In the absence of said notes, and since many other attendees have already written excellent reports from and summaries of TECHSHOW, I thought I’d instead focus on something that occurred to me while attending the CLE sessions, touring the trade show, and engaging in the various social and cyber events connected with the conference.

We’ve been talking about collaboration in the practice of law for some time, and it now appears to be arriving in force. But what’s interesting is that you can detect three different streams of collaboration starting to manifest themselves, each distinct in nature and impact from the others. I think they can usefully be referred to as lawyer-to-lawyer (L2L), lawyer-to-client (L2C) and client-to-client (C2C) collaboration.

Lawyer-to-lawyer (L2L) is the simplest, if not always the easiest, type of collaboration for lawyers: working with other lawyers (colleagues, opponents, or interested observers) to further a goal or increase their knowledge. There are numerous options within law firms: shared calendars and documents, meeting managers, instant messaging, wikis, and videoconferencing. Lawyers can also collaborate with other lawyers outside the firm, of course: marking up an agreement or prospectus on Google Docs or with the advanced collaboration tools on the newest Adobe Acrobat versions. Online meetings and webinars can put lawyers in the same space without incurring travel time and costs. And social networks represent a whole new frontier of L2L collaboration. (Read Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell’s now-definitive text  The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies for more.)

All these tools have the effect of making lawyers’ interactions with each other more powerful, streamlined and efficient. This is a good thing for lawyers insofar as civility and collegiality are easier to extend to collaborators than to competitors, a bad thing insofar as many lawyers’ business models reward inefficiency — expect to see more of the former and a lot less of the latter as the years go by. There still remains the old cultural obstacle, lawyers’ unwillingness to share knowledge and insight even with colleagues. But I suspect that over time, the evidence that collaborating lawyers are happier and wealthier than hoarding lawyers will become overwhelming, and natural selection will do the rest.

Lawyer-to-client (L2C) collaboration is in some respects a simple variation on the L2L version, only with clients at the other end of the line. In addition to the L2L instances cited above, extranets are the most common examples of L2C collaboration, with online project management and real-time document assembly growing as well. But L2C collaboration is less a matter of technology and more a matter of adopting a fresh attitude and mindset towards a lawyer’s role. L2C collaboration is harder for lawyers because it builds into the foundation of the client relationship elements of trust and transparency with which a lot of practitioners are acutely uncomfortable.

L2C-collaborating lawyers need to be so confident about their own processes and the value they deliver that they will have no compunction about giving clients the run of the factory floor, so to speak. They also need to be willing to cede some control over the relationship — always a challenge for this profession — and to actually listen to what clients are saying and work hard to accommodate their needs within their own procedures. Lawyers who open up their practices and processes to clients and who solicit clients’ active participation in the progression and resolution of their matters are the gutsy exceptions today; not too far down the road, they’ll be the general rule, because the market will require it.

That brings us to the third and and most powerful form of collaboration: client-to-client (C2C). Every lawyer should be paying extremely close attention to C2C collaboration, because it has the power to disintermediate them, in whole or in part, from the legal services delivery process.

It maddens clients that lawyers constantly reinvent wheels that have been invented thousands of times before, at substantial cost in lawyers’ time and clients’ money. They think, justifiably enough, that the amount of time a given lawyer spends to complete a task should be inversely proportional to that lawyer’s experience and expertise in this area. Lawyers’ failure to implement this simple marketplace rule can be traced directly to their habit of selling their hours rather than their expertise. Clients have had just about enough of that. And it’s occurring to them that many, many other clients must be in exactly the same position.

In C2C collaboration, clients pool their own legal knowledge and resources to form a vast living database that has the potential to replace much of what lawyers sell. One of the disruptive legal technologies discussed by Richard Susskind in The End of Lawyers? — and emphasized by him during his TECHSHOW keynote address — is “closed client communities” that draw upon their members’ collective experience and wisdom in legal matters.

Imagine millions of social networks cropping up, each peopled by and devoted to a single specific legal matter — divorcing spouses with children in Ohio, laid-off white-collar workers in British Columbia, high-tech startups in County Durham, industrial CLOs with environmental issues in New South Wales. Members contribute their own stories to wikis, supply both questions and answers to Q-and-A sections, and console or encourage fellow members in forums. The end result can be a civilian version of the kind of KM systems many clients wish their law firms would create and make available to them: a database of known facts, creditable experiences, and reasonable extrapolations of what will happen in a typical matter of this type.

This is a prime example of what a C2C collaborative system would look like — and there’s really nothing to stop clients from forming them right now. The best current example is Legal OnRamp, which gears its focus to high-level corporate counsel worldwide. But OnRamp also counts law firm lawyers and others as members, and makes conversations between lawyers and clients about legal services innovation one of its deliverables. In the Susskindian future, many such communities will emerge, cutting deeply into lawyers’ traditional inventory.

Will C2C collaboration make lawyers irrelevant? Of course not — there are extremely few areas of law where even the best-informed clients can wisely go it alone. But C2C collaboration will be one of the forces that will greatly narrow the range of profitable services lawyers can sell. It will hasten the arrival of the day where most of what lawyers do consists of high-value analysis, judgment and counsel, rather than knowledge and process. And quite frankly, it would also constitute a step towards greater access to justice for a lot of people.

As more instances of collaboration emerge in the practice of law, watch to see into which category each instance falls. L2L collaboration will become increasingly common and should be welcomed for its efficiencies. L2C collaboration will also grow and should markedly improve levels of lawyer effectiveness and client satisfaction. But the C2C collaborations are the game-changers, and we need to watch them carefully, because they will directly affect the fundamental nature of what lawyers can sell.

The problem, of course, is that lawyers may not hear about these C2C instances until it ‘s too late — because we’re not going to be part of those conversations.

Judging from these articles, it seems there are two main concerns about law school e-books. The first is that students can’t scribble on and highlight a Kindle the way they can a textbook. Not to be too blasé about it, but I tend to think that’s only a matter of time and technology. Adobe already allows you to make highlights and place notes on PDF documents, and del.icio.us lets you copy-and-paste sections of relevant text when tagging an article for future reference; either of these approaches could point the way forward.

