Image [cc] Gail

A recent post on how law schools need to embrace technology (#1), along with a recent overblown debate on the law firm business model (#2), combined with a conversation with a colleague on “disruptive” technology for law firms (#3), got me thinking. So this time, it was three events instead of three beers that lead to higher thinking.

Bluntly – Technology is not the answer.

Re: #1 – Does the legal profession need to embrace new technology.? Duh. But it is not where change will come from. For years I have watch law firms attempt to recreate the “email killer app” event. The thinking is that good technology will be adopted by lawyers – just like email was. “The next upgrade will remove all of the objections to this application and our lawyers will start using it.” Right. Stop doing that.

Just like the prior debate (#2 – which I won) about blaming the business model for law firm woes, I think blaming the lack of innovation on the absence of disruptive technology is bass-ackward.*

The conversation with my colleague (#3) focused on which disruptive technologies firms should pursue. This brought back memories from a former firm. There we pursued what I consider to be the most disruptive technology available for law firms: KMStandards (formerly KIIAC) from Kingsley Martin. This technology displaces lawyer effort. Done – lawyering disrupted by technology. Of course – at my old firm, no one really used it.

And now, for once, I will not use a car analogy: The thinking is that by deploying these cool new technologies, it’s like placing a bowl of chocolate in front of a group of people. They will start eating it. Isn’t that what happened with email? (Well … not really.) Following the ‘chocolate’ analogy, I propose we are really putting out a bowl of brussel sprouts. A few people may grab one when no one is looking, but the vast majority will walk by, casually notice (and smell) them, and keep on walking. Until we make eating brussel sprouts an integrated part of our business, they will sit in the bowl and the smell will grow (OK – now I regret not using a car analogy).

For lawyers to adopt change, they need to start with Change. Then they can identify the technologies that will enable and drive that change.

In an irony of sorts, at the former firm mentioned above, there was one partner who truly understood this. One day he said to me: “Toby, if we wait until we have the right technology in place, we will never make this change.”

* Ask me how long I have been waiting to use that word in a post.

Sometime over the last weekend, 3 Geeks surpassed 2 Million pageviews.  That either means that 2 Million people have visited our site once and never returned, a whole bunch of you return fairly regularly, or a few of you are completely obsessed with Greg. 

It’s mostly the middle one, but don’t underestimate the Greg Lambert fan club. To a certain demographic, a Lambert sighting is more precious than seeing Elvis hanging with the Beatles at the Loch Ness Monster’s summer place.

In celebration of our 2 Millionth pageview, I thought we’d take a brief walk through a few 3 Geeks Milestones.

  • Toby’s first mention of Alternative Billing: KM in Action

I’ll let the others tell their own stories, if they want to, but I want to share briefly how I came to be a part of this terrific group of people.

I pulled a Jerry Maguire.  My first post, was not written as a blog post, it was a memo to all of IT in my firm.  It was all so clear to me.  I saw the future taking shape and a whole lot of people moving ahead blindly working the same way they always had.  I was always one of the more progressive voices in the firm, but somehow I reached a point where it wasn’t enough to just raise my objections or voice my opinions in meetings. I wasn’t getting through, so I was compelled to put my thoughts in writing and send them out to all interested parties via email.  I included everyone in IT, including the CIO, and I hit send… and waited.

Over the next hour, I imagined all possible responses from “You’re an idiot, stop sending this crap.” to “You’re fired, get out.” But there was no response.  Nothing. Nada. No emails. No phone calls. My message had once again gotten lost in the ether.  I decided it was time to move on. After all, if I think this job is going away, I might as well go find something else to do.

Then the phone rang.  It was Scott Preston, the CIO.  Hours seemed to pass from one ring to the next as I debated whether to answer.  Was I in trouble? Would he be angry? Was he calling to say HR was on their way to my office with security?

I picked up the handset cautiously.  “Hello?”

“Ryan!  Hey, it’s Scott. Listen, I think that piece you wrote is really great.  I’ve got some friends who publish this blog thing.  Would you mind if we posted this?”

And the rest, as they say, is history.  Thank you, Scott.  And thank you Greg, Toby, and Lisa, for letting me crash your little party.

