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.

Image [cc] MyEyeSees

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?

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.