Strategic Legal Technology

AmLaw 100 law firm Dorsey & Whitney last week announced LegalMine, an integrated e-discovery service at a fixed price per document. 

LegalMine is “a powerful tool to review huge quantities of documents – efficiently, thoroughly and accurately.” According to the FAQ page of LegalMine: “Dorsey is unaware of any other law firms currently offering a per document or per-page pricing model for document review.”

This is indeed the first I’ve heard of a law firm doing this though I know that at least three e-discovery vendors announced in 2008 fixed price services: Huron, LawScribe, and Integreon. It will be interesting to see if Dorsey’s move influences other law firms or the overall EDD market. In my January 2007 blog post, Coming E-Discovery Battle between Vendors and Firms?, I discussed potential competition between vendors and law firms for EDD consulting dollars. The dimensions of the competition seem to be expanding. That said, my guess is that Dorsey’s move will have a greater impact on other law firms than on vendors. Let the document review market share war begin!

The Knowledge Management Peer Group of ILTA is hosting several sessions at the International Legal Technology Association annual meeting next week. Listed below are the KM sessions. 

Monday, August 25, 2008: KM Peer Group Sessions and KM Luncheon

KM1 - Starting a KM Program 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Elizabeth Ellis - Torys, Cherylyn Briggs - Dickstein Shapiro LLP, Nola Vanhoy - Alston & Bird, Mara Nickerson - Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
With all of the KM tools and possible projects flying around the legal industry, it’s hard to know where to start. Everyone has ideas and expectations on what a KM program can achieve. If your firm is just venturing into the KM arena and you are wondering where and how to get started, learn from some who have been there and survived.

KM2 - Experience Management - Case Studies in Tackling a Difficult Challenge 1:00 p.m - 2:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Catherine Monte - Fox Rothschild LLP, Kathrine Cain - Winston & Strawn LLP, Stan Wasylyk - Michael Farrell Group
A request frequently made of KM or IS professionals in law firms is to implement a way to efficiently track and report the experience of individual attorneys. Doing this can help both sell work and deliver work. However, experience management has proven surprisingly difficult. Just defining the type of work to be tracked can pose a stumbling block, as it can be tough to find the “just right” level of detail between the “too broad” and “too narrow.” This panel explores ways to manage law firm experience through case studies from firms who have made good progress. Each panelist will discuss the business challenge they faced, the tool they built or adapted to address it, the processes they deployed to ensure good tracking and reporting and the results realized.

KM3 - Enterprise Search - Impact on How We Do Business 2:30 p.m - 3:30 p.m.
Speaker(s): Robert Guilbert - Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Jeff Rovner - O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Rachelle DeGregory - Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP, Chad Ergun - White & Case LLP
Description: Knowledge workers spend approximately a quarter of their time searching for information, but how successful are they at locating what they are looking for? Our panel members have had enterprise search engines implemented at their respective firms for over a year and discuss the changes they have encountered with enterprise search.

KM4 - Wikis in Law Firms 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Michael Mills - Davis Polk & Wardwell, Douglas Cornelius - Goodwin Procter LLP, Ayelette Robinson - Morrison & Foerster LLP
Wikipedia has over 2,000,000 articles created and edited by users. Can you have a wikipedia for the knowledge inside your law firm? Wikis provide an easy-to-use platform for capturing content and facilitating collaboration. We discuss some of the technical, cultural and procedural issues you need to address in setting up wikis for your law firm.

Tuesday, August 26 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm: KM Luncheon
Longhorn C8&9. Join us to meet and converse with others interested in KM. Pick up your food in Longhorn Hall D (ILTA Bistro) and follow the signs to the adjacent private dining rooms (C8&9.)

The 2007 large law firm librarian survey is out. Some of the data surprise me. 

Competitive Advantage (big PDF) in Law Firm Inc. magazine (an American Lawyer, now Incisive Media, publication) includes results of a survey of AmLaw 200 law firm librarians conducted in the spring of 2008; 94 librarians responded. I was struck by what seems like a significant change in market share between LexisNexis and Westlaw.

The survey reports spending across four categories: electronic resources, print materials, LexisNexis, and Westlaw. From 2006 to 2007, the percent share of spending on print increased by two points. Based on what I’ve read in articles and blogs, I assume that this reflects price increases rather than an increase in quantity of materials purchased. Interestingly, the percent share of spending on electronic resources decreased by two points.

The percent share of spending on both LexisNexis plus Westlaw remained constant at 54% but LexisNexis lost three points to Westlaw. Measuring share of just the two relative to each other, LexisNexis lost five points to Westlaw. In a mature market, that’s a big percentage shift.

