Strategic Legal Technology

Thomson, owner of West and other legal properties, has acquired Contact Networks. 

The Contact Networks home page has a notice at top:

“Thomson, the world’s leading information company, has acquired Contact Networks, the global leader in Enterprise Relationship Management, providing social networking for the corporate market. Geoffrey Hyatt, CEO and Founder, states “Contact Networks has built a dominant leadership position with ContactNet, the first and most successful product for enterprise social networking. The best companies around the world already use ContactNet to harness the power of their relationship networks. Joining forces with Thomson continues and accelerates this rapid growth with the full resources of a global leader in information and technology.”

In Something for Nothing? Enterprise Relationship Discovery (May 2007) I discussed the value of this category of software. (I spotted this news item at the LawyerKM blog. Surprisingly, I could not find a news release.)

Both LexisNexis and Thomson are bulking up their legal software and practice management offerings. It will be interesting to watch both companies and see if one emerges as the clear winner.

Anytime a large company buys a much smaller one, there are potential trade-offs. On the one hand, it can offer stability and integration across a broader suites of products. On the other hand, it can stiffle innovation, cause confusion, and limit customer service. Thomson has a pretty good track record on this front so I suspect this will be plus for BigLaw customers on balance.

Update (1/21/07): In the last week, I’ve seen numerous references to Thomson’s acquisition of Contact Networks. The Thomson press release about this is dated 1/15/08. You read it here first!

Does your firm have a clear policy to check and clear conflicts for temp or contract lawyers? 

A lawyer / e-discovery expert asked me this yesterday. With all the articles and conferences about EDD, I don’t recall seeing much on this topic. Nor have I heard anything in private discussions. Some tough issues need to be addressed. Do you need to treat contract or temp lawyers the same as any lateral lawyer entering your firm? How well do agencies or the temps themselves keep track of all the past matters on which they’ve worked? What happens if a temp’s memory is not reliable? Does it matter that a temp might only have worked on a project for a day? Does it matter who pays the temp lawyers (law firm versus the client)? Or where the temps work (your space versus the temp agency’s)?

Does anyone know of published material on these questions or have a policy they are willing to share? If so, please let me know at ron at prismlegal dot com.

What is the life span of a CxO at a law firm? 

Carolyn Elefant’s blog post title - Life for Law Firm Marketers: Brutish, and Ultimately Short - summarizes the lot of law firm marketers. She asks “Is the short life span of law firm marketers unique? Do marketers in other industries also have short tenures as well?”

One can easily ask the same of law firm CIOs and CKOs. Here’s a possibly half-baked hypothesis… The job implied by “Chief” is the real problem. I’m not talking titles. An IT director runs the infrastructure; a CIO sets strategy and aligns IT with the business. A marketing manager run seminars and does direct e-mail; a CMO sets strategy and aligns marketing with the business. Perhaps the short tenure of Chiefs flows from lawyer resistance to (1) strategy and (2) non-lawyer involvement in real management, not just execution.

I give Steve Jobs and Apple huge credit for great design and new business models. But not all is perfect in Mac land. 

Ok, I admit it, I use a PC with Windows. But I do use iTunes and QuickTime. Apple, along with countless other software providers, commits the moral equivalent of trespass on my PC. To wit, here I am working in an application when suddenly my keyboard seems to go dead. But no…. it’s just the Apple Software Update pop-up invading my screen, grabbing control of my system. The dialog box offers to download more than 60 megs of new code for features that I don’t need and seem marginal to me. Even with a fast cable connection, it takes time to download and install. This happens often enough that it is a noticeable drag on productivity.

I’m all for updating software, but developers need to learn how to respect property lines. How about configuration options that let the owner choose how often to be notified and allow setting a threshold for types of updates. With all the energy that created the sleek iPod and iPhone, I would think the designers at Apple could come up with a better way to update software.

Apple is by no means the only developer that commits moral trespass. Here’s a case where politeness and personal productivity go hand-in-hand: developers, please create less intrusive means of updating your applications and give me more control over the process.

In this Roundup: GCs develop lawyer ratings, Canadian firms slow to outsource, and using legal technology for recruting. 

Lawyer Ratings and Why They Matter
I have previously suggested that lawyer ratings could drive lawyer efficiency. A good rating scheme should encourage efficiencies from legal technology, adopting best practices, and outsourcing / offshoring. I was interested to read Corporate Counsel: The success scale (legalweek.com, 11/1/07) about rating systems being developed by UBS, Zurich, and HSBC.

