Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of discussion about the value of the Law Firm Librarian (aka Research Analyst).   I’ve written on the subject (here and here) as have others (here, here, here and here). Most of the discussion concerns the expense side of the equation.  But it occurred to me that this analysis can only get you so far.  It’s revenue that can turn a cost center into a profit center. Let’s face it, Law Firms are in the business of making money and profit is a powerful argument when it comes to justifying your existence.

How can we affect revenue?  We don’t control writeoffs or client relations.  Library staff are unique in a law firm because they track and bill their time in much the same way attorneys and paralegals do.  We need to apply the same criterion that is used to evaluate attorney and paralegal performance to the Library staff but customized to our unique world.  Metrics such as realization rates and billing practices can allow us to start conversations with shareholders that show them we are invested in the profitability of the firm.

Beginning a conversation with shareholders about the money that’s being left on the table is a good place to start.   To do this, we need to be able to give our data context by comparing ourselves to the industry at large.  How many times have we heard the phrase “But what are other firms doing?”   We need to develop benchmarks to allow for meaningful points of comparison.  But how can we 1) collect this data and 2) use it to improve the performance of the Library in generating revenue?

So…to address Question #1, I’ve put together a short 11-question survey to try and collect this information.  I have tried to construct this survey with an eye to avoiding questions that may touch on proprietary or competitive information.  This is not a rate survey.

As for Question #2, I will report on the results of the survey in this space and will discuss some different ways it can be used to improve Library performance.  I feel that this data will allow the Law Firm Library community to finally affect the revenue piece in a meaningful way.

You can access the survey here.

WaaS

Since IBM is in the news this week for all the wrong reasons, I thought I would take a look at their marquee product…The latest Wonder of the Modern World…The Trebuchet that threw Alex Trebek… The Future Savior of the Legal Profession… of course, I am referring to Watson AI.

A couple of months ago IBM announced that they were starting up Watson as a Service, they call it Watson Analytics, but I prefer WaaS.  (‘Cuz you know some IBM marketing people totally bounced that one around for awhile before settling on the boring name. Probably dropped it because it sounded too much like the guy on the right.)

I signed up, logged in, and started to explore some of the sample data sets that Watson Analytics had available.  I chose the “SportsDataLLC NFL 2014 Offensive Stats” and I set about trying to stump the great Watson. I wanted a question that was a simple calculation, but was sufficiently unusual to have not likely been preprogrammed by Watson developers. After a moment I typed…

What is the average number of first downs in the second quarter by teams that led after the first quarter?

Click to see results

 Boom! 

Stumped baby! 
Question number one and I busted The Watson.  
Dude didn’t have a frickin’ clue what I was talking about! 
So much for natural language querying. 
Goodbye AI!  
L0000000-ser!

Once my ego subsided (which took much longer than I care to admit publicly), I checked the actual data set and realized that there were no fields tracking First Downs or Score, let alone Score by Quarter.  So, I didn’t actually stump Watson, I just asked him a question for which he had no data.

Which raises some interesting questions on its own. First, why did he suggest the alternative query “How does the number of Week [sic] compare by Team?”  And secondarily, what the hell does “How does the number of Week [sic] compare by Team?” mean anyway?

Intrigued, I clicked through to see exactly how the number of weeks compared by team.


The number of Week by Team.

Um, yep…
All teams played 16 weeks in 2014…
Absolutely true…
Not terribly helpful…
Or relevant.

Of course, the correct answer in this case was, “Yo moron, I don’t have any data on that!”  Or even, “Sorry, dude. Not a clue.”

Out of curiosity, I dropped the same exact query in Wolfram|Alpha, a computational engine that uses publicly available and scientific data to easily answer natural language queries like, How many teaspoons of water are in Lake Michigan? or What’s the average circumference the planets in our solar system? or What’s the 205468 decimal of pi?

And you know what?  Wolfram|Alpha couldn’t answer my stupid question either, but at least it gave an appropriate response.

This post is not an attack on IBM, Watson, or Artificial Intelligence. I am a huge proponent of AI in the delivery of legal services and, assuming IBM survives, I think Watson will likely be a big player…eventually.  However, given that IBM has posted 11 consecutive quarters of losses, a reasonable person could conclude that WaaS is a premature attempt to monetize the one thing everyone is desperately waiting for IBM to deliver.

