3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Staying Relevant - Part 3: Competition Takes Many Forms

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:09:00 +0000

In Part 2 of this series we covered the beginnings of major change in the legal market along with the initial responses from firms and lawyers.

Non-Traditional Competitors

An emerging and compelling reason for lawyers to make different business decisions is coming from new breeds of competitors. One example is the Legal Process Outsourcer (LPO) market. These companies started as off-shore (typically India) based providers for first document review in litigation. They hire English speaking, American law trained candidates in other, lower wage countries. These much lower-costing, well-enough trained lawyers were appropriately suited for this level of work. So well-matched to the tasks, that in very short order, these document reviewers became viable competitors. Most lawyers glossed over this market encroachment, seeing it as commodity level work no longer worthy of their skills. In reality, this meant millions in fees were no longer going to US lawyers.

The LPOs originally targeted law firms as their customers. But law firms were slow to respond to these offerings, in part due to the ethical constraints of profiting from third-party services. But firms were also concerned about diluting the law firm brand with low-level services. The result was that LPOs shifted their sales and marketing efforts directly to clients. With the acquisition of the Pangea3 LPO by Thomson Reuters, the market saw strong validation of this model. LPOs are now offering a broader range of services including: Contract Drafting, Contract Review, Patent Application Drafting, IP and M&A Due Diligence and other services.

It should be noted that these legal-type services are being provided by non-law firms directly to clients. To date, it appears that no regulatory authorities are investigating these practices leaving these new competitors ample opportunity to go after the legal market, which they appear to be doing. As law firm revenues have gone stagnant or declined over the past few years, LPOs have been experiencing 50% growth per year.

In the solo / small firm segment of the market, other competitors are appearing. For example, LegalZoom is a provider of online legal forms which also provides customer service to assist clients in completing the forms. Some states have taken issue with LegalZoom for, what they believe to be, engaging in the Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL). These states’ efforts do not seem to be having much impact on LegalZoom’s growth. The company reports raising $100 million in funding to-date and $100 million in revenue for 2011. This market for online legal content was further validated via Google’s $18.5m investment in Rocket Lawyer in mid-2011. These providers are taking full advantage of 1) the ability to raise capital, and 2) next generation technology. Lawyers are barred from the first activity and generally unwilling to engage in the second one.

Profit vs. Revenue

Lawyers and firms have been living in a cost-plus business model world for the past 50 years. ‘Cost-plus’ is having the cost of a service plus a profit built into the pricing. Hourly billing rates are a manifestation of this model. As long as there were enough billable hours to go around, profits were virtually guaranteed. This model created a mind-set bent on billable hours and revenue, for which the industry is well-known. The challenge for firms now is that these rules no longer hold true. The shift that began in 2006, accelerated by the recession in 2008, changed that dynamic.

AFAs presented a viable alternative to work through the shift. Instead of looking at just hours and rates, fees and cost of delivery became part of the equation. Now firms began looking at matter financials in a profit margin way.

Most businesses operate on the margin model. Although not a complicated formula (price minus cost equals profit), it is still an elusive one for lawyers. I contend that by the end of 2009, firms were unknowingly operating in a margin world. Unknowingly since their compensation models are founded on a cost-plus model that rewards revenue versus profitability. Therefore firms have a structural blind-eye to the profit squeeze problem. They are unable to even expose the problem, when they really should be focused on resolving it.

A Suggestion

At one point in 2010, a law firm partner asked me if I could do one thing to restructure a firm for the future, what would it be? I gave a simple answer: Change the financial conversation from revenue to profit. Most of the challenges facing firms would come in to focus and receive the attention they need and deserve if that one criterion were in place. Every effort in a firm would shift from supporting a cost-plus model to the margin one that actually exists.

Part 4 provides a forecast on the technology aspect of the perfect storm. This rapidly advancing force brings serious challenges, and hopefully some opportunities to lawyers.

Google Author Tags: Google's All Up in My Business

noreply@blogger.com (Lihsa) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:34:00 +0000

Today, I spent a lot of time messing around with Blogger, Feedburner and Google+.

There is a lot of change afoot with the upgrades in Google+.

Integration for the most part has been pretty smooth--I like that if you have a Google+ account and a Blogger account, it is fairly simple to integrate and feed your new blog posts to your Google+.

But what isn't so easy is integrating co-authored blogs into Google+.

Thanks to a tip from HubSpot, I found a bit of a work-around by setting up a Google+ author tag. But I'm not completely confident it will work. Plus, I had to do something that I was completely loathe to do--submit my Gmail account to the public domain. Ugh.

Why does Google insist upon getting all up into my business?

Skip the Library; Increase Your Risk

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:54:00 +0000

Image [cc] Slippery Tiger

I have found that librarians at law firms walk a tightrope strung over the thorny issues of cost, risk and user demands. We have a reputation of being "gatekeepers" or impeding advances in legal research by holding on to old media at the expense of new media. Although it may be true that there are a few Luddites clinging to the idea of a traditional brick & mortar library, those Luddites are few and far between. Most librarians are actually ready and willing to adopt new ideas, media, technology, user experiences, and procedures, but they are also responsible for advising the risk involved in the adoption to the overall firm in which they work. There are times in which the risk outweighs the cool factor in moving forward.

One of the common themes I'm hearing from vendors these days is that "we need to get our products in front of the attorneys because the librarians are too challenging to work with." It is a logical thought on their end because librarians are challenging. We look past the "whiz-bang" interface and start asking the questions of "how much does it cost?" or "who can access it?" or "does it work with our current infrastructure?" or "what happens if someone gets into something we didn't put in our contract?" or "if we bill clients for the use of this product, can you work with us to make sure we follow ABA guidelines?" In other words, we ask challenging questions and won't move forward until those questions are answered.

There is a reason that law firms hire librarians to manage their external legal research content. We mitigate risk – both ethical and fiscal for the firm. We report up to the powers-that-be in a firm and present the pros and cons of new products, give our recommendations, then implement the decisions that are made. Sometimes the potential rewards are worth the risk, sometimes they are not. Like it or not, librarians do not make the final decision, however we do relay that decision to the vendors (so to them, it seems that we are the problem.) There are librarians out there that never want to bring in new products or technology, but they are rare – and getting rarer.

When vendors successfully do an end-run around the library and get a Partner to sign off on a contract for their product, the librarian spends the next year attempting to undo the damage. Pull any law librarian to the side in at a conference and have them tell you the horror stories of what happened when a Practice Group bought a product (usually somewhere in the vicinity of $25K) only to find out that the firm already had a similar product (sometimes the same exact product), or that the product actually didn't solve that problem the Practice Group thought it would. The story usually ends with how much time the librarian spent on getting the contract reworked into an existing deal (reducing the overall cost, but retaining the product) or finding some way to get out of the contract after tracking down the contract signed by the group.

Many librarians would love to adopt the newest version of a legal research product and be on the bleeding edge of technology. However, our biggest duty to the firm is to make sure that we first look at the risks associated with taking on the latest and greatest products. Skipping the library (either by a vendor, or someone on the inside of the firm) may get a product into the firm, however, it rarely comes without introducing some unforeseen risk to the firm. The librarian is then asked to fix the problem, and usually a note goes out reminding members of the firm that all contracts have to be negotiated through the proper channels, and that "X" vendor must from this point go through the proper channels. For the vendor, the short-term victory turns into a long-term damage to their reputation within the firm. Even worse, now they have to go, hat in hand, to the very librarian they excluded, and work to make amends.

Staying Relevant - Part 2: The Initial Pain and Response

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:02:00 +0000

Image [cc] edkohler

Part 1 of this series set the stage for the perfect economic storm, covering the forces pushing change in the legal market. Part 2 covers the first pain felt in the legal market and how firms have reacted.

Along Comes 2008

Even before the Lehman collapse, clients had already started sending signals to law firms about rate concerns. But after the collapse those signals became directives. Some clients went as far as sending letters dictating rates for 2009. A good friend summed the scenario up well when he noted, “The Guild was broken in the General Counsel’s (GCs) office.” What he meant by this statement was that legal departments and legal budgets were no longer getting a pass when it came to cost reductions. The CEO had come to the GC for his annual “you need to cut costs” visit, but this time wouldn’t take “I can’t” for an answer. In some situations, the CEO brought in Procurement and instructed the GC to use this group as a resource to get control over legal costs. Prior to this, GCs were cautious about pressuring outside firms on rates, fearing they might not represent them in the next large case if they were offended by discount requests. The CEO gave them something bigger to fear.

Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) began to rise in popularity at this time. At least they were in conversations. But many times the GC would ask for AFAs, not really knowing what they wanted out of them. The fallback was another 5% discount off of rates; which the clients pretty much got whenever they asked for it.

Firms Respond

As their clients were attempting to do, law firms gave major focus to their own cost cutting in 2009 and in to 2010. One report documented more than 12,000 lay-offs from large firms in 2009 alone. Law firms sought and found many ways to cut costs. It was an exercise not conducted in quite some time, so cost reductions were easy to identify. Of course these cost reductions had an impact on the legal market vendors, further extending the financial pain into the market.

One cost factor left relatively untouched in these efforts was partner headcount. Partners, as owners, are not as easy to terminate. As well, there is a loyalty to partners, making this type of cut a last-ditch approach. And in the short-run, it was easy to avoid. The cost savings turned out to be more than enough. Many firms posted record profits (on lower revenues) in 2009 and 2010.

But these cost cutting measures can only go so far. Firms faced continuing challenges in 2011 with: 1) no more easy cost cuts available, 2) clients continuing to push on rates and prices driving down realization, and 3) less-than ideal leverage (a.k.a. too many partners). Simple economics indicates that under this scenario, firms began facing a real squeeze on the bottom line. Additionally, the market for legal services is not growing. There are some practices showing modest growth (e.g. Patent Litigation), however the overall size of the legal market is not changing and firms wanting to grow their revenue to sustain profits must do so at the expense of other firms.