The second concern is that authors’ copyrights will be violated if their words can be copied and circulated by anyone with an e-book version of their works. I’m pretty sure this ship has already sailed: if you make your living off anything that can be copied and e-mailed, you need to find another business model or another line of work. This isn’t a technology or copyright enforcement issue so much as it is the ongoing challenge to publishers to find another way to monetize good content.

But I think there’s a third concern that doesn’t appear to be getting a lot of attention yet: that e-books might lead us towards a siloized approach to legal education and scholarship.

What’s noteworthy about the push towards e-casebooks is that it’s coming not from publishers or from students, but from professors, who want more control over the content of the casebooks they use. This makes sense: courses that nominally teach the same subject matter can differ wildly among and even within law schools, because every prof has a different idea about what’s really important for students to know. There’s undoubtedly consensus on the core cases and statutes, but beyond that — well, we all remember law school profs who told the class, “We’ll skip Chapter 16 – it’s not that important.” Profs want the option of removing Chapter 16 from the casebook altogether.

But let’s say the day of the customized e-casebook arrives, and every prof designs her own version, mixing and matching from available sources. Students won’t care that much, because all they really want to do is score a vowel in this course, and if the prof’s casebook focuses solely on what she thinks is important and will eventually grade exams on, all the better.

But can graduates take that casebook into practice? Will it hold up to a court’s scrutiny if it misses something potentially relevant? Is it responsible for schools to certify law graduates and send them out to serve clients with just their profs’ specific ideas about what’s important? And what if the students further customize the book with their own sources and impressions? Do we end up with a unique mash-up law book on every lawyer’s desktop?

The rise of customizable e-books could unintentionally usher in the decline of the authoritative source — the general reference work that everyone agrees can be reliably consulted for guidance or resolution in a specific area of the law. One of the goals of knowledge management is to knock down information silos and get people talking to each other. Customizable e-books in law school could go against that trend, by creating and legitimizing individual islands of legal knowledge.

I don’t think customized casebooks are or ought to be the way of the future — they’re at best transitional. There’s a shift taking place in how legal knowledge is disseminated, and we have to make sure it ends up not at customization, but at collaboration.

Ronald Collins of the First Amendment Center refers to future e-law books as “databases in cyberspace where materials are downloaded onto electronic readers.” Taking this approach, we could make comprehensive legal information available “in the cloud,” accessible to anyone with a wireless laptop and a browser (which, within ten years, will be everyone in the law anyway). Then we’d start to invest that database with the richness of lawyers’ and law professors’ knowledge and analysis.

Profs would direct their students to all the cases they’re required to know, each of which links to other decisions it cites and by which it’s been cited. Each case is assigned a grade of significance by experts or users, to ensure no one misses out on relevant rulings — and the simple act of reading a case could increase that case’s relevance score for others. Each case would be annotated — either through subscription services offered by legal publishers of individual professors, or through a free wiki produced by the broader legal community. Students could download PDF versions of any caselaw document and mark up that document to their hearts’ content. Everyone would effectively have an e-book that meets their needs, but one that draws upon the collective legal community’s authority and consensus, rather than any one individual worldview.

For a prime example of a collaborative approach to legal knowledge in law school, check out Twistlaw. It’s a Montreal-based wiki where students are encouraged to post caselaw summaries (and, more recently, statute summaries) for anyone else to access free. The idea is to do away with the massive duplication of effort by which every student laboriously produces summaries that differ in hardly any material respect from anyone else’s. It’s a lot like law school study groups, except it uses the web as the distribution mechanism. Download these summaries to a laptop, take them to class — are we really that far away from an e-book?

At its heart, the e-book conversation isn’t really about technology, or legal publishers, or even law school pedagogy. It’s about how lawyers interact with legal knowledge — drawing upon it, adding to it, and changing it every day.

• Analytical ability
• Attention to detail
• Logical reasoning
• Persuasiveness
• Sound judgment
• Writing ability (okay, that one’s apparently optional for some)

This list doesn’t include such characteristics as knowledge of the law, courtroom presence, or integrity — these aren’t “skills,” per se, so much as information one acquires or basic elements of one’s character. Even innovation, which I prize so highly, is first and foremost an attitude and willingness to think and act differently.

Rather, I’m concerned here with actual skill: a ready proficiency or applied ability acquired and developed through training and experience. Your degree of character, diligence and intelligence are innate characteristics; skills are what you acquire through their application. If you possessed these six skills in sufficient abundance, you were fully qualified to practise law.

Well, not anymore. From this point onwards, while these skills remain necessary, they’re no longer sufficient: they constitute only half of the set necessary to practise law competently, effectively and competitively. Here’s the new six-pack, the other half of tomorrow’s — no, today’s — minimum skills kit for lawyers (again in alphabetical order).

1. Collaboration skills. This isn’t just about “working well in a team,” essential as that is. This is about the ability to function in a multi-party work environment such that the process and outcome transcend the collective contribution — the whole surpasses the sum of the parts. Thanks to technological and social advances, this is how work is going to be done from now on. Lawyers who collaborate well possess the ability to identify and bring out the best others have to offer, to submerge their own positions and egos where necessary, in order to reach the optimal client outcome. Collaborative lawyers trust the wisdom of the group; lone wolves and isolationists don’t do any good anymore.

2. Emotional intelligence. If you just rolled your eyes at this entry, you probably subscribe to the belief, drilled into us in law school and in practice, that lawyers have to detach themselves emotionally from their cases and clients in order to offer the best advice. That’s idiotic. Clients need our empathy, perspective and personal connection to feel whole and satisfied; colleagues need our engagement, respect and understanding to be their best and help us succeed; everyone needs us to listen better than we do. Distant, detached lawyers are relics of the 20th century — the market no longer wants a lawyer who’s only half a person.

3. Financial literacy. This is a widespread issue, recently identified by The Economist as a factor in the subprime meltdown and other economic woes. But there’s no excuse for lawyers to remain so steadfastly clueless about money: running a business, balancing a ledger, understanding tax principles, working with statistics, calculating profit margins, even explaining the rationale behind their fees. Too many lawyers with Arts degrees just shrug and say, “I was never good with numbers” or “They never taught me that in law school.” Not good enough: every client and every case involves money in some way, and every lawyer in private practice is running a business of one size or another. Financial literacy is essential.

