Strategic Legal Technology

This is a live blog post from the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) annual Futures Conference (agenda). This session is Exploring the Nuances of Value. 

[Posted at end of session; please forgive typos and failures to capture every detail accurately.]

Moderator: Aric Press, American Lawyer Media
Panelists: Toby Brown, Akin Gump; Mark Chandler, Cisco Systems.

Toby Brown

Background: Started in KM, mentioned alternative fee arrangements, then a day later, was talking to a GC about AFA.

How pricing and AFA works:
1. Partner calls seeks help with AFA
2. Asks what partner thinks number should be and factors that might cost the price up or or down.
3. Toby then models how to staff the matter, presents alternatives to partner; they agree on one.
4. Toby then monitors progress on the matter, sending regular reports to partner, checking with partner on staffing. “Here’s where you are, here’s where you said you would be, here is where you are going off track”. Learn from other industries to raise red flag when projects go out of scope or when team exceeds budget. This ultimately requires process re-engineering.

The real value Toby adds is in probing with partner abut the relationship with client and how much of the value / price / cost conversation has already taken place with client. “Value comes out of the conversation with client”. If partner has not had sufficient conversations, Toby talks to clients about pain points and what they want. Example: client initially asked for fixed fee for a very large, ongoing matter. Toby explained that because of risk, that number would have to be high. Client’s real requirement turned out to be predictable quarterly spend, which is quite different. So questions designed to draw out what’s really important to client. In another instance, one client just did not want first year associates on a matter. Yet another example: client needs to be able to demonstrate to an auditor that they are paying “market” for certain legal work.

Mark Chandler

Mark has not heard the type of analytic framework Toby put forward a decade ago. Legal market has been slow to adopt the changes technology has wrought in other service markets. For Cisco, certainty is a keep goal. Cisco management notices of legal goes $1M over its quarterly $50M budget.

Value is subjective. Mark cites macroeconomic concept of consumer surplus, where many consumers benefit from a market price that below what they would be willing to pay. This stands for the proposition that each consumer has a different definition of value. Mark is trying to align law firm thinking with law department needs. Hours are in internal accounting mechanism; they are fine for firms to measure their factor inputs but its not necessarily related to value.

For Cisco, value depends on type of work. Value means one thing for patents (of which Cisco has about 750 applications per year). Cisco gives buckets of patents to each firm so that each firm can take risk per patent but do OK on portfolio. For corporate secretarial work, Cisco outsources all work to Orrick, which hires counsel around the world as needed. Each year, price must come down 5%.

Bottom line: measure value by the case. Value does not mean shifting all the risk; it means aligning interest. Most aggressive bids tend to come from firms that do most work with Cisco. Trust relationship is core to achieving relationship

Mark talks about some law firm ads and taglines. One firm says “Everything Matters”. His view is that’s great - if you bill by the hour. Not great from his view because for Cisco, not everything matters as much.

Question & Answer

To Toby: do you use firm data to analyze past costs or performance. Toby: no longer will do this. Finds that partners will say look at these 5 similar matters and then finds the total fees range from $300k to $1.5M - so how similar can they be. Firms don’t capture data the right way but tools are no emerging, for example, Sky Analytics, to capture data the right way.

Some firms, e.g., Kirkland & Ellis, track their own litigation costs. Is this a growing trend? Toby: yes, more and more firms are using task codes to track and understand time. But even better is to understand the cost of delivering service and finding ways to reduce the cost.

If we track hours, if we analyze historic hours, shouldn’t we be concerned that we are simply quantifying bad ways of working? How do we be sure we can be more efficient? Toby: I can’t get better, faster, cheaper until I have more data about my cost of production. Effort does matter but it is not the only driver of value.

This is a live blog post from the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) annual Futures Conference (agenda). This session is Presentation of the 2012 InnovAction Awards. 

[Posted at end of session; please forgive typos and failures to capture every detail accurately.]

Tim Corcoran is moderating. Scott Rechtschaffen of Littler and Lisa Damon of Seyfarth are on stage to receive InnovAction awards.

Tim provides background on the InnovAction Awards: worldwide search for innovation in the legal market. Tim talks about lawyers’ ‘race to 2nd place’ and how these awards are meant to encourage the first movers. The ten entries this year come from around the world.

LITTLER CASESMART ®

Selected for Littler CaseSmart. Background:
- Littler subject to pricing pressure for decades
- Matra: “Let’s break Something”
- History of experimenting with alternative delviery methods
- Little CaseSmart ("LCS") is a firm within a firm

The problem / challenge: client asked firms to reduce spend by 20%. Partner in charge said, ‘we’re only doing 20% of their work but what if we got all of their work and re-engineered work to reduce cost”

LCS is a re-designed legal process and includes a proprietary technology platform. Re-engineering included assessing who did what work and pushing work to the least cost competent worker. Greatest value in LCS is information for clients, both at macro and micro view. It creates actionable intelligence, for example, identifying where claims occur so client can take action address root causes of the legal problems. Knowledge management, wikis, blogs support the work.

Dedicated flex-time staff attorneys do the work, supervised by shareholders and other full-time lawyers. The fomer are onshore, Littler employers. Though they are virtual workers, firm includes them in meetings and firm activity. They have average 11 years experience and strong EEO backgrounds. One is even ex-shareholder who wants more flexibility.

Client was concerned that Little was not making enough. Client want stability / longevity. 3400+ charges processed through LCS in 2 years. 80% of charges defended v. settled. 1.7% cause findings, well below national average. BI from system has changed employment practices.

Motto has been: Have a big vision, start small, then scale quickly.

SEYFARTH LEAN

Seyfarth and Littler compete vigorously but have united to try to disrupt the traditional market.

Seyfarth is an AmLaw 100, full-service, international law firm. 800 lawyers. The usual mix of partners, some very resistant to change.

Fundamental Principles:

• Legal industry took a wrong turn (law firms became about themselves; compensation tied to closely to minutes; we became vendors not business partners)
• Belief that listening closely to client, firm could really solve client problems; those solutions would delight client and they would reward firm with deep business relationships.

Lisa remembers skepticism of many partners that lowering client bills would be good for firm. But she turned out to be right.

Why Lean Six Sigma? Lean is a journey, not an endpoint. Always need to improve. Firm need a process and an approach to deliver service better. Firm stopped, looked at how it worked, re-designed how it worked, then went to market. The firm put all leaders through Lean training. Seyfarth started big - all leaders went through 4-month Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt training. Ultimately, lawyers hung in because they saw that Lean is more than a process or a tool - it’s a way to think. The firm kep Lean thining and discipline but shed some math and jargon.

Projects span all offices and practices. Not all partners have bought in but the number grows regularly. Lean applies equally to one-off bet-the-company cases and to commodity work.

Quick case study: routine litigation portfolio. Not huge stakes but a lot of cases and fees. Analyzed costs, which depended on task coded billing. Initially, firm had to go back to improve accuracy of task codes. Now, lawyers are better at task coding their time. Look for where costs spikes are in matters and focus process improvement on what causes the spikes. Firm now has 180 process maps.

Continuous Improvement: culture of root cause and ‘why’; lessons learned [after action reviews]; lean discipline and process mapping (including with clients); wonder of metrics (used widely and with clients); tools and technology to support client; understanding what we do well and where we need help; loving disruptive thinking.

What’s Next:
- Embrace disaggregation, including working closely with competing law firms
- Continuous work on developing knowledge resources and tech for client service
- Loving e-billing and working with clients on metrics
- Work with clients, firm, law schools to reshape law school education

Attention innovative law firms, law departments, and legal service providers: get recognition for your innovation - apply for an InnovAction Award. 

The College of Law Practice Management sponsors the InnovAction Award, which honors innovation in law practice management. Innovation can range from technology, to new business models, to marketing campaigns, to creative office design.

Change in the legal marketplace continues to accelerate. If you have developed, for example, a new and better way to serve your clients, a breakthrough way to find new business, new metrics that really change how you manage your business, or a truly innovative way to value and sell your services, you deserve the recognition. Now in its 8th year, the InnovAction Awards conduct a worldwide search for lawyers, law firms, and other providers of legal services who are engaged in extraordinary, game-changing, innovative activities. Applications and more information are available at www.innovactionaward.com.

Here are my personal favorite past winners:

• Berwin Leighton Paisner, LLP (BLP) for Lawyers On Demand (LOD) [2011]
• Pro Bono Net for LawHelp Interactive initiative [2010]
• Mallesons for PeopleFinder [2008]
• Novus Law, LLC for documenting and proceduralizing the e-discovery process [2008]
• DLA Piper for Venture Pipeline [2005]

InnovAction winners present at the College’s annual “Futures” conference, which will be at the end of October this year, at Georgetown Law.

[Disclosure: I am a trustee of COLPM and a co-chair of the 2012 Futures Conference . I have no influence over who wins awards and no financial interest in the outcome. I promote these awards and the College because of my passion to improve law practice and the business of law.]

Last month I wrote a two-part blog post about the new model law firm Clearspire. Subsequently, I had a chance to see Coral, the firm’s custom-developed law practice and business management technology platform. I was impressed. 

I have evaluated much software over the years. Coming from the large law firm environment, however, I am accustomed to reviewing single-function or loosely-coupled applications. In contrast, Coral is a complete desktop and office environment that encompasses not just document creation / editing and e-mail, but a range of other functions, including real-time communication / collaboration, project management, and financial analysis.

Design Goals

Clearspire had the advantage of starting from scratch. Unlike large law firms, it did not have to graft project management, budget features, and other modern requirements onto legacy systems.

So the firm built Coral from the ground up to meet new client demands for better value, with features to serve clients, lawyers, and the firm’s business managers. Key design goals included ease of use for “non-techie lawyers", collaboration within the firm and with clients, scalability, and the ability to break substantive legal work into separately priced and managed discrete activities ("chunks").

Inspired by Apple, Coral emphasizes simplicity, elegance, and intuition. As I described in my prior posts, Clearspire practices virtually, so Coral is not just software, it is the office. To support remote work, Coral offers visual cues about colleagues’ availability.

Key to Clearspire’s business model is managing work chunks (tasks and projects). Coral helps firm lawyers do so with features built around “matter roadmaps", which break matters into phase, activity, and task. The firm identified and retained the services of 12 leading lawyers to build standard roadmaps, investing $1 million in the effort. These features support the firm’s focus on efficiency and aligning interests: each work chunk is priced and measured separately; if work comes in below budget, the client, the firm, and the lawyers share the savings evenly.

System Architecture

Coral is a three-tier stack. At the bottom are systems for document management, records, conflicts, finance, and unified messaging (instant messaging, video conferencing, voice, social media, and forums). Clearspire licensed 3rd-party software for these functions, customizing some packages so much it negotiated IP grants.

A middle layer integrates and aggregates data from the bottom, providing human resources information systems functionality (including experience location), project management, matter staging and management, and reporting.

The top layer is the user interface: a web-based intranet and extranet. Similar but somewhat simplified interfaces are available across a range of mobile devices. The entire stack runs on a private cloud in a Tier 4 data center (which means fully redundant systems and tight access controls).

The Lawyer Interface and Experience

When lawyers log-in, they see a home page with “my to-do list", matter list, key updates, and colleagues’ availability. The availability feature, which Clearspire calls “hallways", signals to lawyers whether colleagues are at their desks and, if so, whether they are available to talk or IM. Coral offers both a geographic and practice view of colleagues. Color coding and icons signal availability (lawyers can control how their availability displays to colleagues).

Most communication is NOT by e-mail; rather it is in wikis or collaboration forums, which means that message exchanges stay organized and are available to anyone who joins the team mid-stream. I find this feature particularly exciting. In 1992, I tried introducing threaded discussion / forum software in a law firm. Though multiple partners tried and liked the forums, none was willing to give up e-mail. Today, with social media arguably uprooting the psychological foundation of e-mail, the stage may be set for Clearspire to move to the next generation of asynchronous text communication.

The document management system is a collapsible hierarchy that breaks work into natural units for a matter, for example, correspondence, court papers, and working papers. This feature looks similar to many large firms’ matter-centric systems. The difference, however, is that there does not appear to be alternate interfaces that let lawyers by-pass the system-designated folders.

Matter roadmaps drive lawyers work. Coral presents each lawyers with his or own customized task list. As lawyers finish one task, the system notes this and presents the next one. While that may sound like Big Brother to some, I think it is essential to standardizing and systematizing practice. Some firms are beginning to assess the cost of allowing each partner to practice in his or her own way. Those that do will most likely find it is high. While many lawyers may consider themselves artisans who need no guidance, clients likely prefer the standardized approach.

