The perils of client interviews

by with 0 Comments

Posted in: Clients, Innovation, Marketing

Via Larry Bodine comes this Legal Intelligencer article about law firm Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, which has hired a 30-year veteran journalist to be a full-time client interviewer, asking clients about their needs, perspectives and complaints about the firm’s services. It’s a good, innovative idea, not least because it involves a tactic that too few law firms embrace: bringing in professionals from other fields. In particular, firms could benefit by adding more media expertise to their marketing and client relations departments, including print, TV, and especially online and new media. But that’s a story for another day.

What really struck me when reading this article was the question: what is the firm actually going to do with the information gathered through the interview process? The client has given up time and energy to speak frankly and at length about its relationship with the firm — what is the firm doing to respond? This is an especially important question in light of studies that show clients who fill out surveys or otherwise reply to feedback requests have heightened expectations of future interactions with the firm: having been asked for their thoughts, they expect those thoughts to have an impact or be implemented in some way.

Ballard Spahr will shortly have reams of data from their top 300 clients (aside: “top 300” clients? I don’t think so. Do you have 300 best friends?), all of which will dutifully be circulated to the management team and to the key contact lawyers for each client. That’s the easy and fun part — everyone likes to learn what other people think about them, especially when it’s good. But what actions is the firm prepared to actually take based upon that data, especially when it’s not so good? Is anybody going to prioritize and follow up on the implementation of client suggestions, in particular the difficult or challenging ones, in the midst of the constant fire-dousing and unrelenting billing pressures of your average law firm?

Any firm that makes a point of collecting client data is also going to have to appoint a senior lawyer to ensure that at least some of what clients are asking for actually gets done. This lawyer would be charged with reporting to the management team what actions have been taken to follow through on what the client talked about in the three, six and 12 months following any given feedback session. Call it a Director of Feedback Compliance, or the Advocatus Clienti I wrote about a while ago, but this enforcement position is critical if busy, independent-minded lawyers are going to take seriously the obligation to digest and implement the results of client interviews.

Law firms put a fair bit of pressure on their marketing professionals to show ROI on marketing; I’d be more interested in knowing the ROI on client communications. Interviewing clients is a great idea, but unless the suggestions they make are fulfilled with real change in how the firm and its lawyers operate, it’s not only a waste of time and money, it’s also raising client expectations that will never be met, which will only cause bigger problems down the line.

Frankly, I’d appoint the Compliance Director first and hire the interviewer later — create the structure for feedback follow-through first, then collect the feedback. Real change only happens when serious enforcement measures are attached to it.

Preparing for the storm

by with 2 Comments

Posted in: Innovation, Leadership

The “About” entry in the column over on the right there states my belief that the practice of law is heading into “uncharted territory.” If you’re skeptical about that, or if you’re unconvinced of the reality of imminent upheaval in this profession, here are two items you might want to look at.

The first is the Legal Transformation Study, a co-production of Decision Strategies International (DSI) and Legal Research Center that’s sponsored by, among others, Altman Weil, Jomati Consultants, and Dupont’s Legal Department. Subtitled Your 2020 Vision of the Future, the report makes plain the intensity of the shockwave heading towards the industry and discusses four potential scenarios that could play out in the near future. An executive summary is available for free; the report itself costs rather more. Here’s an excerpt from the preface:

The truth is, we dare not take any aspect of the future for granted. Paradigms shift, and age-old truisms will be reversed. Prudent and prepared legal leaders will be those who extend their minds beyond traditional thinking and anticipate a variety of outcomes and possibilities. …

During the next decade, operating discipline alone (e.g., “how” we work) will not be enough to meet the challenges our corporate clients face. In the more global, volatile, and uncertain future, “what” we work on with our corporate clients will increasingly define the client’s success (or failure). This is not just repositioning Legal’s relationship with our business colleagues. It is a fundamental shift in the nature of our work.