You may have noticed I did not refer to the economic shift as going to a buyers’ market. My sense is that the legal market is now in a traditional, competitive market; one where firms have to employ a broad range of business strategies and tactics. In the old sellers’ market, the only differentiator was that of perceived legal skill. Lawyers only needed to market their skills, resulting in clients sending them work. In a competitive market lawyers need to show clients an arsenal of differentiators. I shy away from labeling this all as a buyers’ market, since I feel that label obscures the need to utilize all types of tools. Until very recently, there were many lawyers who held to a belief they could just wait this whole storm out and once it passed, bask in the warm glow of another sellers’ market. Given the deeper shift in market economics, this belief is unwarranted. Approaching the market as being competitive in a new and enduring way will lead to better decisions.

Part 3 brings new players in to the equation and offers a suggestion for how lawyers might refocus to meet this challenge.

BigLaw Partner Richard C. Hsu's - The One Page Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

… and I thought I was alone… unique… special in some way. I thought I was the only blogger at my firm, but it turns out I was not alone. Yesterday, I found another person at my firm that was blogging. Not just any person either, but ("gasp") a Partner!! Luckily, it turned out that he didn't know about my blog either. We found out about each other, not through an internal communication, but through a Tweet that was sent out that I happened to see in my Tweetdeck Search column. When I reached out and talked about our shared blogging interest, we both had the same reaction… "Cool!" I know I was a little embarrassed that I hadn't known about another blogger in the firm, but now that I know, I'm letting everyone else know about it too!!

Richard C. Hsu is a Partner in the King & Spalding Silicon Valley office and came over with a group of IP lawyers from what was then Townsend, Townsend & Crew (now known as Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.) But, enough about his day job… more importantly, he's a blogger at The One Page Blog. Hsu's blog (at the cleverly named hsutube.com … go ahead, say it out loud) focuses in on IP issues, as you might expect of an IP Lawyer, but the interesting angle of this blog is that it presents the information in a visual way using video and other images rather than just text.

Richard discusses his thoughts behind why he is blogging in the section of his blog titled "Lawyer's Confessions" where he admits that, although he is a super techie (CalTech grad and experienced programmer), he has found himself somehow "out of touch" with the new generation's mode of communications. He reminds us that, despite our experiences, there seems to always come a day when someone younger comes in and makes us understand that in order to "get with it" we'll need to climb outside our own comfort zones. For Hsu, that meant playing to the strengths that comes with age/experience, and that is understanding strategy. He says it best in his explanation of technology and technology strategy:

On the other hand, technology strategy is not technology. It is strategy. And strategy’s half-life is more like plutonium: what worked a thousand years ago works today, and will work in a thousand years.... Invest in understanding strategy now, and you will understand it just as well — probably even better [in the future.]

It is great having someone on the inside that is testing the waters of blogging. I'm sure that we'll be bouncing ideas off of one another from time to time. Hopefully we'll inspire others to pick up the urge to blog about what inspires them.

I know that Richard has inspired me to try to get my daughters to contribute their skills to help me blog, as he has done with his daughter Maya:

Now that's cool! Go check out (and subscribe to) The One Page Blog.

Staying Relevant - Part 1: The Perfect Storm of Change

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:59:00 +0000

Image [cc] RobertFrancis

Like the series on Marketing 2.0, this series on Staying Relevant is taken from an article written for an upcoming presentation. In 1999 I gave another presentation called Staying Relevant which covered a range of technologies coming online which would significantly impact the legal profession. I suggested lawyers should embrace change if they wanted to stay relevant. Some of my predictions came true immediately (e-filing), others came to be after some years (alternative fees) and others are still waiting in the wings (trusted digital signatures). In this series I review various changes impacting the legal market well beyond technology and again suggest lawyers will benefit from embracing change. This series also highlights the impact of some of my prior predictions, further making the case to embrace.

Part 1 takes a broad look at what has lead to the current climate of change.

“Change before you have to.”

Jack Welch

The Perfect Storm

The legal industry is sailing in a perfect storm of threats to its future. The first storm factor is the economic shift from a sellers’ market to a competitive one. This shift started ahead of the Great Recession. A second factor is the actual Great Recession. With the underlying forces of the market already in flux, this recession greatly accelerated the economic shift. Finally, amongst this economic chaos the pace of technology change continues to accelerate, adding more energy to a raging storm.

The impact of this perfect storm is hitting all corners of the market. It first appeared in the larger firm market, and it has quickly spread. It now includes everything from law schools to the courts, all of which are struggling to deal with vast changes.

To better understand the potential impacts of this storm, let us explore the various aspects of what is happening in different segments of the industry and the forces driving change. As a consequence of this exploration, some predictions will be given, along with some suggestions. However, these comments and various others coming from the market should be weighed against our ability to know the unknown. We have reached a point in human history where predicting the future beyond a few years is quite a challenge. A perfect example is that of Facebook, which grew from zero to 100 million users in less than two years. What things will look like in five to ten years is anyone’s guess. So the best we can do now is keep a vigilant eye on the storm and stay prepared to constantly alter course.

Economic Forces

Up through the mid-2000’s, lawyers across the market were raising rates on a consistent year-to-year basis. This action reflected the relative strength in the market they experienced as sellers. A relatively limited supply of lawyers, along with a growing demand for services, produced consistent growth in revenues. But then things began to shift, slowly at first, but truly at a foundational level.

The changes materialized with clients asking for discounts on rates. Discounts had been given by firms before, but now they became broadly requested and expected by clients. Meanwhile, larger firms continued to push up starting salaries for associates and kept them on lock-step compensation plans, driving up firms’ costs of operation. This economic conflict was hardly noticeable at first, since rate increases and a consistent volume of legal work were still coming in.

To better appreciate the nature of this conflict, we need an understanding of the basic economics of law firms, which are driven primarily by leverage and realization. Leverage is the number of non-partner hours to partner hours. Non-partner hours are those that produce the profits which go to pay partners. Realization is the percentage of dollars realized against standard rates. Realization plays a role since each point below 100%, equates to about a three point reduction in profits. This formula and the profit-squeeze conflict noted above will play a central role in the financial health of law firms going forward. It is therefore essential to our discussions and exploration of the forces at play.

In Part 2 of this series we will walk through the first waves of the storm and how the market has been adapting.

Good News From Texas - Onit Gets Funding

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:17:00 +0000

Balancing out my post this week on some less-than favorable news from Texas, I wanted to share some very good news from the Lone Star State.

Onit, a Houston-based legal technology company, obtained a healthy injection of capital this week. Eric Elfman, a founder and the CEO of the company, has been working tirelessly for months to secure this funding. I know this because he has cancelled lunch with me numerous times.

Onit is doing some very interesting things with technology. Their original focus on legal project management has evolved a bit to focus more on process automation. Process is something every legal department and law firm has, but are just coming to recognize. So an application that automates process is going to have significant value. If you look at the process mapping Seyfarth, Reed Smith and other firms are pursuing and the impact this is having, you will start to fully appreciate the value of such a tool.

The other unique aspect of Onit is its SaaS model. Process automation can be very painful due to the time and investment required in enterprise infrastructure. Onit removes that pain.

I’m guessing the $4.1m in funding from Austin Ventures is going to vault Onit deep into the market. Watch for great things coming from Eric and the team over the coming year.

Congratulations Onit!

TR Legal to End Pay-As-You-Go

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Gediman) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:33:00 +0000

A trustworthy source has informed me that TR Legal is no longer offering pay-as-you-go plans to mid-and large-sized firms. My guess is they are trying to motivate firms to subscribe to their service by contract, thereby guaranteeing a revenue stream for a fixed period of time. However, this is an extremely short-sighted move. As more firms move to a single provider model, it seems to me that the company on the losing end of that process would want to use any means at their disposal to keep a toe-hold in the firm. Remaining competitive requires that you expose as many people as possible to your product. Taking that option away effectively removes your company from competing on a go-forward basis. Those firms that chose other providers will lose any knowledge they have of your product over the length of the contract. In fact, it will result in a segment within the firm that has no history with your product. The end will result will be that contracts lost will not be likely to change providers at the end of the contract.

So what does this all mean? It means that either the market will be divided into those TR Legal and everyone else, with very little opportunity for TR to grow its market share in this space. I guess the folks in Dayton and Manhattan are thanking TR for doing them a favor. But it also means something else that disturbs me even more: TR Legal is blowing a huge raspberry to customers everywhere by showing how little they value their desire to provide TR Legal's resources in a manner of their choosing.

What Are They Thinking?

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:56:00 +0000

Image [cc] Woody H1

Up-Front Disclosures: I volunteer for the Texas Access to Justice Commission (TAJC). Formerly, I worked with the Utah Access to Justice Planning Council and served as President of the Board of the Legal Aid Society of Salt Lake.

Crazy Times in Texas

The TAJC, in an obvious power grab, is driving an effort to offer forms to pro se litigants. In conjunction with the Uniform Forms Task Force, they want to make divorce filing documents readily available to those who cannot afford them. This is obviously an evil plan to take over the world.

In the other corner is the Family Law Section of the State Bar of Texas, “which oppose the forms and claim their use: could hurt the interest of people who use them; will not be limited to low-income Texans; could harm the livelihoods of … lawyers; and may expand to other practice areas besides family law.”

At least they were honest enough to add in the part about harming lawyers’ income. Where do I begin on the insanity of this …?

The basic argument of the Section is that it is better for people to have no access to justice, than allow for the potential of possible risk to them. Yeah - I get that they are representing the financial interests of their section membership here, but this doesn’t pass the ole smell test. Claiming to protect someone’s interest by leaving them out in the cold is just plain bad.

