I am 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 External Resources Interest Group of the ACC Legal Ops Section. The book was introduced at last week’s fantastic ACC Legal Ops Section Conference. I guarantee this will be the most compelling guidebook you have ever read, or I will personally refund the full list price (it’s free). The book lays out why and how law departments and law firms should weave continuous process improvement into the fabric of their relationships. From the opening:

“Clients aren’t asking for it.” When surveyed, law firms’ response as to why they are not doing more to change the way they deliver legal services is that “clients aren’t asking for it.” Given that clients are already voting with their wallets and their feet, “clients aren’t asking for it” might not be the best guide to action. But there is some merit to the argument that while law firms know they need to change, they don’t know how to change in visible ways that will satisfy their clients. You should be asking for more and be more specific in what you ask for.

You should be asking your external providers to get demonstrably better. Stripped to its most basic, you should always be able to identify how your primary providers are measurably improving their delivery of legal services to you. You should have credible evidence— descriptions and metrics—of their process improvements and innovation.

While this compilation will go deep into potential methodologies for starting and structuring such data-driven conversations, do not get distracted by the details or paralyzed by a compulsion to develop a comprehensive approach. If you can’t answer the question, “What evidence do I have that my primary providers are measurably improving their delivery of legal services to us?” ask them for some. Then ask again in six months. Repeat.

Don’t detour into discounts. Discounts are fine, as far as they go. But they do not go very far in actually modifying behavior. Your relationships with your primary providers most likely resemble long-term supplier commitments with high switching costs and intermittent price renegotiation. With people and price in place, it is process that offers the most levers to drive continuous improvement.

You are the urgency driver. If you ask, your external providers will find new ways to add value. If you ask, your external providers will improve the processes by which they deliver legal services to you. This volume will provide you with a menu of potential asks that go directly to process.

At its core, Unless You Ask is about conversations. How to start them and what you can get out of them. You may not get everything you ask for. But unless you ask, you are almost guaranteed to get none of it.

A bit more theatrically, what follows (not in the book) is a hypothetical conversation between me (Q) and a caricature of an inside counsel (A) who has a familiar flair with the English language [Forgive me. I am compelled to be a bit goofy after a long stint of serious writing.]:

Q: Do you select quality outside counsel?

A: Oh, the best. They are really, really smart. The smartest. From the most famous firms. They went to the classiest schools. They know the best words. Really, really fabulous words. Luxurious words.

Q: Fantastic. Are you happy with the rates or fees that you have negotiated?

A: Absolutely. We win every negotiation. We win on rates. We win on AFAs. We win on invoice reductions. We win all the time. We win so often that my firms ask me, “Aren’t you tired of winning?” We have negotiated the very best deals. Huge deals. Ask anybody.

Q: Outstanding. So you’ve got the people and the price in place. You must be satisfied with your firms.

A: No. It’s terrible. Really, really awful. These people, they are not innovative or cost conscious. Transparency? Forget about it. Cycle times are way, way too long. Sad!

Q: That’s not good. How do you address those kind of service delivery issues?

A: I’ll tell you what we do. We do it better than anyone. We cut their invoices. Bam! Every month. And then when they come around begging for a rate increase, we are so very, very good at negotiating new discounts. Huge discounts. And then if they don’t get better, if they don’t meet our high, really high standards, we stop sending them work. Like that! [snaps fingers] It happens so fast your head would spin. You know, we don’t even tell them “You’re fired!” We just stop calling them.

Q: How long have you been doing this?

A: Doing what?

Q: Addressing service delivery issues through people and price rather than addressing process directly.

A: That. We’ve always done that.

Q: How is that working out for you?

A: [Puzzled look]

Q: How do you know your approach is actually modifying behavior? Can your law department point to ways in which your primary providers have measurably improved the delivery of legal services?

A: Frankly, I have no idea what you are getting at. Are you suggesting that we are not really, really terrific at what we do? Because, let me tell you, we are terrific.

Q: No. No offense intended. Let me try to switch to language that is more appealing. I’m sure you are great. The best. Fabulous. Truly fabulous. It’s just that I’ve written a little book. Really, the smallest book. In this book, I have distilled some uncommon practices from some great law departments. Some of the best, most famous law departments. Abbott Labs, Abbvie, AIG, Flex, Marsh McLennan, Shell, Voya. Really, really innovative stuff for getting additional value from your external relationships. The most value, really. And it is presented as a menu, a luxurious menu, very posh. I think it would be huge if you read the book. It would be even huger if you adopted some of the practices and told me about your amazing implementation so I could add a case study to a subsequent iteration. And if you don’t like what’s on the menu—if you think it’s all terrible—tell me that too. It’s a living document. It’s adaptable. So very adaptable. I would really appreciate feedback from someone as successful as yourself.

A: What are you trying to sell me? I’ve been in this business a long time. I know this business better than anyone. I’m big league.

Q: I’m trying to sell you on some ideas. Classy ideas. Proven ideas. Ideas about taking what’s already terrific and making it better by creating deep supplier bonds through structured dialogue that weaves continuous improvement into the fabric of your external relationships. Trust me, it is all very tastefully done. Really elegant. And the book itself is free.

A: Free? Kid, you are terrible at business. A real moron. I could teach you many, many things. Too many things. But I can’t resist a deal. Even I can’t say no to free. Send me the link.

Q: Deal.

The basic themes of the book should be familiar to regular readers. Unless You Ask is a practical guide to structured dialogue. It provides specific guidance on the kinds of data-driven conversations that law firms and law departments should be having and how to go about them. The menu is divided into three sections.

Value-Plus. The book comes from a place of respect for legal expertise and appreciation for the contribution of outside counsel. The value-plus section of the volume is focused on finding alternative ways to take advantage of that expertise. Beyond discrete legal matters, primary providers, and their competitors, can provide value via:

  • Legal Training (CLE)
  • Company Training
  • Support Training
  • Allied Professionals
  • Secondments
  • Advice Hotlines
  • Updates/Alerts
  • Pro Bono

Value-Enablement. Because legal expertise is so valuable, whether that expertise is being properly leveraged through process and technology is worthy of sustained (though not constant) attention. If in-house counsel ask for discounts, they will get discounts. If in-house counsel ask for measurable, continuous improvement in the delivery of legal services, that is what they will get. The book provides guidance on how to ask with respect to:

  • Knowledge Management
  • Process and Project Management
  • Billing Hygiene
  • Data/Analytics
  • Paper Lite
  • Expert Systems
  • Technology Training
  • Staffing
  • Firm Defined (i.e., letting firms present their own innovations)
Why. Some departments have already implemented these ideas. The book is a distillation of their practices. But the approach will be foreign to many law departments/firms. Since new is not something lawyers handle all that well, the Why section is presented in FAQ format to forearm those with the courage to suggest a new approach to improving on the status quo:
  • Shouldn’t we be focused on finding great lawyers?
  • You keep referring to “strategic sourcing” and “deep supplier relationships.” What do those terms even mean? How do they relate to law?
  • Should we really have to ask our firms to do things they should already be doing?
  • How will our firms respond to these kinds of additional requests?
  • Don’t we need to get our own house in order before asking our firms to do so?
  • Aren’t we too busy to run someone else’s business for them?
  • Doesn’t this only speak to incremental improvement?
  • Shouldn’t we use our leverage to ask our firms for deeper discounts on billable rates?
  • Wouldn’t much of this be addressed by a transition to AFAs?
  • How does all of this apply to working with alternative service providers?
  • Why is this suddenly so important?

Finally, this is Version 1.0 of the book. We worked hard to get it out before last week’s stellar ACC Legal Ops Conference. It isn’t complete. It won’t ever be complete. If the book ends up being read and the ideas get implemented (two big ifs), then we will continue to update the volume with new ideas and upgrades of existing ideas. Towards that end, I look forward to comments, criticisms, and suggestions to improve on what we’ve got so far.

_______________________________________
D. Casey Flaherty is a consultant who worked as both outside and inside counsel. Find more of his writing here. Connect with Casey on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or email casey@procertas.com.

Praise for Unless You Ask

“It’s a great read – recommend all in-house to embrace, all outside to get ahead of the curve.” –Jeff Carr

“This is an incredibly valuable roadmap for in-house legal dept management of outside counsel. I mean turn by turn.” –Liam Brown

“A report I think qualifies for gold standard treatment by both corporate law firms and the in-house law departments they serve. So many good ideas—a tour de force in my book. Ignore at your peril” –Betsy Munnell

“A terrific (and free) vade mecum for general counsel – to use a good old-fashioned expression with a contemporary flavour….Whether you are a GC or a BigLaw practitioner, read why Casey titled his book Unless You Ask – and learn from a pathfinder.” –George Beaton

“Must-Read: Unless You Ask or ‘Open your mouth or open your wallet'”–Silvia Hodges Silverstein

“Great read and reference for firms and law departments. Terrific ideas for all.” –Lisa Damon

“Terrific and mandatory summer reading for all lawyers, in-house and outside. I mean really…read it!” –Martin Salomon

“I can’t do UYA justice in this space – you need to download it and binge-read it.” –John Calve

“Read this.” –Jordan Furlong

“Read this. That is all.” –Toby Brown

Image [cc] Elad Rahmin

Nearly five years ago, we did an Elephant Post asking our readers what they think Law Firms would stop using by the Fall of 2016. We thought it would be interesting to review those predictions and see how well we guessed.

