This post originally appeared on the LexisNexis Future of Law Blog under the title, Lessons from Blockbuster: re-engineer, don’t disappear

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/blockbusters-fall-and-netflixs-rise-in-pictures/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1

In a recent session at LegalTech NY, I spoke about what I consider to be the great myth of disruptive technology; that we need to be on the hunt for the next big thing to set our firms apart and leave our competition in the dust. This is a fool’s errand. As I said in my talk, there is no technology that you can buy, build, or even imagine that you can simply drop into your existing workflow and reasonably expect it to disrupt anything other than your existing workflow.

To illustrate my point I presented the old war-horse of disruptive technology fables, Netflix vs. Blockbuster. At the height of their success Blockbuster Video had 9,000 stores, 60,000 employees, and nearly 6 Billion US Dollars in revenue. Six years later they filed for bankruptcy, and in January of this year they finally closed the last of their US stores. Meanwhile, Netflix video streaming today accounts for more than a third of all US internet traffic during prime time hours, and Netflix is the darling of Wall Street. The moral of this story, as it is generally told, is that streaming video is a disruptive technology that brought down Blockbuster, catapulted Netflix to success, and up-ended the entire video rental industry.

But like most fables, that’s just a little too simplistic. In fact, far from being a primary disruptive force, streaming video was just the last piece of a large disruptive puzzle that Netflix had been putting together for years. The primary disruption actually took place long before streaming video across the internet was even a viable distribution method.

When Netflix burst on the scene in the late 90s they had a DVD rental by mail business. You went to their website and signed up for a monthly subscription that entitled you to a number of simultaneous movie rentals. Then you looked through their catalog of available movies, selected those you’d like to see and the order you’d like to see them in, and they mailed you the first few DVDs on your list. When you were done watching one, you slid it back into the envelope, mailed it back to Netflix, and they’d send the next movie on your list. The best part was that you could keep movies for as long as you wanted and there were never any late fees.

This was a huge departure from Blockbuster’s model of 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees, charging a fee at the point of rental, and collecting massive late fees when you forgot to return the movie by the time you promised you would. In fact, a substantial portion of that $6 billion in revenue was directly attributable to those late fees.

It was common knowledge in the late 90s that streaming video would one day be the norm, even if it wasn’t entirely clear exactly how it would work or what it would look like. The technology was out there; it was just waiting for bandwidth and computing power to catch up. While they were waiting, Netflix built a video rental engine that could accommodate a faster distribution method, or indeed, any distribution method that came along. And Blockbuster just kept raking in the dough with the old model that had served them so well for decades. That model continued to work beautifully, right up until it didn’t and Blockbuster went out of business.

The moral of the story is not to go out and find the next big thing before anyone else does, but to re-engineer your business now to accommodate what you already know is coming. We know what the next great innovations in legal service delivery are, even if we don’t know exactly how they are going to work or what they are going to look like. Now is the time to build a legal service delivery engine that can accommodate project management, automation, artificial intelligence, and extreme transparency to clients.

The sad truth of the Blockbuster tale is that despite their market dominance, and their vast resources, they had no way to adopt streaming video without completely undermining the rest of their business. Sometimes I wonder how many law firms are in the same position now.

Image [cc] Kaptain Kobald

There was a very interesting article on Neota Logic’s blog yesterday that has really had me thinking ever since I read it (and re-read it a few more times.) The article, what will the lawyers do now? Dancing With Robots, The Second Machine Age, and The Hammer Song, covers the whole issue of “running with technology” versus “running against technology” in the legal space, but there was one section on legal services and the second machine age that has really made me think about where we are as an industry, where most of us are within this second machine age, and who will be the winners and who will be the losers. Let’s breakdown the six “steam engines of legal services” that Neota Logic identifies:

  1. Online legal research, the law’s first foray into big and digital data For those of us in the law library and research fields, this is our baby. We’ve been the engineer and conductor of this steam engine for the past thirty-odd years. It is one of those technologies that you would have thought by now would be such a standard in the industry that everyone practicing law would be experts. However, we all know there are still Luddites out there that fight this advancement, or simply ignore the technology as much as possible. In fact, think of the number of attorneys that proudly say things like “I don’t even know what my [insert online resource here] username and password is.” So we keep pushing to limit those that ignore the technology and work on those (usually, but not always) younger attorneys to keep them up to date on the latest changes, advancements, and innovations that help them practice law more effectively.
  2. Electronic mail and networks, the harbinger of infinite interconnectedness
    Email has been the biggest bringer of change in the way lawyers conduct business, maybe since the business of law began. No other technology has been as widely adopted as email. However, the use of email has become stagnant, and many attorneys use it the same way today as they did when they adopted it back in the 90s when they signed up for AOL or CompuServ email addresses. They use it as de facto databases and as historical archives. In a way, email has begun to eat its own tail and its usefulness has plateaued and in a way has become a barrier for new and better communications tools. In addition to email, the networked computer system has been so integrated into the daily life of law firms, that when the network is down, work comes to a standstill. Email and the network are the two big steam engines in this category. However, items like Document Management Systems, Client Relationship Management Systems, and shared network resources have also entered the day-to-day lives of  the law firm, but not nearly as widely adopted as the first two engines.
  3. Document automation, drafting contracts with software rather than pencils
    Most, if not all, firms have these resources. The idea being that no document should be created from scratch and you should use the wealth of prior documents to assist you in the creation of the next document. Whether it is add-ins for Microsoft Word like Westlaw Form Builder or standalone products like HotDocs, the process of document automation and drafting tools should be something that every transactional attorney understands and uses. As most of you may have figured out by now, that is typically not the case. Once again, a technology is there that can significantly assist the attorney, reduce risk, and decrease the amount of time and effort spent by the attorney, and decrease the cost to the client, yet the struggle continues to do things the way we’ve always done them, and fight the advancements in technology.
  4. Search, from Recommind for lawyers’ own stuff to Google for everything else
    Ah, search. Only slightly behind email when it comes to overall technology adoption by lawyers. Of course, the easiest (and most widely used) is Google. Many attorneys start (and sadly some end) their research with Google. Librarians brought in an internal version of Westlaw and Lexis with resources like westkm and Lexis Search Advantage that mimicked the legal search tools’ capabilities to identify legal citations and structured language. IT Departments brought in Enterprise Search Tools like Recommind to index everything else. All of those great tools still pale in comparison to the comfort and amount of use that Google still plays in the everyday life of the attorney. When a technology like Google is so overwhelmingly adopted, it makes it that much more difficult to get attorneys to see, and use, other technologies that actually create a better result simply because they are so comfortable with Google. In fact, most of the new search tools attempt to mimic Google’s simplicity in order to trick/convince/ease the attorney away from the massive search engine. As most of us are finding out, that’s still a difficult feat to accomplish, and as Ryan McClead mentioned in his Why You Can’t Find Anything At Work post, user expectations and the reality of Enterprise Search tools don’t exactly mesh very well.
  5. Predictive Coding (a/k/a technology-assisted review), replacing armies of junior lawyers
    This technology is maturing in the e-discovery market, but I think it is still in its infancy when it comes to its overall potential. Replacing hundreds of lawyers with technology has been the steady mantra of Predictive Coding, and as courts remove barriers to this technology, the e-discovery cash cow that has helped many law firms over the past decade, may start to dry up. I’ve been a big believer that Predictive Coding has been too narrowly focused on document review, and that there is much more opportunities for law firms to use this technology to better index internal documents, use it to enhance project management, and tweak it for projects that we normally hire data stewards to conduct. Document Review attorneys aren’t the only ones that will eventually lose their jobs to this technology.
  6. Expert systems, context-specific guidance at scale and speed
    This is where products like Neota Logic and in some regards products like KMStandards (formerly kiiac) are making inroads to the legal market. Processes that rely upon rules, precedence, and fact sets will be automated. Those that don’t believe this are destined to find themselves left out of this great change that is coming to the legal industry. This steam engine is different from the five previous advancements. Expert systems will create ways for savvy law firms to produce revenue streams that are completely unlinked to the time their attorneys spend on client work. Law firms will work with these providers to leverage the firm’s knowledge, experiences, and expertise to create products that are licensed to the client and supported by the firm and provider. The client will use these tools without the aid of the firm, and this can open up opportunities for law firms to recapture work that was shifted in-house years ago. Although there is great opportunity here, it also means that those that ignore the advancements in technology will be left behind and eventually marginalized.

