Technology gap between large and small firms grows

The technology gap between small and large law firms continues to grow.

	25-99 Lawyers	501+ Lawyers
Percent of Equity Partners to Lawyers	49%	28%
Number of Users to IT Staff	53:1	29:1
Percent of Revenue for IT Capital Expense	1%	2.2%
Percent of Revenue for IT Operating Expense	2%	5%

This is just one of the many insights imparted by Hildebrandt’s Third Annual Process & Technology Survey. The survey covers technology costs, staffing and how effectively technology is being used in law firms. … To purchase the survey and receive your trial subscription to X-Spot, contact Jan E. Reddington at jereddington@hildebrandt.com. [Hildebrandt Headlines]

I subscribe to Hildebrandt Headlines, and each week I hear about a merger I didn’t know about, who moved where, or tidbits like those above. It’s free – if you’re interested in this kind of thing, it’s a great resource.

Here’s a more interesting statistic: according to Meta Group, IT spending as a percentage of revenue for the Fortune 1000 was 10% (FY 2000). In other words, the Fortune 1000 is investing in technology far heavier than the largest law firms are. One could argue that this investment is a result of increased complexity – the larger the firm, the harder the problems and consequently the more expensive the software.

I think that’s a cop-out. The larger a firm gets, the more likely it is to be strategically run. And the more strategic an organization, the more likely they are to see IT as a critical component of their strategy. So where are the law firms spending 10% of revenues on IT? (I’m not aware of any today. But if they’re out there, please tell me!)

Try this on for size: what the largest law firms would spend on IT if they were a Fortune 1000 company (source data from AmLaw 100 survey, July 2001):

• Skadden Arps: $110 million


• Baker & McKenzie: $94 million


• Jones Day: $67.5 million


• Latham & Watkins: $64 million


• Shearman & Sterling: $59 million


• Mayer Brown: $53 million


• Davis Polk: $52.5 million


• Sullivan & Cromwell: $51.6 million


• Morgan Lewis: $51.5 million


• Weil Gotschal: $50.5 million

Cumulatively, that’s $653.6 million to spend. Across just 10 firms. Take it to the top 50 and you’re well over $1 billion.Now that kind of dough isn’t being thrown around in the legal market today. Not by a long shot. But give it a few years, and suddenly it starts to look awfully attractive.

And a final note: if you’re a small firm, how can you possibly hope to compete with the bigger guys if they’re outspending you in critical infrastructure areas (not in real dollars, but as a percentage of revenue)?

Radio feature request: TrackBack

Check this out: Movable Type (another weblog application) has implemented a demo of “trackback” – a way of tracking weblogs that point into an individual weblog post. The advantage? If you’re interested in what you’re reading here, then chances are you might like to see what others have said who’ve pointed to the post.

We need this in Radio. If past history is any indication, it’ll be released by dinner time… :)

Making your weblog more usable

Day 15: Defining keyboard shortcuts. One of the least known features of HTML is the accesskey attribute for links and forms, which allows the web designer to define keyboard shortcuts for frequently-used links or form fields. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key. If the access key is defined on a link, your browser will follow the link; if defined on a form field, your browser will set focus on that field. Internet Explorer has supported access keys since version 4, Netscape since version 6. Older browsers simply ignore them, with no harmful effect. [dive into mark]

If you’re not reading this “30 days to a more usable weblog” by Mark Pilgrim, you’re missing out. This is a phenomnal tutorial on the intricacies of web usability, with remarkable tips and tricks. I can’t believe I can set keyboard shortcuts in webpages – why don’t more sites do this?! Mark’s other tips have been useful – you may not end up implementing all of them, but you’ll learn a ton about challenges faced by disabled (blind, deaf, etc.) web users.

VC Firm Using InterAction

Here’s another good bit of coverage in ZDNet about InterAction. This one is about a VC firm (Sevin Rosen Funds) using InterAction, “saving the company money and improving efficiency and productivity.”

In a soft economy, CRM for professional services firms can enable the management team to be more strategic in deciding what business to go after, aggregate everything they collectively know about the prospect, and go after the business. A bit better than waiting for the phone to ring, no?

K-Log Pilot Notes

Within our team, we have been surprised at how well the team klog has helped us to have a better understanding of what each of us is currently working on. We didn’t realize how much of our individual work was below the radar of our closest co -workers.  [David Gammel]

I’m trying to convince our I.T. department to get Radio installed across the company for the various departments (I.T., customer support, R&D, sales, marketing, management) to share data. Hearing more testaments like the above help. If you’re interested in learning more about the K-log (shorthand for “ Knowledge weblog”) concept, visit the Yahoo Group on the subject maintained by John Robb.

Travel update

Six hours on the tarmac. One bag of cheddar pretzels and sun chips. Little air conditioning. Hot, humid New York Summer. “That’s it folks – they’re cancelling the flight.” Wait 30 minutes, then “Change in plans! We’re leaving after all!” We leave at 7pm, arrive O’Hare a little after 8pm, and I get home.

As that famous New Yorker once said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Indeed.

I Pledge Allegiance (Now seeking sponsorhip)

“I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND TO THE
REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS, ONE NATION, (SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITY NOW AVAILABLE), INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL”
San Francisco — A U.S. federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional because it contains the phrase “under God,” a decision that has infuriated politicians from both parties, and sent the United States on a desperate search for a new sponsor. [SatireWire.com]

All Good Things Must Come to An End...

