Image [cc] – Tomozaurus

Jane: The billable hour is dead, Dan. It is the sad and lonely remnant of an era when clients were to stupid to realize they were being fleeced by outside counsel. I for one can no longer, in good conscience, blatantly steal my client’s money. I officially declare the billable hour six feet under, pushing up daisies, defunct, deceased, kaput. Never to be heard from a…

Dan: OK, OK. I get it. You do realize, Jane, that repeating something incessantly doesn’t make it true, it just makes you slightly more annoying than usual. Also, as a graduate of North Tuvalu Online Law School, I’m pretty sure you’re stealing your client’s money regardless of the billing arrangement.
Jane: Woo hoo! Go Land Sharks! I choose to ignore your petty insults, Dan. They are nothing more than the last dying gasp of a big dumb lizard.
Dan: What is that supposed to mean?
Jane: It means that you, my unfriend, are a post-asteroid BigLaw Dinosaur. Desperately grasping at the last lingering rays of light before the sun is forever blocked out, the plants all die, the critters that eat the plants pass away, and your BigLaw Tyrannosaurus — still billing by the hour — ignominiously starves to death.
Dan: OK, first of all, paleo-breath, the dinosaurs that survived evolved into birds not reptiles.  Secondly given your ridiculous scenario, my Tyrannosaurus would die of dehydration or disease long before it starved to death. And finally, you’ve taken this metaphor waaaaay too far. I have no idea what your original point was.
Jane: My point IS that the billable hour, by its nature, creates terribly perverse financial incentives for the attorney and provides absolutely no value whatsoever to the client.
Dan:  I have no idea how that relates, but let’s move on. Perverse financial incentives?
Jane: By rewarding the total time spent working, rather than the actual work completed, the billable hour incentivizes attorneys to either do more work than is necessary, or to work more slowly. Either way, the client is paying more for less relevant work product.
Dan: I’ll keep this really simple for you Jane; the method of billing doesn’t incentivize anything.  The structure of attorney compensation is the problem. Take for instance the guy that changes the tires on your pickup truck. He doesn’t care whether the garage charges you for parts and labor (hourly billing) or a flat rate. He only cares how HE is compensated. If he is paid based on how long it takes him to change the tires, rather than the number of tires he changes, then he’d be a fool not to double tighten your every lug nut and thoroughly polish your rims.
Jane: You pig!
Dan: What?
Jane: I… don’t know, but it sure sounded… Anyway, your argument fails to take into account that by artificially increasing revenue, the billable hour incentivizes the owner to create those bad compensation structures in the first place. Any way you look at it, the billable hour amounts to little more than institutional theft and I, for one, am shocked that you would defend, even advocate for such chicanery!
Dan: I’m not advocating for anything! I’m saying that, as usual, you have entirely missed the point! For certain engagements, certain clients will always be best served by aligning effort and outcome, not just focusing on the outcome. Your attempt to prematurely bury the billable hour is severely hampered by the fact that it is still the most prominent method of billing for legal services. I’m not saying it is the greatest thing ever, or even appropriate most of the time, just that the problem for clients is that the cost of legal services has steadily risen, while the value they have received in return has stagnated. This is not a problem of billing practices; this is a lack of management oversight. Law firms need to completely rethink the way they manage their practices, the way they compensate their attorneys and, yes, the way they bill their clients! But even if the billable hour as a concept were to completely disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, the vast majority of the problems facing BigLaw and their clients would remain entirely unaffected!
Jane: ….
Dan: C’mon, Jane! No snappy comeback? No witty repartee?
Jane: The last dying gasp of a big dumb turkey.
Dan: I’ll take that as a no.

Please submit topic suggestions or make your own arguments at dandj3Geeks@gmail.com.

It seems everyone is talking about the NSA’s surveillance program, PRISM, these days. Although the program seems to be very creative in ways of gathering information, it seems that the group’s presentation skills need a bit of work. Don’t worry, French freelance presentation designer, Emiland, has come in to help!

Emiland has taken the poorly designed NSA PowerPoint presentation and converted the data into something that is actually worth monitoring.

