I know I write my fair share of crap that is of minimal value to anyone, but that’s why we invite Casey Flaherty to post his epic legal tone poems on 3 Geeks.  His insight and valuable contributions balance my own questionable efforts.  After today, the ABAs Law Technology Today is in desperate need of a Casey Flaherty-type ringer.

As much as I hate to call anyone out for writing nonsense – pot/kettle – this turd of a puff piece got my hackles way up.

Four Ways Law Firms Are Using Technology For Exposure and Efficiency 

Helpfully subtitled: A shortlist of ways to leverage technology in your favor.

I know, I know. You’re saying, “Ryan, why would you bother to click on that link? We know that you know all about click bait titles. What pearls of wisdom were you expecting on the other side?”

I don’t know! Call it a moment of weakness at the end of a long day.  For the second and a half it took the page to load, I thought maybe one of the ‘four ways’ would be novel or new.  Something thrilling that I had never imagined. Something to spark my imagination and lead to my next great legal technology insight.

I’ll save you the brain cells.  The ‘four ways’ that law firms are using tech for exposure and efficiency, are:

  1. Becoming a Resource on Social Networks
  2. Blogging About Important Topics 
  3. Launching Law Firm Apps
  4. Digitizing Documents and Using Online Libraries

When I finished reading, I was sad.  5 minutes later, I was angry.  As any blogger can tell you, the stage that comes after anger is Blog Post.

This rant is not about the author, his credentials, his ideas, or his writing.  Mad props and hats off to anyone who can make a living writing anything at all. And I know this was a paid post because I dropped the text into word and confirmed that if you include the title, the post comes to exactly 750 words. That’s not coincidental.  No, the author is a new hero of mine. My scorn is reserved for the ABA and the editors of Law Technology Today.

If this is what the ABA thinks constitutes a modern use of tech for ‘exposure and efficiency’, they should probably rename the site Law Technology 2003.

Here’s my Four REAL Ways firms are using tech for exposure and efficiency:

  1. They are no longer spamming their clients on social networks and instead are building useful and useable tools that clients actually want/need and will pay for
  2. They automate absolutely everything they can so that some of their lawyers can focus on the cool stuff they imagined they’d be doing when they graduated from law school, and others can build the cool stuff that automates the boring stuff.
  3. They stop being so damn proprietary about every little tech idea they have. They’re proud and loud and shout their genius from the rooftops. 
  4. They digitize their documents and use online libraries
Well, I guess that last one would have been the same.  
I stand corrected.

“Richard Susskind writes the same book every five years. He just updates the examples.“

The above would be offensive if it were not a joke frequently delivered in the first person by Susskind himself. What makes the self-deprecation so humorous is that, in part, it is true. Richard Susskind has been delivering a fairly consistent message for decades. And he keeps finding more and more examples of the market making manifest his predictions about how technology will change the way legal services are delivered. Isn’t that what being right looks like?

Prophesy can be a fairly ephemeral business. In 1996, Susskind was labeled “dangerous” and “possibly insane” because he was daft enough to posit that email would become the dominant form by which lawyers and clients would communicate. Within a decade, a lawyer was being laughed out of court after claiming “excusable neglect” for not checking his email regularly. These days, we write articles about lawyer overreliance on email. Apostasy became orthodoxy became barrier to innovation.

From email to the unbundling of legal services to the use of expert systems, Susskind has an excellent track record of outlandish predictions turning into common sense. I strongly recommend all his books, including his latest, The Future of the Professions. I tend to only disagree with Susskind’s forecasts as a joke. Or, at least, so I thought until I read an interview with me where I went a bit further:

Flaherty – unlike, for example, Richard Susskind – is not pessimistic about the future for lawyers, quite the opposite. He believes that technology will not drive lawyers out of their role of trusted adviser. ‘I think that technology can elevate lawyers’ work to a higher level. I also think that younger lawyers will be relieved of the simple, brain-dead work. If you look at it this way, technology is a necessary precondition for allowing lawyers to be lawyers.’

There is much in the above that reflects what I think. But the interview–translated from Dutch–is not exactly the epitome of nuance.

First, I am somewhat neutral about the future for lawyers even if it is a future filled with lawyers. A lawyer-heavy world is not necessarily a good thing. I long ago stole from Susskind the idea that the law does not exist to keep lawyers in lucrative employment. And I am one of those lost souls who believes that our world has sacrificed too much talent to the unproductive sprawl of finance, tax and legal. I consider all those industries to be of substantial importance, but they are all susceptible to self-perpetuating arms races reliant on rent seeking and regulatory arbitrage. Whether this makes me a blinkered libertarian or unthinking socialist depends on your point of view.

Second, as I wrote here, I have no idea what is going to happen decades hence. I am not qualified to referee this point of contention between Susskind and others. I can’t imagine a world much different from the status quo. I also can’t imagine a scenario where the accelerating returns to technology do not fundamentally transform every aspect of work, including the work done by lawyers. And I can’t imagine a world without work. Nor can I imagine what higher-value work it is that humans, including lawyers, will find to do if the automation paradox continues to hold and machine augmentation leads to a higher demand for human labor. Which is to say that I do not possess a fecund imagination. Humanity is fortunate that reality is not constrained by the limits of my imagination or intellect. Just because I have a hard time imagining something does not mean it won’t/can’t happen.