And why can I say this so directly? Ten years ago in Utah, a combined effort of the Court, the Bar, the legal services community AND the Family Law Section provided the exact same resource. It is an online, sophisticated document generation system available to anyone who wants to use it (including non-low income citizens). Did this result in drops in income for family lawyers? No, it did not.

At the time a good friend called me to say the Bar should sue the Court for the unauthorized practice of law. I suggested that would not happen and had a lively discussion with this older, self-proclaimed “bottom feeding” family law practitioner. I understood where he was coming from, since the system could impact his business. We had the same discussion about access to justice noted above. And what happened to him?

He started sending his clients to the forms system first, before he would meet with them. He basically out-sourced document drafting to the courts. Instead of spending his time drafting pleadings, he spent it counseling clients. His clients have very limited resources, so this new approach meant they were spending them on the highest value this lawyer had to offer. His business did not drop. He was happier and his clients were getting better value and service.

The crux of this issue actually hits the entire legal market. Lawyers will do much better to embrace change than fight it in the courts. The market will continue to progress either way. If the TAJC and Court do not meet this need, LegalZoom or someone else will. I recommend the Family Law Section reevaluate their approach to this effort and join with the TAJC. Here’s a novel idea along that line of thinking: Use the same forms as member benefit for your section. Add some additional tools and content on top of the forms and they become a high-value member benefit instead of a vague threat.

I’ll step down from my soap-box now. Having lived and breathed on the access to justice side of the profession, along with being involved in new technologies and change in general, made this a hot-button issue for me. I believe the profession is better than this and should work together to benefit clients and lawyers. This sort of public in-fighting benefits no one.

Do You Know What SOPA Means For You?

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:43:00 +0000

(You might want to find out.)

The Solo Law Firm Librarian and the "Wildcard" Approach to Service

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:01:00 +0000

Image [cc] sjunnesson

Please welcome Guest Blogger Tony Chan

[Note: Tony left a comment on Cindy Adam's post from last week, but I thought it was very insightful to the solo law firm librarian that I asked if I could turn it into its own post. Thanks to Tony for agreeing to sharing this with the bigger audience. - gl]

As a solo librarian managing two locations in different states, the same-floor concept [as discussed in Cindy Adam's post] is simply not feasible.

Face time has its value but people also want convenience. They prefer getting answers and their work done without having to leave their office-- unless they really want to use the paper CFRs in the library or see you in your office but only if you're next door. Time is precious so I only attend non-virtual face-to-face meetings when I have to.

Instead, I take the "wildcard" approach to alleviate staff count, cohesiveness, proximity, or face time issues.

I build rapport through common denominators (things that EVERYONE comes in contact with). And not surprisingly the common denominators are billing and technology. Together they create an opportunity for the library to combine/leverage content delivery, user convenience, and get involved in firm business matters.

Contact opportunities:

Got tech skills?

Use it on the IT front. Become an extension of web development by working with practice groups to build/enhance their websites and work through content delivery/governance issues.
IT's more than happy to put some code-writing/content building on your plate IF they trust you to handle it. After all, librarians are the "I" in the IT. And when you're also the "T", you become the consummate legal technologist!

Got curiosity & rigor?

Help Marketing to research business intelligence.

The CMO will be impressed with your investigative skills.

Like problem-solving? Become an automation specialist by collaborating with Accounting/Records depts. to streamline workflow and cost recovery. Faster collections and better bottom-line for the firm.

I'm on the same floor where the library is and still see people everyday in my office, hallways and the lunchroom.

Out of sight, out of mind? Not me!

MnLCP Talk: Are You LinkedIn?

noreply@blogger.com (Lihsa) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:43:00 +0000

Are You LinkedIn?

View more presentations from Lisa Salazar

This is a presentation that was given to the Minnesota Legal Career Professionals (MnLCP) on January 12, 2011.

I always enjoy talking about social media. It’s a huge passion of mine, right up there with movies. I once gave an entire speech comparing Social Media to the Wizard of Oz. But don’t worry, that’s not this speech!

Throughout this talk, I will be making a couple of other movie references—so keep your ears and eyes open.

First of all, how many of you have a LinkedIn account? 24

A Facebook account? 25

Good, I am speaking to the advanced class.

But for those of you who may not know or need to find good analogies to take back to your colleagues here is one straight from the horse’s mouth, LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner:

LinkedIn is a professional online networking site, as opposed to Facebook’s more social site. What does that mean?

While Facebook is in the business of helping you make connections in your personal life to facilitate social interaction, LinkedIn is focused on mapping connections between professionals, to help develop them within three degrees of connection.

By the way, anyone recognize these two folks? The one on the left is John Hodgman, he was the Father’s voice in animated movie Coraline. The other one is Justin Long, the voice for Alvin in Alvin and the Chipmunks.

And these are the real-life guys. The one on the left, for those of you who didn’t see the Facebook movie Social Network, is Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg. The one on the right is LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner.

What do I mean by degrees of connection?

I’m sure everyone’s heard of six degrees of Kevin Bacon: a game created by four Albright students after watching the movie Footloose during 1994 blizzard. The four students wrote a letter to Jon Stewart, telling him that “Kevin Bacon was the center of the entertainment universe” and that every actor could be connected to him through 5 other actors or less.

Well, this idea of six degrees of separation has its origin from an Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, who wrote a collection of short stories called “Everything is Different”. This idea influenced a great deal of early thought on social networks and LinkedIn is a spin-off of that idea.

I’ll give you some examples. Anyone that reads our blog, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, know that I am a huge admirer of Ashton Kutcher.

Well, I will have you know that I know people that know people that know Ashton Kutcher. He is only three degrees away from me.

And the same with Barack Obama. I, in fact, have a better chance of meeting the president than I do of meeting Ashton. It’s so sad.

Mr. Obama and I have a second-degree relationship while Ashton and I have a third-degree relationship—or what they call a loose connection.

Those third-degree relationships is where LinkedIn comes in and helps you to explore, build out and strengthen these more nebulous relationships.

Right now, there are 153 million people in the U.S. workforce and 3.3 billion people in the global workforce. This is LinkedIn’s target audience. And your potential audience.

Currently, LinkedIn has 135 million members in over 200 countries, with nearly 60% outside of the U.S.

And in the Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area there are over 1,700 LinkedIn profiles that show up in a “law practice” industry search.

So, now we’ve set the stage for why we have to active on LinkedIn, let’s talk about how do you market yourself in this digital landscape?

How many of you have heard of the Four Ps of marketing?

The four Ps are a basic principal of marketing that was introduced in 1953 by Harvard Advertising Professor Neil Borden in his American Marketing Association presidential address. The concept was later published in his article, “The Concept of the Marketing Mix.” And, actually, he borrowed the term “marketing mix” from an associate, James Cullton, who developed the idea in 1948 to describe the role of a marketing manager. So if you ever wondered just what exactly a marketing manager does; well, you are about to find out.

The four Ps are:

1. Product

2. Placement

3. Promotion

4. Price

Product

So let’s talk about the 4 Ps in relationship to you. What is the product? That’s right: you. You, as an attorney, are the ultimate product in any law firm—you are the intellectual property of your firm. Only you know and have the relationships, knowledge and skills to negotiate, procure, and win business. So we know we have a great product—there is no denying that. But unless you are known you will not be retained. So how do we get you noticed? Well, that brings us to a sub-set of the first “P” --packaging.

Packaging

What is packaging?

Well, at its most basic—it is the manner in which you present yourself. It can be as basic as your personal style, your voice, your delivery of services. But in terms of LinkedIn, it is your profile. You have got to make sure that you are taking full advantage of all of the offerings available on your LinkedIn profile.

Many people overlook the additional plug-ins and sections that are available for your profile.

These plug-ins allow you to include certifications, if you are board certified, organizations, publications, legal updates, blogs and tweets.

I would encourage you to these over after the session ends and explore some of these options as well as many other third-party apps, including Martindale’s Lawyer Ratings, Amazon’s Reading List and the hottest social network, SlideShare Presentations.

Now, I am going to assume that most of you have already built out your profile. Let’s face it, LinkedIn has been around for 10 years—as a matter of fact, it was founded in Reid Hoffman’s living room in 2002. If you haven’t built a profile, then now is the time. According to Lisa’s Rule of Law Firm Technology, if the technology has been adopted in the general culture for 10 years or more, then Law Firms can safely bring it into the walls of their firm.

So let’s move on to the next “P”.

Placement

Now placement with regards to online activity is probably the most esoteric concept for people to understand since it is has no physical reality—it is all about virtual presence. So let’s look at it another way.

We know the basic marketing principle behind placement is which shelf in the grocery store that you want your box of cereal to be—optimally, at eye-level.

Well, the same holds true for LinkedIn. So LinkedIn’s goal is to be where the eyes are.

So what is LinkedIn doing to help you make this happen? LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner (3:10) explains that “when you meet someone in a professional context for the first time, one of the first things you do is exchange business cards—you exchange professional identities. We have learned that the more our professional identity is out there, the more potential opportunities accrue to us.”

“Whereas if you were to meet someone in a personal context or in a social exchange—say that you go to a party and meet someone for the first time—it’s very rare that you would say, “here’s my home address and my cell phone number.”

“So there is a difference with regards to the context.”

“So that the more that people can put their professional identity out there—in LinkedIn’s case—it’s your profile—you update your profile. The fresher and more relevant your profile information, the more likely it is to be search-engine optimized. So when someone does a search on a major search engine for your name or someone like you, your LinkedIn profile is going to show up at or near the top of the results.