Working in concert with the matter- and task-based approach, Coral also presents lawyers with a news feed customized to the matter. Many firms struggle to deliver relevant updates to lawyers. This feature looks very promising but is particularly hard to assess without actually working on matters and seeing what updates appear.

The Client Interface

Clients see a similar but role-appropriate or contextual interface. A client dashboard includes a matter overview and list of lawyers working across matters. Per matter, clients can see an overview, a subset of documents the firm chooses to expose, billing, a chronology, and prior communications. Financial reports are also available.

Conclusions

I was impressed: Coral is better conceived than most law firm software I have seen. Because Clearspire was not constrained by the infamous “installed base", it built a system that overcomes legacy problems and, as important, meets new needs. In contrast, existing large law firms have a big installed base of users, hardware, and software. They generally face a future of incremental change; developing fully integrated systems could take many years. The cloud may offer firms an alternative but few large firms seem ready to migrate any time soon.

Over the last decade, I have participated in many a discussion about matter-centric systems. I have been skeptical about the value of most instantiations of it. Coral, however, appears to take matter centric to a new level that seems to make it genuinely helpful to lawyers. Furthermore, knowledge management (KM) is baked-in, with search, wikis, and discussions forums active now and other features planned.

So, does Coral really work as well as I suggest? Will lawyers and the firm be more productive? As with any software discussion / evaluation, answering these questions based on one demo is not possible. From my AmLaw 100 experience, I know that rolling out new versions of standard software is often a challenge – gaining adoption of new ways of working is that much harder. Just as Clearspire has avoided the installed base problem, so too has it avoided the “legacy lawyer” problem. Lawyers who join Clearspire self-select for being open to if not eager to adopt new ways of working. And the firm can also screen for these traits as necessary. Consequently, I expect that lawyer uptake will be very good.

In my prior post, I described the new-model law firm Clearspire, its inspiration, target market, and technology. The story continues here. 

To offer clients billing transparency and predictability at 50% of typical AmLaw 200 fees, Clearspire took several steps described below. I finish this 2-part post with some thoughts about what the future may hold for the firm.

Approaching Value and Pricing by “Chunking” Work

Recall that Clearspire was driven in part by the ACC value challenge. Several elements of it – transparency and control, budgets and fixed fees, appropriate staffing, and tracking to budgets – require what I call “chunking matters”. Most law firms and lawyers treat matters monolithically. My BigLaw friends who work on alternative fee arrangements and budgets tell me that they face constant battles persuading lawyers to create budgets and estimate resource requirements.

I can relate. In the early 1990s, I suggested to some litigators that they create simple case budgets. They looked at me like I was from Mars and gave me the litany of reasons why doing so would never work and, in any event, was a pointless exercise. Similarly, when I suggested putting a project manager on a big case, the lead partner’s response was “Oh, so that would be like having an extra secretary.” In most markets, my little war stories would be ancient history but I fear this reaction remains widespread.

Clearspire thinks differently. It breaks work into discrete phases. Doing so is a function of both a new mindset and the firm’s technology, which not only allows but requires doing so. By chunking appropriately, Clearspire can offer a fixed price for each part and then track performance. Developing this matter-centric model required 10 months of work and took $1 million of the total $5 million investment. The firm supports this approach by carefully evaluating each new matter and allocating lawyers based on closely matching lawyer competency with matter requirements. (Knowledge managers take note: an experience location system is at work here.)

Collaborating More while Reducing Real Estate Cost

Reducing the cost per “work chunk” requires many measures: knowledge management, a variety of tools, and perhaps most importantly, effective collaboration. AmLaw 200 firms seem to believe in the equation: “in the same office” = “collaboration”. In my experience, that is no equation, it is an inequality. Shared offices may support water cooler conversations and make collaboration possible but by no means guarantee effective or regular collaboration.

In contrast, Clearspire consciously designed its culture, systems, and processes to foster collaboration. This approach has the simultaneous benefit of reducing real estate costs.

Office real estate accounts for much BigLaw overhead. Long-term leases have even tipped some firms to insolvency and dissolution. The firm has a smallish downtown office for client meetings, business operations, and lawyer office hoteling. To minimize space requirements, Clearspire seeks lawyers who are comfortable working from their homes or other remotes locations. (Such arrangements are rapidly becoming the norm in many industries; for example, The Washington Business Journal reported on September 14 that Accenture’s virtual nature allows real estate downsize.)

But working virtually requires management. On the one hand, Clearspire recognizes that remote working can isolate lawyers. On the other hand, they also understand the myth that co-location means collaboration. I wrote one of the earlier articles advocating lawyers work virtually (The Future Law Office: Going Virtual, Law Practice Magazine, January 2004), so I too have thought about what it takes to really collaborate.

Clearspire invited Professor Lynda Gratton, a leading authority on organizational behavior, to join the firm as an advisor. She guided the software development team to create a virtual environment (onscreen interface) that provides the “contextual cues” and communication tools to foster collaboration. For example, a series of “hallways” and icons signal each lawyer who is available and the software allows a combination of chat, forums, and video conferencing.

The firm also schedules regular practice group and business meetings, some of which are mandatory. These meetings ensure that lawyers communicate with each other. Furthermore, when onboarding new lawyers – a more substantial process at Clearspire than at BigLaw - the firm provides significant training to make sure lawyers are “re-oriented” to the virtual environment and a more conscious approach to collaborating.

Competition and “Crossing the Chasm”

I asked Bryce both about the competition and if the firm faces a “crossing the chasm challenge”. Bryce sees the legal market as a spectrum of providers, with Blue Chip firms and alternative service providers at opposite ends. The alternatives include legal process outsourcers (LPO) and companies like Axiom, which Bryce characterizes as “high end staffing”. (Axiom’s website sounds like a law firm’s but its disclaimer states “Axiom attorneys are independent and do not constitute a law firm among themselves.")

In the vast middle ground, Bryce sees most of the AmLaw 200, regional firms, and the emerging class of boutiques “spun out” of larger firms. With Clearspire’s seasoned AmLaw 200 lawyers, Bryce places his firm above the regional players and boutiques and below the Blue Chip.

While he suggests that Clearspire has carved out its own niche, in my view, it will compete with mid-tier AmLaw firms, many boutiques, and Axiom and similar high-end staffing companies. I do agree that Clearspire has a business model that distinguishes it from competitors. The question is how the larger market will respond to the model.

A unique business model cuts two ways. Crossing the Chasm author Geoffrey Moore explained that most markets have a few “visionaries / innovators” who buy new ideas because they are new. Once the visionaries have bought, the provider must persuade “early adopters", those who do not embrace change for its own sake but have pressing business problems to solve and see no other solution. That can be hard, but not as hard as selling to the “mainstream” buyers ("early majority” and “late majority").

In most markets, unless mainstream buyers are persuaded, the provider remains a niche player. Bryce does not think Clearspire faces a “chasm” challenge. He thinks that mainstream general counsels will quickly understand the value and buy the firm’s services.

I am excited about the Clearspire model. I also remain astounded that general counsels continue to whine far more about legal fees than they exercise their market power to change how and from whom they buy. Fortunately, in the legal market, law firms can prosper even if they do not penetrate mainstream customers. My hope is that Clearspire will do well with early adopters and that mainstream buyers will come around as they face relentless control cost pressure from boards of directors and CEOs.

What’s Next?

It seems too early to say if Clearspire will successfully cross the chasm. If it does, then what? I can see multiple ramifications. Especially as other firms try to imitate the model, much of BigLaw could be at risk. I suspect at least 50 firms think they will survive as top 20 Blue Chip players. We can guess who some of the survivors will be, for example, Wachtell, Cravath, Davis Polk, Sullivan & Cromwell, Wilson Sonsini, and WilmerHale. But firms without secure and already-stellar market positions should worry about their futures.

What happens to the many firms excluded from the exalted few? I recently read the website of an AmLaw 100 firm that is probably on no one’s list of the exalted. Its lack of differentiation, boring content, and outright grammatical errors in “About Us” shocked me. I just do not see how such firms will survive if general counsels get over the notion that buying AmLaw 200 is always safe and smart.

I am not predicting demise or disaster, just suggesting that with some change in buyer attitude, Clearspire and other non-traditional providers that offer better value and clearer differentiation likely will gain substantial market share from incumbents.

A problem Clearspire should want to have is that market forces do result in the the “AmLaw 20″ replacing the AmLaw 200. Ah, but if the AmLaw 200 disappears, from where would Clearspire recruit experienced, high quality lawyers. In this scenario, I suspect Clearspire will have grown substantially and be well positioned to develop an engine that actually trains new lawyers in an economically sustainable way.

Personally, I find the Clearspire model very exciting. I started in the legal market over two decades ago focused on legal technology and practice support. My goal then and now has been to find ways to make law practice and legal business more effective and efficient. Over the last decade, I broadened my focus to include legal outsourcing because I see its ability to help fix the system. And today, I see the potential the Clearspire, Axiom, and other alternative models have. In fact, I see so much promise in these approaches that I could see eventually broadening my focus once again.

Traditional mainstream media have shown much interest in the legal market this year with articles on legal outsourcing, law school issues, and contract lawyers. The legal press and blog had already mostly covered these developments in detail. One topic MSM covered, however, was news to me and piqued my interest: a new model law firm. I first read about Clearspire in the Washington Post and, subsequently, the Economist. Intrigued, I arranged to meet co-founder Bryce Arrowood to learn more. 

I prepared for my discussion with Bryce by reading the website. I start by sharing with what l learned from the web, then move on to report on our conversation. I also add my own observations. This post is part 1 of 2.

The Website Tells a Compelling Story

The website impresses with its elegant design and clear content. Most BigLaw sites fail to articulate a value proposition or competitive differentiators. In contrast, Clearspire explains how its new business model offers value and differs from other law firms:

• Lawyers Practice Law; Business People Run the Practice. Clearspire created two related business entities, a law firm and a business services company. This structure lets lawyers practice law while business and technology professionals focus on sales, finance, IT, and other support functions.
• Fees 50% Less than BigLaw. Clearspire delivers AmLaw 200 quality at fees roughly 50% less than BigLaw. It does so by slashing three legacy BigLaw costs. First, because Clearspire lawyers work virtually, the firm occupies less real estate and therefore pays less rent. Second, tools and technology built from the ground-up let lawyers work efficiently, which means they spend less time per task than BigLaw lawyers do. And third, because all attorneys are employees, Clearspire has eliminated the partnership pyramid.
• Predictable Fees and Transparent Work. An engineered intake process, project planning and management discipline, budgeting and reporting tools, and a team that consists exclusively of senior lawyers enable the firm to offer clients predictable fees and clear visibility to work in progress.
• Lawyers Earn Competitive Pay and Work Collaboratively. Clearspire saw that AmLaw 200 lawyers face a billable hour pressure-cooker. On top of this, the large firm environment isolates many lawyers. So Clearspire offers 80 to 1oo% percent of BigLaw pay for more reasonable hours and an environment that, though virtual, fosters collaboration. (Clearspire does have a downtown office for client meetings, business operations, and lawyers who prefer an office.)
• Technology Drives the Practice and the Business. The firm has built its own technology to support law practice, client management, lawyer collaboration, active matter management, knowledge management, and business management. It simplifies information access, experience tracking, and staff allocation.

The Impetus behind Clearspire

Clearspire co-founder Bryce Arrowood, a Harvard Business School graduate and entrepreneur, has deep legal market experience. He founded and built LawCorps, one of the earliest and ultimately largest contract legal staffing companies in the US when he sold it.

He saw that BigLaw and its clients’ interests aligned poorly. Bryce likens large firms to a guild, designed to benefit masters (partners) first and foremost. This has arguably been true for a long time so I asked if a specific event catalyzed Clearspire. Bryce said that a 2008 Financial Times article about UK legal market deregulation made him wonder what might be possible in the US. Subsequently, he read about the ACC Value Challenge and the proverbial light bulb lit up.

Bryce realized that by applying ACC Value Challenge principles, an entrepreneur could, even without US deregulation, attack the guild walls with a new-style law firm. He partnered with ex-BigLaw partner Mark A. Cohen to found Clearspire. Both worked closely with Sheldon Krantz (former Criminal Justice Chair of the ABA, DC Ethics Bar Chair and Senior Partner of DLA) to fashion the ethical foundation to the firm’s model.

Aligning interests was a key Clearspire goal: For clients, offer value in the form of predictable and lower fees with transparency into the work process. For lawyers, offer pay in the same range as BigLaw but allow more choice to strike a better work-life balance (e.g., no pressure to bill 2000 hours, bring in business, or make partner). And for the firm, earn a reasonable profit.

