Dennis Kennedy

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November 23, 2008

Law Practice in a Time of Great Economic Turmoil - Roundtable Discussion

The graphic above is a tag cloud from Wordle that I generated from the article, What Should You Do Now? A Roundtable Discussion on Law Practice in a Time of Great Economic Turmoil, which is just one part of an excellent new issue of the ABA's Law Practice Today webzine that you should run, not walk, over to see. Your time spent there will be well-rewarded.

The roundtable article arose from an idea I had to put together a roundtable discussion of some of the most interesting thinkers (and doers) on law practice management issues about the most top-of-mind topic of the day - what should lawyers and law firms (and the profession in general) be doing in this tough economic times?

I wanted to pull together some practical answers to some of the most basic questions that everyone I knew was either grappling with or trying to pretend didn't exist. The latter is more common, while the former is more recommended.

My practical problem was pulling together a group of experts in the face of a very tight deadline. Fortunately, I found a group of eight who were as generous with their time as they were with their expertise and insights.

Frankly, it's a stellar cast: Tom Collins (formerly of the Fabulous More Partner Income blog, who I coaxed out of his novel-writing retirement), Jordan Furlong, Patrick Lamb, Bruce "Adam Smith, Esq." MacEwen, Patrick McKenna, Edward Poll, Allison C. Shields and Merrilyn Astin Tarlton.

And this stellar cast delivers well beyond my high expectations of them. I play the role of moderator and tried to ask the questions that seem to be on most lawyers' minds.

Here's a summary of the piece:

The economic turmoil rumbling through the land has lawyers facing layoffs, uncertainty and flat-out fear. In this roundtable discussion, our panel of law practice management experts share their expertise, wisdom and practical tips about what you need to do right now.

There are six parts to the conversation:

1. The Nature of the Crisis – Uncharted Territory.

2. Tell-tale Signs – When Do You Need to Act?

3. Taking a Prudent Approach – Setting the Right Priorities.

4. What Steps Do Make Sense? Some Practical Advice.

5. Predicting the Future.

6. Best Practical Tips.

There are many, many "money quotes" from this article, but let me give you this one from Merrilyn Astin Tarlton:

Convene a meeting of your firm's decision-makers tomorrow. Agree together to cease hand wringing and start planning. Don't leave the room until you have a short list of things that must be done and the names of the people who will do them - plus a deadline. Hold each other accountable. Switch from saying "What are we going to do?" to "Here's what we're going to do!"

As we say in the article, panic is not a strategy.

I'm proud of this article and highly encourage you to go over to the article and read it from beginning to end. Even better, work your way through the same questions I asked the experts and come up with your own answers to both those questions and the fantastic list of hard questions that Patrick McKenna provides as part of the article.

I put the graphic of the tag cloud at the top of this post for three reasons. First, I'm really intrigued by the visual summary of the article that the tag cloud provides (note that the importance of the word "clients"). Second, the graphic was left off the end of the article, making my last comments in the article quite confusing (at least until it's fixed). Third, to prove that I actually do know the difference between tag clouds and cloud tags, even though I have a tendency to type "cloud tags" (and I hope to get that corrected in the article as well).

Highly, highly recommended. And just one more example of why I love roundtable articles.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Now Available! The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Visit the companion website for the book at LawyersGuidetoCollaboration.com.

Technorati tags: law practice roundtable management economic turmoil recession

Posted by dmk at 05:58 PM | Comments (1)

September 16, 2008

DennisKennedy.Microblog

I've noticed a lot of discussion in the last week or so about ways lawyers (and others) might use Twitter. There have been some good primers on Twitter and Kevin O'Keefe, in particular, has talked about ways lawyers might use Twitter.

I'd suggest that you start with Adrian Lursson's post listing lawyers who use Twitter and Grant Griffiths' Twitter tutorial for lawyers if you want to get some more background.

Here's an example of Twitter use that I've found compelling.

I've experimented with Twitter (I'm @denniskennedy on Twitter) for a while now - actually quite a while - and I have a few thoughts on the subject. They aren't too original, frankly.

Twitter is another possible channel of communication that for the right people with the right audiences might be quite successful for certain purposes. For others, it probably won't be very useful. And, as Jerry Lawson once presciently said about lawyer blogs, for some lawyers, it would be a disaster.

For a variety of reasons, I've found it easier lately to maintain a regular presence on Twitter than on my blog or other channels.

My friend, Marty "The Trademark Blog" Schwimmer, recently pointed me to a possible use of Twitter that I found compelling and launched the subject mentioned in the title of this post.

Marty started using Twitter to create a companion "microblog" for The Trademark Blog. I emailed him immediately when I saw it to tell him that he was a genius. He deflected my praise and said that he got the idea from Techmeme, but I'll still give him credit because we talked about some of the nuances of this approach over the last two weeks.

Typical of my approach, I became convinced about how the idea would work for my blog and then, rather than hopping right in, I let the idea incubate for a while and thought it through. At least for a couple of weeks.

Here's my thinking.

I've said before that the true difficulty of blogging is not the time commitment or the usual things people ask bloggers about. No, the real burden of blogging is the "everydayness" of blogging. How do you maintain a consistent, regular presence?

This is especially true when your style of blogging centers on longer, essayish posts. Or, God forbid, you commit to a series of posts. That final unwritten part (or two) of my series on "my new laptop computer is an iPod Touch" has blocked many a new post for me, as has the yet unwritten ILTA reflections post.

My idea then was to use Twitter as a microblog that worked with this blog. The Twitter blog will be a place for short items - quick links and observations of the "one quick thing" nature (another of Marty's great ideas). Then, to integrate with this blog, I'll collect them every week or so into a post on this blog with its own category.

It's a new and different approach, and definitely an experiment. I also expect it to find its own, somewhat different, audience. It can also see the Twitter posts turning into seeds for extended posts on this blog. I'm also planning to try using the hash tag #legaltech as a way to help people find the posts.

How to find the new DennisKennedy.Microblog? It's at @dkennedyblog (the Twitter character limit on user names got me there). I start there with the obligatory reflexive post and, of course, the obligatory Babylon 5 reference.

I welcome you to the new experiment and invite you to follow the new microblog. Let me know what you think about it.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Now Available! The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Visit the book's companion website at LawyersGuidetoCollaboration.com.

Technorati tags: legal technology legaltech microblog Law2.0 twitter everydayness

Posted by dmk at 09:33 PM | Comments (1)

July 07, 2008

When a Lawyer Has to Leave a Law Firm: Reputation and Other Issues

As this recent article indicates, lawyers are more than a little nervous about job security today (I take the stats with at least a grain of salt, but the trend is definitely interesting). That's no surprise in a time of shaky (or worse) economic news.

As Carolyn Elefant notes, there is far less guidance for lawyers on how to leave a job - and to leave it professionally - than there is on how to find a job. Her new article, "Don’t Neglect Your Reputation When Leaving A Firm," is an excellent addition to the resource list and especially timely in this environment. It also gives me another chance to recommend her book, Solo by Choice.

The money quote from the article:

Last impressions matter as much as first ones. Whether you’re moving on to better pastures or you’ve been forced out, take care to leave your job with your most important asset intact: your reputation.

Carolyn's post about the article kindly mentions the chapter on leaving a law firm I wrote for the most recent edition of the ABA's Flying Solo book and reminds me how surprised I was at how well-received that chapter was and the nice comments about it I got after the book was published. At the time, there definitely was a dearth of helpful information on the topic, especially on the issues that can arise even in the normal friendly departure from a firm.

Leaving a firm, especially when it's not a voluntary decision, but even when it isn't, is a hectic, confusing and disorienting time. There are a lot of issues that arise in the best of situations. In a down economy where there are layoffs and firms in economic difficulties, these issues can become quite complex and difficult. You have to be prepared to land on your feet. Carolyn's article will introduce you to the types of questions you need to be asking yourself. Highly recommended.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Now Available! The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Join the book's Facebook Group here.

Technorati tags: legal solo solo leaving elefant book

Posted by dmk at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2008

Competitive Intelligence Roundtable Article

Just posted on the online version of the ABA's Law Practice Magazine is one of the best articles I've ever been a part of. It's called "Competitive Intelligence Roundtable: CI Tactics, Tools and Lessons to Be Learned."

I asked a who's who of experts on competitive intelligence in the practice of law (Mark Beese, David Bowerman, Cynthia Cheng Correia, Ann Lee Gibson, Mark Greene, Sabrina Pacifici and Meredith Williams) to participate in a roundtable discussion of the basics, practical tips and lessons learned about the use of competitive intelligence. To my delight, they all agreed to participate and the result is one heck of an article from which I learned a ton of things and so will you. I'm the article's moderator and a quasi-participant.

In the same issue is Ann Lee Gibson's How to Create and Use Competitive Intelligence: 45 Tips for Law Firms, a helpful CI primer to read as an intro to the roundtable article.

If you are familiar with CI, you'll benefit from the wisdom of this group. If you don't know anything about CI, these article will get you up and running. IF CI wa not on your radar, after you read these articles, it will be.

Highly recommended.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Debuting at the 2008 ABA TECHSHOW: The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

Technorati tags: competitive intelligence roundtable law pracitce ABA TECHSHOW

Posted by dmk at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2008

Leadership Advisory Board

I've been a fan and a reader of everything Patrick McKenna of the Edge Group has written for many years. An Edge Group training course I took on rainmaking while at The Stolar Partnership was very important in my professional development. It was quite a thrill when Patrick attended the initial LexThink event and I got to meet him in person.

So, when Patrick lets me know about something new that he finds innovative and exciting, I'm all ears.

His latest project, with Baker & Daniels' Chair Emeritus Brian Burke and Managing Partner Magazine, is the Leadership Advisory Board. The Board is a service for new law firm managing partners to get advice from experienced and knowledgeable managing partners through an interactive forum.

I've met a good number of young managing partners in the last few years who have talked to me about their wish to have a way to learn more about how to manage firms, get advice for the challenging questions they face and find some mentoring. Patrick aptly has described it as a "safe sounding board."

It looks like a case where need meets solution, which, given Patrick's involvement, doesn't surprise me in the least. This development is one to watch.

And, the Board, to me, gives us another glimpse of what Law 2.0 developments might look like.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Coming Soon: The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

Technorati tags: leadership advisory board managing partner LexThink! law firm Law2.0

Posted by dmk at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2008

Tom Collins on Law Firm Management Blogs

A special welcome to first-time visitors who found this blog via Tom Collins' post on Recommended Blogs for Those Involved in Law Firm Management on the More Partner Income blog.

It's always nice to have your work recognized and I appreciated Tom adding this blog to his very useful list of recommended blogs. It's great to find my blog on such an impressive list and I appreciate Tom's nice comments about me.

I've definitely noticed more interest than ever before in blogs on the part of law firm management types in the last year or so. In large part, that's due to the large amount of high quality and timely information and commentary about law firm management topics you find every single day on blogs that cover this topic.

Tom's list is an excellent place to start, but don't stop with his list. Be sure to explore on your own and find some more great blogs that will bring you great, practical and timely info on the subjects that matter to you.

Hmm, I notice that I keep mentioning timely information. As a writer, one of the greatest things about blogging is instant publication and getting your written immediately in front of your audience. I currently have several articles (and very good article, if I say so myself) written from more than a month to several months ago that are still waiting to come out in print. Since I usually don't write on the same topics until an article I've written appears it print, it bothers me not to have that article and other thoughts on the same topic out. I'll also be very happy when the book is out - I've never ever had so much material written for so long that hasn't appeared in print or on the Internet. That will change soon, though, with the book release in a couple of weeks.

If you haven't seen Tom's post on recommended blogs for law firm management, then what are you waiting for? Head on over and check it out.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Coming Soon: The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

Technorati tags: legal technology blogs law firm management

Posted by dmk at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

February 21, 2008

By Request: What's Your Best Advice for a Lawyer Wanting to Start a Solo Practice?

With the economy looking a little shaky (or more than a little shaky) and some rumblings already about law firms considering laying off lawyers, the solo option will become a consideration for many lawyers in 2008.

The short answer to your question is to find a great mentor. However, that's really the answer to any question about the practice of law and it's easier said than done.

In my own case, the advice I got that really stuck with me was to be sure to be able to identify exactly where your first client from a client would come from. That simple exercise helps you move from fantasy to reality.

In my recent Blawggie awards, I singled out the solo practice blogs as being a great resource for solos and aspiring solos. You'll want to do some reading there.

This question also gives me the chance to single out and praise Carolyn Elefant's new book, Solo by Choice: How to Be the Lawyer You Always Wanted to Be. I had the privilege of reading a pre-publication version of the book and wrote the following short blurb about it:

Carolyn Elefant's new book continues the tradition of her MyShingle.com website, which I once called "the perfect example of a great web resource." It's chock-full of exactly the practical advice I was looking for when I left a big firm to go solo. Highly recommended.

It's the most current of the books about solo practice. It's also worth tracking down a copy of the latest edition of Flying Solo (you'll find a few chapters in there that I wrote) and, of course, Jay Foonberg's classic, How to Start and Build a Law Firm.

However, after having left a large firm to go out on my own almost five years ago and spent a good deal of time thinking about the solo practice and how best to prepare for it and improve how you do it, I've recently found a resource that I plan to recommend so much that people will get tired of hearing it from me.

The best advice I can give right now is to watch regularly and study BBC's Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

My cable company shows it on Thursday nights on BBC America, but you can also buy a DVD. I've recently started watching it and it's a revelation to me. There's so much that I can see in the show that I wish I would have known earlier.

In the show, restaurateur, chef and absolute master of dropping the F-bomb, Gordon Ramsay, visits and tries to turn around a struggling restaurant and its struggling chef and owner. What is key for a solo practice is how he helps you walk the line between business and profession, accounting and art.

If I were thinking of starting a solo practice now, I'd watch episode after episode of this until I started to see the repeating patterns, the common issues and the common solutions. It really does start to become clear what will work and what won't (at least in concept - implementation and execution are vital factors as well). It strikes me that in the successful situations there is a fascinating balance between being ruthless objective about what you are doing and, at the same time, being very passionate about the service and product that you provide. In addition to some valuable business lessons that you'll see play out in a number of settings, you will also get a feel for whether the life of running a business is something that you want to have. I can't recommend immersing yourself in this show enough, and you will also get the side benefit of learning a whole lot about good food and fantastic new ways to use swear words.

That's my best advice these days. That, and to be willing to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about whether or not the solo life really fits you. You do not want to become a effing solo practice nightmare.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

If you enjoy this blog, remember it has its own Amazon Wishlist and appreciates your generosity. ;-)

Technorati tags: legal profession solo solo practice ramsay mentor flying solo solo by choice

Posted by dmk at 09:08 PM | Comments (1)

February 04, 2008

Cole Silver's Expert Audio Series

Lawyer and career and marketing consultant Cole Silver has put together an amazing collection of audio interviews with a who's who of experts in all phases of law practice management as part of his Expert Audio Series.

It's a collection of top experts interviewed about their best topics, with coverage of key aspects of business development and marketing, career planning and development, and organizational development and management. I've contributed an interview on "Technology that Drives Operational Efficiency."

What is great about Cole's collection is that I've heard many people (including me) with the idea (and best intentions) of putting together a collection of interviews like this, but Cole has actually done it. And done it extremely well. Even a cursory glance at what is already part of this collection will show you the potential value of this material to your practice. It's a great example of what the audio/podcasting world is bringing and how an iPod (or other mp3 player) might be the best business and educational tech investment you can make these days.

Check out Cole's Expert Audio Series.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Coming in March from ABA Publishing - The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together

Technorati tags: legal technology expert audio series cole silver podcast

Posted by dmk at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2007

FastCase and Free Legal Research for Missouri Lawyers

One of my side projects for the last year or so was being part of a Missouri Bar task force charged with bringing a legal research alternative as a member benefit to members of the Missouri Bar.

It was a productive and fun experience, and I'm proud to say that it resulted in both a great new member benefit and a President's Award for the task force from the Missouri Bar.

We recommended FastCase as the service provider and the service launched last summer. More details here.

We had a follow-up conference call yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of usage the service is already getting, and the positive response it seems to be getting to this point.

It also reminded me to recommend that Missouri Bar members who read this blog and haven't tried the FastCase service yet should definitely get out there and give it a try. You can't beat the price.

It will be interesting to see the long-term impact of this program and others like it being adopted by other state bars on traditional legal research tools. Considered this recent development.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Get your legal technology information by audio. Check out The Kennedy-Mighell Report Podcast.

Technorati tags: legal technology legal research fastcase missouri bar

Posted by dmk at 10:25 AM | Comments (3)

September 25, 2007

Recruiting, Paying and Retaining Lawyers: Quite a Discussion Going

Wow! There's been a lot of conversation over the last few days on lawyer salaries, the legal job market, recruiting and retention issues. As much as I'd like to believe that my post "The Brand is the Talent" last week set off this discussion, in fact it was Amir Efrati's The Dark Side of the Legal Job Market in the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog that kicked off the lively conversation. Bill Gratsch does a nice job of summarizing and linking to the some of the posts on this topic.

I also liked Rob Millard's America's Two Legal Professions, Gerry Riskin's Sharp Pin Approaching Associate Starting Salary Balloon, and Michelle Golden's Law Students Building a Better Profession (a great example from the LSBABP blog Michelle discusses is called High Billables & Attrition Take Their Toll on Summer Recruiting). It's worth tracking down and reading the posts on this topic.

The posts also brought me back to Ron Baker's Two Cheers for Gary Boomer post last weekend, which really got me thinking, in part because Ron touched on the role that technology and hourly billing play in professional services recruiting and retention.

My own view? I have a number of thoughts percolating and some of them will definitely appear in the quickly approaching webinar that I'm doing about the role technology can play in law firm recruiting and lawyer retention on Thursday, September 27.

As I've said, the role that the use of technology can play in recruiting seems to get all the attention, but the role technology can play in retention is the more important piece of the puzzle, not just starting salaries. There's still time to register and some spots available for the webinar. If you are interested in these topics, I hope you'll attend the webinar, but I also hope that you'll read the posts I've mentioned and think about their implications.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Upcoming webinar: On September 27 at 12:00 Central, Aspen Knowledge will present Frank Gillman and Dennis Kennedy on "Winning the Battle for Legal Talent with Technology." Information and registration information here. Please mention that you heard about the webinar on DennisKennedy.Blog.

Technorati tags: legal technology webinar recruiting retention Law2.0 starting salaries

Posted by dmk at 09:29 PM | Comments (2)

September 17, 2007

Matt Homann Interview in Law Practice Magazine

There's a great interview with Matt Homann in the current issue of the ABA's Law Practice Magazine. Matt talks about many things: innovation, big thinking, his views on the practice of law, LexThink and his recent move to Xplane, the visual thinking company. The article also includes two sets of helpful tips from Matt for lawyers and their clients.

The money quote:

What’s driving innovation in law firms now?

MH: That’s a particularly difficult question to answer because the forces driving innovation in firms (if innovation is happening at all) are varied. In large firms, big clients have wised up and begun to demand businesslike efficiency, accountability and technology from their counsel of record. Midsize firms have recognized that innovation allows them to compete for previously unattainable clients and work.

For their part, small firms have always innovated out of necessity—and that’s never been more true than today. The lack of institutional friction inside a nimble small firm gives that firm a tremendous advantage in trying new things. What’s driving much of the innovation in small firms now, however, is that a much more educated and Internet-savvy clientele is not only expecting better service, better technology and better pricing, but is also not afraid to find a lawyer who will deliver it.

If you are in St. Louis this evening, I see that there are (as of now) a few openings left for Matt's latest Idea Market event tonight. Check it out if you have the chance.

In any event, read the interview with Matt. But read it quickly, because, despite my suggestions to change this policy over the past few years, this article will disappear behind the magazine's members' only firewall and not be available over the Internet in a few weeks. That might be a good reminder to join the Law Practice Management Section and get the print version of the magazine (with a nice picture of Matt), but I've always preferred the open, always available on the Internet approach. We might see a change in that policy soon, but it hasn't happened yet. Lots of other great articles in this issue too.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Upcoming webinar: On September 27 at 12:00 Central, Aspen Knowledge will present Frank Gillman and Dennis Kennedy on "Winning the Battle for Legal Talent with Technology." Information and registration information here. Please mention that you heard about the webinar on DennisKennedy.Blog.

Technorati tags: LexThink! innovation unconference Law2.0 homann

Posted by dmk at 07:10 AM | Comments (1)

September 05, 2007

Winning the Battle for Legal Talent with Technology

A while back, I had a great conversation with Frank Gillman, Chief Technology Officer of Allen Matkins LLP, about the different ways that lawyers could use technology to attract and retain lawyers and other professionals. Our conclusion was that there were many underused and untapped opportunities - some quite simple and inexpensive - to use technology in these areas.

Fast forward a few months (and after starting associate salaries took another big bump up into the $150,000+ range at leading US law firms). Andrew Sandler at Aspen Knowledge called me about kicking off the Strategic Speakers Series that he was planning. He wanted to produce a series of video webinars that addressed legal technology with a strong business focus. His goal was to give law firm decision-makers information on ways to think strategically about technology in law firms and to place technology squarely within the business needs of a law firm.

That's the approach I like best, and I also really enjoyed working with Andrew on a video webinar about best practices for technology committees last year.

I immediately suggested to Andrew that he try to get Frank to do a webinar with me on the topic of using technology for recruiting and retention so that we could extend our earlier discussion and share it with others.

I'm pleased to announce that on September 27 at 12:00 Central, Aspen Knowledge will present Frank Gillman and Dennis Kennedy on "Winning the Battle for Legal Talent with Technology."

Here's the program description:

The fight to retain and attract top legal talent is one of the most talked about topics in the legal industry and for good reason. The two most significant continual investments a firm makes are in legal recruiting and in technology. What many firms don’t realize is that technology itself can be a deciding factor in the recruiting wars. Our speakers will show your firm how to effectively connect these two factors to give you a competitive edge in this critical war.

You can get more information at Aspen Knowledge's Knowledge Center and register here. Please mention that you heard about the webinar on my blog when you register.

Also, if you have topics you'd like Frank and I to address, specific questions, or, best of all, examples of ways your firm is using technology to recruit and retain law students, lawyers, and other professionals, please leave comment to this post or email me at denniskennedyblog @ gmail . com. I know that I'll be mentioning some of the efforts Meredith Williams spoke about in our recent presentation at ILTA that Baker Donelson is using - if I worked at that firm and had regular access to those tools, it would be difficult for me to leave to a firm that did not offer the same tools.

This webinar will be especially valuable to hiring partners, members of technology committees, department chairs, managing partners, and executive directors of law firms in addition to lawyers and IT directors. It will also be a great way to check out the way that video can be used to present educational and other materials using Aspen Conferencing's videoconferencing services.

Register for webinar.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Get your legal technology information by audio. Check out The Kennedy-Mighell Report Podcast.

Technorati tags: legal technology webinar recruiting retention Law2.0

Posted by dmk at 07:40 AM | Comments (1)

July 23, 2007

Law News Now . . . and More to Come at the ABA Journal

The American Bar Association has today launched a completely revamped version of the website for the ABA Journal to stellar notices, like this, this and this. My friend and ABA webmaster Fred Faulkner played a big role in this launch and I enjoyed getting the chance to congratulate him on his excellent work this evening. Fred was a key reason that the Law Practice Today webzine got off the ground so successfully and I clearly see Fred's influence on this new site. I miss getting the chance to work with Fred on a regular basis as we used to do on Law Practice Today.

You will want to visit the site for legal news, a great blawg directory, and free content from the magazine archives.

I like the direction that the ABA Journal is going with the website and the print publication. In fact, I like it so much that I've recently agreed to take over the legal technology column for the publication starting this fall. I'm looking forward to working with Ed Adams and the ABA Journal editorial team.

It was a big honor for me to be asked to write the column and get the chance to continue the great tradition of the column that "the two Davids" - David Beckman and David Hirsch (two of the biggest names in legal technology history) - established and carried forward for many years. Their column was always my first stop in the ABA Journal when it arrived (except, of course, the issue that had an article with my picture in it - the lawyer equivalent of getting your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone, or at least inside it). I salute the two Davids and hope that I can carry on in their footsteps.

I started out writing about legal technology in a column for Lawyers Weekly USA and I've always liked the regular monthly column format. This new column will become my primary outlet for regular articles on legal technology. I'm planning to take an approach that is highly practical, appeals to all lawyers and helps them in their daily work, and also makes people stretch just a bit and think about technology. I have a list of column ideas already put together, but will always welcome ideas for new columns.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Read the blog posts and RSS feed items I find most interesting on my new linkblog or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Technorati tags: legal technology column ABA aba journal

Posted by dmk at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2007

TWiL, Avvo, Lawyer Ratings and Beyond

I've been off the grid the past week at the annual firm retreat (expect some modest changes in the focus of this blog in the coming months).

I did have the chance to record a This Week in Law podcast last week and it's now live and ready for downloading and listening. The episode is called Rate-a-Lawyer and focuses on the launch of the new Avvo lawyer rating site. In the episode, Denise Howell leads the discussion about Avvo and its implications with Avvo CEO Mark Britton, Ernie Svenson, Mazyar Hadayat and me.

The episode is long by podcast standards, but I encourage you to listen all the way to the end. There's a lot of good discussion and this podcast lets Mark Britton tell his side of the Avvo story to an extent that I haven't seen before, and I learned a whole lot from hearing Mark talk about the service. If you've followed the Avvo story, you'll find this discussion quite interesting. I also suspect that you'll be intrigued by some of the directions the conversation goes.

I'm always an encourager of new approaches, like that of Avvo, so I'd like to see how it all develops. My opinions (generally favorable) and questions (somewhat different than I've seen others raise) about Avvo should be pretty clear from the recording. Tom Mighell reviews the podcast here.

Take a listen. Get the podcast here. I'll be getting back to regular posting this week.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Technorati tags: legal technology avvo twil podcast

Posted by dmk at 09:32 PM | Comments (1)

May 28, 2007

Reminder: May 29 Teleseminar on Legal Ethics and Use of the Internet

Here's a last minute reminder that if you are interested in the ethical issues raised by lawyers using the Internet, I invite you to join me and a stellar panel for an teleseminar on May 29 about ethical issues raised by the ways lawyers use the Internet. I don't know that I've ever seen a presentation on this topic with as many years of actual web-related experience as you'll find on this panel, given that my co-presenters are Kevin O'Keefe and Ben Cowgill.

We've split up the topic and plan to allow for plenty of Q & A. I'm covering ethical issues for law firm websites. Please feel free to let me know about the questions and issues you have on this topic in the comments and I'll try to incorporate that into my coverage. I'm planning to take a historical approach and talk about the evolution of legal ethics and the web from those first days when there were only a few law firm websites, a handful of articles on the topic, and no search engines as we now know them.

Here's an excerpt from the program description and registration information can be found here.

Sponsored by the Legal Publishing Group of Strafford Publications

Tuesday May 29, 2007
1:00pm - 2:30pm Eastern

Early Discount Deadline, May 11
CLE available for an additional fee

Websites, the Internet and email are the preferred communication and marketing tool for attorneys and law firms, and blogs are a popular way for attorneys to exchange ideas and educate clients. However, there are serious ethical risks for attorneys who use these online communications with clients and potential clients.

Sites and blogs that enable users to email attorneys directly increase ethical concerns. And yet, there are few guidelines for attorneys by the courts and state bar associations.

Do the standard ethical rules regarding lawyer advertising apply? If law blogs are defined as political speech, can states still regulate them as commercial speech?

Listen and participate from your office telephone as our authoritative panel discusses the regulatory future and ethical guidelines for communicating with clients and prospective client via websites and blogs. The panel will feature:

The panel includes:

Benjamin Cowgill, Counselor and Attorney at Law, Lexington, Kentucky, focuses his career in the field of legal ethics. He is the former Chief Bar Counsel for the Kentucky Bar Association and a well-known presenter of CLE programs on various aspects of law office technology, including ethical considerations.

Dennis Kennedy, computer lawyer and technology expert, DennisKennedy.com, LLC, St. Louis, is a well-known consultant, speaker and writer who is considered among the most influential experts on the application of technology in the practice of law. He serves businesses implementing information technology and e-commerce initiatives.

Kevin O'Keefe, president and founder of LexBlog, Bainbridge Island, Washington, is the leading provider of marketing blogs for lawyers. He was a trial lawyer for 17 years, during which he successfully marketed his law firm on the Internet.