When you hear reactions to these technologies in the form of “clients pay me to practice law and advise them, not to be a techy” remind the attorneys that this list of six steam engines aren’t about the future of the legal profession, they are about today’s legal profession. If they can’t handle these six advancements, then how can they be expected to handle the next big change that is coming?

Image [cc] Allen Sheffield

As an observer of the legal pricing market, I try to keep a keen eye on the underlying, economic forces driving changes. I have previously posted on the internal forces acting on in-house counsel to save money. And recently, I am seeing a stronger emergence of another aspect of this force.

To set the stage for this, I hearken back to previous comments on how clients are segmenting their work into first, second and third tier work. The thinking around this concept is that clients are implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) recognizing that not all of their work requires a Tier One solution. As a result they are applying more and more pricing pressure to their outside firms.

But what is the shape of this pressure?

Are they actually segmenting their work out and aligning their pricing sensitivities around that? It doesn’t appear to be happening that way. One piece of evidence for this is that clients ask for “across the board discounts.” Whatever discount they negotiate, they want it to apply to all of their work and to all timekeepers within a firm. Rarely do clients exempt out certain types of work or specific timekeepers from a discount. On its face, this shows clients are not thoughtfully segmenting their work by pricing tier.

You might say, “So What?” It just means they are getting better deals on all of their work.

Two thoughts:

First – This means clients are not necessarily making cost decisions based on value, even though the market claims they are. To put this into context, consider a client getting both Tier 2 Litigation work and Tier 1 Tax work from the same firm. These two services have vastly different value propositions for a client. Run-of-the-mill litigation is something a client must tolerate, but it is not a make-or-break situation. Whereas top-line tax efforts can easily reduce a client’s tax burden by substantial amounts. Yet more often than not, clients will lump these two together under the same discount arrangement.

Second – Guess which work drives the discount level? And that’s the moral of this story. Clients, or more accurately, the market is pricing most services using a Tier 2 value filter for all of their work.

This is further evidence of the chaotic nature of pricing in the legal market. Pricing everything with a Tier 1 filter was not logical, but neither is this Tier 2 approach. As an economist, I yearn for a rational pricing market for legal services. Heck – as a someone in legal pricing I want it too. My prognostication is that it is going to take awhile before we see that – if we ever do.

In the meantime, I remain entertained by all of this.

Last week, AALL announced that it has selected HBR Consulting to lead a six-month project on a researched-based study that will identify the return on investment (ROI) of having a law library in an Academic, Private, and Court environment. As I had mentioned back in November when the Request for Proposal went out from AALL, this is the crown jewel project of AALL’s current President, Steven P. Anderson. I have had a first-row seat on this project being on the AALL Executive Board and can tell you that Anderson has been very passionate about this idea and how AALL can help those who work in law libraries by providing specific metrics on the value that they bring to their organizations. I am looking forward to the final product that AALL and HBR Consulting, hopefully sometime later this year.

Here is the official Press Release that came out last week.

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Contact: Kate Hagan,
AALL Executive Director
312-205-8016
Khagan@aall.org

AALL Selects HBR Consulting to Conduct ROI Study

Chicago 2/27/2014—The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) today announced that HBR Consulting has been selected to conduct a research-based study on the important role law libraries play in today’s legal community.

