Postcard - Painted Map of Canada
Image [cc] Adam79

I’m not sure why, but I seem to have a high percentage of Canadian law library and legal industry friends. Plus, as far as I can tell, they are all much smarter than I am, too. So maybe I should just consider myself lucky that they are willing to be seen with me in public.

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries is hosting its annual conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba (that’s directly north of North Dakota, in case you’re looking for it on that map over there…), and the ever so lovely Karen Sawatzky has asked me to speak at the conference as a plenary for the conference themed “At the Confluence: Where Knowledge Meets Inspiration.” The conference will be held in a reportedly haunted hotel, and I hear that Winnepeg is actually quite nice between May 25th and 28th. 

Karen asked a favour of me to push out the CALL’s Call for Program Submissions. If you have any program ideas, please visit the page and fill out the submission.

I am really looking forward to going up and hanging out with many of the folks I see on Twitter or SLAW and going out for one or two or three of those strong Canadian beers after the sessions are over. If you’re going to be there, contact me and let me know!!

The Mixed Media Project
Image [cc] La Tête Krançien

At first it was really cool. Then it got really, really bad. Eventually, I had to just shut down the browser to escape the music and sensory overload!! A YouTube replay of Miley Cyrus at the VMAs?? No… I could actually sit through that. I’m talking about The Festival Issue of VENTS Online Magazine.

It isn’t that the concept is a bad idea, but the final product is simply not very good. In fact, it is a good example of what NOT to do with online magazines and mixing medias. (I’ll place a link to the magazine at the bottom, and you can click on it at your own personal sensory risk.)

Okay… where do I start?? Let me put a list out of what I think VENTS was wanting to do. Remember, good idea, bad result.

Good Ideas

  • They used Calaméo as the back-end product to create the magazine. Simple, straight-forward, process of creating an online magazine
  • A 146 pages of black background, white print, two-page spreads, with lots of dark images to blend in nicely
  • Short, interview style articles that were very easy to read and or skim
  • Actually worked pretty well with my iPhone (I’d probably be writing a different article if I hadn’t opened it up on my PC)
  • Music and videos embedded into the articles related to the bands being interviewed

Bad Results

  • I’m still not a fan of the online magazines that attempt to look exactly like a glossy paper magazine. I really don’t like the swishing sound that is made when you turn the virtual page, or for that matter, I don’t like the virtual turning of the page, either!
  • Flash based from the PC browser
  • When mixing medias, it is important that the reader/listener/viewer maintain control of the different medias. Don’t automatically start the music or videos. Let the user decide when to do that.
  • When you have media embedded into the product, make sure it works. I couldn’t control the sound from the embedded soundbar. I had to actually turn the computer’s volume control down because it was blasting as soon as I ‘flipped’ to the next page.
  • If you have control bars for the media, make sure they work. I couldn’t find a way to turn off the music, and when I did find the media tool bar for the embedded video, none of the controls worked.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I initially thought this was really cool. An online magazine that talked about specific music festivals, specific bands, and gave me immediate access to information, text, links, video, and music to learn more about these festivals and bands. Good idea… something that the people behind the Van’s Warped Tour should consider doing. But, MAN!!, don’t overload me like that with automated media that doesn’t work properly. I’m not sure if the problem lay with the magazine producers or with the backend company producing the format. However, it really ruined a good concept.

Okay… now that I’ve gone on and on about it, here is the link to the online magazine. I tested it in Chrome (bad), Internet Explorer 9 (bad), and on my iPhone 4s (good). If you are on a PC, you might want to turn your volume down before opening the link (otherwise your office neighbors give you funny looks for the rest of the day.) If you can make it through to page 146, you’ll find one of my favorite bands featured there!!

ILTA has published many of the Audio recordings and Slide Presentations from the 2013 Conference here.  They are available for ILTA Members free of charge.  If you are not a member, I highly recommend you become one, or make friends with a member so you can get access to this wonderful resource.  I spoke on Monday afternoon in an experimental session with 3 other terrific speakers.  We each took 12 minutes and presented on a stand-alone topic in the style of a short TED talk.  I spoke third, but I’ve chopped my own presentation out of the others and embedded it here.  If you find this at all interesting, please go to the ILTA page and listen to some more.