4. Project management. It’s a growing refrain among clients, a chorus of frustration that most lawyers have zero skills in project management. Some lawyers wouldn’t even be able to define it: planning, organizing, and managing resources to successfully complete specific objectives while maintaining scope, quality, time and budget restrictions. Lawyers seem pathologically unwilling to estimate time or budget costs (invoking the almighty “it depends” clause) and incapable of creating and managing a plan of action, presumably for fear of failing or being caught shorthanded. But today, everybody project-manages: it’s SOP in corporate life, and lawyers are the only ones in the business chain who seem to have missed the memo.

5. Technological affinity. Gerry Riskin recently called out the legal profession in a timely post on this subject: “too many lawyers pride themselves on their IT incompetencies, believing that it makes them somehow charming and brilliant.” Lawyers have grown accustomed to going unchallenged on their technological backwardness, and even tech-savvy new lawyers eventually succumb to firms’ glacial pace of tech adaptation. Here is a fact: technological affinity is a core competence of lawyering. If you can’t effectively and efficiently use e-mail, the Internet, and mobile telephony, you might as well just stay home. And if you don’t care to learn about RSS, instant messaging, Adobe Acrobat and the like, clients and colleagues will pass you by.

6. Time management. Virtually every lawyer I meet says the same things: “I’m just so busy. I have so much to do. I don’t have any time for myself.” And yes, law is demanding, hard work. But a substantial part of lawyers’ difficulties in this regard lie with their inability to prioritize their tasks and manage their time. Lawyers are terrible at saying “no,” they’re awful at delegating work into more efficient channels, and amazingly, many are still compensated not by the tasks they accomplish but by how long they take to do them. Lawyers who won’t or can’t learn to manage their time will continue to blame their Blackberrys for their difficulties, if they don’t burn out or get fired first.

So there you have it: six core skills that lawyers simply must possess if they want to make a living in the 21st century. Law schools need to teach them; governing bodies need to test for them; law firms need to make their lawyers expert in them. They’re not optional, there are no excused absences, and the test is starting right about now.

Or read it here:

The benefits that knowledge management can deliver to a law firm are well documented. They include reducing wasteful duplication, increasing the firm’s intellectual capital, enhancing the firm’s ability to anticipate and meet client needs, improving the firm’s recruitment and retention arsenal, and more besides. Firms that get KM right, like Morrison & Foerster, have every reason to boast about their success.

But the obstacles to successfully implementing a KM program in law firms are equally well-known. They include:

• Hoarding: lawyers who believe their livelihoods depend on the knowledge tucked away in their files, both print and neural, are intrinsically resistant to sharing it.
• Hedging: with lateral movement epidemic, even practitioners open to KM are reluctant to share knowledge with colleagues who could be competitors tomorrow.
• Billing: when KM activities aren’t treated as billable or equivalent time, lawyers aren’t motivated to take the time and effort to add to the firm’s knowledge base.
• Prioritizing: even if all these challenges are met, lawyers are extremely busy and will often postpone KM duties in favour of more pressing matters – and there are always more pressing matters in a law firm.

None of this is new. But I’ve begun to think that factors like these aren’t just unfortunate aberrations in law firms’ culture that make KM difficult to pull off. I think these might actually be fundamental elements of most modern law firms – part of their DNA – that can’t be overcome any more than you can overcome your own genetic predispositions. If that is so, then that bodes poorly for the long-term success of most law firm KM efforts.

Law firm knowledge management, I’ve come to believe, can only succeed if the people who supply the knowledge are genuinely and enthusiastically motivated to do so. If they see a clear value proposition for themselves, and if they really want to contribute to and build a knowledge center greater than their own, and if they believe there are checks and balances to ensure fairness in giving and receiving knowledge, and if they believe sincerely in the greater good of the firm — then I think KM will flourish.

My sense, though, is that most law firms don’t exactly encourage these characteristics in their culture. With older lawyers continuing to hoard work and neglect mentoring, with associates and partners constantly leaving for greener pastures, with compensation and promotion systems handcuffed to hourly billings, and with all the firm’s efforts bent towards higher profits per partner — well, is it any surprise that KM efforts often find little soil in which to blossom?

KM is fundamentally about contributing to the greater good of the whole; many law firms, I think we can safely say, are not.

Law firms, then, in theory, are perfect places for knowledge management to work. Law firms, in practice, are far from it. That’s why I think the next iteration of KM initiatives in the law – KM 2.0, if you will – won’t involve law firms at all. It will involve individual lawyers coming together to share knowledge on a voluntary, selective basis. It will be private knowledge management.

Private KM teams
Imagine this: a small group of lawyers (as few as five, up to around 20, ideally about 10), each potentially in a different type of environment — a large law firm, a small boutique, a sole practice, an in-house department, a law faculty, whatever. They might all be in different jurisdictions or even different countries. They might not have worked together before, or even know each other that well; some might have never met in person.

But what they all share in common is a knowledge of and profound interest in the same legal subject area — pharmaceutical class actions, say, or business process patents, or asset securitization, or child custody proceedings in Oregon, or small-claims court cases in Nova Scotia, or wealth management in New South Wales, or any of the law’s thousands upon thousands of sub-specialties.

What they want is a way to meet other lawyers with the same interests and complementary knowledge in order to enhance their own expertise through relationships of mutual trust and gain. The Internet generally, and collaboration technology in particular, enables just that.

These lawyers could voluntarily enter into a collaborative knowledge assembly project — private KM teams — with as many or as few other lawyers as they like. All they need is a secure extranet and a simple yet enforceable agreement for giving and receiving knowledge. Each member contributes what he or she knows about the chosen area, and each extracts what he or she needs from the resulting knowledge collective.

Think of it as a private 24/7 CLE program on your chosen subject field, with panelists and other attendees personally chosen by you. Or think of it as subscribing to a specialized online multimedia trade journal where you’ve approved all the contributors (and you’re one yourself). It’d be a novel way for you to gain many of the theoretical KM advantages of a law firm without many of the practical downsides of same.