I will defer to those closer to online research to explain this seeming shift. I say seeming because if different librarians responded in 2006 and 2007, the results may not be directly comparable. The survey does hint at one possible reason for the shift - cost recovery. “Westlaw recovery is better” increased from 35% to 45% and “LexisNexis recovery is better” dropped from 11% to 10%. Separately, client pressure notwithstanding, 70% of law firms recover 61% or more of LexisNexis and Westlaw charges.

A final and unrelated factoid from the survey relates to knowledge management. The percent of librarians who play an active role in the firm’s KM efforts dropped from 84% to 75%. I suspect that reflects a rise in specialized KM professionals rather than firms pulling back from KM.

The The New York Times reported last week (8 Aug 2008) on a study analyzing the cost of not settling law suits. Defense lawyers make bad calls not to settle in almost 1 out of 4 cases. Can lawyers improve that record? 

Study Finds Settling Is Better Than Going to Trial reports that that plaintiffs would have been better off 61% of the time accepting settlement offers; defendants would have been better off 24% of the time. The average cost of defendants’ bad calls was $1.1 million.

Is this just the cost of doing business and practicing law? The Times also reports

As part of the study, which is the biggest of its kind to date, the authors surveyed trial outcomes over 40 years until 2004. They found that over time, poor decisions to go to trial have actually become more frequent.
‘It’s peculiar if any field is not improving its performance over a 40-year period,” Mr. Kiser [a study author] said. ‘That’s a troubling finding.’

Two ways come to mind to improve outcomes. One is consistent use of litigation risk analysis. I have blogged about decision trees, a technique to lay out the legal and factual issues, key decisions, and probabilities to determine an expected case value. It’s hard work and involves judgment but forces lawyers and clients to be clear about a case and its odds. Another way is predictive markets.

Whether either way would help is an empirical question. The typical lawyer’s attitude, however, works against systematically assessing how to improve outcomes. The article reports that :

Several lawyers were dismissive of the study, noting that the statistics mean nothing when contemplating a particular case, with its specific facts and legal issues, before a specific judge. They stressed the importance of a lawyer’s experience.

In other words, “trust me, I’m the expert.” Experience is indeed critical but why not improve upon it if, in fact, analytic techniques actually do improve outcomes? The presumption today is that litigators need not do risk analysis. That 1 of 4 cases mistakenly go to trial and the record has not improved in 40 years, however, shifts the burden of proof onto expert litigators to show why they should not conduct risk analysis.

I fear that for some lawyers, the right adage is less “trust me, I’m the expert” and more “what, me worry?” (with thanks to Alfred E. Neuman).

If corporations succeed in managing and preserving information, will e-discovery collection problems disappear? 

I’ve previously written about ”e-discovery convergence,” the idea that enterprise “information life cycle” management products may reduce or eliminate the need for EDD collection.

Is Preservation in E-Discovery Overrated? at the Clearwell blog (23 June 2008) argues that because litigation holds are inevitably imperfect, corporations should instead focus on rapid collection of relevant documents: “the best way to take the risk out of the legal hold process is to move very rapidly from preservation to collection.”

I view this conclusion, as I do many others in EDD, as a hypothesis that requires empirical testing. Since I lack data, I can only respond conceptually. Litigation holds are more of a “flow” than a “stock” (flows and stocks are standard ideas in accounting and economics). Collecting data at one point in time is often not enough; corporations frequently have an obligation, arising from one or more cases, to preserve data over an extended period - a “flow”. If the obligation continues as a flow, I don’t see how rapid collection helps very much. If, in contrast, there is no ongoing hold - the collection is a “stock” - then the proposed strategy seems to have merit.

One reason to take an empirical approach is that answers may change over time. Consider that companies have multiple reasons to control information. Beyond litigation holds, factors such as storage costs, knowledge management, compliance requirements, and protecting trade secrets drive preservation considerations. With multiple reasons to preserve - or destroy - data, it seems inevitable that companies will focus more effort on preservation and destruction. If so, some of the current risk of lit holds may diminish. That said, I think the points in the Clearwell post about rapid collection to assess requirements and narrow the focus has much merit given where information management is today.

E-discovery is hot. As well it should be with the explosion in data volume and relatively swift (for the legal market) transition from paper to digital data. A just-released salary survey of law firm EDD and litigation support staff puts some parameters on the market demand. 

The Cowen Group is a “leading search firm specializing in staffing and recruiting for Litigation Support, Practice Support and Electronic Data Discovery from coast to coast and abroad.” This week they released survey data on law firm salaries for litigation support and EDD; also included is the number of searches by position type that the firm has conducted since 2005. Register here to get the The Cowen Group 2008 Salary Survey.