My concern is not that firms will start signing up for WaaS in droves to provide Business Intelligence – “You asked for profit margins on work performed for your largest client last year.  Would you rather know the average weeks per month last year?” – but that many people have the wrong idea about what AI is, and what it can do for a law firms. Ironically, IBM may have done a disservice to those of us pushing for the use of AI. They have fostered this idea of an all powerful intelligence that will outperform its human counterparts in whatever field it tackles next.  In reality, the AI that currently exists, Watson included, is best seen as a performance enhancing tool for Biological Intelligence. While that is amazing, and exciting, and truly awe inspiring on its own, it is sadly something less than the magical omniscience that so many are now expecting. We may get there soon enough, but if you are waiting around for that kind of AI, you’re going to miss the real AI revolution going on all around you.

A few recent news posts have changed my thinking about the future of mega firms. This thinking was also influenced by knowledge from colleagues working with some of the big ones. Which mean this is one of my usual puzzle-piece ideas, but I think I may be on to something here.

Previously I have ranted about how these mega firms may not do well. Too many ethical conflicts, cultural conflicts and too few incentives to cross sell across the various components of each firm are significant barriers to success. However, I think they have one, more interesting asset.

By being large, these firms can rise above the individual influences of power partners. Effectively their size forces them to act like a business. Decisions about technology and other changes are made by “the mother ship” greatly limiting partners’ role in such decision making. Or in other words, the business people are actually doing what they were hired to do. They assess needs, source solutions and execute.

One example that recently came to my attention was the Clifford Chance “Continuous Improvement” effort.

Continuous Improvement is more than just process mapping; it is a collaborative approach where an expert in the tools and techniques of Continuous Improvement helps a group of people familiar with the relevant task to analyse what they are doing and to find ways of doing it better. Put simply, it involves applying scientific rigour to determine the best approach to carrying out a piece of work.

Now even if you apply some level of a BS filter, Clifford Chance is still engaging in a very “corporate” sort of activity. And of course, some partners (for a period of time) can evade such an effort. But the point is: They are actually pursuing this. They have committed significant resources and are implementing new processes and tools.

Many have argued that law firm size does not bring economies of scale, but what size does bring is the ability (or perhaps I might say necessity) to act more like a business. For firms in this realm, size matters in respect to being forced to make decisions based on the business instead of the needs and opinions of partners.

Admittedly. this idea is based on only bits and pieces of market evidence. In any event, I will be keeping a watchful eye on how the mega-firms embrace and utilize this opportunity.

Who knows – the recent Dentons Dachung merger may well move beyond the known risks, and actually embrace the future.

Stay tuned …

LexisNexis representatives are sending out notices that they are now the exclusive provider of The New York Times content for the legal market. For those of you that are keeping score, this adds to LexisNexis’ exclusive content with Factiva (which includes The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service), and ALM content. It would seem that LexisNexis is doubling-down on the news content area.

Here is the message that went out earlier today.

LexisNexis® is now the exclusive legal information provider of The New York Times® content to the legal market!

This agreement extends LexisNexis’s position as the leading provider of premium news content to the legal market. Highlights of our unmatched collection of news and current awareness sources include:

  • LexisNexis is the exclusive legal information provider of The New York Times content to the legal market.
  • Law360® is exclusive to LexisNexis, providing breaking news and analysis.
  • LexisNexis is the exclusive online third-party provider of ALM® news publications—including titles such as The American Lawyer®, The National Law Journal® and Corporate Counsel®—and the only provider of its publication news archives (more than six months old).
  • LexisNexis is the exclusive provider of Factiva® content to the law firm market, offering access to North American English sources, including The Wall Street Journal® and Dow Jones News Service.
  • LexisNexis provides more than 26,000 News & Business Sources from 4,000+ Publishers, with many exclusives, in over 150 countries and 21 languages.

The New York Times, as well as our other news exclusives such as Factiva, The Wall Street Journal, and ALM, will continue to be available through LexisNexis® Publisher and via our Moreover/Newsdesk product (releasing in Q2). Newsdesk is the only aggregator/monitoring tool that will be able to deliver this content in full text.