The panel will review these and other key questions:

* How can attorneys protect clients’ privacy rights and attorney-client privilege in online communications?

* What are some of the key ethical concerns for attorneys who use websites and blogs to communicate with clients and prospective clients?

* How are the courts and state bar associations currently handling charges of ethics violations involving attorney use of the Internet and email?

Following the speaker presentations, you’ll have an opportunity to get answers to your specific questions during the interactive Q&A session.

*******************************************************************************

Thanks to Strafford Publications for putting this one together. It's a great opportunity to pick up some ethics CLE credit.

Register for the seminar here.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Like what you are reading? Check out the other blogs where I post - Between Lawyers (feed) and the LexThink Blog (feed).

Technorati tags: legal technology legal ethics ethics webinar

Posted by dmk at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

Are Lawyers Doing Work That Should Be Done By Machines?

Good question. Important question. Maybe the Big Question.

Ron Friedmann offers his insights into the question in a post about an article in which Cisco's Mark Chandler raises the question in the context of document review in electronic discovery.

The money quote from Ron:

I’ve written previously that the choosing the best document review approach - US contract lawyers, offshore lawyers, or software - is an empirical question. Chandler adds anecdotal evidence that computers do better than humans, at least considering cost.

I ruminated a bit about the question outside the context of electronic discovery in one of my favorite posts on this blog from 2006.

The money quote from that post was:

At TECHSHOW 2005, Marc Lauritsen was reviewing the histroy of legal technology and made a comment about tasks that it made sense for computers to do and tasks that it made sense for humans to do. It struck me then, and does even more so today, that part of the reason we see dissatisfaction and burnout in the legal profession is that, arguably in many cases, lawyers are still doing work as humans that should at this point be done by computers, [rather than having computers do the work to free them up] to do more of the creative things that play such a big part in being a lawyer. Properly understood, we should be trying to use technology to enable us to move in that direction.

In his email, Gates says: "In this New World of Work, repetitive, uninteresting tasks like moving data from one system to another will be automated and employees will focus much more of their time and creative energy on work that generates real value and growth."

Important question. Maybe a Law 2.0 question.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Learn more about legal technology at Dennis Kennedy's Legal Technology Central page.

Technorati tags: legal technology electronic discovery Law2.0

Posted by dmk at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2007

No Malpractice Insurance for Law Firm Blogs?

As I often say, if telephones were introduced today, there's no way that the use of telephones by lawyers would be approved under today's ethical and regulatory environment for lawyers. Just think of all the horrible things that can happen when lawyers use telephones.

Like faxes, emails, and websites before them, the "new technology" of blogging has seemed to flummox bar regulators who are unfamiliar with what blogs actually are.

The (over)reaction to blogs continues to surprise me. Let me say this as simply as I can. Blogs are simply one kind of website. The rules on lawyers' use of websites have actually reasonably clear and well-settled since about 1997. At least until the publicity blogs have received in the last two years. Since then, as I have said before, it has really become impossible to determine how blogs will be treated or to predict how regulators will deal with blogs, as the recent New York rules illustrate.

That said, there's been a modest movement toward more reasonable thinking about blog regulation since the New York regulators listened to comments to their proposed rules and made a few changes, even though there's no consensus how even those changes apply to blogs.

Last night, I saw Carolyn Elefant's post about a New Jersey law firm dropped its plans to start a blog because its malpractice carrier, the Chubb Corp., indicated that it might not insure the blogging activity.

I must admit that this came as a surprise to me. I almost posted about the story last night.

This morning, I got a call from Heather Havenstein, from ComputerWorld, asking me for some comments on the story. Her story, "Insurance company refuses to cover law firm's blog," has appeared already on the online edition of MacWorld.

The quote she used from captures the heart of my perspective on this story:

However, [Kennedy] said these types of attempts to impose new types of restrictions on blogs likely occur 'when people aren’t that familiar with the technology and think it is somehow completely new and different. Really blogs are just a form of Web pages. What you’re doing is not different than if you are speaking in public or writing an op-ed piece.'

Or using a website as lawyers have done for at least the last 12 years. Or talking to someone on a telephone.

While I am convinced that blogs can be a vehicle to greatly enhance communications with clients and the public, I am not convinced that, at root, blogs present any new issues that require different treatment under ethical and regulatory rules than any other prior communication technology.

I also suspect that a 5 or 10 minute conversation with a malpractice insurance carrier would alleviate any reticence or concern about covering blogs. It might, however, raise some concerns about whether malpractice carriers want to cover the use of telephones by lawyers. Heh.

My rule of thumb on these issues is to simply substitute the word "telephone" for "blog" and then see if there is any new issue raised by blogs that aren't raised by telephones. I haven't found any yet - in twelve years off thinking about these issues since I first started my website.

Kevin O'Keefe also has his usual great perspective and analysis on this issue here. Careful readers might guess that Kevin and I have had conversations about this issue over the years where we've both used the telephone analogy.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Like what you are reading? Check out the other blogs where I post - Between Lawyers (feed) and the LexThink Blog (feed).

Technorati tags: legal technology ethics malpractice insurance blogs telephones

Posted by dmk at 10:20 PM | Comments (1)

September 18, 2006

Computer-based Legal Decision-making in 2006

Ron Friedmann has a thought-provoking post called "Computers as Lawyers?" that I recommend that everyone who likes to think about the intersection of law and technology take a look at.

The post strikes a lot of notes for me. For example, I've talked with Marc Lauritsen (Marc, how can we talk you into blogging?) and others on and off over the last few years about decision trees.

I remember back in law school at Georgetown, I took one of the first classes in Computers and the Law offered in the US. That was in 1982. Milton Wessel was the professor and I don't know many classes that I enjoyed more. One day, we were talking about artificial intelligence and the law, and the applicability of computers to legal decision-making. I asked this question: If we "knew" (in a measurable way) that an AI program was more likely to reach a measurably "correct" result than a jury, would we change from a jury system to a software system? There was an impassioned discussion, with the overwhelming consensus that people prefer a less accurate human system than a more accurate software system. What was interesting is how the discussion suggested that "objective correctness" was not in fact the goal of the legal system and that justice is something fuzzier, yet more comforting than pure accuracy.

It's now 25 years later and I'm curious whether lawyers end up in the same place. I suspect that as more is at stake, the "human element" feels more essential, but as less is at stake, issues are more mundane, and speed and efficiency matters more, computerized decision-making becomes more attractive. Or, let the computers take the boring cases and save the interesting ones for us.

Read Ron's post and the links he points to and give it some thought.

The money quote:

Lawyers (well, at least the forward thinking ones) are increasingly relying on “smart search engines” to reduce the cost of reviewing e-discovery documents.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Learn more about legal technology at Dennis Kennedy's Legal Technology Central page.

Technorati tags: legal technology electronic discovery Law2.0

Posted by dmk at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2006

Innovation + Action = InnovAction

Here's a must-read PDF download for anyone interested in innovation in the legal profession:

The College of Law Practice Management has just released the Inaugural issue of its e-publication called InnovAction, which celebrates innovation in the legal profession.

I'm pleased to be part of a stellar cast of authors featured in this first issue.

In fact, I highly recommend that you read the wide-ranging Roundtable on innovation topics in which I participated with Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, Simon Chester, Matt Homann and Dan Pinnington. Some of the learning Matt and I have had over the past year or so in our LexThink venture made their way into this article.

You'll also find great articles from Gerry Riskin, Patrick McKenna, David Maister, Silvia Coulter, and Bruce MacEwen, and other great stuff. Kudos to Jordan Furlong for bringing this project to a successful launch.

Download the article here.

While you are downloading great e-publications, be sure to check out Patrick McKenna's highly-regarded new publication called First 100 Days: Transitioning a New Managing Partner.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

This post brought to you by LexThink!(R) - The Legal Unconference. Ask us about private LexThink retreats and conferences for your firm, business or organization.

Technorati tags: innovation innovaction LexThink!

Posted by dmk at 10:43 PM | Comments (2)

July 17, 2006

Is This What They Teach at Reed Smith University?

I first learned about "Reed Smith University" and the other Reed Smith approaches to the practice of law that led me to mention the firm frequently as an example of an innovative law firm from Denise Howell. Given that Denise is a pioneering lawyer blogger and widely-recognized lawyer in digital media, Internet and intellectual property areas, it made sense that she would be part of an innovative firm. I see now that, as usual, maybe it's easier to talk the talk than walk the walk.

Saturday, I learned on Denise's blog, Bag and Baggage, that Reed Smith had fired Denise. I'm revising my opinion of Reed Smith, drastically. As Carolyn Elefant suggests, Reed Smith has probably guaranteed that rather than being known as an innovator or a premier law firm, it will be known instead as "the firm that dumped Denise Howell, one of blawging's greatest talents." Probably not the marketing move any firm would like to make, eh?

You might note that Denise's notes about Reed Smith University mentioned above appeared in The Industry Standard. This is the type of publicity in the type of industry publication that most law firms would kill for. Ironic, isn't it?

[Disclosure: Denise is a co-founder and co-author with me of the Blawg Channel and Between Lawyers group blog projects and I don't even pretend to be objective in my comments. I have not talked with Denise, however, about this happening or the events underlying it. My opinions, as usual, are uniquely my own.]

As I've said elsewhere, I thoroughly recommend that you read Denise's post announcing her departure because it is well-written, savvy and raises important issues for the legal profession.

I was struck immediately by the irony that, as an appellate lawyer, Denise would require excellent writing, analytical and organizational skills. These are exhibited in great abundance in her post, making Reed Smith's decision to fire her even more inexplicable than it first appeared to me.

As a friend of mine – an excellent writer – said after reading Denise's post – "why can't I write something that good?" Indeed, I was involved in hiring at law firms for many years and I'd be willing to hire Denise as an appellate lawyer on the basis of seeing that post as a writing sample.

All of which leads to speculation about what Reed Smith is thinking.

Let me say first that law firms obviously can and will make business decisions, especially personnel decisions, for reasons they believe are in the best interest of the firm. Others, of course, are free to second-guess those decisions. It is certainly fair to reach Carolyn Elefant's conclusion: "Because if you're a talented woman planning on having kids, why in the world would you EVER choose to work there?"

I've been thinking about what lessons we might be able to learn from this situation in our increasingly interconnected and Internet-focused world.

Based on my experience in law firms, inexplicable firing decisions (and sometimes inexplicable hiring decisions) almost invariably result in people inside and outside the firm drawing one of three conclusions:

1. The firm is slimming down for a merger. One standard approach in a pre-merger setting is to strip away people who will not fit into the new entity. Often that may mean of counsel and other lawyers in non-traditional arrangements. Since Reed Smith has engaged in some merger activity recently and there were stories of another one "on the street" at the end of last year, you might reasonably conclude that something along those lines was involved. If you saw other departures or departures from another likely merger candidate, this theory would be reinforced. Even if nothing is in the works, this type of decision invite exactly that kind of speculation..

2. The firm simply made a bad business decision. Hey, law firms don't always make good business decisions. I suspect that the negative economic and PR consequences of this move will far outweigh the savings from eliminating Denise's salary. However, I agree with Denise's assessment of the business acumen of the managing partner of Reed Smith, so I think this conclusion is less likely than #1. However, since Denise is the classic example of a person around whom to market an innovative or Law 2.0 approach, the decision seems to reflect a commitment to an "old school" practice of law. "Old school" may prove the best way to go, but I question the approach and think that signaling a commitment to an old school approach undercuts efforts like Reed Smith University. Ironically, the fact that Denise was an appellate lawyer who did a lot of brief writing and was incredibly tech savvy made her the perfect test case for innovative approaches to dealing with work that could have served the firm well as a model for the future.

3. The firm may be having financial problems. Almost any time an experienced lawyer gets fired, people start to wonder about the finances of the firm. I was a partner at a firm where we might have a partners' meeting in which we learned that we were having our best financial year ever, but also make a decision to terminate an associate, and then would see the staff and other associates worry that the firm was about to padlock the doors and go out of business. It's just the way people react today. One of the most interesting presentations I attended this year was given by Alan Rich of Thomson Elite on why law firms go out of business. It's a thought-provoking presentation that had a lot of resonance for me. In most of the cases, you saw firms that were riding high closing their doors in remarkably short periods of time. In each case, there seemed to be one of more management decisions that, in retrospect, made no sense and reflected a decision to go with "business as usual" when business was no longer usual. I think that this is the least likely of the three conclusions, but I also think, based on my experience, that it will be the one that people spend the most time speculating about, especially if there is even one more departure. I don't think that law firms give that result enough consideration these days before taking actions.

As I've said elsewhere, I'm flummoxed by this decision, but suggest that we all look at it for lessons that we can learn about how we deal with talented people with non-traditional approaches and how to retain them, and for lessons about how best to run a law firm. As my title says, I'm mainly left with this question: "Is this what they teach at Reed Smith University?"

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Like what you are reading? Check out the other blogs where I post - Between Lawyers (feed) and the LexThink Blog (feed).

Technorati tags: legal profession reed smith reed smith university denise howell Law2.0

Posted by dmk at 10:07 PM | Comments (4)

June 21, 2006

Using Technology to Increase Profitability: Moving into Alternative Billing Via Technology - Article

[Note: This is another in a continuing series in which I am reposting some of my original drafts of published articles.]

In a recent post on the Between Lawyers blog, I linked to a post on the subject of value billing and the post seemed to generate a bit of discussion about the topic. It also reminded me that I wrote an article that includes my most extensive writing about the subject of value billing in an article that was originally published in the April/May 2006 issue of Law Office Computing magazine. Not surprisingly, I focused on the impact that technology might and should have in the area of alternative billing. Sharp readers will note that my real topic was profitability and not so much alternative or value billing, which was a bit of a side issue in the article. Nonetheless, I thought I'd republish my original draft of the article (that means there may be a few typos) on my blog and see if people think that it adds anything to the discussion. I really liked the way this article turned out and it contained some original ideas and approaches that I hadn't seen elsewhere. I hope you enjoy the article.

Using Technology to Increase Profitability: Moving into Alternative Billing Via Technology

Better. Faster. Cheaper. These three words have long made up the mantra for the benefits of legal technology, at least for those trying to sell new technologies to lawyers.

However, these three words, even if proven, have never been quite enough to close the sale with many lawyers, especially for technologies that promise to change the nature of the practice or substantially alter the ways legal services are delivered.

The final barrier is often concern about the impact of technology in a system where fees are based solely on the number of billable hours worked. Simply put, if you can use technology to do what is now a twenty-hour project in four hours, haven't you just cut your earnings by eighty percent?

This article is not going to be another manifesto about how lawyers need to end the tyranny of the billable hours system. However, I do want to make you think critically about your current approach to pricing your services.

This article, in fact, is about supplying the missing part of the legal technology equation: how will new technologies or better uses of technology improve profitability, client satisfaction and make your life better? In other words, how does the mantra of better, faster and cheaper actually help you make good decisions about alternative billing methods?

The Billable Hours Dilemma.

Let’s assume that your practice includes drafting a legal document that takes you six hours to produce a solid draft, and that you draft one hundred of these documents a year. You find that you can implement a document assembly application that will reduce the time to create that solid draft to six minutes per document.

Forget about the cost of the software and developing the document assembly application. What have you done to your practice? In a billable hours system, you have reduced six hundred billable (and collectable) hours down to ten hours! In addition to software and development costs, you have lost 590 hours of earnings. However, you definitely have achieved the goal of better, faster and cheaper with your technology.

Of course, this simple analysis is just the starting point. Perhaps not all of the hours are "lost." You might be routinely writing off some of this time. You might "replace" the hours with higher value hours doing something else.

When you implement any technology, you must rethink your approach to the use of your time and how you bill your clients.

I chose this example for two reasons. First, it is a great example of a place technology has a negative impact in an hourly billing approach and almost drives you to consider an alternative billing model. Second, clients increasingly think that lawyers have these capabilities.

In today's world of computerized forms, what does a client think if they see that you spent six hours producing a first draft of a will? Your client will believe that you chose the method that maximizes your billable hours.

Here's one of my favorite analogies. You contract with a builder to build you a new house on an hourly billing basis. The workers show up with no power tools, only hand tools. How do you react?

That brings us to the great billable hours dilemma. If there are strong pressures from clients to reduce the number of hours spent on projects and strong resistance to rate increases, what will the impact be on your practice? In general, the answer will be that you simply have to go out and find more hours (new clients and new projects) each year.

Alternative Billing Primer.

For a growing number of lawyers, technology is one of the drivers toward alternative billing methods. There is a list of good resources for learning about alternative billing in the sidebar.

For our purposes, I want to divide alternative billing into three categories: (1) value billing, (2) enhanced or blended hourly billing, and (3) other innovative approaches.

Think of value billing as flat fee billing. You and the client agree in advance to a fee for the project based on the perceived value of the work to the client. Implementing the document assembly application I mentioned earlier definitely makes sense here.

There are many examples of enhanced or blended billing approaches. You might have one rate for drafting and a higher rate for tax planning, for example. The document assembly application might make sense if your clients pay you more for you tax planning time.

We are also seeing a large number of innovative approaches, Bonus pools and incentives for meeting budget targets are examples in this category. Typically, these are used by large corporations or where there is a high volume of work. Technology might enhance your profitability in these settings.

Billable Hours Not Going Away - Ethics and Other Concerns.

Experts have been predicting the death of the billable hours system for many years. It's still going strong. In many cases, both clients and lawyers are comfortable with the approach and believe it achieves fair results. Changing your existing billing approaches may take time and negotiation and involve changing systems. There is also a vocal group who believe that any type of billing other than hourly billing is unethical, and innovative billing approaches can raise issues under applicable ethical rules.

You will find both a growing momentum for alternative billing approaches and receptivity on the part of clients to these approaches. If you want to see what lawyers really think of hourly billing, watch a lawyer's reaction when any other service provider suggests hourly billing.

For purposes of this article, I am going to assume that hourly billing remains the dominant approach to billing, with a small, but increasing, number of alternative experiments going on in many law practices.

My first rule is that you must think carefully about how technology might help make any alternative billing approach more profitable.

My second rule, which I will now turn to, is that, whatever your billing method, you must always consider the impact of technology on profitability. The vendors may be telling you better, faster, cheaper, but your response should be to ask about and understand the impact on profitability.

Profitability – The Key Measure.

Profitability is the key factor in technology decisions today. I had two recent conversations that brought home this point to me. First, I talked with a partner at a large law firm that is looking at its practice, staffing, technology and much else all in the context of how each item contributes to profits per partner. Second, I spoke with a lawyer in a small firm who made a large commitment to modernizing technology, with the result of a 50% increase in profit on the same annual revenues as the prior year.

Profit, classically, is the result of subtracting costs from revenues. In the short term, we can increase profits by decreasing costs and/or increasing revenues. In the long term, improving customer service also plays a key role in keeping profits strong.

I often find that lawyers underestimate the role technology can play in cutting costs, increasing revenue and improving customer services. Let's look at each of them in turn.

Using Technology to Cut Costs – The Cheaper of Better, Faster, Cheaper.

My wife's brother, Kevin Ford, started a solo law practice with a notebook computer, speech recognition software and no secretary. His calculation was that the technology would cost him $4,000. A good secretary would cost him $4,000 per month and need to be paid before he earned anything. His belief was that the technology investment would help him become profitable more quickly and that the savings each month would accrue to his benefit until he determined whether he needed a full-time secretary.

He was able to wait nine months before hiring a secretary. He saw the technology had a real-world payoff of $32,000. However, more importantly, it had a profound impact on the profitability (and cash flow) of his practice and helped him get his practice off the ground.

Here's another example. Lately, there has been much interest in Internet telephony or Voice over IP (VoIP). It's sold as a way to save money on your telephone bills. Annual call savings might be hard to calculate, but, if as a consultant recently told me, it would cost a law firm that was moving offices more to move the PBX and phones to the new office than to switch to VoIP, then I can easily see the bottom-line benefits.

I recommend taking a much more careful look at real cost savings as part of making your technology decisions. Notice that "better, faster, cheaper" benefits of technology may well offer you cost cutting opportunities. Some of these can be subtle and require that you think about your business model.

For example, outsourced technology services and even hosted software services may help you avoid large investments in hardware and software, reduce staffing needs and provide other savings. Similarly, you might use technology to let you hire part-time employees rather than full-time employees.

There are almost no end to the ways you can look at new technologies as potentially cost-cutters. Keeping documents in electronic form will save you on paper and printer ink or toner costs. Making documents available to clients on secure, private websites might save you postage and overnight shipping costs.

Cost-cutting uses of technology will work for you no matter whether you use hourly billing or alternative approaches. If you are realistic and think carefully about the economics, using technology will help you increase your profit margins on projects and run your office more cheaply, and that's a recipe for having a better year than last year.

Improved Revenues – the Faster of "Better, Faster, Cheaper."

Many variables come into play in determining a law firm's revenues. Projections involve assumptions that may or may not prove true. However, let's cautiously take a look at how technology might improve revenues in both hourly billing and alternative billing settings.

As a general matter, the case for technology improving revenues is easiest to make in the alternative billing approach. Client happily agrees to a price of $1,000 for a will. Rather than taking you ten hours at $100 an hour, you use document assembly to reduce the amount of time you spend to four hours. Assuming you do the same number of wills in the year and use the six hours you "saved" in other fee-generating work, you will increase revenues for the years. By comparison, in the billable hours world, you simply have reduced your fee for the will to $400.

While this example shows how technology can lead you to alternative billing, it's important to see that alternative billing models may not be realistic without the use of technology.

What is the biggest untapped information source in any law practice? It's the time records.

If you start to process and analyze those records, you will learn many important things, not the least of which is how to price flat-fee projects. If you don't know how long it takes you, on average, to do projects, how can you set a flat-fee that works for you? You've been forced to enter your time every day; why not use that information for something that benefits you?

In hourly billing, one of the hidden problems is time write-offs. Let's go back to my example of the document that takes six hours to draft. If you routinely write off half of that time for clients on every bill, then you are not making an accurate calculation of the economics of the impact of technology. Any process where you consistently write off time is an invitation to consider technology alternatives.

The biggest area to consider using technology to improve revenues is to improve your staffing. If using speech recognition allows you to avoid hiring a full-time secretary and hire a paralegal instead, or other technologies allow a secretary to do paralegal work, you've turned a cost into a revenue producer.

Another good area from increasing revenues through technology is to see whether you can automate documentation or other processes to create fees for "annual corporate maintenance" or other legal support or service packages as annual subscriptions.

Client Satisfaction – The Better of "Better, Faster, Cheaper."

The notion of "better" rarely resonates with lawyers. In most cases, the "better" is something that benefits clients more than lawyers. Although you might perceive few immediate benefits, the benefits over the long term can be substantial.

Let me give you two examples of ways to use technology to improve client satisfaction.

First, after developing a document assembly application to generate first drafts of complex estate planning documents, I realized that the same process could routinely generate document summaries and charts of the estate plan for clients with little additional time or effort. For almost no additional cost, clients received a package that helped them really understand the contents of complex legal documents.

Second, with just a couple of mouse clicks, the ReportBooks feature of CaseMap 5 generates a handy client summary of the main facts, issues and cast of characters in a litigation matter, along with an assessment of some of the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence. That's something that clients will appreciate and will keep them coming back to you.

In each example, you are looking to use some aspect of technology, small or large, to improve your client's experience in working with you. It might be as simple as using a color printer or enlarging the font size for elderly clients.

You want to look at technology with an eye for how it might improve client service, which will help tie your clients to you for the long-term. Study after study shows that it is better and easier to land new business from existing clients than it is to go out and land new clients.

Making the Turn to Alternative Billing.

Better use of technology will help you build an environment where alternate billing approaches make sense and may even thrive. I am not, however, trying to convince you, that you must switch to alternative billing methods. I do want to suggest that experimenting with alternative billing is advisable. You can expect to see it from your competitors and be asked about it by clients.

Five essentials for using technology to move toward better billing practices and enhanced profitability are:

1. Understand the Facts and Do Not Rely on Assumptions. If a project takes ten hours of time at $100 an hour, then charging a $500 flat fee will never make economic sense. Similarly, if you do not know the costs per page of printers and copiers, you can't evaluate whether it makes sense to buy a new one. Knowing the total costs of hiring an employee is essential when evaluating outsourcing or technology alternatives.

2. Use Your Facts, Not Anyone Else's Facts. People always give me examples of cost savings from technology for a litigation practice. I do not have a litigation practice. The examples simply do not apply to me. Keep the focus directly on you and what's going on at your firm.

3. Cheaper Will Help You the Most Now, But Faster Will Be the Key in Alternative Billing. Keep your eye on profitability. The benefit of technology today is in how you can use it creatively to cut costs. Cutting costs will help you increase profits, which will give you the flexibility and capital to try new technologies and new approaches to billing. However, cutting costs is only one step. Almost every alternative billing approach makes the most sense when you reduce the time it takes to perform services and become more productive.

4. Look for Billing Inefficiencies as Indicators Where to Experiment with Alternative Billing. I'd be surprised if you cannot use your existing software to analyze your time, billing and collection records to generate useful business information. Are you doing that? You should be. Do some analysis with those programs or a spreadsheet and then use the information. Tasks that are consistently written off, expenses that are not billed and similar facts may show you areas where technology can help you or provide fertile ground for alternative billing experiments.

5. Look for Happy Clients You Can Make Happier. My informal surveys suggest that lawyers often use new clients to test alternative billing approaches. I suggest that you might get better results and feedback by approaching your happy clients. If you've used technology in the past to improve client service, they may be even more receptive.

Conclusion.

It will be a while before we see a massive shift away from hourly billing. However, do not make the assumption that productivity gains from technology are always at odds with the hourly billing system. Instead, focus on the contributions that technology can make to improving profitability – cutting costs, increasing revenues and improving client service – and then use a hard-headed realistic approach to looking at whether your technology helps you in these areas. Then, apply some of the ideas I discuss in this article to begin to experiment with alternative billing models where they make sense for you.

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Useful Resources on Alternative Billing Methods

Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell, Alternative Billing Requires Alternative Resources, Law Practice Today, September 2004 (http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/slc09041.html).

Jim Calloway and Mark Robertson, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590311175/Winning Alternatives to the Billable Hour, 2nd Edition: Strategies That Work, ABA Publishing.

Ron Baker, Professional's Guide To Value Pricing, CCH.

Alan Weiss, Value-Based Fees: How to Charge—and Get—What You're Worth, Pfeiffer.

The [Non]billable Hour Blog – http://www.nonbillablehour.com

Other Helpful Books on Value Billing

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Learn more about legal technology at Dennis Kennedy's Legal Technology Central page. More information on the "Second Pair of Eyes" packages for legal technology audits and strategic planning may be found here (PDF).

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Posted by dmk at 07:57 PM | Comments (2)

June 20, 2006

A Practical Confidential Information Protection Primer

Almost every law firm and lawyer can benefit from paying greater attention to the most basic and practical aspects of protecting information from prying eyes. If you want a good place to start, you simply can't beat Reg Adkins' post called "10 Spy Tips" on the Elemental Truths blog.

Reg lists ten top sources of data leakage and makes it clear that we are often "guarding the air conditioner duct instead of the front door."

The money quote:

If I wanted to know about a corporations business, I go to the snack bar at lunch and read the paper over coffee. You won't believe the things you hear (if you're in education, teacher lounges are hair raising!).

I remember once standing in line to order lunch behind a lawyer who was reading a document prominently labeled "CONFIDENTIAL" and oblivious that everyone in the line was reading over his shoulder.

Read the post and think about some of your habits and practices.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Like what you are reading? Check out the other blogs where I post - Between Lawyers (feed) and the LexThink Blog (feed).

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Posted by dmk at 09:05 PM | Comments (2)

May 22, 2006

Honoring the Tradition of Training: Ten Tips for Running a Summer Program

Denise Howell's recent post mentioning summer programs in law firms made me think back to the first article I ever wrote for publication, just over ten years ago. The article was called "Honoring the Tradition of Training: Ten Tips for Running a Summer Program." It was published in the ABA's Law Practice Management Magazine and I'll always be grateful to John Tredennick for deciding to publish the article.

I scoured my hard drive and found a copy of the article, which might be the original draft. I decided to republish it on my blog without making any changes to it.

This is the time of year that law students start summer jobs and law firms try to find ways to give law students a good summer associate experience. I know that there is still not a lot of material to help lawyers who run summer programs, so I hope that making this article available online will help some people.

I didn't re-read the whole article today. I did notice that it had some of the characteristics of what has become my writing "style" and I noticed that the paragraphs are so lo-o-o-ong, reminding me how writing styles have changed during the Internet era to reflect the way readers prefer to scan shorter paragraphs.

