Navigating Rough Seas: Charting a Course for Success

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the annual NoCALL Spring Institute. This year the event was held in San Francisco at a hotel right off Union Square. It was a great opportunity to network with colleagues and friends, as well as, learning from one another through the fabulous programs.

I usually tweet during conferences as a way to keep my notes organized and accessible, but I forgot my laptop power cord, so I had to go the old-fashioned route and take notes with pen and paper. Egad! I wanted to share some of my personal highlights, if I can decipher my notes.

  • Karen’s presentation was extremely thought provoking. She is definitely challenging the status quo of the library catalog and how we organize information. As Karen pointed out, alphabetical is the cornerstone of library organization, however, Google isn’t alphabetical and neither is Amazon, yet people find what they need. As she stated, “meaning has replaced alphabetical order.”
  • Karen also showed us the kind of information that could be available using technology and analytics. She utilized WorldCat Identities to demonstrate how information could be presented to the end user. Here is a screenshot of a page for Neil Gaiman:
  • As you can see, there is information about the works authored by Gaiman, works written about him and if you slide down you can even see who is most often mentioned with him. This page is completely interactive. Karen believes in “making connections and surfacing the connections.”
  •  Karen closed with the mission of the library, “not to gather things into an inventory, but to organize things that have been inconveniently packaged”.
  • Context is Everything: Cost Recovery Models in Electronic Legal Research
    • This was a panel discussion with myself, Amy Wright from USF School of Law and Martha Campos from Morgan Lewis. A few of the highlights:
    • Amy detailed the USF placement statistics to help us understand why she focuses on cost recovery in a different way than others. USF sends a large portion of their graduates into public service work, and therefore, the overwhelming majority of students don’t really need to understand how large law firms recover costs. I thought this was a tremendous example of “knowing your audience”. Amy also stressed her constant refrain of “secondary sources”, which I know everyone appreciated!
    • Martha recapped a cost recovery program presented at the AALL Conference last summer. What was most interesting to me was that each of the panel members at that presentation had completely different cost recovery programs at their firms; from none at all to striving for 100%. This says to me that one size does not fit all and it doesn’t matter what someone else is doing, it only matters what works for your firm.
    • I spoke about the new research platforms and how the old cost recovery methodologies really don’t fit anymore. Usage is measured in completely different ways between the old and new, and current methodologies will have to change as your users start to migrate to these new platforms. Getting ahead of this trend is a great opportunity for information professionals to demonstrate value that goes right to the bottom-line.
  • Law Library Management in Challenging Times
    • This was a panel discussion between Kathy Skinner from Morrison & Foerster, Ron Wheeler from USF and Eric Wade from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. This diverse group had great insight into may of the challenges we face today. Here are some of my notes:
    • Kathy spoke about the usage of project management and utilizing the entire team to tackle the transition from a siloed organization to a virtual team that provides close to 24/7 access to services.
    • Eric and Ron both stressed their commitment to the people in their organizations over just about everything else. Ron highlighted professional development as a real priority even in the lean times. It was a good reminder that we are a profession made up of people who can bring great value into our organizations with the right leadership.
    • Kathy gave us a new term for the library coined by one of the partners in their LA office: the loungebrary. The library in that office is adjacent to a lounge/collaboration space, so it has become a integral part of the office.
    I would also be remiss if I didn’t also mention Loyd Auerbach and his guided chocolate tasting. Loyd is the proprietor of Haunted by Chocolate. In a past life, Loyd was a most excellent Lexis representative and law librarian. Thank you for teaching us so much about chocolate Loyd!

    Colleen Cable is a Library Consultant for Profit Recovery Partners bringing the “consultant angle” to Three Geeks.

    A headline just crossed my desk from the Sacramento Bee:  “Brown Appoints Former Reporter Lucas as State Librarian“

    Deep Breath…  A manager of one of the most important library systems in California without any apparent
    professional library managerial experience?

    I am concerned that the Governor of California has placed the stewardship of the State Library in the hands of someone without any professional library experience.  I could be wrong.  If there is any information I have missed, please let me know in the comments section below. This item certainly indicates a fondness for books.

    What do you think?  Is this the start of a trend?  Is it necessary for the person in charge of a State Library to be a Librarian?

    UPDATE #1:  The last appointment to this position without any previous library experience was in 1899.

    UPDATE #2:  California Education Code Section 19302 states that “The division shall be in charge of a chief who shall be a technically trained librarian and shall be known as the “State Librarian.” (Hat Tip to David McFadden)

    UPDATE #3:  Here is the full text of the Governor’s announcement.

    UPDATE #4:  

    For an interesting take on this from a website directed to California political reporters (CalBuzz), take a look at this.  The LA Times weighs in on Library Power here.
     
    Keep checking here for new developments.  I’ll keep this page updated.
     