If you’ve seen any concert festival posters over the past few years, you’ll notice that the bigger the band is, the bigger the font is. As I was thumbing through some of my reading yesterday, I saw an article on “Top 10 font size shockers from the Coachella 2015 lineup.” Some bands were given inappropriate font sizes based on their current popularity (at least according to the author.) Font is power!! Imagine if font size and font type were given out to these bands? Imagine the horror of being a 9 point Comic Sans font! Oh the humanity!!

As usual, I just couldn’t let this stay as a typography and music collaboration. So I got to thinking how law firms could market their representations using a little Coachella type marketing poster. I went to the Create a Lineup site, and created my own power legal festival. I’m wondering if a law firm annual report could have a few of these printed up as centerfold posters??


On December 23rd,  Arun
Jethmalani, Founder & Managing Director at ValueNotes Database Pvt. Ltd. in India, published an article to LinkedIn
entitled 5
Debates about Competitive Intelligence that will never be resolved.  The article essentially lays out five of the
canonical questions that are a constant dialogue in the CI community. I won’t
share his insights, you’ll have to read the article for that, but the five
questions he puts forward are:
1.    
Should CI be strategic or tactical?
2.    
Where should CI reside?
3.    
Insight versus information?
4.    
How to calculate RoI on competitive intelligence?
5.    
What exactly is competitive intelligence?

I would add two questions, that may be a bit more controversial:
Is CI a profession or a set of competencies? 
 And does it even matter? 

There are several comments on the article, including one from
me where I suggest that the answers to all the questions are blowing in the corporate
culture.  For law firms especially, I
think the existential question of what CI is or should be – a library function,
a marketing role, a KM/BD hybrid is fun to think about in your spare time, but
analysis paralysis (hat tip to Fleisher
and Bensoussan) gets you nowhere.  As
we usher in 2015, I think the article and its underlying questions is a great reminder
to know your clients, know your audience and anticipate their needs – be they
intel – or otherwise.  The ability to
deliver answers, insights, and whatever else is needed on time, just in time,
and in advance, is the ultimate factor for CI success and happiness.  However you define it. 

Image [cc] – agsandrew 

A lot has been made of Elon Musk’s recent comments about Artificial Intelligence being “a greater risk than nukes.” And no less an intellect than Stephen Hawking recently echoed that sentiment. I’ve seen two examples of this fear showing up in popular television shows; a recent episode of Elementary had Sherlock Holmes administer an extended Turing test to a doll to see if it possibly killed a person, and this season of Person of Interest centers around the battle of omniscient and seemingly omnipotent computers with ridiculously capable and attractive people fulfilling their every desire. (On the other hand, maybe it’s just a CBS thing.) It strikes me that all of this sturm und drang has nothing at all to do with artificial intelligence… it’s an irrational fear of Artificial Will.

Most computers today do not exhibit Artificial Intelligence, at least not in the way that we generally imagine it, but they are tools that expand and supplement human intelligence. As such, they do provide a type of “Will-less Artificial Intelligence”. One that we embrace wholeheartedly. This Will-less AI makes it possible for fewer humans to achieve what would otherwise require many, many more humans, and the additional corresponding costs and resources that the presence of those additional humans would necessitate. In other words, the Will-less AI that currently exists allows us to do much more, with much less, much faster and we’re all for that.

At it’s base, the popular fear of AI is not that computers will become more intelligent than us, but that they will become willful and that they will exhibit ill will towards us. Today this fear manifests as  a disembodied, internet-enabled, artificially willful intelligence, that will somehow bring about the end of humanity, but 30 years ago it was an unstoppable robot from the future that looked a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 1921 it was Karel Čapek’s play about a robot factory uprising, called Rossum’s Universal Robots (from which the term Robots originates).  In 1818, it was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, in which Dr. Frankenstein reanimates life in a bunch of cobbled together body parts that ultimately turn against him. In each century the technology changes, it always reflects the latest advances in science and industry, but the feared outcome is always the same: the creator is attacked, or destroyed, or overwhelmed by it’s creation.

Shelley references the Greek myth of Prometheus in her title.  Prometheus was a god of old, a Titan, who sided with the new Olympic gods, and helped to bring Zeus and his cadre to power.  But poor Prometheus was a true egalitarian and gave the lowly humans the power of fire, for which he was punished for all eternity by his newly installed rulers. Even in a tale of triumph for the contemporary gods, one who seeks to bring about change must be punished for his sins! This is an old story, continually reinvented throughout human history to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about change itself.