“The objective of this project is to produce a comprehensive study of the return on investment and the consequent value proposition that law libraries provide,” said AALL President Steven P. Anderson.

“The last several years have brought fundamental changes to the legal profession and business of law,” he added. “These changes have served as an impetus for law libraries to transform their operations and services in varied and profound ways—and it is now imperative that law libraries demonstrate the value they bring in concise, measurable ways.”

Once the study is finalized, a full report with findings will be released. The report will include important metrics to calculate the return on investment that legal research and information professionals provide within the legal community. AALL will use the report to develop strategies for communicating the ROI of law libraries.

HBR Consulting is a global leader in legal research and information solutions. The HBR project team will be led by Kris Martin, Senior Director, and Constance Ard, Consultant, and consist of additional HBR professionals.

The project will begin immediately and should take about six months to complete.

About AALL
The American Association of Law Libraries was founded in 1906 to promote law libraries’ value to the legal and public communities; foster the law librarianship profession and provide leadership in the legal information field. With nearly 5,000 members, AALL represents law librarians and related professionals who are affiliated with law firms; law schools; corporate legal departments; courts; and local, state and federal government agencies. For more information, visit AALLNET.org.

About HBR Consulting
HBR Consulting—previously Hildebrandt Baker Robbins and the former consulting arm of Thomson Reuters—is internationally recognized as the leading business and technology operations consultancy in the legal industry. Since being taken private in 2011, HBR Consulting continues to expand on its foundation as a leading provider of consulting services to the legal industry. With more than three decades of experience, we help law firms and law departments plan, implement and measure business, information and technology initiatives with a specific focus on increasing operational efficiency and effectiveness. HBR Consulting helps clients holistically address their needs in the areas of Information Technology Services, Strategic Sourcing and Business Operations, and Law Department Consulting. For more information, visit www.hbrconsulting.com.

At last week’s Ark Conference on Law Firm Library Best Practices, I had a little fun with the audience by using Poll Everywhere to create live audience polling questions. My friend, Marlene Gebauer and I conducted five polls during our presentation, and the audience could answer by going to a webpage and clicking the answer, texting an answer to an SMS number, or by Tweeting. (Although, through an error on my end, I forgot to turn on the Tweeting option so that ended up no working.) Because the audience was pretty small, and as most of you know, I am extremely cheap/frugal, I used Poll Everywhere’s free version that allows up to 40 responses per poll.

I thought that it was a big it with the audience, and because Poll Everywhere allows you to embed the Poll into your PowerPoint presentation through an add-in, we could watch the answers come in live. When I present at AALL this summer, I am going to upgrade the subscription (and actually shell out some money) to use this for the larger audience. I highly suggest that if you are presenting to an audience and would like instant feedback, that you take a look at Poll Everywhere and test it out for yourself.

Here are the five questions I asked, and the resulting poll.

I heard a lot of grumbling from BigLaw attendees at Reinvent Law NY about the consumer legal app commercials sprinkled in and amongst the other presenters.  The easiest and most common target was Shake.

Shake is an app for creating legal contracts on the fly from your phone. You answer a few simple questions, the contract is compiled, you can review it and sign right on the phone, then hand your phone to the other party to sign, or email it to them. Simple consumer level document automation in your pocket, resulting in legally binding agreements.  Boy, I wish I had Shake back in my freelance theater days.

But the most frustrating comment I heard was, “Yeah, I guess it’s cool, it’s just not relevant to what we do.” And I heard this from respected, intelligent, forward thinking people in our industry. 