“Bread and Butter” Legal Work at Predictable Fees and 50% Off

To align interests, Clearspire needed a new model and a compelling value proposition. The founders realized that marquee lawyers are overkill for most matters. I shared with Bryce a discussion I helped initiate last year - “Bet the Farm” versus “Law Factory” – which breaks the world into two camps. In one, high-stakes mean price makes little difference. In the other, outcomes are important but are easier to achieve. This more routine work can be automated or highly proceduralized.

Bryce calls this a false dichotomy, saying it misses the vast middle ground of “bread and butter work” that neither requires “brain surgeon lawyers” nor can be easily automated or delegated to non-lawyers. This work, which he estimates at upwards of 80% of BigLaw revenue, requires the experience of ex-AmLaw 200 lawyers like the ones Clearspire hires.

To win this work, Clearspire offers a compelling value proposition: “bread and butter work conducted transparently at predictable fees that average 50% less than what BigLaw charges”. Achieving this of course took much work.

Building a New Business Structure, Investing Heavily, and Rolling Out Slowly

Building a firm to align interests and succeed in bread-and-butter-work at low cost pushed Bryce to come up with a structure that separated practice and business management. Clearspire Law, PLLC, is a multidisciplinary law firm of senior attorneys. Clearspire Service Company, LLC is an experienced business services company that specializes in business process management, including building and operating technology systems to support lawyers.

This structure allows the law firm to focus on law practice and the service company on business operations. With my legal outsourcing day job that includes selling business services to law firms, I agree wholeheartedly with this approach. Simply setting up two structures, however, was just the beginning.

Clearspire also needed to reduce cost. This meant questioning the usual assumptions. And it also meant a significant investment. The firm spent $5 million dollars to develop its own technology, research the ethics rules, and hire enough lawyers and staff to get started.

The firm was in the making for 2.5 years. In October 2010, it “soft launched” to test its approach, systems, and client reactions. In May 2011, it launched three practices areas (labor and employment, litigation, and corporate). Since then, it has won three Fortune 150 companies as clients.

Efficiency via Smart Processes and Technology

Clearspire recognized that the key to aligning interests and offering higher value was better processes supported by the right technology. The ACC Value Challenge articulates many process considerations that drive Clearspire:
1. Focus on outcomes and results
2. Provide clients with transparency and control
3. Use budgets and offer fixed fees
4. Staff matters appropriately
5. Track matters against benchmarks and projections
6. Utilize knowledge management (KM)
7. Leverage technology to increase value
8. Assess performance regularly as part of a continuous improvement plan

Before discussing two core processes, collaboration and matter management, I will focus on the technology itself.

The firm created its own information technology stack to support efficient and collaborative work. The bottom layer consists of several practice management applications, a combination of highly-customized, third-party products and proprietary systems. The custom-built middle layer integrates and aggregates data from the bottom layer. And the proprietary top layer is the user interface. This was an ambitious project and required top talent (see the IT team credentials). Bryce reports the platform can scale to an unlimited number of users.

The stack runs in secure, hardened data centers with real-time mirroring to a back-up center for disaster recovery. Lawyers and staff can access the system securely anywhere in the world on both notebook computers and multiple brands of mobile devices. Access to data and software features depends on device security and configuration. Users with Clearspire-provided and -configured equipment have maximum access and can use the most features.
The firm has already successfully used this platform with lawyers and clients around the world. It was built from the ground up to respect varying global data privacy requirements.

The technology sounds great and I hope to see a demo and write about it in a future post. Hearing the components and investment, I asked Bryce if the firm plans to productize and license it. He did not pause before answering “no”. Beyond concerns about sharing a key competitive differentiator, Bryce’s view is that without the human systems and process approach, the technology alone has limited value.

* * *
In my next post, I will cover how Clearspire approaches value and pricing by “chunking work", fosters collaborations while reducing real estate cost, and views its competition. And I chime in with my own thoughts on its growth prospects.

Disagreeing with the general counsel of IBM may be risky, but here goes. And normally I do not write about policy or legal regulation. But when it comes to creating an environment that can foster legal innovation, I do speak out. 

In a Business Week ViewPoint, Law Firms Should Spurn Outside Investments IBM GC Robert C. Weber takes a strong stand against outside investment in law firms. He urges US bar regulators not to go down the path of the UK and other jurisdictions that have allowed investments in law firms. He is concerned about conflicts.

My view is “let the market decide.” Mr. Weber’s assertions about the risks are just that - assertions. As long as law firms disclose their ownership - and any other potential conflicts - I don’t see why educated clients like IBM cannot make a fully informed decision. IBM can decide to avoid such firms. In contrast, Siemens might be happy to retain these firms if it sees they offer better value.

It concerns me when lawyers take seemingly monolithic stands. Investment in law firms does not rise to the level of morality or “goodness”. Businesses (and yes, law firms are businesses) organize in different ways and have different motivations. So what? The business-to-business legal market (read BigLaw and BigCorp) has smart providers and customers who can evaluate risks and potential trade-offs. Law firms disclose. Clients decide. Why do we want regulators calling the shots?

I care because I see outside investment in law firms as potential route to spur innovation. Innovation in the use of technology, innovation in client service, innovation in thinking, and innovation in operating models. I don’t need footnotes to prove that the legal market has not embraced innovation.

So I ask Mr. Weber, why does he need to impose his perspective on the entire market. If IBM and other big legal spenders announce they will not do business with firms that take outside investment, that is their right. And that stance will likely influence many law firms. But why not let those whose preferences lie elsewhere at least have the choice?

I have long thought that archaic US rules that govern lawyers serve as a barrier to legal innovation such as new law firm business models or the adoption of time-saving and quality-improving technology. 

The recent LegalZoom case, publicized elsewhere, about allegations of unauthorized practice of law, illustrates the problem. In my opinion many ethics rules are irrational because they are based on suppositions, not on evidence. In the LegalZoom case, as I read it, the concern was based on a theory of possible or potential harm. Moreover, the regulators appeared not to weigh potential benefit versus potential harm.

Today, the New York Law Journal provides another illustration of irrational rules. The good news here is that a US Federal Court found a rule to be unconstitutional. Out-of-State Attorney Office Rule Found Unconstitutional (9 Sep 2011) explains why a federal judge found the requirement that a NY licensed lawyer living out of state maintain an office in-state.

The legal reasoning here is necessarily is narrow but the factual analysis is noteworthy: the judge considered how the real world works:

“Judge Kahn said it is illogical to believe that convenience to legal clients plays a part in New York’s rules about where lawyers are situated. An attorney based in northern New Jersey, for instance, is much better able to service a client in downstate New York than is an attorney based in Syracuse or Buffalo, he said.”

Law firm managers and CIOs must stay attuned to the shifting regulatory landscape. Legal de-regulation in the UK, about to get underway, may well have an impact in the US. As regulators, legislators, or judges apply reason and fact, long-standing rules may well fall. When that happens, it creates opportunities for alternative providers to deliver legal services in new ways. And smart large law firms can also take advantage of future rules changes.

Each September, Inside Counsel published its “IC 10″, the annual winners of the magazine’s top 10 innovative law departments (The 2011 IC10 winners). By my read, not much serious innovation is taking place.  

Only two of 10 winners caught my eye as interesting. First, one company uses online bidding to buy legal services. AGCO, a Fortune 500 farm-equipment manufacturer, created a preferred network of law firms willing to price services flexibly, then used Ariba (software for spend management) to have the firms bid “on projects involving commercial contracts, immigration, environmental health and safety, employment, and M&A.” Between the bidding and converging the number of firms from over 300 to 100, the company saves $4 million annually. [A recent Wall Street Journal article notwithstanding, I am not persuaded this practice is widespread.]

Second, NetApp, a storage and data management company, decided to ”streamline efficiency by incorporating Web 2.0 technology within the legal department.” Connie Brenton, NetApp’s chief of staff and head of operations, used a group of five local law students to design and build “an easy-to-use social network for all legal department employees.”

As for the rest, the “innovations” did not strike me as particularly new or special. For example, by my reading, two insurers won for creating somewhat cross-disciplinary teams to meet new legal challenges. Maybe I missed the point, but I thought that was what any organization has to do to get work done. [Pfizer also won a place for its alliance of 19 firms that do 75% of the company’s work at fixed fees. I don’t mean to under-rate this, but this is old news.]

Let’s say I am right that 7 or 10 winners are doing ordinary work. Perhaps law departments are just not going public with their innovations. I fear, however, it just means little game-changing innovation takes place in law departments.

Done something innovative in the legal market? Then get recognition for it. 

The College of Law Practice Management (I am a trustee) sponsors the InnovAction Award. InnovAction honors innovation in law practice management. Law firms, law departments, and other legal service providers can apply. Innovation can range from technology, to new business models, to marketing campaigns, to creative office design.

Review the InnovAction web site and consider submitting an application. For more information:

• Prior InnovAction winners.
• About the College.
• How to Enter for 2011 and download InnovAction Entry form.

The College of Law Practice Management is accepting entries for the 2011 InnovAction Awards through June 1st at www.innovactionaward.com. Rules and application forms are at http://www.innovationaward.com; .

Originally the award recognized innovation that was “never been done before”. The College felt that such a stringent standard meant we could not recognize the many important innovations that put a new spin or execution on old ideas. The judging criteria are:

• Disruption: does this entry change an important element of the legal services process for the better, and marketplace expectations along with it?
• Value: is the client and/or legal industry better off because of this entry, in terms of the affordability, ease, relevance or its effect on legal services?
• Effectiveness: has this entry delivered real, demonstrable or measurable benefits, for the provider, its clients, or the marketplace generally?
• Originality: is this a novel idea or approach, or a new twist on an existing idea or approach?

If you are fortunate enough to have created a competitive edge, let the world know. But do it by June 1st.

Because I am a Trustee and because I believe in legal innovation, I want to recognize the sponsors who make this award possible:

Platinum Sponsors:
Greenfield/Belser Ltd.
Practical Law Company
Inside Legal

Gold Sponsors:
ABA Law Practice Management Section
Attorney at Work
The Canadian Bar Association
International Legal Technology Association (ILTA)
Thomson Reuters

Silver Sponsors:
Altman Weil, Inc.
Association of Legal Administrators
Legal Marketing Association

The InnovAction Awards for 2010 have been announced. It honors innovation in law practice. 

InnovAction is a program of the College of Law Practice of Management. COLPM and InnovAction focus on law practice management writ large; the awards are not targeted at any one dimension such as technology or marketing. (I am a trustee of COLPM and a Friend of InnovAction but had no role the judging process.) Quoting from the the InnovAction website…

2010 InnovAction Winner

Pro Bono Net’s LawHelp Interactive

LawHelp Interactive provides a national infrastructure for online legal document assembly and helps tens of thousands of low-income people each year to complete needed legal forms. LawHelp Interactive was launched in 2005 with support from the Legal Services Corporation, and was used last year to complete nearly 150,000 civil court forms covering such critical areas as child support, protection orders for victims of domestic violence, consumer debt and eviction. LawHelp Interactive increases efficiency for legal aid programs, allowing more people to be helped in less time. It also removes barriers to pro bono participation by making it easier for attorneys to work in areas of law where they may lack experience, and by allowing them to spend less time on tedious paperwork and more time interacting with clients.

2010 InnovAction Honorable Mention

Axiom for its Function Outsourcing initiative:

Axiom’s ability to deliver complex, highly coordinated function outsourcing arrangements result in significant cost savings and notable efficiency benefits for clients. For example, an existing Axiom client found itself under significant cost pressure in 2008. After thoroughly analyzing the client’s workflow, Axiom was able to scope out a sustainable solution on a fixed-fee basis in which half of the client’s technology contracts department was outsourced to Axiom. Unlike many traditional outside counsel providers, the Axiom team delivered transparency to the client, was able to contract or expand in size depending on demand flow, and delivered metrics and efficiency strategies that the client implemented as “best practices” throughout its entire operation.

As I noted in my prior post, the new normal for BigLaw looks bad. Hiring armies of associates and raising rates, once the magic elixir, is now the poison hemlock. Firms need to differentiate and provide more value. And that means - gasp - innovation. If you have already innovated, help your firm win new business with recognition for your achievement. 

The College of Law Practice Management (I am a trustee) sponsors the InnovAction Award. InnovAction honors innovation in law practice management. Law firms, law departments, and other legal service providers (but not vendors) can apply. Innovation can range from creative office design, to technology, to a marketing campaign. For the first time, this year applicants can win Honorable Mention.

