directing users to content seems likely, in the view of some observers, to be supplanted by newer expert systems.

As the culture of attorney self-service expands, the question is circulating again about what the future of law librarians will look like – if we have a future.

Of course, smart information delivery systems must be built by experts, and customized to the needs of specific firms by professionals who understand their legal practice areas and unique firm cultures and deployed to end-users whose interest and comfort with change vary widely. Law librarians are uniquely suited to roles in developing and deploying new resources through their combination of legal knowledge, technology skills, and emotional intelligence.

Even after the new tools have been deployed and attorneys trained in how to use them, librarians continue to play a role in delivering service through these platforms, including performing on-demand research and providing alerts, platform customizations and other services to support end-users. For example, although push technologies for current awareness are typically customizable by individual end users, and some attorneys like to be hands-on with these tasks, more often the creation and curation of alerts falls to library professionals who can do so efficiently and accurately, saving attorney time for other work – such as, well, practicing law.

While librarians are invaluable to developing and supporting self-service technologies, that is not the only role in which they are proving their value.

During the recent SLA Webinar on Evolving Libraries, Kris Martin, one of my co-workers at HBR, discussed an evolution of library services that we have been tracking along two distinct paths, toward either a User-leveraged service model, such as the primarily self-service environment described above, or an Expert-leveraged model.

While the User-leveraged model is characterized by increased investment in new technologies and librarian support for user-enabling applications, with a subsequent decrease in direct research, the role of librarians as researchers continues strong in firms where an Expert-leveraged service model has evolved. In these firms, the research skills of librarians are increasingly utilized as library professionals are embedded within practice groups and other administrative departments, where their familiarity with a wide range of resources and subject-specific knowledge combine to create competitive advantage. In legal practice groups, embedded librarians enjoy inclusion on client teams where they contribute research efficiency and value to client matters. In administrative teams, librarians work closely with marketing and others to provide research and analysis in support of their firm’s strategic business objectives. In addition to providing traditional research expertise, embedded librarians are frequently called upon to provide more sophisticated information analysis.
Both user-leveraged and expert-leveraged service models change the role of the librarian, demanding greater expertise and a pro-active approach to meeting firm information needs.

And there is one more high-value librarian role overarching both models, that of the Generalist/Knower of Many Things. While generalist researcher positions are declining as firms move toward user-leveraged or expert-leveraged service models, the individual with knowledge and experience across a variety of legal subjects, technology, and research functions continues to play an essential role in developing library and information services which support law practice efficiency and innovation. The true generalist who is involved in many areas of research work and engaged in conversations throughout the firm is uniquely positioned to identify opportunities. If innovation is about connecting dots, who is better positioned to deliver value than the individual whose vantage point includes multiple dots?

Firm leaders who empower their librarians to contribute value through support of user-leveraged or expert-leveraged service models and through direct involvement in the creation of systems to support practice and efficiency efforts, will find the “library” to be a valuable asset for many years to come.

I entitled an ACC guidebook Unless You Ask. The title refers to a finding from a series of Altman Weil surveys on why law firms aren’t doing more to change the way they deliver legal services. “Client’s aren’t asking for it” is always a top response from the managing partners. My impression is that the managing partners are correct in their observation that most clients don’t ask. I am working to change that.

So kudos to Altman Weil for confirming with the clients themselves. Their 2016 Chief Legal Officer Survey included a stellar bonus question:

Reorganizing those numbers a bit, only 30.8% of CLOs rate themselves satisfied because they generally are (17.4%) or because they are pleased with their results from asking for change (13.4%). Of 69.2% who are not satisfied, the vast majority have not exercised their inherent authority to ask for change because they are focused only on outcomes/don’t think it is their job to ask (43.2%) or have simply taken their business elsewhere (11.7%). The remaining 14.5% asked for change but did not get it.

This is what one might call an impasse:

  • Law firms are waiting on clients to make them change
  • Clients are waiting on law firms to be proactive or change in response to market pressure

In the long run, market pressure should prevail with client exit playing an important signaling role. But you know what they say about the long run. As discussed previously, the pace of exit is slow, and there is a lot of noise obscuring its signaling function. That is, to return to a framework I deployed in a prior post, loyalty continues to dominate (repackaging the numbers above):

The Voice share is higher than I would have predicted. Though it is about where I would have guessed (10-15%) with the success rate factored in. That 13.4% of in-house departments are effecting change in the way outside counsel deliver legal services seems about right to me.