To truly engage our businesses differently — and better — we need to radically rethink our approach to risk, uncertainty and value creation. As our future unfolds, being absolutely right will be far less important than being nimble and adaptive. Studying every aspect of an issue will yield to a new, more rapid style of decision-making where the predominant belief is that even a decision that proves to be wrong is likely to provoke more useful information than could be learned by delaying decisions pending further study. …

Legal must learn to adapt to the speed of business at the speed of business, while continuing to adhere to our company’s core values and our own professional ethical obligations. Continue Reading

Cheating or collaborating?

by with 3 Comments

Posted in: Innovation, Law School

All I can say is, I’d love to see the law school that tries to flunk a student for setting up a Facebook study group, as Ryerson University in Toronto did this week. Maybe this is a generational thing — I’m officially an X’er, though my leanings are more millennial — but I can’t see how an online discussion group does anything but facilitate learning, not circumvent it. And more to the point, how it’s any different from students gathering in an empty room on campus to do exactly the same thing. I expect Ryerson will change course within a matter of days.

What strikes me, though, is that the way in which we expect students to accomplish tasks in school is very different from how we actually accomplish tasks in our workplaces. If you’re working on a factum or a memo and you’re not sure about something you’re writing, do you head down to the library for an afternoon of thrashing through the authoritative source materials till you’ve learned what you need, “showing your work” as you go? No. You walk down the hall and ask a colleague who’s more familiar with the subject to explain it to you. It’s faster, easier, cheaper for the client, and almost certainly more effective in understanding the concept.

Teamwork is how things get done now, without exception, in the professional world. Law firms boast about “open-door policies” whereby lawyers exchange ideas with each other, and they make great efforts to pool collective knowledge into KM systems. New recruits are quizzed on their ability to work well in groups and contribute towards successful team dynamics. Corporate deals and major litigation require concerted, collective efforts to achieve goals. Online listservs like Solosez are a lifeline for sole practitioners. Corporate law departments want closer working relationships with their outside counsel. In short, no one succeeds in the legal environment by shunning collaborative efforts.

Yet law schools still devote the majority of their time to testing what an individual student can do on her own, not what she can accomplish in a group setting. Unlike MBA programs, where students work on cases in group after group, many law students can graduate without ever having contributed to a team project, learning how to integrate their expertise into a diverse set of personalities and workflow preferences. If there’s any truth to the old charge that law schools “don’t prepare students for law practice,” it’s not in failing to teach professional skills per se, but in failing to train students to learn from each other, to treat knowledge as a gift to be shared, and to give the best of themselves towards the success of the team.

Any law school that wants to earn a real competitive advantage, in terms of producing graduates ready to professionally collaborate, should think seriously about revamping its curriculum to encourage the academic equivalent of Facebook groups: live, in-person, problem-solving working groups, with rotating memberships to ensure you’re not just working with people you like. Increasingly, lawyers will succeed or fail on their teamwork skills; law schools have an obligation to reflect that.

Update: With a hat tip to the Law School Innovation blog, here’s a school that gets it: Washington and Lee University Law School in Virginia is completely overhauling its third year:

• The new third year curriculum will be entirely experiential, comprised of law practice simulations, real-client experiences, the development of professionalism, and development of law practice skills.

• All students will participate in a year-long professionalism program that will include the participation of practicing lawyers and judges and assist students in the development of professionalism in all its aspects, including legal ethics, civility in practice, civic engagement and leadership, and pro bono service.

• The core intellectual experiences in the third year will be presented entirely through a mix of practicum courses that simulate legal practice environments, legal clinics, and internships.

• The demanding intellectual content of the third year will instead be presented in realistic settings that simulate actual client experiences, requiring students to exercise professional judgment, work in teams, solve problems, counsel clients, negotiate solutions, serve as advocates and counselors—the full complement of professional activity that engages practicing lawyers

There’s much, much more, and it’s exhilarating. Read the summary of the new program for more, as well as my earlier thoughts on the third year of law school.