The complete talk is about 12 minutes long. I presented without slides and with a single prop.

See also my short story, The Granny Bug, which was inspired by my research into the Internet of Things.

BONUS: This also doubles as the first ever 3 Geeks Drinking Game! Grab your favorite beverage and drink every time I say the word THINGS. Although I’ll warn you, you probably won’t make it through the first 3 minutes.

Full transcript after the jump….

I’ve cleaned up some of the wording to make it more clear in writing. I think I got my points across in person, but maybe I was just rambling.

TRANSCRIPT:
So, I’m going to change gears quite abruptly. [adjusting microphone] And I want to talk about something that came up a little bit this morning in the Keynote.

Sometime between 2005 and 2008 the number of things on the Internet surpassed the number of people on the planet. It’s estimated that by 2020 there will be more than 50 Billion things online.  Now things, in this context, are Internet connected devices with uniquely identifiable IP addresses.

These things are the things that we use to connect to the Internet.  Mostly they’re computers, and tablets, and smartphones.  You could call them things on the Internet of People.  However, most of the things coming online recently are not on the Internet of People.  They are things that connect to other things.  They are what we call, for lack of a better name – or any imagination, things on the Internet of Things.

If you Google “Internet of Things” you are going to find an entire Jetson’s future fantasy world of automated devices that promise to make your life easier.  You’re going to find the Nest Thermostat, which is probably the most famous thing on the Internet of Things.  It’s a thermostat that learns your preferences and over time it starts to adjust itself automatically. But it also has sensors that can detect when there are people around and it knows when no one is home so it can turn itself down. And it also is connected to the network so it can communicate with your power provider and it can find out what the [power] demands are expected to be for the day, and it can adjust itself.

You will also find things like the Ambient Umbrella. This is a Wi-fi umbrella that has LED lights in it’s base that light up when it’s expected to rain. It communicates with the weather service.

You’ll find something that I think is my favorite thing online, the EggMinder from GE.  This is a little plastic egg carton that sits in your fridge and it has a Wi-Fi connection.  It syncs with an app on your phone so that anywhere in the world, at any time, you will always know exactly how many eggs you have in your fridge.

Now, all of this stuff is really cool, and a lot of fun, and exciting. But there are some outstanding issues that are preventing these things from becoming mainstream. Preventing the Internet of Things from becoming mainstream.

All of these devices are stand-alone technologies.  They all communicate very well within their own platforms and their own ecosystems, but they don’t communicate very well between each other.  The Internet of Things, at this point, is in a very similar state to where the Internet of People was prior to the development of the World Wide Web.  There are a lot of little networks that work fine on their own, but trying to get between them is difficult.  There are companies that are working on a Web of Things concept.  There are several of them [competing to provide this type of easier communication]. And I have no doubt that one of them, in the very near future, is going to step out from the pack and everyone will get on board, and we will get that Jetson’s future that we’re all hoping for.

But as I was thinking about this talk and as I was researching it.  I kept wondering one thing.  One thing was stuck in the back of my mind. And that is, “Is that all?” I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want a Wi-Fi toaster because it’s cool, but really? Is this what we’re hoping to get from this Internet of Things concept?  So I started trying to forget all of this consumer device hype.  [And I wondered] what is the Internet of Things at it’s base? 

And it got me thinking about physics.  I wish it had gotten me thinking about chemistry because then I could do a really great Catalyst metaphor [ed. the theme for this year’s ILTA conference was “IT – The Catalyst”], but instead it got me thinking about physics.  And specifically Quantum Mechanics.  And there’s a concept in Quantum Mechanics called entanglement.  The idea is you take two particles and you bring them together and their quantum fields begin to entangle.  (What ever that means.) When you spin one of these particles the other is going to spin too.  But the crazy thing is you can then separate them, and you can send one of those entangled particles across the street, or across the country, or to the other side of the universe and when you spin the one you still have, [the other] one is going to spin too.