… Or not.

I left the Javits Center early, and got to LaGuardia in plenty of time to get on an earlier flight. It would be a sweet end to an otherwise exhausting month to get home early and relax.

But the gods of air travel decided to hold on for just a little bit longer. I’ve been on the plane since 1:45 p.m. (I’m writing this at 4:45 p.m., and there’s no end in sight for when we’ll actually taxi to the runway.) Apparently we’re delayed due to weather in Ohio.

Why can’t this trip just end already? I just want to go home…

(In case it isn’t entirely clear: yes, I’m whining.)

BlogToaster

Check this out: you can get MSN Instant Messenger updates whenever your favorite blogs update.

Nice. But what if you could combine with an RSS feed? Ooh…

(Apologies in advance to any who are certain this makes no sense.)

Geek stuff aside, there are some positive implications for any organization looking to rely on weblogs for knowledge management. By their nature, individuals don’t like to hunt for information. (<kiss up>Well, OK: many reading this site might like it, but people reading this site are probably not the “average” user inside most organizations. You’re all very smart, very tech-savvy, and motivated to seek out information you’re interested in.</kiss up>)

What this little tool does is monitor weblogs.com, which itself is a clearinghouse of weblog updates. (When I add content to my web site, Radio – the application I use to manage my site – sends a message to weblogs.com to tell it that I’ve updated the site.) BlogToaster sends you an IM whenever blogs you like are updated. From an organizational point of view, this lets users off the hook (in a good way): they don’t have to hunt stuff down, it just comes their way. If it were combined with RSS feeds, then your instant messaging client could notify you of new content on your intranet. (See John Robb’s post to the K-Logs group from a couple weeks ago on using RSS for distributing corporate info.)

Add the ability to post instant messages to your weblog (wouldn’t that be nice) and you’ve got a wonderful way to capture, share and distribute relevant information.

Nice.

Interesting. Is anyone else working on something like this?

Playing with the blogroll again

I think I’m on to something, but it’s definitely not there yet. I’ve changed my blogroll (for non-bloggers, a blogroll is simply a collection of links to other weblogs) to use the Radio Directory Outliner to organize the links. (You can see the early attempts at my home page.) Some advantages to this approach:

• I can incorporate by reference other collections of links (I’m maintaining lists of Prairie Blogs and of Law Blogs) – so that I maintain the links once, but can link to them from multiple places.
  
• The Directory Outliner can present lots of links by rolling them up under top-level folders; you double-click on the folder icon, and you see the rest of the links below. The Directory Outliner doesn’t re-draw the screen, so it’s a nice way to make the home page (and included links) more interactive, more visually appealing.
  
• It’s cool.

So… anybody want to help out? I want to know how to tweak the presentation of the outliner, change the font, remove the top-line menu item (“Top > Links > Etc.”), and so on. Any takers?

Making weblogs an effective KM strategy

Jon Udell posts on Google and k-logging:

My weblog buddies will enjoy this sidebar to an article on the Google search appliance. When I say “Google” in that piece, I mean it in a generic sense. Today we associate PageRank with Google. There will be other ways to pool human evaluation of information, and Google will not be the only inventor of such techniques.

The real point is that k-logging needs to be a game that people want to play, not a job they have to do. [via Jon Udell’s weblog]

I got an e-mail from Skip on this (Skip: where’s your blog?) too. I agree that this is a critical step for k-logs to become valuable resources in an organization (I wrote about it in some detail back in February). But it’s not just about searching. People need to provide their own “filters” to be part of the solution. Technology can help out though. And that’s where Google, blogdex, “Distributed Directories” and others come in.

Ground Zero

After lunch yesterday, I walked a few blocks over to Ground Zero. It doesn’t pack the emotional wallup that you might expect – the people working on the site have done an incredible job of turning it into a massive construction zone (and a clean, orderly one at that). What is incredible is the sheer size of the hole left by the buildings’ collapse. As you walk around the site, it’s the little details that catch you: the patches that decorate the front door of the fire department facing Ground Zero, the five story tall banner erected by families of victims of September 11, the stream of trucks pulling the last of the debris out of the pit up the ramp.

Last night, I had dinner with one of my best friends, Jim McNeal, who has lived in Manhattan for years and was working at the World Financial Center the morning of September 11. His pictures of the site are a powerful first-hand account of what he saw.

On a related note, saw this site at DayPop. A proposal to rebuild the WTC, in memory of September 11 and its victims. Intriguing.

Welcome to the Valley of the Real...

Had lunch with Joy and Chris yesterday, both employed at “BigLaw”. What a pleasure. We had lunch water-side in Battery Park, with a view towards the Statue of Liberty. Aside from the atrocious service (is this a Bloomberg plan to incent bad service?), it was an outstanding lunch.

We all remarked at how strange it is to meet someone whom you’ve “met” online. I’d done this before – when in college, I struck up a friendship with a retired professor at Penn State, Jerry Phillips (we met by e-mail on a political discussion list). When driving from my parents’ house in Minnesota to law school in Richmond, I stopped in Happy Valley, PA and had dinner with Jerry and his wife – less than a year before he died. Without the net, I never would have met Jerry. And though we only knew each other a couple of years, he remains someone with a profound influence on my life.