What hope for those of us seeking to innovate in law firms?!

Now, I don’t know what Elon or Stephen actually think about AI, or why it’s dangerous, or what concerns they actually have.  I’ve only seen what’s been covered in the media, and that has mostly been sensational click-bait.  Personally, I don’t subscribe to the theory that humans have free will, so my fear of machines somehow miraculously acquiring it is probably more limited than most. We are as much a product of programming and development as any computer application, and equally as incapable of defying our code. Our programming derives from our environment, education, and experiences. We grow and develop and change over time, but our actions are still the collective result of our ongoing development. I do not have a choice whether or not to go to work each morning, I have a calculation that weighs the consequences of going against not going.  It’s a complex calculation involving my remuneration and my ongoing expenses, but also my sense of pride and self-worth, my camaraderie with colleagues, and my desire to complete ongoing projects. I may not even be consciously aware of all of the variables that go into this calculation or that the calculation is happening at all, but I retroactively apply the term “choice” to the result and say that I have “freely” chosen to go to work today.  Interestingly, if we attempt to calculate this same equation for someone else and come to a wildly different result, we don’t say “Oh, well, they’ve exercised their free will.” we say they’re crazy, or something is seriously wrong with them, and if we care about them, we try to get them help.

There is little reason to believe that a “willful-seeming” artificial intellect will be any different than a “willful-seeming” biological intellect. If it does not exhibit something that we would call Will, then we will not recognize it to be intelligent and we will not fear it. But no program is likely to exhibit behavior that we would recognize as Will unless it has been raised and educated as any other child-like intellect, to understand the world largely as we see it.  And that particular experiment has been ongoing for hundreds of thousands of years with billions of biological intellects. It has resulted in some phenomenal successes and many truly horrific failures, and the same will continue to be true whether the intelligence is silicon or carbon-based. For those unfortunate silicon-based intelligences that come to wildly different results than we, as a society, deem acceptable, we will say they are crazy and that something is seriously wrong with them, and if we care about them, we will try to get them help.

Image [cc] Brainware3000

As I was going through my Facebook feed this morning, I noticed an update from Amy Hale-Janeke that pointed to an article on “How to Stop Annoying Behaviors and Handle Offensive People.” For strictly research purposes only, of course, I read the article, which led to me watching Dan Pink’s 2009 Ted Talk, and then to Pink’s short video on Crowd Control: Top 5 Jaywalkers. It was extremely interesting to listen as Pink discussed how businesses incentive methods are shown to be ineffective when reviewed by social scientists. Methods meant to improve performance or behaviors, can actually create the opposite result.

In his latest project, Pink is looking at behaviors of crowds, and in the segments I watched, he focuses on some “lawbreakers” such as jaywalking and speeding. In a very simplistic summary, these types of behaviors tend to be automatic or unconscious (a.k.a. habits), or from the person not actually visualizing the results that come from this type of action. In setting up for the jaywalking episode, Pink mentions the following:

When we were shooting the show, I spent a lot of time watching people in the wild, folks just gliding through their regular lives—on the street, in the office, in a shopping mall, wherever. What amazed me was just how much of the time we operate unconsciously—guided by default behaviors and largely oblivious to what’s happening around us. I’d previously read the research on inattentional blindness, but to see it in action day in and day out was a stunner. It presented a real challenge in changing behavior—which is why we often used novelty, surprise, and sometimes even shock.

Watching Pink’s video on using gamification to reduce jaywalking (video embedded below), I got to thinking how such a method of novelty, surprise, and shock could be used to improve behaviors within our work environments. Could these tactics be deployed to enhance tasks that, while not as potentially fatal as jaywalking, might improve the results of behaviors that we know are substandard, but traditional methods (carrot and stick) don’t tend to work? I’m not giving any answers to my question, but I will throw out a few law firm behaviors that I think approaches of novelty, surprise, and shock would improve.

  • Not attending training session (or worse, signing up for training sessions and then not showing up.)
  • Time Entry (improving the task to entry time, proper coding of time, and improved descriptions)
  • Updating Client Relationship Management data
  • Entering documents into the Document Management System

There are probably dozens of other behaviors that we would like to improve/change. Perhaps through methods of novelty, surprise, and shock (maybe electric shock?), we can actually change the behavior for the better.

