Strategic Legal Technology

I have previously suggested that law firms help clients not just draft, but also manage contracts. Now, one is doing so. 

LegalIT (UK) reports in DLA Piper streamlines contract management that “DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary has introduced technology to helps clients manage complex contracts cost effectively, teaming up with Affinitext to implement its contract navigation system.” In my post Taming Contract Beasts last December, I described the Affinitext product.

ALM, the publisher of law.com, is trying out video as a way to connect with its readers. I am pleased about this for two reasons. 

Substantively, I’ve previously argued that law firms should use video/TV and recorded webinars as a way to communicate with clients. So I’m glad to see a mainstream publisher (print and web) try this format.

Personally, I was pleased to be participate in ALM’s initial effort. Clicking the ad unit, reproduced below, takes you to a page with several video clips. One is me, talking about – what else – my blog. Now I know why newscasters use teleprompters!

The lesson here for large firms – lawyers, marketing, and IT - continues to be that video is a way to explore to connect with clients.

This week printing giant (market cap $7b) R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. (RRD) acquired (press release) offshore service provider OfficeTiger (OT). OT previously gained legal market notice through its Hildebrandt joint venture and outsourcing deals with Milbank Tweed. The acquisition could affect both law firms and vendors. 

Its not obvious how RRD’s core print business relates to OT’s offshore “business process outsourcing.” The Wall Street Journal ($) explains that the “hope for Donnelley is that these services will help sell more printing work to its clients, while also making it harder for those clients to move their spending elsewhere.” The Economic Times (of India) comments: “Analysts said Donnelley may be keen to cut its costs as a printer and publishing company and wants to obtain critical size quickly in India… Donnelley seems to be struggling and has been restructuring its business, selling off portions of it.”

Whatever the motivation, the acquisition could change vendor dynamics in the legal market. Any US company that currently contracts with OT for offshore services may now worry that the RRD-OT combination could become a competitor. And vendors that have been mulling offering offshore services may now decide and act quickly.

For law firms, I think the news is good. First, large firms considering offshore services may find comfort in ownership by a big company like RRD. And second, if other vendors do start offering more offshore services, then firms will have a wider range of choices and more bargaining power.

I recently created a new “Roundup” blog category, in which I list (with links) articles, blog posts, and vendors sites that I find. This has given me an idea for a new blog feature, offered here for comment. 

As a personal knowledge management tool, blogs are pretty good, but have limitations. Searching and reporting are limited, at least compared with databases.

When I blog, it would be useful to cause selected text to appear not just in the blog entry, but also as a database record. Some might argue that I should just use a tagging system such as del.ico.us. But I’d like something as an author that is more integrated and database-like.

Does this feature exist? Would it be useful to bloggers? To law firm librarians or knowledge managers?

As a consultant and evangelist for practicing law more effectively, I write about best practices, outsourcing, knowledge management, and technology. Here’s a reminder why law firms need to think about these topics. 

A consultant friend works for a big company, serving many small clients. He’s supposed to have a signed contract prior to beginning work. Reality being pesky, that does not always happen. To satisfy his law department, he recently asked several clients to sign contracts. One wrote back:

“I’m not certain whether I ever discussed this with you or not, but soon after we initially talked about having a consultant agreement in place over the summer, we consulted with our attorneys and formed our own consultant agreement, attached. I wonder whether such agreement would be sufficient for purposes of satisfying [your company]? One of the ongoing issues we have is that due to the fact that we don’t employ in-house counsel, it costs us $5,000 every time we pick up the phone and call them. If we ask them to mark-up [your company’s] consultant agreement, we’ll essentially engage a lengthy, expensive process where modifications are made by us and responded to by your attorneys, and so on and so forth. Please let us know if the attached agreement is acceptable to you.”

Here you have it - a business person struggling with high lawyer fees for seemingly simple agreements. Sure, some lawyers will argue that big issues are at stake. But can’t a standard agreement provide enough protection?

This is a real world example of the “latent legal demand” Richard Susskind describes. Business will eventually figure out how to lower legal costs, either skipping lawyers altogether (and accepting the risk) or finding lower cost substitutes. More legal work will commoditize and at least some BigLaw firms will be affected. There is still opportunity for innovation driven by technology or better processes. Who’ll be first to innovate is an open question.

It’s an old adage that knowledge management is 80% process and culture. But if people don’t play, process won’t work.  

In US law firms, the success of manual KM is mixed at best. I’ve suggested previously that automated approaches may be preferable (e.g., 2006 (Not) Technology Prediction, Is Manual KM Doomed?, KM - Why Automated Approaches Are Easier).

The Wall Street Journal reports in Skills Tracking Lets Firms
Measure Bench Strength (2/13/06, $) that some US businesses have developed skills databases “to help fill specific needs.” Employers create databases that track employee skills and credentials. It’s simple in theory but not in practice. “Employees can misstate or deliberately overstate their qualifications. And some managers may withhold information, fearing that their most skilled employees will be poached by others.” The article details several companies that have developed skills databases and the limitations they encounter.

So law firms are in good company. Those that have built self-rating experience location systems find that lawyers hate rating themselves and tend to under- or over-state their experience. This is just another reason driving firms to automated solutions. For experience locations, systems are emerging that can infer experience based on matters worked on and time billed to those matters.

Few law firms invest in research and development. But doing so could pay big dividends. 

Lawyers spend time on billable work, client development, firm administration, and keeping up on legal developments. Is R&D even on the list?