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Honoring the Tradition of Training: Ten Tips for Running a Summer Program

"How would you like to be in charge of our summer program?" So begins one of the most rewarding roles a younger attorney can have in the administration of a law firm.

You should take a momentary pleasure in the vote of confidence being so selected represents. The increased workload and time commitment, however, may seem a bit daunting. You probably know what you liked, and what you didn't like, about your own summer experiences. You have undoubtedly had some involvement with your firm's summer program and may even be a graduate of your firm's summer program. And you probably had at least an inkling that you would be asked to take on the leadership of the summer program. Where do you find help? What are the best sources?

I've just finished a four-year tour of duty in charge of the summer program at my firm. I was somewhat surprised to find that there are few articles and other materials available to help design and administer summer programs. Some of the more useful articles and sources may be found in the bibliography at the end of this article. Even better is to take over a well-designed program with a predecessor who will serve as an ongoing source of wise counsel and sage advice. That, however, may not always be the case.

This article lists my ten best tips for running a summer program. My firm has a relatively small summer program, but I have chosen the tips which have the most universal relevance. I have tried to combine both the practical and the philosophical and to place the role of running a summer program squarely within the tradition of training that is an integral part of the profession.

1. Involve Yourself in the Hiring Process. You have probably been interviewing law students for a number of years. Being part of the interview process allows you to develop relationships with summer associates early in the process and gives you an opportunity to evaluate potential recruits. When you are put in charge of summer program, you should become more than a mere participant in interviewing and hiring process. Becoming a member of the hiring committee or at least having significant involvement and input in the decision-making process is vital to the success of your summer program.

I tried to interview every candidate that we brought back to the office for a second interview and did a number of our on-campus interviews as well. This approach requires a significant time commitment and may not be practical in your situation. By interviewing each candidate, I could provide consistent answers to questions about our summer program and use my enthusiasm about the program to help sell the firm and the summer program. As time went on, I found that my experiences with summer program helped me identify potential candidates more easily and see potential problem areas with various candidates. I also found the interview process very helpful for getting feedback from students about what aspects of our summer program appealed to them and for getting responses to new ideas that I was considering for the next summer.

Because I saw a large part of my role as an interviewer to be providing information about the summer program, my interview techniques became friendlier and less-threatening. This approach pays dividends in helping you build an early relationship with offerees and allows you to be more active in actual recruiting of individuals. This early relationship also makes early and consistent contacts after a person accepts an offer a more natural process.
Being involved with your firm's hiring committee is useful for at least two other reasons. First, you will learn why offer decisions are made and what factors the other members of the hiring committee feel are important. This learning process will teach you many things about your firm, its culture and its mission. Second, after a couple of summers, you will have had the opportunity to field-test the results of those decisions and the assumptions on which they are based. Your observations become very important feedback to the hiring committee and should help to improve the hiring process.

2. Early Preparation Pays Off. It is difficult to exaggerate the time and energy commitment which is required to run a summer program. When the interviewing component of the job is included, running a summer program requires a significant amount of attention on a year-round basis. After the summer associates leave in August, you will find yourself writing memos to Managing Partners about the summer program, making your own notes about what worked and didn't work and deciding what might be new ideas to try the next summer.

It hardly seems that the summer associates have left (and sometimes they haven't) when you start interviewing law students for the next summer. You will be helping recruit your former associates who received offers and giving references for others. There might be 1-L interviews in December and January. In St. Louis, there is a Minority Clerkship Program which involves additional preparation and interviewing in the spring. By April I felt that I had to focus on the summer program and get set up for the arrival of new summer associates in May.

I also liked to incorporate new ideas in the summer program each year. I spent time looking for new articles and talking to others with the same job in other firms in the "off-season." I also talked to a number of people in the firm after the summer was over to help decide what went right and what went wrong. Also, there were always a number of people in the firm who sought me out to tell me what went right and what went wrong. I am afraid to add up all the hours that I spent in conversations with people about the summer program. As I suggested earlier, you learn many things about the culture, philosophy and mission of your firm by running its summer program.

You must have early and continuing contact with each person who accepts an offer with your firm. It can be as simple as a congratulatory note upon acceptance of the offer, a note to say good luck with finals at the beginning of December, a note to touch base with some information about the program in February and then a note every few weeks from April to the starting date. The worst mistake you can make is to have one of your summer associates call you up to confirm that he or she does, in fact, still have a job with you for the summer.

I also highly recommend some form of written manual and taking the time to do a comprehensive orientation on the first day a summer associate arrives. A manual can take many forms. I simply adapted our firm's staff manual into what I called a "guidebook" to help avoid any potential "official employee manual" employment issues. The guidebook contained a description of firm policies, phone numbers, computer, mail, copier and fax information, maps and biographies and secretarial arrangements. While I touched on much of the information covered in the guidebook during the orientation, the guidebook contained the type of material that will not be remembered after one listening. Our summer associates found it useful to have a written source to turn to for answers to basics questions. Never underestimate the importance of accurate office maps to your summer associates. In addition to the manual, I gave each summer associate and information packet with samples of written work and time sheets, an updated firm resume and telephone list, and articles useful to someone starting his or her legal career.

I have never liked to put someone right to work on his or her first morning on the job, but most summer associates arrive ready and raring to go. My compromise was to spend a few hours in the morning doing an orientation, touring the offices and introducing the summer associates to attorneys, taking them and their "buddies" to lunch, and then letting them get started on a project or two in the afternoon. It is unrealistic to expect that summer associates will hear and digest everything that you tell them in an orientation, but there are a number of items that they need to hear on a number of occasions and it is good to start immediately. I generally began with an introduction to the firm and its history, clients and structure. I proceeded to talk about matters specific to the summer program and then covered a broad range of practical details. I always took the approach that summer associates had not worked in a law firm before and stressed the practical while incorporating a few of my philosophical points about the program. I gave people practical tips about handling their first assignments and soliciting feedback, but I did not feel that walking through a sample assignment was useful. I also experiment with involving other people - managing partner, hiring partner, office manager, librarian - in the orientation itself. Involving others may make sense in your situation and it may even be part of your firm's culture, but I decided that it was best to keep the orientation focused and personal and, except for library tours, everything was covered by me.

The importance of early preparation for administrative matters - offices, secretarial arrangements, network setup, phone numbers, parking - goes without saying. It is good to get on top of this by April so that everyone is thinking along the same lines. If there is a problem with office space or number of secretaries, you can get it worked out much more easily over a six-week period than you can, say, over a six-day period.

Confidentiality and ethics issues involving summer associates have become far more significant in the last few years. There has been a growing awareness of potential conflicts of interest involving a summer associate who may have worked on the other side of a case at another firm the previous summer. Because summer associates are given small parts of cases, a summer associate may have worked on a case at another firm during the previous summer and have no idea of potential conflicts. A summer associate can get caught in the middle of these types of conflicts checks. The better approach seems to be to initiate contact, probably at an appropriate higher level, between your firm and the prior employer to work out the conflicts check issues and keep the summer associate out of the loop.

A large part of my early preparation went toward promoting interest in the summer program and increase participation by members of the firm. Make sure that people who will be participating in the program as "buddies," speakers, hosts of social events or in other capacities are contacted well in advance of the summer. I sent a memo to all attorneys and staff several weeks before the summer associates arrived describing the summer program, giving starting dates and providing brief biographies of summer associates. The day before a summer associate started an item containing a more detailed biography ran in our daily bulletin. Another item was placed in the daily bulletin on the actual start date and informed the receptionists when summer associates arrived so that they would be expected and warmly greeted. The little details really do matter. I also spoke about the summer program at the firm meeting in the spring. Participation by everyone at the firm is a large component of any successful summer program. Getting the summer program on peoples' minds is a first step toward getting that participation.

3. Make Use of Mentors. The summer program is probably not a place where you want to tough it out and go it alone. Although you are likely to run into a few things that no one else has ever experienced, many of the situations that arise during a summer are ones that arise fairly commonly. You will not have all the answers.
Your predecessors will most likely be tremendous sources of assistance to you. I talked to my predecessor on a regular basis and he was an enormous help to me. This type of regular consultation is a way to check your new ideas. Perhaps your ideas were considered or tried earlier. You should definitely learn where the potential pitfalls are as well as get a good sense of what has worked well before.

I also found the members of the hiring committee and the hiring partner to be good sources. It is good to remind them that the decisions they make have real consequences. People on the hiring committee are very interested in the training of younger attorneys and are often very willing to help you.

Your own mentor in the firm, even though he or she has little or no connection with the summer program, is often the best person to help you with some of the thornier issues or to give you important insights. In fact, tip #8 is a near quote from a comment made to me by my mentor as I lamented last summer that I felt I had the system really worked out, but that I was spending more time on the summer program than I ever had previously.

4. Consider Using a Buddy System. I am a big advocate of using a "buddy" system for your summer program. A "buddy" is a young associate who is paired up with a summer associate for the summer. I thought of them as "designated friends"; the buddies would have preferred the title of "associate advisor." A buddy's role, as with many things, lies somewhere in between. Each summer associate was paired with an associate in the firm with whom I thought he or she would be most compatible. The buddy helped the summer associate learn the culture of the firm and the many subtleties that are difficult to pick up in a short period of time - appropriate dress for casual day, forms to use, where to eat lunch and general information about working with individual attorneys. My notion was to try to have the assignment of a buddy act be a catalyst to a friendship that would be likely to develop over the summer in any event. I was not always successful at that, but I didn't expect to be.

The buddies also helped me by being my "eyes and ears" for potential problems and addressing other concerns before they became problems. For example, many summer associates will say that they can take on work even though they are swamped. A buddy could give me a more accurate assessment of the summer associate's workload and I could make the appropriate adjustment. On a lighter note, another example is the issue of what to wear to the firm picnic. I also found it infinitely preferable to pass off the issue to an appropriately-gendered buddy than try to answer questions about whether what type of swimsuit to wear to a pool party or float trip.

Although the use of buddies can take a good deal of the day-to-day load of running the summer program off of you, use of a buddy program does involve additional time to select buddies, keep them informed about what you want and to listen to their comments on summer associates. There are also tricky issues of confidentiality and objectivity. In my view, a buddy's job is to help the summer associate get an offer to return to the firm. As a general principle, a buddy could not give his or her summer associate a project. A buddy was not asked to give me a yes-no recommendation on the summer associate, although I would ask them for a more general assessment on the issue of "fit" and their opinions on whether a summer associate had a good experience and was likely to accept an offer.

For a buddy system to work well, a summer associate has to be able to feel that he or she can confide in a buddy. I chose to emphasize that aspect of the buddy relationship and respect the confidentiality of the relationship. There are obvious pluses and minuses of this approach and you might decide to take another approach. Disclosure of whatever the buddy's role is in the evaluation and information-gathering process, however, is essential.

Finally, a buddy system can help you handle the friend/evaluator dynamic that is an integral part of running a summer program. On the one hand, you want to have enough distance and objectivity to be an effective evaluator. On the other hand, it is unrealistic to expect that you won't end up liking everyone and rooting for them to get an offer. The buddy system allows you to be a bit stronger in the evaluator role. Because buddies are much nearer in age to the summer associates, a buddy system also helps you avoid looking foolish by trying to act like you are younger and hipper than you are.

5. Involve Attorneys on a Regular, Structured Basis Other Than Simply Giving Assignments. I met with all the summer associates on a regular, weekly basis. We would meet each Friday morning in the same conference room. The meetings had two purposes. First was the business side of the meeting. This part of the meeting lasted above five minutes and allowed me to discuss upcoming events, any problems that had arisen, workload issues and the like. The summer associates then had an opportunity to raise any issues that applied to the group at large (individual matters had to be discussed with me individually). The second purpose of the meeting was to have one of the partners in the firm give a talk to the summer associates. Partners could talk on any subject related to their specialty with only the instruction to make their talks personal rather than institutional. Partners were to talk about how they chose their specialty, what they liked most about their work and what they actually did on a daily basis. Invariably, this approach resulted in a discussion of advice that the attorney would give to a young law student. I followed the talk with a short homily emphasizing a point or two that the speaker made. Parents with children who watch Barney will recognize this approach.

This approach built on some of the things which were already being done in the program and reflected part of my answer to my consistent question: "What would I have liked to see when I worked during the summer?" Although this type of program results in a larger expenditure of time, it is very worthwhile. First, it is a non-threatening way to introduce attorneys to the summer associates and to help break down perceived barriers for the summer associates. After speaking to the group, a partner would be more inclined to take summer associates to lunch, to have them accompany him or her to a deposition or closing or to give out more projects. Summer associates were also more likely to seek the partner out either for projects or to discuss some of the points raised in the talk.

Second, it helps law students learn what lawyers actually do. Many law students simply do not know what an average lawyer does let alone what lawyers do in some of the more esoteric areas. Third, because I usually had eight to ten speakers in the course of a summer, I was able to promote participation from attorneys in various departments. Fourth, I could tailor speakers and, in a few cases, topics, to the particular group that I had for the summer. Some attorneys who I wanted the summer associates to meet might not be able to give projects, but were able to speak to them. I also let the summer associates pick one speaker at the end of each summer, which proved to be a very popular and successful experiment. It is a powerful motivator to tell an attorney that the summer associates have picked him or her as the one person they would most like to hear.

You can also benefit immensely from learning about the firm and its history and culture and, more importantly, about your partners and their history, work and interests. You will certainly benefit from being able to refer potential clients to others in your firm and to cross-sell existing clients as a result of the knowledge you gain about your partners that you might not have otherwise known.

6. Adopt a Structured Approach to Feedback and Evaluations. The two dragons of the summer program are feedback and evaluations. These two areas are largely a function of firm culture and you may be able to do little to change existing practices. To paint a fair picture of life at your firm, you will want to develop a feedback and evaluation system that is not too different from the one that is being used for young associates. I focused on eliminating barriers to feedback and evaluation and tried to minimize the amount of paperwork involved. I developed an explicitly two-tiered approach to feedback.

For feedback on the specifics of a given project, I simply relied on the one-on-one relationship between the assigning attorney and the summer associate. I told the summer associate that I would get involved in project feedback only if asked. Part of what I wanted to do was to push summer associates to seek feedback and to help them recognize feedback when they got it. Learning to get and interpret feedback is an essential skill that must be learned and practiced by young attorneys.

My focus was on the general evaluations rather than on specific project feedback. I gave two evaluations during each summer, one in the middle of the summer and one at the end of the summer. Each attorney with whom a summer associate had worked received an evaluation form and I concentrated on ways to get the highest level of responses. I experimented with different evaluation forms and finally decided to use a simplified form with 4 or 5 rating areas that forced a general conclusion. Attorneys seemed to write more comments when I left little space for comments than when I left large white spaces for comments. I used these evaluation forms as the basis for my own comments to the summer associates and filtered the responses back to the summer associates. This approach was preferable to showing summer associates the individual evaluation forms. Personally soliciting oral evaluations from attorneys may sometimes result in more in-depth evaluations, but the enormous amount of time that can be involved probably does not make this method practical in most firms.

Students generally will tell you that they are most interested in getting a thorough and honest evaluation at the middle of the summer. I put a lot of effort into the mid-summer evaluation. A mid-summer evaluation can be very inaccurate since it tends to highlight the comments on the first few projects done by the summer associate. Nonetheless, it is vital to get summer associates as information as possible by mid-summer.

I preferred a structured format for evaluations. I used the same format for each summer associate. Each summer associate review lasted at least 20 - 30 minutes. I began by explaining how the information was gathered and the potential inaccuracies that might arise during the evaluation process, especially at mid-summer. I then discussed with as many specifics as possible the positive aspects of the evaluations. I then mentioned at least three areas for improvement, again using as many specifics as I could. It is one thing to say that someone is "careless"; it is far better to say that the person needs to pay attention to detail and point to a specific oversight, like leaving out a page of a copy of a memo that was turned in to the assigning attorney. An evaluation of the summer associate's written work was next on my agenda. I tried to read some examples of each summer associate's writing, but I focused on a general set of points I wanted to emphasize during the summer - attention to detail, use of citation, drawing conclusions, considering the audience - and then made a few specific comments on the written work. Finally, I asked the summer associate for a self-assessment and his or her view on how things were going. The summer associate and I then tried to develop a plan for the rest of the summer to address the improvement areas or any other problems and to try to get specific types of work in which the summer associate was interested. The final evaluation followed the same format except that I asked for the self-assessment at the beginning of the meeting before giving my comments and I solicited feedback on the summer program and talked specifically about the summer associate's desire to return to the firm.

I liked this highly structured approach because it allowed for criticisms to be made in a positive framework, it ensured that each evaluation was similar, it made it easy for me to keep notes of each evaluation and to eliminate the complaint that "you never told me there were things I had to improve," and it promoted a two-way flow to the evaluation. It is important to seek information as well as impart it. My approach takes a good deal of time and effort, but it provides good information to the summer associates and it helps eliminate misunderstandings from evaluations which can take endless amounts of time to sort out.

7. Handling Social Events. My least favorite part of running our summer program was organizing and promoting social events. The social events were great, but working around schedule problems, work emergencies and other distractions was extremely difficult. And that was just getting the summer associates together.

My conclusion is that no matter how great a social event may be you are always better off getting summer associates out of the office, and out of the library, to attend trials, depositions, closings or any other work that shows what an attorney actually does. The time spent riding and talking with an attorney in a car to and from a deposition will likely turn out to be a more pivotal experience for the summer than will a night at the opera. Similarly, lunches and small group activities are also preferred by most summer associates.

The key, however, is to be who you are. Social events which fit within the firm culture and which are in line with your own personality as well turn out better than a great new idea that you may have. What you want to achieve is a setting where both attorneys and summer associates are relatively relaxed and comfortable (even though most law schools seem to counsel students never to let down their guard at any time) and the summer associates can get a better sense of what the attorneys in your firm are like outside a work setting.

I did not like to schedule many social events in the first few weeks of the summer. You will want to get a reading of what your summer associates' interests are first. Last year's most successful activity might be a disaster with this year's group. Remember also that a summer associate can get overbooked for the summer. Be sure that you do not plan so many activities that summer associates have little free time on the weekends or begin to see the events as a burden.

I always preferred a realistic approach. If there are twice as many social events in the summer as there are in the rest of year, you probably need to rethink your approach.

Remember that you do not have to do everything with respect to the summer program. Delegation is key. Getting several people, especially the buddies, to take over the planning of social events can be a big help. Another good idea is not to attend every event. Your presence can inhibit summer associates and, if you are not there, they can feel that they are not necessarily being told the party line.

8. It's a People Job, Not a Systems Job. Last summer was my fourth summer of running our summer program. I had all of my systems worked out and running smoothly. But I found that I was spending even more time on the summer program than I ever had before. It was frustrating me until I heard the words: "Well, it's a people job, not a systems job."

The systems that you design can make things flow more easily and smoothly, but running a summer program is a very high-maintenance operation. Many people are involved who need to be given attention on a regular basis. Do you really want to go for a week or more without chatting with each summer associate? Do you want to have regular meetings with buddies? Friday morning meetings may take up another hour or two. Managing workload can take up a good deal of time. Gathering evaluations from attorneys who do not turn in their forms can take a great deal of time. Evaluations take time. During the last few weeks of the summer, people who rarely, if ever, speak to you, will spend a great deal of time asking how summer associates are doing and speculating on offers. It is not uncommon to have at least one day during the summer where you find that it is time to go home and you know that all you have done is deal with summer program issues and you have no idea what they all were.

Because it is a people job, the best skills that you can have are flexibility and adaptability. Part of my enjoyment in running our program was making successful modifications in the way I did things during the course of the summer in reaction to the different people and situations we had. I tried to give the summer associates a high level of input into the way the summer program ran. There was also at least one issue which arose every summer for which I was completely unprepared and which I could not have predicted.

By all means, work on setting up a good system. But remember that any system you design will have to be modified over the course of a summer.

9. Practice Patience. My philosophy was to create an atmosphere where summer associates had a chance to show what they could do and then to let them do it. It is better to let a summer associate adopt the approach that he or she believes best than it is to force them into a mold that you think might be best. I did, however, try to do some steering if it seemed appropriate or necessary.

There are a tremendous number of practical skills that a summer associate has to learn over the course of a summer. Part of the summer experience is learning how to deal with these practical issues: How do I get my work done when my secretary is sick? Or, by "memo", did the assigning attorney mean a two-page action memo like my last assignment or twenty-page "law review" memo like the one before that? Or, how can people say that because the assigning attorney rewrote every sentence of my memo and kept rubbing her temples while talking me I should get the message that I had done a good job?

Most of these lessons should be learned by the summer associate himself or herself. Unless the summer associate is really floundering, it is probably best to resist the urge to jump right in and bail him or her out at the first hint of a problem. The vast majority of problems work themselves out in a fairly short period of time. This is especially true of the problems you hear second-hand. When a summer associate comes to you directly, though, you have to deal with the issue directly.

Some issues that arise during the summer should be delegated appropriately. I did everything possible to stay out of issues involving office furniture, for example. Secretarial and administrative issues should be handled by the summer associate with the office manager. Running the summer program gains you precious little weight at the firm - you do not want to be reminded too often how little - and you will want to choose your battles carefully.

Using a buddy system also gives the summer associate an initial friendly first step for advice on handling some issues. Generally, a summer associate is disinclined to bring every little issue to you. You want to be sure that they understand that you are always available when needed, but that there are often other avenues to try.

10. Don't Be Afraid to Stamp Your Imprint. Everyone runs a summer program in response to his or her own summer experience _ keeping the parts you liked, downplaying or eliminating what you didn't like and adding some of the things that you wished would have been part of your own experience. No matter how structured your summer program is, there will be some opportunities to have the program reflect your personality and your insights. It is wrong to simply be a care-taker of your firm's existing program. Every program can be improved.

I tried something new every year. My particular interest was in using the summer program to provide educational opportunities during the summer. For example, I talked one of my partners into being a writing advisor for summer associates. Once I was comfortable with the general structure of the program (and I inherited a good one), I enjoyed trying new things during the summer. As a result, our summer program had a spontaneous feel that reflected my personality.

What I learned at the end of my fourth year was that the person who runs a summer program, in many ways, the first mentor law students will have. Your philosophy about the profession, your enthusiasm about the practice and your firm, and your approach to the training of young lawyers will probably be passed on to your summer associates. That is at the same time both a sobering and exciting realization. George Leonard, in his book, Mastery, says that in choosing a teacher it is good to know who that teacher's teachers were. As I thought about this statement, I decided to make my last talk to summer associates about my own mentors and teachers. It is fascinating to see your own training as part of a historical tradition of teaching and to realize, as I did, how greatly you have benefited from the instruction you received early in your career. You honor your teachers by continuing their tradition of training.

Conclusion

I don't know whether I decided to stop running our summer program because the summer associates kept calling me "Dad" or because I heard myself saying "what a great group of kids." Running a summer program is and should be a young person's game, for many reasons. But I had a four great years.

The great enjoyment and reward of running a summer program comes largely from the opportunity to know, teach and assist the extremely bright, motivated and interesting law students who will end up working at your firm for a summer or, you hope, much longer. I had four "great groups of kids" who impressed me greatly and from whom I learned many things. I am richer for knowing all of them and hope that I have contributed in some small way to helping them become the excellent lawyers, and people, that they are capable of becoming.

I interviewed a law student this fall who told me a story of working with an older sole practitioner for period of time while she was deciding whether or not to go to law school. He gave her a lot of work, but also took a lot of time to talk to her about law school and the profession. When she told him that she had decided to go to law school, he told her that he had spent all the time with her because when he was young an older attorney had done the same thing for him. And, he told her, if she became a lawyer, she would have the same obligation to another young person in a similar situation. This is part of the tradition of the profession.

Often today you see and hear of an obsession with the "career path" and staying on it and fearing that you might fall even one step behind, that time spent working with young law students is time that might be better spent working on your own specialty, and that no one has any time for anyone other than himself or herself. I strongly believe that there is plenty of time and, if running a summer program is a detour off the fast track, it is a detour well worth making, a detour that has long been part of the tradition of the profession.

+++++++

Bibliographic Note: In many ways, the best general reference is Arnold B. Kantner's chapter on summer programs in The Lawyer Hiring Handbook (NALP). A good general article is Daniel F. Hinkel's "Success With Summer Associates" in the April, 1987 ABA Journal at pages 66 -70. An excellent practical article which focuses on orientation is Michele Mainaro's "How to Start Off a Summer Program" in the May 20, 1991 issue of The National Law Journal. You may also have access to seminar materials. The National Association for Law Placement is another source of information. Tapes of sessions relating to summer programs from the NALP annual convention are readily available and can be helpful as would attendance at the seminars.

Written in December, 1995/January, 1996

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Technorati tags: summer associate summer program law firm

Posted by dmk at 06:41 PM

April 17, 2006

Should Law Firms Have Chief Innovation Officers?

Renee Callahan Hopkins raises the question "Should companies have Chief Innovation Officers?" in the new Corante Innovation Hub.

Fascinating discussion. I wonder if we'll see any law firms moving in that direction?

This topic might be an interesting one to discuss at the rapidly-approaching LexThink Lounge event.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Technorati tags: LexThink! Lounge LexThink! chief innovation officer unconference innovation

Posted by dmk at 08:37 PM | Comments (1)

March 01, 2006

Of Counsel Resources

A while back, I did some research on of counsel arrangements between law firms and lawyers. I didn't find a lot of resources, but I found a few and thought I'd post them here as a little starter research packet.

All roads seem to point to Harold Wren and Beverly Glascock's The Of Counsel Agreement, Third Edition : A Guide for Law Firm and Practitioner as the definitive work on the subject. It costs $89, so I concentrated on resources freely available on the internet. In most situations, however, the Wren and Glascock book will be a reasonable purchase (or worth a trip to a law school library).

Here's my starter list:

• Graham Chynoweth's Of Counsel: Meaning and Practice is a good, substantive review of Wren's book.
• Greg Suess and Richardson Lynn's The Of Counsel Role and its Implication for Law Firms is my favorite general article that covers most of the issues.
• McGuire Woods has a list of Legal Ethics Opinion Summaries involving Of Counsel Arrangements
• California Formal Ethics Opinion 1993-129 has a good discussion of the general ethical issues arising out of of counsel arrangements.
• Elizabeth Gorman's Moving Away from Up or Out is a thoughtful and comprehensive academic article that discusses of counsel arrangements.
• Willian Freivogel discusses ethical issues in some common of counsel arrangements here.
• Nancy Gormans' "The Of Counsel relationship" is a good overview introduction to the issues.
• Del O'Roark's If it Looks Like a Parrot . . . is another solid introduction to the topic.
• Virtual Law, Inc. tells the story of a Hawaii "virtual law firm" that uses of counsel arrangements and has no associaties.
• Thomas Sukowicz's Of Counsel Liability is a good, recent overview article on a wide variety of of counsel issues.
• The ALPS Risk Management Report - "Of Counsel" - At Least Two Different Points of View covers the issues from the view of a malpractice insurance carrier.
• Charles Slanina's "Of Counsel": Starting a sentence with a preposition can be a problem, too points out the unintended consequences of this type of arrangement.
• Peter Kennedy's Perilous Practice discusses disqualification issues in California.
• The Florida Bar's Of Counsel Information Packet is a 25-page set of helpful materials.
• The South Carolina Bar has a sample Of Counsel agreement.

This list should help you get started. I'll note that much of the materials dates from several years ago and do not explore the ways of counsel arrangements might be used in non-traditional ways.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Technorati tags: legal profession of counsel

Posted by dmk at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)

Another Law Blogger Goes the Solo Practice Route

Anthony "Biz Bang Buzz" Cerminaro makes his announcement that he is leaving his law firm to start a solo practice. Ernest "Ernie the Attorney" Svenson also made a similar announcement today.

I noticed that Tony made a passing reference to what has jokingly become known as "Kennedy's Law of Blogging" - that bloggers are highly likely to make a significant career change within about 18 months or so of starting a blog. It's my little take-off on Moore's Law.

I will note that these kinds of moves do not surprise me. Many law firms experience partner departures in the first few months of each year.

The trend that really strikes me, however, and one that should give many law firms some concern, is that it is the most tech-savvy lawyers in a firm that are often the ones who are leaving. These are often the lawyers who are the "de facto" technology committees and certainly the "go to" people on legal technology issues. They are also often the people who can work as the go-betweens between the IT department and lawyers and clients.