I am unsurprised by the failure rate. It is innovation. Innovation means different. Different entails risk. My fear, however, is that not much of anything was actually tried by those who now may be discouraged.

My friend Jeff Carr often refers to “massive passive resistance.” Jeff was in the subset of GCs who regularly made public pronouncements of the need for the legal market to fundamentally change (i.e., discounts don’t count). While that chorus became louder after the Great Recession, Jeff was still in the vanguard of an elite subgroup: those GCs who genuinely meant it.

We are all tempted to engage in virtue signaling—saying that which makes us appear virtuous without any real intention of attendant action. As in-house counsel, you may feel compelled to say you are interested in, for example, controlling costs. But, depending on the environment, you may not be compelled to actually pursue cost control. Instead, you focus exclusively on the substantive legal matters in your portfolio (the stuff you went to law school for). There is not necessarily a tradeoff between cost and quality. But there could be. And you’d rather direct your finite attention to your area of interest and accountability. This acute focus also leaves your powder dry for when the real dictate to cut costs arrives. The loosely run law department has a much easier time finding savings than the already lean machine.

As a result, GCs say many things that their departments do not take seriously. Law departments and their individual constituents say much that their law firms can dismiss as theater. Managing partners say all sorts of things that….Well, all of us are more talk than action (though degrees vary). A key to survival is knowing when people with power are serious. The remainder is subject to passive resistance.

I am not surprised then that some law firms were less than responsive to some law departments. Moreover, I suspect that some law departments had a hard time communicating what they wanted. It is reasonable to want your law firms to be more effective, cost conscious, innovative, efficient, etc. But these are nebulous demands. The conversation around service delivery is relatively new. Most in-house teams aren’t quite sure what they want. They are just want more of it. And knowing what you want differs from articulating it in a way that is digestible by someone who has no frame of reference. Someone really ought to write a guide to such conversations.

And even if the communication from the law department was crystal clear, change is still hard and takes time. Maybe the law firm didn’t know how to change. Maybe the client didn’t have enough leverage with the subject firm. Maybe the person to whom the request was communicated did not have the authority/pull to make it happen.

Law departments should pursue concentrated, calculated, and and clearly articulated change initiatives supported by sustained attention (not the same as constant attention). Even then, some efforts will still fail. Such is the nature of experimentation. If guaranteed results are more important to you than improved results, keep doing the same thing you’ve always done for as long as it is sustainable, at which point you will have no option but to experiment and far less room for error.

The Exit share in the chart above is much lower than I would have anticipated. Moreover, the results of the bonus question above do not seem to square with other data in the report:

So 53% of clients have switched firms on the basis of “client service” while only 4.4% of clients have dropped firms due to “unsatisfactory service delivery?” There must be some critical semantic distinction I am missing. The higher exit number is consistent with general industry trends, including the survey’s own findings on insourcing (which still remains less prevalent than discounts and AFAs):

I am fine with exit as a general concept/approach. But I continue to wonder how well it alone addresses the problem. What makes a law department believe that switching firms will fix the client service problem as opposed to just relocate it? The answer I usually get (anecdote warning) is that service delivery is explicitly included in the dialogue with the new firm as part of the retention process. That is, the law department is combining exit with voice.

This prompts the question as to why they didn’t try voice with their existing firm first. Responses tend to suggest that it is easier to shape a new dynamic than reform an existing one. This strikes me as a fair point. But it becomes problematic when path dependence makes exit really hard.

The best read of the data tends to suggest that a majority of clients switch firms. But it does not follow that a majority of their firms feel the impact (only 13.7% instituted a convergence program). Most incumbents retain their privileged status while insulated from the voice of the customer.

Loyalty. I don’t know how I feel about 17.4% of chief legal officers reporting satisfaction.
There is nothing wrong with being “generally satisfied.” While I am a continuous improvement zealot (never totally satisfied), I had the pleasure of working with phenomenal outside counsel. I always wanted them (and us and me) to get better. But this desire did not obscure the fact that they were already exceptionally good. As strange as it may seem, I would have likely ended up in the “generally satisfied” or “got the changes we asked for” buckets.