Fast forward to yesterday. Thanks to our blogs, a number of us have created a community of individuals with common interests. At a high level, we’re all interested in how law firms are evolving and using technology to remain competitive. Chris, the director of KM systems for “BigLaw”, comes at the issues from a strong technology background. Joy, a lawyer with a background in legal publishing, comes at it from another angle entirely – and “BigLaw” is terribly fortunate to have them on board. Few firms today have such strong people on both sides of the equation – and even fewer have people as articulate and committed as Joy and Chris. In the midst of an exhaustive press tour, it was thoroughly refreshing to spend an hour and change swapping stories with them.

As for our “real” identities matching our online personas, it was interesting to put faces (and voices) to words. But we weren’t “meeting” for the first time, though – in real ways, we’ve known each other for months. And that’s cool.

What the blog has done for me is to help me find others who are asking similar questions. Blogs help the answers find us. And at the end of the day, that’s got to be a win-win.

eWeek: InterAction 5 coming...

This makes the past three weeks of meetings with the press worthwhile: we’re already starting to see coverage. eWeek breaks the news that we’re prepping the release of the next version of InterAction:

Several new features in the upgrade, including Relationship Map, Who Knows Who and Related Contacts, help members of a law firm, an accounting firm, a consulting company or a similar professional services business uncover unseen relationships between their colleagues and current or potential customers, according to Interface officials in Oak Brook, Ill.

“The total value of what a professional services firm has is what its employees know and, in particular, who they know,” said Rick Klau, vice president of vertical markets at Interface. “They need to share that information.”

InterAction 5 also provides new capabilities for letting users control who gets to see the information drawn from their systems, new data change management features, and data quality tools to cleanse and standardize data.

This month has been exhausting. But this is a good sign. eWeek is a “tier 1” publication – not focused on the vertical markets we focus on, but on the broader enterprise software market. Following Upside naming us to the Upside 100, it appears that the broader press is interested in our take on CRM. (We develop only for professional services firms; we don’t sell to the traditional CRM market place.)

More to follow.

Test post for RSS truncation

Checking the RSS truncation. This should eliminate this sentence in the RSS feed, but post it to the weblog.

If it's Monday, it must be...

… New York. Thankfully, this month from hell ends this week. After this week, I’m not scheduled to travel anywhere for several weeks. Proof I’ve been on the road too long? The other day I nearly dialed “0” to leave a wake-up call. I was home.

On the plus side, I’m staying at the Hilton Times Square, which has high speed Internet access.

Hoping to catch up with Chris Smith and Joy London while I’m in town. Any other NY bloggers reading this site that want to say hi?

Introducing Monday... in the UK

Even if the guy didn’t have an accent, would there be any question that this was British humor (er, humour)? Classic.

http://www.introducingmonday.co.uk/

Go see "Minority Report"

Went to see Minority Report last night. I almost decided to pass – on the plane yesterday, I saw the Wall Street Journal’s review that said it was dispassionate, not entertaining, and overall a let -down. Fortunately, I checked my favorite movie reviewer before we headed out. If you haven’t read James Berardinelli’s movie reviews before, allow me the pleasure of introducing you. He started posting reviews to rec.arts. movie-reviews on Usenet in 1992, then eventually put his entire database of reviews online at http://www.reelviews.net/. He’s not an academic when it comes to film reviews, but he has a deep appreciation of movies. And I almost always agree with his reviews. (Anyone that puts Dead Again on their top 100 list is kosher in my book.) Your mileage may vary.

In any event, I checked James’ review of Minority Report, and was thrilled to see this statement:

In the wake of the disappointment of A.I., Minority Report arrives in theaters representing a much-needed tonic for Spielberg. However, this is not just a “rebound” picture; it’s an achievement – arguably the best escapist entertainment the director has produced in two decades. Minority Report rivals some of Spielberg’s top adventure/science fiction epics, such as Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark. What’s more, it affirms that, even in the 2000s, movies do not have to be brain-dead to be exciting. When the season is over, Minority Report will more than likely stand out as the best picture to grace multiplex screens during the Summer of 2002.

The film is just pitch-perfect. The pre-cogs (the individuals who can predict murders before they occur) are named Agatha, Arthur, and Dashiell. (Not hard to see where those names came from, but Spielberg’s ability to work tributes into almost every scene – without overpowering the story in the slightest – is one of the little touches that makes this a much more rewarding experience. You’ll catch nods to film noir, science fiction, and stock detective thrillers.) Fans of The Maltese Falcon will smile when they see a scene late in the film lovingly reproduce a famous shot. (To say more would be to reveal a twist in the film.) A nearly-hidden billboard in a mall suggests that one brand of sunglasses lets you “See what others can’t.” (The whole notion of what you can and can’t see is central to the film.)

There’s even a nod to another movie adapted from a Phillip K. Dick short story, Total Recall. In Total Recall, one scene early in the film telegraphs much of the rest of the story. You don’t realize it until you see it a second time – but the rest of the story is laid out in just a few lines of dialogue. Same with Minority Report – a key exchange between two characters tells you all you need to know about who’s who. But even with that one exchange, Spielberg still manages to hide a few surprises.

What I loved about the film is that it rewards further analysis. Like with The Matrix, this is a layered film, with too much to catch in just one viewing. Cruise is surprisingly good (I shouldn’t be surprised, as he reinvents himself with almost every film), and the rest of the cast delivers perfect performances. The film dares you to think about the central themes – destiny, vision, identity, loss – and surprises you by unflinchingly considering the consequences.