Some highlights I found interesting:

• Job descriptions and salary ranges for positions from lit supp analyst up to firm-wide director of litigation and practice support. The salary range, for major east coast cities, is from $60k to $325k
• Eyeballing the time series data presented graphically, I’d say salaries for most positions have increased 50% over the last 3 or 4 years
• The number of searches for most positions has doubled in the same time period. Searches for senior positions in 2008, however, seem to be slowing down. This makes sense: firms have hired more senior managers over the last couple of years and asked them to build out their departments.
• No surprise that NYC positions pay more than DC or Philadelphia. My guess though is the difference does not suffice to really cover the higher cost of living in NYC.

Granted, the above are based on one firm’s experience and we have no data on Cowen Group’s relative market share for search. Nonetheless, given the paucity of good data in this market, I will take what I can get and what I see supports the more anecdotal evidence I’ve heard.

I took the plunge and created a Facebook profile a few weeks ago. I am still trying to decide if it’s worth the time. I suspect many legal professionals, from large firm lawyers to CIOs are asking the same question. 

My Web 2.0 / Social networking go-to-guy, Doug Cornelius (KM Space Blog, Goodwin Procter Bio), answered a question I posed on my Facebook Wall: “I am still trying to figure out the real value of Facebook.”

Reprinted here with his permission is our Facebook Wall to Wall dialogue. Meanwhile, the jury is still out for me.

Ron
Ron is still trying to figure out the real value of Facebook.

Doug
As with any communication tool, it grows rapidly in value as more and more of your connections communicate with the tool. “Less young” people like you and I have fewer people using the tool than much younger people.
I am polling my summer associates again. Last summer the vast majority checked into Facebook at least once a day

Ron
The challenge is finding the optimal way to communicate and digest information. Right now, we are in a situation where each new tool and technology creates another source, another place to check. At least for the “legacy” folks among us. At the moment, Facebook for me is an “extra,” not an “instead of.” Change is hard enough, but it’s even harder where the promise is “do even more work.” All that having been said, do you find it is substituting for any of your prior activities?

Doug
It is of limited value. I largely use it is a platform to tie onto other areas and, in turn, promote my brand. Most of my flow of updates and information in Facebook comes from other sources. My blog posts get pushed into my outgoing feed. I update my status using twitter, Dopple updates my trips.
It is the communication platform of Facebook that is so alluring. But frankly I spend just a few minutes a day checking my “friends” update feed to see what is going on. This is the most intra-Facebook activity I’ve had in a few months.

Ron
So you are saying that Facebook is a personalized aggregation site for other information, I think. That does make it intriguing. But let me be blunt: I am very interested in what you have to say on many topics, but why is your (or anyone’s) status and trips of interest. My friends accuse me of TMI (too much information) but given info overload, should we care exactly what our friends are doing at the moment or where they are?

Doug
Clearly there is lots of noise in all the status updates and trip descriptions and what your friends are having for dinner. You may not care about my trip updates, until you notice that one of them is Washington, D.C. or that I plan to be in South Dakota at the same time as you.
There is serendipity in the noise. It is fairly easy to filter the noise in Facebook. You can tune settings for feeds from of your friends. Less of her, more of him. I think of it as more of diversion than true value time. Check while commuting, while watching the red sox, etc

Ron
There’s a certain irony that we have to rely on this technology to identify circumstances to meet face-to-face. But for all the tech, might not we explicitly try to see each other more? Ok, all that said, given the world in which we live, I can see the value in serendipity. Though in the age of multiple of distractions - Facebook and Linkedin included - I feel like I have less and less time to actually spend with people - serendipity may strike but am I ready? I am now probably guilty of several rhetorical flaws in creating a circular argument

Legal process outsourcing (LPO) continues to be in the news. Law Practice Management magazine (a publication of the Law Practice Management section of the American Bar Association) has a feature article on it. Separately, next week in NYC at the ABA Annual meeting is a “Presidential CLE Centre Showcase Program” on outsourcing (I am a panelist). 

Outsourcing Legal Services Abroad is an excellent overview of the LPO market and issues by Bill Gibson in LPM magazine. I found particularly interesting the experience of Richard Granat, a lawyer who has long been an innovator in delivering legal services to consumers (his web sites include MyLawyer.com and Maryland Family Lawyer.) The article quotes Granat:

“Through my virtual law firm operation, I have used an Indian firm to do legal analysis for clients that I’m working with, and the results have been excellent - and it costs about 50 percent less than the cost of a U.S. paralegal. Since the person doing the work is an attorney trained in English common law, the quality of the work is often better. We’ve also assigned basic legal research, as in compiling statutory materials on a particular subject for every jurisdiction. This work has been excellent and our cost is about $12 an hour, and that cost includes the cost of online legal research services. This cost is less than it would cost [to have the work done by] a U.S. law student, and the work is more reliable.”