Departures of tech-savvy lawyers can have significant short-term and long-term consequences for law firms. This is a trend to watch. I find that most of the lawyers who know the most about technology are no longer with the firms they started with - they are now consultants, solo practitioners and doing other work related to technology. This "brain drain" from law firms bears some watching and some study.

In all events, congratulations and all best wishes to Ernest and Anthony on their new endeavors.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Learn more about legal technology at Dennis Kennedy's Legal Technology Central page.

Technorati tags: legal technology Law2.0

Posted by dmk at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

Ernie the (Solo) Attorney

In a story that is sweeping what some affectionately call the "blawgosphere," Ernest "Ernie the Attorney" Svenson has officially announced his departure from his former law firm and the opening of his solo law practice.

The respect and affection that law-related bloggers, especially the old-timers among us, have for Ernest is as real as can be. Ernest and Denise Howell were the inspiration for many of us to blog in the first place and set a standard of quality, generosity, good humor and inclusiveness that has helped create the unique niche that "blawgs" have in the world of blogging.

In fact, it is a sign of the respect that other bloggers have for Ernest that none of the people had been given the heads-up on this story posted about it until Ernest announced it himself.

So, Ernie, my friend, all best wishes on this next step in your journey. As a song lyric says, "the storm that rends also mends." As you continue your post-Katrina search to find your path, know that you have many friends who will be happy to lend a hand, in no small part for what you have done for us.

As Ernest says:

Dreams that seemed not so pressing before Katrina now seem to be more urgent. I've learned a lot from Katrina, as I'm sure many people have. One thing Katrina taught us is that massive change can arrive very quickly, and have unpredictable results. If uncontrolled massive change can come into your life then why not try to bring about a little purposeful change just to balance things out?

I'll note that, for now, Ernest has decided not to go with my advice that he open a string of "Ernie the Attorney" franchise law firms across the country. I'll also raise the question that I know that is on other peoples' minds - what might a law firm comprised of lawyer bloggers look like?

As my gift to Ernie on the start of his new firm, I am bequeathing to him the spot I have been inexplicably given on the new MyHQ Blawgroll in the category of "Blawgfathers" and a lifetime hotline to call me about technology and other issues.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Like what you are reading? Check out the other blogs where I post - Between Lawyers (feed) and the LexThink Blog (feed).

Technorati tag: Law2.0

Posted by dmk at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

Does Bernard Hibbitts Have a New Editor's Blog at JURIST?

I'm still not sure that my all question-and-answer format experiment is going to work (as the title of this post suggests), but I am sure that it's great news to see that another legal internet pioneer, Professor Bernard Hibbitts, has launched a new blog called the JURIST Editor's Blog over at the widely-praised JURIST legal resources website, which has long been one of the premier legal websites.

The Editor's Blog will highlight what's new on the site and share some views on legal news and resources. Professor Hibbitts tells me that the JURIST site, among others things, integrates seventeen separate blogs into their legal newstream so seamlessly that many people do not realize that it is, at heart, a blog.

The Editor's Blog has started out with coverage of the Alito hearings and links to useful resources about the hearings.

It's great to put a human face on the JURIST site and learn more about Professor Hibbitts' point of view on legal matters. I'll also note that he looks younger in his picture than I had imagined him to be. Check out the new Editor's Blog and its RSS feed. As they say, subcribed!

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Posted by dmk at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2006

What Can American Movies Teach Us About Selling Professional Services?

Mike Schultz on RainToday.com has a entertaining and educational article (that's the best kind) called "Hidden Advice In American Film For Selling Professional Services" about the "secret messages" about selling professional services that can be found in famous movie quotes.

A few examples:

"Why don't you come up sometime and see me?"
#26, Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, 1933
Secret messages: Pay attention for buying signals.

"Show me the money!"
#25, Cuba Gooding, Jr. in Jerry Maguire, 1996
Secret message: Make sure your buyers are qualified. If they don't have a budget or can't find the cash, move on.

"Bond. James Bond."
#22, Sean Connery in Dr. No, 1962
Secret message: Make sure people know who you are.

A fun and informative article. I'm waiting on a sequel that tells us about lessons from quotes from foreign films.

I recommend subscribing to RainToday.com's free Rainmaker Report email newsletter - it always seems to have good articles.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Posted by dmk at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2005

Looking for a Little Help Researching "Of Counsel" Arrangements

I'm working on a little research project, maybe it will turn into an article, on the practical aspects of "of counsel" arrangements between lawyers and law firms.

In part, my working hypothesis is that "virtual law firms" (I know that some of you don't like that term, but bear with me) will be founded on the evolution of "tried and true" legal relationships between lawyers rather than on some kind of new form of "affiliation" or other relationship model.

It seemed like a straightforward topic, until I started doing a little research and couldn't find much of anything.

Here's what I'm looking for some help on:

1. Collections of resources, outlines and articles on this topic (non-premium resources, to the extent possible). Send me the URLs.

2. If you are willing, sanitized copies of "of counsel" agreements so I can see what the standard approaches are.

3. Information, including anecdotal info, about financial and other arrangements and the successes and failures of this approach.

4. Discussion of ethical and practical issues.

I'll create a page of links to the best of the resources I find and post it here and/or on my website.

Thanks for your help.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Posted by dmk at 04:49 PM | Comments (1)

December 12, 2005

Yet Another Reason I'm a Big Fan of Law Librarian Blogs

Betsy McKenzie's post "Rex Libris - Librarian Regnant!" on the Out of the Jungle blog is a celebration of law libraries and law librarians, an enjoyable read and an invitation to read further into the excellent Out of the Jungle blog (and subscribe to its RSS feed).

The post starts out like this and is a pleasure to read (and I encourage you to do so):

"Here is what I think is important and timeless about libraries and librarians: we embody the culture and caring of our society, passed down over the ages. From the Great Library of Alexandria, where items on the shelves were scrolls and finding aids were lists and it was a huge technical leap to arrange things in alphabetical order -- through the medieval monasteries which kept learning alive in western Europe by hand copying Bibles and commentaries and classical manuscripts -- to today's libraries where we are in danger of forgetting our heritage and meaning."

I've long felt that the law librarian blawgs as a group represent some of the very best work in all of legal blogging. And, as I've asked before, will employers please give these librarians some nice raises and bonuses for their work in the blogging world?

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Posted by dmk at 07:59 PM | Comments (1)

October 07, 2005

Pat Lamb on Alternative Fees

Pat Lamb packs a lot of wisdom into this short post about alternative fee arrangements and client service. But don't take my word - read the post.

The money quote:

"The real solution is abandoning hourly rates. But I realize most clients won’t just jump wholesale to this model. So my advice? Experiment. Send some of your work to firms that will do it on a modified fixed fee arrangement."

A bonus money quote for the post that led to Pat's post from the excellent Wired GC blog:

"How long can law firms continue to meet their challenges by raising rates and hourly targets?

The survey says: perhaps not much longer."

In the world of interesting coincidences, I had a long conversation today (before I read Pat's post) with Peter Jenkins of the very innovative Law Department Consortium and I noticed that Pat Lamb is a member of the Law Department Consortium's Advisory Board. That's a group worth watching.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com)]

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Posted by dmk at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

The Big Firm to Solo Practice Route Becomes Less Attractive?

I read a fascinating article today (couldn't find an online version to link to) about a survey that asked lawyers in big law firms whether they would leave their firms to start a solo practice if they were guaranteed sufficient capital to do so.

93% of the respondents said "NO" they would not do so, even with the necessary capital in hand. This number represents a significant increase from the surveys of the last two years.

Given the general sense that generation X is more entrepreneurial than the baby boom generation and the number of big firm lawyers who've complained to me over the years that lack of capital to start their own practice was the only thing keeping them at a big firm, I find the results quite surprising. I'm curious to see what others think of these results, even accepting that they probably are not scientifically valid results.

For those 7% who might want to make the jump, let me note the new 4th edition of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's Flying Solo book has just been published and it is a treasure trove of information for any lawyer in or planning to start a solo practice. Bill Gibson did a masterful job of editing the new edition. I was a co-editor of the Technology section and wrote three chapters. Check it out.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Posted by dmk at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2005

Taking a Fresh Look at the AmLaw Second One Hundred

While you can quibble with some of the factors used in the AmLaw Top 100 and 200 rankings, some of the emphasis placed on the analysis and some of the conclusions that people draw about the rankings, the rankings and related statistical information are a great place to start to take a close look at the big firm end of the legal profession.

Vivia Chen's article, "Am Law 200: Success on a Smaller Scale," does a nice job of setting out this year's results.

In more ways than one, here's the money quote:

"Despite that cheery news, the reality is that the Second Hundred is still the poor cousin of The Am Law 100 -- firms 1 through 100 in our ranking -- and getting poorer by comparison."

I'm interested in the nuances revealed in the article. Although there are some allusions to innovation, there's not a lot of innovation discussed in the article. There is so much more innovation happening at smaller firms. In the Second 100, you see success through leverage (interestingly, in the example, the successful leverage comes through a heavy use of paralegals) and flat-fees (although, curiously, one firm representative backs away from crediting flat fees for improvements in profit).

The quote I found most intriguing in the article comes from Hughes Hubbard managing partner Candace Beinecke, who says, "I don't know what it means to be full-service anymore." The so-called "medium-sized" firms have been struggling with that notion for many years. The first step is admitting that the idea of being "full-service" may be the source of the biggest problems in a medium-sized firm. As a side note, in some states, advertising rules may prevent you from referring to your firm as a "full-service" firm.

How about a second money quote?

"There's a perception that commodity work is bad, but it's just structured differently," says Lisa Smith, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant with Hildebrandt International. "You don't need to do it in New York City with Harvard Law graduates."

There is little doubt that the 101 to 200 firms are in the toughest and most volatile part of the legal market. Lots of challenges,, but significant opportunities. These firms, their strategies and the changes and trends in this category are always worth studying. Not all of these firms will be around in one, two or five years from now, but watching to see what strategies the survivors choose to use will teach both smaller and some of the larger firms paths to consider and to avoid.

By the way, notice how little emphasis is placed on the use of technology in this article. There is a growing disconnect between the technologies clients want their firms to use and the willingness of law firms to invest in these technologies. My bet is still that the clients, in a few years, will start to win these battles on a regular basis.

For some of my most recent thinking about the use of technology in the practice of law and future trends, listen to the podcast I recently recorded with Microsoft's Randy Holloway.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Posted by dmk at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2005

The Sand and the Sea

I love the title Gerry Riskin chose for his recent post on law firm strategic planning - "38% of Law Firms are the Sand and their Clients are the Sea."

The post is great, too.

The money quote:

"Planning is about making choices about what you prefer to do. You earn the right to do those things by providing more valuable legal work that the right prospective clients can appreciate."

Otherwise, as Gerry says, "You just sit there like a grain of sand on the beach and your next work opportunity depends on the the nature of the next wave that rolls in."

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Posted by dmk at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

Great Article on Improving Diversity in Law Firms

Virginia Grant at Altman Weil has written an article called "For Law Departments: Five Strategies to Help Your Outside Firms Increase Diversity (PDF file)" that will reward you greatly for the time you spend reading and thinking about it, and then acting upon its recommendations.

Diversity, like technology, is an area where clients definitely will begin to drive the actions of law firms, with increasingly less patience. Are you going to keep talking about these issues or are you going to do something about it?

The money quote:

"Law firms tend to give the same reason for why their diversity demographics are not at the level they would like: not enough qualified candidates, or an inability to attract minority candidates.
Corporate law departments should not continue to accept such excuses. Law departments must remind law firms that they are in the business of providing solutions and resolving difficult situations." (emphasis added)

Highly recommended, as is a subscription to Altman Weil's email newsletter called Altman Weil Direct.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2005

Discussing Legal Advertising Ethics

I kicked off a discussion about the current state of the ethics rules for legal advertising rules over on Between Lawyers. My initial remarks are discussed in a number of follow-up posts and comments. It all makes for a good discussion of these issues and I recommend the entire thread to you.

In the best and worst category, I'll note that the substantive comments made me think even harder about enabling comments on this blog, while a wavelet of comment spam made me wonder if enablng comments would really be a wise move.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 03:26 PM

May 04, 2005

Bizz Bang Buzz - Great Bizz Info

Anthony Cerminaro's blog Bizz Bang Buzz (feed) is a great example of a lawyer blog that consistently bring you great practical information. It's also a good model for a way you can use a blog to provide useful info that your clients and other lawyers will appreciate - guaranteeing that they will keep you in mind.

Recent postings for just one day included items on questionable employee interview questions, tips for managing a patent portfolio, a summary of business changes in the new bankruptcy act, the Sedona Guidelines for managing information and records, passion and business plan cover sheets. All of it was great. The title fits.

Highly recommended.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 11:10 PM

April 27, 2005

Why Lawyers and Legal Bloggers (Blawgers) Love Google

I couldn't help but notice how Ernie and Matt have been spending their time running Google searches about themselves and then applauding the wisdom of Google. I was a little surprised that they would resort to this type of posting, which was largely pioneered by me at times when I was desperate for material and seeking external validation for my efforts.

I really want to be impressed with Ernie's results and Matt's results, but, frankly, I'm not as impressed as they are (and who could be, really?). Here's why:

In the category that really matters to all legal bloggers, note that I, Dennis Kennedy, am the first result in a Google search today for "coolest legal blogger" and "coolest legal blog."

I'm also thrilled to have Google rank my blog as the #1 result for "best named legal blog."

Among other honors I now have in Google are being the first result for:

"best legal blogger"

"best legal blog"

"most famous legal blogger"

"legal blogger you most want to have a beer with"

"most important dennis kennedy in the world"

"leading legal thinker named dennis kennedy"

"legal blogger who should be paid a lot more money"

"best writer of the legal bloggers"

Oh, Google, you are making me blush.

My colleagues at Between Lawyers have also done well.

Congrats to Tom Mighell - "most admired blawger"

Denise Howell - "most respected blawger" and "best litigator of the legal bloggers." Denise is also the "happiest blawger."

Unfortunately, Google was not so kind to Marty Schwimmer who received only the "best marty schwimmer who authors the trademark blog" award, but I have no doubt he'll find a few others.

Other Google awards of note:

In a bit of a surprise, Jeff "LawTech Guru" Beard took the "most ironic blawger" award.

Evan Schaeffer walked away with the award for "best coffee mug given away by a legal blogger." I was shocked to defeat Evan in the category of "funniest legal blogger."

Of course, Google has a changing dynamic and can be, at times, a bit capricious in handing out favored search rankings. Your results may vary, depending upon (1) when you click any of the links in this post and (2) the efforts of others currently less favored by Google to optimize the favor with which Google treats them.

Not surprisingly, Google also found me as the first result on "most nonbillable hours today of legal bloggers." Back to work.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 10:56 AM

April 26, 2005

New Issue of Law Practice Today Available

I might be a little biased because I'm an editor, but another great the ABA Law Practice Management Section's webzine Law Practice Today has hit the Internet.

This month's theme is malpractice prevention and you'll be able to do a ton of malpractice prevention with the generous collection of features, columns and other material in this issue. Check out the new issue and look for the RSS feed and email subscription to make sure that you get notice of each new issue as early as possible.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 04:05 PM

April 19, 2005

Interesting Top 20 Legal Thinkers Research Project

As my long-time readers know, I tend to shy away from controversy on this blog.

I was struck today by the post “The Women of IP Law & Policy” on Copyfight.

I don’t have any free time to do this research project, but someone who does might compare the instances of overlap between the Copyfight list and the recent Top 20 Legal Thinkers list. I suspect that they might reach some interesting conclusions.

On what might be a related note, kudos to Lisa Stone, et al., for putting together the upcoming Blogher Conference.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 09:05 PM

April 17, 2005

Homann Not Named One of Top 20 Legal Thinkers

With considerably less fanfare than the original announcement of the poll, Legal Affairs, apparently an important magazine covering legal issues, has released its list of the top 20 U.S. legal thinkers, containing most of the usual suspects.

I'm disappointed to report that Matt Homann's valiant write-in candidacy was unsuccessful. You would think that his involvement in LexThink might have helped his candidacy.

As expected, the publication did not rectify the embarrassing omission of a category for practicing lawyers, presumably because they believe that practicing lawyers are not thinkers. Just kidding - I'm sure that they just forgot that we exist and no slight was intended. As the announcement says, "Our list lists to the right a bit, but it also interestingly betrays a presumably non-partisan bias among voters toward judges and academics over journalists and other commentators." Practicing lawyers must be included in "other commentators." I'm sure that's the case.

Congratulations to the winners - I'll let others run the stats on diversity, political leanings and the like.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 07:02 PM

April 13, 2005

Advice to Young Lawyers #28

Posts like “Advice to Young Lawyers #28” give Evan Schaeffer a lock on the title of funniest legal blogger. For those interested in discussing billable hours, this post is must reading. For those who ponder where “thinking like a lawyer” can take you, this post may give you a clue. For those who’d like to find time to read more blogs, Evan does the math. Highly recommended.

Hey, Evan, thanks for the coffee mug. But I really liked the post that prompted you to give me the mug. Would you autograph it for me so I can sell it for more money after you become a famous Hollywood screenwriter?

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 09:31 PM

April 06, 2005

Multiple Takes on the Billable Hour Issue

Bruce MacEwen has posted Savvy Blawgers Query #2: The Future of the Billable Hour. It's thought-provoking reading on the much-debated value billing topic. This topic was the subject at one of the sessions at LexThink.

I gave what I thought was a short, pithy statement that argued, I thought, that inertial forces would keep lawyers from making the change to value billing on their own. Unfortunately, Bruce interpreted what I said almost in almost exactly the opposite way from what I meant.

I said:

"Answer: The future of the billable hours is in the hands of clients. Without client pressure, there is little reason to expect many lawyers or firms to change the current system on their own. Ultimately, however, there will be practical limits for how high rates can go and the number of hours lawyers can work. Until then, I expect alternative billing to remain in the realm of experiment, primarily used by innovative lawyers who will be criticized by some of their peers and praised by their clients. Here's a great experiment: ask lawyers whether they like to have repair, construction or any other services done on an hourly billing basis, without an estimate or cap. If lawyers don't like that approach for their services (and, believe me, they do not), what makes them think that their clients like it any better? Forces for change are building, but the pressure has to come from clients and, even then, change will be slow."

It was sentence #3 that caused the problem. What I meant was that, as a practical matter, there are practical limits to how high hourly rates and the number of hours can go. The market will set a cap on high hourly rates can go. Physical and mental exhaustion will set the limit on the number of hours you can work. When a lawyer's hourly rate hits the market cap, the lawyer (assuming the simplest scenario) will only be able to make more money in succeeding years by billing more hours.

The result of a focus on hourly billing is then a consistent push to raise hourly rates, to maximize the number of working hours and to have incentives to spend more hours on projects.

If, and I know that this is a radical proposition, we assume that lawyers would like to make a lot of money, then, as many critics of the billable hour have argued, they've chosen the worst way to do so.

Unfortunately, at the same time, they've also chosen a way that puts their incentives at odds with those of their clients.

Here's the example I like to give. When we moved to our house, we used a moving firm that estimated that the job would take 3.5 hours and quoted us a flat fee of $350. In fact, the movers were great and got the job done in about two hours. We were so pleased that I think we even tipped the guys. For our $350, we had a great, FAST, no-hassle move and felt we got our money's worth in value.

We recommended the movers to someone else. In a similar experience, they had a great experience and the move was done around an hour faster than the time estimate. They were livid that they had been cheated out of $100, even though they were completely pleased with the work the movers did.

Now the careful reader will have realized that almost everything in this post is a non sequitur. However, I have come this far and have vowed to pull all of this together and make a solid point.

My observation is that billing is largely based on inertia. Once you start down one path, it's difficult to change. As long as lawyers feel that there is still room for either rates or number of hours to increase, inertia will keep them in the hourly billing model. The force that will push them out of hourly billing must, therefore, be external, which means from clients, or perhaps from other innovative lawyers or other professional services providers.

Unfortunately, I wrote my comment in a way that Bruce interpreted: "as soon as it's not an optimal deal for firms, they'll turn to something else."

That's not what I meant. Value billing will almost invariably be an optimal deal for both lawyers and clients, so long as there is trust and agreement on value. Value billing requires more thought and a change in approach. Inertia will almost always win.

Ah, hell, it's easier to write about technology than this stuff. I'll leave this subject to Matt Homann.

I'll only note that the most telling evidence on this issue can be found by watching how hard lawyers will fight to avoid getting into an open-ended hourly billing arrangement with any other service provider.

I've always found Alan Weiss's "Ten Ways to Convince A Buyer That Value-Based Fees Are Best" to be a very useful way to think about these issues.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 08:57 PM

April 05, 2005

Evan Schaeffer on LexThink

Until I get the chance to do some posts on LexThink, you won't find a better post about LexThink than Evan Schaeffer's gentle and wistful essay about his inability to attend.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 11:29 PM

March 17, 2005

The Reverse Perfect Introduction

We hear and read a lot about perfecting our "30 second elevator pitches" so we can best explain to people we meet what it is that we actually do. You can take that idea a step further by getting people specific information about what types of businesses you would like them to refer to you.

John Jantsch at the Duct Tape Marketing blog calls that second technique the "perfect introduction" and then flips that idea on its head - a very useful technique I find myself using more often these days - and talks about the "reverse perfect introduction."

He says:

"To really get the most from this tool, send it out to a list of potential network resources (people who serve the same target market) and ask them to complete something just like it for themselves and send it back to you so you will be better prepared to refer them."

Isn't easier to make referrals to someone who is making referrals to you? How often do you miss the opportunity to send business to good referral sources because you simply don't know what business they are looking for?

[Originally post on Dennis Kennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 09:44 PM

Ernie the Attorney on Better Lawyer Pictures for Your Website and Publicity Purposes

I hadn't planned to spend the last few days posting about law firm website practices, but here I am.

Legal blogging pioneer Ernest "Ernie the Attorney" Svenson has written about another practice of law firms on their websites that has a pervasively negative impact on both their marketing efforts and the Internet itself.

I am speaking, of course, about the all-to-frequent practice of posting shockingly bad photographs of lawyers on websites.

There are an almost limitless number of ways firms make mistakes with photographs. Ernie's comments are right on target.

Suffice it to say, if your portrait on your firm's website looks like it came out of a surveillance camera as you were startled on a windy day, you might want to think about the message you are sending.

I can tell you from personal appearance that some firms have the guy who photographs accident scenes for their litigators drop by and snap a few headshots and then use those pictures for publicity and marketing purposes.

Ernie suggests a photographer to consider. Let me add a strong recommendation that you consider another excellent photographer who, by coincidence, happens to be married to my wife's sister. We call him Uncle Dan, but you can call him Dan Donovan. At Dan's website, you'll find a nice sampling of his photos, that showcase Dan's obvious skill, talent and, as someone who has seen tons of Dan's family pictures, artistry.

Several years ago, I had an article published in a magazine and they sent a photographer over to take some pictures of me for the article. I was disappointed with the picture they chose, but, hey, I had gotten an article published with my picture on it. I showed the article and picture to Dan and I could tell he was underwhelmed.

He called me the next day. He said that the picture had bothered him so much that he wanted to shot a set of pictures of me that I could use in the future and that he would use in his portfolio as he moved toward doing more corporate portraits.

I was so pleased with those pictures and with what Dan was able to create. My blog picture comes from a more recent session we did for another magazine spot.

You will not find anyone more professional to work with than Dan and by the end of the session, you'll have the feeling that you are working with an artist. That feeling will be confirmed when you see his pictures.

I've recently been to an awards event and seen a "one hundred faces of . . ." magazine cover where I was shocked by the pictures that people allowed to be used in these places.

Having a publicity picture that you like and you get compliments on is great thing that almost cannot be appreciated until you experience it.

Here's your assignment for today:

Take a look at your photo on your website and your standard publicity photo.

Take a look at the pictures Ernie points you to and at Dan Donovan's portfolio shots (by the way, it is OK for lawyers to have color pictures, so don't just look at Dan's black-and-white portfolios).

Take another look at your current photo.

If you are a managing partner or a marketing director of a firm, repeat the process for the rest of the pictures on your website.

Let your feelings percolate.

You'll know what you need to do. Now you have a couple of choices about what to do. If you contact Dan, tell him I sent you.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 07:32 PM

March 16, 2005

In Case You Didn't Appreciate How Difficult Ethical Rules (and the Would-be Interpretations of Them) Make it for Lawyers to Use the Internet Like Normal Human Beings

Legal Internet guru Jerry Lawson points to an article called Thwarting Ethical Violations With Web Site Disclaimers by law professor Walter Effross.

I had a bit of a sense of deja vu because, although Jerry doesn't mention this, he, Brenda Howard and I wrote an article that covered some of the same territory a few years ago. Interestingly, and this is a rare occurrence, I still have the same disagreements with Jerry on a few points that I had in that article.

So, I find myself in the unusual situation where I will be quoting the same language from Professor Effross's article as Jerry does, but drawing a quite different conclusion.

The topic is email, in particular the practice of law firms of actually allowing visitors to their websites to send email to lawyers from the website. Just to be clear, we are talking about the use of email links on websites, a practice used by roughly 100% of websites that expect any kind of interaction with customers.

Here's the money quote and the text for our lesson today:

"In this context, it might be an ethically questionable practice to allow visitors to e-mail the firm’s attorneys directly through an e-mail link featured on the site (for instance, on an attorney’s individual page) without interposing a click-wrap box that contains such warnings as those above, and requiring the visitor to click “I agree” before actually composing and sending the e-mail. The box could also specify the jurisdictions in which the attorney in question is licensed to practice, and could state that visitors from other jurisdictions should not contact that attorney for representation. One firm states in such a click-wrap box, “Our policy is not to return e-mail regarding a specific legal matter from anyone who has not already engaged the firm.”

Even if such click-wrap boxes appear when a visitor attempts to send e-mail to an attorney through the site, the site should not display the attorney’s e-mail address, since a visitor could merely write it down or cut and paste it into the address line of an e-mail form generated by the visitor’s own e-mail program, and thereby avoid the warnings entirely."

I'll note that these paragraphs are written without any sense of irony and without any suggestion that making phone numbers available in phone books MIGHT BE EVEN MORE DANGEROUS, especially since we cannot yet interpose a clickwrap agreement on phone calls. Giving out a mailing address would, of course, raise the same concerns about regular mail, especially since a firm could not paste disclaimers on all mail boxes.

I point out these paragraphs not to be critical of Professor Effross, even though I disagree with him on these particular points, but to illustrate the types of things a lawyer who wants to use the Internet in any kind of normal way routinely faces because of interpretations and commentary on the current ethical rules and the lack of guidance out there.

The concern about these kinds of emails is grounded in legitimate concerns about whether an attorney-client relationship can be initiated through the sending of an unsolicitated email, confidentiality and related issues, and Professor Effross does a great job of summarizing those issues in a way that those who are not lawyers can understand and appreciate.

However, there is a difference between reasonable approaches to dealing with these concerns and the point of view out there that seems to require that lawyers place walls, moats and barriers between themselves and the public or else risk violating ethical rules.

But that's not really my point in this post. With a few exceptions, at least in my opinion, Professor Effross's article is an excellent summary and analysis of the mind-numbing number of issues lawyers who have websites have to deal with and address, almost all of which run contrary to any normal notion of usability of a website in the eyes of normal humans.

I encourage everyone, lawyer or not, to read the article and see the restrictions and recommendations. Count up the number of disclaimers that may be required and what all a lawyer might be expected to disclaim. Look at at the hurdles a lawyer might well be expected to jump over. Substitute phone calls or even meeting someone on the street for email and consider what the implications would be if the same rules applied in those situations (arguably they do) and the fiction that "email is different" no longer is accepted as a basic assumption.

Here's my favorite passage that illustrates the lengths some law firms go, and some commentators seriously expect lawyers to go, with respect to the simple act of placing articles on a website:

"In addition, a number of terms-and-conditions pages indicate that the material on the corresponding sites is provided “as is,” and is not necessarily accurate, complete, or updated. Firms have also disclaimed both express and implied warranties for the information provided, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and noninfringement. (One firm even extends this disclaimer to the biographical and bar admittance information about its lawyers.)

It would certainly be more effective not to confine such warnings to the terms-and-conditions pages, but instead to repeat them on each page of the site that links to such articles, or to install a click-wrap screen that pops up when the visitor clicks on such links. The disclaimers could also be embedded conspicuously in the pages containing the articles themselves, since these pages might be cut and pasted into a computer file, saved in their entirety as computer files, printed out, or bookmarked on the visitor’s Internet browser. The visitor might also e-mail to a colleague the web address of that particular page, allowing the colleague to reach the page directly without passing through a click-wrap screen.

