Toby Brown and I got a sneak peek yesterday at Bloomberg BNA’s new Big Law Business community site, and we liked what we saw. We all know that Big Law is big business, but there are very few resources out there from vendors that cover current stories and trends of the business side of a large law firm, and even fewer that promote a community to comment and contribute. Most of us have relied upon bloggers to fill the gap, but a resource like this coming from Bloomberg Law is a welcome new addition.

The site is free to access, but content contribution will be limited to those of us that work within large law firms (AmLaw200), in-house counsel, thought leaders within the industry, and vendors within the industry that want to contribute useful content to the community through articles, white papers, videos, and other (non-commercial) type content.

BBNA’s David Peikin gave us the tour and said that “[T]he community enables legal executives to share best practices leveraging the insight and wisdom of those in similar roles at other firms and supports peer-to-peer engagement with focused, role-based content areas for managing partners, in-house counsel, technologists and marketers.”

There are no walled communities within the site, so everyone can see all the content regardless of what type of role you play within your firm.

The site is now open, so go check it out and see if this is a community you’d like to join. Bloomberg BNA’s press release on the Big Law Business site is below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
David Peikin
703.341.5900
dpeikin@bna.com

BLOOMBERG BNA LAUNCHES BIG LAW BUSINESS, 
COMMUNITY WEBSITE FOCUSED ON THE BUSINESS OF LAW

Arlington, Va. (March 5, 2015) — Bloomberg BNA today announced the launch of Big Law Business, a first-of-its-kind online community that helps law firm executives and in-house counsel be even more successful in addressing opportunities and challenges created by accelerated disruption in the legal market related to the business of law.  Big Law Business enables legal executives to learn how to better manage day-to-day business, finance and technology issues while also sharing best practices.

Big Law Business helps legal executives and professional managers better serve their internal and external clients through access to a wealth of targeted content — perspectives, news and insight, data, and resources — created by Bloomberg BNA editors and thought leaders in the legal market.  The community also supports peer-to-peer engagement in focused, role-based content areas for managing partners, in-house counsel, technologists and marketers and also will offer related online and offline programs.

“Big Law Business provides access to a wealth of robust content, including timely news on the business of law from our dedicated editorial staff and the rich data and in-depth analysis the market has come to rely on from Bloomberg BNA and Bloomberg Law,” said Scott Mozarsky, President, Cross Platform Businesses, Bloomberg BNA.  “Big Law Business features articles, podcasts, videos and white papers, enabling legal executives to stay on top of the latest trends affecting the business of law.  And the community will provide visitors ample opportunities to engage with those in similar roles at law firms and corporations and benefit from shared insights and wisdom.”

You can follow Big Law Business on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Bloomberg BNA
Bloomberg BNA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomberg, is a leading source of legal, regulatory, and business information for professionals. Its network of more than 2,500 reporters, correspondents, and leading practitioners delivers expert analysis, news, practice tools, and guidance — the information that matters most to professionals. Bloomberg BNA’s authoritative coverage spans a full range of legal practice areas, including tax & accounting, labor & employment, intellectual property, banking & securities, employee benefits, health care, privacy & data security, human resources, and environment, health & safety.

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The legal market consolidated a bit more today in Canada
as DLAPiper LLP announced that Davis LLP will be joining the Swiss verein’s North
American arm as its newest member firm in April 2015.  The Am Law Daily, summed up the change in Canada over the past few years
the best:

“DLA Piper is just the latest
firm to expand north, always with struggling mid-tier firms. Two other firms
organized as international vereins—Dentons and Baker & McKenzie—were more successful in
absorbing groups of refugees from the dissolving Heenan Blaikie last year.
Dentons had already entered the market in 2013, combining
with 560-lawyer Fraser Milner Casgrain.

Norton Rose was the first, sealing
a deal with 450-lawyer Ogilvy Renault in 2010. Calgary-based Macleod
Dixon joined
it in 2011, and Fulbright & Jaworski in
2012, bringing yet another U.S. firm under the same global umbrella with a
Canadian one.”

Rich in natural resources and backed by a stable banking
and finance industry, Canada is ever more attractive to companies and law firms
alike. As a resident Canadian amongst the 3 Geeks, I wanted to share and
reaffirm that there is more to Canada than hockey, beer, Coffee Crisp and ketchup
chips and I am not the only one who is taking notice.