If you have innovated and need more reason to consider applying - see Jordan Furlong’s great post about innovation and the award, Why the 2010 InnovAction Awards matter.

Review the InnovAction web site and consider submitting an application. For more information:

• Prior InnovAction winners.
• About the College.
• How to Enter for 2010 and download InnovAction Entry form.

The College of Law Practice Management is accepting entries for the 2010 InnovAction Awards through June 1st at www.innovactionaward.com. Rules and application forms are at http://www.innovationaward.com; the Hall of Fame display of previous winners is at http://www.innovactionaward.com/halloffame.php.

If you are fortunate enough to have created a competitive edge, let the world know. But do it by June 1st.

The College of Law Practice Management is hosting a great “Futures” conference in September. I am a Trustee of COLPM. 

For the first time, the College is opening its program to the public. Two topics are on tap:
(1) the future of law firms and the legal profession and
(2) InnovAction Awards presentations.

On September 25-26, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, the College is co-hosting with the University of Denver Sturm College of Law the inaugural edition of the Futures Conference. Futures Conference program (PDF).

I’ve attended many College conferences and the quality of presentation and, more importantly, discussion is always outstanding, well above most other conferences. The format includes presentations, workshops and small-group discussions. Participants will have the chance to hear from and exchange views with leading innovative law practice managers. Some highligts include:

• Keynote presentation by Ward Bower of Altman Weil, who will provide an update on the Legal Transformation Study (particularly apt I think in this crisis)
• Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq. wil discuss the Evolution of the Law Firm

Other speakers include Harry Trueheart, Chairman of Nixon Peabody LLP, Andy Adkins of the Legal Technology Institute, Ross Fishman of Fishman Marketing, Ann Lee Gibson of Ann Lee Gibson Consulting, Mark Greene, CMO of  Nixon Peabody, David Hambourger, CIO of Seyfarth Shaw LLP, Sally Fiona King, COO of Clifford Chance N.A., Carol Phillips, Director of Administration for the West Coast Offices of Sidley Austin LLP, Dan Pinnington of LawPRO,  Norm Rubenstein of the Zeughauser Group; and John Tredennick of Catalyst Repository Systems, among others.

At the conference, the College will also formally present the InnovAction winners with their awards. See my post InnovAction Awards for 2009 Announced for details. I’ve always found the presentations a great way to learn more detail and hear how legal leaders view the winners.

For those interested in the future of law and law firms, this is the place to be.

The three InnovAction Awards for 2009 have been announced. 

InnovAction is a program of the College of Law Practice of Management. I am a trustee of COLPM and a Friend of InnovAction but had no role in or access to the judging process.

COLPM and InnovAction focus on law practice management writ large; the awards are not targeted at any one dimension such as technology or marketing. (e.g., one past award was for a new type of office design.)

From the InnovAction website the winner and honorable mention award (new category) are:

New Family Organization: Family, Justice and Law initiative

Irit Rosenblum broke fresh ground defending a universal right to family as intrinsic to the practice of law. Rosenblum pioneered a new sphere of legal rights surrounding the family based on the conviction that the rights to marry, divorce, have children, bequeath and inherit assets, and conduct family life are human rights and must be attainable to all regardless of faith, nationality, sexual orientation or status. She founded New Family to fill a critical gap in the practice of law in Israel: to attain the right of every individual to establish a family and to exercise equal rights within it. For the 2 million people in Israel who are subject to discrimination due to family status, New Family’s achievements have been invaluable.

In addition, for the first time, the InnovAction Awards offered Honorable Mentions to entries that have taken an existing innovation in the practice of law, transformed it in a unique and valuable way, and made it better than before. (emphasis added)

Practical Law Company, Inc.: Creating Efficiency for business lawyers

Practical Law Company (PLC) is changing the way business lawyers work. It employ attorneys with significant experience practicing with the world’s leading law firms and legal departments (e.g. Davis Polk, Skadden, Pfizer, Sullivan & Cromwell) to provide practical, up-to-date resources that help business lawyers practice more efficiently and provide greater value to clients. PLC provides the practical, generic level of information needed by all business lawyers that allows them to get up to speed quickly, stop reinventing the wheel and focus on client and firm specific work. It launched its first US services in December 2008 to wide market acceptance. PLC began in the UK in 1990.

–

The five InnovAction judges were greatly impressed by the groundbreaking ideas in the submissions from law firms and companies in the United States, Canada, and the Middle East", said Jordan Furlong, editor of the Canadian Bar Association’s National magazine and chair of the 2009 awards program.

Signs of Innovative Life in the Practice of Law in the April issue of Law Practice Management magazine offers multiple authors’ ideas on innovative ideas for law firms. Here, in slightly edited forms, are the two two items I contributed, one on legal outsourcing, the other on working virtually.  

RETHINK ON-SITE STAFFING

Think about the vast “Middle Office” of BigLaw – all the work required to run a law firm that is neither law practice nor entirely routine back-office support (e.g., copy center, payroll, or plant watering). This includes secretarial support, IT, marketing, finance and accounting, HR support, and business research.

I’ve seldom heard of firms consciously deciding (1) the level of support they should provide and (2) how best to provide that support. Headcounts by function seem artifacts of history and management idiosyncrasy. For example, I know of firms where the lawyer to secretary ratio ranges from about 2:1 to 6:1 and IT spending as a percent of revenue from 3.5% to 7%. It’s hard to explain these big variations, especially in otherwise similar firms.

I fear that the tough economic times will compound the irrationality. Your firm may have laid-off lawyers and staff. Has it used the crisis as an opportunity to re-think and rationalize support? Probably not! Why not improve long-term performance while you reduce costs short term?

Consider what a few innovative firms did even before this crisis. These leaders consciously decided to re-tool lawyer support. Orrick opened a global operations center in low-cost West Virginia in 2003. Some British firms moved back-office operations to India around 2005. Top 30 UK firm Osborne Clarke outsourced much of its Middle Office to legal outsourcing company Integreon early in 2009 (See the OC press release).

Now that we are in a crisis, your firm should think hard about the support your lawyers need and how best to provide it. If your firm operates multiple offices, you cannot win the argument that support staff must be in the same building as lawyers. Once free of the “same building” shackles, think creatively about support. Perhaps it makes sense to centralize some functions in one office. Or perhaps you can rid yourself of the headache of owning and operating large teams and let an outsourcing company do it for you.

If you not yet analyzed what support to provide lawyers and how best to do so, now is the time to act. You may find, centralizing, offshoring, or outsourcing provide the support you need at lower cost.

OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL COLLABORATION

Five years ago I wrote an article in Law Practice Management on “working virtually.” Some firms, typically smaller ones, are finally beginning to adopt this model. Will their BigLaw brethren be smart enough to learn the same lessons?

Most lawyers believe the myth that they must work in close proximity to collaborate and sustain their culture. If you tell clients that your firm assembles the best team across all your offices, how can you argue that lawyers must show up in downtown offices? Their colleagues may well be in other cities. As for culture, notwithstanding Woody Allen’s remark that 70% of life is just showing up, simply being in the same place is neither necessary nor sufficient.

I’m not saying do away with downtown, central offices. Instead, firms can offer the option to work at home or in a low-cost suburban satellite office part of the week. This reduces both lost commuting time and the carbon load. Have lawyers come downtown when they actually need collaborate in person. Wow, what a concept: scheduling time for real collaborate instead of pretending it just happens every day. Firms that do so likely will find that sharing offices downtown becomes viable, which can dramatically lower occupancy cost.

Of course, in the current crisis, firms are shrinking, not growing. They are retaining too many lawyers, not losing enough. So the need for space or to accommodate demands for work-life balance may seem remote. Yet now is exactly the right time to make difficult changes. A firm that set out now to optimize how and where its lawyer work and says what it is doing publicly signals clients and recruits that it’s in business for the long term. Most importantly, it would be better-positioned for the inevitable economic turnaround.

Think you have nothing to worry about by ignoring this? Some large firms do allow this flexibility already. And some start-ups are built on the idea of working virtually, for example, Virtual Law Partner, LLP in the US and Optim Legal in Australia.

Legal Professionals Role-Play the Future of Big Law in The American Lawyer (21 April 2009) reports on an exercise hosted by Professor Bill Henderson at Indiana’s Maurer School of Law to envision the future of large law firms. I applaud the exercise but it leaves me with a “been there, done that” feel. 

The prescriptions include the usual suspects: change associate compensation, lower leverage, offer alternative fees, appoint relationship managers, and re-calibrate partner compensation and expectations. Ho-hum. We’ve read these ideas for decades. Merely stringing them together may not suffice to save a firm in trouble.

The exercise strikes me as geared to tinkering with the business model rather than fundamentally re-inventing how lawyers practice. I think a more productive exercise would be to re-envision practice and then figure out what business structure supports it. I’ve oft blogged about ways lawyers can change how they practice. Examples include using risk assessment to gauge how much to invest in litigation, automating transaction documents, practicing real preventive law, encouraging clients to pursue alternate dispute resolution, developing interactive intake and advisory systems, working virtually (mentioned at least), helping clients manage the entire life cycle of contracts, and outsourcing the middle office. In other words, create value by actually doing something different, not just re-arranging what you are already doing.

To close, I find it ironic that Hildebrandt put up $15,000 in prize money. Hildebrandt is a large and long-serving consultancy serving BigLaw. My sense is the firm has had engagements for many firms over the years. Did Hildebrandt and other consultants, with their hands partially controlling the BigLaw rudder, help steer firms into the shoals where they now find themselves bottoming out? And will BigLaw pay them more fees to save them?

The legal market is contracting - the fight for market share is on. Cutting rates and fixed fees may not be enough. Innovation in law practice can help win new business. If you have innovated, help earn new business with recognition for your inspiration and hard work. 

The College of Law Practice Management (I am a trustee) sponsors the InnovAction Award. InnovAction honors innovation in law practice management. Law firms, law departments, and other legal service providers (but not vendors) can apply. Innovation can range from creative office design, to technology, to a marketing campaign. For the first time, this year applicants can win Honorable Mention.

Review the InnovAction web site and consider submitting an application. For more information:

• Prior InnovAction winners.
• About the College.
• How to Enter for 2009 and download InnovAction Entry form.

The College of Law Practice Management is accepting entries for the 2009 InnovAction Awards through June 2nd at www.innovactionaward.com. Rules and application forms are at http://www.innovationaward.com; the Hall of Fame display of previous winners is at http://www.innovactionaward.com/halloffame.php.

If you are fortunate enough to have created a competitive edge, let the world know. But do it by June 2nd.

I met Ken Adams of AdamsDrafting several years ago. Ken is a practicing lawyer turned contract guru and consultant. He writes a great blog about contract drafting, from nitty-gritty language stuff to big-picture issues. He’s devoted a lot of time to thinking about shortcomings in the drafting process and how it could be improved. I’ve long complained that BigLaw clients whine about costs but fail to exercise their market power to do something about it. One thing they could do is retain experts who could show them how to get out of their rut. Ken is one such expert, so I thought a conversation with him would be enlightening. Ken has also posted Bringing Change to Contract Drafting: A Conversation Between Ken Adams and Ron Friedmann on his blog. 

Ron: Ken, most of the lawyers I’ve dealt with think of themselves as artists. Does contract drafting involve artistry?

Ken: I suppose that lawyering might occasionally be sufficiently inspired that you could analogize it to art, but it’s hard to see how that could be the case with contract drafting. Instead, I suspect that transactional lawyers regard contract drafting as a craft, in that it involves application of technique to utilitarian ends. But even that does contract drafting too much credit, in that two features of contract drafting severely limit the scope for creativity.

First, any transaction will closely resemble any number of deals that have gone before, so at its most efficient, contract drafting would be an exercise in efficient repetition. But as things stand, drafters endlessly reinvent an imperfect wheel, with the result that much time and money is frittered away and risk is needlessly added to the contract process. Of course, some creativity is required to come up with language to express innovative solutions arrived at in negotiations, but that currently represents a small part of the drafting workload.
Second, because contract language states rules governing conduct, it’s very limited and stylized compared to other kinds of legal writing. And of the various usages available to accomplish any given drafting goal, generally one will be more efficient than the others, and that’s the one drafters should use. So contract language is somewhat like computer code.

Given the nature of what currently passes for mainstream contract language—a recent Dilbert cartoon described it as “impenetrable gibberish"—contract drafting would seem less a matter of artistry than of voodoo. Contracts should use standard English—the English of educated readers.