Here’s what I envision as the four key characteristics of private knowledge management teams for lawyers:

1. The lawyers themselves. They might be current or former colleagues, law school classmates, or friends of friends. Or they might not have close personal histories at all, but would have encountered one another through professional networking methods old (associations, CLE events), new (blogs, LinkedIn), and both (personal recommendations). Each lawyer knows enough about the others’ expertise and reliability to make a commitment to the group’s purpose, membership and success.
2. A secure platform. This could be simply an extranet, which are so plentiful and affordable these days as to be almost ubiquitous, or an online project management platform like SharePoint or Basecamp that can serve as a KM portal. Each member would have an exclusive password to be shared with no one else.
3. Acceptable forms of contribution. Everyone thinks and works differently, and a private KM project would recognize this by being open to numerous types of knowledge: formal memos, written articles, bullet-point notes, dictated messages (maybe through Jott), podcasts, videos, links, caselaw updates (maybe through RSS feeds from a case law site), judges’ tendencies, mediators’ inclinations, FAQs, etc.
4. The rules of the road. Private KM teams like these would require a concise set of membership rules, with which all members must comply. They might include a minimum number or quantity of contributions per month, agreement as to the types of acceptable contributions, strictures against sharing access to anyone outside the group, and procedures for resolving disputes, adding or dropping members, and most importantly, enforcing the rules.

These points are only the basic building blocks — the format eventually adopted by the group’s members would be more detailed and would vary widely according to members’ consensus preference. Lawyers, as we know, love rules and procedures, so KM team members would have to make great efforts not to lawyer the thing to death. But difficult issues, such as access to the information upon the group’s dissolution, should certainly be figured out in advance.

Private KM teams would obviously be fairly radical (although not unprecedented — we all remember law school study groups, right?), and I can already envision several criticisms of this kind of scheme. Here are a few:

Trust issues: it’s asking too much for lawyers to trust others (or even themselves) not to allow access to friends or colleagues, or otherwise to export the team’s knowledge base for the members’ own ends. But this criticism is equally valid in the law firm context, and says more about lawyer culture than about KM practice. Moreover, most law firm lawyers don’t get to choose all their partners and associates, whereas private KM team members would be personally selected and vetted by each member before anyone joins; the trust bar would actually be set higher.

Client information: one of the most valuable aspects of a law firm KM system is that information on clients can be shared, including work in progress, past cases, internal documentation, personal histories, etc. To volunteer this type of information in a private KM context would betray client confidences and violate ethical standards. That’s a fair point, and client insight is one of the areas in which law firm KM systems would still hold an advantage. But I don’t see any restriction on contributing general industry knowledge and trends to the private KM team, so long as this information is generally available outside the client context.

Divided loyalties: won’t law firms resent their partners sharing knowledge with their private KM team members, in addition to (or even instead of) their own firm? Shouldn’t the lawyer’s loyalties be first and only to the improvement of the firm’s own knowledge base? Perhaps, but it seems to me that law firms already sanction and even encourage their lawyers to give away their knowledge outside the firm, speaking at CLEs, writing articles or blogs, or authoring books. Arguably, the firm receives a profile boost from such public appearances that wouldn’t apply within a private team environment; but that kind of return to the firm has a limited value, and its absence isn’t sufficient reason to forbid a lawyer from privately improving his or her knowledge base — which the firm would likely not be able to do anyway.

What I’ve laid out here is only an outline that can and should be improved upon (comments to that end are welcome). Nor am I suggesting that private KM teams would replace law firm KM efforts — not for a while, at any rate. But I do think that private KM teams could, right now, offer a powerful complementary way for lawyers to upgrade their own knowledge and share what they already know with others.

The key lies in the fact that the lawyer’s participation would be entirely of his or her own choosing and on his or her terms. Whereas many lawyers who contribute to a law firm knowledge base do so by obligation or institutional fiat, lawyers who join private KM teams could customize the experience to their own liking. The niched subject matter, the modes and frequency of contribution, the other members, and the rules of the game would all be tailored to their own needs and preferences. And because of that, participants would approach the process with the kind of enthusiasm and goodwill that many law firm KM directors could only wish for.

The most important and remarkable thing about The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies is that it’s not really a technology book.

This might come as a surprise, considering the book’s authors are two of the most well-known and widely published legal technology experts around. Tom Mighell chaired this year’s outstanding ABA TECHSHOW and operates the blawgosphere’s unofficial “paper of record” at Inter Alia, while Dennis Kennedy is the closest thing to a household name in legal technology worldwide. Accordingly, you might expect that the latest work from these longstanding collaborators — this time on, well, collaboration — would be a tech-heavy read. And certainly, fans of legal technology minutae won’t be disappointed with the result.

But Dennis and Tom have done more than that: they’ve created a thoughtful, comprehensive, strategic guide for 21st-century lawyers to understand and appreciate the significance of collaboration, and how it can be be integrated into real-world legal practices. In doing so, they’ve reached beyond the legal tech hardcore to the exponentially larger base of lawyers who must respond to the wave of collaboration now striking the profession, but aren’t sure how to begin. Tom and Dennis get these lawyers started and give them a map to follow and signposts to steer by. Considering how central collaboration is about to become in the law, this book really can be called indispensible.

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies clocks in at a little under 300 pages, with the final 50 devoted to a handy glossary, detailed appendices and a useful index. The 34 preceding chapters are a legal collaboration gold mine, starting with explanations of what collaboration in the law is, why it matters so much, how lawyers are already collaborating every day, and how to prepare a law practice for a strategic, client-focused adoption of collaboration. Chapter 5 includes a particularly useful blueprint for a collaboration audit — the authors want lawyers to go into this process informed, context-aware and prepared for what’s to come.

From that point, the fun really begins, with several chapters on document collaboration (everything from MS Word’s Track Changes to online tools like Google Docs to the perils of metadata) and project/transaction collaboration (instant messaging, Adobe Connect, online meetings, and project management tools, to name just a few). Then the book goes into the important subject of collaboration platforms like extranets, wikis, Basecamp, MS Sharepoint and even plain old e-mail, a dangerous yet widely used de facto method of lawyer collaboration. The authors wind up with sections on strategies, practical tips, and potential pitfalls of collaboration (chapter 32, which offers recommended collaboration scenarios for lawyers in different types and sizes of firm, is invaluable). Throughout, they offer up descriptions, pros, and cons of leading products and services and lists of many more. Tightly and concisely written (appropriately enough, collaboratively in Google Docs), the book offers a remarkable amount of detail and insight.