On behalf of all four of the 3 Geeks, and all of our guest bloggers over the years, to everyone who habitually reads the drivel we shovel out, a heartfelt and very sincere

THANK YOU!

We could not have done it without you!

http://cdn.movember.com/uploads/files/2013/Style%20Guide/MO13%20Download%20Styleguide%20I%20FA%20PDF.pdf

It’s November and that means you have probably noticed that shaving habits among some of the men in your life have become somewhat lax.  No, this is not the result of a Gillette strike or a national shaving cream shortage, it’s Movember.

Every November, men across the globe stop shaving their upper lip to raise awareness (and money) for Men’s Health issues.  Movember raises money to fund Research, and projects to raise Awareness & Education , Living With & Beyond Cancer, and Living With & Beyond Mental Illness.  You can see a complete list of the projects they are helping to fund here.

This year, I am participating in my first Movember Campaign.

Me usually

“How can that be?”, you say, “We’ve seen that stupid selfie of you staring wide eyed into your cell phone splattered all over social media for years! (at left) You clearly have a full, manly, attractive beard already.”

Me – Friday, November 1st

Well, last Friday I shaved for the first time in a couple of years. (at right) And let me tell you, shaving sucks. It takes too much time and it hurts. I hate it.  That’s the real reason I wear the beard.  But it’s for a good cause, so I can put up with it for another few weeks.

In the meantime, I’m starting to get a lot of flack from my friends and colleagues who are disappointed with my meager hair growth after one week. Hey, just because I usually have hair all over my face, doesn’t mean that it grows any faster for me than it does for anyone else!  Besides, it’s coming in grayer than I would hope, so it’s a little harder to see. 

Me – Today, November 8th

So if the guy in the next cubicle is starting to look like a 70s motorcycle cop, ask him if he’s participating in Movember. If he is, go ahead make nice donation to his hair growth efforts. If he’s not, sorry. I bet that’s really embarrassing.

You know, I hear donating money to a good cause makes you feel better about yourself.

This post originally appeared on the HighQ Solutions blog.

I
was in London last week and some colleagues and I were discussing blogging.
One asked a very pointed question: How do you get people to comment on a
blog post?  The short answers is, you don’t.  You never will.
Occasionally, when the stars align and you’ve written a brilliant post
on a hot topic, then and only then, you will get a comment or two.  But
even then, it is very likely that at least one of those comments will be
correcting your grammar.

When I attend conferences there are
always a handful of people that come up to me and say they read and
enjoy my blog.  About half of the time they will follow with a
discussion about something I have written in the last few months.  These
are the comments that people don’t leave on the website.  At first, I
was bothered by this.  I thought, “Well, why didn’t you just say that
when I wrote it?”  But I’ve come to think of blogging as starting a
conversation with whole group of people, many of whom I have never met. 
Some of those people will continue that conversation with other people
they know.  Some of them will run into me at a conference and will
continue the conversation with me directly.  And some of them will only
continue the conversation silently in their own heads. I have come to
see any continuation of a conversation that I start as a sign of a
successful blog post.

But still there is the question of how
to write a blog post that interests people and gets them to continue
that conversation? There is no short answer here, but I have a few tips:

