The intentional law office

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Posted in: Collaboration, Office, Talent

I want you to concentrate. Cast your mind back. Try to recall what life was like in the Before Times. Do you remember … The Commute?

Way back, before the pandemic, many of us would leave our homes early in the morning and travel to our collective workspaces. Then, when we were finished doing all the work things for the day, we would leave the workspace and travel back home. We would do this because … well, because that’s the way things were always done. We physically moved ourselves from a living place to a working place (and back again) every day, because we accepted the unspoken corporate assumption that everyone needs to be in the same place for work to get done.

This approach made sense back when people were manufacturing locomotive boilers in a factory or building cars on an assembly line, because you need a lot of people working together to physically turn massive crankshafts or to install each individual car part. If Fred or Carl doesn’t show up for work, then the remaining guys can’t get the crankshaft to move, or the fender doesn’t get soldered on properly, or whatever. The work can’t be accomplished unless everyone is there to pitch in.

If you’re in the service industry today, pouring lattes or changing dressings or fixing leaky pipes, then your physical presence continues to be necessary. But as our economy has increasingly shifted from a manufacturing base to a knowledge base — as more of us exchanged our blue collars for white ones and shifted from group tasks to individual tasks — we forgot to update our thinking about workplaces. We unconsciously carried over the factory model into the office space. We continued to leave our homes and commute to a centralized location even though, in many cases, we didn’t need to be in direct physical proximity with our co-workers anymore.

Was it sometimes helpful to ask a co-worker to look over some advertising copy or give some advice for closing a sale? Sure. But these were exceptions; for most of the day, we sat on individual chairs at individual desks in individual offices (and then cubicles) and did our work individually. Work was something everyone “came in” to do, whether or not everyone needed to be “in” to get the work done.

It’s taken two years of rolling pandemic lockdowns to shake us from our torpid habit of gathering together only to work alone. Over the next decade, a Stanford professor estimates, US workers will spend a quarter of their work time at home — “the number of person-days in the office is never going back to pre-pandemic average, ever.” This has obvious ramifications for corporate office space, employee well-being, and even climate change. But the workplace itself is ground zero for this change, and there will be enormous ramifications in this regard alone.

What we’re experiencing in our society is a shift from the habitual workspace to the intentional workspace. Rather than “coming into the office” because that’s what we’ve always done, workers will come to the office if there’s a reason to do so — and if there’s not, they won’t. The same shift is about to happen in law firms, whether the lawyers leading these firms realize it or not.

A useful contrast in approaches can be found in this Law360 article. Lowenstein Sandler, like many firms, will require employees to come into the office three days a week. This is how the firm’s managing partner explains this policy: “There is value to our people, our clients, and our firm of strengthening our community, which can best be achieved when people work together in a physical location on a regular basis.” This, of course, is simply an assertion of the firm’s preferred reality, a rationale for bringing back something like the status quo ante. Not one law firm in 100 cared about “strengthening its community” before people stopped going into work.

Then there’s Alston & Bird, which will not require its people to come into the office every day. The firm’s managing partner made these perceptive observations:

[G]etting attorneys to return to the office, not because they have to as part of a corporate mandate, but because they see it as adding value to their careers and to their clients, requires a sell on the part of law firms, Sullivan said.

Rather than simply expecting that protocols will return to how they were before the pandemic, firms should develop new work patterns that provide compelling reasons for being in the office, such as in-person mentorship sessions for younger attorneys, team meetings where lawyers can brainstorm in the same room together, and in-house learning seminars, he said.

“We’re not going to make you [come into the office] every day,” Sullivan said. “And if you do, we’re going to make it worth your while, so you see real value in coming in, rather than thinking, ‘Man, I came in because I felt I had to be there, and everything I did in the office I could have done at home.'”

These observations are hugely important, for two reasons. For one thing, everything law firms do has always been an expression of the purest self-interest on the part of their leadership and senior partners. “What will enhance our profits, status, power, and comfort? Do that, repeatedly.” Alston & Bird here is expressing that rarest of law firm phenomena, an employee-focused approach: “What matters to our people? What do they think is important? Let’s (also) pay attention to that.” Apart from anything else, this level of consideration for employees is an astonishing and delightfully dangerous departure from the industry norm.

But these remarks are also important because they represent an entirely novel view — that the law firm should give you a good reason why you should leave your nice home and come to the office.

