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The keynote speaker for the Marketing Partner Forum, Joe Pine, focused his discussion on the idea behind advancing the service economy into an experience economy. He began with the idea of the gumball machine and how adding the experience of seeing the gumball roll down a spiral ramp before exiting the machine has revolutionized the gumball machine industry. He notes that the experience does nothing to improve the taste of the gum, or does it improve anything about the actual gumball itself. In fact, if you think about it, the spiral ramp actually decreases the efficiency of the gumball machine by taking a longer time to dispense the gumball to the consumer. The product stays the same, but the service has advanced by improving the experience of the consumer. Having seen this in action with my four children, I can attest to the fact that the experience drives the customer to come to me and ask for any quarters I have in my pockets.

Pine went on to discuss a number of other services that are improved through engagement of the customer in ways that changes the interaction between the service and the customer. Hospitals that have focused on personalizing, humanizing, and demystifying the hospital stay have created improvements in healing and overall health care experience. Architectural firms that personalize the experience of their customers and cause an engagement between the firm and the customer’s project that makes the customer feel as though they have the complete focus of the firm on their projects. Restaurants that create an environment where the customers are actually a part of the overall presentation, and not simply a bystander there to eat a meal.

There was one example that Pine gave that he says failed in his opinion to engage the customer, although it is known for creating an interesting and interactive environment. The Rain Forest Cafe is a chain that creates an atmosphere of interesting automated animal creatures, but that alone is simply not enough to create an experience (at least not a positive one.) The scene is set, but there is no one directing the experience. I remember my first time in one of these, and was told that there would be a “show” every twenty minutes. We watched, we waited, the animals made a few sounds, moved a bit, but we never actually saw a show. When we left (after about an hour), we asked about the show, and the waitress said that we’d seen the show three times. We left disappointed, and I’ve never gone back.

This type of “show without direction” reminded me of what law firms have created in their receptionist areas of their offices. Lots of interesting items that line the room with spectacular views, and even a few items lying around waiting to be picked up and read. But the experience is usually this:

  1. Exit the elevator; look around for the receptionist area
  2. Greeted by the receptionist; asked for name, who you are here to see
  3. Receptionist calls the attorney and announces you are here
  4. Receptionist invites you to sit down in one of the comfy chairs
  5. You wait until the attorney comes to get you (usually after they’ve finished up editing a document or finishing up an email)
  6. You are then walked back to the meeting room or attorneys office
  7. When you finish, you are walked back to the receptionist’s area
  8. Parking validated
  9. Enter the elevator and leave

There is ample opportunity for engagement with the client, yet the time spent before and after the meeting results in very little engagement actually performed.

The main problem that popped into my head while considering this process is that law firms have created a highly efficient receptionist that can handle high volumes of telephone calls, visitors, and deliveries that enter and exit the law firm. It is all very utilitarian. However, the trade-off for being so efficient is that there is no individual experience. Views may be great, but views with a story behind them are twice as great. We lack that engagement… that storytelling of why something is laid out on the table enabling the customer to see more than the words and pictures before them. No one is making the customer feel as if he or she is important to the firm. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Vendors coming in to sell products to the firm are given the same treatment as clients bringing in thousands or millions of dollars of business to the firm.

I began thinking of how we could change this bland, one-size-fits-all, experience and make it more engaging to the client, and more productive for the law firm. Ideas of a client concierge began forming in my mind. Imagine having someone in your Marketing, Business Development, or Client Teams departments greeting clients (especially key clients) when they walk off the elevator. Knowing exactly who they are, who they are there to see, and being ready to engage the person or persons in conversation. One of the points that Joe Pine made in his talk was that the experience should be a presentation, staged, if you will, and no “back stage” preparations should be exposed to the customer. Therefore, the attorney should be ready to meet with the client and all other business (telephone calls, document editing, emails, etc.) should be put away. If there are timing issues between the attorney’s availability and the client’s time to meet, the concierge should be ready to expand their engagement to fill that time. However, the client’s time is just as valuable as the attorneys, so this should only be a brief extension of the concierge’s performance.