  • Forget about any other kind of
    writing you do.      Blogging is not journalism, it’s not letter writing,
    and it’s certainly not legal writing.  In fact, I would argue, blogging
    is less like any other kind of writing and more like speech.  Write the
    way you speak, without the “ums” and pauses, of course.
  • Read your finished posts aloud. This
    engages a completely different part of your brain and you will find that
    you stumble over words and phrases when speaking aloud that didn’t
    trouble you when you were reading silently to yourself.  These are the
    areas to rework.
  • When you rework your post, make
    clarity of purpose your only concern.     You will find that otherwise
    unacceptable punctuation, grammar, spelling, and formatting sometimes
    gets your point across more succinctly than writing “correctly” does. 
    Go with it.
  • Be personable. Remember, this is a conversation. Nobody wants to talk to a boring person, no matter how interesting the subject.
  • You are not reporting the news.  This
    is a big one for external facing law blogs to remember. If you are
    reporting content that you found on Lexis or the New York Times, then
    chances are your audience has already read it somewhere else, written by
    someone who actually writes for a living. Why compete with
    professionals? Link to those other articles for the details and instead
    write about your take on the subject. 
  • If you are funny, use it.  If you are
    not, please don’t.      When using sarcasm or satire, always make it very
    clear. I don’t care how obvious it is to you, someone will not get it
    and that can be very dangerous. Make sure Sarcasm or Satire are included
    in the Tags on your post when you use them.
  • Be provocative.  Never lie, or argue
    against your actual position (unless doing satire – see above), but it
    doesn’t hurt to take a slightly stronger stance than you would
    otherwise. Nothing gets attention like a bold statement confidently
    made.
  • Don’t forget to use the title. Only
    on a personal blog can you choose your own title, usually you have an
    editor giving your post some boring title that YOU wouldn’t even click on. The
    title should get your audience’s attention, but it also creates a frame
    that sets up their expectations.  Use those expectations to your
    advantage, make people see things differently than they expect from your
    title.
  • Choose topics that bother you. 
    Things that happen, that surprise or upset you; things that you find
    yourself day dreaming about at inopportune times; ideas that get stuck
    in your head; these are the best topics, because they will also get
    stuck in the heads of your readers.
  • Publish immediately.  When you feel you have your ideas down, publish.  Do not sleep on it.  Do not wait to see what you think the next day.  You will hate it.  You will see every flaw and error.  If you wait, you will never publish.  If you cannot publish, or you are not done by the end of your writing session, then start over from scratch the next day and publish as soon as you’re done.
  • Don’t write too much.  You do not
    have to be comprehensive. Set up the conversation.  Throw out a few
    points to think about and then let it go. Remember, you want to start a
    conversation, not finish it.  (This post is already too long and chances
    are good that you haven’t actually read this far.)
  • Leave the audience with a rhetorical
    question, a bold statement, or a thoughtful turn of phrase.      Give them
    something short and concrete that summarizes your post. Find a phrase
    that sticks in your mind and it will stick in theirs too.

Which
leads me back to the issue of comments. After writing a blog for about
three years, I think I now understand why my favorite posts, the ones
I’m most proud of, are the least likely to get comments.  I think it is
precisely because they make people think.  Readers are left with an idea
that is new to them.  It is probably an idea that I have spent days or weeks
formulating, and I’ve just dropped it on an unsuspecting public.  If I
have expressed myself well, and gotten my ideas across, then the readers
too will have to sit and mull over my ideas for a while.  By the time
they realize they have something to say on the subject, they are no
longer on the page, or near a computer.  They may not even remember
where the original idea came from. But when they see me at a conference,
or a seminar, or on a train, or waiting in line for a bathroom, that’s
when they will come up and say, “I read your blog.”  And then our
conversation – the one that I began writing by myself, weeks or months
earlier – will continue, as if we were old friends who had simply paused
for a moment.

Being chastised for using the apparently un-Texan term “nincompoop” I have switched to the more general “Ninnies” in an attempt to keep this dialog above board. So now we can dive into my attack of Susan’s response, to Ryan’s ramblings on Susan’s reply to Jordan’s retort to my critique of Jordan’s original gauntlet-tossing scribe.

With all due respect to my colleagues, this is not a business model problem. The model doesn’t matter. What this is is a Management (and leadership) Problem. Law firm owners seem to think they should have a say in every management and operational decision. No matter the business model, a successful company will not give every owner business decision authority. Susan’s reference to the recently converted GC goes to the core of this. His frustrations center on the inability of even a progressive firm to make a decision.

I have a saying that if you asked a law firm to take a poop (I had to work that word back in), they would form a committee of owners and spend 12 months developing and issuing a report that says pooping is a good idea and the firm should support any owners who make poop requests. The committee wouldn’t actually approve a specific bowel movement request, but would instead suggest a method for how any request to make a ‘movement’ might be approved.