NSA Children’s Books

Emiland isn’t alone in noticing a lack of creative expression from the NSA. The Guardian has assisted in helping (well, in addition to breaking the story), by creating a gallery of #NSAKidsBooks crowdsourced by Darth (probably without a court order, or copyright permission… but, hey, it’s a parody, so we’ll let it slide this time around.)

Even one of my favorite artists/cartoonists/graphic designers, has contributed to help the NSA with their ability to express their abilities in the form of a Venn Diagram, that shows the NSA that “They’ve seen it all.“

Of course, we still live in an age that requires some of us to be stimulated by short videos helping us understand why such a program is worth the price we pay for it (how much is a Civil Liberty going for these days??) Don’t worry NSA, BreitbartTV has you covered there,too.

Let’s hand it to those on the Interwebs that can step up and help the US Government when it falls a little short in its abilities to graphically describe how it is monitoring you.

Image [cc] doni19
Everyone seems to agree that BigLaw is f’d up. The business model is completely screwed up and not in alignment with reality. This allows great sport for those of us who enjoy picking at the various aspects of exactly how BigLaw is headed for disaster.

But what does this disaster look like?

Many prognosticators are on death watch. Which firm will be the next Dewey / Howrey to collapse?

I propose another alternative for BigLaw – Death by a Thousand Cuts. The vast majority of firms will not implode, but instead will fade slowly to black.

Why do I say this?

Law firms, for the most part, act like sheep. They keenly watch the actions of the other sheep and then match them. As we have noted previously on 3 Geeks, most innovative ideas at firms are met with the response: “What are other firms doing?” The result is that firms don’t break away. Instead, they move as a herd.

Alongside the Sheep Factor is the Financially Conservative Factor. BigLaw firms love to brag about being debt free. The point being is that most firms are not in a “Dewey” situation, where their finances are in bad shape. Instead, they will experience profit pressures at the margin. The profitability of their work will slide over time. So instead of facing a cliff, they face a relatively gentle slope.

They will then react in one of two ways (per the Sheep Factor). First they may just accept declining profit. At a former firm I repeatedly heard partners say “Maybe we have been making too much money.” Those partners may be perfectly fine with slowly declining (high) incomes.

The second option will be right-sizing the firms. This will likely take the form of fewer equity partners: be that through de-equitization or smaller incoming partner classes. In this scenario, profits may be maintained or even enhanced, but there will be a smaller ownership pool. So effectively theses firms will shrink to maintain profit.

In either case, these firms will not be in much danger of imploding. They will pay their bills and make partner distributions. Their market share will be shrinking, but there will not be catastrophic collapses.

Of course firms whose financial fundamentals are not in shape should be concerned. But I would venture a guess that after Dewey, most firms took a hard look at those numbers, tightened up their lateral policies and further limited their debt exposure. So there may not be many firms facing a cliff.

Which leads us to our Death of 1000 Cuts – which greatly lowers the entertainment factor of a Death Watch.

Image [cc] Ed Callow
I used to joke with Geek #1 about how we could pluck a lawyer from 1985, teach her email and Word, send her to a few CLEs to update her legal knowledge and she would be “good-to-go” to practice law. The point being – the practice of law hasn’t changed much in 20 or even 30 years.


As a car guy, I tend to translate legal (or any other) market issues into the market for cars. Recently I purchased an older car for a fun project (‘72 Coupe De Ville if you care to know). Besides sending me back in time, the difference between the Caddy and cars of today is extreme. Cars are WAY nicer, safer, faster, more fuel efficient, more comfortable, …. For those who may want to get a ride in the Caddy, I will make sure to point out the advances in braking technology before you get in.

The main point here is that the value proposition of cars advances every year. Recent advances include things like adaptive cruise control, a/c in the seats, self-parking and lane assist. So price increases are more about increased value than they are about inflation, although inflation does factor in.

So … here’s the trick question: How are lawyers advancing their value every year (to match price increases)? Keeping up on the law doesn’t count. Neither does upgrading your office suite or getting new computers.

But now here’s a better trick question: How much does Efficiency and Effectiveness add to value? Clients are pushing for lower prices, which is ‘‘more for less’ but is that more value?