For the sake of argument, I will grant that in it’s current form this particular app is not relevant to BigLaw.  However, I beg you to look beyond the app’s current use. Look just beyond the shiny, colorful, consumer friendly UI, and imagine the possibilities. Imagine sitting in a contract negotiation with a similar app, tapping in negotiated points on a tablet as the app highlights potential concerns for further discussion. Then at the end of the meeting imagine emailing both sides preliminary agreements to be poured over by their armies of attorneys. What corporate counsel wouldn’t love that?  What firm is going to give it to them?  Why does it have to be a law firm?  Why not Shake?
 
I don’t know anybody at Shake, but they seem like pretty smart people.  Their stated mission is “to make the law accessible, understandable and affordable for consumers and small businesses.” In other words, “don’t worry BigLaw, we’re not coming after you.” But scroll down below their mission statement to their Principals and Beliefs and you will begin to get a whiff of much greater ambition.

  • We are not afraid to be bold, push the envelope, and challenge the status quo
  • We are driven by what legal transactions can and will be, not what they have been historically
  • We value innovative design and superior user experiences
  • We are a technology company solving a legal problem, not a legal company trying to understand technology
  • We believe that the legal market is 1) huge 2) inefficient and 3) underserved by technology and 4) begging for change
  • We believe that significant change in the legal industry will be driven by consumers and small businesses, not by lawyers and law firms

Every law firm should create their own list of Principals and Beliefs and immediately adopt the first, second, third, and fifth bullets directly from Shake’s list. But make no mistake, bullets four and six are shots across our bows. Shake may not seem relevant to you right now, and I bet they like it that way.

I’m not sure how I missed this big news coming out of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, but it is something that has made me very happy, and very proud to have played a small part over a decade ago. Peter Martin pointed out on his blog that the Oklahoma Supreme Court, as of January 1, 2014, has become the official publisher of the state’s appellate court decisions and will distribute those decisions through The Oklahoma State Courts Network (http://www.oscn.net). All other publishers, including West Publishing, will be unofficial publishers. This is a big deal, considering that West had been the official publisher for sixty years. Here is a blurb from the Oklahoma Supreme Court decision, 2013 OK 109:

(1) Effective January 1, 2014 the Oklahoma Supreme Court will become the official publisher of decisions of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals. The Oklahoma State Courts Network at www.oscn.net shall be the repository of official versions of the published decisions of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals. Such decisions will become official upon the placement of the respective court’s official seal at the beginning of the published decision.
(2) The Oklahoma Bar Journal, West Publishing Company, and other publishers will continue to be unofficial publishers of decisions of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals.

I’ll ask around to see if I can find out more information behind the decision and write when I know something more. Again, Peter Martin’s post goes into some further detail on what it actually means for a state to publish its own decisions, use a vendor-neutral citation system, and keep those decisions accurate and available.

Thanks to @caminick and those at Justia for pointing this out to me. It is really nice seeing the work started in 1997 by Justice Kauger and my fellow OU Law School classmate, Kevin King, come to fruition. I had the pleasure of managing the Court’s public website from 1999-2002.

If you’re going to submit documents with citations to unpublished decisions to US International Trade Court Commission Administrative Judge Dee Lord, you’re going to have to make sure it has Westlaw citations and not Lexis. In Judge Lord’s ITC Order [pdf] she ordered the parties to change the “incorrect” LEXIS citations for unpublished decisions and resubmit the briefs and reply briefs with WESTLAW citations.

The parties’ post trial briefs and reply briefs include several incorrect legal citations and citations to LEXIS databases for unpublished decisions, which are no longer available to the USITC. To ensure that the cited legal authority is considered, the parties are hereby ordered to review their briefs and verify the accuracy of their citations. The parties shall file corrected briefs, no later than February 14,2014, using Bluebook formatting for citations, fixing any errors in the citations and including WESTLAW citations for any unpublished decisions (including USITC orders and opinions).