Legal Outsourcing Slow to Catch On in Canada
Two recent articles report the legal process outsourcing has yet to take hold in Canada. Outsourcing slow to catch on in Canada (National Post, 10/11/07) reports “Opportunities to outsource legal services to the common law country of India have had few takers so far from Canada.” Few law firms in Canada are outsourcing legal work to India (The Lawyers Weekly, 11/23/07) by Luigi Benneton reaches a similar conclusion. The latter does a deeper dive (and quotes me). Benneton finds that the “main carrot” for legal outsourcing is “the ability to spend more time on higher value-added activities as a huge offshore legal workforce willingly takes care of the details.”

Legal Tech for Screening Lawyer Recruits
British law firm Lovells uses an interactive test as part of its screening of lawyer recruits. Interviews are notoriously unreliable, so its intriguing to see a firm put some rigor around its recruiting and selection process.

Joy London (of excited utterances) and I track branded blogs of large law firms. We have updated the list we first published in March 2007. 

Our directory of large US firm blogs has grown:
- 15 AmLaw 200 firms, up from 9, have firm-branded blogs
- 7 AmLaw 200 firms have RSS feeds, up from 5; the number of feed topics has more than doubled
- We now include a few large British firms

Finding RSS feeds and firm-branded blogs for AmLaw 200 is not that easy. Kevin O’Keefe’s LexBlog has designed many large law firm blogs and Kevin lists them on the Lexblog portfolio page. We also search the web sites of large law firms using the Google custom search engine for AmLaw 100 firms that I created.

With ever-increasing law firm marketing budgets (2% according to one survey), I am surprised more firms do not invest in branded blogs to generate leads. In my presentation, Blogging: Why the Fuss (presented at the ALA Annual Conference, May 2007), I suggested a framework to compare marketing “channels.” In my estimation, blogging is one of the more effective ones, though readers can use the framework to reach a different conclusion depending on the weight assigned to each channel consideration (e.g., cost, frequency, and ease of measurement).

If we have missed any large firm branded blogs, please send e-mail to ron @ prismlegal dot com.

Inside Counsel magazine recently asked its general counsel readers “Have you ever outsourced legal work to India?" 

The questions was asked on the magazine’s web site and the answers published in the November issue:
- 26% “Yes”
- 22% “May in the future”
- 52% “No”

Given that legal outsourcing and offshoring has only been a widely publicized option for less than 5 years, I am surprised that one-quarter half already used and another quarter are considering it. More surprising, however, is that half rule it out. Given the answer choices, the most reasonable interpretation of “No” means “no, and I will not consider it in the future.”

Offshoring may not be a good option for every law department but I wonder how one would explain to corporate management a blanket refusal to consider it. It may not be appropriate today but what about tomorrow? What’s a reasonable basis to rule it out? I suppose the “No respondents” here may well have responded the same a dozen years ago to “Have you ever used e-mail to conduct legal work” or a half-dozen years ago “Have you ever used e-billing with outside counsel.” Smart business people do not rule out viable ways to do business.

Updated (11/19/07): After I wrote above, I came across In-House Lawyers Manage Outside Counsel More Closely (Fulton County Daily Report, 11/16/07). It notes “GCs everywhere seem to be applying the same kinds of cost control measures to the outside law firms as their C-suite counterparts do with any other vendor service…. GCs have talked about sending less critical work to smaller boutique firms, solo practitioners and even outsourcing to India.”

This is the fifth in an occasional series of “maxims” on managing legal technology. Each one is a bit edgy - you have to decide where the line is on just how true it is! 

Honestly Held Beliefs May be Wrong. Lawyers vociferously support their ideas, convinced they are correct. But they may well be wrong. An honestly held idea does not make it right. Always reality-test strongly held individual views by checking against other lawyers and the marketplace.

Some examples from days gone by:

• “E-mail will never amount to much.” That was the honestly held view of many lawyers until around 1997.
• “We can’t use optical character recognition (OCR) - it’s not 100% accurate.” That view belied two distinct misunderstandings: (1) appropriate search tools and techniques could not correct for errors and (2) the alternative was better. In this case, the alternative of objective coding was often said to be 97% accurate but in my experience, it was often worse.
• “We don’t need to worry about e-mail in discovery.” Need I say more?
• “We have no real competitors.” If that’s true, lay off your marketing department.

The question for today is which strongly held views will look as silly in retrospect.

Who would you rather have review litigation documents: contract (temp) lawyers or full-time lawyers in India? 

In Document Review in the US versus India (8/07) I suggested that Indian lawyers likely do better reviewing documents than US contract lawyers.

For a well-written, colorful, amusing, and depressing article about the life of temp lawyers doing doc review, read Attorney at Blah (Washington City Paper, 11/7/07). Those skeptical of offshore review should read this for good anecdotal insight into the typical domestic alternative.