It’s important to note that this book is as much about understanding the power and growing necessity of collaboration as it is about exploring the tools to get you there — arguably, it’s a strategy text first and a technology work second. To that end, it’s aimed more at the collaboration novice than at the expert — Dennis and Tom use real-life illustrations from a typical law practice (and make homey references to kids and grandkids) to put readers at ease and facilitate their entry into this subject.

But by no means is this a Collaboration 101 book with no relevance to intermediate and advanced users — lawyers already interested in and familiar with collaboration tools and strategies will find a lot of useful information too. I know this area pretty well, but I learned several new techniques and approaches to collaboration from reading this work. Dennis and Tom have taken particular pains to note cutting-edge tools like Twitter, drop.io, and even the Texas Bar Circle, which I only blogged about in March. And even veteran collaboration junkies will benefit from the big-picture, disciplined, strategic, and (especially) client-focused approach to collaboration that this book constantly drives home.

I like most everything about The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, so I’ll set out only a few minor reservations here. At times, the authors make too much effort to simplify their subject — even the most jaded urbanite, for example, probably doesn’t need to have the word “silo” explained and defined. The sections on extranets are as detailed as you could ask for, but I wish there was more on intranets, especially regarding their potential as a knowledge management tool. Indeed, KM, arguably among the most important examples of lawyer collaboration, appears later in the book and not in any great detail (though I readily admit it’s a subject that, once broached, could easily fill a book of its own).

But that aside, there really is nothing more you could ask from a book that not only shows lawyers how to collaborate, but also, and even more importantly, why they should and why they need to. As Tom and Dennis say at both the beginning and end of their work, “Collaboration is not an option.” All the talk these days about Web 2.0, or even Law 2.0, essentially comes down to collaboration. Whereas the first iteration of most web-based technologies was individual, one-to-many and static, the newest online developments are collaborative, many-to-many and dynamic. People today expect interactivity — they assume that they’ll be able to participate actively in their chosen pursuits.

Lawyers need to understand this, because collaborative technologies are going to play a key role in the transformation of the lawyer-client relationship. The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies is where every lawyer should start that process.

Avvo got off to a rough start, publishing ratings for dead lawyers and ranking convicted felons above law school deans. These beta-launch problems helped support Avvo’s many critics and formed the basis for a class-action lawsuit. But the lawsuit was dismissed (although the judge was hardly complimentary of the defendant), Avvo continued to expand its reach and work on refining its system, and the company has now apparently made enough progress to start winning over previous skeptics like Robert Ambrogi and Kevin O’Keefe.

I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Avvo one way or the other. On the one hand, I’m supportive of virtually any initiative that tries to provide more information about lawyers to the legal services consumer — reliable third-party assessments would be much more helpful than narrow, one-way lawyer advertising campaigns. And I instinctively rally to the side of anything that shakes up the profession’s status quo and makes lawyers a little uncomfortable.

That said, there are clear and obvious limitations to how useful a numerical rating system can be for lawyers. I like Amazon reviews and Consumer Reports rankings as much as the next person, and I’m the first to say that lawyers would benefit from more exposure to the pressures of the consumer marketplace. But hiring a lawyer is not the same as buying a car or a plasma TV — you can’t reduce all that a lawyer brings to the table to a simple ten-point rating. Partly that’s because people aren’t objects and shouldn’t be treated as such, but also because every person’s interaction with a lawyer will be different, based on personality mix, the nature of the case, the timing of the relationship, and a host of other factors.

And this leads me to what I think is the most important thing about Avvo ratings: they’re not client-based. Avvo’s mathematical model crunches information only from public records and lawyer submissions; client ratings aren’t poured into the mix, though they are provided as additional data points. But such ratings and reviews are still relatively few and far between at Avvo, so what the site really provides is an undisclosed mathematical model’s estimation of how highly a lawyer should be regarded. That’s better than no information at all, or relying on what the lawyer alone feels like telling you, but not better enough to win me over.

Client input is essential for any meaningful rating, ranking or recommendation of a lawyer. But the key element of any client-based rating system is knowing the client who’s giving the review. Most of the client reviews at Avvo are written by anonymous posters who might be real people, complete fictions, or somewhere in between — there’s no mechanism in place that I can see to establish a client reviewer’s identity, contact info or bona fides.

And even if the client is a real, identifiable person, who’s to say that person has the same approach and attitudes as you do? He or she might be an extremely difficult client whom no lawyer can please, or a complete pushover who naively accepts mediocre service as a gift from on high. Really, client-based ratings of lawyers tell you as much about the client as about the lawyer, sometimes more — and if you don’t know the client, how are you any further ahead?

The best illustration of this fact is that when choosing a lawyer, most potential clients rely heavily on a recommendation from someone they trust. If a given lawyer did a good job for a potential client’s family member, friend or colleague, that lawyer holds a tremendous advantage over his competitors for that client’s services. A personal recommendation from someone reliable is gold — but how to get one, other than phoning or e-mailing your friends and family? Is there a better Web 2.0 answer than Avvo?

I think there could be. What I’d like to see, and I don’t think it’s beyond reasonable contemplation, is a social networking model of lawyer reviews: combine the good idea of third-party lawyer ratings with the power of a familiar and trusted contact base that social networks provide. I don’t think Facebook is the long-term answer here — the open social networking movement is poised to dissolve FB’s grip on this nascent technology — but let’s use Facebook as an example for illustration purposes.

Suppose someone wrote a Facebook application called “Rate This Lawyer.” A user who had retained a lawyer for a given task would add the app to his or her home page to let everyone know that, say, Lionel Hutz did a great job (or, knowing Lionel’s track record, a less than stellar job) on their house sale or divorce or DUI defence or whatever. Other Facebook users, looking for a lawyer for a given task, would run a search of their FB friends to see which of them had added this application and whether they had any positive or negative recommendations on a lawyer.