Some of them were spot on… some were close… and some where way off (or perhaps just slightly ahead of their time.) Let’s tick through the lists and see how close we got.

Greg Lambert
Library/Records/Blogging Guy
Westlaw or Lexis

Law firms are already looking at cutting out one of the major legal publishers, and right now, the only real reason that they don’t do it immediately is because there is some resistance (read: one partner doesn’t want to cut the product) and they don’t want to rock the boat at this point. However, having both products is simply not going to be a cost-effective way to run the firm’s research/library operation. There may be that one time when there is a specific product that we can’t access immediately, but firms will see that you just can’t spend that much money to facilitate the one-off products that are needed on a rare occasion.
Note: I actually wrote this before the big Bloomberg/BNA news. It may not take five years to make this happen.

Not Quite: Although there have been a few firms that tested the one-provider method, I think that this prediction didn’t come true in the way that I thought it would. One of the biggest barriers (in my opinion) is that the vendors became very clever in bundling products and providing discounts toward some products if you kept or added additional products. The end result is that it made it much more difficult to jettison a vendor entirely because of the ripple effect that it caused on other (unrelated) products. Of course, there is always the issue of Attorney Preference on vendors, which is also a barrier to going with a single-provider.

Cindy Bassett
Electronic Services Librarian
Loose-leaf

For the most part, we have acquired online access to most of our looseleaf sources and have ended many of our print looseleaf subscriptions so that we aren’t duplicating purchases.  We only continue to subscribe to a few in print (IMHO) because there are a few professors who are used to seeing them in a print format and don’t want to adapt. But it is too expensive to duplicate any purchases, especially when you factor in the staff hours to update them.   Plus, our students hate to file.

Somewhat True: Although loose-leaf subs are still around, many have removed these from the collection where they duplicated online subscriptions. There are still a number of very valued, and expensive loose-leaf subscriptions where the items are not available electronically, or the electronic versions are simply not sufficient in the format to replace the loose-leaf versions. I think that we’re looking at an ever decreasing amount of loose-leaf materials over the next decade.

Shaunna Mireau
Director of KM and Libraries@FieldLaw
CD ROMs

Any content that comes on CD or DVD is (has always been and continues to be) a big pain in the neck.  Work stations are virtualized – no CD/DVD drives; IT has to load it; the DRMs are often unworkable; and the content (please God let it be so) will be moved to other formats which are more easily managed.  I sincerely hope this is a 2 rather than 5 year time span.  Content is the most important factor though, which is why my organization still maintains 2 titles. Please, 3 Geeks publisher readers, enough with the disks already.

True: I can’t believe we were still using these five-years ago.

Steve
IT
Blackberries

It probably won’t take five years for this to happen. Firms will simply stop buying BB’s for their attorneys and staff. Instead, they may (may) give a stipend to everyone to go out and use their own devices that can be installed with protective software (security that would wipe the device in event of being lost or stolen). It’s a no-brainer. The project might pay for itself in the reduction of staff time it takes to just reconcile the bills that come in from all those firm-owned devices.

True: Toby’s adage of “My Blackberry can do anything your iPhone can do… only slower,” is dead, along with the Blackberry itself. I know… I know, it officially still exists, but whenever someone pulls out a Blackberry in public, the reaction now is, “Why???”

Toby Brown
AFA
Technology

We will rent it instead.   Firms are learning that buying, installing, integrating, maintaining and updating technology is expensive and best left to technology companies. The current upgrades by so many firms to Office 2010 and Windows 7 highlights the rats-nest of technology firms are trying to manage.   It’s been my experience that law firms are good at … practicing law. By getting out of the technology services business, they will be able to re-focus their energies on that core competency.

True, but still a ways to go: Firms are much more accepting of Cloud-Based, and Software as a Service-type products. However, there is still a lot of buying, installing, integrating, maintaining, and updating of technology that is housed on firm-owned (or firm-rented) computers, and in-house technology developed and maintained by law firm IT Departments. It’s better than it was in 2011, but still not where it needs to be.

Scott Preston
Techno Adult
Smartphone/PDAs

For many years law firms have purchased, paid the monthly charges and all maintenance fees on smartphones in order to make sure the attorneys were available to their clients at all times.  At this point in time virtually everybody has their own smartphone and they are either migrating all their work traffic to their personal device or they are carrying two devices.  Given the advancement in mobile data management (MDM) it is a fairly simple process to enable most smartphones to securely connect back to the firm’s infrastructure.  This shift should save firms a lot of money in the procurement of smart devices, it will put an extra burden on support services.  So perhaps internal support for smartphones will also stop within the next 5 years.

True: Scott nailed this one. BYOD is the norm for most law firms now. Some may still pay a stipend for smartphones, but most firms are not putting nearly the amount of time, effort, and money in mobile devices that they did in 2011.

Greg Lambert
Blogger
Summer Associates?

The whole Summer Associates program seems to be shrinking more and more every year. Since almost all of those that go through the SA program end up leaving at the end of 4-6 years of practice at the firm, why hold on to this old way of thinking? Perhaps the better approach is to hope that other firms continue the SA program, then after they’ve got them trained and ready, swoop in and steal… er, “lateral” them into your firm.

Swing and a Miss (but, not quite a strikeout yet): I thought that some firms would completely go away from the Summer Associate programs and the college beauty contests for the top 10-15% of graduates from top-tier law schools. I was wrong, but with the bump to $180K for first-year associates, this idea may have some legs yet. Why firms that are in the AmLaw 200, based in lower-costs states are still matching NYC based Cravath wages, is beyond me, but, it seems that everyone is folding. Smart firms will find ways to evaluate talent in other ways, and offer competitive salaries for more work-life balance jobs. So, I missed this time around, but I think there is still something to this idea.

Max Kennerly
Trial Lawyer
Directory Listings

It’s old hat to say the Yellow Pages doesn’t matter for lawyers any more, but frankly I think that same obsolescence extends to lawyer-specific directories like Martindale Hubbell and, dare I say it, even Avvo and Superlawyers. These directories produce minimal client intake and even less client conversion; the question isn’t if they are the wave of the future, because they’re not, but if they’re even worth the bother once a lawyer has a modest web presence with their own professionally designed website. I’m going to plant a flag and say that, in five years, Martindale will be as bad as the Yellow Pages and Avvo will be as bad as Martindale.

Mostly True: While these are still around, the value is getting pretty close to zero for these directories. Superlawyers may still have a following, but it also has a similar number of detractors out there as to why and how lawyers put their names on these directory lists.

Mark Gediman
Librarian/Records
Search engines with proprietary content

I think the trend will move away from purchasing multiple search engines, each with their own proprietary content (i.e. Lexis, Westlaw) to purchasing one search engine and then subscribing to the content for that engine separately.  So, for example, using the search engine on Lexis to access the web, West content, BNA content, CCH content.  This would be true enterprise search.

False: Google still rules. Sorry Mark!!

This post originally appeared on the HighQ Blog.  