This approach changes the default setting from “Come to the office unless you really can’t” to “Stay home unless you’d really benefit from coming in.” It assumes the law firm should make the case for coming to work, providing incentives or rationales that benefit the worker in some way. It reasons, correctly, that if the firm needs to order its employees to come to the office, then there’s nothing valuable (or even something repellent) about being in the office, and that has to be addressed.

Structured in-person mentorship, brainstorming meetings, and training seminars are all excellent reasons to put on some work clothes and make the commute. So are tightly planned and managed collaborative meetings with a specific goal and time limit, gatherings that couldn’t have been an email or a Zoom call. So are customized career advancement sessions with a professional development staffer and senior partner. So are strategic meetings with clients or negotiating rounds with opposing counsel where personal contact accelerates progress.

But let’s not forget, so are social spaces where people can hang out on couches and decompress for a while, greet colleagues and friends, share a coffee or chat about the episode that dropped last night. The social dimension of the office is the one that most home-based workers have really missed, the chance to connect with others. But in many law firms, people feel monitored and judged by the invisible six-minute taskmaster, looming over their frivolous social interactions, tapping its watch impatiently. Good law offices encourage human beings to engage with each other simply for the sake of engaging with each other.

There are all kinds of ways in which law firms could transform their offices into places where people want to be. But the connecting thread is that there ought to be a reason to come into the office. Rather than showing up just because you and everyone else always have, show up when you have a goal you can achieve, or a benefit you can enjoy, or a value you can obtain, or a person you can team with, or a resource you can utilize. The office should be the connecting space — the value habitat — for work.

So, here are three questions for you and your colleagues to think about and act upon:

  1. What would your firm need to do to make your office an intentional workspace — a value destination?
  2. Who would you need to ask to find out?
  3. When are you going to get started?

The price of collaboration

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Posted in: Collaboration

(I’m trying something new here: Two posts on closely related topics, released simultaneously, rather than one massive post. For those of you born before 1992, think of it as a double-album release.)

At the end of the companion post to this one, “The reality of collaboration,” I proposed that the key to collaboration, in a legal relationship as in any other, is that you have to show up to the relationship every day, and you have to work really hard at it. Like a friendship or a marriage, each side has to take seriously not just the commitment to enter a special relationship, but also the hard work required to sustain and grow it.

But maybe most importantly, each side has to recognize that the collaboration, the partnership, is going to change you. If you try to hold back, to have an arm’s-length, surface-level collaboration, I don’t think it’s going to fly. If a corporate law department and a law firm enter into a collaborative relationship, and 18 months later both the department and the firm are basically the same entities they were before, then I think the effort is failing. Real partnership has a real price.

Jae Um puts it very well in her analysis of Microsoft’s Trusted Advisor Forum: “This recognition of what partnership costs is important, from both [the] buyer and seller of legal services. … I continue to see too many law departments and law firms slap the tax that comes with BFF-ship on far too many relationships that don’t offer BFF-level benefits. And just as pretend-BFF-ship demands social and emotional costs, pretend-partnerships lead to unwarranted costs for everyone involved.”

What do the costs of true partnership look like in the legal market? Well, I think that a law department that wants a truly collaborative relationship with an outside law firm has to really believe in that firm, to invest itself in it — not just as a source of expertise and knowledge, but as an organization with complementary values and admirable people. And by investing itself in that firm, the law department must be willing to adapt its own structure and capabilities (to the extent feasible for a corporate division) in response to what the firm offers and provides, to trust in the firm and rely on it, even to incorporate the firm’s patterns and structures to a limited degree.

Even in an overcrowded marketplace, very few law firms (or legal services suppliers) are going to meet those thresholds for any individual client. But that’s the kind of outcome the search for collaboration inevitably leads you towards, and it can be achieved — Microsoft and Perkins Coie are an excellent example.

For law firms, though, the cost could be even higher. Crafting a true partnership with a corporate client means the firm needs to know the client inside and out — to understand its purpose, goals, priorities, strategies, markets, products, customers, rivals, competitive advantages, regulatory environment, compliance pressures, and on and on. It needs to assemble and analyze deep reservoirs of data about the client and its world, and to build and maintain strong relationships with its leaders, all in order to not just solve the client’s problems, but also to anticipate and minimize its troubles and risks and help it to achieve its core business objectives.