Dave Winer, UserLand founder, still not dead

Dave Winer‘s disappearance stunned the blogging community. Winer, a workaholic, journalist, software engineer, and entrepreneur, didn’t show up for his daily blogging on Saturday, June 16. 

Where’s Dave?

It turns out Dave was just not feeling well. Hospitalized for an unspecified condition, speculation runs wild. Dean Peters said “Don’t worry, my uncle had the same thing … she’s doing much better now!”

Withdrawal symptoms reveal blog addictions.

“Dave is crack” is the dominant theme.

Nigel Rowe: “After [June] the 20th the withdrawal symptoms kicked in. I tried everything, super-refresh, dumping my cache, firing up a different browser, deleting all my cookies in case I was being punished for hitting refresh too often. Nothing worked.” 

Deborah Branscum, a confessed Dave groupie, agrees. “Tell Dave he is absolutely not allowed to be any sicker than he is already, or we’ll storm the joint. We’ve got the jones for Scripting News and we need it, bad.”  

Bernie DeKoven “sensed a disturbance in the force.”

Ron Pihlgren “I miss my daily fix of scripting.com”.

Even computers miss Dave. “My aggregator misses you” said Drew Wells.

Guy Bjerke tried turning to caffeine but “coffee doesn’t taste the same when it’s not sipped while reading SN.”  

Richard Herring said “Us ‘Dave Junkies’ will just have to go through withdrawl.”

No consensus on whether blog addiction is its own disease or just a variant of internet addiction.

Other reactions:

• 137 mentions of prayer (including agnostics and at least one atheist)
  
• 43 mentions of chicken soup
  
• 11 mentions of jello
  
• 3 mentions of nurses
  
• 1 Doggie web log 

Sensory Deprivation.

Can you imagine Dave Winer disconnected for a whole week? No email? No news feeds? No posting to 20 web sites before morning coffee? No coffee? No hour-long phone interviews? No coding?

What will fill the void?

What mind bombs will emerge from that creative vacuum?

What must be going through his mind?

Share your best wishes.
[a klog apart]

RoadWired MegaMedia Bag

Musing upon the shortcomings of laptop bags, I was very excited to find a company called RoadWired out of Henrietta, New York. They make bags for just about any kind of computer/electronic equipment that you can imagine. One of the products that caught my eye was a bag for laptops called the MegaMedia Bag. This is a very popular product for RoadWired and features 36 different compartments to hold anything you can imagine, including your laptop! [via LLRX.com]

Where do I sign?

Lawyers Always First to Adopt New Technologies?

From Adam Curry comes this gem of wisdom:

Have you hugged your librarian today? You should! They’re really fun and useful (Sometimes sexy, if they have hair in a bun, glasses and both are let down and whipped off in a simultaneous move). As my (currently absent) friend “Dave“ would say: “Librarians and Lawyers are always the first non-tekkie users of technological developments on the internet because they are professional information whores”. Written with affection! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]

Here’s what I don’t get: within the legal profession, many are convinced that we’re way behind when it comes to technology. I happen to disagree with that assessment (if I didn’t, my choice of career would be rather odd), but it’s interesting to note that some outside the profession see us as “information whores.” (Ahem.)

If that’s true, then the legal profession’s adoption of certain technologies should serve as a  bellwether for other industries. Which industries? And why aren’t more people of this opinion? (Note: I was part of a company that went public in 1999 – largely on the supposed strength of this claim – and the market didn’t respond too positively.)

(Here’s an obscure piece of trivia that lends Adam’s theory a bit of credibility: I first viewed Adam’s metaverse.com site with the Cello browser. It was a web browser developed by a law school. In 1992/1993.)

I'm back...

It would figure that the same week I decide to drive the family all over creation (1000 miles from Boston to Chicago in the past 36 hours, thank you very much) would be the same week that my post about Radio acting as a “personal KM” tool runs at both LLRX and TechnoLawyer.

Oops.

Well, rest assured that I’ll be getting back in the swing of things in the next day or so. Stay tuned.

C|Net on Tower Snow's Departure from Brobeck

At the center of a high-tech legal storm. Stunned by the dot-com implosion, high-tech law firm Brobeck Phleger & Harrison wanted to diversify. But then-Chairman Tower Snow wanted to stay the course. That’s when the sparks began to fly. [CNET News.com]

Now the popular press is picking up the Tower Snow departure from Brobeck. C|Net interviews Snow and tries to read the tea leaves. Snow has some interesting comments about what the future holds for tech-focused law firms, and explains why he joined Clifford Chance.

Best part of the article: when the interviewer calls Snow on an apparent flip-flop regarding the need to diversify (read it, it’s good) and when the interviewer suggests Snow’s reasons for leaving might have been, um, more personal than Snow would like to admit. The journalist did his homework – which is refreshing for non-legal media covering the profession.

Watching Road Rules

You know, just when I thought the reality genre had been completely tapped, my wife and I catch the debut of season 11 of Road Rules on MTV. Aside from the fact that this has to be the first time we’ve watched MTV in at least a decade (not really, but with two kids now it sure feels that way), neither of us really felt like we needed another reality show in the mix of shows TiVo catches for us. (And if we were home, instead of in a hotel with few channel choices, we probably wouldn’t have bothered.)