Ron: It sounds like you think contract drafting should be a commodity.

(more…)

Blogger and editor Jordan Furlong has started a great forum on legal innovation at Linkedin. Jordan’s post has more information. 

The Linkedin Legal Innovation forum has several discussions in progress, including two I initiated on my favorite topics: outsourcing and working virtually. I encourage anyone interested in legal innovation to join (membership is moderated).

Of course, this forum raises the question of how many social media we can participate in and which ones will win. I blog (here and at Integreon), Twitter (at http://twitter.com/ronfriedmann, have a Facebook profile, and participate in Legal Onramp. This is the first substantive use I’ve made of Linkedin because the discussions have been lively and good.

Perhaps we all need doppelgangers to maintain our virtual selves as we live our “real” lives?

The Financial Times (London) has published its annual Innovative Lawyers edition. There is much in this collection of articles worth reading. 

Thought leaders is the lead item. For me, two findings stand out:

• Legal process outsourcing is among the leading trends and top of mind in the market.
• “Careers for lawyers and non-legal staff are already changing… Several firms also put forward entries that recognised that non-legal talent has a valuable contribution to the way a legal business is run.” Note the use of the term “non-legal staff”. I consider this term much better than the demeaning “nonlawyer” (see my post Musings on the Law Firm Caste System).

Taking Charge reviews billing practices and the billable hour but I was most interested in its what it had to say about a leading online legal service:

“Allen & Overy has created an online subscription service… Its Diligence product is a database of legal memoranda… The service has a fixed annual fee of $3,000-$4,000 per jurisdiction and has attracted 11 subscribers since it was launched in August 2007. It needs about 15 subscribers to break even and has a target of 48 within five years… Marc-Henri Chamay, head of e-business at Allen & Overy, says subscription products typically require a large upfront investment in the first year before becoming available to clients in the second year and starting to make money for the law firm in the third year. ‘This means that we are carrying the commercial risk, which is pretty unusual for a law firm’ he says. ‘But this is increasingly what clients are expecting from us to drive their costs down. Diligence is still in the investment phase but some products launched five or six years ago are extremely profitable for us.’ ”

Use IT or lose it reports on interesting legal technology developments. Cleary Gottlieb features for “knowledge engineering techniques to capture the expertise of senior staff, embed it in a computer system and pass it on to junior lawyers online.” The firm created “graphic presentations of how to perform key transactional processes, with each stage backed up by extensive documentation.” Sure sounds like best practices to me!

Other interesting reports in “Use IT":

• Madrid-based Garrigues has create an e-sign system
• ReWord from Reynolds Porter Chamberlain automates service delivery with “an electronic reviewer that quickly scans reinsurance contracts for legal risk.” The system analyze re-insurance contracts to identify automatically biases toward either the reinsurer or the reinsured.
• Baker & McKenzie’s “combined outsourcing and offshoring” creates an ‘insourcing’ hybrid in Manila, where the firm’s “Global Services Manila, accounts for about 5 per cent of the firm’s total staff and is linked to the rest of the firm by technology, culture and reporting lines.”
• Allen & Overy, CMS Cameron McKenna, and Latham & Watkins also feature in the article

Structural engineering reviews recent significant improvements in law firm management. FT research finds a common theme, namely “finding ways to address their ‘glue’ problem by seeking to break down internal barriers and to strengthen internal alliances.”

The article picks up on two themes common in this blog. It recognizes Freshfields integration of knowledge management and business development. “Bringing these functions together into a single operating unit has made it easier to anticipate the services that clients are likely to require and to deploy the relevant expertise more effectively.” And separately, it recognizes Clifford Chance for taking “two vital but relatively routinised support functions ‘information technology and finance’ and centralis[ing] them in one place: India.”

The mantra of many a lawyer is “Whatever is new, is wrong”. Some, however, do believe in innovating and welcome new and better ways of working. 

At the College of Law Practice Management annual meeting on September 13th, Fellows heard presentations from the three winners of the 2008 InnovAction award. All three illustrate the value of innovation in the legal market. Here are my notes form the three winners’ presentations.

Novus Law

• Novus Law, a legal process outsourcing company, won for documenting 864 steps in 94 processes in document discovery to provide a reliable method to predict discovery. All processes are backed by a knowledge management (KM) bank
• The need that drove this: e-discovery process efficiency is about 22k to 67k defects per million, which equates to an error rate of 4.5%; discovery costs are rising at 3x the CPI and clients already spend more than 50% of their legal budget on it.
• Novus met with 200+ people in legal market (AmLaw firms, consultants, profs) to develop a blueprint for a service.
• The company developed an Underwriters Laboratories certified process for efficiency and consistency and earned ISO 9001:2000 certification. UL certification required multiple audits around the world to achieve this
• In 2008, Novus documented that their document reviews were 34% faster, 75% better, and 81% cheaper. They have done projects for two large law firms
• Novus management receives 80 quality measures each morning from prior day’s work
• Enables the process with Web 2.0 collaboration technologies (e.g., wikis), based on SharePoint with a lot of add-ons and some custom programming

Mallesons’ PeopleFind
[I previously blogged about Malleson’s award-winning PeopleFinder system in The Shift from “Client Facing” to “Client Service” Systems]

• Malleons‘ PeopleFinder directs incoming calls to the best available person. This has resulted in 10,000 more calls being answered each month and measurable improvement in client service. This has yielded an observable service differentiation, recognized by the Australian Client Choice Award for Best Large Law Firm for client responsiveness
• The problem addressed: Clients communicate by e-mail or phone. When by phone, it’s usually urgent but calls too often go to voice mail or to someone not ideally suited to help in first instance. Every such instance is a lost opportunity for the firm. There is a similar challenge - and productivity loss - internally
• ROI achieved within 3 months; 98% adoption within the firm
• Mallesons plans to extend on this work:
• PeopleFinder for iPhone and call forwarding controls
• Project Cue: BI (business intelligence) meets phone system - match incoming calls via caller ID to stream client and matter info to desktop of PC associated with ringing phone (like call center)
• Project ClientEye: Extranet 2.0, real time availability of staff, matter and financial info, info feeds, clients will be able to subscribe to info at granular level

ValueChain - Visual Contracting in Outsourcing - Pilsbury Winthrop

• The firm won for its patent-pending visual contracting in outsourcing tool
• Background: Clients ask for help with sourcing issues - minimize cost, increase efficiency, and optimize strategic value. Sectors: BPO - HR, FAO, Facilities, Supply Chain, IT, Tech transactions
• The challenge: lack of standardization in business functions. This makes it difficult to manage outsourcing, costly to operate it, and fails to provide value to the buyer. Increasingly, multi-sourcing is the favored approach, which makes management of outsourcing relationships even harder.
• Visual ValueChain solves these problems with a visual display that “maps” all outsourcing relationships to identify gaps and overlaps in services provided by outsourcers. A color coded matrix shows every process, actor, and location. This visual view helps to eliminate inefficiencies; to improves communication and integration; and to draft more accurate SOWs, RFI, RFP, and contracts.
• Used on 20 major clients valued at > $4 billion. Clients save 10-20% a year over theo course of typical 5 to 7 year contracts

“Whatever is, is right”.  

This statement epitomizes the University of Chicago School of Economics and its laissez-faire approach to economics: the market is always right, so whatever you find in the market, that’s just fine.

Today, flying to Chicago for the annual meeting of the College of Law Practice Management, where innovation in law practice is always a topic, prompted me to think about this Chicago aphorism and lawyers.

It applies just as well to lawyers, who typically assume that whatever they are doing is right. (See, for example, my post about Judge Grimm’s Victory Stanley decision and its implicit assumption that document review by lawyers is right.)

Of course, the corollary to this is “Whatever is new, is wrong”. (Also with apologies to grammarians.) Here at the College, however, we don’t believe that. I hope to have interesting postings in a few days about the proceedings of our meeting.

The three InnovAction Awards for 2008 have been announced. 

InnovAction is a program of the College of Law Practice of Management. I am a trustee of COLPM and a Friend of InnovAction but had no role in or access to the judging process.

COLPM and InnovAction focus on law practice management writ large; the awards are not targeted at any one dimension such as technology or marketing. (e.g., one past award was for a new type of office design.) I was intrigued to see that all the awards relate to my favorite topics: 2 rest on technology and 1 on another and 1 on best practices.

From the InnovAction website the three winners are:

• Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP for its ValueChain Outsourcing Methodology for Visual Contracting:
  

  “Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP was selected for its ValueChain outsourcing methodology. ValueChain is a unique system that visually displays client objectives, capabilities, opportunities and risks to Pillsbury lawyers. This helps the lawyers better understand the impact on clients’ business of outsourcing business functions such as HR, customer service, and IT accounting, as well as how the outsourcing of such operations can best be designed and structured. Pillsbury was recently granted a business method patent for ValueChain by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).”

• Mallesons Stephen Jaques for its PeopleFinder:
  

  “Mallesons Stephen Jaques of Sydney, Australia was honored for PeopleFinder, the technological spearhead of ClientFirst, a program of continuous improvements to the firm’s standards of client service. PeopleFinder gives individuals who contact Mallesons using a BlackBerry the ability to determine whether the person they’re calling is available, and if not, when and where they can be found. PeopleFinder has rerouted more than 10,000 phone calls per month from voice mail to a person who can provide assistance. Mallesons also won an InnovAction Award in 2007 for its TalnetNet initiative.”
  [See my blog post about PeopleFinder for more detail on it.]

• Novus Law, LLC for its Document the E-Discovery Process from Collection to Production:
  

  “For the first time in InnovAction’s history, an award was given to a non-law firm — in this case, a company that provides services to law firms. Novus Law, LLC, was selected for its documentation of the e-discovery process. Novus developed a program that documents and captures the e-discovery process (a significant cost in litigation) to give clients, attorneys and courts a reliable and predictable method for efficiently completing an important part of the litigation process.”

Where is the discipline to control legal costs in business litigation? An innovation in the UK may usher it in. 

Radical Addleshaws venture to offer ‘cost-free’ litigation (legalweek.com, 22 May 2008) reports that

“Addleshaw Goddard is rolling out a groundbreaking funding package for disputes… [the firm will] assess all new and existing litigation cases to see if they can be carried out using a method of external funding. The scheme, called ‘Contro£’, means the firm will try to act on every case using a conditional fee agreement of approximately 50% as well as offering after-the-event insurance and third-party litigation funding. Where possible the three will be offered together, potentially allowing clients to avoid directly paying legal costs.”

Addleshaw Goddard has set up a separate web site, FundingControl for this service. The key statement:

“The ability to reduce financial risk is effected through sharing or transferring some of the risk to Addleshaw Goddard, to insurers, or to specialist third party litigation funders with no connection to the claim or its management. Our litigation funding package offers an integrated solution that will help you to retain control of litigation costs and reduce the financial exposure you face.”

What’s not said is the discipline that such an undertaking necessarily must include. Third parties presumably will not put up money without quantifying the risk. Nor will they tolerate inefficiency and bloated costs when money is at risk.

Diving deeper into the Funding Control website to the Estimate page, you learn that the firm has invested in a process to estimate litigation costs, including what sounds like proprietary software. Reading the more detailed pages, you will quickly see that this innovation is quite complex. But no one ever said litigation was simple.

[Two asides to an already long post…
1. See my related March 2008, Funding Law Suits: Market Discipline to Manage Legal Risk?.
2. The FundingControl site, in my opinion, needs a better design. It took me a while to figure out that clicking on the “Contro£” and box on the left takes you to more detailed pages. Plus I find the scroll feature in use archaic. But the concepts presented seem cutting edge so it’s worth clicking thru and using the scroll arrows on the lower right.]

Reminder: If you innovate, earn recognition. 

The College of Law Practice Management (I am a trustee) sponsors the InnovAction Award. InnovAction honors innovation in law practice management. Law firms, law departments, and other legal service providers (but not vendors) can apply. Innovation can range from creative office design, to technology, to a marketing campaign.

If you, your law firm, or someone you know has been doing something extraordinary – something never been done, or been done in quite this way – go to www.innovactionaward.com to learn more and to access the simple entry form.

If selected for an award, you’ll join some awesome company – DLA Piper, Mallesons, Holland & Hart and more. While you’re checking out the entry information, click on “Hall of Fame” to read about winning entries and enjoy some helpful Q & A about how these pioneers got it done.

The June 2nd entry deadline for the 2008 InnovAction Awards is fast approaching, but don’t worry – there is still time to submit an entry. Take a moment to review the InnovAction web site and submit an application. For more information:

• COLPM blog post about the award.
• Prior InnovAction winners.
• About the College.
• Download the PDF InnovAction Entry form.