I am definitely an advocate of utilizing legal project management and approaches like process improvement. But for all these tools provide, they are not designed to increase value. They reduce costs. In my humble opinion, efficiency is not a value enhancer. One might argue effectiveness is, but I see that as semantics. “Effective” is being better at getting desired results. It’s not about getting different results.

Here are some examples to demonstrate the point: 
– Instead of securing better litigation results, offer a service to reduce the amount of litigation. 
– Or how about a service that organizes client legal content for consistency, to reduce risk. 
– Or how about a service that monitors patent filings against a patent portfolio? 
– Or how about a service that organizes legal content to streamline acquisitions (for clients in acquisition mode)?

Pondering this topic, one value adding legal example does jump to mind: The Poison Pill Strategy developed by Wachtell. That was a new service that added value. But I struggle to think of others.

Back to cars – Auto makers employ process improvement, project management, new technology (robots), out-sourcing and other tools to lower their cost of production. You might argue some of these efforts that focus on effectiveness add value, such as improved gas mileage. However, value-add does not come from improving efficiencies in production to lower costs. Value add comes from new features, functions and services.

Where are those in legal services?



 Dan:  Recently a number of firms have announced reductions in their secretarial ranks as a means of improving their secretary ratios – which is to say 5:1 is the new 4:1. For those not familiar with this stat – it means that the new goal is 5 timekeepers for every 1 secretary. This approach makes a lot of sense. Technology is, in many ways, displacing the traditional role of the legal secretary. Firms should take advantage of these new technological advancements and reduce their headcount to pass along a cost savings to their clients via lower rates.

Jane: That seems perfectly logical and sensible, Dan…
Dan: Why… thank you, Jane?
Jane: Or, I’m sure it would to someone completely incapable of logical thought.
Dan: Here we go.
Jane: First, you callously assume that legal secretaries do nothing but sit around playing Farmville and buying crap on eBay all day. If that is true in your firm, then you don’t need a target secretary ratio, you need to fire people. 
Dan: I’m not saying legal secretaries are lazy, just that times have changed. Most firms are fully digital. Most attorneys draft their own documents, and send their own correspondence. But we still staff as if everything is done by secretaries.
Jane: So, you think the problem of under-utilized secretaries is exclusively caused by disruptive technologies?  
Dan: No, not exclusively, but in part…
Jane: How typically asinine. The vast majority of technological enhancements in law firms are upgrades to the OS and office suite. Neither of those bring significant productivity enhancements. In fact, some evidence shows that office suite upgrades actually reduce productivity.
Dan: I would expect a technological lightweight like you, Jane, to think that the OS and office suite are the most important technology upgrades at a law firm, but there is much more going on technologically behind the scenes.
Jane: And there appears to be nothing going on behind your scenes, Dan. No single, or even group of technologies, has replaced the services of a single legal secretary.  If secretaries are indeed performing less work, then that work is either no longer being done or someone else is doing it. I know of very few things that firms have stopped doing, so that suggests someone else is doing the secretarial work. 
Dan: Look, you ignoramus, I have never said that a single technology can replace a legal secretary, just that the totality of technological productivity enhancements over the last few years have reduced the need for a firm to have so many legal secretaries.

Jane: You mean, because attorneys are typing their own documents, and sending their own correspondence, and managing their own schedules?

Dan: Yes, exactly.  I believe I said that earlier.

Jane: And because many do their own document editing and formatting, basic data entry, and presentation creation?

Dan: Yes.

Jane: And they answer their own phones and get their own coffee?

Dan: Yes! 

Jane: And they do all of these things better than their secretaries used to?

Dan: Well…

Jane: In less time?

Dan: No, but…

Jane: So, assuming it takes an attorney 3 hours to do a task that a secretary can do in an hour, and you have an attorney to secretary ratio of 5 to 1, rather than 4 to 1, how much more money can the firm bill in a year?

Dan: … 4 to 5, plus…??

Jane: Don’t worry about it, genius.  It’s a trick question.

I’m going to make this post short and sweet. American Lawyer Media (ALM), stop acting like this is 2002 and quit with the Pop-Up Ads on your site. There is a good reason why Internet Explorer created a Pop-Up blocker in 2004!!