Now, no less a visionary than Albert Einstein derided this concept.  He called it “Spooky Action at a Distance.” It has since been proven.  But spooky action at a distance is really good description of the Internet of Things, because at it’s core, it’s a sensor that senses the world around it and then communicates that to an actuator that can actually do something about it.

That’s a concept we’re all familiar with within our devices. If you’ve got your iPhone and you put it up to your ear, the proximity sensor turns off your touchscreen so you don’t accidentally hang up with your cheek. The Internet of Things does the same thing, except it allows you to spread out and separate the sensors from the actuators in much the same way that our two particles that are entangled can be separated.  Whereas the particles can be anywhere in the universe, the sensor and the actuator can be anywhere on the network.

So if you start thinking about the Internet of Things in those terms, rather than thinking about it in terms of these consumer devices like the EggMinder.  You start to realize that actually, THIS is the coolest thing on the Internet.

This is called a Twine. It’s a little box and it’s got a battery, a Wi-Fi antenna, and three sensors. It senses temperature, orientation, and vibration. So I can log into it and set rules, that when one of these sensors is triggered it sends a communication across the network.  I can set up a rule and I can leave this on my dryer, and when my dryer stops vibrating, it will text me that my laundry is done.  I can leave this in a window on a hot day, and I can have it set so that it will warn me when my house plants are getting to hot. With a little bit of ingenuity I can tie this into If This Then That, which is an online site that allows you connect various internet services together.  By doing that I can actually make my Twine tweet, or put up a Facebook post. Or I’ve got the Wi-Fi lightbulbs from Phillips, I can have my Twine turn my lights on and off.

Now, you’re going to laugh, but this device, I think, will change the world.

That sounds a little ridiculous, but I want you to think about it this way.  Sixty-Five years ago I could hold a few transistors in the palm of my hand.  Today I could hold billions.  Now, I don’t expect Internet connected sensors to shrink at the rate of Moore’s Law, but if you can imagine that maybe they could shrink at a quarter of that rate, then sixty-five years from now, I could hold more than ten thousand of these in my hand. At that point they’d all be about the size of a grain of sand.

Now, if that happens, these won’t be in boxes like this, and we won’t weld them to our devices. They’ll be everywhere.  We’ll put them in our clothing, in the carpet, on the walls, and in our furniture.  At a certain point, that changes the way we interact with the network.  In fact, the physical world can become the user interface to the network. The physical world can be something that allows spooky action at a distance. And I don’t know exactly how that will work, or what that will look like, but I can imagine, by way of analogy, how it might feel.

If I asked you today, “What computers have you used recently?” We’re all techies, you can probably list a dozen. But if I asked the average person, even they could tell me, “This is the computer I own, this is what I like about it, this is what I don’t.”  Computing is at the forefront of our minds, it’s an active technology.  Something we’re conscious of doing. We use computers as tools to accomplish certain things.

But there are other technologies that are no longer conscious, but they’re still there, and we use them all the time.  If I were to ask you, “What motors do you use?”  You’ll probably think of your car, but as you think about it more, you’ll realize, “Well, there’s the garage door opener, and the lawnmower…” and on and on and on.  You’ve got motors everywhere, but you’re not aware of them.  You’re not conscious of them.

I think that the real promise of the Internet of Things is that it holds the potential to eventually make computers and computing a background technology, so that you are not aware of it in the same way.  So that in seventy five or a hundred years from now, if I asked you “What computers do you use?”  You’ll have to think about it.  And when you come up with an answer it might be, “Well, there’s my toothbrush, and my shoes, and you know, of course the walls.”  But you might answer, “You know, I don’t think I really use computers, but I’m always on the Internet of Things.”

Thank you.

I have had more than a week to recover from ILTA 2013 in Las Vegas and I am slowly starting to return to normal.  But, that is the problem.  I don’t want to return to normal.  I desperately want to maintain the heady state of learning and collaboration that we establish every year for four short days in some ridiculously hot location in late August.  I’ve attended ILTA for the last three years and every year it manages to recharge my batteries and get me excited about what I’m trying to do at my firm.  That enthusiasm usually lasts for a few short weeks before I’m slowly drug back into the muddy reality of “This is what [high level partner] thinks is important, so that’s what we’re going to keep doing for the foreseeable future.”  First my shoes get stuck, and then the walls close in, and soon I’m standing nose to gypsum with just enough room to pull my head back an inch so I can gently bang my forehead repeatedly against the wall in front of me. (Yes, writing blog posts is much cheaper than therapy.)