Gibson notes, however, that Granat “feels more hesitant about sending more specialized legal services overseas at present, he does foresee an expansion in how smaller U.S. firms will use the Indian outsourcing firms to serve their needs and increase their efficiency going forward.” More detail about Granat’s experience with outsourcing is available in LPM at Richard Granat’s Outsourcing Experiences. See also the article about 36-lawyer firm Zeichner Ellman & Krauses positive experience with outsourcing in Battling the Big Boys: Outsourcing Helps New York Boutique Compete in Megafirm Arena

For anyone attending the ABA 2008 Annual Meeting in NYC next week, Bill Gibson will moderate a legal outsourcing panel at 10:30am on Friday, August 2nd, in the Trianon Ballroom at the NY Hilton. The panelists are Sally King of Clifford Chance; Jim Lantonio, the retired executive director of Milbank Tweed and now a consultant; and me. (ABA Annual Meeting program - BIG PDF file.)

Updated 4 Aug 2008: Another LPO article: Sea change - Ever-rising costs are forcing a growing number of law firms to offshore legal work by Mary K. Pratt in the Boston Business Journal, 1 August 2008.

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.”

On July 24, Interwoven, best known in the legal market as a leading developer of document management software for large law firms, announced it will acquire e-discovery player Discovery Mining, Inc. 

According the Interwoven press release, “The acquisition of Discovery Mining extends Interwoven’s offering – the legal industry’s de-facto standard for organizing, finding, and governing matter content – by adding a service for managing eDiscovery. Most organizations do not have the infrastructure to handle large volumes of information, and are turning to companies like Discovery Mining to manage the eDiscovery process for them.”

I’ve previously written about EDD convergence, the idea that enterprise content management, storage, and “big iron” companies will end up “owning” a good part of the discovery market. This continues the trend. The twist here is that Interwoven, unlike most other enterprise content management companies, already has deep legal market domain expertise.

[For reference, here is a list of e-discovery acquisitions that I have tracked.]

I am not a gadget guy but I do depend on my wireless PDA (smart phone) for phone calls, e-mail, web access, and web connectivity (phone as modem). With some trepidation, I decided to switch from my Palm Treo 700p to a Sprint Blackberry 8830. My trepidation was justifed. For the first time outside a conference, I am doing a real-time blog post. 

While I am so far impressed with many features of the Blackberry device, the jury is still out, largely because of huge problems dealing with Sprint and possibly Blackbery - it’s hard to tell where the problem lies. Talk about a drain on personal productivity! I’ve spent hours this week on this.

[Updated 8/1/08: Below is a detailed log of my tech woes with Sprint Nextel last week. All the hours I spent were for naught. Sprint called back earlier this week (albeit not at the scheduled time) and could not advise me on (1) how to install AIM IM on my Blackberry or (2) how to synchronize so that all my calendar entries appear on the BB. Worse yet, since last week, after each sync, the Blackberry Device Manager software crashes. I’ve given hope, however, on getting tech support from Sprint Nextel on these issues. There are only so many hours one can invest. I should have thought harder about getting an iPhone.]

Here are the problems I encountered with Sprint Nextel while ordering the phone and then trying to get it set up ("provisioned” in geek-speak):

Sprint’s own home page for the Blackberry instructs users to “push the wheel key”. Very useful considering my unit has no wheel key.

When I ordered the phone, the Sprint sales rep was wrong about two important facts: (1) a rebate form does not come by e-mail and (2) I cannot simply transfer the voice and data plans from my Treo. The rebate form is on the web and the BB requires a different data plan. It turns out to cost almost the same, so it’s not a big deal, but just more aggravation and lack of clear information, a problem I chronically experience with Sprint.

The set up process started very poorly. The “Getting Started” guide booklet that Sprint provides is very clearly written - but very wrong. Long story short: a tech support person immediately acknowledged that the printed documentation is wrong about e-mail set up. She was as frustrated as I that she has to handle many calls similar to mine.

Set up continued poorly. After 45 minutes on the phone with a very nice and knowledgeable tech rep, my phone still did not have the “service books” it needs. Not clear if this was a Sprint or Blackberry RIM issue.

I found Sprint’s documentation of how to install AOL instant messaging when logged into my account (which “knows” I have a BB 8830). The specific page I found is called “How do I access instant messaging on my phone?” It’s explanation for how to do IM on BB is just wrong. Moreover, during provisioning, was told I would get a “service book” for AIM but that did not happen. This morning I called tech support and the rep instructed me to go to several web sites on BB. After being instructed to several dead ends, got to a page with a download link. I was told to click that link - received “file to big” to download. Meanwhile, the tech rep was replicating the process on a handheld but she had only one bar of signal. Excellent decision by Sprint to locate a service center where there is bad coverage. After much discussion, I asked the rep to send an e-mail with instructions tested by Sprint and was promised delivery within 10 minutes. Another Sprint promise broken.