Lawyers are risk-averse. They frequently fail, however, to consider the risk of alternatives. 

Cutting a Winning Edge in Law Firm Blogs, an article about large law firm blogs illustrates this point. A blog-less BigLaw firm’s spokesperson is quoted, re firm blogs:

“They take effort, we have to generate the content and there’s a big issue when you’re communicating with the public: Are you giving legal advice?” If you say something a reader interprets as advice, you’re then in a situation you don’t want to be in.”

Never mind that e-mail alerts, articles, and content for web sites all take effort to generate. And never mind that the firm has large amounts of content on its public web site that readers might interpret as advice. Is this firm already in a situation it does not want to be in?

Fortunately, the rest of the article is a pretty good and well-balanced view of the pros and cons of BigLaw blogs. It also includes practical steps to take to minimize risks.

Wouldn’t it be great for business development if you could tap all the connections that your fellow lawyers and staff have? 

Well you can. Doing so has been easy for quite some time as I reported in Something for Nothing? Enterprise Relationship Discovery (30 May 2007).

If you are in large law firm knowledge management, marketing, or business development, it should now be easier to persuade management to buy enterprise relationship discovery software. Email Software Delves Into Employees’ Contacts (Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2008) reports on this category of software. “Companies are rolling out software that allows them to mine their employees’ emails and electronic address books for contact information, in a bid to make it easier to establish relationships with potential clients and others.” The article reports that Contact Networks “is used at about 40 law firms, including Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP”.

Few firms like to be first to try something new. A mainstream media report on something means it can’t be all that new. And with two named AmLaw 100 firms as customers and 38 other law firms (and that is just for one product), other firms risk missing being in the middle of the adoption curve, where they usually prefer to be. How long before partners grill the CIO, CKO, or CMO about why the firm does not have this type of product?

Two conferences in the last week examined the future of law practice. Change is forecast but I wonder. 

On Friday, I was a panelist at the NALP annual conference plenary session, The Future of Law Practice: Trends, Predictions, and Imperatives. Some panelists predicted big changes, from a re-working of law schools, to a resurgence of solo practitioners, to a return to values. [Since I was a panelist, I could not blog this one in real time!]

At the same time, Georgetown University “Future of the Global Law Firm” symposium [PDF], reported on in some detail by Adam Smith, Esq in Georgetown Conference on the Future of the Global Law Firm: First-Hand Report. Likewise, much change predicted.

Yet this weekend, as I read Corporate Counsel and Law Practice Management magazines, I was struck by the number of articles that could have appeared - indeed actually did appear - with similar advice 5, 10, or 20 years ago. If things are changing so fast, what are the indicators? Allowing law firms to go public in Australia and the UK may lead to big things but the jury is still out.

And where are the clients in this discussion? Adam Smith, Esq’s list of attendees includes not a single general counsel. If they were not invited, what does that say? If they were but did not come, what does that say? Skimming the NALP attendance list (1300+) I saw only one inhouse law department represented.

Other than Marc Chandler of Cisco, who rightly gets a lot of PR for changes the Cisco law department is making, where are the articles about inhouse counsel doing things a new way? Convergence? Been there, done that, and it may not be working all that well anyway. Alternate billing. Under discussion since at least 1990.

I am still waiting for clients to exercise their market power in a big, new way. Without that, I think it’s more of the same.

I started blogging here 5 years ago. It’s a good occasion to think about how my posts have evolved. I now see that both the legal market and I have moved to “Legal Technology 2.0″. 

Why, you might wonder, does a blog called Strategic Legal Technology cover topics such as working virtually, derivatives to manage law suits, business intelligence, and outsourcing? In Legal Technology 1.0, we focused on infrastructure and applications. Just getting IT to work and lawyers to adopt new systems was a huge challenge. That’s still hard, but around 2000, forward thinking CIOs began thinking about “operations” in one bin and “strategy / practice support” in another. Today, even that distinction is not enough.

In Legal Technology 2.0, firms and CIOs must deeply embed technology in their strategies. Legal Tech 2.0 stems from a two-front legal market war; each front has two battles. There is a war for talent and a war for clients. To get and keep talent, firms must offer the right mix of life style and compensation. To get and keep clients, they must offer the right mix of client service and results. See the illustration below.

In Legal Tech 2.0, firms must wield technology to win these battles. Simple “first order (1st order) technologies” as weapons no long suffice. Instead, firms need “second order (2nd order) technologies”. This is more than merely rolling out new apps. They must transform how they do business, with tech playing a central role.

It’s already happening - I’m just labeling it. Consider Bryan Cave’s business intelligence, Morrison Foerster’s AnswerBase, or Mallesons web-supported recruiting. And consider that at least two global law firm CIOs have new roles and titles that go well beyond technology to encompass business process and strategy.

Two years ago, I developed a portfolio approach to evaluating practice systems. It’s a “2x2″ framework for choosing among practice support tools by comparing revenue enhancement impact against reduction in effort effects. Nice, but not closely enough linked to business strategy.

In the diagram below, an illustration and not a comprehensive picture, I link three 2nd-order uses of technology to law firm battle fronts. ”Working virtually” is a way for law firms to offer lawyers and staff improved life styles. Outsourcing is a way for firms to reduce cost (and hence increase compensation) and improve client service (and hence gain and retain clients). Technology enables both but firms must make many other process and cultural changes.

“Results Metrics” has yet to be conquered. Firms that crack this will win market share. Using technology, surveys, interview, and research, firms or third parties must devise ways to evaluate more rigorously the results of legal representation. When clients can choose from many A-list global law firms, real data on actual results will play an increasingly important role. (Of course, 2nd order tech will be critical to improving results.)

I could have lined up other 2nd order technologies here, including ones I’ve written about such as online legal services, knowledge management, business intelligence, decision trees, etc. The point though is to figure out what the new 2nd order technologies will be. As Legal Tech 2.0 evolves, how will we as a profession and market create additional weapons to fight the battles to come?

This first appeared at Strategic Legal Technology at Prism Legal.

If you innovate, earn recognition. 

The College of Law Practice Management (I am a trustee) sponsors the InnovAction Award. InnovAction honors innovation in law practice management. Law firms, law departments, and other legal service providers (but not vendors) can apply. Innovation can range from creative office design, to technology, to a marketing campaign.

Take a moment to review the InnovAction web site and consider submitting an application. For more information:

• COLPM blog post about the award.
• Prior InnovAction winners.
• About the College.
• Download the PDF InnovAction Entry form.

Fellow blogger Jordan Furlong has an excellent blog post about the potential role of legal secretaries. I’ve written about this topic as well and am glad to have another voice join in. 

In Legal secretaries 2.0 at law21.ca, Furlong picks up on one firm’s idea of assigning secretaries specialties. He suggests that “allowing secretaries to focus on and develop expertise in one particular area creates clear channels through with assignments can flow much more easily and efficiently.” Moreover, he believes in “up skilling” and that secretaries should be “trained professionals with the talent and motivation to constantly move up the value chain.”

I agree completely and have made similar suggestions:

In Powering a KM Windmill ("Baking KM into the System"), Chris Boyd of Wilson Sonsini and I suggested that secretaries could play a much bigger role in manual knowledge management work.

In The Future of Legal Secretaries – Working Groups?, I observed that “working groups would also allow specialization by function and/or seniority.”

In The Business Case to Outsource Secretarial and Document Production Tasks I suggested that outsourcing document-intensive work would allow secretaries to re-focus on higher value tasks.

If firms lay-off lawyers, as some already have, staff may not be far behind. It’s a potential opportunity for firms to re-consider the role of secretaries, focusing on keeping the ones who really add value. Of course, firms don’t have to wait for bad times to execute good ideas, but exogenous shocks often force change.

Ten years ago, large US law firms thought strategy meant “we have quality lawyers.” In contrast, Australian firms were conducting serious market analysis and formulating real strategic plans. They are still way ahead of US and even UK firms. Here is yet another example. 

Minter Ellison is one of the top six firms down under, comparable to a a top NYC or Magic Circle firm. Being a big player in a relatively small but highly sophisticated domestic market, however, drives creativity and innovation. The A-Bomb of Differentiation (Lawyers Weekly, 16 Nov 2007) explains that the Adelaide office invested $5 million in case management and other software to enable it to handle - profitably - high volume work such as “banking, claims management, franchising, leasing, medical negligence and workers compensation.”

By investing in systems, sharing risk with clients, and offering alternative pricing, the firm achieved “double-digit” revenue growth for 5 years in a market generally considered stagnant. Nigel McBride, the Minters lawyers behind this, emphasizes that while technology is essential, the key is offering clients a total solution, a whole different model. While US firms continue to merge ("bigger is better"), Australia shows how innovation - from legal technology to publicly traded law firms - can change a market.

Minters is not the only top-six firm to innovate with technology. Blake Dawson was an early innovator with it legal technology practice; Mallesons has won awards for its TalentNet recruiting system.

Two senior Jones Day M&A lawyers have revealed that the Emperor has no clothes and suggest a plan to dress him. Their article raises thought-provoking questions about how deal lawyers practice law. 

It’s Time To Rethink The Lawyer’s Role In Dealmaking: Start By Facing Up To The New Realities by Robert A. Profusek and Lyle G. Ganske of Jones Day in Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, December 2007, makes several key points:

• “Many lawyers no longer add real value to dealmaking.”
• Lawyers do deals the way they always have while business has moved on: “merger papers for public company deals have become the intellectual equivalents of deeds in a real estate deal.”
• “[D]eal document creation has become a decidedly commoditized process.”
• Lawyers must re-think their roles in deals. Lawyers add value “in mobilizing and managing multidisciplinary risk assessment teams, not in shuffling reams of paper.”
• “We are spearheading an initiative to rethink deal documentation fundamentally, and we intend to invite other leading firms to join our effort.”
• “[W]e will completely deconstruct what it is we do. We will reevaluate how we should staff our deals, what expertise our firms really need, how we serve our clients, and how we bill for our services.”

I have written about several ideas that support re-thinking law practice:

• Document assembly and expert systems (online interactive advisory systems) to address commoditized elements of law practice
• Developing by empirical methods best practice guidelines for how law is practiced and deals are conducted.
• Business intelligence to help assess staffing models and alternative billing.
• Formal risk assessment using decision trees. Granted, I’ve only discussed that tool for litigation, but perhaps it or other quantitative techniques can be developed to understand, discuss, and perhaps even measure deal risk.
• Knowledge management to capture and re-use documents and to tap the appropriate expertise.
• Outsourcing to offshore lawyers routine, higher volume work such as due diligence and contract drafting and review.

The authors’ initiative “to dress the Emperor” includes other law firms. I hope they include the broader community of legal professionals who have thought long and hard about improving law practice. If this initiative does not succeed, does the profession go back to pretending the Emperor has clothes?

BigLaw has had an incredible run since the brief recession in the early 1990s, prospering even during the dot-com bust. If the good times end, law firms will be looking to shave expenses. Where should they look? 

Dan DiPietro, client head of the Law Firm Group of the Citi Private Bank, offers Storm Warnings (American Lawyer, Dec 2007). He writes that in large law firms, “for the first time since 2001, expense growth actually outpaced that of revenue from January through June, depressing profit margins.” The biggest expense increases are in associate salaries, occupancy, and technology. In closing, he notes “2008 is rife with uncertainty…. Will a slowdown in work necessitate layoffs?”

The storm may already have begun. Two law firms cut support staff amid fears of chillier economy (San Francisco Business Times, 12/7/07) reports that “Heller Ehrman LLP cut 65 positions and Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin PC cut 20 positions – or 8 percent and 12 percent of staff, respectively – within the last month.”

I’ve written about innovative approaches that can contain costs and improve profits.

Working virtually: by creating both a culture that allows more flexibility in where lawyers work, firms can improve work satisfaction and lower occupancy cost.

Re-thinking the role of the secretary: a combination of secretarial teams and outsourcing document processing can upgrade the role of the secretary, reduce space requirements, and improve service to lawyers.

Business intelligence: BI can help firms improve profits.

Law firms seem more willing to lay-off lawyers or staff than they are to consider changing how they work. Reductions, however painful, don’t require those left standing to re-consider how they work. Innovation and change may not save jobs in a 2008 legal recession. It offers a path, however, for a law firm to prosper, differentiate itself, and survive future cycles with less trauma.

Well-known legal commentator Richard Susskind again predicts the end of law practice. I respectfully disagree. 

