It has been a busy time for our illustrious Mr. Toby Brown over the past few weeks. In the past few weeks, he has co-written a book with Vincent Cordo on Law Firm Pricing: Strategies, Roles, and Responsibilities, conducted an interview with Bloomberg Law’s Lee Pacchia about the challenges of implementing a pricing strategy at a large law firm and the recent efforts to utilize Legal Process Management software, and last, but not least, been named as a Trailblazer and Pioneer by the National Law Journal (pdf, page 16). The only thing he failed to do this month was be named People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive… (maybe next year, my friend.)

Congrats, Toby on being recognized for all your hard work and forward thinking.

Image [cc] Scazon

The year started out with a trio of mergers in the legal information field when Thomson Reuters announced it was acquiring PLC, and Learnlive, and LexisNexis announced it was acquiring Knowledge Mosaic. The activity tappered off a bit after that initial first week flurry, but there have been a number of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships throughout 2013 and we thought we’d review what has changed this year.

I’m sure we’ve missed a few other activities that happened in 2013. Feel free to add those in the comments.

Let’s see what 2014 brings in the great shrinkage of legal information providers.

This is the time of year when we reflect on all that has happened over the past 12 months; the successes, the failures, the moments of epiphany, the stumbles, the growth and change, basically everything that makes us human. That is why I was so struck by the timing and subject of Seth Godin’s recent post about vampires (and he’s not talking about Team Edward or reviewing the latest True Blood episode). Seth explains that these metaphorical vampires are “people that feed on negativity, on shooting down ideas and most of all, on extinguishing your desire to make things better.” What is so striking to me is that Seth says that these vampires cannot be cured; they cannot be shown the error of their ways. Trying to change their minds and get them on board is a waste of time. Seth explains that all we can do for these people is pity them.

Our profession is undergoing a time of great change, one in which we are examining everything that we do and looking for new opportunities. One in which we cannot afford any vampires. However, we have taken to trying to “cure” the vampires in our midst with education and programs like the recent PLL Summit offerings of “Get out of your Comfort Zone and Lean Up” and “Changing Perceptions” and last year’s SLA conference sessions like “Just say NO to Aimlessness” or “How to Re-energize your Library”. I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to encourage, educate and collaborate with the non-vampires, but maybe we should take Seth’s advice and stop trying to “cure” those among us who have gone over to the dark side.

We have some amazing evangelists for our profession. One of whom is constantly trying to shake things up with his provocative posts. Yes, I’m looking at you Greg Lambert. Greg consciously tries to poke the hornet’s nest in an effort to generate conversation and, hopefully, real change. But ask yourself this, when you read a provocative post or hear a controversial idea discussed, what is your first reaction? Do you immediately try to shoot it down or poke holes in it? Do you meet it with negativity or an open mind? Do you attend the above mentioned types of sessions at conferences and think of all the ways the ideas “won’t work for you”?

Maybe during this upcoming time of reflection, we should also be asking ourselves: have we turned to the darkness or are we still in the light?
Colleen Cable is a Library Consultant for Profit Recovery Partners bringing the “consultant angle” to Three Geeks.

One of the most challenging and rewarding achievements in my professional career was being elected to the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Executive Board. It is rewarding because I get exposure to a number of aspects of the profession that I would normally not find in my day to day work activities. It is challenging because the Association is very diverse and serves the needs of Information Professionals ranging from small county law libraries to multi-billion dollar law firms. From small law firms with a single librarian to Ivy League Colleges. Everyone has personal needs based upon their individual company, firm, court, or school mission, and the membership as a whole has a need to promote the profession and raise standards and awareness in order to display the total value the profession brings to the entire community. As a member of the Executive Board, the challenge can be in striking a balance between individual goals and overall professional goals.

That being said, the Executive Board welcomes four new members:

Vice President/President-Elect: Keith Ann Stiverson

(July 2014 – July 2015)

Secretary: Katherine K. Coolidge, Esq., MLIS

(July 2014 – July 2017)

Executive Board: John W. Adkins and Donna Nixon

(July 2014 – July 2017)

As I end my term at the July annual meeting in San Antonio, these four will add their names to the ranks of the many volunteers that dedicate a three-year commitment to the Association. My advice to them, and to anyone that desires to run for a position in AALL is that they listen to the needs of the membership, observe the current actions of the Executive Board, ask questions, speak frankly, respect the membership and the other board members (even when you disagree), and act in a way that you believe is in the best interest of the profession.

Good luck. I will see all of you in Chicago soon.

Bully
Image [cc] serzhanja

When I was a kid, I used to believe that everyone was nice, and that there was no such thing as a purposefully mean person… then I met my fourth grade teacher and my bubble of niceness quickly popped. Although I still believe that 99% of people out there are well intentioned, good mannered, and overall easy to deal with, there are still those that have none of those traits. Some of whom are in positions of power, and we all end up having to deal with them from time to time.