Biggest surprise: it’s funny. Forcing six college-aged kids to roam around a dorm and make them collectively gain 15 pounds (the “freshman 15” – get it?) in four hours is funny. (That’s one example; there are others.) Road Rules used to be just one big scavenger hunt… but now it’s evolved, including challenges, rotating teams, and the possibilities of voting someone out.

Not bad.

Prairie Blogs Directory

For anyone out there who wants it, I’ve created an OPML file that can serve as the “distributed directory” for Prairie Bloggers. It’s a pretty small list right now, and I’m happy to add others. One of these days we’ll actually get together. In the meantime, send me your link and I’ll add you to the crew.

Note: if you’re a Radio user and wish to include the directory in your own Radio Directory, here are the simple steps:

• Open your desired OPML file (or create one, by selecting “File | New” in the Radio application).


• Create a new node in the outline called “Prairie Blogs” (or whatever you wish to call it)


• Hit Ctrl-K, and type in http://www.rklau.com/tins/gems/ prairieblogs.opml in the URL box.


• Click Save.

That’s it!

Best Law Firm Web Site? Not this one...

Law Firm Marketing – First, Let’s Work on the Web Site

From Denise comes this law firm website, which I nominate for best legal website of 2002.  Humor?  Oh, man this is good stuff.

[Ernie the Attorney]

Well, Let me be a dissenter among the group. This site was funny – when it debuted two years ago. (FYI – the link is to their entry from July, 2000 at the Internet Archive. The firm is also at http://www.b-f-h. com/. Get it?)

While I agree that this site is funny, law firm marketing is about making me want to hire the firm, not making me laugh. At some level, I do want a firm to have a sense of humor, to not take itself too seriously. (True story: one law firm gave me an NDA to sign. It said: “1. We have secrets. 2. You have secrets. 3. You won’t tell anyone our secrets. 4. We won’t tell anyone your secrets. 5. If either of our secrets aren’t secret anymore, we can tell people.” I would hire them in a heartbeat.)

But this firm strikes me as the uncle at family gatherings who tells the same joke every year. It was funny once. Maybe you humored him the second year. But by the third year, you looked for a reason to get out of the room.

These guys (er, gals) need a second act.

A wish list for the Distributed Directory...

The possibilities of what we can do with the “Distributed Directories” concept are incredible. One thing to add to my wishlist (probably not hard, but I’m on my way to a customer dinner and don’t have time to play) is to make this work with Marc Barrot’s Active Renderer so that the directory is expandable/ collapsable without causing a new page view. The user experience would be much nicer.

I can just tell I’m not going to get much sleep tonight.

Distributed Directories

Today, an application for Radio’s outliner that will be new for many. We’ve brought a feature from Manila into Radio Community Server, making it possible for people to create Yahoo- like directories that appear in their Radio weblogs. These directories can include other directories. They’re built on an open format, OPML; which can be created in any compatible outliner, including Radio’s outliner. Viewed another way, directories are hiearchic blogrolls. When you start getting hundreds of links in your blogroll, and start categorizing them, it’s time to look for something richer, and that’s where directories come in. [Scripting News]

Userland is seriously spooky. Ernie and I talked about this about a month ago, saying how nice it would be if we could each maintain directories of links that incorporated each others’ links. The directory would update each time it was published – including updates from other directory owners.

It sounds as if this is exactly what Userland has done. Just for kicks, I created a “Law Blogs” directory – not complete by a long shot, but it’s a start. Go to:

http://www.rklau.com/tins/stories/2002/06/12/ lawblogs.html

To include this directory (go ahead, Ernie: you know you want to), create an entry in your OPML file that contains this link (give the node a name, then insert a link to the following macro):

<radio.macros.directoryFrame (http://www.rklau.com/tins/gems/ lawblogs.opml, height, width, frameborder, cssUrl, flMinimalTemplate, flXmlButton, flLinkText)>

All items following the OPML URL are optional.

Two notes: (1) Those of us in the law blog world (you know who you are, and Denise, when are you crossing the chasm?!) should experiment a bit, then add this to the multi-author blog that’s been quite quiet lately, and (2) I’ll start a “Prairie Blogs” directory that Jenny, Prof. McGee, Eric, Mike, and others can include in their sites.

Cool!

(P.S.: Does the sun ever shine in London? sigh)

“rpk”

Eat What You Kill

No More Origination Credits for Wilson Sonsini Associates. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati associates won’t get credit anymore for new business they bag for the Palo Alto, Calif .-based firm. The firm outlined the reversal of its long-standing policy in a memo circulated last month. The decision is a big change for Wilson Sonsini, and is part of the firm’s attempt to shift away from an “eat-what-you-kill” model that encourages lawyers to work only on their own clients. [Law.com]

I was interviewed today by The Lawyer, a UK legal publication. This very issue came up during our discussion – will there be a middle ground between UK and US law firm business models?  One of the big differences between the UK and US legal models is that the US is primarily an “eat what you kill” model, while the UK is considered “lock-step”. Rick, speak English!

OK, here goes: in the U.S., most firms compensate lawyers based in part on origination credit. The more business you generate, the more money you make. While this sounds right, in practice it often leads to a competitive, rather than a complementary, work environment. Individuals don’t share, for fear that others in the firm might get a share of the credit – and therefore cut into the individual’s take. While it allows so-called “rain makers” to go out and bag the big clients, it doesn’t encourage long-term relationship building.

The UK, by contrast, compensates lawyers primarily based on their longevity with the firm. This is certainly more encouraging for team-based business development: the better the firm does, the better you do. An added benefit is that it encourages loyalty – the longer you’re at the firm, the larger your share of the profits.