The advantage of a system like this is that every lawyer review would be attached to a real, verifiable person whom you, searching for a lawyer, would know in some capacity and (presumably) would trust. You could contact Lionel’s former client to get more information, good or bad, about the relationship, and you could filter what your friend says through your own knowledge of his or her personality, strengths and quirks. Moreover, every review of Lionel by his former clients would link to other reviews by people whom you don’t know, but whose insights could offer valuable complementary information that supports or differentiates from what your Friend says.

Now, if you’re a LinkedIn user, you’re probably already protesting that LinkedIn provides a recommendation service for numerous professionals, including lawyers. So it does, and that alone makes it, to my mind, a useful alternative to Avvo or similar services. There’s a lot to like about LinkedIn recommendations for lawyers, especially for purchasers of business law services.

But there’s still a couple of things about LinkedIn’s system that give me pause. One is that LinkedIn is, like Facebook, a closed network, with a much smaller user base, so the pool of recommendations is necessarily much shallower. Another is that it’s a professional rather than a personal network, and the relationships between contacts aren’t always particularly close or deep. And one always has to be aware of the potential Logrolling In Our Time element of mutual advantage in exchanged recommendations. A system grounded in a personal network, where trust is deeper and there’s no particular advantage to be gained through lawyer reviews, would feel more legitimate.

There are other potential obstacles even to a social-network review system, of course. You’d need a large critical mass of lawyer ratings to make this work, and many people’s Facebook friends live in different cities or countries whose lawyers you can’t retain and who hired lawyers for tasks you don’t need. But LinkedIn’s model of “degrees of separation” could be usefully adopted here, letting you know that, say, two of your FB friends have posted lawyer reviews, but among your FB friends’ much wider collection of contacts, dozens of such reviews have been published, including five in your city. You could then go through your mutual friend to get more information about both the lawyer and the reviewer.

No question, there would be many challenges to getting a true social network-based lawyer review system off the ground, and no system will be perfect. But when open social networks really get rolling and these webs of connection become ubiquitous and easily inter-navigated — which I don’t think is terribly far away — then I can see the adoption of personal service provider recommendations as a standard feature of the social networked world, and lawyer reviews could lead the way.

The best thing about that development will be that clients will finally be given a full-throated voice to tell everyone they know what a great, or not-so-great, job their lawyer did. That will benefit good lawyers and all clients, and would make the legal services marketplace that much more transparent, competitive and client-friendly.

The thing about “Best Employer” lists, as LegalWeek‘s editors point out, is that law firms consider them enormously important recruiting tools for new lawyers and lateral hires. A solid ranking adds lustre to a firm’s marketplace brand and reinforces the strength of its hiring pitch, especially to new lawyers who consider (accurately) that law firms are all pretty much the same. Anything that can help a firm stand out from the faceless crowd, especially on “soft” criteria like flexibility, mentorship and socializing, has a lot of value.

The trouble with third-party marketing and recruiting tools like this, of course, is that they’re destined to be gamed. Savvy firms figure out how the system works and take steps to ensure they do well. Some law firm associates know this first-hand, because they receive a memo “encouraging” them to fill out the “Best Employers” survey and help improve the firm’s standings. It strikes me as odd that firms expect these rankings to impress potential lawyer hires when their own lawyers have been directly involved in what amounts to a manipulation of the results.

In fact, it’s this “gaming” element of such rankings that raise what I think is going to become a problematic element of law firms’ recruiting efforts down the road. Young lawyer recruits, when deciding which firm to work for, are going to start zeroing in very clearly on the authenticity of firms’ marketing and recruitment efforts. This is a generation weaned on word-of-mouth recommendations, and they give a lot of weight to a friend’s or reliable acquaintance’s testimony that something is worthwhile or not. Failing those kinds of first-hand recommendations, they will tend to go, not to press releases, newspapers or magazines, but to collaborative knowledge portals to test the judgment of the crowd. This is where new lawyers are heading now, and law firms need to go with them.

It’s not just a matter of going all high-tech and Internetty. Some firms, of course, are creating recruitment videos and uploading them to YouTube. But in most if not all cases, the videos are commissioned and directed by the firm’s managers and marketers, making them top-down rather than bottom-up enterprises. They might be fun, cool, zany or whatever, but they’re still corporate marketing pieces. Once the novelty of law firm videos wears off (which I think it just about has), then future firm efforts will feel less like hipness or a sincere sign of interest in young lawyers and more like simple gimmickry.

How about social networking sites? Surely the Web 2.0 spirit of Facebook and its ilk contain enough collaborative elements to ensure potential recruits will believe the good things said about the firm? Well, yes and no. Many large law firms in the U.S. and in the U.K. have set up networks on Facebook, some of which have hundreds of members. But again, Facebook networks are normallly firm-sponsored initiatives — and invariably, these networks are closed for privacy anyway, so they can’t really be used for recruiting.

Facebook Groups seem more promising — these can be created by anyone, a lawyer at the firm or a former employee. In some cases the groups are closed, but more often they’re open to all comers, and they feel more real because the firm can’t control the content. Successful examples include Reed Smith’s London office, a group with 188 members and an active Wall, and McCarthy Tétrault alumni, which even contains testimonials by ex-employees about favourite partners to work for. There are also a lot of Groups created by summer students at various large firms. A potential recruit doesn’t have to believe everything she reads there, but these days, she’s pretty good at sniffing out real from fake, and the Group will be helpful to her (and to the firm — assuming, of course, that the reports are good).

A lot of law firm Facebook Groups, though, suffer from too little activity — no discussion threads, no upcoming events, no uploaded photos, and Wall conversations a year or more old. That’s the downside of starting a Facebook Group — just like a blog, you need to feed and water it regularly, or people will lose interest. An untended Facebook Group can resemble a ghost town, creating the opposite effect on potential recruits from what was intended. You might be better to try something more innovative and create a Fan Page for your firm as Morrison & Foerster and Holland & Hart have done.

Many firms are clueless about Facebook, of course, while others don’t get the social networking thing at all. One law firm, which consistently appears in a national “Best Employers” list, responded to a new Facebook group of firm alumni by e-mailing the group’s administrator and requesting she take down the firm logo the group was using and to change the name of the group so that it didn’t use the firm’s trademarked name. Maybe it’s no surprise that group hasn’t had a non-spam entry since last July.