I am not above a little hyperbole to make a point, but I know I’m not the only one who feels like this.  Something wonderful happens at that conference and it’s not strictly the learning sessions, or the vendor parties, and it’s most certainly not the food. It’s the people.

That may sound like a touchy-feely, sentimental, Up With People, BS statement, until you understand that I am not in any way, shape, or form a people person.  I have friends and I like many people. I can easily talk with anyone about any particular thing, but I don’t easily do small talk. I’m not very good at meeting new people. And I struggle with most conversations that begin “So, what do you do?”  The thing about ILTA is that I have very few of those conversations. Strangers at ILTA begin conversations with phrases like, “We’ve been trying to do this. Do you have any thoughts?” Or, if they overhear your conversation with someone else, they’ll speak up and say, “You know, we built/bought something that does that…”  The focus of most interactions and conversations at ILTA are centered around solving problems.  Conversations at ILTA end with, “I’m so-and-so, what’s your name?  And what do you do?”  Then you exchange cards and walk away.  Until you see them in the corridor the next day and introduce them to someone you just met who has a similar problem to the one they’re trying to solve.

There is an openness to this community. One that, by necessity, admits to its own vulnerability.  There is very little pretense or braggadocio. The strength of every success story I heard this year was built upon the foundation of the failures that came before.

When we return to the “real” world, those administrative and bureaucratic walls that too quickly close in around us, also make it very difficult to share our stories, or to ask for help, or even to openly admit our failures.  For four short days in the desert we have no walls and we are free to learn and collaborate with our peers without the constraints of politics or bureaucracy.  It may be that that kind of communication and collaboration can only exist for short periods of time among acquaintances and strangers.  It may be that such a thing can not possibly exist on an ongoing basis within the confines and constraints of a law firm environment. But if I truly believed that, there would be no reason to keep banging against those walls.

They’ll come down. If not this year, maybe after ILTA 2014.

Here I am, sitting in my office, planning out my budget for the next year when along comes this announcement from Amazon: “Introducing the Kindle Matchbook.”  It seems that Amazon will provide you with an ebook copy of a book that was purchased from them in print for a nominal ranging from a Free (yes, I said free) to a high of $2.99.  And they’re willing to count purchases made all the way back to 1995.  There is one limit:  this is only available for titles that the publishers have opted in on.  I think this is pretty darn exciting but what will really be interesting is how widely the publishers support this program.

As a Law Librarian (or Research Services Specialist if you prefer), I’m thrilled to see a purveyor of the printed word that acknowledges that it is cheaper to publish books electronically and gives you a benefit for purchasing the print edition.  In the Legal Publishing world, Firms are expected to pay the same price for an ebook as they do for a the printed edition (and yes, you do save on the Shipping & Handling charges) and you need to spend several thousand dollars annually on software to manage the confounded things.  Perhaps this move by Amazon will shake this model up.  You can find more information about this Amazon program here.

Google and Apple - true love
Image [cc] Joakim Jardenberg

Since the demise of Google Reader, I’ve been a little less frequent in going through my RSS feeds using the Feed.ly platform. Over the long weekend, I tried to catch up (and am still trying), and came across an article from bwagy on the different approaches that Apple and Google take when it comes to preparing their customers for change. Apple takes a slow, methodical, periodic approach. Introducing the next #Version in the series, followed by the next #S version about every two years. There are significant changes with each upgrade, but not so much that the customer feels unfamiliar with the product. Apple seems to hold back on some changes so that they do not get too far ahead of its customers. Google, on the other hand, pushes out changes as they come available, sometimes at the expense of leaving some customers very uncomfortable with the changes. The interesting thing that has happened over the past few years is that Google has become cool, and Apple has become the stable platform for the masses.