That’s an incredibly valuable piece of digital real estate because you get a chance to represent your experience, your skills and, most importantly, your ambitions. And that’s how opportunities accrue to people and the more they see these opportunities, the more engaged they become. Not only with their profile, but with their network, sharing information and knowledge within a professional network.”

So that leads us to search-engine optimization. Simply put, you want to make sure that you are on the first page of any search engine result. So, say for example, you perform a search for Minneapolis trademark attorney, you make sure that you or your firm’s name shows up in the search result.

I’ll give you an example, we at Fulbright have worked really hard to make sure that all of our attorneys show up on Google’s first page if you do a search for them.

So for instance, Ronn Kreps’ firm bio is number one, followed by his LinkedIn profile. That’s the way we like it at Fulbright and we built our web site with this purpose in mind.

So how do you make sure that your LinkedIn profile is search-engine optimized? Make sure that you are building your profile with your target audience in mind. One common mistake that I see, is that profiles are built to an internal audience. They write things like so-and-so is a “practice head” or so-and-so “leads a department”.

If a GC or a business owner is looking for a lawyer, they are not necessarily looking for practice heads or department leaders; they are looking for law firms, attorneys or lawyers. So make sure and use these kinds of words liberally in your profile. There are a number of locations in your LinkedIn profile to plug these words in: your summary, your experience, your organizations.

Another way to search engine optimize your profile is to update it regularly. You might want to calendar a 15-minute task once a week to make sure and update your profile with fresh content. Which leads to the next “P”: Promotion.

Promotion

Now, most attorneys don’t like to talk about promotion. They start getting nervous about advertising rules and ethics. Which they should.

But there is also this knee-jerk reaction to any form of marketing that go back to a time when lawyers could just hang out a shingle in their home town and wait for work to come in.

Well, those times are gone.

In 2011, the ABA reported that there are over 1.2M lawyers in the United States (ABA). In Minnesota, there are just over 23K—with a population of roughly 5.3M people, that’s 1 lawyer for every 227 people.

According to a 2011 New York Times article, 888 folks had passed the Minnesota bar. Legal services has become an increasingly competitive market place. I still remember when the first commercial by a lawyer came out in Texas. I was a freshman in college and was sitting in the dorm’s TV lounge when a whole room of college kids began booing at the screen.

Now, it is just a fact of life.

Plaintiff and criminal lawyers have seen the advantage of this and have plowed full steam ahead. Bigger defense firms have been much more reticent but as they get squeezed out of more and more market share by other law firms, they are beginning to take legal marketing more seriously.

So how can you use your LinkedIn profile to help promote you and your law firm without violating any ethical rules? In short—a disclaimer.

Make sure and study your ethical rules with regards to board certification and make sure that you put appropriate disclaimers to ensure that you are not creating any expectation of a attorney-client relationship. Those are the most basic of guidelines. – by the way, this particular disclaimer is pretty interesting. It is from a 2009 30-minute fan film called the Hunt for Gollum, which is based on the appendices of the Lord of the Rings.

But, in all seriousness, there is no need to fear posting on LinkedIn. My general rule of thumb—which I got, by the way, from the general counsel of the European Newspaper Financial Times—don’t put anything online that you wouldn’t put in a business email.

So let’s get back to promotion.

Do you know what the most under-rated tool is on LinkedIn?

The status update.

I bet you thought I was going to say groups. Well, as you will soon see, this will factor into this ubiquitous but under-utilized tool.

Let me give you a good example.

One of our lawyers just finished writing an article. He wants to get it published—every single lawyer that I know wants to get their article in a law review journal or a legal periodical. Fair enough; there is a merit to that desire. It legitimizes you, it gives you some street cred.

But I would argue that these publications do not get in front of your target audience. Remember, people that might retain your services may or may not be readers of these types of publications.

And in this day and age, who has time to read?

Everyone is increasingly relying upon Kindles, iPads, search engines, keyword results, scraped content, Law360 emails, other emailed newsletters and the like.

So how do you take advantage of that?

A few simple steps:

If the magazine has agreed to publish the article, immediately list it on your LinkedIn profile with a link to the online publication. If the publication does not have it published online, then make sure and it get it online somewhere. Fulbright regularly post our lawyers’ reprints to our firm’s web site.
Once the article is on the web, post a status update on your LinkedIn profile. This automatically sends a notice to all of your contacts that you have just written an article. This is reaching your first degree relationships.
Next, post a status update on any group that you belong to. This will send a notice to all of the group members that you’ve just written an article—this is reaching your second and third degree relationships, or people you don’t know but who have similar interests and who you’d like to get to know.
Next, advise the site administrator of your firm’s LinkedIn profile so that they can post it as a status update on the firm’s LinkedIn page. Faegre & Benson is doing a good job of this.
Lastly, If you have access to any other social media pages like Twitter, Facebook, etc., make sure that this same information is sent out to these sites.

So, theoretically, an article written by the attorney that I mentioned to you in my earlier example has now has gotten in front of: 43,000 hard copy readers + 100 LinkedIn contacts + 250 members of LinkedIn Group 1 + 100 members of LinkedIn Group 2 + 4,000 LinkedIn Company followers + 2,000 Twitter followers.

And the biggest difference between those hard copy readers and the LinkedIn connections?

What is the likelihood that someone will tear out your print article and mail it to a colleague versus someone pushing the Forward/Retweet button? It is so much easier to do it electronically—it makes the person forwarding the article look smart and, ultimately, it makes you look smart.

There is just not enough good content out there. The web is starved, hungry for fresh content. That’s what keeps the beast going. So if you are speaking, writing, meeting, talking, going to meetings, why not get all the mileage you can get out of your activity by providing status updates?

By putting your select, well-positioned and strategic updates online, you are positioning yourself as an expert in your field.

I call it the “Cocktail Party” strategy.

We have all been at those cocktail parties where someone walks in and just seems to take over the room. They know everyone, everyone knows them and now they know that the party just got good and now, we are all in for a good time.

Well, you can be that person. But you can’t do it if you aren’t at the cocktail party. Heck, if you aren’t on LinkedIn and participating, you don’t even realize that there is a party going on.

I know of entire reputations that are made simply by being online. I have watched, first hand, entire reputations built on the web. Take 3 Geeks, for example. My friends Toby and Greg have turned themselves into Legal Technology rock stars by simply churning out their blog, tweeting good content and developing online relationships.

And the do think that the movie Julie & Julia was about cooking? No. It was about blogging. A girl decided to blog about her daily attempt to cook one Julia Child recipe a day. It was about blogging, not cooking.

And I have seen this happen over and over again in other industries: cooking, make-up, music, entertainment. And young lawyers are making their names known by simply connecting to one another online.

What don’t see are the behind the scenes interactions that aren’t on display online. Toby, Greg and I are constantly getting phone calls, emails, and lunches about going to conferences, doing product reviews and writing CLE programs.

Which leads to the final “P”—price.

Price

Now, traditionally, price is the value that customers assign to the product. Both offline and online, this is a tricky proposition.

In pricing, there is perceived value, the reference value and the differential value.

What does this have to do with LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is free, so why do you have to worry about this?

Well, I think that the better measurement for LinkedIn’s spend is not money but time.

In today’s online economy, I measure not how much money I am spending online but how much time I am spending online.

Everyone hates the onslaught of emails.

My prediction is that everyone is going to get a clue and start pulling the plug on their lives. We will see more unplugged vacations, more unplugged retreats, more unplugged spaces.

We are seeing it in movie theaters and business retreats. Vacations that are off the grid are becoming more and more desirable.

And consumers are becoming savvier about Groupon’s daily deals and walking away from these fire sales.

We are learning, one by one, how to be more thoughtful about how we spend our time online. So it is about striking that balance between how much time we want to spend online and how much of our contact’s time do we want to take? We don’t want to exhaust our contacts and wear out our welcome.

So let us consider the contact’s perceived value of your status update. Everyone is always quick to say, “I am not getting on X, Y or Z social network, why should I care what so-and-so had for lunch?”

Agreed. We don’t want to read about that sort of drivel nor do we want to contribute to it.

Our updates, then, should be meaningful and pertinent to our audience.

That means that we should be carefully selecting and culling our contacts list and providing them with meaningful content that could make a difference to their business.

So don’t think about your contact list in terms of sheer volume. Instead, look at them as providing you with potential revenue. Now this does not mean only having relationships with GCs. It also means developing relationships with people who influence or come in contact with GCs. Do not be so single-minded to think that only lawyers know lawyers.

One of the best stories that I have about this is about one of our IT guys. Back in 2005 we were chatting when I found out that his daughter was an assistant GC at CountryWide. You know I beat a path to our subprime practice group! And don’t forget the summer interns—sure they may not have taken the job with you and may be working at a competitor. But that won’t stop them from moving to other jobs and possibly going in-house at some point in their career.

This just goes to show how your status updates can become valuable to your contacts because, they in turn, can use that information and Pay It Forward to their contacts.

The reference value is about how your status updates stack up against your competitors. If you aren’t making any updates, your competitors are winning that particular race. If you are making updates and no one else is, as Charlie Sheen would say, that’s WINNING! If you are in a competitive market, then you need to be hitting it hard and matching your competitors update for update.

The differential value is about how your updates differ from the competition. Are your updates short, forward-friendly and links easily accessible? Is the content inviting other to forward?

By the way, did you know that if you say “please forward” or in Twitterese, “please RT”, you stand an 80% chance of being retweeted than if you don’t? It just goes to show you: It never hurts to ask.

And include a link, be it a photo, an article, a video. And the link should be shortened so that it will maximize your space. There are all kinds of shortners out there: Tiny URL, Bit.ly are just two.

So in the in end, the price that your contacts pay is the time that they spend reading your updates. Make it worth their while.