In addition, a firm could add to each web page containing an article or flyer the date when the document first appeared, as well as an indication of whether and when the version on this site has been updated. Warnings that this information is not offered as legal advice and that it may not reflect the current state of the law could also appear on each of these pages.

If a site indicates a date on which it was last updated, care should be taken to warn visitors that not every page in the site was updated at that time. Perhaps separate update notices could be put on each time-sensitive page.

Firms might also consider adding to each of these pages, instead of relegating to the terms-and-conditions page, the statement that views, perspectives, or conclusions espoused in articles, speeches, or client alerts featured on the site do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm or of any of its lawyers or clients."

Well, who else's views might they reflect?

I'd love to see Jakob Nielsen analyze the usability of websites that adopt all of the practices set out in this article.

I've had a website for nearly ten years and I swear to you that the guidelines and rules for lawyers with websites are less clear now than they were even ten years ago when all of this was new.

As I have long said, if I ever leave the practice of law, I'll point to issues like these as a big part of what drove me out.

By the way, I have not yet heard whether the proposed legal marketing rule changes in Missouri, which arguably prevent lawyers from using email in any meaningful way to communicate with non-clients, have been enacted or not.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 10:07 PM

March 15, 2005

By Request Tuesday – Will Evan Schaefer Ever Be Able to Work at a Big Law Firm Again?

Many people do not know that Evan "Notes from the (Legal) Underground" Schaeffer and I both live in St. Louis and once worked, although at different times, for big law firms.

The difference between us is that, after Evan's post on the practice of some big law firms of "scrubbing" their websites of the biographies and contact information of associates, I at least have some chance of being able to work at a big law firm again, while Evan might have blown his last chance. Not that Evan really cares about that.

You see, Evan returned home fresh from a vacation in Prague and was hit with the disturbing story of the "associate scrubbing" practices that gained so much attention lately. His take on the topic, which illustrates why I've long said that Evan is the legal blogger most likely to end up writing for television or movies in the near future, is an instant classic, even though some might think that he "pushes the envelope" in his tale of the future of these types of practices.

I, for one, think that his description of law firms continuing to make dead associates meet a 2,400 minimum billable hours requirement is way over the top and quite unfair. At most, law firms would only make a deceased associate's estate pay the fines for not turning in time sheets in a timely fashion.

I'd also like to thank Evan for again leading the way in showing that lawyers can use the "f-word" in their blogs. I can’t remember if Evan was the first (there have been several instances over the years), but I'm grateful to Evan and the others that have shown that it can be done.

I'm still too uptight to go in that direction (or maybe I haven’t found the right opportunity yet). Heck, the farthest I'm willing to go is to link to Mark Pilgrims's classic quote on the difference between personal and corporate blogs.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 11:55 PM

March 11, 2005

ABA TECHSHOW Welcomes Law Student Attendees

I had some feedback on my recent post, "Should I Go to ABA TECHSHOW?" and thought I'd follow-up on a couple of things over the next few days.

As the recent National Law Journal article on law firms that scrub their websites of any traces of their associates suggests, young lawyers really need to take an active role in learning about what to expect in their early careers and how to take steps to prepare to land on their feet if they start out in what turns out to be a bad situation.

There's no time like the present to get started if you are currently in law school.

One of the areas that law schools will not prepare you for is legal technology and the role technology will play in your practice.

You can get a good look at what is available and learn from lawyers who actually use technology by coming to ABA TECHSHOW.

The concern, as always, is yeah, but won't it cost me a lot of money?

It won't, especially if you are already in the Chicago area.

I see two great options for law students.

1. Take advantage of the special $145 registration fee for law students. In addition to letting you attending the education sessions, tour the exhibit hall and general have the run of the show, you get a couple of lunches, and, with a strategic approach to locating continental breakfasts and receptions, you can probably cover your meal expenses as well.

2. Take advantage of the free exhibit hall pass. You won't get to go to any education sessions, but you can spend some time on the exhibit floor and learn about the technologies now available to lawyers. Drop on by for a day or for an afternoon.

For more info and the online registration form, head on over to http://www.techshow.com.

I encourage law students to make ABA TECHSHOW part of your studies this semester and look forward to seeing more students than ever this year.

Some of the things I see and hear about law firms doing to new lawyers embarrass me. I'd like to do a little bit to help put things right with law students. I want to make it clear that law students are welcome to attend ABA TECHSHOW and I encourage you to attend. If you see me, please introduce yourself and I'll try (I can't make promises, but I'll really try) to make some time to chat with you at least briefly about technology, blogging and the legal profession.

I also want to alert law students and new lawyers that the March issue of the Law Practice Today webzine is a theme issue focusing on issues facing young lawyers. It should be posted on the website in the very near future. Our approach is a welcoming one - not one in which we suggest that young lawyers should be hidden away from the public.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)].

Posted by dmk at 10:31 AM

March 10, 2005

Oh, Now I Understand Why Associates at Large Law Firms Blog Anonymously

There have already been a number of posts (Bruce MacEwen is especially good) reacting to Leigh Jones' shocking article called "Want to Poach Associates? Good Luck" in the National Law Journal, which reports on the trend of law firms scrubbing their websites of any biographical or other information about their associates. However, I find the behaviors discussed in this article so disturbing that I'll add my own thoughts.

I'm stunned by the lengths some law firms are going to make it impossible to contact associates or find out anything about them or what they do.

Hello, anyone ever think that your clients might want to call or email an associate working on a project for them and want to use your website to get the info?

I can't even imagine a more short-sighted practice, with negative consequences at countless levels. And, of course, a practice that guarantees that their best associates will be leaving.

You treat people like anonymous cogs in a machine and theb you wonder why they aren't "loyal" enough to the firm? Even better, will these firms deny associates promotion to partnership because they aren't bringing in enough business?

The best part is that this "tactic" should have no impact whatsoever on keeping a good headhunter from getting to the associates.

No wonder the law firm associate bloggers I hear from go to great lengths to stay anonymous.

I just shake my head in disbelief at this kind of stuff. I'm wondering how cool it is to tell your parents and friends that you have a job at a leading law firm and they can't even find any trace of you on the firm's website?

The phrase running through my mind: "climate of fear."

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 10:24 PM

March 09, 2005

The Most Important Post I Read Today - From the Mouths of Flacks

Blawg guru Denise Howell posts such consistently good material that you can start to take Bag and Baggage for granted. It's time again to give her some props. She's been in the zone lately with a long string of great posts.

Her recent post From the Mouths of Flacks is one of those not-to-be-missed gems that all lawyers will want to spend some time thinking about carefully.

Here's my take on the post, but don't rely on my interpretation - read Denise's words.

The world of blogging (or Internet or other tech-affected areas) moves on at a rapid pace raising all kinds of legal and quasi-legal issues.

Lawyers, with a few exceptions, pretend that none of this is happening or that none of this really matters that much. Lawyers barely observe what is happening, let alone participate in blogging or the legal questions it raises.

In the meantime, some very smart people with great instincts and solid philosophical and practical approaches discuss and work together first to help others navigate this new world of legal issues and then to try to set some reasonable ground rules so bloggers (or others) can operate, evolve and advance this new world.

At some later point, lawyers take notice and, often disregarding the guidelines and standards developed by the culture, jump in to reassert their traditional role of setting legal guidelines and standards. Strains and difficulties ensue and the antipathies toward lawyerdom increase.

Denise's post sounds a strong wake-up call for lawyers to participate in the discussion from the inception, especially because it affords lawyers the chance to work with the people who are making things happen.

She also notes that some bloggers in the field of PR and marketing, as one example, have had to move into the vacuum created by the absence of lawyer involvement and (I definitely agree with this assessment) are both offering solid, informed advice and taking the initiative on discussing these issues.

Here's where Denise sets the pace for lawyers: She's putting together an audio program (a/k/a podcast or "plawdcast") for IT Converstations on the hot Google "AutoLink" issue that combines both leading bloggers, in this case, Cory Doctorow and Robert Scoble, and leading lawyer bloggers, in this case the brilliant Marty "The Trademark Blog" Schwimmer. This audio session will be a must-listen and offers a good example of the types of efforts lawyers should be making.

BTW, don't neglect any of the great PR/Marketing blogs Denise links to in her post. Many, and now all, of them are regular reads for me and I highly recommend them too. In fact, I have a folder in FeedDemon just for Marketing and PR RSS feeds). There are a lot of great blogs in that category.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 10:05 PM

March 03, 2005

Reid Trautz Sets My Agenda for Today

One of the great things about subscribing to RSS feeds is that all kinds of great ideas show up in your newsreader every day from experts in their fields. For free.

Law practice management expert Reid Trautz (and a speaker at the upcoming TECHSHOW 2005) provided me with another great example the other day. His post called "Files That Talk" is both a subtle reminder and a call for action. It is essential reading and it certainly hit home at the Dennis Kennedy Law Firm. We're carving out some time today to implement Reid's suggestions.

The money quote:

"Here is my proposed standard for office appearance: My clients can visit at any time without the condition of my office embarrassing me or causing the client to silently question my effectiveness and efficiency."

Think about it.

Reid goes on to say:

"Meeting with clients in a conference room is, at best, a temporary solution to a messy office. Quite frankly, it’s a cop-out. The same goes for shoving documents in the file with the best intentions of neatly organizing it later—it only gets attention if the matter goes to trial or a hearing. In the meantime, clients and others are watching the mess grow.

Taking time to frequently organize your files and offices will provide your clients with a positive picture to take with them during and after the representation.

Not a sermon, just a thought."

In this case, the thought is more powerful than a sermon.

Think about it. Then think about it again.

[Originally posted on DennisKenedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 09:25 AM

February 22, 2005

By Request Tuesday – What's Your Take on All These Big Law Firm Mergers?

This question is sometimes asked in this way: Will medium-sized firms disappear?

Bruce "Adam Smith, Esq." MacEwen posted an important analysis of this issue a while back. I like Bruce's analysis but I'm not as positive about the megamergers.

What's my take when I read about the stream of mergers of large law firms?

Excuse my language, but I don't have an effing clue what's going on in the case of most of the ones I've read about.

Most of them seem like there's been a failure of imagination and some sense that getting bigger is the best route to take because it's better to do something than do nothing.

I'd expect to see enormous levels of lawyer attrition, IT integration headaches and puzzlement on the part of clients.

Here's one example of my take on the subject. I understand "cherry-picking." I understand going out and getting superstars to staff areas where you plan strategic growth or where clients need additional services. However, why would you pick up an entire firm to fill those needs? You are begging for attrition on both sides of the merger, and likely to lose plenty of people that you'd like to keep.

Integrating two large firms, in terms of people, systems, IT and everything else, is likely to be a long, involved process that will inevitably take most the eyes of most lawyers and staff off the ball for a significant time.

I'm a big fan of Tom Peters and his approach informs my own. Read some of Peters' comments on recent business mergers and his negative responses to some of them. I simply don't see the business case in most of the stories I see about large law firm mergers. I've never felt that combining two struggling organizations gives you any guarantee that you'll end up with one combined, successful organization.

So, I don't even pretend to understand this trend. I'd put my money on leaner, faster, client-focused firms, boutique firms and creative affiliations like consortia and even the so-called "virtual" law firms.

Just my opinion. FWIW.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 10:09 PM

February 18, 2005

The Law Professor Blog Tour Continues – Today We Visit TaxProf Blog

I've gotten a good number of private emails in the last few days - unfortunately, none of them from law professors - from my recent, and increasingly desperate, attempts to attract the attention of the law professor bloggers and to prove that the current divide between law professors and practicing lawyers is not as absolute as it may seem and that, in fact, my outreach efforts can help bridge the chasm.

The emails are from practicing lawyers lamenting the split between academia and the practice and generally telling the story of one perceived slight or another. It's kind of sad.

Other emails are of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink variety and suggest that I really do know and have conversations with many of the law professor bloggers and that the Law Professor Blog Tour is, in fact, an elaborate joke. If only that were true.

I will admit that I have at various times over the years met a few of the law professor bloggers or been on the same email lists with them, including a short conversation with the captain of the A-List law professor blogging team, Larry Lessig. (Does anyone think that Professor Lessig's occasional struggles with relatively straightforward technology issues (see comments to this post for a few of many alternatives) undercut his credibility on technology law issues?)

But, I digress.

On the tour today, we visit Paul Caron's unfailingly excellent TaxProf Blog. I must confess to having been a tax lawyer for more than ten years of my legal career, so I may find more appeal in this blog than others do. But it is getting to be tax season.

Caron's blog is the model I would point any law professor considering a blog to study as part of the preparation for launching his or her own blog. It's informative, it's interesting and it has a great mix of academic materials and popular materials, along with links to great resources. Again, I'm not sure Professor Caron has tenure (he definitely should), so I hope I'm not blowing his chances by making favorable comments about his blog.

Interestingly, Caron has a recent post on the issue of the taxability of money received via "tip jars" on blogs. He sums up the issue and the relevant case law nicely and it's a very good introductory discussion of the legal issues.

However, I'm not really persuaded by the arguments or the academic analysis that urges that these "tips" are not income for tax purposes. They might not be, but the case law analysis gives me little comfort.

My approach is both more practical and more simple. It goes like this:

1. Does Amazon send you a 1099 or other IRS form reporting the tips as income? I admire the courage of anyone who files a return using different numbers (or not including numbers) reported to the IRS.

2. It's called a "tip" jar, not a "gift" jar.

3. Waiters, waitresses and others have onerous requirements and procedures for reporting tips. Not to make class arguments, but should professor bloggers soliciting tips by tip jars be treated any differently? Why? If I like a waiter's service and tip 20%, is he entitled to treat the amount over the standard 15% tip as a "gift"? I don't think so.

4. Bloggers with tip jars actively solicit funds and the language used by bloggers when telling their audiences about "tip jars" almost invariably refers to helping the bloggers "monetize" their blogs or cover costs.

5. In my experience, the IRS will not roll over an play dead when you cite a law review article or two in support of your decision not to report income or take an aggressive stand on a tax issue. Hoewever, you might get lucky and find an agent who is so inclined.

As I've always said, I'm the practical kind, especially on tax issues, but I'm always interested in learning good ways to save money on taxes. If I used a "tip jar," I'd be reporting the income. Of course, the tax on the extra $5 of tip money I'd be fortunate to get is not all that big a deal.

The TaxProf Blog – highly recommended, even for people who are not tax lawyers.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Posted by dmk at 10:26 AM

February 17, 2005

The Law Professor Blog Tour Continues - The Yin Blog

I suddenly realized that there might be a chance that the law professor blogs might actually notice my blog before I got the chance to mention all of my favorite law professor blogs, so I decided to accelerate my pace a bit.

I wanted to be sure that I mentioned my absolute favorite law professor blog - The Yin Blog. I'm not sure that either Tung Yin or his co-blogger, Kevin J. Heller, have tenure yet, so I'm hoping that my favorable mention of their blog doesn't hurt their chances for getting tenure. My apologies in advance.

I don't think that I can give a higher compliment than to say that here are law professors that you actually would want to sit down and have a beer with. Although they (in fairness, that's Kevin's gig on the blog) can get a little too political for my taste (about one political post a month usually does it for me), they cover a lot of topics with great style and a sense of humor (Oops, now that may have cost them tenure).

Not to cause dissension among the co-bloggers, but the blog is named after Tung Yin and he's clearly the star. I'm so impressed that I'm now telling prospective law students that they need to consider going to law school at Iowa, and I've added Iowa to my mental list of top 20 law schools. It's the power of blogging at work.

Tung and I share some common interests in science fiction and TV. This post on spy TV shows is brilliant and my views are quite similar. Hmm, maybe that's the reason I think the post is brilliant. I'm assuming that his silence on the new season of MI-5 reflects my silence because of the unspeakably horrifying plot directions that have all-but-gutted the show we knew, and from which there is almost no chance of recovery.

So, I give you The Yin Blog, a truly great law professor blog, no joking around.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/).]

Posted by dmk at 09:13 AM

February 15, 2005

Are Posts About Group Blogs as Partnerships Ads in Feeds?

As part of my ongoing commitment to reach out to law professor blogs, I highlight another of the law professor blogs I read regularly - Stephen Bainbridge's excellent ProfessorBainbridge.com, which covers coporate law and a multitude of other topics.

Professor Bainbridge may have given us the first clear example of the use of an ad in an RSS feed with his post called Are Group Blogs Partnerships?

This ad for his book on corporate law is a good model of the tasteful informercial approach to advertising in RSS feeds that bloggers might adopt successfully. It avoids pop-ups, animations and other intrusive ad techniques. I, for one, got most of the way through the ad before I even realized that it was an ad for the book - a tribute to the professor's writing skills.

For those, especially those in academia, fundamentally opposed to ads in feeds, I recommend this ad as a good example to study for a model of the types of tasteful and informative ways bloggers can use ads in RSS feeds as a way to monetize blogs.

I have two specific comments about this use of an ad in a feed:

1. Professor Bainbridge neglects a simple addition to the hyperlink to his book that will increase the commission he will receive on purchases through the Amazon Associates program. I'd be happy to share this technique with him.

2. Does this use of advertising undercut the credibility of Professor Bainbridge's analysis of the legal issues that he discusses in the text of the article? For me, it does not, in part because his analysis is well-reasoned and I'm sure would be echoed by other professors and commentators. However, others might disagree.

This use of advertising in RSS feeds gives us food for thought and an excellent example of a real-world use that can be discussed as part of the "ads in feeds" debate.

As he concludes in his ad, er, post, go buy his book (but preferably from my Amazon Associates link).

Note: The ad appears to be working - only four copies of the book were in stock at Amazon.com when I published this post.

[This post originally appeared on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/.]

Posted by dmk at 09:28 AM

February 14, 2005

Susan Crawford Praises Amateurism in the Blogging Context

One of the law professor blogs I enjoy reading is Susan Crawford's blog, which I highly recommend.

Sometimes, as I've commented before, you can read the law professor blogs and get the feeling that practicing lawyer blogs don't even exist. I figure that it's all a process of education and it's always good to extend the olive branch (or maybe wave it wildly so the profs notice it) to those in the ivory towers of academe.

Susan penned a Valentine's euology of sorts for Benjamin Franklin and a mini-ode to amateurism today that very much captures the feeling of energy and potential that I feel in the blogosphere these days.

Unfortunately, at the same time, her post reminded me of the disconnect those of us in the practice feel when we think of our brothers and sisters in academia. The professors praise the amateur ideals of blogging, while those of us outside the walls of academia think of ways to turn pro with our blogs and earn a few dollars for our time and efforts in blogging. The irony, of course, is that we often talk about becoming a professor as one way of turning pro while some professors (and I don't consider Susan in this group) see themselves as the Platonic ideals of amateurism. Go figure.

It's no wonder that (1) the Matt Homann for Top 20 Legal Thinker write-in campaign has drawn such interest and (2) you don't see my name on the list of Top 20 Legal Thinker nominees - I don't seem to be capable of making these "fine distinctions." I'm the practical kind.

Posted by dmk at 09:20 PM

February 13, 2005

You'll Want to Be Sure to Read This New Blawg from Reid Trautz

A good number of legal bloggers have been twisting the arm of the DC Bar's Reid Trautz to start a blog. Our efforts have paid off with the debut of the cleverly-named Reid My Blog!

Like Jim Calloway, Reid is a well-liked and well-respected authority on a variety of law practice management topics and his regular insights will be a welcome addition to the blogosphere. Reid is an excellent speaker and a frequent author who widelyknown for providing great, practical information.

The debut of Reid's blog ramps up the pressure on a number of other highly-regarded law practice management experts who are very close to launching blogs. Watch for new developments in this area. I'm seeing seeing the faint outlines of the initials "DP" in my crystal ball.

Welcome aboard, Reid.

Subscribed!

Posted by dmk at 09:58 PM

February 11, 2005

Colorado Law Firms Have Great Opportunity to Hire Well-known Young Legal Blogger

From the Math Class for Poets blog:

Tim Hadley, the author of the well-known legal blog, Math Class for Poets, posts about his availability, experience and credentials as he begins his hunt for a new legal position. It's rare that a young blogger with Tim's history (blogging since mid-2003) and stature becomes available on the job market. Law firms in the Denver area, especially any law firm contemplating launching blogs in the future, have the chance to pick up a gem.

Check out Tim's post and, even you you aren't in a position to interview Tim, let's see if we can help him out in his search.

[Originally posted by Dennis Kennedy on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/).]

Posted by dmk at 04:47 PM

January 26, 2005

A Conversation with Ernie the Attorney

If you know me, you know that I have a bunch of nicknames for the lawyer bloggers. Ernest "Ernie the Attorney" Svenson has long been "the coolest blawgger." The new interview of Ernest on JD Bliss will help you understand why I think this nickname is appropriate. I also like to say that Ernest is even cooler in person than he is on his blog - no small feat. After you read this interview, you'll understand why I gave Ernest one of my "lifetime achivement" Blawggies for 2004.

Ernest is the legal blogger who most inspired my entry into blogging and gave me the model for the approach that I have taken. I'm such a pure fan of bloggers and blogging that I still remember how thrilled I was the first time I got an email from "Ernie the Attorney." I told him that and he told me that he was thrilled the first time he got an email from "Dennis Kennedy." It was a good laugh.

Reading the interview made me wish that we had more chances to talk. Ernest and I stayed up until 4:00 AM talking in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel at TECHSHOW last year - the first time we met. He then introduced me to one of his favorite haunts in New Orleans a few months later. We'll get the chance to catch up at TECHSHOW and LexThink!, if not sooner.

I'm noticing that more and more of my phone calls and emails are to and from other bloggers. I also hear the term "community" used more often by bloggers. One of the reasons there is a sense of community is the generosity, creativity and good hearts of the early legal bloggers like "Ernie the Attorney."

People often ask me what I've gotten from all the work I've put into my blog, usually in the sense of "what is the ROI?" I'll always duck the financial aspect of that question, but the real reward is in the new friends I have made. I simply cannot put a value on friendships like the ones I now have with the Blawg Channel core group, Denise, Ernest, Marty and Tom, and the other bloggers I now have as friends - almost too many to list, especially without leaving out someone.

There's a tendency for those who are new to blogging to look mainly at the marketing and other possibilities of blogging, which are very real, without appreciating the way that blogging allows you to connect and create communities of interest. I sometimes get criticized for not pursuing the commercial potential of my blog and my blogging as much as others think I should, but I've always placed a very high value on friendships and blogging is an amazing friendship-building tool.

So, read the interview with Ernest. Take some time to think about his wise thoughts and resolve to explore the ways that your blog can help you build friendships. To me, blawgspace is still a generous place, in no small part due to the efforts of people like Ernest.

I highly recommend the JD Bliss site. Josh Fruchter is doing great work with this project. For those of you who haven't already gotten enough of my story, there's an interview with me on JD Bliss that covers some of the important directions I've taken in my career.

Posted by dmk at 10:46 PM

January 20, 2005

Homann, Kennedy Law Firms to Pioneer Combined Annual Retreat Concept

I'm pleased to announce that Matt "the [non]billable hour" Homann and I have agreed to hold a combined annual retreat for both firms this year. It will take place this weekend when Matt and I drive to Chicago together to do some prep work for the LexThink! Chicago conference and attend the Chicago BlogWalk. The deal to combine our law firm annual retreats came together when we were able to land two of the best law firm retreat speakers currently available, Dennis Kennedy and Matt Homann.

Regular readers of this blog will recall that last summer I pioneered the annual retreat by blog format. As a follow-up, I can report that last summer with had a superb speaker, had lots of ideas and made some great plans, but, as is common, did not execute the plans after the retreat as well as we hoped. By combining the efforts of two firms, we hope to improve both our ideas and our execution. Plus, Matt and I were going to be riding together on the four-hour drive to Chicago and hanging out for the weekend anyway.

Although I prefer to keep the focus on retreat business, Matt may issue an open invitation for bloggers in the Chicago area to meet us in our hotel lobby.

I'm such a fan of blogging that I can't wait to meet some of my blogging heroes at the Chicago BlogWalk, including the great Jack "Knowledge Jolt with Jack" Vinson, who convinced me to move to full-text feeds.

There have been some discussions of broadcasting the retreat sessions as a webinar or podcast, but we haven't been able to guarantee broadband coverage all the way from Highland, Illinois to Chicago. We have not ruled out an audio program based on the retreat.

By the way, the response to LexThink! Chicago truly overwhelmed us and delayed us in getting invitations out, but we have vowed to get the invitations out before we get on the road to Chicago.

Posted by dmk at 11:54 AM

January 03, 2005

Jim Calloway's Blog Goes Live!

I learned today that Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips blog has made its official debut. What a great way to launch the year of 2005 in legal blogging.

As you may know, Jim, among other things, is the chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2005, the practice management advisor for the Oklahoma Bar and one of the best-hearted people you'll ever find. I'm pleased that he mentioned his excellent article, "Technology, Stress and the Lawyer's Quality of Life," in one of his early posts. It's one of my favorite articles on legal technology and I recommend it highly. It'll give you some inspiration to start the new year.

I just happen to know that Jim has been thinking about starting this blog for a while now and I'm so pleased to see that his ideas have come into reality. This blog will definitely be one to watch. Welcome to the blogosphere, Jim.

For the rest of you who are thinking about blogging or made a resolution to start a blog this year, come on in, the water's fine.

Posted by dmk at 10:13 AM

December 28, 2004

New Issue of Law Practice Today Posted - The Future of the Practice of Law

The new issue of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's webzine, Law Practice Today is out, with a theme of the future of the practice of law.

There's a great roundtable article (I'm pretty sure I guessed who the mystery panelist is), other related articles and the usual excellent collection of columns and core section articles. I've written a short column about good Internet resources on the future of the practice, which notes how vibrant and lively the blog world is in comparison with the world of standard websites, especially on topics like this one.

Recommended reading as you consider what directions to go in 2005 and beyond.

Posted by dmk at 11:33 PM

December 21, 2004

Announcing LexThink! Chicago

What do you get when you bring together a select group of innovative, big-thinking people from the worlds of law, business, technology, marketing, and consulting for a full day and ask them to design the perfect professional service firm?

We call it LexThink! Chicago.

Innovate. On April 3, 2005, we will turn the Catalyst Ranch space in downtown Chicago into laboratory space for a group of innovators and thought leaders. We'll create and test ideas for transforming the delivery of professional services, to better match the needs of professionals and their clients alike. With a full day of targeted presentations, small group discussions, collaborative brainstorming and other exercises, we will will mix innovative business practices with proven client service strategies and promising technology applications to create the formula for the perfect professional services firm. The focus of every conversation will be on turning talk into action, and bold ideas into realities.

Motivate. Attendees will take away dozens of practice-changing ideas while making many new friends. LexThink! Chicago will be a chance to meet in person bloggers, authors and speakers that have motivated and challenged us over the years. Spending a day with this group will generate renewed energy and enthusiasm and give you a new action list for making the changes you want in your practice, your business and your life.

Activate. In too many cases, the surge of enthusiasm from an inspirational conference drains away steadily as you return to the real world. LexThink! Chicago is designed to create extended relationships, with opportunities for structured feedback and continuing discussions, social support, and ongoing motivation to transform your practice. The collaborative experience will continue with ongoing discussion groups, monthly conference calls and other ways to connect with LexThink! alumni.

LexThink! Chicago is the brainchild of well-known lawyer bloggers Matthew Homann, Dennis Kennedy and Scheherazade Fowler, who have been thinking (and blogging) about ways to make meaningful changes in their professional practices. LexThink! Chicago grew out of one of their brainstorming sessions and their own “what if” questions.

To permit meaningful participation, to generate the best conversations, and to work within the limitations of the creative space we've reserved, participation in the first LexThink! Chicago will be by invitation-only. We’re limiting it to a select group of professional service providers—lawyers, accountants, consultants, strategists, coaches, technologists, marketers and entrepreneurs.

If you are interested -- or know someone who might be -- get in touch with us soon by e-mailing Matt Homann at homann@gmail.com. We will send out the invitations before the end of December, so make sure you let us know about your interest as soon as you can. We are seeking sponsors for LexThink! Chicago and expect to set the registration fee at less than $200 per attendee.

Many people always ask “Why?” There are also some who ask “Why not?” We’re the second kind. How about you?