The whole concept of how to approach change made me think about the way law firm librarians package the mass amounts of online, print, and on-demand resources we buy for our firms. We all know that most of our lawyers, paralegals, and other members of the firm that use research products are usually creatures of habit, and don’t adapt very well to new platforms. Many of us know that there are partners out there that are still upset that WordPerfect 4.2 was taken away from them. However, change is the one constant, and there are many times where we know the products we are familiar with are transitioning into new platforms, or have been purchased by one of the big legal publishers, and eventually will become either completely obsolete, or with just completely go away altogether. So how do we approach the inevitable changes? How do we prepare our customers for the changes?

Some of us push the next level of technology or research platforms out to our users much in the way that Google pushes change. New product comes out. Buy it. Push it out. Train, train, train. Then use the early adopters as champions to show that it can be done, and that everyone needs to get on board. The Google approach can also include bringing in a wide variety of unrelated products that address a broad range of needs. Changes come quickly, and sometimes a product can change multiple times over a relatively short time period.

Some of us push the Apple approach to change. We coordinate contracts so that they align and the changes come periodically. Since we know we have two or three years before we need to make changes, we hold back the changes and have them fit a set life cycle to fit those two to three year periods. The information about the changes come well in advance of the change itself. Many times the customers watch as their peers from other firms discuss all of the new bells and whistles of product version #S, while they are still stuck using the pre#S version. This can create an interesting dilemma of driving demand for change from a base that is usually change-resistant.

The common thread between the Apple and the Google version for addressing change is that they plan for the change and the customer base understands the pros and cons of how their favorite technology companies push change to them. Take a look around at your change policies. Which version do you take when it comes to pushing change to your customers. Do you even have a policy? If you don’t, it might be time to consider implementing one. The only thing worse than pushing change out to your customers, is blindsiding them with it.

elephant show
Image [cc] Alex Faundez

The three-year law school program. Is it too long? President Obama hinted that it may be when he suggested that law schools seriously look into making it a two-year program. Does a third-year law student have a better grasp of the practice of law than his or her second-year counterpart? We asked, and you answered.

Is two-years enough time to teach students to “think like a lawyer”? Some think that it two years would help to push students out into the real world faster, and essentially better prepare them to handle the day-to-day questions, practices, and procedures that lawyers actually face in their practices. Some think that it is a step in the wrong direction and that it would throw these graduates into a world that relies upon law firms or lawyers to bear the burden of training (and paying) unprepared lawyers. Some think that those cost actually should be pushed onto the market rather than having graduates burdened with the vast amounts of debt that will take decades to pay off. However, some are skeptical that those costs would actually be pushed back onto the student by law schools raising tuition rates to make up for the loss of the year.

Enjoy the response. Again, if you missed your chance to contribute (shame on you) and you have your own opinion on the topic, take the more traditional route and let us know in the comments.

Anonymous
Last I heard firms were up in arms about the (non-existent) practical skills of new associates and clients, at least Big Law clients, were fuming over high hourly rates for law firm “trainees.” Rather than producing more “practice-ready” lawyers, 2-year programs would pawn off more of the costs for training onto firms and clients. How is this not going backwards???

Susan Hackett – Legal Executive Leadership
It seems to me that the real question isn’t the length of the stay in school, but the relevance of what’s taught. I’d be supportive of a shorter curriculum if the focus was on practical skills and their application; the current 3-year curriculum teaches legal theory and caselaw, with only a sprinkling of classes geared to serving a client or participating in a law practice. While I don’t think law schools should become technical institutes, I think most of us with fancy JDs felt ill-prepared to actually serve a real client when we graduated after 3 years of curriculum focused on theory without application to real-life practice.

For those worried that 2 years is not enough time to make a legal professional out of a college grad, perhaps we could focus on two years of formal training in law school, followed by additional time outside of the school/classroom in practical apprenticeships, from which – if successfully completed – a student could be passed forward for admission to the bar. Doctors, for instance, are required to combine schooling with residency or other clinical work to assure that they’ve been vetted in a manner which tests not only their memorization of theory and principle, but their ability to actually treat and heal a patient.  Why not consider this with law?