Conclusion

So LinkedIn is just one tool in your online arsenal. I hope this whets your appetite and encourages to try other online tools—Twitter is another great online tool that integrates very well with LinkedIn.

In fact, you can now use #IN at the end of a tweet and it will automatically repost your tweet as a LinkedIn status update, but only if you if have your Twitter profile tied to your LinkedIn profile.

Finally, as it’s explained in the famous “ignore the blond” scene from 2001 movie, A Beautiful Mind, (2:02) real life economist John Nash says, “Adam Smith said that the best result comes from everyone doing what’s best for himself. Incomplete. Incomplete, ok? Because the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group. Governing Dynamics, gentlemen, Governing Dynamics. Adam Smith was wrong.”

This movie was based upon a 1998 Pulitzer prize-nominated book of the same name. In 1994, Nash ended up winning the Nobel prize for his revolutionary work on game theory. This game theory was the mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances that would end up playing an instrumental role in online algorithms for games, markets, auctions and peer-to-peer systems.

All of which led to the development of sites like LinkedIn.

“The best result will come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group.”

Blowing a Viral Opportunity — Being Right vs. Being Smart

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:28:00 +0000

There are times when defending your legal rights can do more harm than good. I think I saw a prime example of that this week between a creative YouTube video that was blowing up the Internet, and a company that asserted its legal copyright claim to shut it down.

A YouTube video was put out around December 30, 2011 from someone named kdynamic, where he took a recorded interview from MoBoogie in 2007 where artist Bassnectar explained the concept of Dubstep in music. The presentation was set up in Prezi, and the audio from the interview was overlayed on the presentation, and it was a thing of beauty. I don't even like Dubstep music, but I found the presentation helped explain it in a way that I would have otherwise not cared about one little bit. The visuals, along with the audio were fascinating, and held the viewers attention in a way that separately they would not. I sent it to some of my teaching friends as an example of combining lecture with video in ways that hold their students' attention.

When I viewed it earlier this week, it had already been viewed over 180,000 times, and websites all over the music scene were linking to it, or embedding the video on their site. The creator of the video acknowledged the artist (Bassnectar) and basically asked for forgiveness for doing this without permission first. It seems from some of the other things that I saw from Bassnectar, was that he was cool with the video, but admitted that he's changed some of his thoughts on the music style (what it means and how it is laid out) since the interview.

The original interviewer, MoBoogie, however, was not as forgiving. Apparently, MoBoogie sent a letter demanding the removal of the video because they owned the copyright for the original interview. kdynamic attempted to keep the video up with the presentation being overdubbed by generic non-copyrighted music, but MoBoogie didn't even want that out there, so the whole thing came down. In the music world, it made MoBoogie look like a jerk.

In reality, (or at least my version of it) MoBoogie blew a golden opportunity here. Anyone that has a website or blog knows that once content hits its one-day-old birthday, it is out-of-date. Old news. Cast off into the depths of oblivion with the occasional view from a random Google search. Here was an opportunity to get nearly 200,000 eyes back on one of their old stories. Instead, MoBoogie took the hatchet approach and cut off their own hand in the process.

It is clear that kdynamic was wrong and in copyright violation. It is clear that MoBoogie had the right to shut down the video. But being right, doesn't always mean that you're doing the right thing for yourself. I think that MoBoogie would have put itself in a much better position to ask kdynamic to place a link to MoBoogie's original interview and mentioned that there were additional interviews of Bassnectar there. They could have done so in a way that would have told kdynamic not to do this again without permission, but still be able to ride the coat tails of this viral video all the way back to their website (perhaps even getting additional ad revenues as a result.) Instead, they came down hard and fast, and essentially blew a golden opportunity.

If MoBoogie was smart (and it doesn't look like they are), I would suggest that they hunt down the person that did this Prezi presentation and hire him as a contract worker to do more of these presentations on some of their other interviews. I imagine that instead of doing something smart like that, they are instead hunting down others to quash with their legal rights. Apparently, being in the right, is better than being smart and seeing the opportunities that are out there.

A Modest Proposal For Email

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McClead) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

"Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die"

I first saw this phrase on someone’s email signature, but sadly I can’t find the original email so I don't know who said it. I Googled the phrase and found this guy. His origin story is pretty good, so I’ll go with it. At the end of his post he sums up the problem nicely:

"… email is a knowledge cul-de-sac – a dead end for valuable ideas – a graveyard of potential. Email is where corporate IQ kicks back and has a brewski. Email also contributes to corporate amnesia; forgetfulness that costs businesses millions – perhaps billions in repeated mistakes every year.

"Email is also wasteful; threads grow with unending off-topic discussions and CC lists expand, eroding productivity in all corners of the enterprise. Indeed, email is a problem but imagine trying to do business without it. Even with the massive heat-loss from this antiquated and weak communications model, two things are clear; (i) no one has come up with a better approach that has challenged or displaced email, and (ii) it works pretty well in spite of its shortcomings."

A fundamental problem with email is that it has made communication so cheap and easy, that we use it habitually for all types of communications that are not really appropriate to the medium.

For example, if I need you to review the attached document by the end of business tomorrow, then an email is an appropriate method of communicating that information to you. If however, I need you to review the attached document immediately, then I should probably track you down and make sure you got the message. Emails get lost and get caught by spam filters. Recipients aren’t always at their desk or looking at their computer screen. A phone call and a shared computer screen, or visit to your office with the document in hand would be more appropriate.

Similarly, if I have made lunch reservations and I want to notify you of the time and place, then an email is perfect. I don’t expect an immediate response, it’s not mission critical information. If you don’t receive it, then you’ll probably contact me to find out when and where we’re having lunch. If, however, I send you a message saying, “Where should we go to eat?” and you respond, “I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”, then that conversation would be better had in another forum. Real-time conversations work better on the phone, in a desktop video conference, or in an instant messaging application.

Office newsletters or reminders of the upcoming Holiday Party work well in email. Email is very good at handling “one to many” communications as long as a response is not necessary. But email breaks down when used for “many to many” communications such as a message sent to a large group of people asking, “Does anyone know how to...?” Invariably, someone will reply and CC: another party saying, “No. But I think so-and-so does.” At that point there are at least two different threads passing each other on the server and not every participant has access to all information. Even if you eventually find the answer, there will be a lot of emails in a lot of inboxes. How will you find the correct answer again in six months? Will those emails still be there? And how will the next person to come across that same question benefit from your previous inquiry? They will probably need to go through the whole exercise again. “Many to many” communications belong in social networks, or on bulletin boards, or group workspaces where that kind of information can be more easily shared with a large group and stored for future reference.

So, how can you get people to use other methods of communication when email is not the most appropriate?

Delay delivery of all outgoing emails by 5 minutes.

A five minute delay is long enough to be a nuisance when email is inappropriate, but not so long as to make a difference when email is the best choice.

Looking again at our examples above, a request to review a document by the end of tomorrow would weather a 5 minute delay easily. As would a notification for a lunchtime meeting in a couple of hours. If the invitee couldn't make that time, then he would be be likely to pick up the phone or send an instant message, rather than try to communicate in real time with the email delay. Finally, the office newsletters and notifications would not be affected by the delay, but a group of people trying to solve a problem would quickly move that conversation to another medium like a social network or a conference call.

I believe this simple change would drastically cut down on the volume of emails, which would in turn make the emails that do end up in the inbox more visible. More importantly, this five minute delay would also make employees more conscious of their use of email. Before habitually firing off an email, a sender would think to themselves, can the recipient survive without this information for the next 5 minutes? Can I wait 10 minutes for a reply? If either answer is no, then email is probably not the most appropriate way to send the message.

Of course, a simple email delay alone will not solve the "Knowledge Death" problem. Alternative communication tools, like I've described above, would have to be made available. Information shared using all communication tools would still have to be captured, stored, and made accessible for future use and reuse. This is a huge undertaking, but getting people to use the right tool for the job is the first step to getting a handle on the problem.

Now, how to convince the powers that be to “break” email in the name of productivity?

The Analysis Fitness Test

noreply@blogger.com (Zena Applebaum) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:16:00 +0000

Last night, I had the honour (that is spelled correctly, check Greg's posting on the CLawbies for more detail) of participating in "Using KITs+1™ in Boosting Your Organization's Analytical Fitness™ " presented by Dr. Craig S. Fleisher, Chief Learning Officer/Aurora WDC, to a joint audience of members from the Toronto Chapters of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals and Special Library Association . This was the first time Dr. Fleisher presented this material, and I can promise you it won't, nor should it be, his last.

The talk was about the next generation of intelligence analysis – analysis 2.0 if you will and our analytic fitness levels. I won't recap the entire presentation because I would likely mash it up horribly, but here are five take-aways, musings and thoughts on competitive intelligence (CI) and analysis 2.0 that I am still pondering (note the italics) today. The ability to provide good CI and to really know what your clients (lawyers or otherwise) need is predicated on trust. Studies have shown that it takes 7.3 years to build the kind of trust necessary to be seen as the kind of "trusted business advisor" our clients expect. Um… I knew it took a year to get your "legs" in a firm, but 6.3 more to be trusted??

In the last several years, we have seen a significant increase in our data storage capabilities. I carry a 3 gig thumb drive on a key ring for example, but all this data we carry around and have access to has a very short half-life. Why are we storing it beyond its shelf life and/or not using it sooner?

Analysis 2.0 is about dialogue and discussion – think crowd sourced analysis. This necessary means we, as CI practitioners, will have to recognize our own blind spots and prejudices, right?

The current CI cycle, no matter how many steps you include, always involves the definition of an issue or a Key Intelligence Topic (KIT), Data Gathering, then Analysis, etc. In the next generation of analysis, we will need to provide real time analytics. Can we do various steps concurrently? Perhaps the answer to real time analysis is more in keeping with the scientific method of stating a hypothesis and then collecting the right data to prove the point – is that CI or just cheating?