Yesterday, I ran across an article written by Marc Chernoff entitled 7 Smart Ways to Deal with Toxic People, and it described a number of the traits that most of us hate dealing with in what he labels as “Toxic People.” The basic advice is to not let Toxic People get into your head and stay there. My favorite is #5: “Don’t take their toxic behavior personally.” It’s probably the hardest thing to do, but it is also the most liberating when you can remember that the person you are dealing with treats most people this way, and that it must work for him or her because they continue to act the way they do. To modify a common meme I’ve seen on Facebook, “Love your enemies… it really ticks them off.”

Being in the legal field, it seems that we may be subject to a greater share of Toxic people. Whether that is actually true or not is probably up to your individual situation. However, whether it is a Partner in a corner office, or a Secretary down the hall, or a mean Librarian, this article walks through a number of ways to deal with these Toxic people and gives some really good advice that I think most of us could use in our day to day lives. Mean people exist, but as Chernoff rightly puts it, you don’t have to allow them to take up space in your head… “raise the rent and get them out of there.”

Reading about big data seems to be a daily exercise. So lately I have been putting a few brain cells on the subject of new ways of applying data analytics to the legal market.

And here’s today’s idea: The Analytics of What Clients Reject.

What if you take the emerging tools for analyzing billing data (ala Tymetrix), but instead of analyzing what is in client billings, focus the tools on analyzing what is being rejected in the billing process. We have all read about clients’ unwillingness to pay for online research or first year associates, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see if and how that truly plays out?

For instance, maybe clients reject first year associates on M&A work, but actually encourage them for labor litigation. Or maybe financial services clients pay for paralegals but not e-discovery project managers. You could also start to pull out trends and spot issues before they become problems. Imagine a firm planning to hire a pool of staff lawyers finding out their primary client market is trending away from their use.

Part of this thinking came about based on an eBillingHub seminar I saw that opened my eyes quite a bit. One stat they gave was that 44% of law firm ebilling invoices are rejected on the first submission. This of course means there are a lot of time entries and other billing entries the get rejected.

Basically these rejections are feedback on the various Outside Counsel Guidelines in place. Beyond avoiding billing rejections that may harm the client relationship, having this type of information would allow law firms to proactively avoid “stepping in it,” and to adjust their strategies at a market level instead of client-by-client.

Of course this thinking is predicated on the idea that law firms have such strategies. Well …. maybe they would if they had this type of information. At its simplest level it would lead to faster payment of bills, which on its own has value.

And now back to your regularly schedule program …

Gendarmenmarkt - Glaskugel
Image [cc] delpax

Many of you may have seen Jeff Bezos’ interview this weekend on 60 Minutes where he discussed the next phase of Amazon’s delivery process is looking to using drones to deliver products and remove third-party delivery services altogether. It is an interesting concept, and one that focuses again on streamlining the process of moving physical products from the manufacturing process to the consumer in the most efficient (cheap and fast) way. This will put a scare in the UPS and Postal Service delivery people. I guess the next progression in the Amazon process will be to sell consumers devices that will simply manufacture the desired product directly in the consumer’s home. That will scare the Foxconn folks. Like it or not, the whole business model is to remove the human from the process as much as possible, and link the customer with the product as quickly, often, and cheaply as possible.

Information Professionals like Librarians, Analysts, and Researchers are very familiar with this process because the information we deal with everyday has already gone through a transition that Bezos is attempting to do with physical products. So, for us, what is the next step? What is the equivalent to Amazon’s drone that will be the next driver in information delivery? I think the answer to this question lies in the advancements we see taking place in e-discovery products, specifically in the predictive coding methods that are becoming common place in that market, and using those tools along with research savvy to create products/results that are much more analytical.

For Information Professionals, we will need to start pivoting away from being the ad hoc researcher and shift over to more predictive analysis processes. In fact, as I was drafting this post, I serendipitously received an invite to a training conference specifically on “Predictive Analytics & Business Insights.” Within the description of the training are specific concepts that we should begin assembling into our customer service models:

  • Predictive Analysis – harnessing predictive capabilities to optimize business operations and develop an analytics culture
  • Risk Analysis – leveraging the wealth of organizational data, in real time, to predict risk and respond accordingly
  • Marketing Analytics – how analytics impact and optimize marketing planning, operations and performance
  • Customer Analytics – customer-driven analytics that encourage innovation, enhance engagement capabilities, enhance retention and loyalty, and promote growth

The past twenty-five years of information has produced a process that has removed much of the human from the process. Lawyers directly receive their information from the producers of that information. The Information Professional’s job has been more and more of vetting all of the different products out there and helping to make sense of it all. The value has shifted away from our ability to find the golden nugget of information within a mountain of data, and has been focused on getting our customers access to the best products, in the most efficient manner, all while maintaining costs. This will continue to be a valuable service, but we have a strong talent pool of researchers, analysts that we need to transition away from the traditional research model and over to areas of predictive analytics to help drive new business to the firm.