The idea behind the client concierge is actually two-fold. First and foremost, they are there to engage the client and create an experience that lets the client know that they are important to the firm, and that at this moment in time, our resources are focused upon them. In addition to the engagement, there may be valuable information that the client discusses with the concierge. There may be exciting personal news the client talks about, or new business dealings brought up in the conversation. The concierge should relay these points to the attorney or departments responsible for this particular client. This isn’t about prying, it is about creating a better relationship, and improving the client’s overall experience with the firm.

I brought my idea up a couple of times, and was a bit surprised by one answer I received. “Clients like being left alone in the reception area. It gives them time to check and answer their emails.” I really hope that is not the case. I would think that clients do not like waiting (especially if they think the clock is running on the attorney’s billable time.) Instead of making them wait, engage them. Instead of letting them come up with ways to pass the time, take advantage of the time they are giving you by appearing at your office. Personal contact between clients and the law firms that represent them are fleeting. Firms should find ways of leveraging that time and engaging the clients in ways that produce a more positive interaction, and result in a better experience for the client.

While the east coast is buried in another snowstorm, I am in sunny Naples, Florida today to speak at the Marketing Partner Forum. Full disclosure: It was a bit chilly, so I had to stop and buy a light jacket to handle the temps that fell into the 50’s and will dip into the 40’s tonight, so I won’t be surfing these waves.

All kidding aside, I enjoy coming to these conferences mainly because it exposes me to people, ideas, and practices that are outside of my normal routine. In return, I expose the attendees and fellow presenters with ideas and practices that are outside of their normal routine. So it is a mutual benefit (at least I think so.)

Today I am speaking on the concepts of data found inside and outside of firms that help develop Business Development/Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence programs. It’s something that I’ve been talking about for nearly ten years, and you’d think that I’d run out of things to say or learn. However, it is usually quite the opposite. In crowds like I’ll face this afternoon, there will be folks that will seriously question my ideas. There will be people that have failed where others have succeeded, and there will be people that succeeded where everyone else has failed. It is a somewhat cathartic process for both the speakers and the audience.

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately, and will discuss in the talk today, is the idea of telling others to stop thinking of what we do as educating the attorneys about business development, or client risk exposures, or industry trends, and start thinking of ways to instruct the attorneys to make money off of the information placed in front of him or her. I imagine that this is not a new concept to Marketing and Biz Dev folks, but I think there is room to grow in creating a process where everyone along the assembly line of BD/BI/CI understands what the end goals are of the process, and what role they play in actually creating a chance to bring in new revenue into the firm.

Too much of the time, we think of presenting the information in a way to educate the attorney. We throw out the phrase “actionable intelligence” when we present the information, but are we limiting the actual meaning of that phase to merely educating the attorney rather than directing the attorney? Have we become some type of quasi-CLE provider? Perhaps we could rename our group to Continuing Business Education, or Continuing Client Education, and be honest in what we are actually doing.

When you are discussing a business opportunity with an attorney, be prepared to answer the following question: “How do we monetize this idea?”

If that is what we are attempting to do with BD/BI/CI, then that needs to be known throughout the whole process. Every step along the way, from concept, to research, to engineering, to technology application, to analysis, to final product… how will this drive business and bring more money in the door? When you move it away from education and into revenue generation, it can help identify what is and what is not business driving concepts.

I look forward to the audience blowing holes in my ideas this afternoon. At least I can then walk away with an idea for a follow up blog post.

Kate Martin, Law Library for the Circuit Court for Montgomery County, Maryland, is organizing an Access to Justice (A2J) Conference in Baltimore on March 21st. The conference is through the local law librarian chapter, LLAM, and anyone familiar with Kate should know that she tends to develop very strong programs that take on a life of their own (Martin established the Private Law Libraries Summit a few years ago.) More information on signing up for the conference will come in the next few weeks, but put a placeholder in your calendar for March 21st and get out to Maryland to enjoy the first day of Spring.

Kate describes the relationships between law librarians and A2J as “a core value of law librarians – and it is becoming more critical as professional legal assistance becomes more expensive and beyond the reach of even average, middle-class Americans.” Many of the public facing law libraries have seen the increase of self-represented litigants over the past decade, and Martin believes this trend will only continue to grow. However, she does not think that the responsibilities of A2J lie on the shoulders of court librarians alone. Just because you may be a firm librarian, Martin believes you,  too, can help with A2J issues.

