90% of people don’t know how to use CTRL+F to find a word in a document or web page. Instead, they search the old-fashioned way, manually skimming the text.
This preponderance of ignorance is stupefying to me. But I want to be very clear that I am using the word “ignorance” in its most
I am disappointed every time I guest lecture a law school class.
Because anecdote is often more compelling than data, I’ll start with an example from two weeks ago. An adjunct professor who teaches one of those great law school classes with cool titles like Tomorrow’s Lawyer had his students take the Word module of
Technology training is important. Competence-based assessments are a great technology training tool. At the outset, assessments permit trainees to test out of training they do not need. By identifying competencies and deficiencies, assessments serve as the basis for tailored training plans. Assessments then validate that training has been effective.
As formulated above, training
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| 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
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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
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| Image [cc] Venson Kuchipudi |
It’s Fall Associate time again. Newly minted law school graduates, fresh off their taking of the State Bar Exams, are moving into those empty windowed offices, given a computer, assigned one-fourth of a secretary, and told to start working toward hitting the benchmark of 635 billable hours for the rest of the
While I was in Seattle at the 2013 AALL Conference, I had a chance to listen to, and briefly talk to Casey Flaherty of Kia Motors America, Inc. As many of you have read recently, Casey is making waves by giving his outside counsel some basic skills tests on how long it takes them
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| Richard and Maya Hsu of The One Page Blog |
“Today, with the help of my thirteen year old daughter…”
This is how my former colleague, Richard Hsu, now a partner at Shearman & Sterling starts his “HsuTube” videos on complex transactional legal concepts. We’ve covered Richard before when he and I both worked
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
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A friend from another firm recently told me a story that made me think about the way law firms are structured, the resources available, and whether or not attorneys actually take advantage of those resources. The story goes something like this:
A Practice Group Leader and a few other partners sat down