Nina Platt reminded me this morning of just how annoying and counter-productive these are when you’re trying to actually read something on an ALM site and you have to navigate through the pop-ups and the over-zealous ad placements on the page. I count two pop-ups surrounded by four additional ad placements. We all understand that you need to get ad revenue… but be a little more classy about how you do it, okay?? And LexisNexis, it makes you look bad, too.

Count ’em… 2 Pop-Ups and 4 Inset Ads
Image [cc] Alistar McDermott

Ryan McClead’s post on THE Knowledge System has made me think of the way we ask others to work, and how effective, or ineffective that process is. In watching the TEDx video, there was a different part that stood out to me as Michael Idinopulos discussed the Disembodied Work process and how most of our work is now a series of “one-off” requests rather than a structure process. Idinopulos discussed the idea of putting Wikipedia-style knowledge system in place and encouraging people to transfer their knowledge from inside their heads onto a discussion board. The process started out fine, then dwindled, then incentives were offered (iPods, champagne) to promote sharing, but as the incentives went away, so did the effort to add information into the knowledge system.

The basic problem to these types of processes are actually very simple to explain, but difficult to fix. The overall problem is that these processes are viewed as “outside the normal” flow of work. If a person has to stop what he or she is doing (practicing law, answering reference questions, responding to RFPs, etc.) and go do some data entry so that someday in the future the results will make it easier for someone else to do their job, then these processes are doomed to fail. We try to make adjustments for this outside-of-the-normal-work-pattern by giving incentives for data input (back to the iPod, champagne ideas) or, even worse, by hiring people to be data stewards to do the work for them because we simply know the person that should be adding in the knowledge, won’t do it.

Now, this brings me to a story that I heard at lunch last week with a vendor. He said he was talking with his boss about a new product launch and they wanted to define what they would consider to be a “success.” Do they look at dollars as a benchmark? Do they look at usage? Do they look at market share? All of those are pretty definable goals and easy to track. Or, do they look at ease of use? Do they look at how the product helps attorneys do their jobs better? Do they look at whether current customers tell others about how great the product is? Not as definable, but probably a better indicator of how good their product really is. At the time, we didn’t really come up with which of these questions would actually help identify what would be a success. Then he mentioned another story, and that’s when I realized what the answer should really be.

While in the UK, he mentioned that he surveyed a number of attorneys about a product and what is would take to get them to move off of that product and on to his alternative platform. One of the responses he got went something like this:

If you take this away from me, I will quit my job. I cannot effectively do my job without it.

That, my friends, is what everyone wants to hear. That is the definition of success.

Now, this answer related directly to a product, but the same concept can be applied to almost any type of process that should be included in the normal flow of how we conduct our work. Take for example, the library:

If you take the library support away from me, I will quit and go somewhere that has it. I cannot effectively do my job without the resources and support the library provides.

Or,

If you take the knowledge base that KM (or IT or __) provides to this practice, I will quit and go somewhere that has it. I cannot effectively serve my clients without it.

The key is that the product or service has become so ingrained into the normal work flow of the person, that they would be less effective without it. The PC, email, and ‘the network’ have already become success stories in the modern work flow. Can you say the same about the Client Relationship Management system? The Document Management System? The Firm Wiki? The After-Matter Review process? Probably not.

As long as those systems are viewed by the worker as processes that require them to stop doing their normal job, and input data into something that they may, or may not see any return on their investment of time and effort, then those systems will never be successful.

 

 

 

Hello! And welcome to the inaugural post of our brand new “Dan and Jane” series here on 3 Geeks.

At a conference recently, a fan mentioned that she missed our old Elephant posts.  We loved getting outside opinions and ideas, but frankly it was a lot of administrative work and we’re not really administrative people.  Well… actually, we are administrative people, but only in our day jobs.  We don’t want to do it in our free time too.  We’d rather spend our time writing our opinions than cobbling together a whole bunch of different opinions.  So, we’ve decided to split the difference with our Dan and Jane posts.