“We’re especially targeting private law librarians by showing them a way to use A2J to raise their profile within their firms and support their firm’s pro bono efforts,” says Martin. “A2J will also offers a way to give back to the community.”

The conference is being marketed on the national level, and will be the first symposium on A2J that is completely organized for librarians. There will be several tracks covering A2J issues and hands-on sessions discussing and advising on the current issues. Martin already has speakers coming in from Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, Utah, and Georgia, with more lining up across the country to speak and join in on the discussion. The registration (I’ll post a follow-up when the official announcement goes out), will only cost $65, and the seminar will be held at the University of Baltimore during Spring Break, so you won’t even have to fight students as you make your way around the building.

Image [cc] Topsy

Based on a delightful and wide-ranging conversation with Pratik Patel from Elevate about Legal Project Management (LPM), we were able to boil the LPM Challenge down to a single phrase. We were talking about what clients are demanding in terms of pricing and transparency. And how clients are pushing for more project management tools and efforts from their outside firms. But more importantly, clients are starting to ask for more meaningful answers to their LPM requests.

Of course this also lead to discussing how lawyers struggle with LPM and PM in general, always citing the unpredictability of legal matters. And here’s the rub – the lawyers are both right and wrong. Yes – legal matters are unpredictable, but clients still want to see meaningful implementations of LPM with their outside firms. Clients really want to see improved efficiencies from their law firms. They want better evidence that their matters are being handled in the most cost effective manner and they are looking to LPM as evidence this is occurring.

Previously I would have argued about lack of scope and how lawyers and clients don’t engage in out-of-scope conversations. This is obviously still the case. But instead, this time the conversation centered on efficiency and unpredictability.

So here’s the $64 phrase: Law firms need to demonstrate efficiency in the midst of unpredictability.

Unpredictability, poor scope, no scope … are all part of the landscape. Court hearings will be postponed. Closing dates will be moved. Motions will be filed. But through all of this, clients still want to see their work being completed Better, Faster and Cheaper.

So the real trick for LPM is finding the best way to demonstrate this to clients. Just telling them you are more efficient is not good enough. Firms will have to be able to functionally demonstrate it. Now this is no small task. But I suggest knowing what the challenge is in such a simple way is a great starting point.

I wanted to use this platform as a way to share our experiences on the new mandatory eFiling system for Texas Civil Courts. I have talked with many librarians around Texas over the past few weeks and have found many of us have been tasked with preparing our firms for the new mandate, and working with the vendors in testing the new system. To say it has been a strain on our sanity may be a bit of an understatement.

So that we may “share the pain” (or, if you have a success story, please share that too), please comment with your experiences on this post. I know that many have decided to switch from traditional vendors because of their inability to adjust to the new eFiling system, or for the inability to also meet the mandate for eService for the ten largest Texas county courts.

Here is the statement from the eFileTexas.Gov site on the mandate:

In December 2012, the Texas Supreme Court mandated e-filing in civil matters. The first group of counties (Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis, Collin, Denton, El Paso, Hidalgo and Fort Bend), the Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals and the 14 Courts of Appeal become mandatory January 1, 2014. This means that attorneys will no longer be able to file paper documents at the clerk’s counter. E-filing in all other counties will become mandatory on a graduated schedule through July 1, 2016.

The eFiling system and consolidation under one platform is supposed to make it easier, faster, and more efficient for those filing matters with Texas courts. Has that been your experience? Have you jettisoned your current provider for a new provider? Have the Court Clerks for the counties affected been helpful during the transition? How are you preparing your attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, and other staff for the new eFiling system?

Please share your experiences with all of us!!

 

Image [cc] LendingMemo

Ed Walters love to mention that information and data can be ‘elequent.’ The ideas behind the eloquence is finding innovative ways of collecting, indexing, searching, recalling, and interfacing with the information in a way that captures the attention of the user, and gives them the ability to take action based on that interaction. It might sound like a lot of buzz-words, but when you think about it, the reason we conduct legal research is to obtain a result that allows us to take action, or advise others on what they should do next.

As I was watching Ed Walters retweet a number of messages today on the issue of alternatives to Lexis and Westlaw driving legal information to commodity status, there was a comment from The Raveller (@ravellaw) that caught my attention.  “The trend isn’t commoditization of research, it’s the reinvention of it.”