Last week, at the HighQ Forum in London, our new robot overlords displayed their mighty powers and declared that all human lawyers should line up and await their turn at the guillotine. 
Oh wait… I’m wrong, that didn’t happen.
However, we did get a brief glimpse into the future of legal service delivery, with what could arguably be called the first true robot lawyer. 
Yes, it’s a title that has been thrown around quite a bit recently. Both ROSS and KIM have been labeled robot lawyers, but ROSS is a very powerful research tool and KIM is a ‘virtual assistant’, akin to Siri for law. 
Not to in any way diminish either of these technologies, if moderately pressed, I will admit to being a huge fan-boy when it comes to both of them, but I think the term robot lawyer when applied to these technologies has invited skepticism and derision from people who claim that computers simply cannot do what humans can do. 
We set out to do some actual lawyering with computers.
HighQ Collaborate is a platform that allows for easy sharing and communication within firms, or between clients and firms. We may not be not the obvious choice for setting out to create a robot lawyer.
But therein lies the strength of our approach, because our robot lawyer is not a product.  It’s not a creation of a single company. It’s simply a proof of concept to show what is possible when you combine resources and tools that you have at your disposal to create something that is greater than the sum of it’s parts. 
This is a technique I talk about a lot, that I call bricolage.
Bricolage gives you the best of both the Buy and Build options. You are still building a custom solution to solve you particular problem. That could potentially give your firm a competitive advantage.
However, you are also using purpose built tools that are fully supported by other companies to ensure that you have the most robust solution possible. To me, bricolage is the answer to the Buy vs. Build question for law firms.
In February, HighQ announced its integration with RAVN, an AI data extraction tool that allows you to pull specific data out of unstructured documents and to move it into a structured format. 
On June 9th, at our Client Forum, we also announced integration with Neota Logic, a different kind of AI that allows you to build powerful expert systems to replicate virtually any logical process that can be codified.
For the forum I was joined on stage at the British Film Institute on the south bank of the Thames, by Sjoerd Smeets from RAVN and Greg Wildisen from Neota Logic. And as a demonstration of the combined power of our three platforms, we presented a scenario:
Imagine you’re a law firm, and you are approached by a client that is considering acquiring a large number of commercial leases. They want you to help determine the value of these leases over their entire term, as well as identify any risks associated with each lease.
Now, most firms would have two options:
  1. Get a bunch of young lawyers, or contract lawyers, in a room and have them manually plow through the many thousands of leases, calculating the value and highlighting and risky clauses or potential concerns.
  2. Work with the client to identify a subset of leases to review manually, and make a number of assumptions about the rest of the leases in order to provide some likely risks they may face.
But with HighQ, RAVN, and Neota, there is a third option.
Clients will commonly upload a large set of documents into our HighQ Collaborate site. An administrator will then go through the documents, ensuring that they are appropriately filed and then notify (or set auto-notifications to notify) the appropriate lawyers that the documents are out there waiting for some attention. 
In our demo last Thursday, the files were bulk uploaded and then RAVN went to work reviewing the documents.
First it identified the types of documents that were in the zip file. There were 10 commercial shopping mall leases and 5 ISDAs. As the audience watched, Sjoerd from RAVN, hit refresh and nothing happened.
He waited a second, hit refresh again, and nothing happened. He looked back at his laptop that was running the software, which I could see running, and I thought, “NOOOOO!  The curse of the live demo!” I was silently screaming what an idiot I must be for trying to do this live. 
But then Sjoerd hit refresh one more time, and you could see that the numbers were changing. RAVN was moving the files to the Shopping Mall Leases, and ISDA folders that we created. 
Then he clicked over to iSheets, our online spreadsheet/database module, and showed how RAVN was populating the sheet with information from the uploaded documents. First one row of data showed up, refresh, four more rows, refresh, all ten. And with that Sjoerd handed the computer over to Greg from Neota. 
Greg took the stage and showed the app that Neota had embedded into Collaborate. With the touch of one button marked, “Run Lease Assessment” the app performed four tasks for each lease. 
It calculated the portfolio rental value from any given start date, it assessed risks associated with the calculated rental value (such as tenants right for early termination and/or assignment, special obligations on the landlord, conditions around the security deposit, etc). 
Clicking through the app brings you to a valuation summary that shows the total value of the aggregated leases, as well as an aggregate Red Amber Green risk assessment of all leases. In addition, each lease is given its own valuation and risk report and the iSheet is updated with the valuation and risk report. It does all of this in seconds. 
I took the stage again and did my best Steve Jobs impersonation. “That is amazing!” Except, it wasn’t hyperbole, that is actually really amazing. Several people came up to me after and said, “I’m afraid your presentation was too slick, I don’t think that everyone in the audience understood what you three just did there.” 
But enough understood it. And enough can extrapolate to their own use cases and opportunities.  Enough can imagine how they could then use Collaborate to share the results of the AI engines, filtering views of the iSheets and permissioning them for different audiences, the client, the practice group, the contract lawyers, and any others you could think of. 
Each group seeing only the information that is relevant and important to their portion of the work at hand. Enough understood what we did on Thursday that they are beginning to talk, and they are beginning to ask whether we could make this work for their particular use case.   
This robot lawyer does not replace human lawyers. It makes them faster, more efficient, more consistent, and happier. 
Because this robot lawyer tells them where to focus their energies, on high risk leases, or contracts.  The kinds of things that lawyers really want to do, instead of mindlessly slogging through 50 mind-numbing, perfectly normal contracts a day, hoping to find the one anomaly in a hundred contracts. 
This robot lawyer doesn’t replace human lawyers. It makes them better lawyers.
My Workshop for the South African
Online Users Group Meeting in
beautiful Pretoria, South Africa (6/7/16)

It’s been a while now since I’ve written a truly geeky post that didn’t focus on law libraries. I’m going to try to make up for that with this one on how to pull data from websites using Excel.

Last week, I had the absolute pleasure of traveling to Pretoria, South Africa to present at the South African Online Users Group meeting. In addition to presenting at a local law firm and giving a keynote speech on the value of law library service, I also got to teach a three hour workshop on web scraping and website monitoring. We kept it simple at first, and eventually got so far in depth with the discussion that even I got confused. I’ll hit some of the highlights of my workshop here, specifically with using Microsoft’s Excel.

Web scraping is the action of using computer software techniques to extract information directly from websites. Since many of us use Excel to compile the information, whether it is text, numbers, geographical information, or currency, I like to show all the ways that you can directly pull data into Excel and start manipulating it.

So why would you use web scraping? There are a number of reasons. You may want to create some type of prototype that shows how you can interpret and analyze data and you need some sample data to test or demo your project. You may want to arrange information in different ways to make the data more valuable to you or your audience. Data analysis is a common reason to pull blocks of data to prove a trend or tenancy from the data. And finally, you may want to take external data and combine it with internal data (say Industry Data combined with client data) and compare or evaluate internal trends.

Web scraping is something that you really want to do as a last resort. It can be complicated, and time consuming to set up, so you want to see if the website may have an API that you can use or if you can buy the data from the owners. If it is a simple one-time thing for a small amount of information, then think about copying and pasting rather than scraping. If it is something that you’ll do over and over again, or it is a large amount of data, then scraping may be the better option. You also want to make sure that you aren’t breaking any laws or terms of services for the website. The key phrase that I borrow for this is, “Don’t Be Evil.” People work hard to collect and produce data, don’t blatantly steal someone else’s work, especially if it will do financial or other harm to them.

Now that the do’s and don’t’s are out of the way, let’s look at some options you can use to pull data into Excel from web pages.

  1. Simple Cut & Paste: 
    If the data is pretty clean, and within a table on a webpage, you can keep it very easy by
    – highlighting the information and copy it (CTRL+C or right-click “Copy”)
    – the trick in pasting the data is using the “Paste Special” option when you paste the data back to Excel (right-click -> paste special -> text (or unicode text) )
  2. Data -> From Web:
    Excel has a very simple tool on the “Data” tab called “From Web.” This allows you to simply put in the URL to a website, and Excel will bring up a browser screen that will let you pick the data from that website. This option is simple, but sometimes will pull in all of the data from the page, and you’ll have to do clean up later. Still much easier than recreating the data, and much cleaner than a copy and paste. Here’s a short video that shows how to do that.

  3. Excel’s Power Query:
    In Excel 2016, there is a new built-in tool for downloading from the web that you can use through the “Data” tab. If you have this version, go to Data -> New Query -> From other Sources -> From Web.
    If you do not have this version, don’t worry. You can download the Power Query tool bar add-in from Microsoft from this page.
    Here is a good (and short) video on how to use Power Query for Excel.

  4. Using APIs with Excel
    Now we start getting a little more complicated with the use of Excel formulas to pull data via an API. In order to access an API, you will need to sign up for the API and receive a “Key” that is unique to you (and you need to protect that Key from others seeing it.) Once you have that (or you can use open XML code like RSS feeds) you’ll use two functions in Excel:
    =WEBSERVICE, and
    =FILTERXML
    Again, it is much easier to show you a quick video than to walk you through this process, so here is a short video explaining how to use Excel and APIs.

  5. Specialized Add-Ins for Excel
    There are add-ins that you can upload into Excel to expand functions that pull data from websites and social media outlets.
    SEO Tools for Excel – This is a very powerful tool that allows you to pull data from different types of websites and social media sites. There is a free version that comes with lots of functionality, but an anoying start up screen whenever you launch Excel that makes you wait for a few seconds before you can use Excel. The paid version comes with extra functions and no anoying pop-up start screen.
    Excel Scrape HTML Add-In – This is a free add-in that allows you some additional function features in Excel to pull data from websites.
    Both of these add-ins are a little more complicated than I want to go into at this point, but you should know that these (and others) exist out there and my help you in your data gathering.

This covers most of the Excel portions of my workshop I conducted last week. It shows that there are some powerful built-in functions in Excel that can help you with data gathering and make it much easier for you to manipulate and analyze data you find on the web. Go forth and scrape!

In Part 1, I introduced the idea that we are all professional cyborgs. I used my personal experience with a diabetic toddler whose life literally depends on computers attached to his body to ruminate on how technology is so deeply intertwined with our professional lives that we often don’t even notice it. I rejected the notion that the use of technology can somehow be considered as distinct from ‘real’ lawyering.

In Part 2, I compared a decade of reading that an artificial pancreas is right around the corner to the even more drawn out asymptotic dawn of artificial lawyers. I used the professional progression of a composite successful lawyer who graduated law school in 1977–the mean and modal graduation year of the chairs of the AmLaw 10–as a touchstone for comparing the various AI hype cycles to more mundane progress that actually had an impact (desktop computing, the internet, mobile). I, however, concluded with the idea that the failure of technology to live up to the hype was a good reason to be skeptical of hype but a terrible reason to be skeptical of technology.

In this Part 3, I will talk about what happens when technology does live up to the hype (we stop thinking about it) and why our technology always appears to lag behind (because it does).

Expectation Calibration and Self-Driving Technology

 We pay attention to that which demands our attention. The only reason I ever think about my own pancreas working is because my son’s doesn’t. Likewise, I don’t think about my pulmonary, respiratory, or digestive systems unless something is wrong (like we only notice the miracle that is breathing when we’re congested). If my son were ever to acquire the long-promised artificial pancreas, I would stop thinking about it. Just as when he switched over to an insulin pump I stopped thinking about giving him insulin shots.

We are predisposed to focus on what the technology doesn’t do well yet. As the comedian Louis C.K. discusses in this clip–which I pilfered from this great Daniel Pollick presentation at Lexpo–our expectations ratchet up almost instantaneously:

[For those of you who didn’t watch it, Louis recounts being on one of the first planes to test in-flight wifi. It works for a while. Then the wifi goes down. The gentleman in the next seat remarks, “This is bull&^!#.” Louis jokes about the guy being mad at something not working when five minutes before he hadn’t known it existed. The guy had recalibrated his expectations that quickly. This leads to a longer reflection by Louis on how we all complain about the hassle of air travel instead of constantly marvelling at the fact that we beat gravity. We are human beings flying through the air at hundreds of miles an hour thousands of feet above the Earth, and we’re pissed off about it.]