I installed the Blackberry software to synchronize to Outlook via the USB cable. Initially, it appeared the sync worked properly. That was 2 days ago. Now I am trying to perform a sync. The system wants to delete most of my 6,000 calendar entries (I like having my history on my handheld). As I inspect this, I see that the initial sync only captured appointments from the end of May forward, even though the on-screen messages suggested all had been synced. I am currently on hold with a Sprint tech rep trying to sort this out. I’ve just been promised, at 1225pm EDT that a supervisor will call back within 20 minutes to resolve the sync issue. I asked that the supervisor also check into the missing e-mail about AOL IM software.

Now waiting… to hear back re sync

Just see (1238pm EDT) that I received an e-mail from sprint asking “Do you have aim icon now?” Answer: no. So maybe there was supposed to be an AOL AIM or AIMpro “service book” after all???

More than 20 minutes has elapsed (now 1235pm) since promised call re sync issue. Another broken Sprint promise.

So it’s now 205pm EDT… no further word on above. So I’m hold with “Executive Services Department", waiting for a rep there to try to resolve the above. Are we having fun yet?

229pm EDT: Exec Services is friendly but tells me I should call a different number, advanced Blackberry support, to resolve this. Not exactly one-stop shopping. The rep tells me that the service level (SLA) agreement he has with other departments is three days. Wow, Executive Service Team gets worse service than ordinary customers? Not sure what Robert Johnson, Sprint’s Chief Service Office, appointed in 2007 (see Sprint 10-k) was thinking.

232pm EDT: On hold at advanced tech support.

237pm EDT: Talking to a tech rep. On AOL Instant Messaging (AIM), he points to me a Blackberry web site where I can down load the AOL IM servlet. It downloads fine. But then when I try to use it, the app says go back the same URL to activate my phone for IM. Of course, when I go back to that URL, the only option is to download the software. Looks like an infinite loop at this point. [It’s now 3:06pm - how’s that for productive use of time?]

320pm EDT: Still on with tech rep. Can’t get AOL IM to work. He suggests I download to my computer and then sync it to handheld. I run into error messages on attempted download. App shows in BB sync manager but not clear if that’s the download to BB handheld or my desktop. I abandon this for now… moving on to synchronization issue.

338pm EDT: We are unable to resolve the synchronization problem. Even sending e-mail to Sprint is a big challenge. My message with three screen shots takes multiple tries to get through. We schedule a call back for Monday… I ask that Sprint escalate, analyze, and propose a course of action that does not require hours more of my time. I did get an e-mail address from the rep but it’s a Hotmail account. What does this say about customer service that customer service reps reps don’t have corporate e-mail accounts? What does it mean for Sprint Nextel’s records retention and potential future e-discovery challenges?

612pm EDT: Self-help department: I changed configuration options on sync software so that only future calendar appointments sync. I don’t have all my past entries, but at least now I can sync without deleting data in Outlook. Separately, RIM Blackberry web site on AOL AIM for Blackberry says I can download IM software onto the BB phone at http://www.blackberry.com/instantmessaging. Not true. That page has no available links.

658pm EDT: Cleaning up e-mail. Found an e-mail from Sprint on how to install AIM. Go to bookmarks on handheld and click on “Install AOL Instant Messenger”. Nice, but “page could not be found.” Sprint Nextel or RIM Blackberry at fault?

It’s very hard to understand why setting up a smart phone should be so hard and time-consuming. With 85% of Americans owning cell phones, many upgrading with some regularity, one might think it would be in the provders’ own interest to simplify to provisioning process. Apparently not.

Though law firms are laying off staff, I have seen no evidence (yet) that legal IT workers are particularly at risk. That said, it’s always good to be prepared 

Every professional who wants to remain employed should have a current resume. You just never know when it might come in handy. I see many resumes because I hire, network, and informally advise my friends on their careers and resumes. A few simple resume rules that I see violated surprisingly often:

• Two pages. Period.

• No typos (that’s what friends and families are for!)
• Professional look overall (e.g., no cramming text with font and spacing games)
• Positioning of your experience appropriate to the target job (i.e., you may need multiple versions)
• PDF (not Word)
• File title that’s descriptive (e.g., Ron Friedmann - Resume - July 2008.pdf)

In this day and age, especially if you are a technical expert or technology manager, you should also be findable on the web (see my post, Managing the Brand Called You). At minimum, get a Linkedin profile. It may not help but it’s hard to see how it can hurt.

If you do a job search, make sure you have a short, cogent cover e-mail message or letter. It should explain what you seek and why you are qualified. Even if you’ve just had a great conversation with a contact do this. Your contact may want to forward your e-mail, so it should be self-contained. That way your contact can simply write a short cover note like “Great person, I endorse her if you have anything open that might fit … see below.”