First off… let’s look at the definition of commoditization:
1:  commodify; specifically:  to render (a good or service) widely available and interchangeable with one provided by another company
2:  to affect (as a brand or a market) by commoditizing goods or services <fierce competition threatened to commoditize prices>

In this case, we tend to think of legal information as the products that our courts, legislatures, and administrative offices produce that guide our society on issues ranging from basic rights and wrongs, to how we conduct business in a uniform way. In the researcher’s world, we tend to think of it as primary law materials.

The comment from The Raveller on reinvention versus commoditization could be interpreted a couple of ways. First, have we already tipped the scale toward primary law being a commodity? Second, does it not matter that the massive primary law pool of information become a commodity in order for other vendors to create inventive ways of presenting the information? Can you get to this second option without first achieving commodity status? I sent a tweet back out to The Reveller and Ed Walters asking.

Ed responded with “Data — esp. primary law — should be (is?) a commodity. Software to make sense of it will be very competitive.”
David Houlihan answered with “Primary law is effectively a commodity. Access was the differentiator, but eroding fast.”

Having just gotten off of an hour and a half phone call on BigData, my brain was buzzing with possibilities of what new technologies, and different approaches to raw information like primary law could bring to the legal research community. We have thought of primary law very linearly for centuries. We are just now coming to grips with the possibilities that a non-linear, even chaotic, approach might unveil the hidden values buried in the raw data, simply because we’d never thought to approach the information that way. Much like technologies have accomplished in the electronic discovery industry.

I think that eventually someone will take the billions of dollars spent on e-discovery technologies and predictive coding, and will turn its focus on massive amounts of information like primary law and discover ways of retrieving actionable information that we never thought possible. Who knows… perhaps there will eventually be products spun out of the NSA that will have commercial use when it comes to primary law? Or, perhaps there is some kid in his or her parent’s garage right now working on the next great process that will take us in a way that no one predicted in 2014. It is very exciting to think about all the possibilities.

So back to my question of reinvention without commodity status. Does commodity status drive invention, or does invention drive commodity status? I think there are arguments for both sides, but I’d say that we’ve probably hit a tipping point where reinvention and the promise of more elequent methods of making primary law into something new and unique and useful in unexpected ways will drive whatever information has not slipped into commodity status into that category very soon.

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In a time when it is easier to point out what’s wrong with the your profession, it is always enlightening to find someone that can still find enthusiasm for generating ideas and inspiring others to join them in achieving them. After seeing a number of negative emails and Facebook posts yesterday, I had an unsolicited phone call from a collegue who wanted to tell me about a project she is working on and how I, too, should be excited about it. By the time I hung up the phone, I genuinely was excited about what she was planning and offered to assist in helping her promote it once she had the specifics nailed down. (more to come in the next few weeks)

It isn’t the first time that she’s had this effect on me, but it is the first time that I actually thought about how someone with a positive attitude can improve the attitude of those around them. It’s refreshing to find someone that looks at a serious issue and says “hey, we are in a great position to do something good here, so let’s do it!” It really helped counter-balance the Facebook post I saw that explained that if I didn’t appreciate someone’s posts on insulting a whole group of people, then I should just blank-off and unfollow them (which I did.)

It reminded me of a good quote I heard from a really bad movie my daughter rented. “There are two ways to build the tallest building in the world. One: Build a giant skyscraper. Two: Tear down all the other buildings.” It is always more productive when you surround yourself with those willing to build.

Image [cc] außerirdische sind

A recent question about implementing Legal Project Management (LPM) at law firms brought my thinking into focus. Although I had generally been approaching LPM this way, I had not articulated quite as clearly … until now.

The usual questions I get center on my advice for how a firm should roll out LPM. Should they hire certified project managements? Should they train associates on LPM? Should they train all lawyers on LPM? Should they invest in legal specific PM technology?

My new answer is  … Yes.

Which is the short answer for … It Depends.

And what that really means is that LPM will take a different shape in different circumstances. For one practice embedded certified PMs will make the most sense. In another practice it might be training senior associates.

The real point here is that a firm should be cautious about narrowing its LPM approach at the macro level. It should let the needs of the practice determine how LPM evolves. Different practices and even different clients will have unique needs. This means firms will need to be flexible in their approach to LPM. They will want to have doors open to each approach and not commit entirely to one or another. Perhaps over time one approach will surface as the standard, but until then I suggest firms not impose what could potentially be a a litigation solution on a transactional practice.