These will be the written equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship in the style of Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtain’s Saturday Night Live Point/Counter-point sketches.  (Oh, c’mon children. Google it.) We will hit beneath the belt and above the intellect. We will have Dan and Jane tackle big controversial topics that you or we, probably wouldn’t write about under our own names.  We have a couple of examples lined up in the next few days, but ultimately, we want you to submit topics and arguments for Dan and Jane to discuss.  Don’t worry about being funny or insulting, we will take care of that.  Send us your tired and poor arguments, your huddled whiny complaints yearning to be published.  We’ll sufficiently tart them up and put them in Dan and Jane’s voice.  And if you want it, we’ll even give you full credit.

UPDATE: You can submit topic ideas for Dan and Jane to DandJ3Geeks@gmail.com.

For those of you not wanting to fully enter the Dan and Jane fray – feel free to voice your opinion on whether Dan or Jane wins the day, or if you think they are both completely off point. Leave a comment, or just vote in the box to the right.

Episode One finds Dan and Jane arguing about whether change is possible in BigLaw…

*****************************

Image [CC] – Kili

DAN: Listening to everyone harp about how stupid BigLaw is, or even how stupid lawyers are in general, has got me thinking lately. First – I grow tired of hearing about it. Second – we (as an industry) are not that stupid. The industry may be risk-adverse, or even at times fully risk avoiding. However, stupid is not usually on the list. Things HAVE Changed and I have proof.

JANE: Well, Dan, it’s about time that you’ve finally started thinking, but I’m wondering what kind of mushrooms you had on that hemp burger at lunch? Nothing has changed and to my eyes, yes, we ARE that stupid. Richard Susskind has been telling us for fifteen years that the legal world was changing and warning that we had to adapt, but still many firms are following the path so deftly blazed by Dewey and Howrey.  Whatever “change” you’re about to pull out of your butt wouldn’t buy you a cup of coffee.
DAN: Too bad we’re not checking yours for change, Jane, I could probably buy a Buick.  Lawyers are adapting.  Admittedly, not in big ways yet. However, they are absolutely changing the way they deliver their services. Some of these changes are due to direct client demands (ala no first year associates). Others are being embraced much more directly, in response to market demands. It’s good ole market forces in action.
JANE: Lawyers couldn’t find a market if they wanted to buy tomatoes. The only forces “in action” are the “Oh $#&!, they’re going to dump me if I don’t cut my rates” forces.
DAN:  As usual, you’re as wrong as you are ugly, Jane.  More and more lawyers are creating budgets for matters. Some (or likely many) of these are simple, high level budgets, but they are budgets nonetheless. Five years ago – not so much. And these budgets are starting to matter more and more, even when they are only internal targets.
JANE: Budgets?! Budgets!!  That’s your freaking change? Lawyers finally start doing something every seventh grader learned to do in Home Economics and you’re ready to throw a doo-dah parade.
DAN:  I AM about to start throwing something… Also, staffing of matters is MUCH tighter. In part based on client demands, but also driven by budgets, lawyers are limiting the number of people billing on each matter. 
JANE: No longer billing for the janitor’s time, huh?

DAN: This approach drives cost savings and drives some minimal project management. With a limited number of team members, it means resources have to be allocated more thoughtfully.

JANE: No more “matter parties”, where every associate in the office gets drunk and naked and bills a couple of hours to the client they pull out of a hat.

DAN: Look, you smarmy little cynic, perhaps it’s not full-on project management, but it is a greater focus on managing to budgets. And that IS a definite change from the way they used to do things.

JANE: You…

DAN: Will you shut the heck up and let me finish!  Lastly, there is much more interest in new technologies. Prior to 2007 any technology that cut the number of hours on a matter was not very popular. Now, there is a clamor for these types of tools. Admittedly there is limited adoption, but the mere fact that opinion has swung around so hard is a sign of change.

JANE: I’ll tell you what’s swinging around hard… The idea that this interest in new technologies is in any way related to a real change in the mindset of lawyers. The only thing driving new legal technology is the iPad. You just try selling a new time-saving project management tool that doesn’t have an iPad app.