While I don’t really have an opinion, or a rooting interest, on the net employment effects for legal professionals, I do think the nature of work will change. And, as expressed in the interview, I suspect it will change for better. That does not necessarily mean it will get better for everybody. As Tyler Cowen writes in Average is Over:

This imbalance in technological growth will have some surprising implications. For instance, workers more and more will come to be classified into two categories. The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?

Third, while I find it intellectually fascinating, I don’t derive much in the way of practical guidance from reaching firm conclusions about how the world will look a few decades from now. The Susskinds (Richard wrote the book with his son Daniel) predict the end of (most) lawyers, but not anytime soon:

Our expectation is that, over time— by which we mean decades, rather than overnight— there will be technological unemployment in the professions. In other words, there will not be sufficient growth in the types of professional task in which people, not machines, have the advantage to keep most professionals in full employment….

We cannot emphasize strongly enough that we are not predicting that the professions will disappear over the next few years. We are looking decades ahead in this chapter, and anticipating an incremental transformation and not an overnight revolution.

In the short and medium term, the Susskinds envision that we will be operating in a streamlined version of the present:

There are two possible futures for the professions. The first is reassuringly familiar. It is a more efficient version of what we already have today. On this model, professionals continue working much as they have done since the middle of the nineteenth century, but they heavily standardize and systematize their routine activities. They streamline their old ways of working. The second future is a very different proposition. It involves a transformation in the way that the expertise of professionals is made available in society. The introduction of a wide range of increasingly capable systems will, in various ways, displace much of the work of traditional professionals. In the short and medium terms, these two futures will be realized in parallel. In the long run, the second future will dominate, we will find new and better ways to share expertise in society, and our professions will steadily be dismantled. That is the conclusion to which this book leads.

From my reading, the long run is the point of disagreement. The counterprogramming tends to concur with Susskinds on the near-term implications of advancement in technology. Indeed, in Can Robots Be Lawyers?, Professors Remus and Levy expressly limit their analysis to the next decade–a decade in which they, too, expect far-reaching effects from technological innovation:

Our focus is recent developments in legal automation, but we take as a given that earlier innovations dramatically impacted legal practice. Word processing revolutionized document drafting. The Internet permitted rapid document transmission and video conferencing; accelerated the breakdown of law firms’ information monopoly on rates, services, and clients; and increased clients’ ability to spread legal work among multiple law firms. Email increased the speed and ease of communication both among lawyers and between lawyers and clients, and expanded the number of associates a single partner could supervise and so has facilitated the growth of large law firms. These innovations changed law practice in fundamental ways. The next wave of technologies, our focus in this paper, promises similarly far-reaching effects.

We anchor our discussion in the current and foreseeable trajectory of these technologies in the present and near-term future (roughly the next decade). The resulting analysis is admittedly linear, risking that we underestimate the impact of radical future innovation.

Even if I were convinced of lawyerless future, I am not sure what the consequences of that conviction would be for me. Because of the aforementioned lack of imagination, I am hard pressed to conceive of a future of any indeterminate length that would affect my near-term thinking (an imminent apocalypse would change some priorities).

I, for example, would wager that we are headed for a future dominated primarily by driverless transportation. But there is a strong argument that I am wrong given the well-documented challenges of fully autonomous vehicles. Either way, I still need to drive and service my existing car, worry about road conditions, and remain concerned with whether my fellow drivers are paying attention. That will be the case until it isn’t (if ever). My belief about the future–while I like to read and think about it–does not have much effect on my immediate present.


Similarly, if I were to be persuaded by Robert Gordon that progress has stagnated, I would advocate that the legal profession take advantage of the already available advances in process and technology to improve the delivery of legal services. If I were persuaded by Remus and Levy that technological advances are going to have far-reaching but not existential effects on the legal profession, I would advocate that the legal profession take advantage of the available advances in process and technology to improve the delivery of legal services. If I were persuaded by the Susskinds that the far-reaching impacts of technological advances over the next decade presage a future of dwindling lawyer employment, I would advocate that the legal profession take advantage of the available advances in process and technology to improve the delivery of legal services.

What came through in the interview was a bit of exasperation. My exasperation was not with the Susskinds or anybody else writing thoughtfully about, or working towards, introducing capable machines into the legal ecosystem. My exasperation was with the fact that I so often feel compelled to talk about robots replacing lawyers despite the fact that I don’t even pretend to have any expertise on the topic. Moreover, I know that, in general, this discussion leads to an unproductive place, which is why so many of us caveat discussions of law and technology by assuaging fears that Skynet is on the verge of eradicating lawyers.

Too many people, a majority of whom are lawyers, treat the robots-replacing-lawyers question as if it is a binary condition. Either it will happen or it won’t. Nothing else merits consideration. For them, there is no use in discussing the intervening decades where technology incrementally changes the way we work as we automate tasks rather than jobs.

On one level, this leads to a kind of existential dread and attendant hysteria where all people want is to be assured that their jobs are safe. If they don’t get that assurance, they devote their mental energy to coming up with all the ways that humans are super special and can never be displaced. They latch onto clever turns of phrase like a commenter to my recent article, “a machine might know that a tomato is a fruit but a human would know not to put it in a fruit salad.” You then freak them out with things like Chef Watson and plummet down the rabbit hole until you end up in “Can a submarine swim?” territory. But if they do get the assurance, they stop listening because the big question has been answered.