This will require the law firm to expend a tremendous amount of effort, energy and bandwidth on the client — but all these resources are finite. What you devote to one client is what you cannot dedicate to another. The cost to law firms of a serious client collaboration would very likely include a reduced capacity to serve other clients, because not every client can be your BFF and you need to choose where to direct your singular devotion. When considering the intensity of what major clients are going to ask of their primary outside counsel in future, the degree of client-specific focus a law firm will have to undertake in response might ultimately render it best suited to serve only that client, or a few others very much like it.

Now it’s true, as Ron Friedmann points out, that if a law firm narrows its focus to one or a very few clients, it might paradoxically end up reducing its value, because clients rely on their firms for intel and insight garnered from a wide range of other clients in the same or affiliated industries. I’ve certainly heard from clients that they value outside counsel precisely because these firms interact with so many market stakeholders that they get the industry “lay of the land” more comprehensively than the client can.

The challenge, though, is that as clients push firms to “know our business deeply” and “be our collaborative partners,” the firms could wind up being dominated by these clients, making it harder to strike that balance of general market knowledge and specific client insight. I’ve heard law firms’ managing partners talk about the need to scale back the ranks of their clients and focus most on the highest-value, top-performing ones — push the “80% of our work from 20% of our clients” ratios up towards 90 and 10. That has undeniable benefits for the firm. But it also has costs. And clients have to appreciate that they can’t ask the same law firm to be both “our trusted collaborative partner” and “our eyes and ears out there in the industry.”

Now, look: None of the foregoing commentary, in this or its companion post, is intended to disparage and reduce collaboration efforts between law department and law firms. I think these efforts are great, for the same reason I think friendships are better than acquaintances and marriage is better than hooking up. Better and deeper human relationships are always a worthwhile goal, and the same general logic applies to business entities that can develop strong bonds of mutual reliability and success. The commercial legal market would be a significantly better place if more companies followed Microsoft’s lead to establish and maintain strong, demanding, grown-up relationships with a select number of outside legal providers.

But the market would also be a significantly different place if that came to pass. The notion of massive full-service law firms teeming with myriad disparate clients would start to give way as a new model firm emerges — one that specializes not in a practice area or even an industry sector, but in the strategic enablement and advancement of a single client’s (or a handful of clients’) goals.

In that scenario, the supply side of the market might coalesce into one group of providers that delivers a wide range of services to an extremely small handful of clients, and another group that delivers a very narrow and specific type of legal service to a wide range of clients (and I can assure you that law companies and ALSPs are very interested in that kind of approach).

I guess what I’m saying, to bring this special two-part episode back to its beginnings, is that partnership and its benefits are worthy goals of collaboration, but remember: Partnership will change you. Both law departments and law firms need to be aware of what true collaboration between the buyers and sellers of legal services would look like, what it would require from both participants — and what it might do to the legal market as we’ve always known it. The full-service, multi-client law firm is a fixture in our collective imagination of this industry, and it has a lot of merit. But it is, I believe, inherently resistant to collaborative partnerships with clients. In a market dominated by that kind of supplier, client-firm collaboration will be the exception, not the rule.

But if we strive to make such partnerships the rule rather than the exception — or if we see the emergence and growth of new providers that are only too happy to devote themselves blissfully to deep collaboration with their clients — than we could start to reimagine the legal market in some very interesting, and potentially transformative, ways.

The reality of collaboration

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Posted in: Collaboration

So I was recently asked to write a paper about ways in which law firms and corporate law departments could collaborate more. My thesis is going to be: Are you sure that’s what you want? Are you certain you know what you’re asking for?

Most of what’s been written on collaboration in the legal industry simply deploys the word as if we all agree on its meaning, and in any event, usually addresses internal collaboration within law firms, or supply-side collaboration between firms and other service providers. Examples of true collaboration between a legal buyer and legal seller are rare, and I think there’s a reason for that.

When clients yearn wistfully for greater collaboration with their outside counsel, they usually identify their goal as building a partnership with the law firm. But “partnership” implies a deep, long-term relationship between client and firm, one that reaches beyond merely tactical matters to address and fulfill fundamental client needs. The word “partner” suggests (as it does when used within a law firm) a high degree of trust and commitment, a sense of shared goals and mutual dependence. Implicit in this desire for partnership is an assumption that the standard firm-client relationship is coldly transactional, and that a collaborative relationship could deliver more value.

But value for whom? If collaboration really is about partnership, then that enhanced value must be experienced by both participants. So our first question is whether the parties to the collaboration share the same understanding of “value.” Because if your partner in collaboration is not generating any value for itself, then you’re not really collaborating — you’re just shaking down your supplier (or your customer, as the case may be) for a better deal. 