CI practitioners need to develop or maintain a sense of humility about intelligence and recognize that sometimes you will be wrong, and that's okay. This goes hand in hand with being a trusted advisor. Think of it like the weather man (or woman). Each morning we trust our clothing choices to the forecasted weather. Often the weather person is right, sometimes not, but we rarely lose complete faith because the next morning there we are again, listening for the forecast and choosing outerwear based on what we hear. As the weather people, we have to know that we are trusted even if we are sometimes wrong. And sometimes as creators of intel, we have to realize that experience counts too. Sometimes you just have to step outside and feel the temperature yourself, right? Use your gut and be ok if you are wrong.

Dr. Fleisher is a dynamic and exciting speaker – he encourages discussion and forces people to think about CI in ways we haven't yet. He is pushing the envelope and creating new paradigms. Are your analysis skills ready for the workout?

Success Breeds Competition or Lexis Announces Practice Advisor

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

It’s one of those often overlooked economic rules: If you start a company and become successful, others will notice. Especially others with capital. In this case Practical Law Company (PLC) introduced a product/service a few years back and has been doing quite well with it. So much that apparently LexisNexis saw an opportunity and has just announced their own Lexis Practice Advisor offering. They were kind enough to provide a preview demo for Geek #1 (a.k.a. Greg) and me.

The Basics

It is generally understood that most electronic legal content is of more use to litigators, so Lexis wanted to address the needs of the other side of the market. Lexis interviewed (in some fashion) over 600 lawyers on their practice needs in the transactional space. What they learned from these lawyers was A) they have definite needs for content automation and quick access to relevant content, and B) there aren’t many alternatives in the market.

Today Lexis rolls out the first phase of this the product, dubbed “Business Law,” and will add more content options over the coming months. We suggest you check it out to get an idea of what content is included in the Business Law portion along with what’s on the horizon.

Having only seen a demo, the product looks easy-to-use and has a good amount of content around each document offering. This allows the user to quickly understand what’s needed for a given transaction along with options for digging deeper as required. The screen shot shows the clean interface and content options.

Differentiators

When I asked the Lexis team what sets their offering apart, they gave me three factors. First – the step-by-step nature of the product makes it very easy for lawyers to use. Greg and I always joke about how technology needs to be very very very easy to use to be successful with lawyers. This product is. Second – The content links into the deep legal content of Lexis, making relevant statues, regulations and cases very easy to locate. Third – The type of content is unique. I gave Lexis a Fourth factor – broader appeal. Whereas PLC may appeal to the higher end of the market, Practice Advisor is a more do-it-yourself offering that most any segment of the market would use. The pricing approach reflects that with a reasonable price per lawyer per month.

If you have a transactional practice, Practice Advisor should be on your list of products to check out. It will be interesting to see how this offering competes in the market, especially as the content grows.

Future View: Aligning Offerings with Changing Client Preferences

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:19:00 +0000

Image [cc] gilderic

[Please Welcome Guest Blogger,
Andy Hines, author of ConsumerShift]

As a futurist, I've interacted with several library groups over the last few years. No surprise there, as libraries are living through nothing short of a seismic shift in the industry. Many of the groups are well aware of digitization and Google and related trends that are reshaping what libraries are and what librarians do. A common and laudable strategic response is explore for ways to provide more value-added services, that is, to differentiate their offerings and services from, if you will, people thinking that all they need is Google and the like to meet their information needs.

I do not pretend to have the magic formula that will address this challenge. One area that I think I’ve been able to help is in providing an understanding how client (or consumer or customer or end user, etc.) preferences are changing.

Many of my clients across industry have had some sort of client segmentation that they refer to when devising new offerings or thinking about their strategy in general. But they are static snapshots of the present (or more often, of the recent past). But what about the future segmentation? Can we get some insight into what clients of the future might be different?

It’s with these questions in mind that I wrote ConsumerShift:How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape. It brings together my research and work over the last dozen or so years in helping clients understand the patterns in how client preferences are shifting. I found that values--defined as “an individual view about what is most important in life that in turn guides decision-making and behavior”-- are the single best source of insight for understanding this shift. I analyzed more than twenty systems of measuring values (and that’s not all of them) and identified the common the themes. The real “home run” in terms of supporting data is the World Values Survey run out of the U of Michigan over the last 40 years on a global basis. Spiral Dynamics is another great system.

So what’s shifting? The text box summarizes four types of values. The newly emerging types on the scene are Postmodern (about 25% of the US population now) and Integral (perhaps 2%). Most of the clients I’ve worked with especially in long-established industries, e.g., vehicles, food, and yes, libraries, are used to and quite comfortable dealing with clients with traditional and modern values, and have designed strategies and offerings suited to them. But many are at sea when confronted with the much different preferences of the Postmoderns and Integrals.

To cut to the chase, I’ll suggest four relevant changes to law librarians from Postmoderns/Integrals:

Distrust of institutional authority: (yikes, how can that be in our profession?) they put their trust in their personal networks -- witness the explosion in social media and networking
Desire for co-creation and active participation: they are not passive consumers, particularly for offerings that are important to them; they want a say in how offerings are designed, and in some cases will actively participate – see the Open Source movement as an example
Desire for appropriate technology: they are turned off by technology for technology’s sake; they don’t reject technology, but see technology as a means to an end; they are less concerned about having the latest and greatest, but more concerned with what gets “results”
Desire to “give back” to the local community, the experience, and the personal touch: While outsourcing has great economic appeal in many cases, the postmodern/integrals recognize the tradeoffs and are more willing to consider local and personal options that contribute to overall community benefit

I suspect your initial reaction might be “huh?” Or “not in my firm!” Or “we’re bottom-line here.” These shifts may indeed be at odds with your mainstream culture. But take a deeper look, what are the innovators in your firm like? How about the newer hires? And are their some “closet” Postmoderns and Integrals that keep a low profile, because the organizational culture is not quite ready for this? I suspect yes. And I also suggest, as you think about your long-term future in this industry, to be aligning yourself with emerging client preferences (of course, by no means overlooking the mainstream). The trends suggest they will eventually be the mainstream.

Andy Hines, www.andyhinesight.com

Law Firm Librarians: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Image [cc] puddy77

[Guest Blog from Cindy Adams]

As research has evolved in recent years, we all have seen decreased foot traffic within our libraries. Attorneys rarely need print materials and are able to complete most tasks on their desktops. If no one comes to visit the library, is the facility, and its staff, still relevant?

In addition to the evolution from a physical presence to an online presence, our Atlanta office faced a special challenge. When the building was being designed more than 20 years ago, I begged management to put the library on a floor with attorneys. Sadly, I was overruled. So, for 17 years our Research Team has been at least three floors and two elevator rides away from our customers.

As research became an activity conducted by attorneys in their offices, we saw less and less of other people. As time went on our visitors became fewer and fewer, and requests came to us more frequently by phone, and now, via email. Over the years we were cut off, quite literally, from our customers.

Even though we were out of sight, the number of requests was not decreasing. As email emerged as the standard of communication, our work continued to grow. Using a unified Research Team approach, every research request is shared with every Team member. Research Team members, who are located in three of our 10 offices, respond to requests from people they may never meet. The library is no longer a physical location, but rather a virtual service. Our face-time with our customers was becoming a thing of the past, and face-time can be critical to building and maintaining relationships. Our research load proved that we weren’t out of our customer’s minds yet, but I knew we needed to do something to become more engaged with other people in our Atlanta office.

I didn’t want my team to be toiling in obscurity – faceless voices at the other end of a phone line—or signatures at the end of an email. How could we become more involved in daily interactions with other people at the firm? At conferences, I heard the mantra over and over – Get up from your desk and walk around. But who has the time? How could we leave our phones and computers?

Then, one day last summer, the light bulb came on! Our librarians no longer needed to be located with the print materials, which have become the least relevant part of our research arsenal. We were on the computer most of the day, rarely visiting the stacks. Why did I persist with the notion that we need to be near the books? The librarians needed to be with the attorneys, so that’s where I proceeded to send them.

First, I needed to sell the idea with all stakeholders. To get the ball rolling I proposed the idea with the librarians themselves. Initially there were reservations, but as we discussed ways to put the plan into practice, the affected team members saw how this could improve our relationships with attorneys. Each librarian is partnered with a practice group. They are the experts in a topical area, to whom other members of our Research Team turn for assistance. Each librarian would be moved to the floor with the attorney teams for which they were the expert researchers. For example, our corporate specialist would be moved to the floor with the corporate attorneys – a few steps from her best customers.

After the team began to see the possibilities of such a move, I approached my supervisor who enthusiastically approved it. I then crowd-sourced the idea with attorneys from the affected practice groups, who were excited to have a librarian accessible. Buy-in from firm management was obtained. Indeed, the most difficult challenge was finding suitable offices for the librarians. To date, one librarian has yet to move to her practice group’s floor as there is no office available.

The moves took place over several days. We sent announcements to practice group members advising them of their specialist’s new location, and sent a general email to everyone in our Atlanta office. Our three librarians were welcomed to their new floors by attorneys and staff.

My office also remains on the floor with the print collection, along with our technical services assistant. We’re here to offer assistance to persons wanting to use the books. That said, my floor has become as quiet as a graveyard.

So what was the outcome? This challenge became a huge opportunity. Our Atlanta team members are now actively engaged with attorneys, paralegals, marketing personnel and secretaries on a daily basis. They hear what’s going on while visiting the coffee machine or copier. Attorneys stop by their offices, just to visit. By being physically present, we hear what’s going on and have become more proactive in providing research assistance. We’ve seen a marked increase in live requests from attorneys. Many attorneys – including partners - have told me how much they appreciate having a research expert nearby. We are no longer on a floor far, far away. Every day our librarians are engaged with our customers. What a change!