On another level, AI triumphalism–what someone much smarter than me calls “AI madness“–also stifles serious discussion. People buy into the hype. They start believing in magic and Easy Buttons. They just expect everything to work immediately and seamlessly. Intuitive interfaces (of which we have very few) stop being sufficient. They want machines that intuit the user’s objectives. I want those machines, too. But they aren’t quite here yet. For now, we still need to do the hard work of systems integration, security, training, workflow mapping, process design, and all the other things that people do not feel the need to discuss when they believe that technology will automagically solve every problem.

I’m all for measured discussions of the state of play of AI in law. I’m not dismissive of technological advancements. I concede that it is of genuine academic interest how those advancements will affect the profession a few decades from now. Truly, academics have a responsibility to think about the changing world for which they are preparing their students. But the rest of us have a responsibility to do better now. That means taking advantage of the imperfect technological advances that are already available to improve the way legal services are delivered. My hope is that we can do that while also enjoying and contemplating the provocative ideas that emanate from the Susskinds and their fellow travelers.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Casey Flaherty is the founder of Procertas. He is a lawyer, consultant, writer, and speaker focused on achieving the right business outcomes with the right people doing the right work the right way at the right price. Casey created the Service Delivery Review (f.k.a., the Legal Tech Audit), a strategic-sourcing tool that drives deeper supplier relationships by facilitating structured dialogue between law firms and clients. The SDR is premised on rigorous collaboration and the fact that law departments and law firms are not playing a zero sum game–i.e., there is more than enough slack in the legal market for clients to get higher quality work at lower cost while law firms increase profits via improved realizations.
The premise of the Service Delivery Review is that with people and pricing in place, process offers the real levers to drive continuous improvement. Proper collaboration means involving nontraditional stakeholders. A prime example is addressing the need for more training on existing technology. One obstacle is that traditional technology training methods are terrible. Competence-based assessments paired with synchronous, active learning offer a better path forward. Following these principles, Casey created the Legal Technology Assessment platform to reduce total training time, enhance training effectiveness, and deliver benchmarked results.
Connect with Casey on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter (@DCaseyF).

I recently participated in the LMA/ Bloomberg Law Survey (you can participate here before March 7th) on trends in legal marketing, business development, pricing, competitive intelligence and knowledge management.  I know, quite the range of topics. MarkGediman and I blogged a fair bit last year about the Bloomberg Law survey results, and I don’t doubt that the same will happen this year too.  In fact, I am already blogging about it.  The survey questions lead the participant through a series of questions with ranges on how much has changed within marketing and BD departments in the last three years.  Items like competitive intelligence, knowledge management, pricing and process improvement are lumped into the same survey as more traditional marketing efforts such as content marketing (rebranded client updates if you will), and public relations.  Are all of those things being delivered by Marketing and Business Development Departments?  Does that make sense?  Perhaps we should make kitchen sinks while we are at, or be both the umpires and the hotdog vendors…For many years, I have suggested that a key to a firm’s competitive advantage is better collaboration amongst its administrative teams, from BD to Marketing, KM to CI and Accounting, all of whom seem to play a role in this year’s Bloomberg Law Survey. Perhaps the silos are breaking themselves down as market forces are creating the imperative to share while the technology keeps getting better, making it easier to share and work towards a common goal of increased efficiency and smarter client service. 

The survey also attempts to determine changes in headcount and budgets for Marketing and Business Development Departments over the past 24 and coming 24 months, as individual line items and as part of the firm collective headcounts and budgets. Very interesting. I would like to think and will post eventually about the CI’s role (and others) in shifting from a cost centre to lead generator and sales pipeline for firms.  I am hopeful that the survey results will reflect this position as well.  The results will be shared at this year’s annual LMA conference April 11-13th 2026, in Austin TX.

Stay tuned, I expect there will be much more here to blog about soon! 
Image [cc] Josh Bancroft

This morning, the American Library Association came out against the FBI’s attempt to order Apple to unlock an iPhone connected to the San Bernardino shooters, who murdered 14 people and injured another 22 back in December 2015. ALA’s Managing Director of the Office of Government Relations issued the following statement:

The only thing that could make last December’s attack in San Bernardino more horrible would be its use to profoundly erode the Constitution’s protection of our fundamental freedoms. Man­dated ‘back doors’ into encrypted systems cannot successfully be labelled ‘Bad Guys Keep Out.’  The only way to protect our data and, ultimately, our freedom is to fight any attempt by the courts and Congress to hack the Constitution.  ALA stands with Apple.

I also stand with Apple on this issue, and encourage my peer Law Librarians and Legal Information and Technical professionals to do the same. Librarians have always stood up for the rights of citizens against government intrusion. Long before there was a public uproar, or Edward Snowden, Librarians were pointing out and fighting the privacy breaches of the PATRIOT Act. It is time to stand up again and support the Constitution over the individual situation, regardless of the horror and tragedy surrounding the reason we wish to bend the rules.

Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, issued a response this week rejected the United States government’s request where he underlined the dangerous precedent this order would create:

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

It appears that the primary reason that the FBI is asking Apple to break the encryption and open the phone is one of convenience and cost. The government has not exhausted less intrusive methods of opening the shooter’s phone. Yes, it may cost more money and time to unlock the phone without Apple’s help, but it will cost far less in what this dangerous precedent creates if the Government successfully orders Apple to unlock that phone.

I stand with Apple.

I recently gave a ‘client case study’ presentation at the HighQ Client Forum in NYC (recapped here). On the day, I opened my talk thusly:

I am of the opinion that I could tell you absolutely everything I have done at the firm for the last three years in excruciating detail, with charts, graphs, and full step by step explanations and you could take that back to your firm and it would be of almost no value to you. Except in so far as it may provide you with a bit of inspiration to try something similar, or a map to avoid some of the pitfalls that I have encountered.

That was the set up of my opening joke to explain why I was speaking in extremely generic terms about my ‘case study’ and also to justify why all of my screenshot examples looked like this.

In short, my firm did not share my generous opinion on sharing.

That is certainly their prerogative and they are by no means alone.  I find that most law firms feel similarly about their various technology projects. Most people who work in law firms are to some degree fearful of speaking publicly in detail about any projects they are working on. Not because they think they are somehow giving away the farm, but because they don’t want to raise the ire of the managing partner or the marketing director.

One low level techno-peon, whose firm belongs to a knowledge sharing consortium of non-competing regional firms, told me that she was told to forward any information she receives from the group to the managing partner, but that she was never to share anything with the other firms.   I’m willing to bet that most staff in the consortium have received similar instructions from their firm’s management.  In the upper echelons of law firm management, it seems to generally be believed that the use of specific technologies, in a particular way, to solve a problem or build a product, constitutes a ‘competitive advantage’ of some kind.

It does not.

We are all using the same tools to build the same kinds of products and services for the same potential clients.

If I tell you that I am using tools A, B, and C to develop a solution that does X, Y, and Z. Even if I show you detailed screenshots of my final product, or give you a demo of its various features, you cannot recreate what I’ve done.  Even if I gave you the completed product itself, along will full rights to use it as you saw fit, you couldn’t get anyone at your firm to sign off on it.  Trust me, it’s hard enough to get two lawyers at the SAME firm to agree on simple introductory wording for a product let alone actual legal interpretations; lawyers from different firms agreeing on anything is nearly unthinkable.

The competitive advantage, the ‘secret sauce’ if you will, has absolutely nothing to do with the technology or how I/we/you put it together.  The advantage is in the knowledge and intelligence that your firm’s lawyers bring to the product/service/solution and that will be different at every firm. Even if the outward appearance and general construction of the eventual product is identical. (Which it can’t possibly be.)

In addition, it is highly unlikely that your technologists or consultants have discovered a unique combination of tools and resources that no one at any other firm has ever thought of.  The one exception would be if your in-house development team built something entirely from scratch, but then I would argue that any immediate advantage you may gain is more than offset by the long term headache of software maintenance and support, and you’re actually digging an innovation hole.

Now, to be clear, I am not advocating for a mass uprising of technologists to start spilling their firms’ secrets. Nor am I suggesting that I would ever share details of what my former firm was working on against their wishes. Nor will I ever share details of anything that I work on for any company in the future without explicit permission to do so. However, I truly believe that in most cases a strict devotion to the ‘competitive advantage’ myth actually does a big disservice to the secretive firm itself. They struggle to learn through trial and error what could simply be learned by talking to others who have gone before. Although, if you don’t share, no one else is going to share with you.  Those good old kindergarten values at play.

It strikes me that this bizarre behavior is like construction contractors jealously guarding their secret use of wheelbarrows, nail guns, and wooden framing.  Those things constitute baseline technologies for building a house.  However, the fact that a crew uses those technologies has almost no bearing on the eventual quality of the house.  It’s the work of the specialized craftspeople that ultimately determines the value of the end product.

The same is true for law firms. Firms should have faith in the skill of their craftspeople (lawyers) and encourage their construction foremen (technologists) to talk to others in the industry about construction (legal technology innovation) best practices.

Otherwise, what is the message we, as an industry, are sending to our clients?

“We’d rather spend our time and money reinventing the wheelbarrow than using technology to solve your legal problems.”

I hereby relinquish any claim to copyright on that phrase. If any firm wants to adopt that as their marketing slogan, be my guest.

If you read Legal IT Insider, or if you follow Greg or me on Twitter, you have probably heard the big news regarding HighQ.

They hired me!  (Oh, and they got some investment of some kind. I don’t really follow that stuff, but hey, I guess that’s pretty cool too!)
As of today, I am the Business Transformation and Innovation Architect at HighQ!  This is a customer facing role, which will allow me to work with HighQ customers around the world to imagine, develop, and deliver new legal products and services through the HighQ platform.  I gave a talk at the HighQ Forum in NYC about how I’ve been doing this kind of thing for the last few years. A recap of that talk has become my first HighQ blog post, The 3 Boxes of Innovation.  
After my talk at the Forum and throughout LTNY week, I had people that I have known, followed, and looked up to for years coming up to me asking when they could contact me to discuss their particular use case.  For me, this is the most exciting aspect of my new role.  Rather than speaking in ridiculously oblique terms about the tools I’m using and the products we’re building at my firm, and getting much the same from friends and colleagues (and readers of this blog) at other law firms, I now get to roll up my sleeves and work side by side with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the legal industry to create new and innovative products and services.  How cool is that?
I had one non-negotiable requirement before I would agree to take on the new job. One of my duties will be to write for the HighQ blog, and I’m happy to do it, but I must be allowed to continue writing for 3 Geeks.  Stuart Barr’s response was, “that’s fine with us as long as it’s not against the rules of 3 Geeks.”  I’m not sure I have ever laughed so hard in my life.  Rules? 3 Geeks? It’s like he’s never met any of us!
But, as I thought about it, there are some ‘rules’ here on the blog.  They are not written or rigidly enforced, but they are generally adhered to by all of us. 