Judge Lord joined the ITC Bench in September last year, and it would seem (and I am hoping) that this is her preference to how she wants briefs filed and not a larger trend. Since according to the USITC website [pdf, page 21], decisions can be researched on both Westlaw and Lexis, it would seem that both citations would be accepted by the USITC. However, the part in Judge Lord’s decision that says that Lexis unpublished decisions “are no longer available to the USITC”, may be driving this decision and thus creating an “incorrect LEXIS” citation.

This type of decision could mean that anyone submitting documents to the USITC would have to use Westlaw in order to submit “correct” citations. Let’s hope not!! Of course, it would be great if the courts would use a universal citation for their published and unpublished opinions, but that might be just too much to ask…

[Hat tip to Amy for pointing this out, and to Mark for getting me the USITC mention of using Westlaw or Lexis for USITC research.]

[Ed. Note: I incorrectly referred to the ITC as International Trade Court. I should have said International Trade Commission. – GL 2/15/2014]

Note: My good friend, Michael Robak, from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, Law School attended the ReInvent Law NYC conference, and has a guest post of his experiences. I had all kinds of good intentions to make it to the conference this year, but alas, my day job and a Partner Retreat scheduled for the same day got in the way. Thanks to Michael for sharing his experiences with us.

Greg – I am heartened to learn that you had a ticket for Reinvent Law NYC 2014 and were all set to go so you could see it for yourself.  Truly sorry that your work kept you from attending because, in my view, Dan Katz and Renee Newman Knake created another terrific and thought provoking event!
What I found very interesting is that I couldn’t really compare NYC to the Silicon Valley event because even though the subject matter was similar it contained its own unique energy and vibe.  I’m sure there were quite a few people who had been at both or had followed via the “prism of twitter” (which is no way shape or form like actually attending a conference, but that’s my view) and have different views.  The commentary is already beginning to fill up the “blog-o-spheres”, so let me add some more.

Held at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, we were warned of a strict adherence to the fire code’s people limits, so at least two emails warned in the two days before the event.  The event was free but emails let you know that even if you had a ticket reserved you still might not get in because they conference was “oversold”, so best to get there early.

The doors opened at 8 a.m., so I showed up at around 7:20 to find a few people already gathered.  One of those was Monica Bay editor in chief of ALM’s Law Technology News who had just finished putting on one of the best LegalTech and CIO Summit shows I’ve ever attended.  So it gave me a chance to visit and pitch an article idea (we law librarians should be writing for LTN, although I recognize for some of us this doesn’t quite qualify as peer reviewed scholarship, it’s where our writing should be seen).  Also, a shout out to 3 Geek guest blogger, Ryan Mclead, whose presentation was terrific and Ed Walters’ talk at the CIO summit one of his funniest/thought provoking best.
[ed note: after Ryan’s post from yesterday, Michael may want to take back his shout out to Ryan.]

While waiting at that early hour I also had the great good fortune to meet Andrew Weltchek, a practicing solo attorney in New York who knew nothing about the conference but had received an email and was intrigued by some of the presentation titles.  I say good fortune because, since he was not one of the usual suspects, it was wonderful to engage in conversation about the speakers and content in a way that helped me think through why I think there is so much to what Dan and Renee have done with their Reinvent Law lab.

This was such a fantastic venue for its history, but no liquids were allowed in the Great Hall, creating a situation where the coffee break was offered in the very narrow corridor outside the hallway and the coffee placed somewhat in the middle and if, like me, you sat on one particular side of the hall, the coffee and coffee line were between you and the restroom.  Which led to my having to explain to more than one caffeine deprived person that I really wasn’t cutting into the coffee line that I really was just trying to get to the restroom.  I changed seats at each break thereafter to avoid such issues.  Plus it was just cool to see the stage from different parts of the auditorium.

But narrow break space and no wifi aside, there were 40 speakers at the event including Richard Susskind as the end speaker.  There were a lot of great talks, lots of ideas, and I’m writing to you because I’ve already seen push back from some who attended (and some who just followed the conference) on whether this was really a great event, or just more of the same old pablum.
I’m writing to again explain why I think this is the real deal (and what I mean by dealier) but also to tell my brethren law librarians that they need to pay particular attention  to what is happening here because it signifies opportunities amidst all the hype of doomed law libraries.