The TimesOnline is publishing extracts of Susskind’s forthcoming book. The kick-off article, Will lawyers exist in 100 years? (10/22/07), links to landing page The End of Lawyers, which in turns links to book excerpts - the first is Legal profession is on the brink of fundamental change) - and comments from two well-known managing partners. The article aptly summarizes Susskind’s key point:

“The driving force towards the end of lawyers as we know them is twofold: information technology and what Susskind calls the market pull towards commoditisation – carving up a lawyer’s job into identifiable and discreet pieces that can be outsourced and done more cheaply by others. As a result, the jobs of many traditional lawyers will be substantially eroded and often eliminated.”

After two decades in the legal market working for and with large law firms and with extensive experience in legal technology, online systems, and legal outsourcing, I do not share this view:

• Information Technology. Robust infrastructure and a myriad of applications do make lawyers more productive and efficient (at least those who have taken the time to learn). It’s not, however, revolutionary and developments to date have not endangered lawyers. As for sophisticated interactive advisory or document drafting systems, no one has yet developed an effective economic model to support more than niche use, at least not in the business-to-business market. I am among the handful who tried creating this market: I left a large law firm in 1998 to join expert systems platform developer Jnana. I wrote several articles articulating the business case for interactive advisory legal systems. I also track this market via my online legal systems blog posts and my list of online legal services. The list is a bit dated but that’s because not that much visible has happened since my last update.
• Legal Outsourcing and Offshoring. Joy London and I have documented the growth in “legal process outsourcers” (LPO) in our list of legal outsourcing and our November 2006 LLRX article, Developments in Legal Outsourcing and Offshoring. Personally, I voted with my feet this year and now work for Integreon, a company that provides legal and knowledge outsourced services. The legal market is adopting outsourcing and offshoring. For example, substantive tasks such as contract drafting / management, due diligence, business development research, and document review in litigation are easily moved offshore; similarly, administrative tasks such as word processing and finance & accounting support are easily outsourced. This outsourcing, however, substitutes neither for high-end lawyering nor for the “hand-holding” that many clients need and want.
• Where is the Empirical Evidence? Many, Susskind and myself included, have previously predicted all types of changes in the legal market. Yet the market is not so different now than 20 years ago. Large law firms serving the business market continue to grow in size and profitability. In the US, many ethical barriers continue to make providing alternate services to consumers difficult or impossible. In the UK, simple assertions that UK legal reforms will transform the market do not suffice. Where is the empirical evidence? What percent of High Street (Main Street) legal services can realistically be automated or outsourced? Of that slice, how many consumers will choose self-service over traditional hand-holding? And will there be new matters that keep High Street lawyers busy, taking the place of whatever may in the future be commoditized, outsourced, or handled by technology? Are there any data to support predictions of demise? The ultimate indicator will be a drop in the number of lawyers per capita.

One of the related commentaries is by former Clifford Chance managing partner Tony Williams. His Ten trends that will shape the legal market offers what I consider a more balanced and realistic view of the future.

The American Lawyer October 2007 “Global Issue” focuses on the recent success of leading UK law firms, especially the Magic Circle. Many factors contribute to their success; I’ll focus on two that I follow closely: outsourcing and law firm management. 

Magic Touch notes that leading UK firms “have taken better control of their global costs, introducing tighter management of their back-office functions and starting to explore savings from outsourcing support services.”

Touched by an Angel reports that Linklaters’ managing partner “relies on legions of nonlawyer managers, including 14 on the firm’s ’strategy team,’ several recruited from elite consultancies and paid on a profit basis.”

Both these trends also apply in the US. On outsourcing, Hildebrandt’s 2007 Client Advisory, (3/07) notes that “a number of [US] firms have begun to experiment with ‘outsourcing’ as a means of controlling costs.” On management, many large US firms have hired professionals with years of industry experience for roles such as the CIO, CFO, CMO, and CSO.

Quantifying whether the Brits or the Yanks are ahead on either front is hard. But the impressive gains in London make these articles worth reading. And perhaps emulating some of the success factors.

[There is only one passing and uninteresting reference to technology in these two articles. Hmmm!]

For many in the legal market, change is an anathema. But not all, as two sets of awards demonstrate. 

The College of Law Practice Management announced today four winners of its InnovAction award. TalentNet by Mallesons, which I called a new “‘weapon’ in the war for talent” in my post yesterday, is the only tech-based winner. The other winners: DLA Piper’s New Perimeter, a pro bono initiative; Holland & Hart’s Foundation, which builds “relationships between attorneys and staff, and between offices and practices within the firm” through community work; and Raskin Peter Rubin & Simon LLP’s Association of Media and Entertainment “to support the career development of in-house counsel in the entertainment industry. ” [I am a Trustee of the College.]

Separately, the Financial Times (London) announced its Innovative Lawyers. Blogger Adam Smith, Esq. has a good write up in his post The FT’s Second Annual “Innovative Law Firms” Awards.

The FT Private practice: Information technology category article notes that “[o]n the whole, law firms are not noted for technological innovation and this year’s entries were, for the most part, sound implementations of the tried and tested.” That said, FT IT winners (PDF) include Wragge & C0 for sharing IT best practices with clients, Linklaters for automated term sheet generation, and Clifford Chance for “20,000 users in more than 270 organisations [who] use the CC suite of online training and knowledge products in 50 countries and eight languages.”

Technology innovation is alive and well in large law firms. 

Later this week, The College of Law Practice Management will announce the winner(s) of its InnovAction award. Leading up to this, the College has been blogging each application entry. [I am a Trustee of the College but not involved in the InnovAction judging.]

Several entries posted so far are based on technology:

• Foley & Lardner’s Private Equity Matchmaker “brings together Foley clients from around the world who are seeking capital with those who are actively pursuing private equity investment opportunities.”
• Holland & Hart’s internet-based compliance management system helps its “clients increase the return on training investment, improve employee knowledge and understanding of policies and regulations applicable to their businesses, and automate retention of training records.”
• Reed Smith’s IP Management Mapping Program “provides a web-enabled “snapshot” of an IP portfolio in real time in presentation-ready format. With it, our Firm’s clients have immediate access to the most up-to-date data, displayed in either map or chart form.”
• Morrison & Foerster’s AnswerBase is “a unified knowledge management system that allows users to search across the enterprise with a single, simple search boxes, provides each user with a contextual understanding of search results by displaying the relationships between relevant data, enforces the firm’s security policies, and respects users’ privacy concerns.”
• Mallesons Stephen Jacques’ TalentNet “a web based solution for recruitment management… has vastly improved the firm’s recruitment outcome while reducing costs… [it] manages all internal and external processes in the recruitment lifecycle, from the requisition through to the final appointment. TalentNet has removed most of the administrative overhead in the recruitment process.”

The mix of innovations is interesting. Three are client-facing and one is internal (AnswerBase). Perhaps most unusual is TalentNet since it targets the recruiting market. In my March 2006 post, A New Weapon in the Talent Arms Race, I noted that big firm salaries tend to be the same, so firms need to find other recruiting differentiators. I wrote about blogging; Mallesons illustrate another “weapon” in the war for talent.

Law firms and law department can earn recognition for their innovations. 

The College of Law Practice Management (I’m a trustee) sponsors the InnovAction Award to identify and honor innovation in law practice management. The application deadline is June 1st.

Should law firms blog? That’s the question I addressed on May 2nd at the ALA’s 36th Annual Educational Conference and Exposition in Las Vegas. 

In Blogging: Why the Fuss?, I explored whether blogging is a good marketing vehicle for law firms. (I also covered blogging basics, software options, and explained RSS.)

Being a blogger, I may be biased but my presentation is not conclusory. I offered a framework for marketers to compare options: a grid with “channels” as columns and “channel considerations” as rows. Channels include synchronous ones such as seminars and one-on-one meetings plus asynchronous ones such as updates, articles, books, and web sites. Considerations include cost, frequency, reach, and re-use value. I used stars (more=better) to rate options. Reasonable people can disagree about the ratings. The point is to assess systematically blogging in comparison to alternatives.

The BigLaw examples included were drawn from the Large US Law Firm Branded Blogs and RSS Feeds that Joy London and I maintain.

I touched on the issue of the potential tension between firms as institutions and individual lawyers. Firms should want their lawyers blogging on a firm-branded blog. Individual lawyers, however, realizing the possibility of future lateral moves, may prefer their own names as the brand. Since lateral moves became common only 15 years ago, this tension is relatively new. I suppose it applies to any publishing channel but my gut is that it’s worse for blogs. Anyone aware of any good material to help understand the dynamic of building firm brand equity verus individual lawyer name-recognition equity?

Two respected publishers now offer e-discovery (EDD) help, both supported by advertising. 

Law.com (ALM) offers its e-discovery roadmap and Findlaw (Thomson) its Electronic Discovery Rule Wizard. The former is organized by stage of EDD processing, the latter by the FRCP. Both have interesting interfaces, offer some substantive content, and link to advertisers.

I recently wrote about how technology may change traditional legal publishing. Neither of these appear to offer sufficient depth to threaten traditional research, but they may reflect yet another new legal publishing model.

Legal publishers play an important role in the legal market. They have moved from print, to digital content, to assembling an array of services. How will changing technology affect the publishers? 

A large legal publisher recently asked me to address this question. This was not a research project; rather, it was based on my own market observations (plus a few conversations with friends in large law firms). Here are some comments on my Legal Publishers in 2007 and Beyond presentation…

Business Context: The market for primary and secondary legal content is big but well penetrated. To maintain growth, large publishers now offer a wider range of content, software, and services (often by acquisition). This strategy lets them address a bigger portion of the legal value chain, gaining a greater share of law firm wallet.

Content Delivery: New technology alters information delivery; in particular, portals, taxonomies, search, RSS, and mobile devices drive personalized delivery. In the past, lawyers visited multiple sources. Today, information comes to them on a custom basis. As systems incorporate more business logic, the chances increase that the right lawyers see the right information at the right time. Changes in information create some market tensions: (1) Pricing and licensing are open (if not contentious) issues. (2) Law firms want delivery via multiple channels, on flexible license terms, from multiple sources, via the platform of their choice but publishers sometimes want to control delivery.

Content Creation: Blogs, podcasts, wikis, XML, and other new (web 2.0) technologies will affect content creation more than delivery. Law firms have always generated a lot of content. Now, via blogs and RSS, they can distribute it more widely at low cost (see, e.g., the list of large firm blogs and RSS feeds). Government content is increasingly available over the web, with some agencies adding value over time (e.g., the SEC will add XBRML tags to EDGAR). Separately, low cost hardware and software platforms let niche content providers thrive. The growth of law firms, the government, and niche players as content providers could threaten publishers.

Opportunities: Publishers can take advantage of new technologies to expand their delivery channels and customer base. With multiple new sources, customers may want a single, aggregated, vetted, and tagged source. And publishers also have deep expertise (human editors) that can continue to add value in new ways.

Summary: Technology is a two-edged sword for publishers. The likely outcome is that new technology propels publisher growth, albeit with some bumps along the way.

Can Wall Street work its magic to reduce legal risk and cost while earning healthy returns? 

Three related themes dominate recent financial news:

• Bundling Assets: investors reduce risk by buying aggregated individual instruments.
• Uncorrelated Risk: investors want asset classes that do not move together.
• Higher Yields: too much liquidity means low yields; many investors put some money in high risk – high reward instruments.

In the 1980s Wall Street invented bonds backed by portfolio of individual mortgages. From these “collateralized mortgage obligations” (CMO) have sprung many similar investments.

Consider the possibility of collateralized legal obligations (CLO). Growth in e-billing provides a rich data source. These data, if aggregated across companies, could enable analyzing litigation risks, costs, and outcomes. By measuring and predicting risk and bundling pending suits, it might be possible to create a portfolio investment.

Companies could hedge legal risks by pooling them. Investors would pay premiums that let them gamble on portfolio outcomes. “Gamble” here is a good thing – liquidity and risk management. Bundled litigation risk may be no less predictable than the weather some investors already bet on.

CLOs would offer general counsels a risk management tool and investors a high risk/reward opportunity uncorrelated with other market risks. So why not apply Wall Street techniques to manage legal risk? If the dollars are there, the ethics issues can be addressed. Comments to clo at prismlegal dot com

Getting customers to drive innovation is a common theme these days. Therein may lay one barrier to legal market innovation. 

Customer-Controlled Innovation by Patrica Seybold in Optimize Magazine (Feb 07) is a good overview of how innovative companies collaborate with customers to transform their product development process.