The librarians speak with each other every day, even though we may not see each other. We hold monthly meetings where we share firm news and research challenges. In essence, our Atlanta team communicates in the same way we work with librarians in our other offices. We are truly a virtual team.

If you’ve seen foot traffic and visits to your library decrease over time, you may want to consider this nontraditional approach. Out of sight, out of mind? Not us!

The Law & Grad School Blame Game

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Image [cc] zen

There has been talk for the last few years about the unsustainability of the Graduate School program in the United States. For many of us, we have heard the segment that talks specifically about law schools, and have watched as many of the schools are caught in… shall we say, stretching the truth about hiring rates and salaries after graduation. Unfortunately, these issues are not limited to law schools, they are affecting practically every graduate level program in the United States. The cost of obtaining a graduate level degree is not necessarily being off-set by the employment opportunities out there that require these degrees. However, students still persue them; graduate colleges still accept them and increase tuition and fees each year, and; Federal Student Loans are guaranteed by the US government insuring that schools get paid, banks get paid, and students get left with massive amounts of debt.

Everyone Else is to Blame

Last week, I ran across a few things that reminded me that this problem isn't going away anytime soon. First of all, I had lunch with my co-blogger, Toby, who reminded me that no one involved in this situation thinks that they are the problem. He told a story of how years ago he sat in a room with people representing law schools, bar associations, law firms, and lawyers, and how it became a "everyone is to blame but me" session. He mentioned that everyone knew the system was flawed, but that the flaw lay in someone else's area of responsibility.

The second thing I saw was a tweet from Jim Milles from this week's Association of American Law Schools' annual meeting:

Jim Moliterno on Washington & Lee's 3L curriculum reform. This is a great time for reformers because there's demand to do better. #aals12

I responded to Jim and asked him how in the heck can there be reformers in an environment when no one thinks they are the problem?? His response was that he thought it "was a little bit of encouragement from Dean Moliterno" on the subject. So, does that mean this is not a call to action, but more of a wish that someone would step up and be the reformer that law schools need? Best of luck with that.

So once again, law schools know there's a problem, yet aren't ready to step up to the plate to fix it.

Industry Responsibilities

What about the Bar Association?? Well, apparently they aren't to blame either, according to the ABA President, William Robinson. In a Reuters interview, Robinson placed the bubble blame squarely on the shoulders of the students who go to law school:

It's inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago…

Robinson's suggestion to the problem is if a student does decide they are willing to take the risk of entering a down-market job industry like legal, at least do it through a cheaper school. Robinson then picked up the ball and squarely punted it away from the ABA by saying that the ABA was completely powerless in holding down the cost of a law degree.

So the ABA isn't to blame, it must be the Schools or Students fault.

Students Responsbilities

That brings me to an article I saw regarding students and the burden they have with debt after grad school. On the Life Inc. portion of the Today Show's website, there was an interview of two law librarians titled "Loving the job, but hating the student loan debt." At first blush, I have to admit that I wasn't very sympathetic to a couple that took on more than $150,000 in student loans, and was having a hard time meeting those obligations even though their combined income was more than $100,000 a year. While reading this, it made me wonder if William Robinson's assessment that students are idiots for jumping into grad schools, and taking on massive amounts of debt for a potentially moderate paying profession is correct.

Is it wise to go to a grad school that charges in the neighborhood of $40K a year in tuition, as this librarian did by getting a degree at Drexel instead of a state school?? If the median wage of a law librarian is $54,500, does it make sense to go to a program that will cost you somewhere between $80K and $100K to finish? Jennifer Wertkin nailed the situation perfectly when she tweeted a response to this story and said "Law librarians overeducated & underpaid." Although it is required for most law librarian jobs to have an advanced degree like a JD or an MLS, can that be sustained in an economy that doesn't produce the pay to support the debt needed to enter the workforce?

Pressure to Take the Risk
In a way, the whole situation reminds me of the recent housing bubble. Think of the similarities of the home ownership pressures and the pressures that the higher your education level is, the more successful you will be. We are told that college graduates are more likely to make tens of thousands of dollars more than their high-school counterparts. Grad school graduates make more than undergraduates. It reminds me of the argument we heard about home ownership equaling success (think of those home owners vs. renters stats for crime, income, stability, etc.) So, there is pressure on the students to take on more education than they probably need. Add to that, the easiness of credit for college tuition (conveniently backed by the Federal Government in most cases), increased tuition costs, and add in a sudden economic downturn, and you got yourself a bubble ready to burst.

Free-Market and the Big "POP!"

Earlier this year, I heard futurist Andy Hines make a comment at the AALL Future's Summit, that Higher Education in the United States is in for an implosion in the next ten years. I think he may be right on that topic, and I think I might know what will cause the implosion. Of course, this is all speculation on my part, so I could be wrong, but bare with me on this. Just think about what would happen if the Federal Government decided to adopt some austerity programs, and one of those programs was to stop guaranteeing student load debt? Suddenly, the free market would kick in and students would have to practically prove that they have employment lined up in order to get a student loan for grad school. No loan guarantees would essentially sink most grad programs. It will be at that time that you will hear the giant "POP" in this bubble.

Marketing 2.0 - Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:46:00 +0000

This is the last in a three part series on the evolution of marketing. Parts 1 and 2 looked at fundamental changes in the marketing landscape, Part 3 will look at how marketing is responding to these new challenges.

The Reaction

As with most new technologies, there have been mad rushes to adopt certain channels as the ‘go to’ options for getting customer attention. These rushes have also been followed by the traditional backlash, with businesses not realizing hoped-for returns on their marketing efforts for a given forum. With all this chaos and constantly changing environment, it is challenging for businesses to focus and direct their marketing in the right channels with the right kinds of messages.

In some respects, it is back-to-basics for marketing professionals as they need to re-examine their customers’ wants, needs and habits. What is different are the dimensions of those factors. Now different customers chose different channels for their content. And they even chose different channels for different types of content. For example, someone may read a hard-copy morning newspaper, but then immediately switch to RSS feeds for their industry updates. So a business not only needs to understand the type of customer they want to reach, but also the probable methods for how these customers prefer to consume content related to their products and services.

What Does This Mean?

Marketers need to look at the entire universe of channels and plug into the high value ones with the appropriate messages. And as they do this they need to engage with their customers in a positive dialog. The return on that effort will be valuable, direct customer input along with new messages actually designed by the customers and passed on to their own, expanding networks.

In defense of the legal market, there are some providers proactively approaching the Marketing 2.0 challenge. Even some large firms are actively engaged with Twitter. However, as challenging as marketing has become for the entire market, the late arrival and slow-to-adopt-change nature of the legal profession, means the challenge is rapidly increasing.

Like most aspects of change presented by the New Normal, the legal profession is in great need of ground-up reassessment of its marketing practices. Starting on this now (or yesterday) would be a good idea.

This concludes the three-part series on Marketing 2.0. We explored the shift in marketing power from provider to customer and the qualitative change from one-directional messaging to a chaotic conversation. With change becoming a constant, we can expect further dynamic shifts in the role and purpose of marketing.

5 Resources for Summarizing Web or Other Content

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:14:00 +0000

Larry Hawes reminded me yesterday of a web content summary tool I reviewed a while back. Unfortunately, it turns out that the product no longer exists. So, I got to looking for other options that were out there and came across a few that I tested using Zena Applebaum's Competitive Intelligence and Know Your Client post from yesterday. I reviewed five products, but there are many more out there for you to find (or comment about here, if you know of some good summarizing tools.)

Here are the products and the results:

Summly

Summly only works on iOS platform (iPhone and iPads). You can go directly from the App itself, but I found the plug-in for the iOS Safari browser to be a better way of getting a summary of the web content on the smaller screen of my iPhone. Here is the results for Zena's article:

Know Your Client in 2012 – Why You Need CI, Now!

- So in 2012, answer the cry for CI and KYC!
- If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program.
- Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work.

Here's what it looks like in the app:

GistWeb

GistWeb is an online resource that allows you to click on a bookmark and it will take the webpage you are currently viewing and create a summary of the content.

3 Geeks and a Law Blog: Know Your Client in 2012 -- Why You Need CI, Now!

View Original Article

63% Reduction Achieved (245 words)

From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients. Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work.

If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program. Contrary to popular belief, CI is not about competitors or who did what deals, CI is about the competitive landscape for both firms and clients.

So in 2012, answer the cry for CI and KYC!

No better solution than meeting your clients personally to make sure that the detail you want to know is correct.

GreatSummary

GreatSummary is a website that allows you to plug in large amounts of text into a textbox or you can put the URL of a website and it will summarize the content found on the website. I found that copying and pasting the content of Zena's article worked better, as it didn't pick up all the extra content found on our blog that was unrelated to the article:

GREATSUMMARY

Highlights

Top 10 highlights automatically generated by GreatSummary

Source: User Text

Knowing your client, their market, their industry, their issues and their pending challenges from both a legal and business perspective is CI. Knowing your client is about knowing who are the C-suite and in-house counsel team. (0)
Professional service firms everywhere write about KYC rules, and law firms themselves are creating new processes and procedures for dealing with the KYC rules. (0)
From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients. (0)
Every time I see an email circulate in our firm about KYC training for associates or new KYC procedures, it makes me think -- there is more knowing your client than finances and ethics. (0)
More importantly, the difference between research and CI, is that CI will help keep the answers consistently and routinely up-to-date, so when a client calls, the service provided is second to none. (0)
Clients should not be left waiting in the reception area; boardrooms should be comfortable and help clients feel at ease; legal opinions should be expertly drafted without any errors; client entertainment should be of the highest caliber. (0)
Knowing the client includes knowing where your firm's relationships with the client exist, if at all. (0)
Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work. (0)
Contrary to popular belief, CI is not about competitors or who did what deals, CI is about the competitive landscape for both firms and clients. (0)
If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program. (0)

Free Summarizer

Like the GreatSummary site above, Free Summarizer also allows you to paste in large amounts of text into their webpage and create a summary. You can pick the number of summarized sentences for it to return, and it will display the results on the results page, plus you can have the results emailed to your as well.