 

Okay… it’s Friday. It’s snowing in Dallas, and it’s a bit slow around the office. But, when I saw that Reed Elsevier was going to change its name to RELX, I thought maybe it was a joke to draw attention away from the black/blue vs. gold/white dress discussion. Apparently not.

I’m sure there was a big Think-Tank of Marketing Gurus involved in this decision, but on the surface it looks like it was a room of Gen Y’s that had never heard of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood… otherwise, they would have seen snarky posts like this one… or this one… or this one, coming.

Not sure what CEO Erik Engstrom is trying to pull off here, but I think for the next few weeks, he’s going to catch a bit of ribbing for this decision.

Does R E L X stand for:

R: Reed
E: Elsevier
LX: LexisNexis??

If so, then maybe those of us in the legal industry can RELX… I mean, relax. The RELX Group, plc became official on February 26th, with the official, and final move to the name coming on July 1st this year. The relxgroup.com website is already active. Quite Frankie… I mean, frankly, it’s a bit confusing.

As we find out more behind the decision to change the name to a four-letter acronym, let me leave you with some great lyrics to a great song, and see if Mr. Engstrom is up to make making it his intention, and keep scheming those schemes.

But shoot it in the right direction
Make making it your intention-ooh yeah
Live those dreams
Scheme those schemes
Got to hit me
Hit me
Hit me with those laser beams
 
 
Good luck getting rid of that earworm.

Image [cc] slworking2

Recently I participated on a panel on the future of the profession for the National Conference of Bar Presidents and walked away thoroughly convinced the profession is doomed.

For those of you unfamiliar with how bar associations make decisions, I offer the following story:

If someone asked for permission to go to the bathroom, a bar would form a task force (or commission) to fully examine whether going to the bathroom was a good idea and to highlight all of the pitfalls around bathrooms. After 18 months they would issue a report stating that going to the bathroom is generally a good thing and should be promoted to those who need to go, but only if all of the potential negative impacts have been understood, limited and communicated to those considering bathroom breaks. The report would not actually authorize the request to use the bathroom. It would be left to the Bar Board to actually enact a rule permitting said activity. The Board rarely follows up as they are busy forming the next task force and would not want to take any heat for authorizing such a dramatic change.

In the meantime, the guy who made the original request either went, or died.

The presentation panel actually offered a real-life example, that broke this mold – at least in some fashion. The panel participant from Washington, discussed how they are implementing Limited Licensure Legal Technicians (LLLT). That effort began in 2001, culminating in the first licensees coming online this Spring. But in this circumstance, the Supreme Court actually pushed this through, against the wishes of the bar. The result was one small change to the market that took 14 years to implement.

And here is where things got ugly – the audience focused in on the details of the LLLT program, trying to poke holes in it. This audience was made up of Bar Presidents and Executive Directors. These people are well positioned to drive change across the profession. But instead of talking about how they could adopt similar changes in an accelerated fashion, they were looking for ways to kill it.

I sat there as long as I could listening to this. Finally I could take it no longer and interjected. I “suggested” that a failure to drive disruptions would lead to others moving in and taking over the legal market. With some internal fortitude, I was able to avoid using swear words.

After the presentation a number of attendees from state bars sat down to chat with me about all of this. A universal theme was that whatever they might do to disrupt the market and drive innovation will be met with strong resistance by the bar membership. As I see it, bar associations have little to gain by pushing on this issue, even though they have a lot to lose by doing nothing. Their members will not abide any efforts short of turning the clock back. I gave numerous suggestions for how a bar might drive change to the group. All were met with exacerbation and a recognition that any efforts will be met with broad and strong resistance.

For a long time I have held out hope that the legal profession would step up and address the needs of the market: for both lawyers and clients. After this experience, I have come to the hard conclusion: That is not going to happen. As smart as lawyers are, their training and experience have made them a reactive and dogmatic group. In their minds, the way they have been doing it is the only way to keep doing it. Anything else is a threat to the profession and their practice specifically.

This all saddens me. Lawyers hold a sacred duty to the rule of law. Their inability to act means the rule of law will be handed off to someone else – someone without that obligation. As a society we will all be worse off.

If the medical profession is any indicator, we should fully expect insurance companies and or perhaps banks to become our future legal service providers.

Welcome to the future.

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.