Let me start with some particular highlights for me and see if I can unite them as a theme within the conference.  This is hardly a comprehensive review but a snapshot of some of the talks and ideas that particularly resonated with me.

First, for me, was Paul Lippe’s talk, Legal by Design.  This idea of the need for thinking about designing service was woven throughout the day, particularly again with Margaret Hagan’s talk later on.  I particularly enjoyed Paul’s describing his own early days of working to re-conceptualize the delivery of legal services with “the cabal” of Susskind, Carr, and Chandler.  And discussing his current work, after re-entering the legal industry a few years ago, in trying to push along what he thought surely should have been accomplished by now.  Paul’s talk is when I first thought talking about “design” meant we are talking fundamentally about law as an information intensive industry much in need of a UX rethink.  The next talk I thoroughly enjoyed was David Howarth’s Law as Engineering.  I’ve had his book on my desk for the last couple of months because it explains well that, again, we are talking about information systems that are subject to design principles.  Or, more correctly, subject to rendering as drawings and schema.  Librarians, of all people, should be able to grasp this concept best of all, particularly those of us who know how (and love) to use Visio to bring clarity to the systems that surround us.

Now, here is where the “dealier” part comes in; the next presentation that grabbed me wasn’t so much of a talk as it was a real time presentation of all the folks in the room who have gotten venture capital backing for startups in the legal space.  Joshhttp://www.lxbn.com/2014/02/07/joshua-kubicki-shines-light-legal-startups-reinvent-law-nyc/ua Kubicki’s presentation had him asking all the members of the audience who had been funded as a legal start up to come up on stage.  People started pouring on stage to provide stark evidence of the $458 million that has been bet on such startups.  Now, as was said throughout the day, a lot of these will fail.  But, as Kyle Westaway said in his opening talk, you have to be smart enough to know whether to pivot or persevere, i.e., your idea didn’t work, should you pivot and go elsewhere or tweak and correct and persevere.  The other talk that particularly reinforced this “dealier” aspect was David Perla’s.  David is the co-founder of Panagea3 and his talk asked whether we were at the stage of a number of new legal industry business forms or something just before.  He took a number of the startups (many of whose founders were in the room) and described a taxonomy of “new life forms” which will most likely lead to newer and better forms of business after a time of evolution.  I highly recommend watching all the videos but his is particularly interesting for the way he describes the “pre-Cambrian” life forms.

One of the ventures he described in the legal research space was Judicata which had been presented earlier in the day by Itai Gurari.  What I thought was useful from Itai’s presentation was his showing a picture of Thomas Edison’s first phone and identifying how John West developed the topic and key number system at roughly the same time.  There was no new legal research analog for the iphone Itai then showed. 

The other talks that particularly drew me in were:  the “T shaped” lawyer talk by Amani Smathers, in which she took a look at how IBM developed human capital and identified similar skill sets needed for the 21st century lawyer.  Her idea was the long downward part of the T was the deep lawyer domain knowledge but the skill set placed in the top of the T were a mix of tech and business skills.  Also, the previously mentioned Margaret Hagan talk on using design to create smarter and better access to justice for the consumer and, of course,  Richard Susskind’s talk.  His talk was really worth the day long wait since he neatly, I think, identified the stages that have happened and are happening on the way to 2038 when law should, in his view, finally look fundamentally different.  Or, rather, should be expressed along the lines he began writing about back in 1988.