Will we see viral marketing campaigns in the law? For years now, consumer marketers have been planting people in bars and social events to masquerade as a “regular person,” talking up and building a buzz around a certain product. If the talent crunch gets really bad – and the odds in that direction are pretty good — will firms go a similar route and try to manufacture fake word-of-mouth? Maybe, but the cost of being found out would be enormous, and young lawyers aren’t dummies.

Law firm marketing and recruitment efforts will never become irrelevant – there are too many talented people working on it, and good marketing is unbelievably powerful. But I do think that as the months and years go by, new lawyer recruits will pay less and less attention to these efforts, zoning them out when it comes time to really decide which of three or four firms they should cast their lot with. Instead, potential firm hires will turn to sources they consider independent, reliable, collaborative and authentic in order to find information they trust.

Firms won’t be able to control that process, which will frustrate them. But if it somehow leads to a higher profile and better reputation for legal employers that have genuinely earned positive word of mouth, that can’t be a bad thing. And one fewer “Best Of” list in the law would always be welcome.

I loaded up on numerous sessions and gathered a ton of material that will be making its way into National and onto CBA PracticeLink in the coming weeks and months. But I thought you might be interested in a few highlights of the seminars I attended and what I took away from them. (Note that the “takeaway” isn’t necessarily the presenters’ position, but rather is my impression of where things are and where they’re headed in the future.)

* Privacy on the Internet, a keynote by Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Marc’s address was both entertaining (he opened with a discussion of the Eliot Spitzer case) and sobering (the amount of data about us that both government and the private sector are collecting is astounding).

Takeaway: Google is amassing the greatest collection of data in history and the tools to do some disturbing things with it, and all we have to reassure us is their word that they won’t misuse it. But we’re at the stage now where we need to be asking exactly who owns “information” of various kinds. For example, we worry that Google can track and keep everything we do online, including things we searched for and found. But much of this data would never have existed in the first place if not for Google: information that we consider our private business exists only because we voluntarily use Google’s services. Can we rightly lay claim to it? Isn’t it the consideration we chose to render Google in exchange for free search? As both privacy and anonymity become harder to maintain, we need to think a whole lot more about this.

* Document management, by Steve Best and Debbie Foster. Lots of great stuff here, including Debbie’s insight that in the modern law office, “document management” is really “knowledge management” — tremendous amounts of valuable information are contained in places (spreadsheets, powerpoints, e-mails) that aren’t considered “documents” per se.

Takeaway: The speakers emphasized that the only truly effective DM system is one that makes compliance involuntary. Human nature and office culture are both such that staffers will always look for a way to get around the new system of naming, filing and locating documents in order to use their own. This reminded me of what I’ve been hearing more often in knowledge management circles, that the most reliable way to harness lawyers’ knowledge is to automate the process, extracting the information from lawyers without them knowing it or participating in the process: many law firms have not found ways to sufficiently motivate lawyers to freely share what they consider their stock in trade. It makes me wonder about the bad habits we’ve developed in the legal profession regarding the information we use every day, that we’re at the point of needing to circumvent choice and remove human activity to guarantee success. That’s not good.

* Tech for small law offices, by Carolyn Elefant and David Masters. Another solid session, opening with the six factors small law practices need to think about when considering a technology purchase: cost, mobility, ease of use, tech support, client compatibility, and security. Also, a great rule of thumb: any multi-function device is probably going to do one thing (the manufacturer’s specialty) extremely well, another so-so, and the rest terribly.

Takeaway: Carolyn and David called the laptop “the essential tool of the modern lawyer,” and it was either here or in another session that someone said there’s no justification for a lawyer to buy a desktop computer anymore. That seems about right: laptops now have almost all the benefits of a traditional desktop (screen sizes will necessarily tend to be smaller) with all the advantages of mobility that lighter frames, longer battery lives, and most importantly, wireless broadband can provide. Very soon, desktop computers will seem as clunky and old-fashioned as gigantic stand-alone monitors now do in a word of flat screens. But with the advance of the laptop (along with the PDA, the cellphone and even the thumbdrive), we’ve entered the world of fully mobile and therefore fully vulnerable client data. One in ten laptops will be lost or stolen, and the loss rate on cellphones and UBS drives is ridiculous. Yet many lawyers don’t even password-protect their mobile devices, let alone encrypt their data. It’s probably going to take a high-profile client data disaster and subsequent action against a law firm to get lawyers to take mobile security seriously.

* Collaboration technology, by Dennis Kennedy and TECHSHOW Chair Tom Mighell. Tons of great stuff here: Google Docs, wikis, Zoho, CrossLoop, drop.io, SharePoint, Basecamp and AdobeConnect were just some of the products and innovations discussed. If you’re interested in learning more about this area, Tom and Dennis have just co-authored a book on the subject.

Takeaway: I get the feeling that 2008 will be the year extranets take off. As I’m sure you know, an extranet is a secure, private website that serves as an online command center, most often for a transaction or litigation, that lawyers and clients can enter 24/7/365. There’s so much technology available now to create extranets or quasi-extranets that price and access barriers are falling, and clever lawyers (especially in smaller practices) are now setting up individual extranets for each client for their particular matter. This has the potential to change the dynamic of the lawyer-client relationship, since the client now has unprecedented access to her files, documents, instructions, and most importantly, the progress of her case and of her bill, anytime she wants. Client information belongs to the client, not the lawyer; but lawyers have always been the ones in control of it. Extranets are going to change that, and soon.

* Law firm economic performance, by Brian Ritchey of More Partner Income. Brian was reporting the results of LexisNexis’ 2007 Law Firm Economic Survey. I won’t go into the details here, since this is a product LexisNexis sells, but the results would be eye-opening to large or midsize law firm partners who wonder why productivity is flat even though they’re working harder than ever before.

Takeaway: I’m willing to wager that an inability to manage human relationship challenges is the biggest profitability drain in law firms today. Partners hoard work and don’t share enough of it with associates; in a non-hierarchical structure, firm management doesn’t have the power to change that. Associates don’t receive enough challenging or interesting work and lose their enthusiasm for the job. Other associates become “non-equity partners” in part because neither they nor the firm want them to become full equity partners or to leave altogether; but these “superannuated associates” are often the least profitable lawyers in the firm. Law firms are places where, because of culture, structure and business model, it’s very hard to have those “difficult” conversations that take place in the business world every day as a matter of course, and as a result, cross-purposes or conflicts that need to be resolved for everyone’s good are left to fester. Confronting these personnel challenges and acting on them will be the mark of law firms in the pole position in the race to succeed.