1. Don’t call out your own firm

Not really a rule so much as prudent self-censorship.  I have openly mentioned my firm only once, when I wrote about the London Office Choir winning a competition.  I’ve actively avoided writing anything that could be directly attributed to anyone at the firm or would be easily recognized as a response to anything that happened at the firm. (Though I occasionally rode a bit close to that edge, like when I wrote a satirical poem in response to the Texas Bar’s stupid Opinion 642 after it caused the firm’s CIO’s title to be changed to Chief of Information Technology.)  However, those who poke the bear too many times, tend to not remain employed by the circus… if you know what I mean.

2. No advertisements

We occasionally review products, tools, or books, but we generally don’t endorse anything.  Also, we allow vendors to write guest posts all the time, but those posts are generally about industry trends or market analysis and not specifically about how great their products are.

3.  The three beer solution

Again, not really a rule, but more of an axiomatic guideline.  “There is no problem that cannot be solved over the course of three beers. And no problem that will not be made worse by ordering the fourth.”  Like I said, axiomatic.

I think that’s about it.  3 ‘rules’ for 3 Geeks, if you will.  For more than 5 years I have fretted about rule #1 for fear that some marketing stooge would track me down for some innocuous firm ‘secret’ I divulged, now it’s rule #2 that I need to worry about. After all, 3 Geeks is not a platform to extoll the virtues of HighQ products any more than it’s a platform to push our firm’s legal services. We have the utmost respect for our devoted readers, and while I may openly shill for HighQ products on the HighQ blog, I hereby promise to never use 3 Geeks as an advertising platform for my new employer.

For example, I will never use my 3 Geeks posts to write about how you can use HighQ Publisher as a platform of platforms that can integrate multiple solutions into a single user interface to build revenue generating subscription legal services for your clients. I will never write about the versatile HighQ Collaborate product that can be used as a simple deal room file sharing service, or as a full internal and external social networking tool, or could even be paired with HighQ Publisher to become your firm’s modern social intranet. I will not even write a post about the slogan I’ve been using to sell HighQ inside the firm for years:

“It’s like SharePoint. You know, if SharePoint didn’t suck.”  

I won’t write about those things here, but you can be sure I will on the HighQ blog.  So subscribe to the blog or follow me on Twitter if you are interested in those things.

Finally, I just want to say thank you to Greg, Toby, and everyone involved with 3 Geeks, including all of our regular readers.  Without this wonderfully supportive community, I would just be a pissed-off low level IT support guy, struggling to get by in a law firm, frustrated, helpless, and desperately afraid as the industry changed around me.  I’m fairly certain HighQ wouldn’t want to hire me then and I doubt anyone else would either.

Thanks for letting me get a few things off my chest for the last 5 years.

More to come…

A few minutes ago, AALL President, Keith Ann Stiverson, made the announcement that the members of AALL voted down the proposed name change to Association for Legal Information:

The proposal to change the name of American Association of Law Libraries to the Association for Legal Information has failed by a vote of 1998 (80.11 percent) opposed, to 496 (19.89 percent) in favor. A record number of members voted on this proposal, with 59.51 percent casting a ballot.  

The fact that 60% of the members took the time to vote, showed that the issue was important, and the fact that 80% of those votes were a “no” to name change, drove home a point that I’ve heard from the members over the past few months. It is clear that the ALI name was not the one members wanted. It was also clear that many of the members were open to the idea of change, but that members wanted much more of a voice and the ability to comment and bounce ideas before an up or down vote is made.

While there are a very small number of members that felt that AALL as “American Association of Law Libraries” was just fine, most of the people I talked to made a comment similar to this:

I am fine with rebranding the association and even changing the name… but just not this name.

I am happy that the members made their voices heard. I am happy that the AALL Board took the initiative to put this challenge out to the members and get the conversation started. This is not the end of the conversation, by any means. This is the beginning of a longer conversation, and a chance to look at the good and bad of what’s happened over the past couple of months and how to move on in a respectful way to the next step in the process.