I think I can sum up my highlights by saying the practice of law is information intensive and governed by a series of identifiable rules, business processes, and work flows.  Many, if not most, of the legal startups are looking at the delivery of legal services and identifying the processes that occur, the artifacts that fall out of those processes and asking why does it have to be that way? is this the best we can do to deliver the services of an information intensive industry?  So, to think in Paul Lippe’s terms of Legal by Design, as law librarians, as an information professionals, we should be at the center of this movement that seeks to explain the business of law as a developed repository of information and a delivery of information, on behalf of the client seeking a trusted advisor to assist with the nature of their law problem.  Law librarians can help explain, guide, and provide an integrative view of the legal system in the service of rethinking how best to deliver service.  Really, it is about information governance, a term entering its second or third year as a proper buzzword at LegalTech. 

Basically Ediscovery has opened the lid on how poorly organization’s information systems handle the ebb and flow of information, the connections between people and knowledge, within organizations.  So I don’t use the term as described at LegalTech.  Instead, I would seek to co-opt this term, “Information governance”, for law librarians.  I would say we are in the best position to help with this discussion because we can bring clarity to this information intensive industry and its rules and business processes and work flows.  With clarity there stands a chance for lawyers (and others) to make a good living and provide greater access to justice…. In my humble opinion.   My thoughts here are still a work in progress but, to paraphrase Dana Carvey’s grumpy old man, “dang nab it” we librarians ought to be in the thick of all this reinvention.  Thanks for letting me get the word out.  And, as I say, check out the videos, much better than relying on a Twitter feed.

http://www.susskind.com/images/book-tomorrows-lawyers.jpg

During the first week in February every year e-discovery vendors descend on the New York Hilton for E-Discovery Week LegalTech NY.  The rest of the legal technology vendors set up shop in nearby hotels and pilfer attendees away for customer forums and individual demos. It becomes increasingly difficult to find people who admit to coming to New York that week to actually attend LTNY.  They may go to a session or two, or breeze through the vendor hall, but most of the people I meet claim to come for one on one vendor meetings and other festivities taking place away from the Hilton.

This year’s LTNY was followed by ReInvent Law NYC, a TED-style event presenting forty or so short presentations about new approaches to legal services and technology, created and hosted by Michigan State University law professors, Daniel Katz and Renee Knake.  I was not able to attend all of the talks, but I saw enough to know that THIS is the way to give presentations; 6 to 10 minute sessions.  All of the presenters I saw were great, but even if the topics didn’t interest me, I didn’t have to sneak out or grind my teeth through an hour of Windows 9 installation hurdles, I could just check my email for five minutes until the next topic was introduced.  I have been fortunate to be a part of similar sessions at ILTA last year, and LTNY this year, and I heartily encourage those organizations to follow ReInvent Law’s lead and expand the use of these short sessions going forward.

Despite the slick presentation style of ReInvent Law, I came away with the same question that often plagues me after forward thinking LTNY or ILTA sessions. Who are we trying to convince?  The self-selected audience for an event like ReInvent Law already gets it.  These are the people that are already changing the way law is done, or attempting to change their firms, or writing (or blogging) incessantly about the need to change the way we do things.  The same goes for this blog. If you read 3 Geeks more than once, there’s a pretty good chance that you already agree with our progressive approach to doing things differently.

I am certainly not the first to point out the existing echo chamber in the legal blogo-conference-sphere, but I want to be the first to present a solution to break out of it. It is time to embrace the time-honored traditions of growing religious organizations everywhere.  They understand that you can’t grow your following by simply preaching to the people who show up week after week, you have to go out and proselytize and evangelize.  You have to go to where the heathens live and browbeat them convince them with logic and reason of the fundamental truth of your beliefs. It’s time to send the young presenters of ReInvent Law on missions to visit the upper management of our largest firms, the people who don’t come to ReInvent Law, but actually have the power to (you know) reinvent law firms once they are successfully converted.

I see hordes of young, recently graduated, Michigan State lawyers knocking on the doors of BigLaw Managing Partners everywhere, not to beg for work, but to raise high their dog-eared copy of Tomorrow’s Lawyers and ask, “Have you accepted Richard Susskind as your Legal Savior?”