Likewise, I am sympathetic to those CLOs who are outcome oriented or feel law firms should be proactive. Few CLOs have the time to worry about service delivery. And law firms should be proactive.

That said, I submit that it is the responsibility of the legal department as a whole to behave like sophisticated consumers of legal services. The fact remains that ours is a buyers’ market, and the buyers cannot abdicate responsibility for how legal services are delivered. Silence is taken as assent to the status quo.

Accepting that the CLOs do not have time for the details is different than thinking that service delivery should not fall within the ambit of someone’s (or someones’) job description. For me, this responsibility grows with the size of the department.

A solo GC or a few lawyers just trying to keep their head above water absolutely need to triage. But specialization accompanies scale, as does the professionalization of management. In the survey, 77.6% of law departments with 50 lawyers or more report having one or more people dedicated to “law department administration” with 15.9% of their time (6 weeks per year) focused on outside counsel spend tracking and analysis. Since service delivery has an appreciable impact on spend (as well as quality and speed), it seems reasonable to suggest that a few of those days should be directed towards the subject.

Frankly, I’ve probably spent too much time thinking about legal supply chains. To me, the law department is not the retail customer (end user of the car, phone, etc.) but the manufacturer/distributor who should absolutely take an interest in how component parts are produced (i.e., responsibility for the entire value chain). Deep supplier relationships are central to my worldview. And I am probably missing something about what seems to me a facile approach to driving change—i.e., expecting instead of demanding.

It would be a completely different story if most in-house counsel were satisfied with their outside counsel. They aren’t. It would be a completely different story if the pace of exit were enough to cause immediate modifications in behavior. It isn’t. It would be a completely different story if the outcomes-only mindset were enough to close the gap between expectations and performance. It isn’t.

We now have years of data on the CLOs’ perception of how much pressure they believe they are putting on law firms and how serious they believe the law firms are about changing. There has been essentially no movement. In particular, the delta between the two has returned to pre-Recession levels:

I would wager that the gap will never fully disappear. Law departments are never going to believe that law firms are as serious about change as they should be. But look at what a low opinion corporate clients have of themselves. They only cracked six on the pressure scale once in last eight years. Clients seem to know that the outcomes-only mindset is not getting them the outcomes they want. Why not try a different approach? If it fails, the status quo continues just as it would have under the current regime. If it works….well, that’s when things become really interesting.

Full Arc: Law Firm Resistance to Change and Law Department Responsibility

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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 our guest blogger, Susan Kostal, San Francisco based legal affairs journalist and consultant.
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One of the most fascinating ideas out of this year’s LMA Legal Tech West conference was a workshop on design thinking.

Design thinking has taken the corporate world by storm. Intended to build a culture of free exchange of ideas, constant iteration and learning from failure, it is sacred credo in Silicon Valley and at the heart of almost all innovation.

Law is one of the slowest, if not the slowest, industry to evolve, but design thinking has a good chance of changing that.

Design thinking has many definitions, but at its core, whether designing a product or business process, it comes down this: instead of a designer-led process, it’s a user-led process. This concept comes out of the Institute for Design at Stanford (d.school), and launched its most popular course, Designing Your Life.

Mark Beese of Leadership for Lawyers led attendees, myself included, in a design-thinking exercise to improve the onboarding process for lawyers and staff at a law firm. We were paired in teams and assigned to learn as much about our partner’s onboarding process, what they liked, what they didn’t, and then in rapid-fire mode come up with as many ideas as possible to solve their issues, whether they seemed feasible or not.

We were instructed to sketch these out, which, for someone used to working with words like me, unleashed a creativity and excitement about solving the problem that felt fresh and new.

Pipe Cleaner Breakthrough

With 10+ ideas in hand, we went back to interviewing, really digging into our partner’s experience, and then narrowed down our solutions to three. Then, we were given Post-Its, pipe cleaners, rubber bands, paper clips, markers, paper tubes, etc., and asked to build a prototype.