Posted by dmk at 11:43 PM

The Savvy Blawgger Panel, Version 1.0

Bruce "Adam Smith, Esq." MacEwen has launched the first iteration of his Savvy Blawger Panel, a feature in which he poses important questions to a panel of, well, savvy blawgers. This edition looks into the future and the question was:

"Looking out five to ten years, what will the single most significant change be in terms of how sophisticated law firms (think AmLaw 200) are managed, on the 'business side'?"

There are some great ideas and I highly recommend you study the answers carefully.

I'm one of the panelists and comment on the vital importance of diversification in its different forms by saying:

"The most significant change for successful firms will be the development of a diversified, portfolio approach to the various businesses of a law firm - services, products and licensing of intellectual property - in a much more diversified environment of people and outside partnerships."

I know that some of my readers will be surprised that, for once, I have one of the shortest comments in the collection.

I'll note that Bruce mentions "Capital Asset Pricing Model" in introducing my comment, but I'm thinking in terms of modern portfolio theory, which I've written and spoken about on a number of occasions.

Posted by dmk at 12:07 AM

December 20, 2004

Jeffrey Rosen Gets All Mixed Up About Blawgs, Blogging and Other Things

Professor Jeffrey Rosen, apparently unnerved by the success of Matt Homann's write-in campaign to be named as of the "Top 20 Legal Thinkers," has launched a publicity-seeking missile in a wide-ranging attack on a range of blogging targets with his recent article in the New York Times Magazine.

Unfortunately, as a mere practicing lawyer, I was unable to follow or understand most of the article. However, Rosen did paint a view of the blog world that was new to me. He set up quite a number of straw men and mowed them right down. Mainly, I was left wondering what he could possibly be saying to his students that had him so worried about them blogging about him. That's more a criticism of me, of course, than it is a criticism of his article, which I'm sure that I'd find quite good if I could understand it.

I know this is petty, but I took a secret pleasure in seeing the Treo 650 called the "Trio 650" in an article criticizing the loose standards of bloggers in comparison to the high standards of the lords of journalism. I also enjoyed that in an article focused on privacy, Rosen managed to give away the secret that two anonymous bloggers are students at his law school. Oops. Note that Rosen is actually listed as an official candidate for one of the Top 20 Legal Thinkers, unlike popular write-in candidate, Matt Homann who was left off the list, as were practicing lawyers in general.

I had more concern, however, for the unfortunate impact of the article, which seems to have successfully garnered a lot of publicity (what diatribe against blogging won't these days?), on fellow Blawg Channeler and legal blogging pioneer, Denise Howell.

As many bloggers, but not all nominees for Top 20 Legal Thinkers such as Rosen, know, Denise has long been known and credited for coining the term "blawg." I can understand that there might not have been enough room in this extremely long article (4 separate sections on 4 separate pages, with a long, long animated ad to sit through) to mention Denise by name.

However, it would have been nice to get the definition right. "Blawgs" are most definitely not limited to blogs written by law students, as Rosen and the fact-checking team at the NYT Magazine might lead you to believe. The general definition of "blawg" is "a web log written by lawyers and/or concerned primarily with legal affairs." Denise is far too generous and inclusive a blogger to have intended the limited definition used by Rosen. In fact, someone less generous and inclusive than Denise might even suggest that some of the law student blogs cited by Rosen might not, in fact, meet the definition of "blawg."

So, the term Denise coined gets mentioned without attribution to her and mis-defined in an article that offers the back of the hand to bloggers and appears in a prominent and high profile print publication. The great irony, of course, is there is now a good chance that Jeff Rosen will soon be cited as the source of the definition of "blawg" with the citation noting the definition he uses in his article. Oh, where is the justice?

I'll keep my eyes open for a"clarification," but, in the meantime, I'll be volunteering some of my time to the Vote Matt Homann effort.

By the way, if you want to read a very good, thoughtful discussion of the subject that Rosen attempted to cover in his article, check out Ugly Exhibitionism While We Gawk at the Soap on Renee Blodgett's excellent Down the Avenue blog. In the "it's a small world" department, I actually met Renee at an ABA TECHSHOW several years ago when she worked for Dragon Systems and I was writing a legal technology column for Lawyers Weekly USA. It was at the first vendor event I ever attended and I appreciated the fact that Renee was willing to participate in the fiction that I was a serious journalist rather than the proto-blogger I probably was. Even better, she got me an extra dragon Beanie Baby so I could take two home for my daughter.

Posted by dmk at 10:09 PM

December 16, 2004

Looking at Law Firm Diversity Statistics and the Stories They Tell

During the 1990s, I spent quite a few years on my firm's hiring committee. For most of those years, I was on the Steering Committee of the St. Louis Minority Clerkship Program, an effort made to increase diversity in St. Louis law firms by placing minority law students in summer jobs at St. Louis law firms and corporations.

Wendy Werner, then Assistant Dean for Placement at St. Louis University Law School, and Chip Misko, now at Stinson Morrison Hecker in St. Louis, were co-chairs of the committee in a number of those years. At one time, this program was the second-largest program of its kind in the US.

Wendy and I were talking a while back about that program. There were some great young lawyers who went through that program. Some have gone on to do quite well, although almost in every case not with the firm they spent the summer with.

However, when I look at the numbers today, I struggle to see that the effort had any impact on increasing the numbers of minorities in St. Louis law firms. It's frustrating if you look at the goal of increasing representation in larger St. Louis law firms, but, as I said, many "graduates" of the internship program have gone on to do extremely well.

I grew to believe that retention was the biggest issue, and the answers to the questions about retention do not seem to be easy ones for most firms.

I told Wendy that I'd like to see current statistics just to get a sense of where we were after 10 - 12 years.

Wendy sent me today a link to an article called "Women and Attorneys of Color Continue to Make Only Small Gains at Large Law Firms."

The article sets out some thought-provoking statistice about diversity issues in law firms. It's worth remembering in this context that I believe that Georgetown University Law Center either reached or came very close to reaching a 50/50 male/female ratio for law students while I was there in 1980 - 83.

From the article:

"Recent research from NALP reveals that attorneys of color account for 4.32% of the partners in the nation's major law firms and that women account for 17.06% of the partners in these firms."

Compare 1993, when "attorneys of color accounted for 2.55% of partners and women accounted for 12.27% of partners."

As the article notes, "the presence of women comes nowhere near to matching their presence among law school graduates, which has ranged from 40% to almost half since the late 80's. Similarly, the percentage of minority graduates has doubled, from 10% to 20% during the same time period."

What struck me about the article is the way the statistics illustrate the retention issue.

"Women attorneys hold 43.36% of associate or staff/senior attorney positions and attorneys of color hold 15.06% of these positions."

Let me emphasize those numbers:

Women

Associates/staff attorneys 43.36%
Partners 17.06%

Attorneys of Color

Associates/staff attorneys 15.06%
Partners 4.32%

Of course, there are stories, reasons, variations by geography, and special circumstance behind these numbers, but the numbers, at minimum, suggest that something is not working the way it should be. I don't mean to assess any blame, but I don't think anyone will think that these numbers are good. We certainly can do better, probably much better.

The current pressures and environments in law firms, especially large law firms, make it unlikely that we will see movement of these numbers in a positive direction soon. Law firms are grinding up male associates and young partners at an alarming rate, too.

However, I hate to throw in the towel. There should be some new and creative ways to deal with these issues. I have a few ideas that I haven't tried out yet. I know that Wendy has others. Others of you certainly have better ideas than I do. It's worth making the effort.

If you've ever heard me speak on the future of legal technology and the Internet, you know that I like to end with some comments on the role that technology, especially the Internet, can play in both improving diversity and in helping people understand the important role diversity will play in the success of any organization or venture as we move into the 21st century. This topic has moved back on my radar screen for 2005.

How about yours?

Posted by dmk at 08:16 PM

December 15, 2004

Legal Affairs Magazine Offhandedly Insults Practicing Lawyers

I thought that Evan Schaeffer would have picked up on this story by now.

Legal Affairs, apparently an important magazine covering legal issues, is conducting a poll to name the Top 20 Legal Thinkers in America. The list of candidates includes Academics, Judges and Writer/Commentators.

Uh, what about practicing lawyers? I guess my lawyer friends and I don't count as "thinkers" in the rarefied air found in the halls of Legal Affairs.

Despite my apparent deficiencies as a "thinker," I have a few thoughts about Legal Affairs magazine and the attitude it embodies. I doubt, however, that Legal Affairs will find them in the top 20 thoughts directed its way in 2004.

It's great that blogs are going to make publications like Legal Affairs totally irrelevant.

Posted by dmk at 04:59 PM

December 09, 2004

Holy Cow! Big Law Firm Hourly Rates Rocket Skyward

Leigh Jones's article on Law.com today called "Law Firms' Billing Rates Climb Ever Higher" will confirm what the clients of many clients of law firms already suspected was happening.

This article will give you a lot to think about. Is demand for legal services ever impacted by price? Are 10% (or greater) rate increases appropriate? How high is too high? What possible justifications do law firms have for introducing efficiencies or technology innovation into the process when clients tolerate 10% or better rate increases? Is it time to look to smaller firms, regional firms, spinoffs from large law firms or individual lawyers with focused practices and big firm backgrounds? At what point to clients need to get into the driver's seat and drive technology, alternative fee arrangements and the like? What increased level of service do you get at the increased rate? Aren't those rates in the Midwest (say, for example, St. Louis) starting to look good these days?

Make sure that you notice the associate rate increases mentioned in the article.

There is good news in this article, even beyond the invitation it gives you to shop around your work that doesn't need to be done at the highest-priced firms. Here's the quote from Joel Henning of Hildebrandt International you will want to ponder carefully:

"Lawyers tend to be terrified of losing clients because of increased rates."

This is so true. Clients will want to ask for special treatments and discounted hourly rates as a matter of course. The odds are great that you will get them. You can thank me for this tip when you see how easy it is to save some money on rates. That still leaves the issue of the number of hours spent, but we can save that topic for another day.

Reed Smith reported the highest partner hourly rate - $875 per hour - although you will notice that the firm uses an interesting "it depends on what the meaning of dollars is" argument about this rate. Although blogging fans may think that blawg (and Blawg Channel) favorite and all-around great person, Denise Howell of Reed Smith, deserves to be the firm's highest compensated lawyer, it appears that the $875 does not reflect her hourly rate, so hourly rate bargains for top lawyers are still available even in this market.

[Required humor warning and disclaimer for lawyers: the previous paragraph is intended to be both a joke and a compliment to Denise, not any type of commentary about the policies of Reed Smith, which certainly has the reputation of being one of the best firms in the US - after all, they were smart enough to hire Denise. I still cannot believe how accomplished she is for someone as young as she appears in the picture on the front page of her blog.]

For what it's worth, I'm not raising my hourly rate for 2005 and my approach has been to make any rate increases apply only to new clients. I'll keep my clients on an hourly rate at the same rate that they started with me until they decide that they want to raise them. I've always thought it makes sense to do something special for your existing clients, as does Matt Homann.

The bottom line, as I have told many people this year, lawyers won't move to new technology, KM, alternative billing or much of anything else until clients make them pay a price for continuing to play "business as usual."

Posted by dmk at 11:01 AM

December 08, 2004

Guy Kawasaki's Hiring Exercise

Planning to hire someone? Try this exercise before you make your decision.

From Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start:

"EXERCISE

Think back on your first few jobs. True or false?

_____ I was perfectly qualified.

_____ I am holding candidates up to standards higher than the person who hired me used."

What action steps does your answer require?

For more great information on hiring, check out George's Employment Blog, an excellent example of how practicing lawyers are using blogs to provide useful practical information on legal topics that affect people and businesses on a daily basis.

Posted by dmk at 11:54 AM

Guy Kawasaki on Deal Lawyers

Guy Kawasaki, in his book The Art of the Start, has some choice words for lawyers. If you are a lawyer who represents businesses or you are in a business that uses lawyers, Kawasaki offers excellent insights into the lawyer/client relationship.

Consider this:

"[F]ind a lawyer who genuinely wants to do deals, not prevent them, and set the right legal framework. Many lawyers view their role as the 'adult supervision' that will prevent stupid deals from taking place. However, their bias is often that a deal is bad until proven good. Avoid this kind of lawyer. Instead, find one who views his role as a problem solver and service function for you, the customer."

I recently spoke to a group of IT and business people about the Open Source licenses. I decided to take the approach that if you found good business reasons to implement an Open Source project, you wanted to decide how best to manage your legal risks and how to make the project happen. You didn't really want to have your lawyer tell you "no, no, a thousands times no" no matter what the business benefits of the project might be. The group voted unanimously at the end of my three-hour presentation to let me speak an extra half hour after the original ending time and told me that I wasn't like any other lawyer they'd ever met. Yes, it did feel like a standing ovation.

Lawyers are trained in law school to spot issues and are rewarded in exams for doing so. They don't often get trained to help decide what to do about those issues if you want to move forward and how to balance the various risks. Unfortunately, unless you move past this bias in your training, you will be exactly the type of lawyer Kawasaki advises businesses to avoid. Is that the kind of lawyer you want to be? How do you become the other kind?

Posted by dmk at 11:52 AM

November 24, 2004

Changing Your Notions of Legal Marketing - Law Practice Today

As you know, I'm a little biased because I am an editor of the ABA's Law Practice Today Webzine, but the new November issue, which focuses on legal marketing, is chock full of great articles. I highly recommend that you check it out.

The four feature articles on legal marketing from four stellar authors will definitely expand your thinking about both the theory and practice of legal marketing - just in time for gearing up end of the year / beginning of the year marketing efforts.

Blawg Channeler Tom Mighell has a column covering blogs on legal (and non-legal) marketing. My contribution to this issue is called Revolutionizing Case Preparation and Client Relations with CaseMap 5 – Making It Easier to Win Cases and Clients, in which I suggest an innovative way litigators can use one of the best litigation software programs to market legal services to both existing and new clients simply by giving clients the kind of information they wish you were giving them now.

And there are even more good articles in this issue.

Posted by dmk at 04:46 PM

November 16, 2004

Fish & Neave's Identity Loss Problems Continue

Some would argue that it's been a tough year for the prominent patent law firm, Fish & Neave. The firm has fought what appears to have been a losing battle to keep its identity.

First, the firm suffered through the agonies of being a victim of "identity theft by employee," with the attendant negative publicity.

Now, the firm will have its 125-year-old identity swallowed up by Boston's Ropes & Gray, in a merger that, at least for now, will create the 8th largest firm in the country.

This merger is the latest in the large law firm merger fad of 2004. I'll join the list of people who are baffled by these types of mergers and wonder what benefits that they will bring to lawyers in either firm or their clients in the long run. Presumably, however, the combined IT department will have a strong commitment to computer security.

The Blawg Channel's Marty Schwimmer asks good questions about this type of merger here and here. Philip Mann has a more detailed and hard-hitting analysis here.

I'll simply suggest that we all check to see how many lawyers stay with the merged firm for more than a year. Losing your identity once in a year is bad enough, but losing it twice is a terrible thing.

Posted by dmk at 11:28 AM

November 01, 2004

Alternative Billing, Round 2, in Law Practice Today

The new issue of the ABA's webzine, Law Practice Today, revisits the subject of alternative billing as a follow-up to last month's issue. Once again (please forgive my bias as an editor), this issue presents a strong collection of articles on the real world practicalities of today's practice of law. The lead article is an interview of one of our leaders in innovation in pricing legal services for corporations, Jeff Carr, with whom I have had the great pleasure of co-presenting on the role technology can play in providing more efficient and more acceptably-priced legal services.

Just a few quotes from Jeff will give a flavor:

On forming his own firm: "I thought I was fed up with being a lawyer. What I learned was I didn’t hate the practice of law, I hated the business of law as it was being practiced at law firms. What brought me back to in-house practice after this little five-year experiment was the fact that at my core I’m a lawyer. I worry about our profession and I worry about the failing of lawyers in law firms to understand that they are in a business and to understand that it is a customer service business, and understand what customer service means."

On the great attorney / client "disconnect": "If you think of the law firm model, the economic model is based upon total revenue brought in the door. And that’s a function of hourly rate times the number of hours that you actually bill for and can collect for. That has absolutely no relationship, whatsoever, to the value that the corporate client places on the services."

On what has been called the "latent market for legal services": "I think quite frankly legal services have gotten too expensive in this country. Look at the rise of things like Nolo Press and Willmaker, software packages, that essentially permit people to do a lot of what would have been done by a lawyer on their own. Let’s face it, most legal work, about eighty percent of it, in any context, whether it’s your personal stuff, or whether it’s in a corporate world, is commodity type of practice. It’s really that only twenty percent are high value, high risk, bet the company, go to jail, lose your house matters. Those are the things that you really need the specialized service for. I think, in general, legal services have been priced out of the market for the general consumer. "

Lots of thought-raising and, perhaps, action-provoking ideas in this interview. If you are familiar with Jeff's speaking and writing, that will come as no surprise, but, if you aren't familiar with Jeff's approach, this interview might hit you like a freight train.

You will also find an article by Ward Bower on one of the most important issues new partners simply do not have an appreciation for, and an issue that may one day kill some law firms - unfunded death and retirement plans. Stephen Gallagher and Leonard Sienko discuss new approaches to strategic planning. I chip in with a list of Internet resources that take new perspectives on the alternative billing issue. And much more.

Check it out.

Posted by dmk at 09:47 PM

October 27, 2004

Interesting Speculations on CLE, Blawgs and Blawg Channel by Stephen Nipper

In the who was carbon copied on that memo department:

Stephen Nipper, in a fascinating post, raises some thought-provoking questions about the role blawgs, such as The Blawg Channel, which he specifically mentions, might grow to play in the world of continuing legal education and meeting minimum CLE credit requirements. A must-read.

It does make me wonder whether Stephen might have touched on some things that might already be in the works. Not that I'm saying that I mean anything by making that comment, of course.

Posted by dmk at 04:39 PM

October 18, 2004

Blawgs Appear on the Radar Screens of Corporate Legal Departments

Jeff "LawTechGuru" Beard sent me an article from the October 2004 Corporate Legal Times on legal blogs and how corporate legal departments are starting to use them as resources. The Blawg Channel was featured in two ways. First, Blawg Channeler Marty Schwimmer was quoted in the article. Second, The Blawg Channel was prominently mentioned as one of the recommended places to start exploring legal blogs.

I'll also note the article mentions or quotes a number of my blogger friends, including Jeff Beard and fellow St. Louisan George "George's Employment Blawg" Lenard, both of whom have been doing some great blogging lately.

The article is called "Legal Blogs Add Spirit to the Letter of Law," and is apparently only available to subscribers of Corporate Legal Times.

Posted by dmk at 10:30 PM

October 12, 2004

Email Marketing Rules for Lawyers: Wise Commentary, Impossible Results

For many years, Will Hornsby, Staff Counsel at the American Bar Association, has been one of the most respected commentators and experts on the extraordinary world created where legal ethics rules and the Internet meet.

His new article, "Spamming for Legal Services: A Constitutional Right Within a Regulatory Quagmire," should be read by all regulators and regulators-to-be of legal marketing by email. The article, while not yet available online, appears in the Fall 2003 issue of The John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law that just arrived in my mailbox. If you are interested in this area, it's worth the effort to track down the print version.

Hornsby has stated clearly some of the paradoxes and difficulties that have puzzled lawyers trying to use email in a normal fashion for anything that might be considered "marketing" in nature. Hornsby has raised the Q word in connection with these rules.

Here are few key items from the end of the article:

Hornsby notes that if, as many experts contend, a lawyer licensed in one state who sends emails to people in other states in which he or she is not licensed is deemed to be subject to the laws of each other state, he or she must comply with the laws of each and every state. As Hornsby notes in my favorite sentence in the article, "This creates a difficult, but not particularly impossible burden."

As he notes, full compliance is not only administratively impractical, but also requires "labeling and disclaimer obligations that distort the message in a way that undermines any marketing benefit that may result from this tool." Based on the discussion regarding the recently proposed Missouri marketing rules changes, a good number of lawyers are actually comfortable with this result.

Hornsby then goes on to point out the irony of the current rules. "As a result, lawyers providing personal legal services are better able to seek clients through unsolicited emails compared to those who are serving the corporate marketplace. This result should be the opposite of the intent of these regulations. Instead of protecting unsophisticated consumers against the possibility of overreaching, the result is the elimination of messages to corporate entities that are best able to assimilate the information and impose marketing controls to eliminate abuses."

Finally, in an argument I have made throughout the debate on Missouri rules changes, Hornsby concludes, "Meanwhile, law firms that could effectively convey a marketing message in a cost-effective way to a wide audience of prospective clients are restrained, if not prohibited, from doing so through this method of communication."

This result reminds me of John Lennon's famous line, "Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn't it?"

Posted by dmk at 10:53 PM

September 29, 2004

Cisco's General Counsel Thinks Small (Firms)

From Law.com's Corporate Counsel

Cisco's GC Thinks Small

Cisco's General Counsel, Mark Chandler, has a well-deserved reputation as a thought-leader in the developing area of client-centered approaches to the delivery of legal services. I ended my last presentation on legal knowledge management with his well-known quote: "Technology is absolutely the only way firms will stay efficient and effective. Those who don’t use it well won’t survive."

More important, however, Chandler has the reputation for walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

In this interview, Chandler addresses, for me, one of the biggest questions facing lawyers who want to develop sophisticated, technology-based law practices outside of the big firm environment: if we build it, will the top corporate clients be willing to come to small, start-up firms or will the "no one gets fired for hiring Skadden" mentality still prevail?

In Chandler's world, the answer is that small firms are indeed part of the legal services equation. He gives several examples.

If you only want to pay attention to one developing legal trend over the next two to three years, this trend is the one that I suggest that you watch.

As an aside, I don't think that Chandler was joking when he made the last comment in the article.

Posted by dmk at 10:58 AM

September 27, 2004

September Law Practice Today Focuses on Alternative Billing

The September issue of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's free webzine, Law Practice Today, is now available. Our theme for this issue is "Alternative Billing," a much-discussed topic among clients of lawyers, even if lawyers generally try to avoid the subject.

There's a generous selection of six articles on the alternative billing theme, a list of links to useful Internet resources on alternative billing penned by Tom Mighell and me, monthly columns on law practice management issues, and articles on our core topics - management, marketing, finance and technology. I was especially interested in Kathy Clarke's introduction to the concept of "appreciative inquiry," but I'm sure that you wil find many interesting items in this issue.

Posted by dmk at 04:28 PM

September 15, 2004

September Issue of Law Practice Magazine - Great Tips

The September issue of the ABA's print magazine, Law Practice, is now available online for free to both members and non-members. It will be available only to members when the October issue appears.

The focus is on "tips" and it is chock-full of great tips on a wide variety of law practice topics. It's a remarkably useful and valuable issue. If you check out this issue while it's free, you'll understand why many LPM members believe that the magazine subscription alone justifies the $40 cost of joining the Law Practice Management Section. Add the $100 discount to ABA TECHSHOW, and membership seems like it pays for itself.

Info about the LPM Section and how to join can be found at http://www.abanet.org/lpm/.

Posted by dmk at 06:32 PM

September 09, 2004

The first iTunes affiliated blawg on the block?

The title of this post is a little tribute to Rex Hammock, whose rexblog is a blog I've enjoyed greatly. He posted recently about how he had become one of the first approved partners in the new Apple's iTunes Affiliate Program.

Yesterday, I received my confirmation of approval as a partner in the iTunes Affiliate Program, making me, I believe, the first in the blawg world to become a partner in the program. At the rate of a nickel per clickthrough song download, the affiliate program will probably never be a big profit center. However, once I get the program linking details worked out, watch for more frequent references to songs and long lists of my favorite songs, best songs for blogging, songs about lawyers, etc. My sense is that I probably refer to more songs than any other lawyer blogger (except for maybe my song-writing partner, Ernie the Attorney), some of you might not notice much of a change.

Posted by dmk at 11:52 PM

August 30, 2004

Client-Centric Marketing: What Clients Want

From the excellent SmartPros newsletter:

Client-Centric Marketing: What Clients Want makes a compelling case for August Aquila and Bruce Marcus's Client at the Core: Marketing and Managing Today's Professional Services Firm.

Here are some excerpts from the review's excerpts from the book:

• Because clients are more sophisticated in the ways of the law and accounting, they no longer accept the advice of the professional without questioning, challenging, demanding more reasoning and detail.
• Because of the complexity of business today, clients demand that their professionals know more about the clients' business and industry than ever before.
• Professional services always function best when trust is at the heart of the relationship, but the corporate scandals of recent years have eroded that trust. That trust must now be regenerated.
• Where once the narrow structures of a profession were sufficient to serve clients, clients now demand a broader spectrum of capabilities. The more broadly educated and well-rounded professional is the one with the greater advantage in meeting the needs of today's clients.

These excerpts are singing one of my songs - note the emphasis I placed on client-driven technology initiatives in the law firm portion of this post. I've added the book to my reading list.

Posted by dmk at 12:34 PM

August 23, 2004

New Law Practice Today Mentoring Issue

I'm biased because I'm on the board of the ABA's Law Practice Today webzine, but we just published another issue that rocks. The featured theme is mentoring - about as important a topic as there is. You'll find the best collection of articles on lawyer mentoring I've seen. Highly recommended.

My contribution is the this month's "Strongest Links" column called "Finding Great Resources about Mentoring on the Internet May Be Even More Difficult Than Finding a Great Mentor On Your Own" - a reflection on mentors I have known and mentoring in general, and a set of links to excellent Internet resources on mentoring.

Great work by Wendy Werner and Fred "Let's Ride" Faulkner, especially, that went into this one.

Posted by dmk at 09:17 PM

Adam Smith Esq. Has a Serious Message for All Lawyers

Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith, Esq. has been in the zone lately with a string of excellent. thought-provoking posts. His post today, "There is No Place for the Computer in the Home," may be the best one of this stretch.

Maybe it's because Bruce talks in terms of "structural" problems, something I tend to do, but Bruce makes an important point about the growing disconnect between business, law and innovation and ties it to one of the least prophetic quotes of the computer era. It will make you think.

I recommend reading this post and spending a few minutes reading Bruce's recent posts. Of course, subscribing to the feed should be a given.

Posted by dmk at 09:02 PM

August 17, 2004

Is Evan Schaeffer the "Anonymous Lawyer"

It wasn't until I read Evan Schaeffer's lengthy and detailed analysis of the Anonymous Lawyer yesterday that the realization suddenly hit me - Evan could in fact also be the Anonymous Lawyer.

Think about the following:

1. Evan is way, way too interested in the details of the Anonymous Lawyer and the hidden identity of the Anonymous Lawyer. Way, way, way too interested, if you ask me. Very suspicious.

2. Evan and the Anonymous Lawyer are, by wide consensus, the only two humorous legal bloggers. Think about it, what are the odds that there are actually two lawyers who have a sense of humor and can write humorously?

3. Evan is the only legal blogger who has kept multiple well-written blogs going for a long time. Might he not have one more (Anonymous Lawyer) also going, hmmm?

4. Evan's knowledge of the details of the Anonymous Lawyer posts is encyclopedic - not what you would expect from the casual fan.

5. Evan's never let himself be seen in person. Neither has Anonymous Lawyer. QED.

6. Evan's entire post yesterday appears to be a trial balloon that floats future plot lines for the Anonymous Lawyer.

7. Most importantly, Evan's blog is replete with characters he has invented. He's no amateur at creating fake characters. My favorite character, by the way, the one who is always defending trial lawyers - that one cracks me up every time.

8. There have been other clues that I am not yet ready to divulge.

Perhaps we can find an expert text analyst to determine if Evan's blogs and the Anonymous Lawyer are, in fact, written by different people, or whether the multi-talented Mr. Schaeffer has created yet another masterful ruse. I hope that the answer is the former, because, if it is the latter, I would be forced to proclaim that Evan is not only the funniest lawyer blogger, but also the king of all lawyer bloggers.

[DISCLAIMER: This post includes multiple attempts at humor and should be regarded by lawyers as such, to the extent possible, rather than taken literally in each instance.]

Posted by dmk at 11:07 AM

August 16, 2004

How to Attract Clients: Sell Nothing

Ned Steele has a good little article called "How to Attract Clients: Sell Nothing in today's Smart Pros newsletter.

It has a simple message and five easy little steps to conduct a low-key and effective marketing campaign that has the virtue of its regularity, its focus on helpfulness, and its ease of implementation.

To summarize briefly:

Have a good database of clients, prospects, referral sources, and potential prospects.

Use your database often.

Use your database smartly.