DAN: Jane, you ignorant sludge monger. That is simply not true.  There is real change going on and I am seeing it at all levels of the market. Just last week I heard about a small firm (20 or so lawyers) utilizing AFAs and efficiency approaches. Granted, much of this change is a refinement of the old way of doing things.

JANE: Much of this change is masking the old way of doing things.

DAN: I still think the legal market needs to embrace deeper, more structural changes. However, to say lawyers are stupid and not changing is missing the real picture.

JANE: Dan, PEOPLE are stupid and you’ve just proven it. To the extent that lawyers are people…well.

DAN: Change is occurring!

JANE:  Whatever.

A metal bucket
By Jon Pallbo (Jon.Pallbo@gmail.com)
(Own work) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

I recently watched a TED talk by Michael Idinopulos, called Mr. Manager, tear down these (digital) walls!  It’s a great talk and is well worth your while to view the entire 17 minute presentation.  The story he tells beginning at the 2 minute mark has been haunting me since I first watched it.

He tells of visiting his grandfather’s stock brokerage firm when he was a child and seeing all of the desks lined up in the open office space. Then he tells of returning when he was in high school and seeing his grandfather’s brand new big private office. He assumed his grandfather would be happier with the office, but the grandfather longed for the old office layout. The grandfather tells of how new information traveled in the old space.

“You could almost watch… that information as it traveled from one end of that floor to another.  One broker would tell another broker, it was overheard by a third broker, and within 2 minutes flat that information could go from the first broker to the last and we all knew what was going on as soon as any of us knew anything.  Now, we sit in our private offices. We call our clients on the phone, but really, we have no idea what’s going on.”

Idinopulos uses this story as a launching point to tout the benefits of a social workplace and while I wholehearted agree with his point of view (go watch the video), I’m going to use his story to make a slightly different point.  Given the right conditions human beings are pretty good at instinctively managing knowledge within an organization.

Unfortunately, our modern firms do not conform to those conditions. To compensate we have created large KM infrastructures and systems designed to deliver institutional knowledge to employees across the world at the flip of a switch or the push of a button.  We imagine these tools to be delivery mechanisms akin to plumbing or electrical wiring, but knowledge is not a utility like water or electricity.  It can not be generated at a single spot, or efficiently gathered into a reservoir before being pumped down system.  Sadly, there is no fount of ultimate wisdom from which we can siphon gallons of knowledge to be distributed to the great masses of thirsty thinkers. Instead we ask people to help us capture knowledge “for everyone’s benefit”.  Like asking each person to carry one bucket of water up to the rooftop tower so that we can all benefit from running water for the day. And we wonder why it doesn’t always function as we would like it to.

The ultimate key to designing systems that can facilitate knowledge transfer and flow across a global enterprise is not to better incorporate our utility-like systems into existing workflows, or to make them easier to use, or to improve the quality of knowledge they capture (all perfectly fine goals), but to change the metaphors around which we design them.  KM is not a utility, it’s a big open room.  We need to focus on building systems that replicate the open office layout of Michael’s grandfather’s brokerage on a global scale.  We need geographical representations of who is working with whom on what, updated in near real time with a point-to-click and pinch-to-zoom interface that an infant could use.  And that should be our intranet home page!  The user drills down into this slowly spinning globe to get details on individual projects, matters, groups, practice areas, attorneys bios, experience, etc. With a quick tap you can see the public profile and e-social history of each, and then send a message, email, telephone, or instantly collaborate with any individual or group across the world.  The presence and availability of all firm employees are readily visible for all to see, and those with appropriate rights can see graphical representations of Toby’s profit drivers for each matter.  Another simple gesture inverts the globe to show our clients and our contacts in much the same configuration.  Drilling down on this map gets you to client history, financials, news, etc.  All relationships are graphically represented and previously hidden connections become obvious at a glance.

All of this technology and the data backing it up already exists, but it’s in a hundred different unrelated, utility-like systems, each of which requires extensive training and the occasional bucket to be carried to the roof.  THE knowledge system, the KM holy grail, is the system that gives Michael’s grandpa the feeling he had in the open floor plan while he’s sitting at his desk behind his closed door in one regional office of his multinational firm.  Just imagine…

“You can almost watch the information as it travels from one continent to another. One lawyer tells another lawyer, it’s noticed by a third lawyer, and within 20 minutes flat it goes from the first to the last. We all know exactly what is going on as soon as any of us knows anything.”