The partner who grew up on a Dictaphone and banker boxes is not going to proceed in a state of perpetual amazement that she can access all the world’s knowledge and all of her firm’s files from a $600 computer that weighs 5 oz., fits in her pocket, and performs 120,000,000x faster than the $23,000,000 computer that weighed 600 lbs. and guided Apollo 11 to the moon. She is going to complain that the connection is slow, the battery runs down too fast, and something mission critical isn’t quite working right. Alternatively, she is not going to learn to operate the device anywhere near its capability and, on the basis of her own ignorance, conclude that the device is not all that useful. Most commonly, a little of both.

We want self-driving technology. When we get it, we stop thinking about it and recalibrate our expectations. When we get partially self-driving technology, we focus on all the driving we still have to do. We are not built to be satisfied.

We’re Running The Red Queen’s Race And We’re Always Losing

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

From Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, those who run the Red Queen’s race go as fast as they can in order to stay put. When I was growing up, grandparents expected you would send them a school picture every year. Today, grandparents complain if you don’t post daily kid photos to Facebook. It is not just that expectations reset at warp speed. They also tend to ratchet in ways that outpace our ability to deliver.

Enterprise IT, for example, faces all manner of expectations problems due to the consumerization of technology. In the beginning of the digital era, businesses always had the best technology. People had to go into the office so they could use this or that machine. For your standard knowledge worker, the dynamic has flipped. Now most people complain that what they have at home is better than what they have at the office.

Their personal phone is newer. Not bogged down by security protocols, their personal computer is faster. Google embarasses their enterprise search capabilities. Amazon is light years ahead on filtering functionality. Dropbox seems better for document management. The result is incessant complaining and dangerous forays into shadow and stealth IT. People want something that works, now. They don’t care to hear about systems integration or that Apple took years to offer its consumer-targeted iPhone with enterprise-level security controls. IT can’t win, they can only try to keep up.

Arguably, legal has it even worse. Our technology is often reactive. We didn’t know we needed virtual deal rooms or electronic discovery until enterprise data volumes had already exploded. We were ‘late’ on information governance, social media, cybersecurity, privacy, BYOD, etc. because there was no role for us to play until there was role for us to play, at which point we and the technology we use were in perennial catch-up mode.

Relative to any time in the past, our tech is greatly improved. Relative to our actual reference classes–(i) what is available on the consumer market and (ii) the scale of the task at hand–the tech we notice is almost invariably deficient.

Real Lawyers Didn’t Need Tech To Be Successful

This is not where I launch into a diatribe about older people not getting tech. I consider such thinking to be lazy, essentialist nonsense. Older people invented tech. Being an impostor, I know many people, some of them lawyers, who are older than me and wipe the frakin floor with me on tech acumen. Oh, and the digital native is a load of malarkey.

Yet that older people are entirely capable of getting tech does not mean that they do. Some do. Many don’t. And many who don’t are wildly successful. You can be a successful lawyer without tech having much of a felt impact on your career, let alone contributing in any discernible way to your success.

The lawyer who graduated in 1977 probably made partner in 1985, a year Bruce MacEwen recently recalled:

Second, the staff:lawyer ratios today would be unrecognizable to a time traveler from, say, 1985. They might be tempted to protest, “how can we afford to pay lawyers to type?” Don’t scoff; an early and terminally benighted boss of mine uttered those unforgettable words to me in about that very year, when I offered to bring in my own very primitive DOS-based, green-screen IBM PC clone on which I’d taught myself WordPerfect.

Things have changed since 1985. But they have changed far more at the bottom than at the top of the pyramid where our successful lawyer now resides. In many respects, our successful lawyer may be like Bruce’s hypothetical time traveler. They sometimes visit the tech-centric inner workings of their firm, but they find it alien and have no need to live there.

I promise to someday explore some of the ramifications of this social distance. But today is not that day.

_______________________________________
D. Casey Flaherty is a consultant who worked as both outside and inside counsel. Find more of his writing here. Connect with Casey on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or email casey@procertas.com.

In the May 23rd American Lawyer article, “More Law Firms Outsource Their Law Libraries [pay wall],” is a wakeup call for some librarians, old news for many, a call to arms for others, and a confirmation of a shift in the profession for the rest. Outsourcing is a scary word, but one that cannot be ignored. We’ve had Deb Schwarz from LAC discuss the myths of outsourcing right here on 3 Geeks. I would be one of the first to step up and tell you that, in some cases, outsourcing the law firm library makes sense, and LibSource (LAC Subsidiary) or one of the other outsourcers (also known as “Managed Services”), would be a viable way to run the library. However, I’d also step up and say that it should not be the first or only option for struggling law libraries.

I will state this again… in some cases, outsourcing the library is a viable option for some law firms. I’m not anti-LibSource or any other Managed Services group that comes in and hires librarians, and maintains library collections and services. That being said, I also recognize that law firms, especially AmLaw 100 and 200 firms, like to copy what other firms are trying. I tend to say that most law firms do not want to be first… but, they don’t want to be last, either. With outsourcing getting more press, it’s bound to happen that law firm leaders will wonder if outsourcing is right for their firms. It’s the nature of the beast in this industry. I’d like to give my peers, and those law firm leaders that are reading this, some ideas and talking points when this discussion comes out.

Service is a Floor, Not a Ceiling

As someone that manages the law library function (as well as other departments) at my firm, I know that the most critical function of the library is not simply about providing good service. Good service, along with a good collection, a well-maintained budget, and on-demand responses to the needs of the law firm are the absolute basics of what a law library does. If that is what you provide, you’re doing the minimum. If you’re a manager of people, you know what it’s like to manage those that just do the minimum. You keep them around, but if you ever got a chance, you’d replace them in a minute. Think about how your firm’s management committees view departments that just bring in the minimum to the firm. Your services, and your people must be viewed as an integral part of the organization.

The Library is a Powerful Resource, Leverage It

I sell my department in many ways, but one that has a great effect on the leadership is when I tell them that the Library is the conduit for all external information, and understanding how these resource tie into the overall firm needs. Whether it is tracking down assets, conducting background checks on expert witness, or finding that elusive piece of information hidden in the recesses of a county courthouse, the Library and its professionals know how to find information. They find it quickly. They leverage their peers and professional associations. They do it at a cost that is appropriate (or lower.) They are experts at this. When you have these experts, usually with some subject matter expertise they have learned while at the firm, you have a powerful resource beyond traditional Westlaw and Lexis databases. My suggestion is to find ways of embedding these experts into the Practice or Industry Groups and take advantage of their expertise. Outsourced services, even if they end up hiring your own people to stay in the library, do not become a part of your culture. There will be turnover, and those brought in will service the company for which they work, and that is not your law firm.

Don’t Let Bad Librarians Bring Everyone Down With Them


This is for law firm leaders who have librarians they do not think are doing the best work for their firm. Find New Leadership! Nothing drives me more crazy than seeing someone that has led a department into the ground. I’ve seen it in law firms, academic settings, and in Government Law Libraries. People that have kept their heads down, not asked for anything, kept under budget, and didn’t rock the boat, be a twenty-plus year director of their law library. It makes me shake my head, and I get angry when I hear these stories. In many cases, I see that the staff has kept these zombie leaders alive by doing great work despite the lack of leadership. Unfortunately, when bad leaders retire (or finally get a buy-out package when someone discovers the lack of production), they are replaced by someone that isn’t a law librarian or information professional, or the position is simply left vacant and the library becomes rudderless. That’s a shame, because there are a number of strategic thinkers out there that know what a great law library can bring to the organization. By not giving these leaders a chance, and passing the library over to Marketing, KM, or IT, it brings it back to a department that simply gives good service, but not helping in accomplishing strategic goals.

Give the Law Library a Voice in the Discussion

I knew that ALM was working on an article about outsourcing, so I wrote a piece a week ago called “If You’re Not at the Table, You’re on the Menu” where I laid out some examples of how it is important to be involved in the strategic direction your law firm is taking. It doesn’t matter how great the ideas are if no one ever hears them. The law library leadership needs a voice in the conversation. For those in other departments that think that if they allow library leaders to be involved means that your individual power is somehow diminished, then it’s time for you to grow up and realize this is not a zero-sum game you are playing. Libraries that are engaged in the discussion bring ideas to the table that other departments simply don’t even know about. It could be how to streamline Business Development processes, or improve due diligence investigations of lateral partners. It could be improving conflicts processes by exposing current conflicts staff to external resources. It could be exposing IT department to new products that it can then integrate into Practice Group and Industry portals. Clients are looking for firms that are efficient, have improved processes, and innovative. Outsourcing can get you to step one, but would have a much harder time getting to steps two and three.

Law firms typically spend millions of dollars on library resources, and if you’re not allowing the librarians and others within the department to champion those resources and spread their ideas on how to best leverage them, then you might as well be pouring that money down a drain. Remember, even if the department is outsourced, the outsourcing company uses your resources, not their own.