In a slight admission of some validity to the bitch about the partnership business model, it may be conducive to poor management decision making. However, I have seen firms using LLC or professional corporation models with all of the exact same problems. The only difference is they call owners shareholders instead of partners.

So I guess the five of us are basically arguing about the precise way in which law firms are screwed. This started as a discussion about associates’ expectations about becoming owners. Built in to those unrealistic expectations is that once they become owners, they will also be able to slow down the decision making process for a firm.

Of course we should expect individual business owners to want to maximize their own personal returns, but any business that lets those agendas drive overall decisions, or worse, stop decisions from being made, is nuts.

The bottom-line here is that I am right.

PS: I vote Jordan buys.

from Susan Hackett‘s comment on yesterday’s post.

Image [CC] – Matthias Weinberger

I was chatting yesterday with a great guy who’s been in-house as a GC for most of his professional life, and has recently affiliated with a law firm. He loves this firm and he loves the people he works with, but his one frustration is the slow pace of decision-making/change due to the business model for operations in the firm – even in a firm that is as progressive as the one he’s joined up with. Moving anything through a large firm partnership today is glacial, it’s inefficient, and the process is overwhelmed by the partnership’s inability to nimbly execute (think: turning an oil tanker in a bathtub).

So my point is that even if the best partners in the greatest firms have embraced super-valuable ideas to pursue transformative business strategy, their partnership model will continue to throw up operational barriers to their ability to implement change.

As Jordan notes, in larger firms, the partnership model doesn’t motivate behaviors as it might have been envisioned to do in a smaller firm environment. Instead, it creates a super-class of owners whose sole common ground is the maintenance of the status quo and rewarding short term financial returns. They hold the power to make decisions for the whole, but they don’t operate in the interests of the whole – whether the whole is defined as the entity’s current sustainability and future prospects or the long-term development and interests of the majority of firm workers.

I don’t know if this is a result of the law firm partnership business model run amok in larger firms, or just (as my Grandma used to say) “Plain Ol’ Greed” too long rewarded. But the fact is that partnership models in large firms punish and frustrate the efforts of strong leaders to execute better business decisions for the firm’s long-term health. And that includes better decisions about hiring, training, cultivating rising talent, and compensation: all based on value to the firm and to clients, and connecting performance to business goals.

Large firm partnership models allow for “super minority” packs of powerful, self-interested owners to hold captive the larger interests of firm and its future constituents. I live and work in the Washington, DC area – there’s an excellent example of such irrational dysfunction under a dome just a hop and a skip down the road from my office.

In the grand tradition of bad prison movie “wisdom”, I’m walking confidently into the yard and picking a fight with the biggest meanest gang I see, in this case, Toby, Jordan, and Susan.

With all due respect, you are all missing the point.  The problem is not what you call non-partners, or how you recruit them, or train them, or whether they exist at all.  The problem is the partnership itself.

I attended a conference last year in which a panel was discussing how they would design a firm if they were starting from scratch today.  Over an hour into the conversation someone asked, “What about a Limited Liability Partnership of owners?”  Two of the three panelists were partners in their firms, but when everyone was done laughing, they all agreed that partnership is a terrible business model and no one would build a firm that way today if given the choice.

Look at the new Alternative Business Structures in the UK and Australia, that allow firms to pursue outside investors and allow non-attorneys to be owners.  Admittedly, I haven’t been following too closely, but I haven’t heard of any investors clamoring to stick their money in traditional LLP law firms. If you look at new firms, and non-firms providing legal services, that are nipping at the heels of BigLaw, how many of them have a partnership structure? Why would they? How much time does Axiom spend trying to figure out what to call their non-partner-track attorneys?

Maybe the reason we are struggling to define non-partners, is because Partnership itself is limiting way beyond just liability.

OK. I’m ready to take my beating now…

Puzzle me this: If a lawyer conversed with a client in front of a law enforcement representative, would the conversation be privileged?

Answer: No.

Conversations held in the presence of any third party, let alone one representing the government, would constitute a waiver of privilege.

Previously on 3Geeks (and perhaps too many times) we have tackled the subject of the use of free email services and how that waives privilege. But now the NSA has upped the ante on the topic, basically spreading it to all email.