Have reasonable expectations of search professionals. Remember, their client is the employer, not you. If you’ve worked with search professionals previously and have a relationship, it’s fair to expect at least a bit of advice and words of encouragement. But absent prior, decent relationship, expect a response only if your credentials happen to match a search currently underway.

If all this seems obvious, sorry, but as mentioned, I never cease to be surprised at how many of these simple guidelines are violated.

Update, 25 July 2008: A reader asked a good question, prompting a clarification. The 2-page resume limit is for resumes you send by e-mail to a contact and, I would say, even to an HR department. If you have a web-based resume or submit your resume to career web sites, then I have less personal experience. Certainly for web based resumes (if you have your own site, as this reader does), longer may be better because you get more potential hit words. I suspect anyone relying on career sites should read separate advice for how best to optimize resumes in that venue.

I am a long-time fan of the UK-based Legal Technology Insider and its companion Orange Rag blog. So I was pleased to learn that a US edition launches soon. 

From a PDF-flyer:

“American Legal Technology Insider – a new publication focusing on the large firms sector of the US and Canadian legal IT industry. From the same publishing company as the UK’s market leading newsletter Legal Technology Insider and The Orange Rag breaking news blog, and edited by the Insider’s award winning lawyer-turned editor Charles Christian, American Legal Technology Insider (or ALTi) will follow the UK newsletter’s formula of treating vendor and industry news as real news. Concentrating on the large firms market, along with news stories on who is buying what, the latest trends and developments in legal technology, staff appointments and moves, and vendor corporate news, regular features of American Legal Technology Insider will include: a guest thought leader/opinion piece by a vendor, consultant or law firm IT director; a round-up of the biggest deals of the month; a front page slot covering the product launch of the month; plus ‘up and running’ – an implementation or upgrade case study; and previews and reviews of all the major North American legal IT events.”

To receive this new publication, send e-mail to altisubs at legaltechnology dot com or visit http://www.americanlegaltechnologyinsider.com/ (this will go live on or around 7 August 2008, when the first issue launches; for now, this URL points to the Orange Rag blog).

Much as I am a friend and fan of Law Tech News, I think it will be good for the US legal technology market to have a competing publication.

PeopleFinder, a new system by leading Australian law firm Mallesons, makes clear that previous views of client facing technology have been too narrow. 

Client-facing typically has meant extranets, document creation software, or content-rich systems, including online legal services. While new instances of these come to market periodically, innovation is now rare and existing systems no longer serve as a marketing differentiator.

Consider instead the idea of client service systems. With this broader view, law firms can take a different and better direction, one not bound by content.

PeopleFinder illustrates the way. A recent College of Law Practice Management blog post, InnovAction Award Entry by Mallesons Stephen Jaques describes the system. [Note that Malleson’s won a InnovAction Award in 2007 for its TalentNet, mentioned in some of my prior blog postst.] According to the blog post, provided by Mallesons in its award entry, PeopleFinder

“has resulted in over 10,000 more calls each month being answered by a person rather than voicemail…. an initiative designed to lift client service and promote Mallesons’ high standing in the Australasian professional services market.”

PeopleFinder enhances client service by integrating multiple internal information sources to determine lawyer and staff availability and location. The goal is to direct incoming client calls to the lawyer or staff person best able to respond on the spot, while the client is still on the phone. This speeds client service and avoids phone tag and the resulting client frustration.

PeopleFinder, available on the firm’s Intranet, indicates the status of each person, for example, Available, Busy, Out of Office, or On Leave. Users can set their status but absent intervention, the system infers it by evaluating Outlook calendars, instant messaging (IM) activity, BlackBerry usage, keyboard activity, and VOIP status. PeopleFinder does not reveal confidential calendar information such as the details of a meeting - it only conveys available times.

The system helps users connect to the right person, offering choices such as automatically dial an office or mobile phone, initiate IM, or send a text message. PeopleFinder also revives the useful Camp On feature of older central phone switches. If a phone line is engaged (busy), you can be notified and connected automatically when the line opens. Additional features help users deal with time zones, determine when someone will next be available, find a colleague’s office with a dynamically generated floor plan, and identify others working on a file (matter).

PeopleFinder reflects several conceptual and technical innovations:

• A coherent vision of and broad buy-in to improving how quickly the firm responds to clients
• Recognition that existing data can be collected and analyzed to find people and determine their status
• Integration of multiple back-end systems such as Cisco CallManager, MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, PeopleSoft, Metastorm Workflow, and several databases
• Creation of a Web 2.0 interface that makes usage easy

Now that Mallesons has changed our mind set from client facing to client service, it will be interesting to see if other firms innovate.