Lead the Conversation before You Are the Conversation

Law Librarians are often risk-adverse people in a highly risk-adverse industry. We want to do what’s right, serve our organization, and help in the overall success of our law firms. Most of us do not like conflict. Well, that’s too bad in this situation. Start strategizing your arguments on why outsourcing is not a viable option for your firm. List out the pros and cons (and be honest), and design a plan that shows the leadership that the law library can bring much more of a value proposition to the firm as a strategic partner, than it would bring as a managed service by a third party. Step up and lay out your ideas, goals, and successes. Admit your previous failures and explain how you’ve learned from that and how it has made you a better group because you know have experienced and understood what went wrong. For each point that makes sense on why the law firm should outsource your group, counter with a better plan for why it makes more sense to not only keep you within the firm, but to expand what you do in a more strategic way.

There’s A Battle Going on For Your Law Library – Step Up and Defend It

There’s a battle going on in this profession. In order to be a winner in this battle, you must create your plan, align your resources, and be willing to step out there and defend yourself and those that follow you.

Continuing with my two-year-old son, Pickle. As I laid out last post, Pickle is a cyborg. A Type 1 diabetic, his life literally depends on computers that are attached to his body. Because of him, I find myself contemplating the fact that we are almost all professional cyborgs. Technology is now an inescapable element of delivering legal services. The objection that using technology somehow differs from ‘real’ lawyering is misguided. If it affects the outcome or the bill, it is real enough.

Still, just because technology is essential does not mean it is all that good. With respect to my diabetic Pickle, I have one question: where the @#%& is his artificial pancreas?

My wife is also an insulin-deficient cyborg, I have therefore been reading the same damn story about the same pending breakthrough for over a decade (e.g., 2006, 2011, 2016). We are eternally on the cusp of the machine finally replacing humans in the labor-intensive process that is monitoring blood sugar levels and delivering insulin when necessary.

Pickle has a continuous glucose monitor. But it needs to be calibrated multiple times a day. And it is not accurate enough to be relied on for dosing insulin. So the monitor does not obviate the need to regularly prick his fingers and draw blood to check sugar levels. Indeed, the best commercially available glucose monitor is actually a trained dog— the repurposing of 26,000-year-old technology and more evidence against functional fixedness. But a dog, like the monitor he actually has, cannot communicate with his insulin pump, which still needs to be run manually (i.e., we still have to direct the pump to dose insulin).

The cycles of hype and disappointment around an artificial pancreas gives me quite a bit of sympathy for older lawyers who have been through many such cycles re artificial intelligence. As a stand-in for older, successful lawyers, I am going to assume a law school graduation year of 1977 since that is the median and modal graduation years of the chairs of the AmLaw 10. They have been hearing how machines were going to replace them since long before they took the bar.
If you believed the hype on artificial intelligence, it was silly for our successful lawyer to even attend college, let alone law school. In 1970, they would have read the following in Life magazine:

In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will be able to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.

Instead, their law school graduation in 1977 was at the tail end of the first AI winter–a period of reduced interest in AI due to its failure to live up to the hype. 
A far cry from human-level general intelligence, the technological marvel of 1977 would be the Apple II. Poor predictions, of course, run in both directions. In reacting to the Apple II, Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp. stated, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” 
But there is a legitimate question as to how long a prediction has to remain valid to be considered accurate. While Mr. Olson was dead wrong in the long run, a decade later, in 1987–when our successful lawyer had already made partner–only 10% of households had a personal computer. In the midst of that not-so-disruptive diffusion of computing power, important publications would continue to print pablum about the coming robot revolution. The New York Times ran stories with ledes like, “Before today’s teen-agers finish college, computers will interpret changes in tax law and plan tax strategies for business.”
Yet 1987 was also the year when economist Robert Solow observed his eponymous paradox, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” In related news, another brutal AI winter was coming. After a resurgence in AI research and hype, the collapse of the Lisp machine market in 1987 presaged the imminent failures and fall from grace of the early expert systems, “fifth generation” computers, and the Strategic Computing Initiative leading to New York Times articles like “Computer Fails as Job-Killer.” 

In 1997, the machines finally won…at chess. IBM’s Deep Blue topped Gary Kasparov under tournament conditions. The press went nuts:

When Gary Kasparov beat IBM’s chess computer in 1989 he arrogantly told the programmers to “teach it to resign earlier”. Yesterday, though, the world champion found himself humbled by a 1.4-ton heap of silicone in a victory for IBM’s Deep Blue that marks a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence. It is a depressing day for humankind in general. (here)

In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity (here)

Elsewhere in 1997, our successful lawyer had been a partner for more than a decade and practicing for two decades. The home computer market had not yet broken 40%. The still nascent home internet market had not yet cracked 20% penetration. In developments that would actually make an impact, the domain and famous spelling error www.google.com would be registered, almost a year before the company would be incorporated.

In 2007, our successful lawyer had been a partner for more than 20 years and practicing for 30 years. They could read increasingly more about the coming singularity and contemporary regurgitations of the Life article from 1970:

Social security will have to be expanded, introduced at lower and lower ages, till essentially everyone lives on social security. The taxes will be paid by fully-automated businesses run by robots. And human beings have to deal with the problem of excess leisure…I am afraid that the long term future we are building will have no space left for human beings…a world where we have these robots and better and better artificial intelligence, where systematically those systems replace humans, human services, human work…Is it a good or bad thing if robots become our natural successors and we fade into extinction?

But evidence of true machine intelligence outside of very narrow domains like chess remained illusory. As a practical matter, the tangible breakthroughs were mostly about being able to take the office with you everywhere. In 2007, Blackberries were a thing, and Apple announced the iPhone.

We are closing in on 2017 when our successful lawyer will celebrate 40 years in practice with more than 30 of those years as a partner. Much closer to the end of their career than the beginning, they can still read the same damn story about their imminent obsolescence. Or they can read the counterprogramming. We should forgive them for being a bit skeptical.

Yet there is something disingenuous about my account. It is accurate, as far as it goes. But it is also needlessly reductive in a way that I think is best captured by the incomparable xkcd:

Returning to my understandable focus on the perpetual promise of the artificial pancreas. In fixating on a closed system that eliminates the human factor post installation, I  miss the genuine progress being made. What used to be a death sentence is now an inconvenience. And that inconvenience has gotten considerably easier to manage now that we can do things like monitor my son’s blood sugar remotely on a watch–continuous glucose monitor links to his iPhone; his iPhone transmits to my wife’s iPhone; her iPhone transmits to her Apple Watch. None of those devices were commercially available when my wife was diagnosed a decade ago. That is amazing even if it is not the technological nirvana we were promised.

One way to react to hype cycles is to laugh at the peaks in hindsight. Another is to pay attention to the progress that follows:

Because the story I told above focused on the more sensational claims of machines making humans obsolete, it treated the PC, the internet, and mobile as inconsequential asides that only served to demonstrate the hyperbolic nature of the press coverage. But like a good lawyer, I could use the same facts to tell a very different story in which technology crept into every aspect of our professional lives. There will be real similarities between the immediate lived experience of a lawyer who graduated in 1977 and the one who graduates in 2017. But there will also be real differences that would have seemed like bad science fiction to someone entering an analogue professional environment four decades ago.

I think there will be an artificial pancreas soon. Machines will be able to do that one sequence of things well enough. Likewise, I suspect that machines will continue to progress at doing other things well, including some things traditionally done by lawyers. But I am doubtful* that we are nearing artificial general intelligence. Focus should therefore remain directed towards the automation of tasks rather than the complete elimination of jobs. As Robin Hanson has observed, while technology gains are exponential, the impact may be linear because job power levels are distributed lognormally:

I often meet people who think that because computer tech is improving exponentially, its social impact must also be exponential. So as soon as we see any substantial social impact, watch out, because a tsunami is about to hit. But it is quite plausible to have exponential tech gains translate into only linear social impact. All we need is a lognormal distribution, as in this diagram:

Imagine that each kind of jobs that humans do requires a particular level of computing power in order for computers to replace humans on that job. And imagine that these job power levels are distributed lognormally.

In this case an exponential growth in computing power will translate into a linear rate at which computers displace humans on jobs. Of course jobs may clump along this log-computing-power axis, giving rise to bursts and lulls in the rate at which computers displace jobs. But over the long run we could see a relatively steady rate of job displacement even with exponential tech gains. Which I’d say is roughly what we do see.

For our successful lawyer, however, the felt impact of technology progress on their professional accomplishments may be less than linear, it may be negligible. This has consequences for how lawyers in position of power react to those of who emphasize that we are all cyborgs now. More on that in Part 3.

_______________________________________
D. Casey Flaherty is a consultant who worked as both outside and inside counsel. Find more of his writing here. Connect with Casey on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or email casey@procertas.com.

*I’m way too dumb to have a smart take on the timing of general artificial intelligence. But the implications are so profound that it almost makes them not worth talking about. It would be similar to debating how the legal profession might change if the Earth were again struck by a meteor like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Everything changes, and almost no one is going to care what effect it has on profits per partner. Until then, I am in Ryan’s camp. It is only AI/magic until we start to use it, then it is software. It is only a human-displacing robot until we start to rely on it, then it is a dishwasher.

My two-year old just got his first iPhone. Now, Pickle (yes, Pickle!) is never without it. The iPhone goes everywhere with him the way other kids might drag along a stuffed bear. We are even thinking about getting Pickle a haute couture fanny pack to ensure his iPhone is on him at all times.

I’ll give some of you moment to catch your breath…. Scrambling to ascend that high horse so quickly probably took a lot out of you. Yes, I am familiar with the research on screen time and brain development. I don’t care. I don’t care because we didn’t get Pickle an iPhone so we could subject him to the perverse moral dystopia of Thomas the Train.