Unless you live under a rock with no wifi, you will be aware that the NSA is tracking global email communications and storing them in Utah (a nice place to visit). So, as a lawyer should you now expect that a government agency is obtaining copies of all of your confidential client communications? If so, you might want to ….

Oh never mind. If we actually took this rule seriously, all lawyers would be encrypting their email communications. And we know they are not and no one is asking them to do so.

I withdraw the statement.

Jordan and I will need to add Susan Hackett to our traveling road show as she has now entered the fray. Below Susan responds to Jordan’s critique of my critique of his original post. (Just writing that makes me kind of dizzy).

 See if you can follow the bouncing ball in this interesting debate.

 Thanks to Susan for adding to the conversation.

I’m with you both on many of the points raised, but have to say I’m most interested in two elements here that Jordan addresses near the end of his post and that he’s promised to cover at Law21: 

1.) the issue of training (or should I say “lack of training”) in most firms because partners are so busy performing as much work as they can themselves (and sometimes hoarding hours and clients that should be served by others who are more junior) that they take no time to invest in the next generations of lawyers who will succeed them in the firm at EVERY level. 

and

2.) the issue of the pipeline of legal talent – on which both firms and clients rely, which is only going to become a more acute concern as the boomers continue to move slowly toward retirement. There will be far fewer lawyers with significant experience and carefully cultivated training in the pipeline behind each successive class for the future if things don’t change soon. 

As a result, I think we have to give Greenberg Traurig (GT) more credit than Jordan suggests is due. At least they’re actually training new lawyers in a systematic way (regardless of whether they’re creating the future class of partners or not). Most firms are moving their mouths to claim that they’re raising their associates and future partners up and helping them prepare for the challenges of sophisticated practice, but they aren’t. And thus, the promise or offer made to those new lawyers who invest their lives in firms, as well as the promise or offer made to clients that the firm has a well-prepared bench who are properly prepared to handle their work appropriately, isn’t worth the paper their marketing brochures are written on. 

I’ll offer up my regular harping on behalf of the client perspective in all this, and remind folks that many clients are watching closely what firms are and aren’t doing to respond to change: not just open their minds to new thinking, but act to implement new ways of working. While the new class of employed lawyers that GT is raising up here are presumed by Jordan and perhaps others to be a non-starter in terms of value (suggesting it would be better/faster/cheaper to outsource than to build your own more expensive bench of employed talent), what GT is essentially creating here is a team of in-house counsel… clients carrying the same designation of employed lawyers working in their company’s businesses may be a little surprised to hear the presumption here that employed lawyers are likely to lack the ability to deliver value as well as outsourced teams. 

If anybody is likely to recognize and wish to discuss how to leverage a team of carefully trained and supervised law firm in-house lawyers, perhaps it’s the in-house counsel who work in the clients firms like GT serve. Maybe GT isn’t thinking like a law firm here; maybe GT is thinking like a client. In assessing their program, take a minute to look at it through the lens of the client’s business model, rather than the mis-aligned lens that law firms often use to assess what’s of value to them (while not focusing on what’s of value to their clients).

I’m not ready to jump to the conclusion that clients won’t value this new class of GT lawyers. They may not be motivated or trained to become the next generation of partners as we’ve known them in big firms, but that may not be such a bad thing. Why would anyone want to build their future firm based on the motivations and training that has left many firms with a teetering foundation in today’s competitive market? Maybe GT is building something that they will profit handsomely from because it provides what clients want to buy rather than what old-line firm partners want to sell. 

Let’s remember who are the responsible parties for in-elastically driving up rates over the last several decades to the level that there is no longer any correlation between cost and value for clients of larger firms: it wasn’t the servicing or employed lawyers (who clients LOVE!); it was untrained baby lawyers (who cost too much because firms hired 50 of them every year with the assumption that attrition would weed out 45 of them before they returned the firm’s and clients’ investment by becoming partners) and partners seeking ever-higher PPP.