Mix your tools.

Go to the media.

Then, as he concludes, "Finally: REPEAT THE ABOVE REGULARLY. And watch the prospects come calling."

A short, wise and highly recommended article, perfect for a slow August afternoon in your office.

Posted by dmk at 05:50 PM

August 13, 2004

Six Ways to Unmuddle Your Legal Writing

I'm a big fan of Evan "Notes from the Legal Underground" Schaeffer. Evan offers guest blogging opportunities on his blog. He wrote a great series of articles on improving your writing recently and I wanted to highlight his great series of articles as well as add a few comments of my own.

The result is a piece called "Six Way to Unmuddle Your Writing," which distills some of my observations about legal writing.

It goes something like this:

Six Great Ways to Unmuddle Your Writing

1. Know Your Subject Matter. I find most muddled writing in places where the writer does not fully understand their subject. It�s no different from when you are asked a question about a point about which you are uncertain. You stammer, start to use jargon, reach for more polysyllabic words, ramble around in circumlocutions, and generally try to change the subject. The same phenomenon happens in writing. Take a close look at something you wrote on a subject that you know very well. Then take a look at something you wrote where you didn�t really understand your subject. Notice the difference. Try to write in the former style more often.

2. Write with the Action You Want to Obtain Firmly in Mind. What do you want your reader to do after they read what you have written? It�s endlessly surprising how often lawyers, whose job, after all, is to persuade people, forget this point. Read what you have written and when you finish, ask yourself, �so what?� Focus on the action you want your reader to take in response to your writing. Then go back and edit, remove and rearrange what you have written so that your revised draft leads the read to the desired action. It is hard to convince a reader to do what you want even if you write clearly, but it is impossible when your reader has to try to figure out what action you want.

3. Put Yourself in the Place of Your Reader. Remember that your reader is at least as tired, distracted and unable to concentrate as you are. You want to write in a way that anticipates that state of mind. What is your reaction to receiving a ten-page, single-spaced letter with no headings, bullet points or executive summary? Why do you expect your reader to have any different reaction? Do you like section headings, numbered points, short paragraphs, executive summaries, a one-paragraph conclusion at the end or other reader-friendly techniques? Lots of other people do too. Do not forget that your writing is meant to be read by another human. Make it easy for them to do so.

4. Write in Your Own Voice. Many lawyers spend the early part of their careers learning how to write for one or more partners. Other lawyers tend to write in ways that they think that lawyers should write. In each case, they are not writing in their own voice. Writing clearly in your own voice is difficult enough. You may not be able to avoid writing for your supervising lawyer, but avoid making your life harder and your writing even less clear by pretending to be someone else when you write. Reading aloud what you write is a great exercise to help you develop your voice.

5. Copy Your Best. I have interviewed hundreds of law students in the law firm hiring process. I tried to learn a few lessons from this experience. In fact, as some of the people I have �coached� on interview skills will tell you, I learned quite a few lessons. Here is an important one. If a candidate becomes convinced during the interview that he or she really wants the job, their demeanor, approach and even posture change radically. It is quite striking. Interestingly, whether or not you are interested in the job, you can easily mimic this response in any interview that you have and your likelihood of success increases greatly. Is it �fair� to do this? I will leave that question for you, but there is no reason not to take a similar approach to your writing. Find examples of your best writing � the ones that got you the results that you wanted � and study them. For example, compare how you wrote a slam-dunk winner of an argument to how you wrote a sure-fire loser. Then start to copy your best and most persuasive writing, even in places where you don�t have your best and most persuasive arguments.

6. Realize that It�s a Journey, Not a Destination. There is always room to improve and lessons to learn. The goal is to write in the best way for your audience to understand and respond in the way that you want. Be open to hear constructive criticism and make adjustments that further this goal. In most cases, criticism of your written work is not criticism of you. There are many roads to this goal, but a long way to travel. Take it one step at a time.

*****

You can read the article in full form on Evan's excellent Notes from the Legal Underground blog.

By the way, I really enjoyed doing a guest blogging gig and would be happy to consider other guest blogging spots that might fit my interests and schedules.

Posted by dmk at 04:18 PM

August 04, 2004

Applying Open Source to the Legal Process: A Perfect Example

Marty "The Trademark Blog" Schwimmer is one of the few lawyers I know whogets the Open Source philosophy, its implications and its applications.

In his post, "Let's Open Source The International Trademark Metasearch," Marty identifies a significant problem, sees a solution that commercial developers probably cannot or will not solve, and recognizes how an Open Source approach will produce a result that helps everyone.

Take a look. You will appreciate the wisdom of this creative approach. If you understand this post, you will take a big step toward understanding the whole "Open Source" concept. If it gets your interest, my Open Source License Law Page is not a bad place to start.

I expect more ideas for these "Open Source" projects in the area of the practice of law will be coming. The question is will we bring them out of the idea stage and into reality.

Posted by dmk at 07:20 PM

August 01, 2004

Can I Market MY Law Practice With Both Hands Tied Behind My Back? In Missouri, I May Have to

Missouri's newly proposed revisions to the rules for lawyers wanting to advertise, market or solicit potential clients have been released for comments. Comments are due by the end of August.

I discuss the proposed rules in much more detail in this post on The Blawg Channel.

I'm dumbfounded by the proposed revisions. They are over-complicated, contradictory, do not take into account new technologies (such as the very new idea of email), apply rules appropriate to a limited number of trial lawyers to all lawyers, and generally micromanage the advertising process to guarantee that any efforts that follow the rules cannot possibly be effective.

Here would be my approach. Identify the specific problem areas. Consider the general principles of the First Amendment. Determine the least intrusive approach to address the specific problem area. Do no harm.

However, I'm not on this committee and, frankly, I have no idea what is intended to be accomplished by these rules or what thought processes produced them. Take a look for yourself and decide.

The only good news I see is that presenters talking about the wacky world of lawyer advertising rules have about 15 minutes of new comedy material.

I'm just at a loss trying to understand this kind of stuff. Heck, I gave them a set of comments a month or so ago, including a suggestion that referring to wording required on the "outside of an envelope" would make the committee look ridiculous in an era of email. They apparently were not persuaded by my comment on that subject or any other. I expressly offered to review the proposed rules for technological anachronisms, but was not taken up on that offer.

For a great thought experiment, imagine a yellow page ad strictly limited to no more than 1/4 of a page with all of the disclaimers and required language these rules require. You may have to leave your address out the ad.

I scratch my head in disbelief, but presume that these rules will pass with no further changes. I'm pretty sure that blogs are not outlawed by the rules, but I'm sure that I'll be adding a ton of disclaimer language to my blog and website rather than using the time trying to earn a living.

The irony, of course, is that the existing rules should cover the concerns the drafters seem to be most concerned about and that it might make a bit more sense to enforce the rules than to micromanage the marketing materials and marketing efforts of all Missouri lawyers.

Posted by dmk at 10:28 PM

July 21, 2004

Wow! Thanks for the Great Reaction to The Blawg Channel

I was busy today. That's why I haven't replied to your emails. And, no, I'm not saying that blogging about Damien Pagan and "vita triptych drub" is more important than responding to your email.

I didn't fully comprehend until launching The Blawg Channel how neatly the concept of "fast prototyping" dovetailed with that great line "Ready, fire, aim."

However, I'm a little overwhelmed by the great response we've gotten today.

[Memo to New Bloggers: You have to be ready to have a real audience from your first posting. Don't even think about trying a "testing 1, 2, 3" post. ]

We might have to release in the future some of our emails trying to work out the small details and decisions you never fully think about in advance. To our credit, even with a group of four lawyers, we've at least resisted bringing up the "is it The Blawg Channel or just Blawg Channel" question, an almost primevally instinctive lawyer question. Go ahead and laugh about it - but what do you write in when you're filling out a form or ordering coffee mugs with the name on them? You see, the practice of law is not quite as easy as some people believe.

But we're working on the details. Expect to see more announcements soon, or maybe soonish.

Posted by dmk at 11:40 PM

July 09, 2004

News Story Disproves Claim that Big Law Firms Have No Identities

Big law firms have it tough these days. Many critics claim that they have no identities, no personalities, no souls, no individuality.

The good news is that the article "Impersonating a Law Firm" in today's ABA Journal eReport tells a story that utterly refutes the claims that at least one big law firm has no identity.

The article's subtitle says it all: "Fish & Neave Identity Stolen by Paralegal, Prosecutors Charge." Now I don't pretend to have a black belt in logic, but I did have a minor in philosophy in college and it seems pretty clear to me that Fish & Neave's identity could not have been stolen unless, in fact, it had one. Q.E.D.

I eagerly await the "critic's" attempts to refute this argument.

I recommend the article for the story it tells, the questions it raises (how do you spend $500,000 on psychics?), and the highly-nuanced arguments of lawyers (you'll catch a version of "it depends on what the definition of identity theft is" argument in there).

In the Sarbanes Oxley world, these kinds of occurrences are going to draw attention to the security and other IT practices of law firms, and, frankly, I'm not sure that some companies are going to like what they find.

Here's a great item to find on your "to do" list if you are a partner at Fish & Neave: "Explain to clients how they really can be sure that we can keep their important documents and records secure, safe and confidential."

On the other hand, maybe it is better to be considered to have no identity than to be referred to as "you mean the firm where the paralegal (allegedly) stole the firm's identity."

For those who enjoy irony, you might take a look at Fish & Neave's discussion of its technology capabilities. For those at big firms enjoying a laugh at Fish & Neave's expense, contemplate for a minute that, as one of the premier patent firms in the U.S., Fish & Neave is likely to be doing a better job on technology than firm's that do not have such a strong technology focus.

Posted by dmk at 12:36 PM

June 30, 2004

The Dennis Kennedy Law Firm Annual Retreat

It's time for my first annual retreat and that's what I'll be doing for the next few days.

I would be the first to admit that the whole notion of a law firm retreat strikes fear in the heart of any law firm partner who has ever attended one, for good reason, but it strikes me that now is the right time for this kind of exercise and I am determined to try to do it right.

I have three things working in my favor. First, we were able to obtain world-class law firm retreat speaker Dennis Kennedy to speak at our retreat. I can't wait to hear what he will have to say about effective use of technology in the practice of law, where the practice is headed and, in particular, the notion of client-driven technologies. Second, I have vowed to avoid at all costs the three worst features of most law firm retreats and partner meetings - interminable and aimless discussions of associate reviews, contentious debate over amendments to the partnership agreement that seem like they should be non-controversial but you cannot figure out exactly why people are so exercised over, and lengthy explanations of firm finances backed up by indecipherable spreadsheets displayed in fonts to small to read. All of these have been banned from our annual retreat. Third, we have an agenda that has real and substantive issues.

Here?s the current agenda:

1. Where the Heck are We Today? I started my solo practice a little over a year ago. If you subtract out the time it took for a longer-than-expected recovery from "minor" surgery, I'm really at a good one-year point and we are halfway through 2004. It?s a good point from which to step back and assess everything, including whether the use of the royal "we" for a solo practice is appropriate.

2. Eating My Own Dog Food. I know, this phrase all but belongs to Microsoft, but it makes a lot of sense for me today. Why do the shoemaker?s children never have new shoes? Several of my smartest and best advisors have recently asked me the question: "What advice would you give yourself if you came in as a consultant to yourself?" That strikes me as a very good question.

I have great advice and ideas that I give and would like to give to clients. How good am I at implementing that advice in my own business? What's the holdup? Let's tally things up and see where my practice stands based on my own principles and the practices I advocate and discuss in my articles and presentations. Among other things, portfolio management is a key item.

3. The "Blow Out" Epiphany. There's a new reality show on Bravo called "Blow Out," which follows the startup of a new shop for Jonathan Antin's hairdressing business in Hollywood. I saw an episode last week and then caught another episode and a repeat this weekend. To my credit (even though my wife spotted it sooner), I realized halfway through the second show that I watched that I was watching myself in Jonathan, or at least what I was heading toward becoming. What were the clues? Oh, things like watching him install outlet boxes, physically switch phone lines, and generally try to do everything himself when he has a group of great people around him. The question: am I trying to do too many things myself? What do I do about it? To those of my friends who have been hinting to me about this - I think I'm finally starting to get your point, but you might want to be a little more direct next time - remember the 2 by 4 and mule metaphor.

4. Collaboration Opportunities and Necessities. By the way, I don't have to think too hard to know what the answers are to the questions in point 3. The real issue is to decide what to do about it, especially since I increasingly realize that I am in regular contact with the largest group of bright, accomplished people who I admire and trust than I've ever been around in my life. It's a virtual group rather than a local group, but I think that raises mainly logistical issues.

At least three topics on the table:

A. The "virtual" legal secretary or administrative assistant. I had a great conversation at ABA TECHSHOW with Sharon Quaintance at Law Docs Express about what they are doing in the area of "virtual" legal secretaries and how that might help me. It's time to follow-up. [Note: Done! Email sent.]

B. Hiring the proverbial "bright college summer / part-time intern." I have too many projects that are close to done that require work that I'm not finding time to do. It's frustrating. I had a phone call last week where I was advocating the use of a college intern in another context and gradually realized that it also makes sense for me as well. Nailing down the idea, putting together the job description and ad are all on the agenda. If you are reading this and might be interested or know someone who might be interested, let me know.

C. Throwing Open the Doors on Potential Collaborative Projects and Relationships. This is the big one, but it makes so much sense. I've already started to do more co-written articles, so, psychologically, I'm more open to the concept than I have been in the past. However, I really want to throw the doors open and consider a wide variety of ideas, projects and other relationships, with the idea of making myself more "web-like" than "silo-like." If you've ever wanted to work with me on something on float a collaborative idea by me, now is the time. For example, I'm thrilled with what?s happening as a result of joining the Advisory Board of LegalRA.com, a new entry into the legal research world that gets many, many things right and is creating a fantastic tool that includes several important features that I have wanted for a long time. Check it out and tell them I sent you. (I'll write more about this in the future, but the "My Library" section of the service is what will blow people away.)

Let me restate the obvious. I've said this many times in many ways, but the current world of legal bloggers is tailor-made for jump-starting collaborative efforts.

5. The Product Line. I?m sitting on more content and intellectual property than many people dream about. It's a matter of unlocking it and turning it into products. That's a huge priority for me this summer and a big piece of the hiring an intern idea.

6. Services as Products and Packages. If the billable hour model is busted, then flat rates, service packages and products are clearly the way to go. It's a matter of creating the packages and then marketing to the right people in a way that they can understand. That's easier said than done.

Here are two illustrations:

A. Executive Review Express. I offer a reasonable flat rate service where I will review and give you comments and negotiating approaches on an IT agreement or software license within one day or three days, as you choose. Many people have been very curious about how successful this package has been, because they think it is a compelling package, especially since both other lawyers and my own clients could use the service. My conclusion is that the results to date have been disappointing. I believe that the problem is one of marketing rather than concept, but I'm not sure.

B. Put Dennis on Your Technology Committee. When I came up with this idea, I thought it was the best business idea I ever had. The concept: for a fixed price, you get Dennis to take an overview survey of your firm's technology, participate by phone in your firm's tech committee meetings, and take advantage of my expertise and industry contacts. Brilliant, right? I've found no interest whatsoever. Again, is the problem marketing, conceptual, or, as I now believe, institutional (an unwillingness to bring outsiders in to see, if you will, how the sausage is made)?

On the agenda - creating and marketing these types of approaches. Help me out on with some reactions to this idea. One of my uniquenesses is that I practice computer law at a high level and I'm also one of few attorneys who understand what software is out there, how it is and can be used, et al. Given that, why wouldn't someone want a package where I "audit" your existing software licenses and help you set up license management practices? As a benefit, you also get my insights into software practices, program usage, purchasing methods that don't make practical sense. Other idea fragments on packages - Your IT General Counsel, Total License Audit, Helpdesk for Your IT Contract Administrators.

6. The Latent Market for Business Legal Services. Richard Granat and others have spoken and written for years about the "latent" market for legal services. To drastically over-simplify, the idea is that there is a large middle class group of people who have definite needs for legal services, but who cannot afford, do not understand the benefit of, or otherwise do not use the services of lawyers. As a result, they "go it alone" or do nothing, often to their detriment.

I believe that the same idea applies in the business context. In the latent market for business legal services, you find a large number of businesses where owners, executives (often CFOs) and others make "seat of the pants" legal decisions on their own for many of the same reasons Granat and others discuss. Another portion of this market routinely "underlawyers" the problem - i.e., uses a general lawyer for issues that should be addressed by lawyers who practice in the specific area. An example would be a company that has its real estate lawyer looking over software licenses.

In either case, mistakes are likely to be made. When I describe my practice as "providing consumer protection for businesses entering into important technology contracts," I have the picture of this latent market for business legal services in mind. These are the people I can and want to help. At the annual retreat, I want to take some time to think about this concept, its implications and approaches to target this latent market, especially in ways that take advantage of Internet delivery of services, products and collaborative efforts.

7. Channels, Sponsorships and Advertising. Earlier this year, I did a small experiment with sponsoring and advertising with respect to my web efforts, given that my website drew over a million hits last year. The pace is even higher this year and the percentage of hits going to my blog has reached 60%. As a result, you will find logo sponsorships from CaseSoft, Fios, Worldox and Tabs 3 on various pages on my website. I?ve all-but-decided to forego writing product reviews and turn my focus instead to using the Dennis Kennedy channel to create a limited number of sponsorships from vendors that I like and would recommend, are doing cool things, or make sense for my audience. The upcoming redesign of my website will reflect more of this ?channel? approach. In the legal space, it is still unclear if this approach will be approved (and in what form) and how best to do it. Unfortunately, there have been recent stirrings in ethics regulations that more restrictive advertising regulations of all kinds are ahead for lawyers, with a justification/focus of the "dignity of the profession" involved. Since a vocal group of lawyers have suggested that lawyers should not mention the fact that they like such "common" things as NASCAR on their blogs (I guess that the #48 decal of Jimmy Johnson I put on my laptop to help keep an eye on it during airport screenings would be problematic to them as well), the howls about advertising or sponsorships on law firm websites will probably be forthcoming. My reaction: get a life!

8. New Tech. No, not stuff I want. I want to look into technologies that make sense for me, my clients and the delivery of legal services. No mysteries here - I write regularly about these things in my articles and on my blog. The big one that I keep rolling around in my head is web services (the dot Net variety, e.g., MySmartChannels)). Personal KM, CaseMap 5, OneNote, Tablet PCs, RSS, and "generation 2" document assembly are other good examples.

9. The Impending Health Insurance Crisis. There's no question that I love my move out of the firm environment and my new approach. However, the fly in the ointment is health insurance - namely a COBRA election that will run out this fall. Although I hate the idea of hanging out a "will take employment for health insurance" sign, the fact remains that the health insurance system is a disaster area for small businesses, the fact that health insurance availability is so tied to traditional employment in a society that increasingly sees independent businesses is a train wreck waiting to happen, and I don't see anything in the current election campaign that gives me a good feeling. If you have ideas, I want to hear them, but both pricing issues and availability issues can easily move any solo business (including mine) back to an employment model. That's going to take some thought.

10. Other Ideas Rattling Around. I have a bunch of notes, ideas, lists, articles, books and the like that I need to take some time to pay attention to and think about. I have a lot of follow-up to do just on people I've met in the last few months. Lots of ideas for clients, friends, readers of this blog and others. There is the small matter of collecting and harvesting those, turning them into action items using the David Allen model, and then working with my "priorities advisor," Wendy Werner, to develop a solid going-forward approach. I'm energized and I haven't even started yet.

As always, I welcome input, suggestions, recommendations, questions, ideas for paying me money and the like. Email me at dmk@denniskennedy.com.

Posted by dmk at 12:56 PM

June 24, 2004

Will Work for Referrals

I learned a long time ago that one of the best questions you can ask anyone in business is "how will I know when I have someone I can refer to you?" As a result, I'm always pairing up people I meet with service providers I already know.

Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to learn the flip side of referrals - making sure that people know when to refer someone they know to me. It's kind of a major deficiency, if you think about it.

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing shares a couple of getting referrals tips as part of his pre-announcement of the release of his new ebook and audio program, Referral Floods.

While you are there, don't miss his post called "Educate Your Referrals." Excellent advice. And "Referrals are a Matter of Motivation."

Oh, what the heck, take a few minutes and read through the archive. I guarantee you'll get some great ideas that you can really use.

Posted by dmk at 07:40 PM

How Do General Counsels Select Law Firms

There's been a small flurry of great articles about the current state of the art among general counsels of corporations for the selection of outside counsel. All are worth reading by any lawyer who has or wants corporate clients.

First, Bridgette Herschensohn's "How Do General Counsel Select Law Firms?" summarizes the key points from a recent seminar on this topic that featured a number of cororate general counsels. She highlights five key concerns for corporate counsel. They probably will not surprise you, but I want to highlight two observations. First, corporate counsel seem to use practices that guarantee that (1) they will all keep looking at the same set of large law firms and hoping that these firms will changes and (2) smaller, innovative firms amd lawyers will never get on the hiring radar. This practice is a big deterrent from lawyers looking to leave large firms and create technologically innovative firms. Second, point #4 refers to "the added-value factor." Here's the simple translation - alternative billing practices ideally implemented with technology and service enhancements.

Legl market guru Larry Bodine, in his usual incisive fashion, covered another similar seminar and posted about it in his blog at "Getting Into the Corporate Counsel Mind." He sets out four practical lessons, some of which are in line with the points from Herschensohn's article and some of which are diametrically opposite.

On Law.com. Nathan Koppel's "Courting Shell" covers Shell's recent "beauty contest" to both choose and limit the number of its law firms. Koppel highlights Shell's primary criteria, such as quality, cost-effectiveness and professionalism, but he focuses on the critical fourth factor, one which some law firms, even in 2004, still find surprising, diversity. It's an important article for all lawyers working in the corporate legal market. By the way, diversity could easily be one of my first questions in my proposed "2 by 4" blog feature. I spent a good portion of the 1990s on the steering committee for the St. Louis Minority Clerkship Program and, over the years I've heard opinions from lawyers on diversity issues that still make me shake my head and wonder what planet they came from.

I recommend the best resource I've found on the interaction of corporate counsel and outside law firms. It's Larry Smith's Inside Outside: How Businesses Buy Legal Services. Trust me, you'll thank me after you read it.

Finally, at Law Practice Today, we're working on two theme issues for July and August. In July, we'll focus on electronic discovery. The August issue will address the whole topic of corporate counsel / outside counsel relationships. Please contact me if you have an interest in contributing an article or want to learn about advertising or sponsorship opportunities for either or both issues.

Posted by dmk at 02:29 PM

June 23, 2004

My New 2 by 4 Feature Will Compete with Matt Homann's Five by Five

I was talking with Matt "the [non]billable hour" Homann on the phone this morning and congratulating him on the wildly successful "Five by Five" feature that he has developed. I highly recommend the entire collection - Matt has come up with a cool idea and it's amazing how the simple offer of a "Five by Five" t-shirt has brought out some of the most articulate and thought-provoking ideas about the practice of law you are likely to see outside of Law Practice Today. Sorry, the LPT promos have become a reflex action for me lately. All kidding aside, there is much wisdom in the two Five by Five collections and lots of great ideas that people should implement rather than simply talk about.

By the way, for those playing the game at home, I found myself, like Ernie, wishing that I had written Denise Howell's response this week and Yvonne Divita's response in the first week. Unfortunately, I'm far too young to do that "who's your favorite Beatle?" thing, but I would pick Edge as my favorite U2-er.

Perhaps I digress.

In any event, I suggested several new Five by Five topics to Matt until he caught on that all of my suggestions led inescapably to the conclusions that (1) I was the perfect guest and (2) the questions were so calculated that Matt would have to change the name to One by Five.

By the end of the call, I have to admit that the little jealousy monster had climbed up on my shoulder and was whispering things in my ear. Why indeed have I mentioned Matt's blog posting more than my own lately? Fortunately, the green guy had a great suggestion that I can't wait to implement.

See what you think of this one . . . .

"The Two By Four (tm)." It's based on the old mule training proverb that you need to whack a lawyer, er, mule with a two by four just to get the mule's attention. It will be a weekly collection of of four items from two well-known experts of things that most businesses already know or are already doing that it will take a whack from a two by four to get lawyers and law firms to pay attention to.

Since we're talking about lawyers, maybe I should call it Four by Four. Let me know.

Unfortunately, I have no ideas yet to match the comedic stylings of Evan "The Funniest Blawger" Schaffer (see, e.g., "Types of Lawyers #4: The Lawyer Who Carries Another Lawyer?s Briefcase") and Anonymous "Another Pretty Darn Funny Blawger, If Like Me, You Like That Kind of Humor and Spent Most of Your Career in Large-ish Law Firms" Blogger. Anonymous served notice on Evan today that Evan might have a little competition in the comedy category via Anonymous's "Diary of an Anonymous Lawyer" post. Anonymous also used this post to move way up on the charts in the "blawger most likely to get a book deal out of this blogging thing" list, even though my money is still on the "one of the law professors" betting option.

Note: No mules were injured in the writing of this post.

Posted by dmk at 12:11 AM

June 20, 2004

Tom Peters: Brand You Survival Kit

Tom Peters has a new article on his "brand called you" theme in the June issue of Fast Company, which I recommend to your attention.

I liked this quote:

"We survive by staring change in the eye--and adapting. . . . A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside."

It's no secret that I believe that most lawyers and law firms are way too passive in their response to today's world of change. This article may give you a few ideas for ways to move into the active minority.

Thanks to the PR Machine for the pointer and the clever comparison of the article to a Madonna set-list.

Posted by dmk at 09:22 PM

June 14, 2004

Matt Homann's Five by Five

When I talked with Matt "the [non]billable hour" Homann this past weekend, he told me how excited he was about his first "Five by Five" feature. Now, I see why.

Matt's idea is to get a group of five experts to give lists of five ideas on a number of topics.

The first Five by Five covers "What are the five worst mistakes a lawyer can make when marketing to a female potential client? Alternatively, what are the five best things a lawyer can do to secure a female's business?"

The responses are fantastic and deserve a wide audience. The interviewees include Kirsten Osolind, Michelle Miller, Anita Campbell, Yvonne Divita, and Jennifer Rice, all of whom have excellent blogs.

There is a tremendous amount of wisdom and practical advice in these posts. I've cringed in meetings when I've seen many of the "points to avoid" repeated by male attorneys. Great stuff.

Posted by dmk at 10:26 PM

June 10, 2004

Tom Peters Moves to Blog Format

I'm a big fan of Tom Peters and it's great to see that he is moving his web site to a blog format. Apparently, he is still making a decision about RSS feeds.

Tom . . . RE-IMAGINE! RSS IS WHERE IT'S AT!!!

Posted by dmk at 10:57 AM

May 12, 2004

IRS invites Denial of Service Attack?

From Paul Caron's TaxProf Blog:

IRS To Seek Input on "Systemic Tax Issues"

"The IRS today invited Tax Profs, tax lawyers, and taxpayers to bring "systemic tax issues" to the attention of the IRS's Taxpayer Advocate Service via the Internet. Advocacy projects will be initiated on those items that affect multiple taxpayers and relate to IRS systems, policies, and procedures. The advocacy projects developed from these issues are designed to accomplish four fundamental goals:

? Protecting taxpayer rights
? Easing or preventing taxpayer burden
? Ensuring equitable treatment of taxpayers
? Providing essential services to taxpayers

To submit suggestions for advocacy projects, go here and click on ?What is Systemic Advocacy.?

So soon after April 15?

Maybe it's because I used to be a tax lawyer, but I've consistently found the TaxProf Blog to be an excellent resource with lots of useful posts and continuing coverage of the dancing going on over the release of Teresa Heinz Kerry's tax returns. The most recent items notes that the first two pages might be released after October 15 and that releasing those two pages "strikes a balance between my family's privacy and the media's request for more financial information." Senator Kerry also went on to say, "Well, first of all, if I had been president, we wouldn't have had any need to seek input on systemic tax issues." Just kidding.

Check out the TaxProf Blog.

Posted by dmk at 01:43 PM

May 11, 2004

The True Competition for Estate Planning Lawyers???

