Of all the adaptations law firms need to make to be successful, the biggest challenge going forward will be making changes to their partner compensation systems. Ben Weinberger of Prosperoware tackles the subject head-on in today’s guest post.

The earliest known written legal code, Ur-Nammu’s Code, has been attributed to have originated in 2050 B.C., though its authorship is still up for grabs (some attributing that to his son, Shugli).  Shortly after that, law firms were formed on a partner-based business model whereupon compensation was based largely upon hours originated and hours worked on behalf of the firm.

And so it went for a while.  This compensation model brought with it an obvious behavior incentive for lawyers or partners to bill as many hours as possible.  As the market slowly shifted, so did the clients’ sentiments regarding this particular form of incentivizing.

In remediation, firms first recognized that they had to look more carefully at billable hours and compensate their timekeepers on realization rather than billable rates.  This first foray into restructuring the compensation model ensured, at the least, the firm was actually compensated prior to the lawyer or partner.  As firms grew in size and complexity and management structures became more complex, however, compensation models evolved to incorporate numerous other metrics that brought with it a combination of some science–and some art.  Still, partners responsible for bringing in large books of business were always compensated for that volume, just as partners who brought in billable hours were compensated for billable hours.

The clients’ sentiments, however, have not been satisfied.

The shift in market–as driven by those shifts in sentiments–is accelerating. In fact, a legal talent/future business strategies report just released by Deloitte boldly forecasts a radical tipping point for the legal industry by 2020, a short four years–or less than one five year strategy plan–from now, stating:

“The transformation of the profession is likely to be profound…Indeed, by around 2020, we expect a tipping point for individual firms which will impact the competitive landscape [and the role of talent in law firms]. Businesses must prepare effectively now so they are not left behind by the end of the decade.”

Smart firms have started recognizing and evolving the way they do business to accommodate this change in market condition.  Specifically, they are starting to compute profitability of matters, using business intelligence, and empowering their professionals to understand cost of production and more modern performance metrics such as actual margin on matters.  The firms are providing their professionals with the appropriate tools to enable them to select appropriate resources and more accurately budget matters to ensure sustainable profitability for the firm.

Unfortunately, one issue remains at many firms that hinders their ability to modernize their business:  legacy compensation models.  In the firms which are getting ahead of the game and trying to evolve their culture to a more profit oriented focus, without also adjusting their compensation model, they’re battling themselves as they retain inefficient incentive structures to drive the right behavior.

If specific billable hour targets are still tied to partners’ compensation, they have less incentive to distribute billable work to the most cost-effective resource.

When I was at a firm a few years ago, the finance director and I went through an exercise to compute the relative profitability of each grade of our lawyers in the firm–newly qualified associates, senior associates, junior partners, etc.–all the way through to the senior partner level.  By correctly assessing a number of criteria that evaluated the true cost structure, we were able to calculate the cost of each billable hour per each different grade of lawyer.  Once identified, we shared the results with our firm partners:  and as it so happened, our most profitable hours were being worked by our senior associates. In various ensuing discussions I’ve had with colleagues and peers at other firms, it would seem that this result is a fairly standard occurrence.

As part of the exercise, we computed and readily shared with the firm’s partners during a retreat the true profitability metrics for each hour worked by our equity and senior equity partners. For senior equity, this equated to approximately negative USD $130/hour. This was not an easy statistic to share with the senior partners (it’s tricky to tell your collective ‘bosses’ that, to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite films, Mr. Mom, “you’re doing it wrong”); however, we took the exercise further and explained that their time was, in fact, best spent managing clients (client care), focusing on business development, and ensuring that work was appropriately distributed across the firm. Recast across these work functions, they more readily accepted and comprehended the validity of the financial results we were sharing.

The next logical step was for our firm to take a much closer look and carefully evaluate its compensation formula for partners.  We took a more holistic view of what types of behaviors we were seeking to drive and what we wanted to incentivize partners to do, and what clients wanted to incentivize partners to do—these three things are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, should be aligned.

In recognizing that the firm was in a competitive market and that a significant source of its revenue was being generated through alternative fees and fixed fee work, there was very quick recognition and acceptance of the need to ensure that work was being completed in the most efficient and economically viable manner.  We found that by providing our lawyers greater insight into firm resourcing, costs, and historical budgeting, and that by enabling our lawyers to see in real time how their engagements were progressing, they were better able to ensure that work was being completed efficiently, effectively, and appropriately.