From the client perspective, enhanced value in legal services might include the following factors and be measured by the following metrics:

  • Lower outside legal spend → saves money
  • More predictable outside legal spend → improves budgeting
  • Preventative risk identification and management → less litigation
  • More productive internal legal operations → increases efficiency
  • Fewer points of contact with a law firm → increases ease and consistency of service
  • Greater diversity within law firm personnel → fulfills corporate values
  • Greater alignment of value of task with value of provider → saves money
  • Free CLE provided by the law firm → enhances in-house skills

There are certainly other examples, up to and including the grand prize: a demonstrable contribution by the legal function to the company’s profitability, market share, or brand strength. These are all ways in which a corporate law department would consider its value to have been enhanced by a deeper relationship with a law firm.

Now, here’s a list of factors with which a potential law firm collaborator would likely define and measure enhanced value:

  • More money from clients → more profits for partners

I’m not trying to be cynical here. But I’ve dealt with a lot of law firms in my time, and the overriding value in the typical law firm really can be expressed in that one line. And the problem is that very few of the ways in which corporate law departments define “value” include giving law firms more money.

So we have a built-in disconnect. When a client comes to a law firm and talks about collaboration and partnership, what the law firm invariably thinks is, “This is a great opportunity for us to grow our business with this client.” Then, when the client starts pulling out some of these examples, there’s a startled silence as the firm thinks, “Oh. That’s what they mean by collaboration.” And the whole endeavour is kneecapped from the start.

The problem is that law firms aren’t normal businesses, and they’re not motivated by the kinds of things that drive normal businesses. Greater client collaboration might very well give the firm steady work in the coming years and first choice of high-end files and a more competitive position within the client’s industry, and so forth. But unless the whole effort increases individual partners’ profits this year, or at worst next, the firm will be cool to the idea. And if the collaborative effort actually reduces partners’ profits this year or next year, then the firm is not going to get on board this train.

To date, there’s really been only one type of collaborative initiative that has seemed to satisfy both client and firm objectives, and that’s convergence: The client narrows its panel of outside law firms, either increasing the amount of work the surviving firms obtain or, at worst, preserving the same amount of work in what otherwise would be a loss of the client and a revenue bloodbath for the firm.

But as research increasingly shows, convergence has not delivered the value that clients had hoped to achieve.

  • AdvanceLaw and its GC Thought Leaders Experiment has found that “clients with panels do not see meaningful differences in outside counsel performance for their matters (on quality, cost-efficiency, responsiveness, solutions focus, and the like) as compared to clients without panels.”
  • Casey Flaherty has written that he’s “long believed most convergence initiatives waste considerable time for limited benefit … convergence remains an excellent opportunity to leverage volume to reduce unit cost. Unfortunately, that is about as far as most corporate law departments take it.”
  • Dennis Kennedy recently argued that “convergence can, perhaps paradoxically, act as an innovation destroyer if not properly tended…. It’s hard work that requires constant attention. It’s easy to see how these programs can actually destroy innovation.”

Now, what AdvanceLaw (in a companion article), Casey, and Dennis all make clear is that convergence can deliver real benefits to the client and firm alike — but it requires careful planning, clear goals, frequent contact, and consistent follow-up, especially on the client’s part. These efforts all exact costs, from the client and the firm alike. So in many cases, it will be only very large law departments, and/or those with especially dedicated leadership, that can assume and manage those costs.

For an example of how to do convergence right — and of the effort required to achieve that goal — check out Microsoft’s Trusted Advisor Forum:

Microsoft asked its top external legal service providers to share two innovation stories at a Trusted Advisor Forum at its Redmond campus. In brief:

  • Tell us one way have you have gotten better in the last year
  • Tell us one way you will get better in the next year

The initiative flows directly from General Counsel Dev Stahlkopf. A few weeks after her elevation in April 2018, Stahlkopf set expectations with outside counsel during a relationship-partner lunch at Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs Global Summit. One of her concluding slides read, “Our Ask of You: Partner with us to continuously improve and innovate.”

Read this essential analysis of the Forum by Jae Um at the Legal Evolution blog and you’ll appreciate the extensive thought, sophisticated strategy, and significant effort that Microsoft undertook to organize and execute this event. “Microsoft is doing something unusual here: sustained and intentional action underpinned by very rigorous thinking,” Jae concludes. “And the entire team at Microsoft is brave enough to do this with as much transparency and candour as practically possible.” But she also notes that many firms invited to the Forum struggled to meet Microsoft’s two requests (which is okay), while some firms simply declined the invitation to participate altogether (which is not).