As I was riding back from Austin, Texas yesterday afternoon, looking out the windows at the remains of the Bastrop fire from two years ago, I got the first news of the tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma. It brought back the thoughts of me hunkering down in the basement of the Oklahoma City University School of Law fourteen years ago. My fingers danced across my phone going back and forth between social media sites, CNN, and KFOR television’s web broadcast looking for more information on what was going on. The sickening combination of déjà vu and helplessness started drifting over me in waves.

It is strange how we are so connected these days to others around the world. Almost no place seems to be foreign to us any longer. We could track our friends through their posts on Facebook, and fear for those that hadn’t yet updated their status to let us know they were okay. We could hear from old friends who had long since moved away from Oklahoma, relive those past tornado experiences, and send prayers, best wishes, and contributions to their friends that remained and were currently affected by the latest storms. I reached out to my cousin in Boston to determine if his sister in Moore, Oklahoma had contacted him yet to let him know she was okay. The connections were both comforting, and unsettling. I felt like I could know exactly what was going on at any moment, and frustrated by the reality that I really didn’t have that power.

After 20 minutes, I received a message back from my cousin saying that his sister was fine and that the tornado went south of her existing home, and just north of the home she and her husband were building. They were thankful to have been spared, once again from the third F4 or F5 tornado (May 3, 1999; May 8, 2003, and May 20, 2013) to strike the Oklahoma City suburb in fourteen years.

I turned back to Facebook to track other friends (mostly librarians) in the area.
 
My good friend, and fellow AALL Board Member, Katie Brown, was having nearly the same experiences I had back in 1999. She posted on Facebook that she was:

In the basement of the law library stay safe people!

She was actually with some of the same people I sat with in that very basement. I could picture sitting along the walls of that lower level looking back and forth between the doors of the bathrooms, the other library staffers and a few law students that were there for their final exams, and the doors that went in both directions toward the serials collection and the National Reporter sets. I’m sure the building has changed with the renovations over the past dozen years, but I still see the old layout as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. In 1999, my pregnant wife and two-year old daughter were on the opposite side of the damage. In 2013, Katie’s husband and kids (well, cats) were also on the other side of the destruction. It was bizarre watching the updates and understanding what would happen next as she made her way back across a broken terrain to reunite with her family, just as I had done so many years ago.

As a librarian in Oklahoma, there is kind of a trend of living in Norman, and working in Oklahoma City. The idea is to enjoy the college-type atmosphere and more liberal settings of Norman, and actually make a living in your profession in the more populous OKC region (that is, if you absolutely can’t find a job in Norman that pays a decent wage.) The drive each day takes you up I-35 via Flood Ave or  24th Ave and you pass through Moore each morning and afternoon. I’ve been gone from the area for more than 10 years now, but can still remember taking the 25 minute drive every day from my North Norman residence to the Administrative Office of the Courts building just blocks away from the State Capitol building. Moore wasn’t a place we went to… it was a place we drove through.

As I watched update after update come in from friends, I started remembering how difficult it was to drive back home to Norman that night back in 1999. That 25 minute trip became a five-hour journey. My Oklahoma librarian friends were having to make that same journey last night.

One friend posted:

I am going to take Sara Road down to Highway 9, then back up into Norman. If anyone knows why this won’t work, let me know.

Katie posted:

Just got the all clear to leave the basement. But there is a tornado between my work and my house so I am staying in okc for awhile.

Then the wait began to see the next post, knowing it would be hours from now, to confirm that they made it home safely. Four hours later, both had confirmed they made it. My initial reaction was relief… then I had a twinge of jealousy that they beat my travel time by an hour. I chalked that up to having a cell phone, social media and GPS to guide them around the roads they had most likely never traveled before.

Like I said earlier, it is strange at how connected we are these days. You feel empowered, yet helpless at the same time. I’m not sure if it is a good thing or bad thing, it’s just a thing we all have to get used to. Now time to go back to Facebook and check in to make sure everyone else is okay.