We got him an iPhone because he was recently diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic. The iPhone links to his continuous glucose monitor and transmits the readings to his mother and me. It alarms if Pickle’s blood sugar gets too high (so we can dose him with insulin) or too low (so we can pump him full of sugar). If you don’t think that is a good enough reason to get a two-year old an iPhone (an older model donated to us), you can take it up with my wife. Let me know how that works out for you.

Of course that means that my kid is a cyborg. How sweet is that?

 

 

Pickle’s life literally depends upon computers—a glucose monitor and an insulin pump—that are attached to him. He is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. He is an organism that has restored function due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on feedback. My Pickle is a cyborg.

Using the term a little more loosely, however, aren’t most of us professional cyborgs at this point? I know that I feel my ability to conduct business draining away anytime the battery life on my iPhone or laptop approaches critical level. How exactly does a modern lawyer operate without relying on modern technology?

How do you not Google? How do you exchange documents your clients without email? How do you file anything according to local court rules and efiling protocols without an entire array of hardware and software? How do you conduct a litigation of any appreciable size without some understanding of ediscovery? How do you handle divorces without knowing about Facebook? How do you complete an M&A transaction without considering IT and information assets?

You can actually be ignorant of all those things and still be an obscenely successful lawyer. The trick is to already be successful. I was in the audience a few years ago when the great Ted Olson gave the opening remarks at Legaltech. His talk was not well received because he made it clear at the outset that he considered the audience a bunch of nerds (which, to be fair, we are). After all, a yellow pad was all the legal tech he needed to be Ted freakin Olson. And that’s fine, for Ted Olson. Ted Olson is so ridiculously good at the things that Ted Olson is hired to do that no one should care that Ted Olson doesn’t use tech. If Ted Olson decided to incorporate augury into his preparation for oral argument, most clients would happily pay for the birds.

But you know who is probably using tech pretty heavily? Some of the people on Ted Olson’s team. I believe Ted Olson when he claims that he operates without any device that requires electricity. I doubt the same can be said for his team, let alone his firm. As a client, you want Ted Olson as your lawyer (if it is the kind of matter that demands Ted Olson) but you would not necessarily want Ted Olson chairing the firm’s technology committee.

Ted Olson telling a room full of legal tech folks that the only tech he needed was a legal pad would be like him telling a room full of legal marketing professionals that the only marketing he ever had to do was establish himself as one of the most prominent and successful appellate lawyers in history. True enough. But not exactly replicable at scale.

I am reflecting on this because I often get lured into pointless philosophical debates about what constitutes ‘real’ lawyering. Frankly, I am ill equipped to discuss such lofty Platonic ideals. If it affects the outcome or the bill, it is real enough for me. Delegation to associates or nonlawyers does not make it any less real or obviate the duty of oversight. (As always, I hate the term “nonlawyer” and prefer allied professional, but the ABA did not put me on the drafting committee for the model rule).

If I am feeling generous, I try to reframe what the person is saying. Usually, they are not actually arguing that tech is unnecessary. Rather, they are often expressing a belief that the tech-related work is not where lawyers add the most value. On this we almost completely agree. Which is why I find it so tragic that lawyers (and staff) waste so much time on tech-dependent activities because they have never trained to properly use the core technology tools at their disposal. We often find a place of consensus where we would both prefer a world where lawyers spent more of their finite time devoted to applying their learned judgment to solving client problems.

Sometimes, however, I discover that we are having a different discussion. It is not the one about whether lawyers should use tech. It is the complaint that while lawyers have to use tech, the tech has not lived up to the hype. Here I have even more sympathy. I’ll express it in Part 2.

Part 2 (originally a separate post because I’m trying to get more into the whole brevity thing)

Continuing with my two-year-old son, Pickle. As I laid out last post, Pickle is a cyborg. A Type 1 diabetic, his life literally depends on computers that are attached to his body. Because of him, I find myself contemplating the fact that we are almost all professional cyborgs. Technology is now an inescapable element of delivering legal services. The objection that using technology somehow differs from ‘real’ lawyering is misguided. If it affects the outcome or the bill, it is real enough.

Still, just because technology is essential does not mean it is all that good. With respect to my diabetic Pickle, I have one question: where the @#%& is his artificial pancreas?

My wife is also an insulin-deficient cyborg, I have therefore been reading the same damn story about the same pending breakthrough in closed-loop insulin delivery for over a decade (e.g., 2006, 2011, 2016). We are eternally on the cusp of the machine finally replacing humans in the labor-intensive process that is monitoring a diabetic’s blood sugar levels and delivering insulin when necessary.

Pickle has a continuous glucose monitor. But it needs to be calibrated multiple times a day. And it is not accurate enough to be relied on for dosing insulin. So the monitor does not obviate the need to regularly prick his fingers and draw blood to check sugar levels. Indeed, the best commercially available glucose monitor is actually a trained dog—the repurposing of 26,000-year-old technology and more evidence against functional fixedness. But a dog, like the monitor he actually has, cannot communicate with his insulin pump, which still needs to be run manually (i.e., we still have to direct the pump to dose insulin).

The cycles of hype and disappointment around an artificial pancreas give me quite a bit of sympathy for older lawyers who have been through many such cycles re artificial intelligence. As a stand-in for older, successful lawyers, I am going to assume a law school graduation year of 1977 since that is the median and modal graduation years of the chairs of the AmLaw 10. They have been hearing how machines were going to replace them since long before they took the bar.

If you believed the hype on artificial intelligence, it was silly for our now successful lawyer to even attend college, let alone law school. Near their high school graduation in 1970, they would have read the following in Life magazine:

In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will be able to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.

Instead, their law school graduation in 1977 was at the tail end of the first AI winter—a period of reduced interest in AI due to its failure to live up to the hype.
A far cry from human-level general intelligence, the technological marvel of 1977 would be the Apple II. Poor predictions, of course, run in both directions. In reacting to the Apple II, Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp. stated, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
But there is a legitimate question as to how long a prediction has to remain valid to be considered accurate. While Mr. Olson was dead wrong in the long run, a decade later, in 1987—when our successful lawyer had already made partner—only 10% of households had a personal computer. In the midst of that not-so-disruptive diffusion of computing power, important publications would continue to print pablum about the coming robot revolution. The New York Times ran stories with ledes like, “Before today’s teen-agers finish college, computers will interpret changes in tax law and plan tax strategies for business.”
Yet 1987 was also the year when economist Robert Solow observed his eponymous paradox, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” In related news, another brutal AI winter was coming. After a resurgence in AI research and hype, the collapse of the Lisp machine market in 1987 presaged the imminent failures and fall from grace of the early expert systems, “fifth generation” computers, and the Strategic Computing Initiative. These disappointments resulted in New York Times articles like “Computer Fails as Job-Killer.”
In 1997, the machines finally won…at chess. IBM’s Deep Blue topped Gary Kasparov under tournament conditions. The press went nuts:

When Gary Kasparov beat IBM’s chess computer in 1989 he arrogantly told the programmers to “teach it to resign earlier”. Yesterday, though, the world champion found himself humbled by a 1.4-ton heap of silicone in a victory for IBM’s Deep Blue that marks a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence. It is a depressing day for humankind in general. (here)

In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity (here)

Elsewhere in 1997, our successful lawyer had been a partner for more than a decade and practicing for two. The home computer market had not yet broken 40%. The still nascent home internet market had not yet cracked 20% penetration. In developments that would actually make an impact, the domain and famous spelling error www.google.com was registered, almost a year before the company would be incorporated.

In 2007, our successful lawyer had been a partner for more than 20 years and practicing for 30 years. They could read increasingly more about the coming singularity and contemporary regurgitations of the Life article from 1970:

Social security will have to be expanded, introduced at lower and lower ages, till essentially everyone lives on social security. The taxes will be paid by fully-automated businesses run by robots. And human beings have to deal with the problem of excess leisure…I am afraid that the long term future we are building will have no space left for human beings…a world where we have these robots and better and better artificial intelligence, where systematically those systems replace humans, human services, human work…Is it a good or bad thing if robots become our natural successors and we fade into extinction?

But evidence of true machine intelligence outside of very narrow domains like chess remained illusory. As a practical matter, the tangible breakthroughs were mostly about being able to take the office with you everywhere. In 2007, Blackberries were a thing, and Apple announced the iPhone.

We are closing in on 2017 when our successful lawyer will celebrate 40 years in practice with more than 30 of those years as a partner. Much closer to the end of their career than the beginning, they can still read the same damn story about their imminent obsolescence. Or they can read the counterprogramming. We should forgive them for being a bit skeptical.

Yet there is something disingenuous about my account. It is accurate, as far as it goes. But it is also needlessly reductive in a way that I think is best captured by the incomparable xkcd:

Returning to my understandable focus on the perpetual promise of the artificial pancreas. In fixating on a closed system that eliminates the human factor post installation, I miss the genuine progress being made. What used to be a death sentence is now an inconvenience. And that inconvenience has gotten considerably easier to manage now that we can do things like monitor my son’s blood sugar remotely on a watch—continuous glucose monitor links to his iPhone; his iPhone transmits to my wife’s iPhone; her iPhone transmits to her Apple Watch. None of those devices were commercially available when my wife was diagnosed a decade ago. That is amazing even if it is not the technological nirvana we were promised.