White-water change management

by with 0 Comments

Posted in: Big Firms, Innovation, Management

If you help make the decisions at a large law firm anywhere in the world, I assume you’ve been keeping tabs on the developing impact of the UK’s Legal Services Act. There’s been talk about the fallout from the Clementi Report for quite awhile now, especially regarding share offerings by law firms. Seminars are coming up and commentaries have been published; now, we might be about to see a practical application of all the talk.

A Legal Week story published late last week contains this striking opening paragraph: “Lyceum Capital has become the first investment house to openly target legal services, as the private equity firm moves to position itself ahead of sweeping deregulation of the U.K. profession.” Lyceum is not fooling around: the investment house has set up an advisory panel that includes, among others, Richard Susskind and Tony Williams. Any project with those two people on board is to be taken seriously. Big, creatively destructive change is coming, and fast.

This leads me to think that a lot of firms are not taking the ideal approach to change management. There’s a tendency, in any change initiative, to imagine that your organization is fixed, your environment is fixed, and all you’re doing is moving your organization from A to B — shifting the furniture, basically. This overlooks the reality that (a) every organization operates in (and is affected by) multiple external environments simultaneously, and (b) the organization itself is changing every day, whether its members know it or like it.

A better way to approach change management might be to envision your environment as a wild river, the kind you go white-water rafting on: fast, unpredictable, dangerous in parts, requiring constant course corrections. Your job is to navigate that river by guiding your craft along it as best you can — while understanding that the shape of your craft, the people handling the paddles, and your overall water-worthiness are constantly in flux, often in ways that are beyond your control.

The legal marketplace has never been a fixed room full of furniture, but for many years it was a pretty sedate stream. It’s been a rougher ride than that for quite a few years now, but I’m here to tell you: there are white, foaming rapids ahead, maybe steeper than we’ve ever seen, and a lot of boats aren’t going to make it. Those that do will be focused on riding the waves, staying alert to the dangers, keeping one eye on the far shore, and most of all, understanding one key thing: you’re not in full control. The river has more to say about your destination than you do.

Successful change management in this environment requires both a commitment to do whatever it takes to survive coupled with an appreciation of the modest influence you can exert over the end result. As we enter a time of true upheaval in the legal profession, place your highest priority on alertness, adaptability, acceptance of powerful forces, and a focused, unified effort on the goal. Give your full attention to what you can control, keep a respectful eye on what you can’t, and make sure everyone understands and accepts the difference between the two.

Moneyball, women and law

by with 3 Comments

Posted in: Big Firms, Innovation, Management

Google my name and you’ll find I’ve written a few things about baseball, mostly during my time as a co-founder of and contributor to Batter’s Box, a top-notch Canadian baseball blog. As it happens, one of my favourite baseball books (outside of Thomas Boswell’s and Bill James’s works) isn’t really, I don’t think, about the game at all. Moneyball, a Michael Lewis best-seller about the innovative team-building strategy of the Oakland A’s, is, to my mind, a business book that happens to be about baseball.

If you’ve read Moneyball, you might agree with me that its fundamental lesson is the importance of identifying undervalued assets in a marketplace and stocking up on them before the competition figures out what you’re doing. The A’s front-office combo of Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta figured out that players who reached base a lot contributed as much as or more to victories than did players with more dramatic talents (e.g., stealing bases), yet commanded much lower salaries.

For a team with one of the lowest payrolls in the game, it was a no-brainer for Oakland to pursue the high-value, low-regard personnel, even in the face of derision from richer teams who favoured highlight-reel players. And that’s just what they did. In the result, the A’s were one of the winningest teams of the late ’90s, equalling the performance of New York Yankee clubs with five times their payroll.

It wasn’t a perfect story: Beane conceded that his, um, “stuff” didn’t work in the playoffs, and some of the young players most highly touted in the book never fulfilled what the A’s expected of them. But other teams vindicated this strategy by starting to follow his approach, so Beane switched gears — he began targeting top defensive players as his next “market inefficiency” to exploit. Today, the A’s, when healthy, continue to be a perennial contender.