But therein lies the problem: profits at UK firms are often lower – much lower – than their US counterparts. Consequently, many UK firms are looking to change their compensation model in an effort to boost profits. It’s not so simple a solution – though many seem to believe that there is at least some causation between compensation model and profitability .

In any event, it’s interesting to note that Wilson Sonsini is moving away from the eat-what-you-kill model. Why they’re doing it for associates is easy enough to figure out – they don’t get a vote. (And, as one associate admits in the article, they’re also not bringing in all that much business.) Buried later in the article, though, is an even more interesting prospect – that the partner compensation structure may be under review.

That’s when it gets interesting. My prediction? Any firm where the decision-making authority is decentralized will have an incredibly difficult time making a decision that is in the long-term best interest of the firm but sacrifices their own self-interest. (The firm may make more money over the long term, but their annual compensation may suffer.)

This is what Morrie Schechtman talks about when he states the professional services firms need centralized hierarchies for decision-making.

Recognize a Raygun When You See It

Marvin the martian school of office politics. Remember Marvin? I often explain office politics in terms of this particular cartoon. Marvin had his ray gun. When he has his ray gun – he’s all powerful, he may not be good at using it. But it makes him feel powerful. If you somehow take his ray gun away he’s reduced to a quivering mess, bawling his eyes out.

When working with people, you have to remember that everyone has their own ray gun, it might be a set of responsibilities, an application they developed or some other thing that you may think they have no right possessing. Try and recognize a ray gun when you see it.
[How do you know that?]

Managing Companies in the New Economy

How To Manage Companies in the New Economy [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

John suggests that the new compact between corporations and previously ignored stakeholders is “reward us, provide us more for less, integrate with us, train us, and invest in us and you get to keep your job.”

John is right – in the wake of Enron, Global Crossing and Andersen, employees and business partners have more power than they used to. But corporate behavior is directed by one thing: compensation. It’s how we measure rewards, how we punish behavior we don’t like (by witholding that compensation). In order for the corporations to make the shift John is predicting, we need to identify how they’ll make money behaving the way we want them to.

Perhaps the answer isn’t how they’ll make money, but how they’ll avoid not making it. Interesting. If I’m reading John correctly, he’s suggesting that the only route for corporations to survive is to embrace open access (for partners, suppliers, employees) and open standards (for integration).

On the road again...

Back in London. Mental note: the Heathrow “Fast Track” (reserved for business class and first class travelers) is not fast. I’ve yet to see anyone move through it faster than people get through the “normal” line.

The line for coach travelers is always four times as long, yet there are at least three or four times the number of immigration people checking passports. So… no matter how important it makes you feel, don’t take the Fast Track line!

(And Heathrow Express is great – 15 minutes to downtown London. Roundtrip is less than half of a one-way cab fare.)

Cross Selling: The Holy Grail

A friend who’s in marketing for a large west coast law firm recently analyzed average revenues per client. She took two groups: clients serviced by one practice area, and clients serviced by four or more practice areas. Average revenue in the former camp was $500,000. The latter? $1.5 million.

She dubbed the resulting cross-selling initiative in the firm the million dollar mission.

Countless studies report that selling to existing clients is far cheaper (as much as four times less expensive) than trying to sell to new clients. Yet firms struggle to implement effective cross selling initiatives, and those that do often fail. Why are law firms (and accountin firms, and investment banks) so bad at it?

1. Lack of incentives. Outdated compensation models (particularly in the U.S.) fail to compensate team-selling, and instead try and reward individuals for business that they generate on their own.
2. Lack of measurement. If firms (law firms, accounting firms, investment banks) don’t measure the details of where the revenues came from, how they obtained the business or what activities are responsible for the revenues, they are completely incapable of identifying where the opportunities for future revenue growth lie. The business development at that point can be described as an “answer the phone when it rings” approach.
3. Lack of knowledge. Ask any lawyer at a moderately-sized to large law firm about the firm’s other practice areas, and you’ll frequently get a blank stare. (Not really. They’ll actually try and tell you about a lot of things, most of it half-remembered principles from whatever related class they recall taking in law school.) I know of just a handful of firms that actively encourage their professionals to educate themselves about their other practice areas, and even those efforts are mostly voluntary.
4. Lack of awareness. If the lawyers don’t know what other services the firm offers, how can the client possibly be expected to know? It’s criminal when a client hires another firm to do work that your firm can handle simply because they didn’t know you could do it.

Two items brought this home for me in the past couple days. First, I was struck at the AAM conference how many accounting firms are struggling with this very issue. Compared to law firms, accounting firms are doing a better job of aligning themselves around “products” (bundled packages of services targeted to specific types of clients). However, they’re still not measuring much in the way of segmentation information that would yield actionable information about how to grow the business.

Second, I read an article in this month’s Forbes about Tom Jones, Citigroup’s chairman of the Global Investment Management & Private Banking Group. (Interesting historical footnote: this is the same Tom Jones who, armed with a rifle, led the militant takeover of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969.) Jones’ entire job is about cross-selling, and by all accounts he’s doing a phenomenal job of it. From the article:

In a bear market year [2001], when many fund groups lost assets, Jones’ took in $65 billion in new money. The lion’s share of that was due to the cross-sell. In 1997 only 27% of all funds sold by the Salomon Smith Barney retail sales force were Citigroup products. [SSB is a part of the Citigroup family.] Now the share is up to 47%. Primerica [another Citigroup subsidiary] increased its proprietary fund sales to 67% of gross U.S. sales, up from 50% in 2000.