One way to react to hype cycles is to laugh at the peaks in hindsight. Another is to pay attention to the progress that follows:

Because the story I told above focused on the more sensational claims of machines making humans obsolete, it treated the PC, the internet, and mobile as inconsequential asides that only served to demonstrate the hyperbolic nature of the press coverage. But like a good lawyer, I could use the same facts to tell a very different story in which technology crept into every aspect of our professional lives. There will be real similarities between the immediate lived experience of a lawyer who graduated in 1977 and the one who graduates in 2017. But there will also be real differences that would have seemed like bad science fiction to someone entering an analogue professional environment four decades ago.

I think there will be an artificial pancreas soon. Machines will be able to do that one sequence of things well enough. Likewise, I suspect that machines will continue to progress at doing other things well, including some traditionally done by lawyers. But I am doubtful* that we are nearing artificial general intelligence. Focus should therefore remain directed towards the automation of tasks rather than the complete elimination of jobs. As Robin Hanson has observed, while technology gains are exponential, the impact may be linear because job power levels are distributed lognormally:

I often meet people who think that because computer tech is improving exponentially, its social impact must also be exponential. So as soon as we see any substantial social impact, watch out, because a tsunami is about to hit. But it is quite plausible to have exponential tech gains translate into only linear social impact. All we need is a lognormal distribution, as in this diagram:

Imagine that each kind of jobs that humans do requires a particular level of computing power in order for computers to replace humans on that job. And imagine that these job power levels are distributed lognormally.

In this case an exponential growth in computing power will translate into a linear rate at which computers displace humans on jobs. Of course jobs may clump along this log-computing-power axis, giving rise to bursts and lulls in the rate at which computers displace jobs. But over the long run we could see a relatively steady rate of job displacement even with exponential tech gains. Which I’d say is roughly what we do see.

For our successful lawyer, however, the felt impact of technology progress on their professional accomplishments may be less than linear, it may be negligible. This has consequences for how lawyers in position of power react to those of who emphasize that we are all cyborgs now. More on that in Part 3.

*I’m way too dumb to have a smart take on the timing of general artificial intelligence. But the implications are so profound that it almost makes them not worth talking about. It would be similar to debating how the legal profession might change if the Earth were again struck by a meteor like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Everything changes, and almost no one is going to care what effect it has on profits per partner. Until then, I am in Ryan’s camp. It is only AI/magic until we start to use it, then it is software. It is only a human-displacing robot until we start to rely on it, then it is a dishwasher.

Part 3 (originally a separate post)

In Part 1, I introduced the idea that we are all professional cyborgs. I used my personal experience with a diabetic toddler whose life literally depends on computers attached to his body to ruminate on how technology is so deeply intertwined with our professional lives that we often don’t even notice it. I rejected the notion that the use of technology can somehow be considered distinct from ‘real’ lawyering.

In Part 2, I compared a decade of reading that an artificial pancreas is right around the corner to the even more drawn out asymptotic dawn of artificial lawyers. I used the professional progression of a composite successful lawyer who graduated law school in 1977—the mean and modal graduation year of the chairs of the AmLaw 10—as a touchstone for comparing the various AI hype cycles to more quotidian progress that had real impact (desktop computing, the internet, mobile). I, however, concluded with the idea that the failure of technology to live up to the hype was a good reason to be skeptical of hype but a terrible reason to be skeptical of technology.

In this Part 3, I will talk about what happens when technology does live up to the hype (we stop thinking about it) and why legal technology always appears to lag behind (because it does).

Expectation Calibration and Self-Driving Technology

We pay attention to that which demands our attention. The only reason I ever think about my own pancreas working is because my son’s doesn’t. Likewise, I don’t think about my pulmonary, respiratory, or digestive systems unless something is wrong (like we only notice the miracle that is breathing when we’re congested). If my son were ever to acquire the long-promised artificial pancreas, I would stop thinking about it. Just as when he switched over to an insulin pump I stopped thinking about giving him insulin shots.

We are predisposed to focus on what the technology doesn’t do well yet. As the comedian Louis C.K. discusses in this clip—which I pilfered from this great Daniel Pollick presentation at Lexpo—our expectations ratchet up almost instantaneously:

[For those of you who didn’t watch it, Louis recounts being on one of the first planes to test in-flight wifi. It works for a while. Then the wifi goes down. The gentleman in the next seat remarks, “This is bull&^!#.” Louis jokes about the guy being mad about something not working when five minutes before he hadn’t known it existed. The guy had recalibrated his expectations that quickly. This leads to a longer reflection by Louis on how we all complain about the hassle of air travel instead of constantly marvelling at the fact that we beat gravity. We are human beings flying through the air at hundreds of miles an hour thousands of feet above the Earth, and we’re pissed off about it.]

The partner who grew up on a Dictaphone and banker boxes is not going to proceed in a state of perpetual amazement that she can access all the world’s knowledge and all of her firm’s files from a $600 computer that weighs 5 oz., fits in her pocket, and performs 120,000,000x faster than the $23,000,000 computer that weighed 600 lbs. and guided Apollo 11 to the moon. She is going to complain that the connection is slow, the battery runs down too fast, and something mission critical isn’t quite working right. Alternatively, she is not going to learn to operate the device anywhere near its capability and, on the basis of her own ignorance, conclude that the device is not all that useful. Most commonly, a little of both.

We want self-driving technology. When we get it, we stop thinking about it and recalibrate our expectations. When we get partially self-driving technology, we focus on all the driving we still have to do. We are not built to be satisfied.

We’re Running The Red Queen’s Race And We’re Always Losing

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

From Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, those who run the Red Queen’s race go as fast as they can in order to stay put. When I was growing up, grandparents expected you to send them a school picture once a year. Today, grandparents complain if you don’t post daily kid photos to Facebook. It is not just that expectations reset at warp speed. They also tend to ratchet in ways that outpace our ability to deliver.

Enterprise IT, for example, faces all manner of expectations problems due to the consumerization of technology. In the beginning of the digital era, businesses always had the best technology. People had to go into the office so they could use this or that machine. For your standard knowledge worker, the dynamic has flipped. Now most people complain that what they have at home is better than what they have at the office.

Their personal phone is newer. Not bogged down by security protocols, their personal computer is faster. Google embarrasses their enterprise search capabilities. Amazon is light years ahead on filtering functionality. Dropbox seems better for document management. The result is incessant complaining and dangerous forays into shadow and stealth IT. People want something that works, now. They don’t care to hear about systems integration or that Apple took years to offer its consumer-targeted iPhone with enterprise-level security controls. IT can’t win, they can only try to keep up.

Arguably, legal has it even worse. Our technology is often reactive. We didn’t know we needed virtual deal rooms or electronic discovery until enterprise data volumes had already exploded. We were ‘late’ on information governance, social media, cybersecurity, privacy, BYOD, etc. because there was no role for us to play until there was role for us to play, at which point we were in perennial catch-up mode.

Relative to any time in the past, our tech is greatly improved. Relative to our actual reference classes—(i) what is available on the consumer market and (ii) the scale of the task at hand—the tech we notice is almost invariably deficient.

Real Lawyers Didn’t Need Tech To Be Successful

This is not where I launch into a diatribe about older people not getting tech. I consider such thinking to be lazy, essentialist nonsense. Older people invented tech. Being an impostor, I know many people, some of them lawyers, who are older and considerably more tech savvy than me. Oh, and the digital native is a load of malarkey.

Yet that older people are entirely capable of getting tech does not mean that they do. Some do. Many don’t. And many who don’t are wildly successful. You can be a successful lawyer without tech having much of a felt impact on your career, let alone contributing in any discernible way to your success.

The lawyer who graduated in 1977 probably made partner in 1985, a year Bruce MacEwen recently recalled:

Second, the staff:lawyer ratios today would be unrecognizable to a time traveler from, say, 1985. They might be tempted to protest, “how can we afford to pay lawyers to type?” Don’t scoff; an early and terminally benighted boss of mine uttered those unforgettable words to me in about that very year, when I offered to bring in my own very primitive DOS-based, green-screen IBM PC clone on which I’d taught myself WordPerfect.

Things have changed since 1985. But they have changed far more at the bottom than at the top of the pyramid where our successful lawyer now resides. In many respects, our successful lawyer may be like Bruce’s hypothetical time traveler. They sometimes visit the tech-centric inner workings of their firm, but they find it alien and have no need to live there.

I promise to someday explore some of the ramifications of this social distance. But today is not that day.

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D. Casey Flaherty is a legal operations consultant who worked as both outside and inside counsel. Find more of his writing here. Connect with Casey on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or email casey@procertas.com.

If you’ve ever been on a committee, or on any type of board, you know that if you miss a meeting, there is a good chance you will be assigned to lead a project that no one else wanted. It’s something that we all dread, but come to expect when you’re not there to defend yourself. Now, imagine that you’re never there, but still have to take on all those unwanted projects. That’s what many of us on the administrative side of law firms face. It really doesn’t matter what department you are in… if you have no say in the decision making, there’s a good chance that decisions will be made for you.

I was at a meeting this weekend, and heard this succinctly said by former Houston City Council member, Sue Lovell, when she was discussing political decision making. “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” That made me sit up and pay attention because it resonated with me about the law firm environment, and how business decisions are made, and tasks are doled out to those that are absent, and even worse, those that had no voice or representation during the decision making.

How many times have we found ourselves tasked with projects that we know are fruitless, but by the time we understand what our role is, the other pieces of the project are already in motion? There’s no turning back, and if you jump in and say “hey, what you’re wanting me to do is not possible!” No… you don’t want to be seen as that person that tosses the monkey wrench into the project, so you do what you can, and hope that someone else fails before you do.