I blogged a while back about the topic of re-framing law school educational models if you’re interested:  http://www.legalexecutiveleadership.com/2011/blowing-up-the-box-starting-a-conversation-about-re-engineering-the-us-law-school-educational-model

(Next up: the need to talk about whether the US bar exam is a meaningful way to test for competency to practice, either!)

Cheers –
– Susan

Bob Wells
I am a proponent of two year law schools, with a third year being optional if the student sees value in the course offerings.  A good friend is a law school dean, and he believes that a person who goes directly from undergraduate to law school will not be ready to take on the legal issues of another.  Another friend believes that two year schools will only bring on more for profit law schools.

GRR

  1. That the elite schools will up the cost of tuition to cover the losses (look at the cost of two year MBAs at the elite schools if you don’t think that this likely to happen).
  2. That a two year program will require that low tier schools just teach the bar subjects and bar prep for students to pass the bar.  There will be no time for practical skills course. 

I understand the need to reformulate the law school experience but this is not the way to do it.

Adam Ziegler, Lawyer & Co-Founder of Mootus
What matters more than the length of the program are (1) the cost to students and (2) the value of what they’re being taught. Right now, students are spending $150K to acquire knowledge and skills that employers and sophisticated clients seem not to value. Whether it’s two years or three years, we need to attack those fundamental problems directly.

Norse Elephant
Image [cc] kaiban

President Obama made an off-the-cuff remark last week when he was quoted in The Washington Post, “that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years.” Apparently he knew this would cause some controversy, but he took solace in the fact that he doesn’t have to run for a third term and can make controversal statements like this.

Now, remember that the President is on his “College Affordability Bus Tour” so the topic is focused on the overal cost of school, not the actual numbers of lawyers that our 200+ law schools are pumping out into the industry these days. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun/conversation on the comment and what the overall outcome would be of removing the 3L class out of law schools and just releasing fresh faced 2L’s out into the world.

Therefore, this week’s Elephant Post question is simply:

What Could Possibly Go Wrong With Reducing Law School To A Two-Year Program?

Here are the rules for answering the EP:

  • Fill out the form below, or email me (xlambert at gmail dot com) with your answer
  • You can give us your real name or stay anonymous
  • I’ll put out the answers on Friday
  • See what others have answered

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Fuller Classroom with elephant
Image [cc] PainterWoman

Training… something we do every year for incoming Fall Associates, yet somehow most of us walk away feeling like we really didn’t help integrate the newbie lawyers into the firm the way we’d really like. Of course, many of the Associates are too concerned with the billable matter that was assigned to them right before the training began, to worry about little things like learning how we bill back to the client for our online resources, or file items in the DMS, or reserve meeting rooms. So, we asked if we could start over, and create the training the way we really wanted, how would you do it?

There were some themes that ran through the answers. Two specifically.

  1. Real Simulations (bring your work to class)
  2. Make Training Mandatory (no billable work assigned until training is completed

There were a couple of other items that stood out to me. First, one of the answers expanded our Fall Associate idea to all lateral hires. We tend to think that Fall Associates have certain technology skills (which they don’t), but even worse, we assume that Lateral hires understand all of the basic principles of how a law firm works (which they don’t.)

The other item that stood out to me was about the format of training. It doesn’t have to be classroom style, and it doesn’t have to be a set time for everyone. Why not have parts of the training set up as on-demand style and let the Associates take the training at their own pace (of course, they still have to actually do the on-demand training.)

Lots of good stuff. If you didn’t get a chance to submit your own answer, there’s still the option of putting it in the comments.

(1) Adam Ziegler

  1. “Real” simulations, with immediate, direct, high impact feedback from supervising lawyers. For litigators, this might include drafting a small-bore motion (like a protective order motion), a discovery meet-and-confer, taking a minor deposition, a substantive legal brief, a client meeting. Impose time limits. Reward for out-performance.
  2. Basic, practical tech training, both “how to” and “best practices.” Excel, Word [e.g. redlining], Dropbox/Box, PPT, Outlook. Reward for out-performance.
  3. Business development, marketing and networking. Off-line and online activities. Set specific goals, measure and report, and reward for out-performance.
  4. Creative, collaborative problem-solving. Give small teams of associates a tiny budget and very short window of time, and require them to identify a discrete problem relevant to practice area, build a prototype solution and pitch it to the entire group. Reward for and implementation of best work.