Predictive Analysis may not be as cool or flashy as Amazon’s drone idea, but for those of us looking for the next big idea in the Informational Professional market, this may be what helps keep us relevant in a market that is needing us to step up and fill this need.

confused!
Image [cc] Ian Harvey

ALM Legal Intelligence released a new survey today called “Turf Wars: Defining New Roles and Competing for New Territories” where they have found that law firm morale concerns have moved away from focusing on layoffs, and moved over to issues of compensation and training. I have not read the report, only the news wire email that they sent to me, but there are a number of things that show up in the press release that make a lot of sense in the post-great recession era.

According to the press release, there are three factors that are common in law firms:

  1. Too much “dead weight” in the firm
  2. Compensation is lower than peer firms
  3. Too much work for current staffing levels

I’m going to throw out #2 on the list and focus on #1 & #3, as they seem to be very much related.

Anyone that has worked in a law firm in the past five years knows that firms took on a “more with less” approach in 2009. Although lawyer headcount may be down at many firms, I think that most of us would agree that the more with less approach has weighed most heavily on the supporting staff at law firms. The trends have been to reduce Secretaries to 4:1 or higher ratios, hiring freezes, or reduction in staff by natural (or encouraged) attrition has caused changes in the lawyer to staff ratios at most firms. At the time, many of us commented that the Great Recession finally forced firms to make reduction in staffing that should have been made years ago. However, according to the ALM survey, did firms end up losing good people, and retaining those that are now seen as “dead weight”?

Firms are now attempting to define the strategy of reducing staff levels to a x:1 ratio. Do secretaries simply keep maintaining their traditional roles and job functions, only with more attorneys to cover? Or, do secretaries become technology specialists or some other ‘new’ function? Do Records personnel now expand into Risk Management roles? Do Librarians become research and resource analysts? Does IT shift to user experience advocates? If so, have firms stepped up to actually train and support these changes?

It would be interesting to see if what the survey is defining as “dead weight” is really those people within the firm that have been expected to take on new roles and responsibilities, but haven’t received the proper training or support to actually succeed in those new roles. Great plans without actual changes in structure and support through training is doomed to fail. I think that is a reason behind firms finding that they face the dichotomy of too much dead weight staff, yet have too much work for the current staff to handle.

I know that we’ve talked for years about the amount of information that people give out freely via social media platforms, but I haven’t seen any video that’s better than Jack Vale’s Social Experiment in showing strangers how much he can know about them just by reviewing their social media posts.

For those Fall Associates, next year’s Summer Associates, or the Senior Partners that post on social media site, have them take a look at this video to see just how easy it is to gather information. Of course, as someone that conducts research for a living… tell them to keep on posting. It makes me look very good when I’m able to report on a potential lateral and give out quality information like their kids’ names, where they like to vacation, and where they frequent on the weekends.

My favorite part of the video comes around the 3:15 mark where one of the ‘pranked’ victims says “Thanks for invading my privacy.” I don’t think he understands what privacy means. He’s not alone.

I am not ashamed to admit it that I am a fan of Facebook. I post pictures when I’m on the road (much to my wife’s chagrin) and it has been the way to keep up with what my family is doing, as we don’t seem to talk on the phone very much. One of my absolute favorite things about Facebook, however, is being able to track certain interests that I have, specifically music, and to keep those separate in an Interest Group page an off of my normal News Page. That is, until Facebook apparently broke something and now my Interest Pages are all broken. My ‘guess’ is that in one of Facebook’s frequent updates to their security (or lack there of), someone broke the ability to isolate your like pages to an Interest Group unless you also allow them on your News Feed. That’s a pain!!

I searched around the Facebook Help Page and found lots of others are having the same problem. I also found that Facebook has pretty much ignored this new ‘feature’ and is pretending the problem doesn’t exist. I really miss being able easily track my favorite bands, music magazines, and concert halls all in one place.

My first plea is to Facebook. “FIX IT!!“

My second action was to take matters in my own hands and to create a work-around until Facebook “FIXES IT!!!” It involves a little bit of manual work up front, but I’ve found it to be pretty good in keeping me up to date on my 60+ Facebook pages that I used to follow in my Music Interest Page. It involves the following services/programs:

  1. Facebook2RSS
  2. Feedly
  3. Outlook (optional)

I’ve talked before about converting Facebook pages to RSS feeds on company information, but the same concept works for Interest Pages as well. The steps are easy (but as I said earlier, there is some manual processes up front to make it happen.)

  1. Take your list of Facebook Like pages and open the URL for each one.
  2. Copy that URL and go to Facebook2RSS, paste the URL in the text box and click the “Generate” button. This will give you the Facebook ID for that page that gets added to the RSS feed address. NOTE: the standard RSS feed for Facebook is this:
    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=[fbid]
  3. Go to your Feedly account and create a New Category under “Organize” and then Add Content into this category.
  4. Repeat (this is that dreaded manual process I’ve been talking about.)
  5. Once you have all of the feeds in the category, you can export the OPML file and import it into Outlook.

I have found that doing this has reinvigorated my interest in Feedly both on my smart phone, and within the Chrome or Firefox browser (because Feedly doesn’t work in IE for some reason). It has also been a good way for me to keep up with my interest in music, bands, and venues until Facebook FIXES THE INTEREST PAGES!!!

If you’ve found other workarounds for this problem, let me know.