To do so is at the core of a firm’s future success, according to Deloitte:

“Firms will want to continue to demonstrate that they can offer clients the best products, price and service. We believe that the most successful law firms will be those that are agile enough to flex resources in order to meet client needs at an efficient price.”

Firms today that are looking at ensuring sustainable business models need to look not only at how they are allocating work and pricing that work, but they also have to consider how they are incentivizing their professionals to complete that work. If their compensation models have not evolved in such a manner as to help encourage the most appropriate distribution of work, they are going to find it far more difficult to implement real positive change in both the behaviors and the long term profitability—ie longevity–of the firm. 2020 is less than four years away.

Where will your firm be then?

Ben Weinberger is the Vice President of Solutions for Prosperoware. Ben is an industry thought leader and a licensed attorney with more than 20 years of experience in the strategic development, transformation, and direction of operations and technology in a variety of public and private organizations.  He can be reached at ben.weinberger@prosperoware.com.

Is Legal CI Sales Enablement


I’ve posted here before about CI as the new Client Intelligence and I still believe that. Clients more than ever – still – want to work with lawyers and law firms who understand their business, and that comes from, among other things, CI. But in giving a presentation recently to some new and interested parties at the firm it occurred to me that CI in law firms is turning out to be sale enablement or engagement. CI in law firms builds a pipeline, creates leads and informs winning RFP responses. At least the way I have being doing it…which made me think about all the conversations and discussions that have happened on this blog and elsewhere in the legal management world about sales people in law firms.  Are they a necessity? Maybe.  Can firms do well without them? Sure, though always better to have them. But what about CI people? 
I have seen a marked increase in CI people at firms – at all levels – from analyst to specialist, manager to director over the course of my dozen plus years of doing CI in law firms. Not only has the number of roles increased, but so too have the depth of those roles, the publications, continuing education opportunities, technology platforms and consultants in the space.  There has been a quiet building of the practice behind the scenes, not at the forefront as has been the case with pricing people or sales people.  These roles are seen as truly disruptive and borrowed from other disciplines. But CI people have kind of just evolved out of BD, KM, Library and other roles to fill a growing need in law firms.  That also means that CI people are often the bridges between these departments as well. 

I have been trying to articulate why it might be that CI professionals in firms are an accepted and growing domain. All I can come reasonably come up with, is that culture eats strategy for breakfast or whatever Peter Drucker really said.  If lawyers not administrators or law firm management types are talking to clients, then lawyers are de facto sales people and CI people, not actual sales people, become sales enablement folk – tasked with helping lawyers make one kind of sale or another. Most CI people in law firms started in Marketing, Business Development, the Library or research services and somewhere along the way learned about CI. Some people started doing CI and were then trained in the discipline, as was my path. Others, were thrust into the CI role and have been learning by doing along the way.  Regardless, many of CI people in law firms that I know, have been at their firms for a while, or at the very least, the people who created and established the CI function have been at the firms for a while. Generally speaking, the longer someone or some role exists at a firm, the more deeply entrenched in the firm culture and the firm DNA a person or role becomes. It follows then, that an evolved CI person or a newly hired one by an evolved other kind of manager, understands a firm’s unique selling points or differentiators. Good CI people understand their firm’s culture and how to find new clients, fill a pipeline or help grow existing client accounts in a way that is culturally relevant to the sales –non-sales-people, aka the lawyers.  Strategy such as that which would be brought to be bare by external consultants, or sales people may not jive as well with firm cultures.  Strategic plans on paper may be the ultimate in best practices but only when executed with institutional knowledge, cultural sensitivity and know-how, are these plans destined for success. Law firms are cultural places, you only have to look at the AmLaw 100 or 200 to see that. What other industry boasts a top 200 of its kind?  The accounting firms have managed to get it down to the Big 4, even the biggest sports franchises in the world with all of expansion teams don’t start the season with a top 200. The big differentiator for firms is often culture and culture can only be defined and sold on the grounds of intimate understanding. CI people, steeped in a firm’s culture can connect the internal and external dots to create a sales pipeline in a way that others may not be able to because of the inherit objectivity and collaborative nature of CI in law firms. 