Here is the summary:

Knowing your client, their market, their industry, their issues and their pending challenges from both a legal and business perspective is CI.

From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients.

Clients should not be left waiting in the reception area; boardrooms should be comfortable and help clients feel at ease; legal opinions should be expertly drafted without any errors; client entertainment should be of the highest caliber.

Knowing the client includes knowing where your firm's relationships with the client exist, if at all.

If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program.

TopicMarks

I've used TopicMarks in the past and have been very impressed with the integration it can have with Google Docs, Google Reader, and other resources. Unfortunately, it was not working at the time I wanted to test it, but I did want to include it in this list so that you can go to it in the future (hopefully this is just a "Saturday Morning Maintenance" issue. TopicMarks is a cloud-based service that will store your information and add to it automatically through your feeds or Evernote.

Know Your Client in 2012 – Why You Need CI, Now!

noreply@blogger.com (Zena Applebaum) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:31:00 +0000

In the last several years, Know Your Customer or Know Your Client (KYC) legislation has come to the forefront. Professional service firms everywhere write about KYC rules, and law firms themselves are creating new processes and procedures for dealing with the KYC rules. Every time I see an email circulate in our firm about KYC training for associates or new KYC procedures, it makes me think – there is more knowing your client than finances and ethics. For Example, what about client current awareness, business issues, pending legislation, outside counsel of record, board of directors and the C-Suite. To me, KYC is a cry for competitive intelligence (CI) help!

From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients. Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work. And many firms focus their marketing and branding efforts around the client experience. Clients should not be left waiting in the reception area; boardrooms should be comfortable and help clients feel at ease; legal opinions should be expertly drafted without any errors; client entertainment should be of the highest caliber. But the true differentiator between firms is in the service and the commitment to the client relationship. It is not the lavish entertainment, or even the right coffee brand in the boardrooms that makes the difference. Expertly crafted legal opinions and practical defensive contracts will certainly help, but buyers of legal service everywhere will tell you that what they really want from a law firm is a group of lawyers who are responsive and smart. Clients want lawyers who meet their needs by delivering timely targeted advice. In other words, clients want lawyers who know them, understand their business needs and their industry issues.

If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program. Contrary to popular belief, CI is not about competitors or who did what deals, CI is about the competitive landscape for both firms and clients. Knowing your client, their market, their industry, their issues and their pending challenges from both a legal and business perspective is CI. Knowing your client is about knowing who are the C-suite and in-house counsel team. Knowing the client includes knowing where your firm's relationships with the client exist, if at all. Knowing the clients means knowing what pending legislative changes will impact a client's business – you can offer legal and business advice to mitigate any risk or vulnerabilities. These are all the questions that a quality CI program can help you answer at a moment in time. More importantly, the difference between research and CI, is that CI will help keep the answers consistently and routinely up-to-date, so when a client calls, the service provided is second to none. The goal of a robust CI program is to keep firm lawyers current about their client's business – it would be as if the lawyer is embedded in the client's office, market and industry.

So in 2012, answer the cry for CI and KYC!

Marketing 2.0 - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:36:00 +0000

The second post in this series on the evolution of marketing, explores the shift from one directional marketing (provider-to-customer) to interactive, multi-directional marketing. In the first post we discussed how things shifted from a scarcity of the number of available marketing channels to the scarcity of customer time and attention. This interactive aspect has a bigger impact on marketing and therefore gets a bit more attention here. Again, editorial on how this change applies in the legal market is added in italics.

The Next Layer

The persuasion aspect in the original marketing method directed content in one direction. Business crafted a marketing message and wrapped that up in various forms of advertising to push it in front of customers. Customers only served in a receive mode. To stay fresh, these messages became more dynamic and creative and actually drifted away from product descriptions to emotive appeals. Knowing your car had power breaks was useful, but imagining you powering through the curves on the Pacific Coast Highway was compelling.

With the rise of the Internet not only did the number of channels spike, but the ability for the customer to participate actively blossomed. This was Web 2.0. Here we saw the rise of Blogs and Wikis, followed by social media platforms such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. Beyond the scarcity dynamic, this Web 2.0 environment presented a qualitative change in the way customers consumed information about products and services. Instead of passively accepting the information presented by the provider, they could participate in the development of the marketing message.

What emerged was a conversation between business and customer. Although this continues to present a challenge to business, it also presents an incredible opportunity. Businesses can find out directly and almost immediately how customers react to a new offering, price and brand. And any deficiencies will be quickly identified with possible solutions coming right from the customer.

Lawyers are trained in talking at people not talking with them. They present to courts and juries and give advice and counsel to clients on deals and regulations. As well the ethics rules generally frown on marketing interactions as that may create attorney-client relationships. Therefore 'interactive' does not come naturally to them.

This new interactive environment also drove a shift from persuasion to value in the style of messages being presented by business. In addition to appealing to their emotions, customers now need to find some direct value in a message, even if it is just entertainment. In other words, to get customers’ attention, business needs to motivate them via their self-interest to consume marketing content.

Successfully meeting this new-style value challenge presents a qualitative increase in the value of marketing. Valuable content, combined with an interactive, participatory audience, leads to customers extending a message much deeper into a market. This multiplier effect means one customer finding value in content will pass it along to their own network with no additional cost to the business. Multiply this effect out and well-crafted messages can reach an audience of millions at a very low cost.

Where business has stumbled in this arena is attempting to deliver old-style, one-direction messages in this interactive environment. Businesses push out a message and then either don’t engage with the customers or attempt to defend their message when it is critiqued. As might be expected, customers have not reacted well to these attempts. Business continues to struggle with this challenge, as it is a bit of a moving target.

Lawyers are stumbling - to say the least. Many legal blogs have comments turned off out of fear someone might ask a question. This eliminates the interactive component. Blog posts are are the typical newsletter style of content and tweets are mostly ads. This misses the mark on providing value over ad copy and their messages die before becoming part of any conversation.

I predict this interactive aspect of marketing will remain a substantial obstacle for lawyers.

In Part 3 of this series, we will explore how the market is reacting to these fundamental changes and what it all means for marketing going forward.

Marketing 2.0 - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Toby Brown) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:50:00 +0000

Later this month I will be co-presenting with Jordan Furlong at the ACLEA Mid-Year Meeting in New Orleans. Our topic is using social media as part of your web presence and your overall marketing strategy. This prompted me to write a paper (for the handouts) on Marketing 2.0. I wanted to put a stake in the ground on how marketing is evolving in general and use that as a foundation for us to explore the value of various social media options in the presentation. I am breaking the article up in to three pieces for the blog and adding in some editorial (in italics) about how each article segment impacts or applies to the legal market.

Marketing Origins

Marketing, as we know it now, was born in the mid 20th century. The growth of radio and TV provided the means and impetus to get the attention of customers and persuade them to purchase products and services. In those days the limiting factors were the scarcity of marketing channels. We had 3 commercial TV stations and a limited number of radio stations. There were daily, weekly and monthly papers and magazines as well. But the main point here is that the owners of the distribution channels were in a position to determine who had access to their growing list of listeners, readers and viewers.

The scarcity of marketing channels has been even more pronounced for lawyers due to their late arrival to the marketing world (Bates in 1977) and the lack of knowledge on where their customers look for product information. This scarcity situation lead to lawyer referral service channels via bar associations and ultimately, the ubiquitous local TV ads for personal injury lawyers. Even today lawyers use of traditional marketing channels is quite limited. Their advertising dollars tend to be focus on client trade publications and other narrow channel options.

Now

Over the past 10 or so years, this scarcity situation was changed dramatically. Now what is scarce is customers’ time and attention. The number of potential channels for delivering content to the market is now effectively infinite. So as a marketer, instead of competing for space in the channels, you are competing for position in the various channels along with individual customer’s attention.

The challenge of being late to the game is compounded in the web 2.0 space. As lawyers find the need to actually compete for position on the web, their lack of market knowledge about their customers is a tremendous handicap. Additionally their style and impulse is one-direction marketing. They are used to being the expert who others come to. The primary marketing experience for lawyers is letting customers know they are experts and thus someone they should hire. In an environment where the ability to even spot your customer is a basic skill, the ability to actually get one's attention in the mass chaos of web content is well beyond lawyers' current skill-set.

However the web is full of opportunities and resources for lawyers to easily access. So there is hope for playing catch up.

In Part Two of the series, we will look at the interactive nature of web 2.0 marketing options and explore the impact of customers participating in the marketing dialog.

Fred Milano — From Doo-Wop to Doo-ing Legal Research

noreply@blogger.com (Greg Lambert) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:46:00 +0000

Milano, DiMucci and Mastroangelo

Fred Milano passed away on Sunday at the age of 72, just three weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer. Milano is best known for his place in Rock and Roll history as being in the doo-wop band, Dion and the Belmonts. However, Milano had a second career later in life as a Legal Coordinator at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City.

According to Milano's obituary, he taught a legal research class and assisted inmates with researching their cases. Karen Powell, director of the law libraries said that Milano had lots of energy and you knew when he was in the building "because we'd hear him singing and skipping up the stairs." Milano was still performing with the Belmonts just weeks ago at casinos and other venues.

Here's Milano, along with Dion DiMucci and Carlo Mastrangelo on American Bandstand singing A Teenager In Love.