Perhaps we should give GT credit for trying something new (more than most of its peers have done), and for exerting significant effort to train those in the firm serving clients with more efficiently valued services. I’m going to wait to see how that new class of lawyers’ services are actually packaged and priced (you reading me on this one, Toby? 🙂 before I assume that the cost and value of those carefully trained lawyers is not as good for clients as the cost and value of lawyers in comparable non-law-firm service providers (or the cost and value of those associates who are largely not being developed in firms without programs like this).

Maybe GT will fail. Goodness knows, there are things I would have done differently if I was running the project. 

But I’m not. And Huzzah! to GT for trying something new. There are a lot of smart people working there, and there’s a reason they have a hugely successful law firm and I don’t. So I’m in favor of giving them the benefit of the doubt and I’d encourage those of us who are interested in pushing forward firms to try new ideas to step back from our natural tendency to be hyper-critical about the perceived flaws in the idea to give the firm room to see if what’s good in this project can move law firm training and client service options deploying new lawyers forward in the current desert of options for many new lawyers.

This post originally appeared on the LexisNexis UK Future of Law Blog under the title Stealing the market: The degree that now has infinite value.

Image [cc] – doozle

On 17 October I saw Daniel B. Rodriguez, Dean of the Northwestern University School of Law, speak at the ARK Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession conference.  His presentation explained how some of the challenges that we are experiencing in law firms have trickled down to the law schools, and he gave some examples of how they are adjusting their approach and curricula to better prepare their students for the “new normal”.  One of the solutions he described was partnering with other schools to provide joint degrees. Since the economic downturn, Northwestern has reduced the number of traditional JD-only students, but has increased the size of their JD/MBA dual degree program. He also expressed an interest in partnering with a medical school to develop a JD/MD curriculum, and he made a passing mention of possibly doing something with “the humanities”.

I wholeheartedly applaud the joint degree approach. In my opinion, there is a severe lack of basic business understanding among lawyers. The fact that the phrase “not all revenue is profitable” often requires a lengthy explanation is a good indication that attorneys need more business training.  The JD/MD seems a little less immediately applicable, except of course to medical and health care law, but anything that gets attorneys to see how other people think is probably a good thing.  Which brings me to “the humanities”.  As a former music major, I can say the JD/MFA in vocal performance, or piano pedagogy, will probably have limited application; however, there is joint degree program that I believe could provide infinite value to attorneys, firms, and clients: a JD/MA in Design.

In BigLaw, the phrase “Who else is doing this?” is so common a response to any new idea, that it has officially become clichĂ©.  We have a tendency to focus heavily on what our competitors are doing. Unfortunately, we only perceive other BigLaw firms as our direct competitors.  We benchmark our businesses against similarly sized firms that think, act, and are run, very much like we are.  Meanwhile, there are a number of firms, and non-firms, providing legal services that are so far beneath our radar that they might as well be underground and they are beginning to get traction with our client base.  Unless we are careful, they will eat away at that base from the bottom, until we are fighting over the last scraps of global legal work that these smaller firms can’t handle.  But of course, by that point, they’ll be able to handle the big global work too.
There are numerous precedents for this kind of race to the top of the ladder, while an unexpected or unrecognized competitor dismantles the ladder from the bottom up.  Most famously in the US airline industry, where traditional airlines bench-marked exclusively against each other while low cost airlines like Southwest and JetBlue stole their market from the bottom.  

Incidentally, the epithet “low cost airline” is a bit of a misnomer.  While these companies do indeed offer lower priced tickets than traditional airlines, they have stolen much of the market by out-designing their predecessors. They designed new customer experiences, and new business models, while the old guard was focused on what all of other big airlines were doing.  Frankly, these “low cost” airlines have a better product that many consumers prefer, and they happen to deliver it at a much better price. And today, there are only two US airlines bigger than Southwest. They are the last two standing after a series of bankruptcies and mergers.

I think BigLaw faces a similar fate – not tomorrow, or next week, or next year, but that future is out there waiting for us – unless we begin to design new legal products, new customer experiences, and new business models that make those products and experiences profitable. We need to fight for the bottom and the middle of the market, if we hope to continue to provide our premium services at the top. I would probably start by hiring people with joint JD and design degrees, or even, maybe just the design degrees.