And that’s the thing about collaboration: You have to show up to the relationship every day, and you have to work really hard at it, with goodwill and positivity, to get it right. Like a friendship or a marriage, each side has to take seriously not just the commitment to enter a special relationship, but also the hard work required to sustain and grow it.

That’s the reality of collaboration between clients and law firms — but neither clients nor firms might fully appreciate the costs of that reality. More on that issue in the companion post to this one, “The price of collaboration.”

Transforming Bar associations

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Posted in: Collaboration, Innovation

So I’ve been busy writing again, this time about what the changing legal marketplace is doing to two longstanding members of that market: law librarians (for Thomson Reuters’ Legal Solutions column) and bar associations (for the ABA’s Bar Leader e-magazine). The latter article, co-authored with the great Fred Ury, prompted a post by Sam Glover at Lawyerist: How Can Bar Associations Stay Relevant? Sam was skeptical about our prescriptions for bar associations and suggested one of his own:

In addition to offering free forms and CLE, I think what would get me most interested in my bar association would be a return to basics: building relationships among members. This could be especially valuable for solos. I get the best forms from my colleagues, but I wish I had an easier time finding mentors when I moved into a completely new practice area. I like to learn about technology and marketing and stuff, but I always find that the people doing the most interesting things in their law practices are in the audience at CLEs, not on stage. And, perhaps most crucially, I can get CLE credit just about anywhere, but I don’t have a local softball team to join.

I left a comment on Sam’s post, which I’d like to expand upon here, since this whole question is drawing a lot of attention — and rightly so. Bar associations are facing some existential challenges right now, and I wouldn’t want to see them just disappear beneath the waves without trying to extend a hand.

Many bar associations find, when they do a sober inventory of their true assets, that they have fewer than they supposed, especially in terms of the relevance and distinctiveness of their activities and services. Almost everything they offer to lawyers can be replicated in some way by other service providers, most of which have neither the overhead costs nor the organizational slow-footedness that hamstring associations. Like law firms, these are legacy organizations with legacy costs and legacy thinking, and they find adjustment to be a very difficult process.

But what most bar associations can still boast, the one legacy holdover that’s helpful to them, is their reputation: the brand recognition and authority they can still muster among lawyers. These assets have been developed over the course of many years of service, albeit service to a very different profession in a very different market than this one. But the respect survives as brand awareness, legitimacy and trust — much as it does for many historic law firms whose name partners died a long time ago.

Legitimacy is not a standalone asset, of course: what matters is what you do with it. And if bar associations are going to survive, they need to apply that legitimacy by providing lawyers with services that have one thing in common: they are distinctive. Bar services have to differentiate themselves from similar services available elsewhere. Here are a few examples that expand upon the points Fred and I made in our article:

Forms: It’s not enough simply to stick the association’s logo on a boilerplate legal document and suppose that that will carry the day. The document has to be distinctively different and better: assembled by leading practitioners in a given subject area, subject to scrutiny by blue-ribbon oversight committees of judges and lawyers, approved by the local professional insurance provider (ideally, a bar-affiliated one). Create forms and documents like these, demonstrably and qualitatively better than what other providers sell — and then provide them for free solely to members. That has value to the lawyer and will help set the association apart.

CLE: Bar association CLEs often are no different than what private providers offer, while association annual meetings have tended to become exercises in both self-absorption and self-congratulation. But what Fred and I proposed is distinctive CLE: extremely practical and law-business-oriented programs would stand out all on their own (most CLE offerings are retrograde black-letter law-based), while (as I wrote two years ago) fresh new formats would invigorate attendees: un-conferences, speed-roundtables, micro-panel discussions for small, specialized groups, and so forth.

Relationships: Sam emphasizes this, and it’s true that building relationships among lawyers has real value. But most lawyers now have multiple channels for facilitating relationships (both old and new), and importantly, they don’t need an association to help maintain them. A good route forward here would be to affiliate relationship-building with the distinctive CLEs mentioned above: get lawyers out of their seats and walking around, talking to other lawyers about practice and business issues. Associations could also host “private study groups” that give lawyers the opportunity to interact, come to rely on each other, and build distinctive networks available nowhere else.