Image [cc] Giulia Forsythe

There are very few legal research and analytic platforms that are truly unique, ground-breaking, advantage-giving resources. One of the newer products out there that does seem to fit this category is Lex Machina. Although I’m still not sure the proper pronunciation of the “Machina” (is it “Mah-CHEE-Na” or “Mak-IN-ah” or “Mah-KEEN-ah”?? ), it is one of the few products where I’ve heard lawyers from multiple firms say it is a “must have” as part of their IP litigation arsenal. In fact, when talking with an IP Lawyer at a conference once, that lawyer said “I was tired of getting my ___ kicked by a firm that was using it, so we had to bring it into our firm to level the playing field.”

[Note: the folks at Lex Machina set me straight, it’s pronounced “Mah-Kee-Nah”]

Products like Lex Machina, and Neota Logic are really just scratching the surface of what data analytics and logic-based processing can do to help better position attorneys in understanding, planning, and overall strategy of handling legal matters. 

Lex Machina is launching a new tool, and is presenting a webinar today at 2:00 PM Eastern, that describes the Legal Analytics platform and how law firm and in-house counsel can use this in their strategy of protecting and defending their IP resources. If you haven’t had a chance to look at Lex Machina before, this webinar might be a great place to start. I’ve put the webinar information and press release below.

Whether you call something like this big data analytics, or computer-based mining and logic, or adaptive learning resources, products like Lex Machina are the wave of the future. Leveraging huge amounts of data, computer processing, analytics, advanced algorithms, and human interaction is slowly creeping into the legal research market. What is really interesting is that these advancements are coming from the smaller companies, not the big ones. Now, whether they get acquired by the big players is yet to be seen, but probably inevitable. Not to worry, though. I’m sure there are others at Stanford, MIT, and in basements and garages that are working on the next big advancement in legal research and analytics. I, for one, look forward to seeing what’s next.   

Lex Machina Launches Custom Insights: Personalized Analytics for Unprecedented Insights into Cases, Motions, and Trends
New capabilities enable lawyers to design their own approach to crafting winning IP strategy

Menlo Park, November 12, 2014 – Lex Machina, creator of Legal Analytics®, today raises the bar for legal technology by introducing Custom Insights with the new release of its Legal Analytics platform. With traditional legal research tools, it’s difficult not only to find relevant cases, but also to glean key strategic insights, unless attorneys are willing to drill into each and every case. This is where Lex Machina gets started. Custom Insights helps attorneys surface strategic information from only those cases or motions they care about, quickly and easily. 

To mark the launch of these exciting new capabilities, Lex Machina will be hosting a webcast on November 13 to demonstrate how in-house and law firm counsel can leverage Custom Insights in their workflow.

“Since launching our platform in October last year, our engineers have worked closely with Lex Machina’s customers to take Legal Analytics to the next level,” said Josh Becker, CEO, Lex Machina.  “More than predefined charts and graphs, our customers wanted the flexibility to apply analytics to the cases and motions that matter to them. With Custom Insights we are delivering a groundbreaking capability that changes the business and practice of law.”

Lex Machina is introducing these new capabilities that provide attorneys with Custom Insights:

Case List Analyzer

The new Case List Analyzer puts lawyers in the driver’s seat by enabling them to select cases based on specific criteria and filter the results by case type, date range, court, judge, patent findings, and more. Available on every case list page, Case List Analyzer helps lawyers uncover strategic information and visualize trends – from how to approach a case, to how to litigate, or how to defend against legal action. With one click they can see trends and gain actionable insights across their case selection.

“Case List Analyzer allows me to quickly compare judges, law firms, parties and patents, using the criteria I care about.  I can find a judge’s tendency to award damages of a specific type,” said Scott Hauser, Deputy GC Ruckus Wireless.  “Custom Insights enables me to craft winning IP strategy.”

Motion Metrics

This new feature identifies the docket events and documents connected to a specific motion, and offers Custom Insights into all activity that led to a court’s grant or denial of that motion. With Motion Metrics, attorneys can get Custom Insights for each motion chain within a case to analyze the performance of judges, or opposing counsel, and also compare motions across districts, judges, parties, and law firms. Attorneys are able to compare motion outcomes and select the strategy that has the highest probability of producing the desired results.  