This is my standard theme: It’s about the conversation. Just as I suggest talking with clients about their fee needs, I also suggest similar conversations with practice group leaders to determine their needs. We better make sure we understand the problem before we propose a solution – or more appropriately in this case – solutions.

Image [cc] Chris Makarsky

There were a couple of incidents I read about over the weekend of government officials destroying unreplacable historic documents. The reasons for the destruction are not exactly clear, but it gives conspiracy theorists some interesting ideas of why officials would destroy the archives of which they are supposed to be caretakers for the next generations to come.

First there is the matter of the 100+ year old Franklin County, North Carolina documents that Diane Taylor Torrent of The Heritage Society of Franklin County, NC discusses in her Facebook post of Timeline of the Destruction of 100 Year Old Franklin County, NC Records. This involved the uncovering of a room in the Franklin county courthouse basement housing records going as far back as the 1840’s. It is a facinating read of the difficulties that many archivists have to deal with when it comes to historical documents and the issues that come with time, water, mold, storage, and worst of all, government bureaucracy. Please take the time to read the story, but I’ll be the spoiler here and let you know that the documents were all incinerated after the state archives stepped in and took control. I’m sure the state will eventually come back and say that the records were destroyed for “safety” concerns over mold, but one blogger has her own ideas on what may have occurred.

The other story came from Boing Boing called Canadian libricide: Tories torch and dump centuries of priceless, irreplacable envionmental archives. The Canadian govenment had made promises of selling or digitizing materials from the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick, as well as the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Instead, the records were simply destroyed. Sent off to landfills or burned. Some copies have been found overseas, according to an update, but the fact that no records were kept of what was destroyed leaves many pieces of the collection lost forever.

I have never been one of those fanatics that believes that everything should be kept forever. However, government archivists are caretakers of our past so that it may be passed on to those that come after us. There is a reponsibility for these caretakers to be both responsible in their actions, and to think beyond the needs of today. I sincerely hope that both the North Carolina Archives, and the Canadian governments have solid reasoning for their actions and publically disclose what they destroyed, what was kept through digital or other means, and specific reasoning for why they decided to burn or bury these historic documents.

Image [cc] Austin Kleon

As I caught up on my professional reading through the slow week between Christmas and New Years, I came across a Forbes article by Ruth Blatt called The Remarkably Simple Technique Behind These Innovations In Music and In Business. To boil the article down to its core concept, businesses and music bands created innovative ideas and practices by removing something that was essential to the product. Blatt pointed out a few examples of where companies or music groups succeeded by stripping out something essential:

  • Southwest Airlines removed seat assignments
  • The Beatles stopped making music based on the need to play them live
  • Removing the backup battery out of an Emergency Room piece of equipment
The idea of removing something deemed essential and discovering something unique dovetails with with my article from 2012 where I asked “Now, Why Am I Still Doing This?“, but it goes further by not just removing processes that are no longer needed, but by eliminating critical (or at least what we think are critical) components of our overall processes, products, and services. In the firm law library world, some of these ideas are already happening:
  • Remove the researcher from the library (embedded librarians)
  • Remove the books from the library (virtual library)
  • Remove the word “Library” from the service description (notion being discussed by PLL)
 Perhaps there are other things we could do as well. How about:
  • Shifting minor routines to Secretaries or Word Processing departments (pulling cases, statutes, Shepardizing, cite checking, monitoring dockets, etc.)
  • Stop setting up alerts
  • No more clipping services (or whatever you call it these days with the online variations)
  • Stop billing researcher time
  • Stop providing personal copies of books to lawyers
  • Rotate Associates into the Researcher role

Again, these are more than the typical “Sacred Cows” that are brought up at budget time each year. These are essential services that are typically provided by the law library and should cause a collective gasp whenever discussed. Sometimes it is only by turning ideas and processes on their heads that you can see things differently and come up with unique innovations.

I’ve challenged some of my friends in other departments to think of ways they can add to their own team’s value by subtracting essential services. I’ll extend that challenge to the 3 Geeks’ readers as well. Think of something essential in your process… and remove it. What would happen?