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.

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…