[Note: The firm shared information about PeopleFinder with me and I allowed the firm to review this blog post in advance. ]

Today inhouse counsel at Sun Microsystems shared hands-on experience with legal outsourcing. This is the best legal process outsourcings (LPO) presentation I have seen to date by an actual customer. 

The Legal Process Outsourcing Chapter of the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals today held its second webinar, chaired by Mark Ross of LawScribe (his recent blog post describes the event).

Connie Brenton, Assistant General Counsel for Sun Microsystems, provided an in-depth case study of Sun’s decision to offhsore a large-scale document review project, from the search for the provider through the RFP process and concluding with Sun’s analysis of the projects outcome. High points of her presentation include:

• The drive to reduce cost motivated Sun to look at outsourcing starting in 2005 and to travel to India in 2006 to learn more about providers.
• The first offshore project in 2006 was a contract review. It did not go well but Sun learned many important lessons about how to outsource. {Editorial note: corporations understand that problems are learning opportunities, not failures; law firms find this idea difficult.}
• The second project was much better because Sun provided and required much more training and process guidance. Sun looked beyond the management of LPOs, who are often experienced US-trained lawyers, to assess the skill level and training of Indian lawyers. Sun also provided a project manager and contract templates. {Editorial note: Ms. Brenton did not use these words, but it sounds like first project was classic “lift and shift” outsourcing, which almost always fails, and second was a re-thinking of how to use different resources to do work a better way.}
• Beyond the savings from labor cost arbitrage and process improvement, Sun cut costs even further through a “dynamic bidding event” (DBE), a real-time, web-based process in which providers bid on the work. Total savings of offshoring coupled with DBE were 78% relative to budget. Project was “wildly successful.”
• Sun continues using LPOs. This year, it improved its approach, refining task delegation, pricing, and how it prepared and presented requirements to the LPO. In evaluating vendors this time round, Sun saw that leading LPOs are very flexible and highly sensitive to quality results.
• The company is committed to continue using offshore resources. Sun may insist that is US outside counsel work with offshore providers.

The process Ms. Brenton laid out is a great road map for other law departments that want to outsource.

Several large law firms have laid off lawyers and staff. Less publicized are other cutbacks. 

I hear from friends in multiple BigLaw firms that they face pressure to reduce travel costs. If “necessity is the mother of invention” and there is a “silver lining in every cloud,” then perhaps we will see wider adoption of collaborative technology. Much non-client-billable law firm travel is to attend conferences or visit other firm offices. Many web-based technologies allow teams to collaborate and people to present without anyone leaving their desks.

Relatively old technology includes web conferencing, webinars, and instant messaging (IM). Relatively new includes a host of Web 2.0 systems, from shared applications (e.g., Google Apps or Basecamp), to easy point-to-point video, to social networking (e.g., Facebook, Linkedin, and Legal Onramp).

Law firms looking to reduce travel cost can “kill two birds with one stone” by using the cost cutback as an incentive to cause lawyers and staff to use the web in lieu of travel. Beyond cost savings, this will mean less personal and environmental wear and tear.

PS - I finally broke down this weekend and established a Facebook profile. I can see the promise, but as one of my friends messaged me, “be careful about drinking the Kool Aid.”

The American way is “innocent until proven guilty.” The American Lawyer way seems to be “guilty by association”. 

The July 2008 American Lawyer, in the “Bar Talk” section, has an article Irony, Thy Name is Guidance sub-titled “Howrey’s EDD provider has EDD problems of its own.” The short article reports that discovery practices of Guidance Software, Inc., makers of popular EDD software EnCase, “have come under attack” for how it produced e-mail in an employment matter.

That an EDD vendor may have its own EDD problems is perhaps newsworthy. But the article opens by asking “Did Howrey bet on the wrong horse when in linked up with electronic data discovery provider Guidance Software, Inc. in May?” Two paragraphs later: “The same month that Guidance announced its alliance with Howrey, an arbitrator in Los Angeles admonished the Pasadena-based company for its discovery practices in an employment suit in which it is a defendant.”

So what? The implication seems that Howrey is somehow at fault. I don’t get it. The magazine, instead of analyzing the business value of Howrey’s alliance with Guidance, implies the firm has chosen poorly. What is the standard of care for a law firm (or any entity for that matter) in choosing products or business partners? Should customers not use a leading product because the company has what may be a minor legal problem?

For the many BigLaw partners I’ve met over the years who believe that American Lawyer has an axe (or two or three) to grind, this article will certainly confirm their views.

It’s surprising, but computers seem less predictable and more moody than people. 

Who would have thought that the seeming black and white of the binary world would lead to the moral equivalent of moodiness. And I don’t mean dystopian visions such as HAL in 2001. I mean here and now, on each of our desktops or laps.