My partner was overwhelmed with the amount of information thrown at her on her first day, and wanted more personal, warmer touch points. One of the offerings I came up with was a branded mug. Sure, lots of people give out branded material to new hires. But along with my mug came a supply of coffee or tea—whichever beverage the new hire had accepted when offered a hot beverage in the interview process. I’m not sure that would have occurred to me absent me taking the time to craft a mug from pipe cleaners. My onboarding solution, while small, told my partner she was welcomed, that the firm wanted her to be happy at work. More importantly, it told her she was valued, and that her needs were noticed and were as important as corporate goals.

Some teams had unworkable ideas, such as a corporate jet to squire new hires for a tour of the firm’s offices. But that prompted me to think about giving each new employee a modest transit or parking voucher. The message the employee gets is that we are so excited you’ve joined us that we want to pay for your commute for your first few days with us.

How It Works In The Real World

Davis Wright Tremaine has embraced design thinking, is using it with clients to find legal process solutions, and has created DWT De Novo, an internal consulting firm to help its lawyers develop more client-centric ways of solving problems.

Jay Hull, DWT’s Chief Innovation Partner, told me that there are about 20 DWT staff and lawyers actively involved and 10 full-time people dedicated to the initiative. Hull, a former transactional lawyer, said the key is multi-disciplinary teams that feel free to pitch ideas, can iterate quickly, and who are confident enough to show clients prototyped options that aren’t yet fully baked, so team members can learn during the design process what features appeal to the client and which aren’t working and need improvement.

“To me, it starts with empathy for the client,” Hull said “and burrowing into what it’s like for them to engage with the product or process.”

Hull’s time in-house helped tremendously, he said, where he struggled with existing processes. “There was a huge transaction, and on the 42nd draft of the agreement, it hit me. What were we thinking? Couldn’t we have done this in 20 revisions? There has got to be a better way.”

Studying the Giants of Customer Service

At the launch of the effort, two DWT professionals participated in a two-day design-thinking workshop hosted by Nordstrom, well known for its top-notch customer service. Then several lawyers, Hull included, visited the dSchool and met with Margaret Hagan, a fellow at Stanford Law’s Center on the Legal Profession. She launched the Legal Design Lab, experimenting in how design can make legal services more usable, useful and engaging.

DWT debuted the concept with a large public company. “They needed thousands of documents reviewed, knew they couldn’t do it efficiently in-house, and didn’t want to pay for a traditional review by a law firm,” Hull said.

Using software DWT already owned, the firm conducted an automated review of the contracts, with human beings doing post-automation quality control, for a fixed set-up fee of $15,000. The audit singled out several hundred contracts that needed further review, for which DWT charged a per-contract flat rate.

Note that this is a process- and solution-oriented approach, rather than a pricing- model approach, although the firm billed the client on a flat-fee basis. It hatched a single-point solution and provided the model for other contract review projects.

Clients “Want a Different Model”

Microsoft, a longtime client, is a big proponent of design thinking. In-house lawyer Lucy Bassli needed thousands of procurement contracts reviewed so she could free up her department’s lawyers for higher-level work. She wanted it structured as an annual flat-fee engagement. She asked for RFPs and “made it clear she wanted a different model,” Hull said.

DWT more directly applied design thinking principles, including empathizing with the client and crafting an MVP (minimum viable product) with rapid iterations based on client feedback. The process analysis included details I’ve heard many in-house counsel complain about, such as how documents are managed, how communication with the client and related firms should be structured, and how projects will be assigned.

“We are ‘all in’ on this concept, and the firm is behind it,” Hull said. Now, DWT partners are coming to Hull and his team for help. “I’ve had lawyers come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’m not exactly sure what you guys are doing, but the client says it takes way too long and costs too much. Can you help me?’”

Design thinking “opens up pathways to better solutions, where there isn’t this constraint so common in the legal industry that everything that comes out of your mouth better be perfect, and you better be prepared to defend it at all costs,” Hull said.

“That’s just dumb, and very self-limiting.”

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Susan Kostal is a legal affairs PR, marketing and business development consultant based in San Francisco. She covered legal affairs as a journalist for nearly three decades. You can follow her on Twitter at @skostal and view more of her content at www.susankostal.com.