Looking for the law connection? Others have found it before now: the Moneylaw blog is a great example, as is a terrific blog titled Empirical Legal Studies, which challenges conventional wisdom in the law through the careful application of metrics and reason. Ever since I read Moneyball, I’ve been interested in identifying inefficiencies in the legal talent marketplace.

One of the most obvious is women lawyers, especially those in their 30s and 40s, who are driven out of many law firms by relentless billing demands and inflexible workplace cultures. Continue Reading

Professional collaboration networks

by with 3 Comments

Posted in: Innovation, Technology

The January 2008 edition of the ABA’s Law Practice magazine contains an intriguing article by Tom Mighell about a social network for Texas lawyers. (Hat tip to Larry Bodine.) Tom describes the Texas Bar Circle, which is less than a year old but already has 2,200 members who build profiles, link to colleagues’ or friends’ pages, read State Bar news, create groups, browse a careers section, and participate in discussions. The TBC is restricted only to Texas lawyers, making it another of the gated communities on the web that I wrote about last fall. Altogether, it’s a fantastic development and, I hope, one that creates a precedent for other state bars and provincial law societies to do the same.

Services like the TBC, of course, are essentially a variation on the basic social network model made über-famous by FaceBook: a self-assembling online community of people who connect with friends and make new ones, acquire and share information, and establish an identity for themselves on the Net. You could describe an online community like this as existential — the value it provides lies in the experience of the community itself, in the gathering and intermingling of lives. A business network like the TBC or LinkedIn adds a professional angle, but at the end of the day, these sites are primarily about connecting and are a lot of fun, which is obviously a good and sorely needed thing in the law.

But I’ve been thinking recently about what the next generation of social networks will look like — networks that don’t just connect people, but also put them to work. It lies, I think, in the difference between connectivity and collaboration. Facebook is, at its heart, a simple connectivity application: an ongoing global experiment to see if everyone really is separated by six degrees, and which of them is single at the moment. But it doesn’t, and isn’t meant to, produce anything — outside of massive groups whose very size and presence is intended to publicize a particular cause, Facebook is not a collaborative space.

Collaboration is applied connectivity – we’re all together here, so now let’s accomplish something. A truly collaborative online network for professionals would allow them to both connect and construct – to accomplish tasks, build knowledge, or move a project ahead in some way. Achieving this goal requires more than just lawyers, who tend to hoard information and expertise when left to their own devices. It requires clients, too — and when you add them to the mix, new possibilities emerge. Continue Reading

Crowdsourcing legal research

by with 2 Comments

Posted in: Collaboration, Innovation, Research

A terrific discussion is underway at SLAW, prompted by news of a new Canadian online research service, about the future of commercial legal databases. Ever since the LII system (Legal Information Institute) got rolling, the writing has been on the wall for fee-based online caselaw databases — how much longer can you charge a price for what a competitor is giving away free?

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.

Money talks

by with 1 Comment

Posted in: Billing, Collaboration, Innovation

I get a huge kick out of law firm innovation. It’s one of the reasons I signed on last year to be a judge for the College of Law Practice Management‘s Innovaction Awards, and why I’m doing so again this year. It’s like being a film buff on the screening committee for the Oscars.

So I was happy to see this Legal Blog Watch article penned by Carolyn Elefant. The Rosen Law Firm, a major family law outfit based in North Carolina, set up an internal wiki for operational and knowledge management, to which all lawyers and staff contribute. It essentially replaces the firm’s previous Lotus Notes regime and saves them thousands of dollars. That alone is innovative, compared to most firms.

But the kicker is that in order to motivate employees to participate, every Wiki contribution puts the author’s name into a draw for a $1,000 prize. That, as you might imagine, spurred the rapid development of the Wiki, which is now an invaluable firm asset.

This isn’t Rosen’s first venture into innovation: the firm has also distributed dozens of copies of a video game to help kids through a divorce, and name partner Lee Rosen wrote this excellent article on getting the most out of your firm’s technology investment. But I’m really impressed with the Wiki and the $1,000 incentive prize, which sets an example more firms ought to consider.