From the excellent DealNews.com, which gives you a daily email option and a choice of RSS feeds to bring you all kinds of Internet bargains:

**WillWriter 2002 for $1.99** - 10:16 am

software-blowouts.com offers Broderbund's WillWriter 2002 for $1.99, the lowest price we've seen. Shipping is $5.95.

http://dealnews.com/newsdaily.html?article,65888

I'm having a hard time (and I used to do only estate planning) coming up with an argument as to why not to use this for my own will, for a set of standard forms, or, in cases where there are no estate tax concerns or other special circumstances, to recommend this software to a reasonably savvy person to prepare a draft and then hire a lawyer only to review the documents and supervise their proper execution. In the last option, a client would pay only a small fraction of the going rate for estate plans while still getting the services that are the most important for a lawyer to provide. A case could be made that an estate planning lawyer should scoop up a bunch of these at $1.99 and offer them free to new clients, outsource the preparation of documents to clients, and charge them only for review and execution services and a "maintenance" plan.

The real practice of law question that I am trying to come to terms with these days: Should the cost of standard "form" document preparation drop to zero and document preparation simply be a standard feature of a "legal services package"?

Posted by dmk at 11:23 AM

May 05, 2004

How Companies Use (and Abuse) Law for Competitive Gains

Wharton's Strategic Management has published "How Companies Use (and Abuse) Law for Competitive Gains," an extended excerpt from a new book by Wharton legal studies professor G. Richard Shell, called Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will. I expect that the book will create a lot of interest and controversy.

From the story:

"Shell?s thesis centers on what he calls ?competitive legal strategy? ? the use of contracts, courts, regulation, and lobbying to secure competitive advantage in business. He shows how Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, Andy Grove, and Bill Gates, among others, have forced rivals to the bargaining table with litigation, defined the boundaries of their markets with regulations and used politics to fight competitive battles. Nor, Shell notes, is this a recent development. Long before SCO Group tried to gain control over the Linux market with copyright lawsuits, the first manufacturers of sewing machines, automobiles, radios, and even airplanes perfected litigation strategies to control their respective industries. Shell uses examples from business history to illustrate his thesis."

A concluding point that is worth taking some time to think about:

"Law is perhaps the most hidden of all competitive strategy tools. Many in business fear getting tangled up with lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats, so they keep their distance from legal matters. But it is just this aversion that makes legal knowledge such a rich source of competitive advantage for those who take the time to understand how legal systems really work."

What comes first - legal strategy classes in business schools or business strategy classes in law schools?

Posted by dmk at 09:07 PM

April 28, 2004

Do Lawyers Make Good CEOs?

The BusinessPundit raises the interesting question, "Do lawyers make good CEOs?"

It's a good topic for debate, but it's also a question for which I have some rooting interest. I worked with Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, Inc. and Hardee's Food Systems, Inc., on quite a few projects when we were both at The Stolar Partnership in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I'll also remember when Andy told me that the work I was doing on a particular high-profile project was the type of opportunity that would make me a partner in short order. He was right and I enjoyed working with him. As a lawyer, he had both a great attention to detail and an ability to see the bigger business issues. I also suspect that his cross-examination skills have been put to good use in getting answers to tough questions.

I see a little bit of Andy in Hardee's commercials and the Six Dollar Burger especially. I even got a little chuckle when I saw a commercial featuring Andy - "hey, I know that guy!"

Now, I definitely do not think that most lawyers will make good CEOs, but I've worked with and met a good number of lawyers who certainly would.

Posted by dmk at 09:18 PM

The Three Fallacies

Just one of several excellent postings recently from BrandAutopsy focuses on what Paul Williams refers to as the Three Fallacies. They are Complacency, Conservatism, and Conceit.

Read the post and then consider how they might apply to your firm or organization. Your feeling of discomfort will be proportional to your need to take action.

By the way, Paul laments his inability to make it through Tom Peters' Re-Imagine!

Re-Imagine! definitely rewards the patient reader. The key is to relax, stop fighting to impose your stylistic standards and let Tom drive the car while you ride. It's a trip well worth taking. Failing that, the audio CD might be a better way to go for some people.

Posted by dmk at 08:58 PM

April 19, 2004

Matt Homan Walks the Walk

What will the 21st century legal practice look like? Consider this example.

Matt Homan is a bright young lawyer with many cool ideas. Even better, he doesn't just talk a good game - he puts himself out on the line and follows his own advice. That's something that I really admire. I like people who make you challenge your own assumptions and force you to get off your ass.

Matt just announced the opening of his new era of law practice - The Silver Lake Group, complete with a Citizen Kane-esque statement of principles. That's cool and something you don't see very often.

I had the idea a while back to start a newsletter called "Practice Transformation." I might still do that, but Matt makes me think that it's better to try to transform your practice than to write about how it might be done.

Keep rocking, Matt. No more excuses, though - we've got to get together next week for lunch, breakfast, whatever.

Posted by dmk at 11:43 PM

April 08, 2004

Proposed Study: Associate Departures from Connecticut Law Firms

David Giacalone in a post called Associate Disciplined for Remaining Silent covers a new Connecticut Supreme Court decision that upheld a reprimand for a junior attorney who remained silent in the presence of falsehoods by his senior lawyer, where the silence deceived a judge. As you might expect, the case had some unique facts, which are discussed in the comment to David's original post. The most salient fact might well be that the senior lawyer told the judge what the junior lawyer had told the senior lawyer, creating a situation where the junior lawyer would definitely know there was a misstatement. It wasn't a case where the junior lawyer heard a senior lawyer say, "There's a new case that I didn't have the time to get yet that addresses this exact issue and rules in my favor."

I have to admit that the following quote from a news reporter got a chuckle from me because of purely theoretical approach it takes:

"Even if it enrages the senior partner or undermines the argument, a lawyer is duty-bound to speak up and prevent a judge from getting the wrong impression."

David says: "I can already hear the wailing of bleeding hearts and enablers, who say such a rule is "unfair" to the poor, powerless associate." He's right that there comes a time where you have to take a stand and that once you bend on small things it becomes easier to justify bending on bigger things, but it's a tough spot to find yourself in early in your career when you are with a senior lawyer in front of a judge. Given the idealized and theoretical notions of Law that you learn in law school, you might well be more speechless than misleadingly silent.

Since most lawyers who read this story will probably think that "yeah, he speaks up and he gets fired," I want to move from the topic of the rule to the topic of the atmosphere for associates today.

It's not the rule that's unfair to associates, it's the fact that it adds another worry for associates who are currently living in a system where they walk on eggshells out of fear of being fired, are caught in the crossfire of crushing billable hours minimums and demands to "keep your hours on this project as low as you can," refuse even to ask permission to attend and be reimbursed for continuing legal education, bar and other volunteer activities, and question what they've gotten themselves into. What's worse is that (1) clients hate to pay for the time attorneys spend talking to each other and (2) minimum billable requirements on partners have cut into the time a partner will spend training and preparing associates for cases. As a result, litigation associates complain that they rarely are given the big picture view of a case and there work is strictly limited to the one issue in front of them. They might be with a partner who made a blatant misstatement and have no idea whatsoever that anything was wrong, but in hindsight, they'd look pretty bad.

I've said many times that the current methods big law firms use with associates are grinding up some of the brightest and most capable young lawyers I've seen. There have to be better ways.

So, for anyone who is looking for an interesting survey/study to do, tracking the rate of departures of litigation associates from Connecticut law firms in 2004 might be a good choice of topic.

Posted by dmk at 05:58 PM

April 07, 2004

Recommending Adam Smith, Esq.

Bruce MacEwen's blog, Adam Smith, Esq., covers the economics of law firms and is off to as strong a start as any law-related blog I've seen in a while. He discusses some important ideas and trends, perhaps none more important than the implications of Sarbanes Oxley for law firm document management systems. My friend and legal tech guru Michael Kraft also made some excellent points on this topic at TECHSHOW.

Posted by dmk at 08:42 PM

February 19, 2004

Jurist's Free Legal News Feed

Bernard Hibbitt's is one of the pioneers of legal websites. I wanted to help get the word out on Jurist's Paper Chase, a legal news service edited at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law by Professor Bernard Hibbitts and a volunteer staff of law students. You or your firm can add this news feed to your website by following these instructions. Be sure to check out the other great features of the Jurist site.

Posted by dmk at 12:01 AM

February 13, 2004

Abraham Lincoln on the Practice of Law

David Giacalone's post "A Lincolnesque Law Practice?" collects a number of excerpts from Abraham Lincoln's writings about the practice of law. Giacalone weaves the excerpts together in a way that makes for a pleasantly educational read for a Friday.

Posted by dmk at 11:35 AM

February 03, 2004

How Appealing Will Big Firm Life Remain for Blawgers

I send my best wishes to pioneering legal blogger Howard Bashman on his recent decision to leave his old firm and start a new practice.

Close readers of my recent article on legal technology trends for 2004 will note that one of the key trends I identified was a movement of prominent big firm lawyers to solo and small firm practices. Bashman's move is an example of exactly what I expected to see when I made these comments.

This trend raises a number of intriguing questions and opportunities.

Look at the legal talent now involved in blogging. Now think about the notion of "virtual law firms" and elawyering. Is the idea of the "Blawger Law Firm," with the innovation that term implies, all that far-fetched? Just a thought.

Posted by dmk at 12:00 AM

January 06, 2004

The Magical Million Hit Mark � Yes, Blogs Might Work for You

I got a note from my web host, who was running my log files for 2003, that my web site had hit the magical 1,000,000 hits mark for 2003. As a frame of reference, there were 200,000+ hits in 2002.

As most of you know, the number of hits statistic can be very misleading, especially given all the hits on a site (especially a blog site) than happen automatically by robots, spiders and other software animals few of us really understand. That said, topping the million mark is meaningful by any standard, especially for a niche site such as mine. In addition, my pages have few graphics, so the hits number on my site is not as grossly overinflated as it can be on some sites. However, don�t rain on my parade and tell me even more reasons the hits number might not matter; I�m very excited to hit this milestone.

What were the differences between 2002 and 2003? The two significant ones where (1) I left my old law firm to start my own practice and my website became a more central part of my marketing, and (2) I started this blog. I think difference #1 might have accounted for a significant, but reasonable, increase. However, I would guess (not having the log files yet and, let�s face it, I�m probably never going to find some spare time when I actually want to dig into them), that perhaps 80 � 90% of the increase is attributable, directly or indirectly, to the blog. Then, even if I categorize a large portion of the �blog hits,� say 2/3, as being �mechanical,� or in some way attributable to pinging and other hits generated automatically in connection with RSS feed and news aggregator mechanisms, I still have to conclude that the blog had a huge effect on traffic to my site.

We shifted to a way I can get current traffic stats for my site in mid-November. These traffic stats also are consistent with about a tripling of page views and visitors since the end of last year.

Awesome! Thanks to all of you who visited my site and helped me hit this milestone. Onward aand upward!

Posted by dmk at 10:16 PM

December 18, 2003

Blawgspace is a Generous Place

Nearly every time I've spoken about the Internet over the last seven years, I always end by saying something to the effect that "I've found the Internet to be a helpful and generous place. There have been many people who given me great advice and many kindnesses over the years, and, as a result, I'm always happy to try to help people out, if I can, so that they can also experience some of the good things I've found in my Internet experiences."

I like to use the example of how in my earliest days of e-mail, I sent an e-mail to document assembly guru Marc Lauritsen and he quickly responded with a detailed and helpful response. I've always tried, not always successfully or promptly, to take the same approach.

I noticed two things today that re-emphasized to me that the world of legal blogging, at least in its current early history, embodies that same sense of generosity.

In part, the reason for this is that some of the same people who were in the earliest groups of lawyers with web sites are also in the earliest group of blawgers. But, it is more the case that the earliest group of blawgers (the "First Ones") also have been very generous and helpful to new blawgers. As just one example, Ernie the Attorney, Tom Mighell, Denise Howell (I still owe her a belated congratulations on the baby and look forward to working with her on the IP Memes newsletter in 2004), and others have gone out of their way to mention new blawgs and give new blawgers a bigger audience and more recognition at the start than they could ever have imagined. By the way, I was talking with Ernie on the phone today and I still feel like I'm getting the chance to speak with a major celebrity.

So, today, I noticed that Jeff Beard at the LawTech Guru Blog said some extremely nice and generous things about both Ron Friedmann and Michael Arkfeld. Not that that suprised me - Jeff is one of the truly good guys.

Second, Internet-for-lawyers guru and regular writing partner of mine, Jerry Lawson, is doing a set of posts that show his great generosity and readiness to build communities.

And here's the cool part. When I watch lawyers on the news talk shows, there always seems to be so much bitterness, divisiveness and polarization - all those things that give lawyers a bad name.

As we near the end of 2003, it is so cool to see how blogs have not only brought back the enthusiasm and energy of the early days of the web, but also provided a medium in which lawyers can show that the TV picture is not the only picture, that lawyers can be creative, generous and help in creating communities.

With that, I salute those who have created the blawgosphere in 2003.

Posted by dmk at 10:04 PM

November 21, 2003

Dave Pollard on Drucker on Innovation

A cool discussion and summary by Dave Pollard on Peter Drucker's approach to innovation.

Pollard concludes:

"In the last three years business innovation has gone from business' Job One to an insignificant part of corporate strategies, as executives have become obsessed instead with slashing costs and heads in an insane race to the bottom, quality and customer be damned. Such an approach is, like seemingly everything else in vogue in the Bush era, short-sighted and unsustainable. You cannot cut yourself to greatness. It's time to start a new bandwagon for business innovation."

Posted by dmk at 03:17 PM

October 31, 2003

The End of Credit Hours in Academia?

Fascinating article today about the push to end the credit hour system in academia.

From the article:

"Having time- and space-bound measures that equate learning with a certain place and a certain time is clearly outmoded. And yet it is the DNA embedded in both the academic and funding system," said Jane Wellman, coeditor with Thomas Ehrlich of "How the Student Credit Hour Shapes Higher Education," a recently released collection of essays on the credit hour.

The many different types of educational opportunities available today, including online education, are making the time-based approach less and less relevant.

Posted by dmk at 09:19 AM

October 14, 2003

A Great Blawg Goes Silent

It's so sad to see that David Giacalone has decided to shut down the excellent ethicalEsq? blog due to health-related reasons. I've admired the growth and evolution of his blog and pointed to it on a number of occasions.

David was a needed voice who focused on critical issues for the profession and the delivery of legal services. I expected that he would grow into a sort of conscience for legal bloggers and through them the legal profession. His approach has affected the way that I look at some of today's issues and reminded me and others that we need to pay attention in a thoughtful way to these issues on a regular basis rather than simply scrambling to grab our required hours of ethics continuing legal education credit at the last minute.

David forced us to think about the ethical issues, which are complex and difficult, and, I believe, will also be considered to have played an important role in the early history of legal blogs.

I understand his decision, but hope that his voice will return again in some form. For me, it gives me a new impetus to cover these issues on a more regular basis and I'll probably do that from time to time on the eLawyer Blog.

David, my best wishes to you in all you do and a big thank you for a job well done.

Posted by dmk at 08:27 PM

October 10, 2003

Missouri Bar Alternative Billing Methods Committee Final Report

Kudos to the Missouri Bar for its 2003 Alternative Billing Methods Committee Final Report, which sums up the results of a survey of Missouri lawyers on a variety of issues related to hourly billing and other options. This report was undertaking in response to recent ABA efforts to determine the "corrosive" impact of hourly billing on the profession.

The report provides a lot of good data for people interested in these issues and I recommend the report highly. Great work by the committee.

By the way, it's no secret that I believe that billable hours practices, especially minimum billable requirements, are slowly, but surely, destroying the legal profession.

Posted by dmk at 02:02 PM

October 08, 2003

First Thing . . . Let's Quell All the Lawyers

David Giacalone continues his great work over at the ethicalEsq? blog with a piece called "First Thing . . . Let's Quell All the Liars."

Among other things, the piece discusses the various interpretations and misinterpretations of the famous Shakespeare quote. Can you believe that lawyers have twisted the meaning of the quote to the point where they argue that the quote actually represents the highest degree of praise of lawyers??!!

David points out a growing perception that increasingly affects lawyers in a subtle but negative way. This perception is one that lawyers must learn to understand and appreciate.

He says, "Like it or not, to the average person, lawyers seem to be in the business of lying, their degree being a license to lie (and steal)."

This point of view is really the default perception that people have of all lawyers. It's a little unnerving to me, after 20 years of practice, to run into this attitude on a regular basis. Fortunately, it's usually manifested by people telling me that "you're not like most lawyers - you're honest." I interpret that as a compliment, but, sheeesh, what kind of a state of affairs have we gotten into here?

There are a number of implications of this presumption, but it helps you understand why so many clients will say that the reason that they fired a lawyer was because the lawyer did not return phone calls.

Here's the way I see it. Client starts with the assumption that lawyers lie. You tell them that you are available to them, will return calls or promise work by a certain date. If you don't return a call, are late for a scheduled appointment, or are late on a promised deadline, you have not committed a small impoliteness, you have confirmed the "liar" stereotype.

Paying attention to every detail that reinforces the "liar" stereotype has become a necessity these days, especially in the first period of representing a client.

A similar phenomenon also takes place when dealing with other attorneys.

The bottom line: excellent, responsive client service is not just an optional behavior these days.

Posted by dmk at 07:52 PM

September 29, 2003

From ethicalESQ: Schiltz's "Sermon" Should

From ethicalESQ:

Schiltz's "Sermon" Should Be Mandatory Reading for Everyone Who Cares About Lawyers and the Legal Profession.

It's hard to make the case for reading an 80-page law review article, but it's done here. There are important issues facing the legal profession. We need to think about them. Here's a great place to start.

Posted by dmk at 10:57 AM

September 18, 2003

My New Online CLE Seminars

One of the things I'm now doing is working with DigiLearnOnline.com to make collections of my materials and presentations available as online Continuing Legal Education courses.

Two courses are now out and others will be appearing in the new future. They are:

1. E-Commerce: Key Legal Concerns - This course gives an overview of some of the most interesting issues and themes in e-commerce law and shows how developments on the Internet are pushing on traditional legal concepts and raising difficult issues for the lawyers, judges and legislators trying to adapt existing law to these new ways of doing business.

2. Email Management for Lawyers: Taming the Email Tiger - This course is designed to help attorneys more effectively deal with their increasing reliance on communication by email. The course covers dealing with email effectively, dealing with spam and viruses, the ABA Opinion on Email Encryption and offers best email tips for attorneys.

As a bit of warning, it is highly likely that the "Legal Technology Primer" collection of my articles will soon no longer be available for free access in its entirety on my web site.

Posted by dmk at 11:04 AM

September 12, 2003

James Champy on the "Idea Recession"

"There's a growling bear in the marketplace of ideas." So says James Champy in this article wondering if our current tendencies toward retrenchment bode ill for creating the ideas and structures we need to evolve business in the coming years.

Posted by dmk at 02:03 PM

September 10, 2003

ELawyer Blog on Demise of Legal Web Sites

Carolyn Elefant has a great post on the eLawyer Blog about a recent article about the lack of success of the early web sites designed to provide or enhance legal services.

Carolyn's analysis is right on target.

I might add a few other observations.

First, the interpretations of the ethical rules that affected many of these sites were murky at best and lawyers wanting to go all out with some of these ideas would have definitely taken a risk of disciplinary hearings (rightly or wrongly - it was just new territory). Whether a lawyer can add his or her name to some types of directories is still an unresolved question.

Second, the MDP (Multi-disciplinary practice) debate had a definite chilling effect (and I speak from personal experience here), because there were so many concerns being raised about what law firms could and could not do, whether you could hire non-lawyers, and, perhaps most important, there were arguments that in a legal service business a lawyer's compensation could be drastically limited because the lawyer could not receive compensation based on the work of the non-lawyers. This stuff was extremely complicated and difficult to figure out.

Third, many of the legal sites came into being in the go-go days of the dot-com era, leaving them vulnerable to underfunding and only a short-term business plan. We learned that it's difficult to build a lasting business based only on a clever domain name.

Fourth, no one ever quite figured out what part of the legal business could actually be delivered over the Internet. I think I know some of the answers, and I'll share those at my consulting rates, but most of these legal sites missed the mark.

Fifth, the visions of IPOs and making millions blinded people, moving them toward elaborate universal approaches and neglecting good, profitable niches.

Sixth, the failures scared everyone. Rather than learn from the failures, the general tendencies were to write off the whole idea. This reaction is a corollary of the typical view of lawyers that "the law is unique; the law is a profession, not a business."

Not suprisingly, I believe that after the shakeout, there are opportunities and we may still see very successful legal sites develop over the next few years - too many people are looking the other way and it's a good time to reinvestigate this area.

The eLawyer blog is definitely a great blog and well worth your attention.

Posted by dmk at 10:17 PM

September 02, 2003

Client Service Ideas - Answering the Old Estate Planning Question

I'm on a legal listserv and there was recently a thread on what an attorney should do with clients who get drafts of their wills, et al. and then never get back to the lawyer about executing them. The lawyer wondered whether his problem was unique and if there were good ways to move the client along and, not so coincidently, get paid. This lawyer tended to have his secretary make a follow-up call to schedule an appointment, with limited results. There were a number of great suggestions on what to do on a "going-forward" basis, but the thread ran primarily toward the "send them a bill and see if they call" approach.

Now, I'm not necessarily critical of that approach, especially in certain situations, but I also see this as potential opportunity reach a happy result for everyone.

I practiced exclusively estate planning law for over ten years, so even though my focus now is quite different, I had a few thoughts on this topic that I thought might be worth sharing on this blog as well.

And, of course, there's no good reason not to repurpose listserv responses into blog posts.

++++++++++++++++

The first rule of an estate planning practice: you can lead a client to the will, but you can't make him/her sign it.

This nearly-universal problem stems from the fact that most people dread stepping up to signing their wills and usually only do so willingly when faced with a "focusing event," and, in my ten years of estate planning, nothing focused people more than a plane trip. My only a-little-bit-less-than-serious answer might well be that your best approach might well be making reservations for a plane trip for them.

To me, the issue is largely one of communication. Many people simply do not understand that they need to formally execute the documents and how to do so, no matter how well you explained it or set it out in writing. It's not particularly your fault or theirs - people are just largely unaccustomed to working with lawyers and don't know the steps we take for granted (in a surprising number of cases, they may even know exactly what "drafts" are).

I say, pick up the phone, call them personally and see if they have any questions and schedule an appointment (transfer them to your secretary, if appropriate, only to schedule). Why wait around? Why let your first contact after they receive the drafts be a bill or a call from your secretary? In most cases, they're expecting you, the lawyer, to tie up the loose ends and tell them what comes next, or they may simply be puzzled by the quantity of documents ("what's this trust?" or "why are their documents for each of us?") or language they can't understand (slip some of my old technical generation-skipping transfer tax clauses on for size). A shocking number of clients simply do not even read your cover letters. In any of these events, they will welcome the call from you and not from your secretary. Show them that they are first-class clients (our saying at The Stolar Partnership was that we only had first class clients - no second-class clients) and that their matter rates the personal attention of their attorney. We tend to forget that estate planning raises many uncomfortable emotions for many people. It is definitely true that some people believe that signing a will means that you will die soon.

There are dangers of letting drafts hang out there a long time: people can die or become incompetent, family situations can change drastically, people can and do "sign" wills (even ones clearly stamped "DRAFT") and think that they are covered, and there are other instructive stories that I might share at another time. In addition, collection gets more difficult the longer it gets to be after the work is done.

I do question the approach of just sending the bill - won't your word-of-mouth be better if you're known as the lawyer who called to check to see if everything was OK instead of the lawyer who sent me a draft and a bill and never talked to me? I'm not being critical of other lawyers using the "send the bill" approach - I tended to be more of a "send a letter" estate planning lawyer than a "call them up" lawyer and in some cases sending the bill is the only way to get someone's attention - but it's worth considering what image you want to create. I also suspect that spending just one morning making phone calls to your clients who have been holding drafts the longest will more than pay for itself in cash flow.

The great thing is that by following-up and scheduling a quick appointment, you can present the invoice in person at the signing and more than likely get a check on the spot, and everyone leaves happy and smiling, with the client telling you that she will be sending her neighbor to you.

Then, you can go back to your new clients with a new engagement letter that takes a "half of the fee upfront" or "half on completion of draft" or other preferred fee arrangement type of approach. Lawyer X's approach of scheduling the signing appointment at the initial meeting is also a very good approach to consider for future clients, especially in the case of standard estate plans. That should really help with both project flow and cash flow and reduce collection concerns. The ultimate scenario, of course, is to have the initial meeting, generate the documents by document assembly while the clients go to lunch and sign the documents and get your check when they return from lunch. A very nice day's work, if you can find it.

Posted by dmk at 09:45 PM

August 19, 2003

Elawyering Blog - Virtual Law Firms

I'm honored to have been invited by Jerry Lawson to participate in his new group blog, eLawyer Blog. As usual, Jerry has some cool new ideas and has assembled quite a group of commentators.

I posted my first entry today on virtual law firms, a subject several people have brought up with me lately.

I've tried to raise some of what I think are the right questions to think about on this topic.

Last night, I started to read Fast Food Nation and was struck by how much today's large firms reflect the assembly line, industrial model. That makes the topic of virtual law firms even more interesting to me.

Posted by dmk at 11:25 AM

August 01, 2003

Increased Health Risks for Law Firms Without Casual Dress Policies

Recent health findings may cause law firms to rethink prohibitions on casual dress. The concern is that tightly tied ties may damage eyesight by raising pressure in the eye, possibly leading to glaucoma. From the article: "The experts say that the ties are probably causing the problem because they are constricting the jugular vein, the main blood vessel returning blood from the head towards the heart."

Posted by dmk at 12:01 AM

July 09, 2003

New Blawg on Charter School Law

I'm convinced that there is enormous potential in very focused legal blogs. To illustrate this point, my friend David Scott recently launched a blog on charter school law, his area of expertise. He told me that he's already the #1 hit on Google for a search on charter school blog.

Posted by dmk at 01:18 PM

June 12, 2003

Solosez.net Debuts

Bob Ambrogi breaks the story of the new SOLOSEZ.net web site, which collects many useful ABA materials for solo and small firm lawyers.

Posted by dmk at 09:51 AM

May 30, 2003

A Shortcut Approach to Career Planning for Lawyers

The Preliminary Results from Boalt Research Project: 26 Factors in Effective Lawyering lists 26 skills, traits or characteristics successful lawyers have.

Assume that you are a reasonably successful lawyer considering getting out of the law practice. Sit down with this list and pick out your best 6 - 10 skills and the 6 - 10 you like best. Make a first cut on combining those lists.

Then start to work with a variety of combinations of the factors on your tentative combined list. Suddenly you're not just another burnedout lawyer who thinks that all he or she can do is practice law. You are person with marketable skills.

Now, put together combinations of those factors that appeal to you and start thinking about jobs that fit them.

This exercise should take you about 15 minutes. You can thank me when you start your new job.

Posted by dmk at 01:24 PM

May 27, 2003

You Find the Coolest People in the Blogs

Legal marketing maven, Larry Bodine, has joined the blogging world. Check out his blog at http://radio.weblogs.com/0125000/. His Law Marketing Portal is a fabulous resource on legal marketing.

Posted by dmk at 11:03 AM

May 21, 2003

LLRX Returns

The great LLRX.com site has returned with new content. LLRX is one of the truly valuable legal web sites with tons of great articles in its archives. The new issue launches with some excellent articles and I'm proud and pleased that it includes some newly published material from me, including the latest edition of The Internet Roundtable. A big thank you to Sabrina Pacifici for keeping LLRX alive and going.

Posted by dmk at 07:37 AM

April 10, 2003

Looking for Legal Marketing Articles for Law Practice Today

As many of you know, ABA Law Practice Management Section's Law Practice Today Webzine is now live. In addition to being one of the main co-editors, I am also the lead editor of the Marketing section. If you have articles on legal marketing, new or previously published, that might fit our webzine, please let me know and we'll see if we can put you in front of this great audience.

Posted by dmk at 09:59 AM

February 26, 2003

Hildebrandt's 2003 Client Advisory

Hildebrandt International has released its 2003 Client Advisory, an excellent summary of the current state of the legal profession. A few notable quotes that may resonate at some firms: "In difficult times you should suppress the urge to grab at random opportunities inconsistent with your firm�s long-term strategy." "Even institutional knowledge quickly becomes dated and worthless if the professionals aren�t constantly updating and enriching it. When clients or professionals lose confidence and begin to depart, no professional services firm can escape decline -- and ultimately dissolution -- if the situation isn�t somehow reversed." Required reading for those in big firms, clients of big firms and competitors of big firms. The weekly Hildebrandt e-mail newsletter is also a good resource on large law firm developments.

Posted by dmk at 07:43 PM