(2) Steve

I have one word that would help more than any other: “Mandatory”

Actually, now that I think about it, two words, “Mandatory” and “Graded” (applied to both the Associate, and the Partner responsible for that Associate.)

The biggest pitfall of training is the dreaded “I can’t go because Partner X has given me an assignment.” If there is no reprecussions from skipping training, or forcing Associates to pick between training and actually working on something that counts as billable time, then training will always come in second. By putting some accountability on both the Associate and the Partner, the firm shows that training is important and that everyone is expected to do whatever is needed to make sure that the newbies learn the ropes of the way work is performed at the firm.

(3) Anonymous

  1. Make training mandatory.
  2. Remind partners/mentors/supervisoring attorneys that training is for the benefit of the new associate and is mandatory.
  3. Have real life scenarios in training sessions.
  4. Implement quizzes during training (especially for library & IT.)

(4) Anonymous

I would do two things:

  1. Provide a 45-60 minute individual training orientation to the new associate on the print and electronic resources that are of general applicability, and also specific to their practice. Give them an opportunity to ask questions about the resources. I would also use this time to provide helpful knowledge and insight as to how the firm is organized and operates.
  2. Provide a once-yearly, 1.5 hour universal session to all new associates to showcase and optimize the firm resources available to them. The session would demonstrate why the resources are relevant to their law practice, and provide instruction as to how to access and search them. The underlying theme of the session would be to transition the associates from law school theory to real world practice.

(5) Anonymous

I can’t wait to see what others say! I just wanted to drop a line and suggest that training (at least at big law) should also include laterals. I was a five-year government lawyer went I went to big law. I was given a day of training on the office computer system. I had no idea how to use a copier that required a user ID and matter number. (I was told to have someone else make the copies). I also had no idea how to bill or even how to drum up assignments. (Certainly those were necessary skills). Not that any of it really mattered. I didn’t have a performance review until year 5. But then again, big law hired me as a staff attorney or third-class citizen.

(6) Anonymous
Our concept of the ideal fall associate training program, including library orientation, would start with a multi-disciplinary group (MDG) composed of representatives from various departments responsible for providing information to new hires. This group, working with the departments, would select and centralize resources (handouts, handbooks, recordings, etc.) and make them available to the fall associates in an online environment (e.g., SharePoint). SharePoint would also provide a place where the MDG could share information with each other (e.g., associate names, practice groups, start dates).

A timeline and deadlines (e.g., calendared appointment reminders) would keep associates on track in reviewing resources, tests would be incorporated into the process and some review would be mandatory. The MDG would schedule live sessions or in-person meetings. Fall associates could review resources as needed after completing orientation.

In the library, brief audio and/or video presentations providing just-in-time information would be accessible via a mobile platform for ease of access. We would link appropriate resource use to associate evaluations.

Attendance and successful test completion would be automatically tracked online and metrics would be compared against benchmarks (in the case of the library, use and cost benchmarks) to determine success.

Tomorrow is the deadline for early bird, discounted registration for the upcoming P3 Conference. The Conference, on Pricing, Practice Innovation and Project Management, will be a unique experience for those interested in these topics. 

The Conference was designed around the goals of the Client Value Shared Interest Group of the LMA. These goals are: 1) professional development for those serving in pricing and project management roles, 2) developing a knowledge base of best practices, and 3) driving the development of products and services suited for the new, emerging needs of firms and clients.
To #1 – the Conference will have advanced content on the subjects involving top experts from each field. For #2 – there will be sessions talking about best practices related to each topic and finally for #3, providers will be talking about their new offerings and soliciting input for future development from conference participants.
To see the full Conference schedule with topics and confirmed speakers, check out the website. You can also secure discounted hotel lodging there.
Registrations are coming in fast. So secure your spot now, and save a few bucks with the early bird rate.
See you there!