This is still fresh in my mind, so there are a few ideas that I’m bouncing around in my head, and would like to discuss as we move forward:

  • I think members are still receptive to a name change (AALL (alone), changing Libraries to Librarians, adding “Information Professionals” to AALL, or adding Professionals to ALI. But, I don’t think anyone has the stomach to try this right away. Let’s put a pin in this one for now, and move on.
  • Rebranding goes on. No one is standing still. Members, Board, Stakeholders, etc. We all know that the association needs to adapt to serve its members and to increase awareness of the stakeholders in what we all bring to the table within our organization, and the overall value of our profession. That discussion moves forward.
  • I think the Board “heard” the members when it came to involvement and discussion prior to voting. I, for one, as an incoming Vice President/President Elect, heard that message loud and clear.
  • I think most of the members understood what the Board was attempting to do, and even when they disagreed with the Board’s actions and ideas, did so respectfully. There was no evil intent. If you think there was, I suggest that you re-evaluate the situation and give the board the benefit of the doubt here, and move forward.
  • There will be no running to the doors. AALL is the association for those of us that call ourselves law librarians. No other organization focuses more on our profession. We can face the future together, we can argue and debate the path, but at the end of the day, we come together for the greater good of our profession.
  • That said, our profession is changing. Librarians, Lawyers, Analysts, Writers, Researchers, and other professionals within the legal field have many things that we can learn from each other. Looking to bring in non-traditional roles into the ranks of the Law Librarian association does not make us weaker, it makes us more diverse, and stronger as a whole. Law Librarianship is still the pivotal function of the association, but narrowly defining who fits that role is a disservice to all who can benefit from the association.

Although this was a record number of people that turned out to vote, there were still over 4 in 10 of us that didn’t vote. That, to me, is a red flag. As I move forward over the next couple of years and move from Vice President to President, I would like to find ways to reach out to those other 40% and find ways of motivating them back into the ranks of active and contributing members. I also want to make sure that the other 60% also remain active and seek out ways that we can help ourselves, each other, and the profession.

One of the best features that Lex Machina provides for Intellectual Property attorneys is their increased accuracy of information pulled from PACER. The improvements that Lex Machina has made on Cause-of-Action (CoA) and Nature- of-Suit (NoS) codes entered into PACER make it an invaluable resource to clearly identify relevant matters and weed out irrelevant cases. By improving the data, Lex Machina reduces the “garbage in – garbage out” effect that exists in the PACER database.

Now Lex Machina has turned its focus on cleaning up another annoyance found in PACER data, as well as many of the other platforms that pull data from PACER. The Attorney Data Engine analyzes the PACER information and identifies the attorneys that are actually associated with the case, even if those attorneys do not show up on the attorney list via PACER.

I talked with Karl Harris, Vice-President of Products at Lex Machina, a couple weeks ago, and he gave me some insights on the new Attorney Data Engine, and how they are increasing the accuracy of identifying attorneys and law firms that are actually working on the cases filed through PACER. Karl mentioned that in New Jersey and Delaware, two very important states when it comes to Intellectual Property cases, only about 54% of the attorneys that work on the cases, actually show up in the PACER information. That means that nearly half of the attorneys are missing from the metadata produced by PACER. When accuracy is important, missing nearly half of the attorney names can cause quite a problem.

For those of us that ever put on a demo for an attorney of docket information, we know that one of the first questions the attorney asks is “can you find ‘X’ case, which I represented ‘Y’ client?” If you cannot find that information, the demo may as well end right there. Attorneys are issue spotters. If you cannot get accurate information, they will not trust that the product actually works.

With the new Lex Machina Attorney Data Engine, you should be able to find the attorney information, even if PACER missed it.

Here is an overview of the three components of the Attorney Data Engine:

  1. The PACER metadata itself: Every time Lex Machina crawls PACER data, they keep a historical record and can identify when attorneys are added or removed from a case over time. This makes the PACER data better by itself.
  2. Pro Hac Vice Extractor: Docket entries will mention when attorneys are added Pro Hac Vice to a case. Lex Machina also keeps a record of attorneys associated to law firms (over time.)
  3. Signature Block Analyzer: Lex Machina analyzes the documents attached to the docket entries and identifies the signature blocks for each attorney. Even if the attorney’s name doesn’t show up in the Docket entry, if they have a signature block, they are then associated with the case. 
Karl Harris states that the Attorney Data Engine makes Lex Machina “the best source for reliably figuring out which attorneys are involved in which cases.” 
It will be interesting to watch Lex Machina grow over the next couple of years, and to see how its new parent company, Lexis, assists in advancing its progress through access to additional data points. It is not a far jump to see how the Attorney Data Engine processes can be turned into a Company Data Engine using Lexis’ company information databases. Lexis has the content, and Lex Machina has the analytical resources to make that content better. It should make for some interesting results as the two companies learn how to adapt processes to the different products. 
[NOTE: Please welcome guest blogger, Michael J. Robak, Associate Director/Director of Information Technologies, Leon E. Bloch Law Library, University of Missouri – Kansas City.]
This
year’s ABA Tech Show is from March 16 – 19, 2016. (http://www.techshow.com/ )   It is also the 30th anniversary
of the Tech Show.  This year, for the
first time, an academic specific event is going to be tied to the Tech
Show.  The half day conference, on the
morning of March 16, 2016 is an opportunity for law school faculty and
administration, law students and practitioners to discuss the “how and what” of
teaching technology as well as develop a framework for adding an academic track
to the 2017 program.  Law students are
particularly encouraged to attend the event and the show.  Pricing for law student admission to the 3
day event is $100. (Registration link here: http://www.techshow.com/pricing/ )
Below
is the program description – if you are planning to attend the ABA Tech show,
this will be a great way to start the event!
Teaching
Technology in the Academy:  Are we
finally at the Tipping Point?
A
Law School Roundtable discussion held in conjunction with the 2016 ABA Tech
Show
Hosted
by IIT-Chicago Kent School of Law
March
16, 2016
9:00
– 12 noon
No
charge for registration
Roundtable Description
2016
marks the 30th Anniversary of the ABA Tech show.  In 1986 the idea of “micro-computers” in law
practice, to quote Jeff Arresty, one of the show’s founders, “was at its
complete inception”.
Much
has changed in those 30 years when it comes to legal technology.  But law schools have not yet fully embraced
the importance of technology competency for law students.  Even though law schools have begun to bring
technology courses to the curriculum and to experiment with innovative concepts
like legal hackathons, much remains to be done. 
In
July, 2014 and again in April, 2015, the University of Missouri – Kansas City
hosted two conferences on Law Schools, Technology and Access to Justice.  These conferences were supported by the Ewing
Marion Kauffman Foundation and brought together academics, legal technologists
and members of the Access to Justice community. 
One of the stated goals of the conferences was to produce a specific
direction for the teaching of technology in law schools.  A set of principles, referred to informally
as the Kansas City Principles, were developed and state as follows:
Statement of Fundamental Principles
Fundamental Principal
#1: 
In their role of
ensuring that the lawyers of tomorrow have the core competencies to provide
effective and efficient legal services, law schools have the responsibility to
provide all students with education and training to enable them to understand
the risks and benefits associated with current and developing technologies and
the ability to use those technologies appropriately.
Fundamental Principal
#2: 
In order for lawyers
to fulfill their professional obligations to advance the cause of justice, it
is essential that economically viable models for the delivery of legal services
be developed that allow all members of society to have access to competent
legal representation or effective self-representation regardless of income, and
law schools should assist in the development of technologically-supported legal
marketplaces that help identify available alternatives and, where legal
representation appears most appropriate, to empower those seeking the services
of a lawyer to identify and retain a competent lawyer of choice at reasonable
cost.
Fundamental Principal
#3: 
As part of their
responsibility to assist in providing access to law and justice, law schools
should use their legal knowledge and technological capabilities to make the law
more comprehensible and readily available to the public so as to empower people
to use the law and, where appropriate, lawyers, to improve the quality of their
lives, and should include in this endeavor, among other initiatives , working
with national, state, and local governments to provide the public with free
on-line access to statutes, regulations, cases and other primary law at all
levels of government.  
Fundamental Principal
#4: 
In order to encourage
community economic development and contribute to a strong global economy, law
schools should educate lawyers who can stimulate entrepreneurship and
innovation and assist in developing technology that can support economically
viable means of providing affordable legal services to small businesses, social
ventures and start-up enterprises.
Fundamental Principal
#5: 
Because technology has
the potential to reinvent the processes of law in ways that can help achieve
access to justice, law schools should encourage their students, faculty and
graduates to research, teach and implement non-traditional, technological
approaches to legal innovation that will maximize the ways in which individuals
and entities can achieve the benefits of law and legal process.
The explicit goal of this
half day event is to not only continue to drive the discussion that led to
these principles, but to develop an agenda for how to proceed, including how to
involve the ABA Law Practice Management Section and leverage the opportunity
provided by the ABA Tech Show.
In addition, there has never
been a better opportunity for practitioners to help influence law schools on
the best directions in which to proceed with technology training.  It is expected that the roundtable audience
will include not only members of the academy but also practitioners, law
students and vendor representatives, and the participation of all these
segments in the conversation will be beneficial to determining next steps.
Agenda
8:30 – registration
9:00 –
10:15 – Moderated Panel Discussion:
Meeting
Technology Competencies for the 21st Century lawyer: The Role for
Today’s Law Schools
     Moderator:            Dean
Ellen Suni – University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law
     Panelists: Professor
Ronald W. Staudt          – IIT Chicago- Kent
School of Law
                        Professor Oliver
Goodenough      – Vermont Law School
                        Professor William
Henderson       – Indiana University
Maurer School of Law
                        Dean Andrew Perlman                   –
Suffolk Law School
10:15
– 10:30 – Break
10:30 –
12 noon – Discussion Forum
The
panel will lead a discussion with members of the audience to move toward
consensus regarding the next steps for advancing the teaching of technology in
law school and examining how the ABA Tech Show can be part of these efforts
going forward.
12
noon – boxed lunch

I received multiple forwards of this article entitled “The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Lawyer.”

Apparently, I can’t just enjoy things anymore. I thought it was a good article. I found much in it that I liked. A properly balanced individual would simply recommend it and move on. I, however, am not properly balanced and the siren call of being a blowhard is sometimes too hard to resist.

First, let me offer up an emphatic Amen! to the opening paragraphs:

As a profession, we’re haunted by the specter of our incompetence with technology. We should be. For too long, we’ve clung to our Dictaphones, been duped by elementary phishing attacks, and failed to understand the meaning of “reply‑all.”

These “goofs” of the technically inept are becoming increasingly dangerous in both our businesses and our client representations. You hardly need to mention the threat of data breaches or e‑discovery sanctions to send chills down most lawyers’ spines. And the problem won’t be solved by an influx of younger attorneys who exchanged their pacifiers for iPads. In my personal experience, I’ve found many tech dunces actually to be in the ranks of the younger lawyers.