Recent personal examples… (1) A fresh MS Outlook 2003 install on a new computer crashed regularly on opening; re-building the Outlook profile did not fix the problem. Four months later, the problem seems to have, by and large, fixed itself. (2) A new Dell computer would not connect to a WiFi access point in the line of sight. Six months later, miraculously, it just connected, with no user intervention. (3) The status bar in MS Word hides itself once a week for no apparent reason. (4) Sprint’s newly installed (and re-installed several times) Mobile Broadband Connect software refuses to work on my PC, the trouble shooting efforts of the highest level tech support notwithstanding.

Mainframes, IBM punch cards, and timesharing were frustrating to use but consistent. Likewise, early PCs. Then came local area networks. Then came the Internet. Then came patches, automatic software updates, and a host of other behind-the-scenes operating system and application activity. With every re-boot creating, in essence, an altered ecosystem, PCs behave more moodily than most people. Applications stop working, then they start. Systems freeze for no apparent reason (or, worse, display the dreaded blue screen of death).

Of course, all this takes a big toll on personal productivity. And it’s led me to say, with a straight face, “My computer is in a bad mood so I’m in a bad mood.” Maybe I need to start saying “I hope my PC’s mood is better tomorrow.”

[Yes, I do use MS Windows. Yes, I know with a Mac or Linux it would be better. And no, those are not viable solutions in most businesses.]

In the late 1990s, large law firms started creating web-based interactive legal advisory systems. What happened to that trend? 

Market data on the number subscribers, and revenue is not available; as far as I know, the best listing of these types of systems is my Online Legal Services list. Anecdotal evidence suggests that online advisory system development crested around 2002 or 2003 and that many firms did not earn the hoped-for return.

We may be seeing another round of investment now; see below for two relatively new services. Here is why I think we may see a resurgence:

The technology cost to create web-based systems has fallen. Hardware, software, and hosting is all much easier and cheaper today than a few years ago.

The lawyer time cost has also fallen. First, law firms invest more in marketing now, both out of pocket expenses and lawyer time. In 2000, the cost of creating an online system seemed enormous. Today, in comparison to other marketing hard and soft costs, the development effort just may not seem as big relative to other initiatives. Second, the growth of knowledge management in many firms coupled with lower cost technical means of accumulating information means that firms are more easily able to “mine” work that they already do for other purposes. That is, firms realize they have a lot of useful information and the marginal cost to re-package it for web-based delivery is not that great.

The explosion of web-resources generally - e.g., Google, newspapers online, Wikipedia, and government statistics - creates subtle market pressures for law firms to keep up.

Here then are two services I came across recently:

MoFo IT Advises: ‘Listen to Your Users’ in Law Tech News (3 July 2008) reports on a new Morrison & Foerster affiliate that offers an online legal service: the “International Privacy Database is a comprehensive, current assessment of the obligations of various privacy and data security requirements and includes in-depth analysis of virtually every privacy law in the world… We created a subsidiary, Summit Privacy Resources, to offer this content via subscription. It was created so that this information could be shared with entities that presently are not clients. Started in April 2007, the system is now in pilot production.”

Construction law made easy by large Australian firm Minter Ellison “is a dedicated online resource for all construction, property and infrastructure industry professionals.”

The MoFo system is by subscription; the Minters one requires free registration. A future post will cover another system I recently came across.

How does managing legal technology compare to managing corporate technology? 

A panel discussion at the Strategic Technology Forum in Lisbon, hosted by LegalWeek in Lisbon last month addressed the question. The panelists were David Coates, IT Director of Bond Pearce and formerly of UBS; Jason Haines, Director of IT, Allen & Overy LLP and formerly of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC); and Malcolm Simms, IT Director, Eversheds LLP and formerly of Disney/ABC Television Group.

The panelists pointed out several differences:

In legal it’s about words; in corporate it’s about numbers. This makes a big difference in how CIOs present business cases to management.

Lawyers resist change, industry embraces it.

Corporate management asks “what’s the business case?” Law firm management asks “what are other firms doing?”

Legal market software suppliers are few; corporate many. A corollary: legal software vendors are less innovative.

Corporations do zero-based budgeting, meaning CIOs have to justify items each year. In law firms, budgeting is a continuous and incremental process without the need to justify each year.

“There is no PowerPoint in law firms.”

All of these resonated with me. One comment on “no PPT in law firms.” I think this difference has a deeper meaning than many may think. Presentations are not just about content; they are about guiding or controlling a conversation. When I started as a manager in a large law firm, I met frequently with the management committee to discuss tech projects. Discussions wandered and were, as a consequence, often unproductive. So I decided to use a presentation as a way to help guide the discussion. The resistance to my doing so was palpable. I wish I had had a chance to pose this hypothesis to the panelists for confirmation or rejection.