I found this article referenced at The Secret Life of Contract Lawyers at Legal Blog Watch, where Carolyn Elefant comments on the article and provides links to other resources re document review and contract lawyers.

It looks like one large law firm finally sees business benefit in developing best practices. 

Heller Ehrman announced in September that Suzanne Hawkins joined the firm as Chief of Practice Excellence. She

“will be responsible for developing best practices to ensure that the highest quality legal work will be delivered to clients, and that that the firm provides services that are efficient, cost-effective and responsive to client needs. Her responsibilities include the development and implementation of processes and training to enhance the delivery of legal services.” (emphasis added)

Interviewed in in Law Firm Inc. (10/2007), Hawkins says her position is “all about people, processes, and technology. There are a lot of opportunities in legal departments and law firms to improve their systems and methodology of delivering services to clients.”

It will be interesting to observe her impact at Heller. Her role seems more senior than most practice support positions. She is one of six Heller “Chiefs.” Hawkins was previously senior counsel for legal operations at GE and then consulted at both Hildebrandt and Huron. So her background is not typical for practice support.

The role could end up with a focus on quotidian e-discovery issues, the usual application development, and bits and pieces of knowledge management. If so, so what. Or it could focus on systematically and empirically testing and adopting best practices and, as importantly, communicating the benefits to clients and prospects. If so, what an exciting development.

Ocasionally I post about personal productivity tools. I used web-based back-up system Mozy for months and find it fantastic. 

Mozy is a web-based service, accompanied by desktop software, that back-ups selected directories on your hard drive. Up to two gigabytes of storage is free; unlimited storage costs about $55/year. Every few hours (you can specify this), Mozy automatically backs up to a remote server any files that have changed. It even backs-up open files, including Word documents and Outlook (PST) files. I started using it after reading very positive reviews in both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

For the majority of people who do not regularly back-up home PC(s), Mozy is an excellent solution. Previously, I regularly backed-up to an external USB or hard drive using software called SmartSync. That is excellent software, but it requires regularly remembering to take action. With Mozy, once you install and configure it, the back-up is automatic. Plus the back-up is offsite, which means your data is safe even if your house were to burn down. I’m a belt and suspenders man when it comes to my data, so I still do sync files to external media, but much less frequently. So Mozy saves me time and gives me peace of mind.

Should law firms do e-discovery data collection and processing inhouse? 

Most large firms have - and should have - the capacity to process and collect some amount of data. The question is how much. As far as I know, only a handful of large firms have significant in-house EDD collection / processing and run it as a significant profit center.

Personally, I would avoid the risk of mistakes and challenge of keeping up with ever-changing technology. A more general issue is the role of businesses beyond pure practice inside of or connected to a firm. Law Firms Backing Away From Affiliate Businesses (National Law Journal, 11/2/07) reports that many firms are selling affiliates and few are opening new ones.

Whether a big e-discovery processing center is run as a legally separate affiliate or not, I think it raises the same issue: should law firms be in businesses other than law practice? I think that this article adds to the reasons to avoid turning EDD processing into a business venture.

Prismlegal.com has been down a fair bit over last 3 days. Apologies. Web hosting company is working on this.

“McDermott, Will & Emery plans to create a new tier of attorneys – think of them as permanent contract associates – to handle lower-end tasks at lower billing rates." 

So reports McDermott Will to Add Lower-Paid Associates (The Recorder, 11/2/07). A big focus of these new attorneys will be document review. I am all for any step a large law firm can take that reduces legal costs. Some comments on three points in the article:

1. “While hiring contract attorneys is nothing new, creating a second class of full-timers is.” Fact checking please! Look back two decades: Law Firms Add Second Tier (New York Times, March 11, 1987) reports on Jones Day hiring “staff attorneys.” Or just one year ago, read in sibling ALM publication American Lawyer, Temporary Lawyer (Sep 06), “Some [large firms], like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Sullivan & Cromwell, have created a new category of full-time attorneys outside the associate track to handle document review in place of temps.”

2. The new McDermott Will attorneys will “put in more like 30 to 40 hours and be paid something like 25 percent less, though an exact pay range hasn’t been decided.” Work what sounds like 1/3 to 1/2 the hours as many associates for 25% less… will some associates want “down grades?”

3. A Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges partner is quoted on the alternative of conducting reviews offshore: “In high-stakes litigation, it would be giving up too much control. A document that might seem harmless might be the key to victory, and we’d be really fearful that sort of thing would be missed.” As I’ve written many times (see, e.g., Onshore v Offshore Pivot Point - Part II (9/13/06)), this is an empirical question. Lawyers assume - usually without evidence - that whatever they are doing now works and works well. In my experience, US document reviews have fewer controls and QC processes than those conducted offshore.