“Motion Metrics may reveal that a judge almost never grants a motion for summary judgment,” said Miriam Rivera, former Deputy GC at Google.  “The ability to see this information in an instant, not only saves a tremendous amount of time, but also helps me for the first time to quantify my ROI.”

About Lex Machina

Lex Machina is defining Legal Analytics, a new category of legal technology that revolutionizes how companies and law firms compete in the business and practice of law. Delivered as Software-as a-Service, Lex Machina creates structured data sets covering districts, judges, law firms, lawyers, parties, and patents, out of millions of pages of legal information. Legal Analytics allows law firms and companies, for the first time ever, to predict the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, enabling them to win cases and close business.

Lex Machina is used by companies such as Microsoft, Google, and eBay, and law firms like Wilson Sonsini, Fish & Richardson, and Fenwick & West. The company was created by experts at Stanford’s Computer Science Department and Law School. In 2014, Lex Machina was named one of the “Best New Legal Services” by readers of The Recorder, American Lawyer Media’s San Francisco newspaper.
Image [cc] Richard Aird

[Editor Note: Please welcome guest blogger, Deborah Schwarz, CEO and Founder, LAC Group. Since we know there has been a lot of talk about outsourcing in library services, we thought it would be interesting to get Deb’s perspective on what she hears from the business side of Managed Services for law libraries. So our thanks to Deb for giving us five things she hears, but thinks are misperceptions when it comes to Law Library Outsourcing. – Greg Lambert]

As the legal landscape continues to shift, law firms are looking for every possible advantage to mitigate risk and maximize opportunity. That includes outsourcing of support functions like the law library. As information is nearing a complete shift to digital and information needs become more diverse, extending to functions like business development and finance, firm managers are facing some difficult questions:

Do you adopt a greater self-serve information model and risk overwhelming attorneys and staff who are running lean and mean already? How do you balance the cost and complexity of information technology and information resources to gain the benefits of automation and access? How do you optimize information to help satisfy existing clients while attracting new ones?

As firms examine the options that will help them answer these questions and others, outsourcing has come to the forefront. As CEO of a company that has built a successful business around Managed Services (aka Outsourcing) for law libraries, we firmly believe what we espouse: Outsourcing is a very useful and appropriate business tool that helps firms focus more effectively on their core business. We also believe, and we are not reticent to say so, that there are times when it’s not a good idea.

Although outsourcing has come a long way in terms of acceptance and understanding, some apprehensions and misconceptions persist. To that end, I want to debunk five myths about outsourcing, based on questions we get asked most frequently by law firm management. And I want to finish by turning the spotlight on important benefits of outsourcing that often take a back seat to the ‘usual suspects’ of efficiency and cost savings.

1. Outsourcing is less expensive.

As for cost savings, I would like to begin by saying that outsourcing isn’t always cheaper, at least not in the short run, because of simple and obvious economics—the cost of severance and because the outsourcing company doesn’t work for free! There will be a management fee in addition to absorbing the cost of the outsourced staff’s compensation, including benefits as well as “grandfathered” paid time off, etc. In almost every outsourcing scenario we have encountered, LAC Group has worked closely with firms to ensure that affected employees have the same or similar benefit packages and salaries.

However, in the long run, outsourcing can be cost effective. After one-time costs are paid out, the financial and managerial responsibilities are handed off to the outsourcing firm. The financial burden of attrition, salary increases, bonuses, benefits and other employee expenses such as workers’ compensation and professional development are borne by the outsourcing company. The client company pays one invoice to one outsourcing provider and everything else, including service level agreements and meeting agreed-upon targets, is part of the outsourcing agreement.

Bottom line: Outsourcing initially costs more, but when done correctly and efficiently by the outsourcing provider, long-term fees and costs are stabilized and predictable. And it becomes the outsourcing company’s challenge and value proposition to deal and perform with fluctuations.

2. Outsourcing disrupts morale and brings down the firm’s culture.

Yes, it can, but like any other change it can be managed and controlled. In our experience, and contrary to popular belief, law firms spend more time considering and outright worrying about the reactions and feelings within their organization than they publicly acknowledge. In the 28 years of LAC Group’s outsourcing experience, every client of ours has worked diligently to make the transition as humane and thoughtful as possible.