Advocacy: Again, as I’ve written before, “lobbying” doesn’t exactly have a inspirational ring to it, and issues activism can be highly divisive and detrimental to member retention. So I think lawyer associations should transform themselves into lawyers’ marketplace evangelists. They should adopt as their mission a sustained campaign to trumpet the unique advantages of choosing lawyers over the many other options spreading throughout the legal services market. Advocate to clients why a lawyer is better than the “non-lawyer” alternative. Nobody else is carrying out that kind of lobbying, and bar associations are perfectly placed to do so.

Associations should recognize that the residual (and in fairness, often continuing) level of recognition, trust and respect they command among members of the profession is their most outstanding asset — but it’s an asset with which to start the reinvention process, not end it. Maintain that recognition and respect, seek always to improve them, and most importantly, find ways to leverage them. But along with the process of identifying that value comes a recognition and acceptance of some tough choices about who you are as an association and what you stand for.

A bar association that tried taking the steps I outlined above would immediately run into stiff opposition, both internally and externally, from people who resist change and prefer the longstanding ways of doing things. It’s my belief that sticking with traditional services delivered in traditional ways inevitably will result in gradual, relentless attrition for the association and ultimately, a smaller organization. But making the tough choices and radical changes described above will deliver much the same result, albeit far more quickly. Either way, associations are going to experience member loss. So the questions become: (1) If you’re going to lose members anyway, don’t you want to lose them in service of being the organization you want to be? And (2): As between these two paths forward, which do you think holds more promise for renewal and revival down the road?

I addressed the National Association of Bar Executives (NABE) a few months back, and one of my messages to them was this: you need to get used to the idea of being smaller. Associations (like many other entities in the legal market, such as law schools and legal publishers) have long been accustomed to equating size with success: if you have lots of members and are always adding more, then you’re winning. I suggested to these bar leaders that they abandon the idea of growth for growth’s sake and start aiming to become focused, distinctive groups that, yes, might be smaller, but that have very high levels of satisfaction and loyalty, because they do things differently and they do them extremely well.

The legal market now and in the future is too fractured and specialized for an all-purpose, general-interest association to adequately and comprehensively serve — especially if it looks and feels like every other service provider out there. Decide what you want to be, and who you want to be for: that’s good advice, as far as I’m concerned, for both bar associations and the lawyers they hope will join them.

Available now! My first two published books: Evolutionary Road (e-book published by Attorney At Work) and Content Marketing and Publishing Strategies for Law Firms (co-authored with Steve Matthews, published by The Ark Group). Click the links to learn more and order your copies today.

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.  

The three types of collaboration

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Posted in: Clients, Collaboration

There was a lot to take away from yet another excellent ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago last week. One thing I didn’t take away, though, was my laptop. I managed to lose it the night before leaving and spent a fruitless morning searching all over the Hilton Chicago hoping to find it. Happily for me (and for the CBA, whose laptop it actually is), a good samaritan at the ABA (yet to be identified and thanked) found it and is shipping it north as I type. But until it arrives, I’m bereft of all the notes I took during the conference (aside from those recorded in my irregular Twitter feed from TECHSHOW), and so the detailed report  I had hoped to file for you is essentially sitting at Customs for an indefinite period of time.

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.

Customized casebooks vs. collaborative knowledge

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Posted in: Collaboration, Law School, Publishing

Ready or not, here they come: electronic law texts are gaining momentum. A conference in Seattle this weekend on the future of the legal casebook will discuss how these books can be made widely available in electronic format (here are Gene Koo’s submissions for the workshop). The growing popularity of Amazon’s Kindle, especially the book-sized version on the horizon, has made the long-mooted concept of law school e-books a sudden possibility.

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. Continue Reading

Core competence: 6 new skills now required of lawyers

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Posted in: Clients, Collaboration, Competition, Management, New Lawyers

Up till now, the necessary and sufficient skill set for lawyers has looked something like this (in alphabetical order):

  • 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). Continue Reading

Book review: The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies

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Posted in: Books, Collaboration

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell (Chicago: American Bar Association Law Practice Management Section, 2008 )

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. Continue Reading

Client-based lawyer ratings

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Posted in: Clients, Collaboration, Marketing

I haven’t written before now about Avvo, the online lawyer rating system that generated so much controversy when it was first launched last year. Most of what you need to know about the site can be found in this collection of articles at Legal Blog Watch, but in a nutshell: Avvo provides a numerical rating for lawyers based on a number of factors drawn from state bar records, court records, peer reviews and lawyers themselves. Avvo can rate lawyers with or without their permission, and does not reveal the nature of the mathematical model used to calculate the ratings.

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. Continue Reading