In other words, cross selling alone accounted for nearly 11% revenue growth in a bad year. Jones accomplished this by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles – especially compensation and confusion. Jones “had to negotiate a myriad of treaties among retail brokerage units, traditional bankers at Citibank both here and abroad, private bankers catering to high-net-worth clienst, Primerica insurance salesmen serving middle and lower income households and Travelers life insurance operations worldwide.”

The lessons from Citigroup’s success are important, and services firms would do well to heed them:

• Provide strong direction. If Citigroup wasn’t clear in its goals, it would have been unable to clearly articulate the vision or the reasons for why change was necessary.


• Demand strong leadership. Jones was every bit the statesman, striking deals among any number of different groups. But at no time did he stray from Citigroup’s stated goals. In fact, he walked away from one unit that felt it got a better deal by offering competing products from Fidelity. Rather than sacrifice the company’s larger goals, he left the unit alone.


• Measure performance. If Jones had not achieved the growth he ultimately saw in 2001, adjustments would have been necessary. If Citigroup didn’t measure revenue generation and the associated activities in support of that revenue, it would have been impossible to know if it was working or not. (Unfortunately, hunches alone are not conclusive.)

There is no magic bullet to develop a successful cross selling program. Key to success is first identifying the goals of the program. Once the goals are clear, the firm needs technology that can facilitate the capturing of necessary information (demographics, segmentation, who do we know at the client, what have we done in the past) and the easy dissemination to the key players. That’s when it gets fun – and where there’s real money at stake.

Cross selling: the Holy Grail for Professional Services Firms

After attending the AAM conference and reading an article in Forbes about Citigroup, I got to thinking about the challenges of cross selling and the tremendous opportunity for growth cross selling represents for professional services firms. I jotted down a few thoughts, and will likely revise this from time to time…

A friend who’s in marketing for a large west coast law firm recently analyzed average revenues per client. She took two groups: clients serviced by one practice area, and clients serviced by four or more practice areas. Average revenue in the former camp was $500,000. The latter? $1.5 million.

She dubbed the resulting cross-selling initiative in the firm the million dollar mission.

Countless studies report that selling to existing clients is far cheaper (as much as four times less expensive) than trying to sell to new clients. Yet firms struggle to implement effective cross selling initiatives, and those that do often fail. Why are law firms (and accountin firms, and investment banks) so bad at it?

1. Lack of incentives. Outdated compensation models (particularly in the U.S.) fail to compensate team-selling, and instead try and reward individuals for business that they generate on their own.

2. Lack of measurement. If firms (law firms, accounting firms, investment banks) don’t measure the details of where the revenues came from, how they obtained the business or what activities are responsible for the revenues, they are completely incapable of identifying where the opportunities for future revenue growth lie. The business development at that point can be described as an “answer the phone when it rings” approach.

3. Lack of knowledge. Ask any lawyer at a moderately-sized to large law firm about the firm’s other practice areas, and you’ll frequently get a blank stare. (Not really. They’ll actually try and tell you about a lot of things, most of it half-remembered principles from whatever related class they recall taking in law school.) I know of just a handful of firms that actively encourage their professionals to educate themselves about their other practice areas, and even those efforts are mostly voluntary.

4. Lack of awareness. If the lawyers don’t know what other services the firm offers, how can the client possibly be expected to know? It’s criminal when a client hires another firm to do work that your firm can handle simply because they didn’t know you could do it.

Two items brought this home for me in the past couple days. First, I was struck at the AAM conference how many accounting firms are struggling with this very issue. Compared to law firms, accounting firms are doing a better job of aligning themselves around “products” (bundled packages of services targeted to specific types of clients). However, they’re still not measuring much in the way of segmentation information that would yield actionable information about how to grow the business.

Second, I read an article in this month’s Forbes about Tom Jones, Citigroup’s chairman of the Global Investment Management & Private Banking Group. (Interesting historical footnote: this is the same Tom Jones who, armed with a rifle, led the militant takeover of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969.) Jones’ entire job is about cross-selling, and by all accounts he’s doing a phenomenal job of it. From the article:

In a bear market year [2001], when many fund groups lost assets, Jones’ took in $65 billion in new money. The lion’s share of that was due to the cross-sell. In 1997 only 27% of all funds sold by the Salomon Smith Barney retail sales force were Citigroup products. [SSB is a part of the Citigroup family.] Now the share is up to 47%. Primerica [another Citigroup subsidiary] increased its proprietary fund sales to 67% of gross U.S. sales, up from 50% in 2000.

In other words, cross selling alone accounted for nearly 11% revenue growth in a bad year. Jones accomplished this by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles – especially compensation and confusion. Jones “had to negotiate a myriad of treaties among retail brokerage units, traditional bankers at Citibank both here and abroad, private bankers catering to high-net-worth clienst, Primerica insurance salesmen serving middle and lower income households and Travelers life insurance operations worldwide.”

The lessons from Citigroup’s success are important, and services firms would do well to heed them:

• Provide strong direction. If Citigroup wasn’t clear in its goals, it would have been unable to clearly articulate the vision or the reasons for why change was necessary.
  