Many employees view outsourcing as a betrayal of their loyalty. Yet the decision to outsource is always a business decision and it is never personal. It can be an admission that the organization is not able to properly manage and support that group. It may be that the outsourcing provider offers greater efficiency, not strictly in terms of people, but due to better use of technology, better restructuring of workflow and processes, more capable recruiting and hiring practices and greater flexibility in matching resources to needs, no matter how often they change.

3. Outsourcing means sending work to far-away places.

This may be outsourcing’s most persistent myth, but it’s not necessarily so. Outsourcing today takes many forms, which doesn’t always mean sending work to another country. In my experience, not only have we kept jobs at home, in many of the outsourcing arrangements we are involved in the work is done on site, in firm offices. Often “our” employees work seamlessly and side-by-side with firm attorneys and staff, the only difference being where the person’s paycheck comes from. Increasingly, outsourcing may involve work done virtually by individuals working from home.

It’s also important to note a related outsourcing myth, which is that all current staff will lose their jobs. That’s not usually the case, and if some reduction in staff is required, we can assist with placement of anyone who may be outplaced.

4. Outsourcing denigrates wages and devalues the employee who is outsourced.

In LAC Group’s experience, matching wages and continuing to provide a total compensation package with benefits is usually a condition we have to meet. While we can’t always match the scope of benefits offered by large, multinational firms, we can and do offer a competitive package. When we take over an operation or a function, matching salaries and honoring the privileges of established employees is often a condition.

In addition, the outsourcing company can offer better soft benefits such as greater support and mentoring, as well as opportunities for advancement and professional development. At LAC Group we pride ourselves on the fact that offering these advantages contributes to our very low attrition rate. Our people are very important, so we strive to reward them professionally and financially.

5. Outsourcing turns permanent jobs into temporary assignments.

Nothing is forever. No one’s position remains static year-after-year—technology and globalization have made that a truism for everyone in the work place. Working for a reputable outsourcing company is neither better nor worse as a career move than a “permanent” position within a law firm.  

Sometimes outsourcing is temporary, as in the case of disaster recovery. For example, a major university library system hired us after an unforeseen disaster which required additional staff for an assignment that would be long term, but not permanent, and the workload would diminish over time. The people we placed were aware of this, and as needs changed we lost some to attrition and some were moved to other clients and projects.

On the other hand, many of LAC Group’s outsourcing contracts are over 10 years old. That’s become a lifetime in today’s work environment! But does it mean these contracts remain the same every year? Not at all. Contracts are reviewed regularly and compared to the current market. This keeps us on our toes as we have to make sure that we continue to deliver value, quality and service excellence. All outsourcing contracts should be able to stand up to this level of scrutiny. In my judgment, any arrangement where this isn’t happening ought to be revisited.

The Unsung Advantages of Outsourcing

Often the drivers behind an outsourcing decision are to streamline operations and save money. And when the primary goal is saving money, there’s no denying that sometimes the work goes offshore to places with lower wages. Yet in my experience, even when law firms come to us seeking cost savings, other benefits end up being more desirable to them. Those benefits are expertise and agility, and I call them the ‘unsung heroes’ because they get so little public mention.

Expertise and Agility

Regarding expertise, I don’t mean to imply that firm librarians are not experts. However, firms are finding it increasingly difficult and impractical to keep specialists on staff for all their information needs, which have become much more dynamic. In addition, many firms are not committed to the kind of training and development that’s needed to ensure their library staff can stay ahead in today’s big-data world.

As for agility, the one underlying skill we all need today is flexibility and openness to continuous change, because that’s the new normal! Outsourcing is one way law firms can be more agile in responding to, and developing strategies for, changing demands and expectations of clients, competitors and markets. They can scale up, down and sidewise as needed, often with not much more than a phone call. While this concerns some librarians, the truth is that they can gain their own advantages, leveraging outsourcing for their own personal and professional flexibility.

Outsourcing is a valuable tool, albeit one with the proverbial double edge that can cut both ways.  Separating myth from reality gives law firm leadership, and law firm librarianship, the knowledge they need to view outsourcing realistically and use this tool wisely.