An unstated assumption in the article is that producers and consumers differ. That’s a good assumption in most markets. But in law, at least BigLaw, what’s the difference between producers (law firms) and consumers (law departments). Not that much. Perhaps that’s one reason innovation is so slow. I can’t think of other markets where the training, personality, and work of producers and consumers is so similar.

Change is hard. To wit, many lawyers have trouble adapting new technology. A very humorous video provides an enlightening perspective on change management. 

Ernie the Attorney pointed to this hilarious video at YouTube. A must see for anyone who’s ever had to explain technology to someone else. It beats the stories about users thinking a mouse was a foot-pedal or not understanding that the computer needs to be plugged in to work.

One aside here… the video also illustrates the power of story telling in conveying information. “Story telling” is a common knowledge management topic of discussion, though not so much in the legal market. Maybe KM managers need to study video production!

You thought the tech bubble burst a few years ago. Well, some of us who live in a different tech bubble have just experienced a pin prick! 

Last week Cisco GC Marc Chandler gave a speech predicting, in effect, the demise of BigLaw, largely at the hand of technology. Several bloggers have already commented: Carolyn Elefant in He’s Talking ‘Bout a Revolution, the Wired GC in Cisco GC Talks Real Legal Tech, Adam Smith, Esq. in “New Delivery Mechanisms That Will Be Highly Disruptive"–Clayton Christiansen Is Talking To You.

Chandler seemed to be opening the door to legal tech nirvana. Life inside the bubble (to mix my metaphors) is good. I thought about all the great things I could say. Instead, I invited well-known law firm consultant Peter Zeughauser to comment. At my request, he posted on the just launched College of Law Practice Management blog.

The post of his title, Boring GCs, says a lot. I highly recommend you read his entire short but poignant post concerning Chandler’s speech. My bubble is much smaller today but not quite burst.

I have posted previously about the UK Clementi reforms that allow outside investment in law firms. Fellow blogger Adam Smith, Esq. reports that several money sources have recently approached large UK firms. 

His recent post about potential investments in law firms, It’s Happening Sooner Than You Think, notes that “the idea is for investors to have a fixed income” and investors “can make savvy investments in labor, as well, and in developing a cross-border technology and infrastructure platform that can provide lasting competitive advantage to your professionals and your clients.”

Let’s be clear on the dynamic here. Valuing the steady stream of law firm profits is easy because, compared to many other businesses, future profits are much less variable and prone to risk. Consequently, there is little arbitrage opportunity in differing views of the value and an investor would have to boost revenue or reduce costs to see a return. As Adam Smith, Esq. points out, technology supports both. Consider some examples: Relationship discovery, business intelligence, and proposal generators can grow the top line. Document assembly, work force allocation, and work flow can shrink costs.

Unlike existing law firm management, investor-led management would, to make their investment pay off, have to drive technological change. Perhaps forward thinking CIOs should hope for outside investors. And the would-be investors need to assess the CIOs and be prepared to replace those who cannot drive true change.

The legal market is not known - yet - for embracing innovation. And the life of a law practice management innovator can be lonely. That can and will change…  

The College of Law Practice Management (of which I am a trustee) sponsors the InnovAction Award, which is designed to identify and honor innovation in law practice management.

If you are in a law firm, inhouse department, or other law practice (no vendors please) that has done something innovative - whether with technology or otherwise - please take a moment to review the InnovAction web site and consider submitting an application.

You don’t often read about legal market innovation in Business Week. 

Case Study: Access To Justice - Designing a better user experience of the legal system in the Inside Innovation supplement to Business Week (11/27/06) describes an innovative project at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. The project is being led long-time leading edge legal tech thinker Prof. Ron Staudt. Its goal is to make courts and legal proceedings more accessible to citizens.

Inspired by the latest corporate approaches to innovation, students went into the field to observe how citizens interact with courts and fill-in forms. They then worked with a team of design students to create a virtual guide (using an avatar) that guides citizens in completing forms and the system. They created easy-to-program and easy-to-use software that several states are now rolling out to provide better access to justice.

BigLaw can learn lessons; lessons that go beyond technology. After all, how many large law firms identify a problem, do field work to study it, and then work with designers to create a solution. This is an approach that law firms should consider adopting to create innovative new services.

BigLaw has become more business-like but much still sets them apart from corporations. One differentiator is the role of information technology (IT) in innovation. 

Innovation expert Eric Mankin’s IT & Innovation: Out Of Sync? in Optimize magazine (Oct 2006) explains that IT professionals were a force for innovation in the 1990s but are now a barrier. In many companies, IT sets barriers to innovation such as prohibiting outside groupware, forbidding user-installed software, and limiting system access. Security concerns are behind this; plus security sops up a lot of dollars that might otherwise be spent on support and applications.

I don’t think that IT hinders innovation in most large law firms. In fact, lawyers often stymie IT professionals’ innovative ideas. Fortunately, as I pointed out in my prior post commenting on the AmLaw Tech Survey, some firms adopt innovative ideas from or involving IT.

Should innovation be sudden, abrupt, and revolutionary? Or should it be incremental? 

Nicolas Carr, author of the Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter” that stirred much debate, now questions the shibboleth that “If innovation is a good that companies should pursue, more innovation is even better, and the best innovations are those that upset existing markets or industries.” His comments appear in a Wall Street Journal interview, How to Be a Smart Innovator (9/11/06, $). His answer: “Mr. Carr says, companies need to be prudent – even conservative – in where and how much they encourage innovation.” Highlights of his comments include:

• Innovation is costly. Innovation effort must be disciplined and focused on areas where it can pay.
• Don’t try to innovate across multiple dimensions. Dell succeeded based on innovative low cost manufacturing and Apple succeeded based on innovative design, but Gateway failed in trying to innovate products and process simultaneously.
• Most people don’t like change and adopt new technology slowly. Innovation needs to help consumers and users bridge the gap between old and new.
• “The ability to be a good copycat is extremely important for companies and probably as important as being a good innovator.”

This is all good advice for law firms, which operate in a market resistant to change. My own observation is that in spite of challenges, many BigLaw CIOs find ways to innovate, sometimes in the back-office, sometimes in practice support, and sometimes even in delivering legal services to clients.

In future posts, I’ll share more about a program that launches in 2007 to find and reward legal market innovation.

InsideCounsel magazine (formerly Corporate Counsel) reports on 10 innovative law departments in what appears now to be an annual feature. 

The 10 Most Innovative Legal Departments in Corporate America (Sept. 2006, PDF) focuses on new but simple solutions to common law department problems. This year, like last (blog post on 2005 top 10), 5 of the 10 involve technology:

• Pfizer’s anti-counterfeiting effort relies on a collaborrative system with a customized taxonomy.
• Kraft’s reversal of a long-standing policy against joint ventures includes “an online guide, which provides users with criteria Kraft uses to evaluate and approve joint ventures… It also includes a number of downloadable legal forms.”
• BMO Financial improves communication to business clients via a series of line-of-business specific “legal micro-sites” on business unit home pages to provide tailor-made information for each business.
• Lucent’s “knowledge management renaissance” is driven by a wiki.
• Verizon created an e-discovery team that gained control of the process, lowered costs, and improved consistency.

These further reinforce the conclusion I drew last year that law departments are increasingly sophisticated about technology and that good solutions typically do not require creating software from scratch.

I recently proposed a portfolio approach to evaluating law firm IT and KM projects, suggesting a focus on initiatives that increase profits. Two innovative actions by large UK law firm Eversheds help illustrate the idea. 

Eversheds set to transfer 90 staff in IT outsourcing deal in legalweek.com (August 2006) reports that “Eversheds is outsourcing the bulk of its IT function to an external provider…” It also reports that magic circle firms Allen & Overy (A&O) and Linklaters have also secured further back-office outsourcing deals. The Eversheds deal “is understood [to contain] provisions to outsource various core support functions including Eversheds’ helpdesk network, infrastructure teams and its IT training specialists.”

Core IT infrastructure, while critical to a firm’s success and a competitive necessity, is purely a cost . It consumes money and management attention without conferring strategic advantage. So it is doubly interesting to see another Eversheds initiative…

Eversheds to test applicants for online reasoning in legalweek.com (Sep 2006) reports that “Eversheds is to introduce new online reasoning tests for potential trainees as the national giant bids to widen the net in recruiting future lawyers.” The test will cover verbal and numeric reasoning. As a quant jock myself, I like that that lawyers should have some quantitative skills. According to one firm manager, the online test will help students who have not done so well academically. What a concept – grades might not be the only predictor of lawyer performance! The firm expects the test to help hire the right people and therefore avoid costly mistakes.

With this second initiative, the firm is spending on an IT-backed expecting to retain more or better lawyers and reduce hiring mistakes – and that means higher revenue and profits. So are Eversheds’ moves are an outlier or harbinger? I can’t say that Eversheds applied the 4-quadrant analysis I proposed, but in my view, the firm is thinking appropriately about managing the IT portfolio.

I recently recommended the College of Law Practice Management’s InnovAction publication (PDF). In addition to several feature articles about innovation, there are several informative short case studies. 

I contributed case studies of innovation at Bryan Cave and Morrison Foerster. John Alber of Bryan Cave provided the information for that firm’s innovative use of business intelligence software. Oz Benamram of MoFo co-authored the case study on his firm’s creation of the AnswerBase knowledge management system. These two are available at prismlegal.com here (HTML).

Other case studies include:
- Blank Rome: mentoring and interactive training
- Bowman & Brooke: mobile technology trial kits
- Law Chambers of Nicholas Critelli: space design customized to functional needs
- DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary: Venture Pipeline, to help start-up companies
- Halleland Lewis Nilan & Johnson: cultural re-alignment to foster team work
- Holland & Hart: innovative community service that also builds teams
- Pinsent Masons: OutLaw.com, to help start-up businesses
- Simpson Grierson: marketing campaign that changed perception of the firm
- Sughrue Mion: mock trials in Asia help establish its market position
- Wragge & Co: fee prediction and transaction management system

There’s a great new publication out on innovation in the legal market. 

The College of Law Practice Management (of which I’m a trustee) released today an “e-zine” about legal market innovation (PDF). I’ve not had time to read it yet but saw some articles in draft and contributed a couple myself, so I know this will be a good read.

Creating this was a very significant undertaking. Many contributed but I want personally to thank Jordan Furlong, editor of the National (the flagship publication of the Canadian Bar Association) for being the editor-in-chief. Regular readers of this blog will recognize several contributors, including David Maister, Bruce MacEwen (aka Adam Smith, Esq.), and Dennis Kennedy among many others.

This publication is part of the College’s InnovAction program, which we will re-launch in connection with our annual meeting in September. Eric Mankin, whom I’ve recently referenced several times, will be our keynote speaker on the topic of Innovation.

With this post, I have also started a new blog category called Innovation and Change Management.

Surveys and articles suggest that many general counsels are unhappy with outside counsel. Perhaps GCs need to hold up the mirror to find the answer to the problem. 

In my recent post Looking for Law Firm Innovation, I reported on Eric Mankin’s research documenting the lack of legal market innovation. Today, Eric has another of his insightful updates (Prospects for Legal Innovations) that examines why there is so little innovation in the legal market. The bottom line: innovation is rare because clients don’t demand it.

In previous blog posts (“Procuring” Outside Counsel and Technology, Glass Half Full or Half Empty?, Call to Arms for GC: Force Your Outside Lawyers to Avoid the Mistake Doctors Make) I suggested that if GCs don’t create pressure for better service delivery, then perhaps CEOs, CFOs, or procurement officers will. I’m still waiting.

For BigLaw CIOs, it’s important to understand the overall business environment and potential constraints on innovative ideas they have. If you’ve ever felt like you are pushing on strings, this helps explains why.

CIOs often champion law firm innovation but frequently face a tough battle. Why? 

I’ve advocated innovation as a large law firm manager, legal technology consultant, and software marketer. Getting buy-in is a challenge. Eric Mankin, an expert in business innovation and an old friend whom I’ve cited previously, offers a great analysis of legal market innovation in his weekly e-mail update.

Eric notes that the business of law is bound by the ideas of legal precedent and the billable hour. What passes for innovation in the legal market is old hat in most industries. He notes that the average of income of lawyers (not just BigLaw partners) is high and therefore the incentive to change low. Law firms are late adopters: innovation is a cost of business, not an opportunity. I certainly can’t cite a single instance of the market punishing a BigLaw firm for being a late adopter.

His entire “Looking for Law Firm Innovation” analysis is here, with permission and is worth reading. And I personally look forward to hearing more about the fruits of Eric’s research, which he will present at the annual meeting of the College of Law Practice Management (PDF link).