    3-26-17 11:03 AM PDT

    Image [cc] Preston Rhea

    We live in an extremely interconnected world. A very fragile interconnected world. We are so reliant upon that connection that when it stops working, we stop working. That’s why when I saw Mike Elgan’s article this weekend called “How an Under-Appreciated iOS7 Feature Will Change the World,” I suddenly realized that we may be on the edge of a interconnected world that is no longer vunerable to the ISP server going down, or a tractor cutting a network cable in Nebraska and causing Internet connectivity going down in Texas. The feature in iOS7 is called Multipeer Connectivity Framework (MCF), and it is based upon Wireless Mesh Networking (WMN).

    The idea is pretty simple, but the results can (eventually) be something spectacular. Right now, the only app that I found that has utilized the Multipeer Connectivity Framework is the one that Elgan features in his article, called Firechat. At this time, the app is pretty a basic chat app that allows you to see “Everyone” that is chatting on the app, using the normal chat server. But the advanced (and eventually cool) feature is the “Nearby” function that picks up those using local bluetooth or WiFi connections. It’s not just point-to-point connections, but point-to-point-to-point…. One connection tethering to another, and then another as long as the chain of connections remain linked. It might not be much right now, but given time, and the massive amounts of WiFi and cell connections currently available, it could become a new version of what we concider the Internet.

    Here are some “practical” examples of what advantages a MCF network could do:

    • Emergency connections during power outages or natural disasters
    • Local communications set up for festivals, conferences, or community events (where cell towers tend to get overwhelmed)
    • Network and Communications networks that exist even when governments block ISP or Internet services for political reasons
    • Networks in poor or rural areas that are not served (or well-served) by Internet Providers

    There is a lot of potential in this new feature found in the iOS7 upgrade. As Wired magazine noted back in January, It’s Time to Take Mesh Networks Seriously, And Not Just For The Reasons You Think. We have stepped into a new world… we just don’t know it yet.

    I have said in the past that my job as a blogger is to get the conversation started.  By that measure, my last post was extremely successful.  Three bloggers, that I know of, felt compelled to write follow up posts to The Myth of Disruptive Technology,  and at least one commenter went so far as to “not suggest this post is without value”.

    I think I agree with all of them, but I’m not sure I said anything they think I said.  🙂

    Sam and I had a good laugh on Twitter about starting a conference to rival ReInvent Law called the Slow-Evolving Practice of Law Conference. Although, to be honest, I’m not against the idea of reinventing or disrupting law, in fact, it’s probably going to be the most outrageous and outlandish ideas coming out of ReInvent Law that will eventually be watered down and whittled away until they become the small incremental change that adds up over time. Big ideas most often lead to incremental change, while incremental ideas get swept away.

    And I agree with Nina, Disruptive Technology and Innovation absolutely exist! The myth that I refer to in the title is “that you can buy, build, or imagine [a technology] that you can simply drop into your existing workflow and reasonably expect it to disrupt anything other than your existing workflow.” And I stand by that. I draw a distinction between technology that by its very existence will disrupt an industry (which does not exist) and a company that uses such technology to great effect in order to disrupt an industry (which happens all the time). Netflix, and other video streaming services, are the latter and, as Nina rightly states, they are continuing to disrupt other industries like cable television.  But again, it’s the business model that is disruptive, not the delivery mechanism. The delivery mechanism may make the business model possible, but on its own it’s of little additional value. It’s not the technology that’s disruptive, it’s how you use it.

    And Steven’s post is fantastic, I went back and reread it three times. There’s some great stuff in there and some fascinating analysis, but my thesis was not that Blockbuster “failed by not responding earlier to Netflix”, but that Blockbuster “had no way to adopt streaming video without completely undermining the rest of their business.” They weren’t willing to undermine the good thing they had going, which was a rational, if ultimately fatal, decision.

    When I first published the post on the LexisNexis Future of Law Blog, my good friend Ron Friedmann gave me a hard time on Twitter.

    I joked that I couldn’t give everything away for free, but I actually alluded to the answer in the next sentence. “Now is the time to build a legal service delivery engine that can accommodate project management, automation, artificial intelligence, and extreme transparency to clients.” While that is definitely not a comprehensive list of the next great innovations in law, I think it’s fair to say that those four innovations are already happening. And those four innovations all point to one big historical change for the practice of law, process efficiency now matters. 

    Maybe I should have said that efficiency is to law what streaming video is to the video rental industry?  I didn’t want say anything that concrete in the last post, because let’s face it, it’s ridiculous. Although, I can’t help but think there’s a parallel between Blockbuster not being able to stream video and remain profitable and some firms not being able to increase efficiency and remain profitable.  After all, profit has been based on inefficiency in law firms for a long time. Technology may be able to help, and some of those technologies could be called potentially disruptive, but technology alone will never make you disruptive, or efficient, or profitable.  I think my original point was something along those lines.  Although to be honest, this has been interpreted in so many different ways, I’m not entirely sure what I meant originally.

    Still, I can take some solace in the fact that at the very least my original post made Byron think. And that’s good enough for me.

    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.