Law firms ask a lot of their employees, mostly with regard to cramming a whole lot of work into comparatively few hours. The lawyers, in particular, are directly motivated by the compensation and advancement systems built into the billable hour regime, and they place billable activity in extreme priority to everything else, including marketing, business development, practice management, pro bono work and, most importantly, their own personal time. So if firms want their lawyers to do things other than bill time, they need to design a reward system that can compete on those grounds. Continue Reading

A new offshoring strategy?

by with 1 Comment

Posted in: Innovation, Outsourcing

Another day, another article about a major international law firm getting involved in India’s legal market. Pretty soon, the question’s going to change from “Why is your firm in India?” to “Why isn’t your firm in India?” But today’s entry is notable for other reasons.

Howrey LLP, reports The American Lawyer, is opening a new office in Pune, India. Note, however, that Howrey is not contracting with an offshoring company like Pangea3 or SDD Global to have that company’s lawyers do work for them. Instead, Howrey is opening its own branded office, not to practise law (still illegal for foreign firms in India) but to handle document management, a labour-intensive task for this litigation/IP-heavy firm.

Howrey becomes the first US-based firm to go this route; previously, Clifford Chance set up a back-office operation in a New Delhi suburb. And as Ron Friedmann has noted, Seyfarth Shaw and Lovells have done more than just dip their toes in Indian waters too.

But here’s what’s really interesting. In the article, Howrey’s managing partner and CEO, Robert Ruyak, leads off by making very clear, “It’s not offshoring.” And the article goes on to include this quote:

Ruyak concedes that clients “don’t want to use outsourcing.” But this, he repeats, will be different. “We will have our own people working on this. It’s training, it’s control, maintaining the security, the quality of the results.” He adds that clients will have the choice of whether to use the Indian office to cut costs or to have their work done in the U.S.

Howrey evidently perceives that there is a reputational risk associated with offshoring — that some clients (and no doubt, more than a few partners) have reservations relating to quality, process or security. I haven’t heard of any Indian offshoring firm accused of any of these defects, but perception usually trumps reality, so Howrey seems to want a different approach. Continue Reading

Student-focused law degrees

by with 1 Comment

Posted in: Innovation, Law School

Mark Osler at the Law School Innovation blog points us towards the University of Dayton Law School, which offers students the option to complete the standard three-year degree in just two calendar years (including a summer off) through an earlier start date and a more intensive course load. The implications, as Mark observes, include less time and lower costs. The major downside would appear to be less time to fully absorb the law school experience.

But would that necessarily be a bad thing? I’m certainly not the only law school grad who found third-year largely unnecessary and mostly frustrating, from academic, career and even social points of view (two years is probably the maximum time you can keep future lawyers cooped up before nerves fray and friendships splinter). When you spend a year taking courses marked as “elective,” that’s a pretty good sign you’re going through the non-essential motions of a degree program.

What interests me even more than the two-year accelerated program, though, is the way Dayton arranges its curriculum. The “Lawyer as Problem Solver” program lets students choose from among three curricular tracks: advocacy and dispute resolution, personal and transactional law, and intellectual property, cyberlaw and creativity. As you might guess, the first is geared towards students who want to focus on litigation and mediation, the second is for those interested in transactional solicitor-type work, and the third is meant for those headed for the entrepreneurial new-media industries. In all three cases, this is a program designed for people who fully intend to practise law.

Now, we’re not looking at a fundamental reimagining of the law school degree here. The track courses constitute less than one-sixth of the total course load, and of the 31 courses required to graduate (30 for the personal/transactional law track), all but three are mandatory core offerings. It’s also too bad that only the personal/transactional law track offers a course in law practice management. The course looks brilliant and seems like it ought to be required for everyone, especially since the school states flat out that the track system is there to “help prepare students for practice in a particular area of law.” Continue Reading