We all have to find ways to “be at the table.” Now that doesn’t mean that you have to physically need to be sitting at the table when decisions are made, but it does mean that your voice has to be represented in some way before decisions are finalized and action plans are put into place. I have a “C” title, but that doesn’t buy me a seat at every management committee meeting at my firm. Nor should it. However, it does buy me a ‘voice’ at the meeting. It buys those that report to me the ability for me to relay legitimate concerns or ideas to the committee, and a chance to rebut unworkable initiatives before they are put into action.

I’ve listened and watched some of my peers talk about their firms as if they have absolutely no say in what tasks are assigned to them, or what their roles are in the strategic goals of their firm. That is both sad, and frustrating for me to hear. Sometimes there is a general dysfunctional decision making process at their firms. If decisions are pushed down without any input on the part of those being tasked with those action items, then the firm is rolling the dice on whether the objective can be accomplished at all. It is setting people/departments up for failure without even giving them any chance to succeed. That is a bad situation, and if that is happening to you, and you cannot fix it, my only suggestion is to beef up your resume and look somewhere else for employment.

Most of the time, however, I see it as a lack of willingness on behalf of the individual to step up and work to have his or her voice represented at the table. Sometimes it’s a cluelessness in reading the situation, and understanding that the lack of engagement is causing the powers-that-be to see them, or their department as expendable. I’ve seen it during leadership transitions when managers do not understand that the way it’s always been done, is no longer the standard within the organization. I’ve seen it during downturns in business when shifts in business models make certain services obsolete, yet department heads keep churning out irrelevant work product as though nothing has changed.

Now back to the saying that Council Member Lovell so eloquently stated. “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” If you are a leader in your organization, are you at the table? If not physically, is your voice and those for whom you lead, represented at that table? If you are unsure, you need to step up and find ways to be heard. It could be as simple as asking for a seat. In many instances, it means finding a champion that has a seat, and lobbying them to represent your ideas and fighting on behalf of you and those you lead. The worst thing you can do is nothing and hope for the best. If you do that, you will find yourself one day as the main course on that menu.

The CLOC Institute last week was phenomenal. I barely tweeted because I was so engaged by the content and conversation. I did, however, transcribe one quote that got some attention from the legal commentariat:

I gravitated to the quote because it was consistent with my pre-existing notions of the role clients and structured dialogue play in driving improvements in legal service delivery. But because the statement only reinforced my extant beliefs, it did not inspire any sort of reflection. Another speaker from the same Big Thinkers panel, however, added another dimension to my musings on collective conversations.

Firoz Dattu used to teach economics at Harvard. Among many other cogent points, he talked about getting past the failings of individual firms and thinking more about how we can correct market failures. In particular, he emphasized the lack of perfect information. As someone who has long labeled law a credence good subject to Baumol’s cost disease, this observation resonated with me.

Perfect markets are purely theoretical. The textbook conditions for competitive markets—perfect information, rational market actors, homogeneity, free entry and exit, numerous participants, no regulation, no externalities, no principal/agent problems, etc.—exist in degrees, not absolutes. But understanding how and why a particular market deviates from the competitive ideal is critical for efforts to correct how that market functions.

In a perfect-information condition, all consumers and suppliers have perfect knowledge of price, utility, quality, and production methods. This differs from omniscience. Perfectly knowledgeable participants can still compete. Chess is a competitive game with perfect information. Both players have seen every move and can derive the range of possible future moves from the rules.

Backgammon is also a perfect-information game despite the role of the dice. Rolling the dice introduces quantifiable exogenous uncertainty from chance events—i.e., we do not know what numbers will come up, but we do know the range of possibilities and their probabilities. Working from a fresh deck, blackjack and poker with all cards facing up would be perfect information games. But stacked decks and hidden cards result in an imperfect-information condition and also much of the fun of gambling.

Legal action is a gamble with plenty of stacked decks and hidden cards. There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns that drive activities like discovery and due diligence. But even the basic decisions, like which lawyer to hire, are fraught with imperfect information. With the billable hour still dominant, we are generally guessing about price. With contingent outcomes, we have limited ability to judge utility. We have almost no barometer of quality apart from the poor proxy of pedigree. And we harbor deep suspicions but traditionally have had no real transparency into production methods.

We can’t eliminate risk or uncertainty. We can’t have perfect information. So shouldn’t we just get back to doing the law stuff? This is the point where many market participants throw up their hands. Having cogitated for a few painful minutes, most people return to their days jobs with some implicit, if grumbling, acceptance of the status quo.

Firoz Dattu is not most people. One of the founders of the General Counsel Roundtable (now CEB Legal Leadership Council), Dattu is the CEO of AdvanceLaw. AdvanceLaw has brought together the GC’s of over 100 of the largest corporate clients (e.g., Google, McDonald’s, Nike, Sony, Deutsche Bank, Mastercard) into something that looks from afar like a loose consortium. Rather than buying together, the GC’s of these legal service consumers pool resources to vet law firms and, once firms qualify for the go-to list, commit to sharing feedback on quality of service.

But how much can you really vet law firms? Law firms look pretty much the same. There are no agreed upon measures of quality. Likewise, there are no bright lines for judging outcomes. Who is the better trial attorney: the one who ‘won’ a case that should have been worth $10M to the plaintiff or the one who ‘lost’ the case while limiting the damages paid by the defendant to $100K? How do we measure the outcome if the parties avoided trial by settling for $1M? How do we evaluate the deal or contract that never resulted in litigation? As Deming said, “Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.”

That is probably what it would be: opinion. I don’t have any insight into the AdvanceLaw methodology, but I suspect it involves a fair amount of subjective evaluations on both the front and back end. Kind of like Yelp or the reviews on Amazon. Not exactly hard science.

But it does not need to be hard science to be useful. General accuracy is preferable to false precision. I find the scores on Yelp and Amazon to be quite informative (and AdvanceLaw is far less susceptible to fake reviews). Customer satisfaction is inherently subjective but terribly important. Knowing that 100 people subjectively determined they enjoyed a meal is a better guide to action than having a precise measurement of the max temperature of the oven in which the food was cooked.

While we can’t have perfect information, we can have better information. We can reduce, rather than eliminate, risk and uncertainty. A few well-informed customers sharing their opinion provides infinitely more information than nothing and is more credible than advertising (either you have no information or you believe what the seller tells you). There are numerous methodologies for capturing qualitative metrics. But these measurement methodologies work best with scale and diversity of sources—the two things the AdvanceLaw loose consortium approach provides.

Think about the advantages from the buyer’s perspective. One major barrier to dynamism in the legal market is high switching costs. Despite long-standing dissatisfaction with their incumbent law firms, client purchasing behavior reflects a devil-you-know conservatism. This behavior is rational in a low-information condition where the primary method to determine if there is a better alternative is a resource-intensive vetting process followed by a risk-intensive trial run.

Pooling resources on the vetting process reduces the burden. Sharing feedback reduces the risk—someone credible has already done the trial run. The formal system for building reputational capital also creates an extra level of market discipline for the participating firms because a bad customer experience will have effects beyond the individual client relationship. Law firms go from operating in an environment where they are almost guaranteed that their performance will not be shared to an environment where they are almost guaranteed that it will. Incentives affect behavior.

Clients are not the only ones who suffer from an information deficit. Firms believe they do great work. But only a third of corporate counsel would actually recommend their primary law firm to a peer. Returning to the quote that opened the post—“I’m at a large law firm. The only time I have seen changes is when clients have initiated it”—think about the advantages from the seller’s perspective. Single-source vetting combined with a robust feedback mechanism from over a hundred clients does more than preserves resources. It introduces consistency and transparency.

Often, law firms that do not get past the vetting process have no idea why. Those that make it on a panel list then have little insight into the circumstances that lead to the ebbs and flows of business volume. The conventional way to fire a law firm is to stop calling them. The lack of dynamism among law firms is not just because clients don’t switch often. Clients’ reasons for switching, or not, are usually opaque. 

Presumably, AdvanceLaw tells firms why they don’t make it on the go-to list and what they would need to improve in order to so. Likewise, I’m assuming that law firms are made aware of the feedback so that they have guidance on how to get better. The subsequent rewards for getting better and doing exceptional work are amplified by the transparency to other potential clients. Law firms move from a situation where there is often no feedback to one with constant feedback that is shared with over a hundred existing and potential clients.

Moreover, the dynamism driven by better information is not limited to individual clients and firms. There are system implications. Where thorough vetting and detailed, quantified feedback displace brand and pedigree as indicia of quality, the playing field becomes leveled for smaller firms and challengers. This does not necessarily presage the death of BigLaw, but it does intensify competition and accelerate the pace at which law firms are remade.

I’ve been focused on information problems for years with my Service Delivery Review and Legal Tech Assessment. The market needs more information. But the market also needs to be structured in a way that facilitates the dissemination of information. Recently, I’ve been reflecting about the roles played by geography (Toronto) and organization (CLOC) but Dattu, along with some exciting things my friend Bill Henderson is working on, has really got me ruminating on the importance of collective feedback loops. Structured dialogue is a powerful feedback mechanism, but it can be amplified if it is embedded in the proper collective structure.

We need to make a better market rather than focus on the shortcomings of individual market participants.

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D. Casey Flaherty is a consultant who worked as both outside and inside counsel. Find more of his writing here. Connect with Casey on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or email casey@procertas.com.