In general, the strongest impression I took away from TECHSHOW is that lawyers aren’t taking privacy and security as seriously as they ought. It’s not just a matter of using spouses’ names for passwords, or sending valuable client data using highly vulnerable GMail, or taking BlackBerrys and thumbdrives into the outside world without protection and encryption in place, that sort of thing. I think it’s more of a generally cavalier approach to communications across the board, perhaps best exemplified by the lawyer who recently allowed Outlook AutoComplete to accidentally send a confidential e-mail not to a client, but to a reporter with the same last name.

Information is the currency in which lawyers deal, and never has information been so open to loss, theft, espionage, illicit collection and monitoring. Yet you’d never know it from the way lawyers play with their information as if the world is their inter-office mail system. Technology has removed a great many barriers, maybe none so important as the barrier between what one person knows and the other person wants to know. Lawyers need to get on board this train fast.

So that’s my unofficial TECHSHOW report. If you didn’t go this year, try to make it in 2009: change is simply happening too fast to miss out on a resource like this.

I thought of M. Ledru-Rollin upon reading an article in today’s edition of the National Law Journal about law firms sending their lawyers on leadership training programs. One of the points it raises is that “leadership” is an elastic concept into which firms like to insert things like team-building or strategy buy-in exercises. I’m not really in favour of that, because leadership is too important a concept to be diluted: the more meaning you pack into that term, the less effective it’s going to be. That, in turn, raises the question of what law firm leadership is fundamentally about.

Well, I sure don’t have the answer. David Maister has said: “I think more rubbish has been written about ‘leadership’ than almost any other business topic. A lot of it is patently false, and even more of it is dangerous,” and I won’t add to the pile. But I will suggest that the collaborative aspects of leadership deserve more attention.

Strength, decisiveness and vision are often wrongly regarded as attributes of a lone, rugged, heroic persona — the brave individual who rallies the troops through the sheer force of being right. That works great in movies but rather less well in complex professional businesses, especially law firms of autonomous partners who will not be dragged anywhere they don’t want to go.

But good leaders know they don’t have all the answers, and they don’t care. What they do have is the judgment to tap into their best people’s collective wisdom and the confidence to integrate and orchestrate that knowledge in the right direction. They’re not diminished by seeking input, because they’re not looking for consensus or the path of least resistance: they’re looking for the right answer. Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith, Esq. has written a lot of smart things about leadership, including this advice for managing partners:

You need to listen. Seriously listen. “Active listening” is one of the more depressing cliches to have emerged from the booming self-help industry, but I’ll tell you what active listening means to me: Actively encouraging disagreement. What is wrong with this picture I’ve drawn? What am I missing? If you were me, what would you do differently? “Conflict” it’s not; “consensus” it’s not. Common sense it might be.

That is so hard for lawyers to do — we hate, hate, hate not being right about something, especially when the stakes are high. A lawyer without all the answers feels deeply vulnerable. But leadership isn’t about owning the right answer — it’s about putting oneself in the service of the right answer, and recognizing that everyone has a piece of the map to get there. A leader who demonstrates the courage to be wrong, along with the firm conviction that we’ll get it right, has an intoxicating combination at his or her disposal.

In that regard, an innovative program just announced by Edge International and Managing Partner magazine shows the value of tapping into collective experience. Edge partner Patrick McKenna and Baker & Daniels Chair Emeritus Brian Burke are spearheading the Leadership Advisory Board, comprised of experienced managing partners who will offer new law firm leaders the chance to access their knowledge and insights. It’s a great example of mentoring, which the legal profession needs, in the service of leadership, which the profession needs even more.

The answer lies in value-add, which is where I think the really interesting developments will emerge. What will be the killer app for online legal research? At SLAW, Wendy suggests commentary and analysis, Laurel recommends a winnowing function, and Simon C suggests citation frequency tracking — all excellent ideas that an enterprising database provider should move on right now.

My contribution is the idea of a Digg-like function that would allow those viewing a case to determine how helpful it had been to previous readers in a given subject area. It would harness the wisdom of crowds to help determine what is and isn’t an important case. It could adopt the simple Digg click approach, or the slightly more detailed Amazon “Was this review helpful to you?” five-star format, to let users signal whether a given case is worth future researchers’ time. It’s not that far off from the old library rule that a well-worn book with marked pages and wrinkled binding shows its heavy use and utility to those who have come before.

But what I especially find appealing about this idea is that it would help bring about the democratization of caselaw selection. During my time as editor of The Lawyers Weekly, I discovered something important about front-page news: it’s arbitrary. As a news consumer, I had accepted the unspoken presumption that what a newspaper placed on its front page, above the fold, was the most important news of the day. Then I was put in charge of choosing what would run above-the-fold-on-front. I chose front-page stories, and cases to be reported on, for a variety of reasons, and precedential significance was only one of them. Take a look at your local paper for confirmation that what’s on top of page one isn’t what you’d necessarily agree is the top story. Ditto for what leads off the newscast, local or CNN.

The same goes for the printed law reports that all of us (save the newest arrivals to the profession) grew up with. Who decides what gets reported and what doesn’t? One person, or a small handful of people, who may or may not have viewpoints, interests or biases that affect their choices. With every case now online, and tagging systems increasingly sophisticated, there’s no reason to keep assigning the editorial function to an elite few. The crowdsourced approach to online caselaw rating allows the entire legal community to weigh in on whether a given decision is important, and why. Given the choice between the expert and the crowd, I’d like to hear from the crowd.

It’s the natural next step towards an overall collaborative approach to legal research. Thanks to JD Supra, we can already see what a collaborative precedent and document database looks like. What will come next? Collective annotation of key statutes through a wiki? A multiplicity of online law reviews like The Court? More law school case summary services like Twistlaw? The discussion about the future of legal research won’t center around the commercial providers much longer. It will center around which free, collaborative sites create the best ways for lawyers and legal professionals to collectively improve everyone’s ability to find the legal information they need.