It was like the author, Jeff Kerr of CaseFleet, was writing me a personal love note. Extolling the importance of tech competence while also puncturing the myth of the digital native. I got goose bumps. But…and you know there has to a but…he lost me:

What are we do to? Who is going to save us from our troubles with technology? The answer is simple: Hire lawyers with technical smarts and reward them for their contributions. The tech-savvy lawyer need not have the ability to write programs in assembly language or understand x86 chip architecture. The main components of tech savviness are curiosity and accrued knowledge on how to get the most out of computers.

But I emphasize that these tech saviors must be lawyers; part of our technology problem stems from pervasively outsourcing solutions to vendors and consultants rather than developing skills ourselves. Even partners must grasp the importance of tech issues and understand the methods by which we’ll achieve the best results.

I yield to no one in my commitment to lawyers developing better tech skills. But that commitment in no way detracts from my affinity for the growing importance of allied professionals. Indeed, one of the objectives of improving lawyer tech skills/comfort is to help them appreciate the role allied professionals can play in delivering superior legal service. While I support the call for lawyers to take ownership of their technical ineptitude, I am loath to endorse anything that would seem to diminish the potential contributions from allied professionals. I want more, not less, diverse teams.

My last couple of columns have made mention of the growing importance of legal operations. I’ll write my legal ops post someday. Then again, I am being beat to it. Yesterday, the ACC released their CLO Survey, which found that law departments had doubled their legal ops headcount. The cover of this month’s Legaltech News featured Mary O’Carroll, the head of legal ops for Google, and one of the leaders of CLOC. Mary is amazing. She has awards coming out the wazoo for her achievements in the legal industry. Mary, however, is not a lawyer. Apparently, Google doesn’t care. Then again, what could they possibly know about tech.

As some of you may have seen, I transitioned from writing a monthly column in the ACC Docket on legal technology to writing a monthly column focused on legal sourcing. My co-author on my new column is not a lawyer (making me guilty by association). But he is the Global Sourcing Officer for Shell Legal. While he does not have a JD, he does have an MBA, a Masters in Technology Management, and experience at three AmLaw 50 firms. Did I mention he is the global sourcing officer for legal services at the third largest company in the world despite not having a JD? It’s almost as if he possesses a skill set that would be very hard to acquire while also being a practicing lawyer.

For me, this is a yes and situation. Yes, I am for more tech-savvy lawyers. And, yes, I am for increased utilization of allied professionals. I see them as complementary and mutually reinforcing.

That brings us to Mr. Kerr’s definition of “tech-savvy lawyer.” I am on record as stating that our baseline is too low. Mr. Kerr, however, sets the bar really, really high:

What are some characteristics of the truly tech-savvy lawyer? To begin with, this lawyer is fascinated with and passionate about technology and the role it plays in our profession—both as an instrument of greater efficiency and a paradigm shift in the ways we litigate cases and think about evidence. She has no fear of tech, enjoys experimenting with new tools and technologies, and solves computer problems with a Google search rather than a call to the help desk. (In fact, this lawyer probably is the help desk already.) She is a magician in Word and Excel. (If a lawyer can’t get the most out of these tools, then good luck with more complicated ones!) She has written some code. She has a strong tech vocabulary and probably knows about things like metadata, encryption and relational databases.

There is probably already some fierce competition for all 17 lawyers who fit that description. The number is likely larger. But my own empirical analysis suggests that less than 5% of lawyers are at baseline competence in Word. The number who are baseline proficient in Excel is an order of magnitude lower. Finding a lawyer who is a magician in both and has done some coding narrows the population down to an extremely small subset. These unicorns exist (one of them is my business partner and best friend). But they are exceedingly rare. Though, like Mr. Kerr, I am all for creating more of them.

I welcome the rise of the tech-savvy lawyer. I also welcome the complementary rise of allied professionals. I’m not sure Mr. Kerr and I even disagree. He wants lawyers to get serious about their own tech competence and not take evasive maneuvers like the delegation dodge. I enjoyed his column and the foregoing is meant in good faith and good fun. Still, words matter. And there are some inartful implications for the role of allied professionals in the words selected.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Casey Flaherty is the founder of Procertas. He is a lawyer, consultant, writer, and speaker focused on achieving the right business outcomes with the right people doing the right work the right way at the right price. Casey created the Service Delivery Review (f.k.a., the Legal Tech Audit), a strategic-sourcing tool that drives deeper supplier relationships by facilitating structured dialogue between law firms and clients. The SDR is premised on rigorous collaboration and the fact that law departments and law firms are not playing a zero sum game–i.e., there is more than enough slack in the legal market for clients to get higher quality work at lower cost while law firms increase profits via improved realizations.
The premise of the Service Delivery Review is that with people and pricing in place, process offers the real levers to drive continuous improvement. Proper collaboration means involving nontraditional stakeholders. A prime example is addressing the need for more training on existing technology. One obstacle is that traditional technology training methods are terrible. Competence-based assessments paired with synchronous, active learning offer a better path forward. Following these principles, Casey created the Legal Technology Assessment platform to reduce total training time, enhance training effectiveness, and deliver benchmarked results.
Connect with Casey on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter (@DCaseyF).