The experience of CI professionals gives them a unique perspective on the attorneys client base, including insights into their training and thought processes.  This allows them to provide analysis that works to the strengths of the attorneys as problem solvers rather sales professionals.  In turn, this allows the attorneys to sell their services in a targeted manner by addressing client needs and how they are best suited to solving them rather than with a general sales pitch.  I think this approach allows firms to capitalize on what differentiates them from others in acquiring new business.  And may also speak to the large number of successful firms.  Law firms are not a fungible commodity and CI enables them to emphasize this.

It is only too bad sales doesn’t start with a C or I would have a new set of CI initials to expound.  Is CI legal sales enablement?  
 

 

 

 

As some of you know, I have spent the last three years studying and working as an actor and I’ve been amazed at how much of what I’ve learned in acting makes my KM work better. So, as a break from the usual KM and legal tech discussions, I thought I would share four of the top acting rules and show how they apply to each and every project you do.

Acting Rule #1: Be in the Moment
Another way of saying this is “don’t anticipate.” In acting, you typically get the full script for your project once you get cast, so you know the end of the story before you start shooting any of the scenes. But alas, as you shoot each scene, you need to act like you don’t know the end of the story. In other words, in that moment that you’re shooting that scene, you need to be in that moment, and not anticipate what’s going to happen later. After all, if you were a person actually living through that moment, you would not know what’s going to happen, and as an actor you need to portray that real person.
Project Application: When speaking with users or other project team members, don’t anticipate what those users or other team members are going to say. Take a breath and be in that moment, not back at your office responding to that new email that just arrived in your inbox. This will not only help you strengthen your relationships, it will also make sure that you don’t miss or dismiss something new or different that your ‘scene partner’ is sharing with you.
Acting Rule #2: Listen
You’ve probably all too often seen actors who don’t look like they are authentically reacting to their scene partner but rather are just waiting to say their own next line. 
Project Application: In addition to staying in the moment of whatever conversation you’re having, genuinely listen to the other person, don’t just wait until it’s your turn to announce your idea. Whether it’s a vendor, team member, user, or superior, listen to what they say. This applies not just to the words they’re saying, but also — and perhaps more importantly — to what they really mean. Sometimes people choose words that soften or mitigate what they really mean (or, perhaps, the opposite). Listen closely, and you can probably tell what they really want you to know. Being an excellent listener will allow you to respond in a way that truly addresses your colleague’s needs and concerns, and will help make you a trustworthy and respected project partner.
Acting Rule #3: Put All Your Attention on the <wait for it….> OTHER Person, Never on Yourself
Diva, anyone? That doesn’t apply just to the acting world. Many people are focused on their own agendas, or on how some action or inaction will make them look. Don’t be that person. 
Project Application: If you’re building a project or providing a service, put all your attention on your client, internal or external. Make sure you are addressing their ask and their need, and that will make the project the best it can be, and you the star (but that shouldn’t be why you do it).
Acting Rule #4: Read the Other Person’s Emotions
We don’t talk a lot about emotions in the legal world. But in acting, emotions are the core of our work. Acting is an emotional art; the way you use and flex your physical muscles for a bodybuilding competition, so you use and flex your emotional muscles for acting. I spent my first six months of acting training focused solely on emotional exercises that connected me deeply to my own emotions and honed my ability to read other people’s emotions. The result: within a few seconds of meeting someone, I can tell if they’re distracted, stressed, proud, confident, insecure, sad, angry, joyful, content, worried, threatened, anxious, compassionate, playful, open, generous, or a myriad of other things.
Project Application: Believe it or not, understanding where your colleagues are coming from, especially in a conflict, will vastly improve your interactions with them. Are they being a bully because they’re actually insecure? Or because they’re being bullied or pressured by someone else? Are they not contributing because they feel frustrated? Or because they feel overwhelmed or unheard? Are they being stubborn because they desperately need a win? Or because their job is on the line? If you can see what’s going on underneath the words, you can address the real conflict (delicately, or even without the other person knowing) and probably get what you both want. For example, if they’re worried about their job but you know that your solution is better, you might not say “I know you’re worried about your job,” but you might say “here’s why I think we should try this solution, and let’s put your name front and center on this project because of all the work you’ve done.”
Be in the moment, listen, focus on the other person, and read your colleague’s emotions. Four rules that I hope help make your projects and your relationships the best they can be.


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.