The focus of R&D should be driven by strategy (see Adam Smith, Esq.’s recent Do You Have a Chief Strategy Officer? Post on strategy). Here are a few ideas for potential R&D topics:

• E-discovery - particularly figuring out what approach to reviewing large quantities of documents works best. Some law firms now focus on e-discovery though it’s not clear that they are investing in R&D. ( For firms focusing on e-discovery, see my blog post New E-Discovery Law Firm or the recent law.com article Form an E-Discovery Group in Five Steps.)
• Project management - applying the technique to large litigation or transactions could work wonders. Some firms now have project management offices residing in IT with aspirations to extend to the practice, but the transition is difficult and slow.
• Conract management - companies large and small struggle with managing their contracts. I’ve argued before that law firms could profit from helping companies manage contracts.
• Pursuing commoditized work - apply document assembly or other automation to compete for and profitably handle high volume, moderately complex matters.

Of course, R&D does not always result in successful innovation. So law firms that start down this road should proceed with the “fail fast” mindset. The first attempt may not work, but that does not mean giving up. Just try again.

I’ve already written about what lawyers can learn about searching from shoppers. Now comes another lesson from retail. 

On Monday (3/6), Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S. ($) in the New York Times explains that retailers

“are using R.S.S., or ‘really simple syndication,’ to feed product alerts to Internet users who have set up personalized Web pages on Yahoo, Google and other sites…. retailers see them as a way to reach consumers who are growing weary of commercial e-mail.”

Just as search techniques in retail is informing how leading edge firms design their systems, so too can retail inform how firms should deliver legal updates. E-mail is fine for now (maybe). But large law firms should give their clients the choice of receiving legal updates via RSS.

I am trying a new idea - occasional posts highlighting articles, blog entries, and vendor web sites that I have recently found interesting.  

Beyond sharing my “findings,” this is personal knowledge management for me. By creating a blog category and labeling entries, I hope that I can find these references for myself in the future.

Practice Group and Law Firm Management
Two articles by Susan Raridon Lambreth of Hildebrandt in the Feburary and March issues of Law Practice Today:
How Do Client and Industry Teams Fit Into Our Practice Management Structure?
What Does It Take to Develop Effective Law Firm Leaders?
Blog post on Matt Homann’s the [non]billable hour: Attorneys Aren’t Knowledge Workers [by guest blogger Ron Baker]

Marketing
March LPT article by Ed Poll:
Do You Know Who – and Where – Your Biggest Clients Are?

Knowledge Management
Blog post by Ross Dawson on organizational network analysis
Organizational network analysis goes mainstream

e-Discovery Vendors of Interest
PSS Systems: “Retain, dispose, preserve, produce” solution.
Clearwell Systems: “By discovering, organizing and analyzing the information captured in email, Clearwell enables you to lower discovery costs”

“You can never be too rich or too thin.” Or have too much computer screen real estate. 

In the office, my Vaio notebook sits in a docking station and connects to a 19″ external LCD monitor. I “virtualize” the notebook and external monitor, so that I can use both screens. This means I can move the mouse cursor across both screens as if they were one (a standard Windows XP feature).

Two screens are a huge productivity booster. I tile my open applications so that I can access each with a single mouse click. I tend to keep my calendar open on the small screen because I reference it constantly. For Webinars, I view on one screen and take notes on the other (or sneak looks at my inbox). Two screens mean I can view more information and easily cut and paste across apps (and screens). On the road, I miss my acres of screen (and my external full-size keyboard.)

Anecdotally, I do not recall seeing many large firm lawyers who virtualize their displays. The physical set up and training for this is an issue, but I think the payback is worthwhile. Alternatively, a 21″ monitor would provide similar benefits.

Query to Readers: After I undock and then re-dock, I have to move all apps back to the external monitor manually. Anyone know a way to automate this, specifically to cause Windows to “remember” the position and size of each app??

Business Week reports in Subcontinental Drift (1/16/06, $) that a growing number of Westerners go to India to work for outsourcing companies. Are lawyers next? 

The article notes that

“firangis - or foreigners - have always been part of the Indian outsourcing scene. But until recently, they were mostly highly paid experts from companies that were sending their work abroad, helping the new Indian team learn the processes… Those folks are still coming to India, but they’re being joined by less-experienced people who make little more than the rock-bottom wages paid to locals that are a key draw for multinationals.”

The article focuses on young people seeking relatively low-level work. I wonder though if some US contract lawyers might not find an Indian stint rewarding. Assuming document review working conditions reported at the Temporary Attorney blog are accurate, moving to India could be a big life-style upgrade.

An offshore company seeking to offer lawyer review for responsiveness and privilege might want to seed a local team with experienced contract lawyers from the US. With the right technology to monitor review progress, it really shouldn’t matter where the lawyers sit. And clients could probably pay travel costs for a few lawyers and still come out way ahead.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a technology standard that makes automatically distributing information easy. Many organizations (including the New York Times and WilmerHale) use RSS to let web site visitors receive updates automatically. Now, a large law firm is using RSS internally. 

Marketing expert Larry Bodine blogs that “Dykema Chooses Newsgator for Firmwide RSS Aggregator.” With this enterprise tool, the firm can automatically deliver information directly into the Outlook based on individual need.

For more information, see my prior posts: Blogs and RSS Feeds - Enterprise Approach? and Follow-up on Enterprise Blogging and RSS, both from last summer.