• Demand strong leadership. Jones was every bit the statesman, striking deals among any number of different groups. But at no time did he stray from Citigroup’s stated goals. In fact, he walked away from one unit that felt it got a better deal by offering competing products from Fidelity. Rather than sacrifice the company’s larger goals, he left the unit alone.
  
• Measure performance. If Jones had not achieved the growth he ultimately saw in 2001, adjustments would have been necessary. If Citigroup didn’t measure revenue generation and the associated activities in support of that revenue, it would have been impossible to know if it was working or not. (Unfortunately, hunches alone are not conclusive.)

There is no magic bullet to develop a successful cross selling program. Key to success is first identifying the goals of the program. Once the goals are clear, the firm needs technology that can facilitate the capturing of necessary information (demographics, segmentation, who do we know at the client, what have we done in the past) and the easy dissemination to the key players. That’s when it gets fun – and where there’s real money at stake.

Samsonite soft.dock

This sounds cool (courtesy of Wall Street Journal Smart Money, which I’m reading on the plane):

A brand new bag: Laptops are supposed to be travel-friendly. But unpacking one in a phone-booth-size coach seat typically means sending a flying elbow into a fellow passenger. Situations like these call for the Samnsonite soft.doc ($69.99, www.datavis.com), a new laptop case that’s one part carrier, one part workstation. The bag has pockets that allow you to keep your mouse and power pack plugged in so you don’t have to pull everything out to play Tetris. And a mesh sling angles the keyboard to put some air beneath the machine – a welcome feature for those of us tired of feeling as if our laptop is melting our skin. [Smart Money]

I’ll update and find a picture to include. Sounds like a great replacement for my beat-up Tumi (which, I’m sad to say, hasn’t held up all that well and really isn’t that great a bag).

Flying to Reagan National Airport: Absolute Nonsense

Flying back from San Antonio, I connected through St. Louis. I was in the waiting area at the gate, and while on the cell phone overheard an announcement that asked us to clear out of the boarding area. Then two guards proceeded to up-end every piece of furniture in the boarding area, pick up trash cans, etc. Apparently this is routine for all flights into DC.

Who are they kidding? If you actually manage to get through security with a weapon of some kind, do they really think you’re going to leave it on your seat in the boarding area? If what they’re worried about is someone on the inside leaving a weapon behind, this is far from fool-proof: just leave the weapon at the next gate.

Why aren’t they doing the same for flights to Chicago (they could take out the Sears Tower, after all), or San Francisco (Golden Gate), or Boston (Hancock Tower), or… the list goes on.

The bottom line is that I feel absolutely no safer now that this charade has completed. What a waste of resources. But now that the feds are in charge, it’ll be different, right?

Right?

Where are the B batteries?

“B” Cell batteries: Mystery solved. Stefan sez:

If you go to a battery display in a drug or convenience store or Radio Shack, you’ll find AAA-cell batteries, and AA-cell batteries, and C-cell batteries and big ‘ol D-cell batteries.

But no A or B cell batteries.

This has bothered me for years, and past searches turned up nothing.  Now, thanks to an article on the Discovery Channel Canada site, I know what a B cell looks like. Apparently, A cells are available in Canada, but they didn’t include one on the little photoshopped battery line-up included in the article. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!) [bOing bOing]

I’m including this only because I nearly posted a question about this on Tuesday. I had to replace the batteries in my two month old’s bouncy chair, and realized that I’d never seen a B battery. That struck me as odd, and I resolved to post a question here in the hopes that someone could answer it for me.

This is just proof that blogging really is powerful technology: blogs answer my questions before they’re asked, further simplifying my life. :)

Personal KM and Radio

I sent the following e-mail in three weeks ago to the TechnoLawyer list, and it’s still inexplicably not going out. How can you claim to have an e-mail distribution list if the e-mails aren’t getting distributed? Rather than continue to wait, I figured I’d just throw it out there… and let Ernie, Denise and others pick it up and run with it. If other lawyers find it useful, all the better!

TechnoLawyer member Robert Donahue asks: “I have been exploring Knowledge Management for some time now, trying to find an individual system rather than an organizational system — something I can use to take advantage of as much of the benefits of KM as possible in a firm that is not currently interested in KM. Suggestions? Software?”

About three months ago I started using a program called Radio made by Userland, Inc. (http://radio.userland.com/). Radio is a weblog application – designed as a poor man’s web content management system to automate the publication of content to a web site. Weblogs have become a big deal lately (I wrote about them in last month’s LPM Magazine, the article is here: http://www.abanet.org/lpm/magarticle2002_v28n3_p8.shtml ; the popular press, including MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and others have written extensively about them in the past few months) and Radio is emerging as the leading application for weblogs as Knowledge Management tools.

Radio runs as a server on your desktop (don’t worry, it will run on Win98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP, it will also run on Mac OS X, and Mac OS “Classic” 7.5.5 or later). Point your browser to Radio’s home page (running on your desktop), and you’re ready to go. Setup takes less than five minutes. Radio’s abilities as a KM tool:

1. Easy capturing of unstructured information. Radio takes anything you type into your Radio home page and publishes it to your weblog. The weblog can be a private site, published to your firm’s web server or even to your own hard drive; alternatively, it can be published to Userland’s site – 40 megabytes of storage space is included in your Radio license. Radio can also ftp your site to a web server you maintain. Once this information is published, Radio creates an automatic calendar of past entries, and archives every post in an intuitive format: http://site/year/month/day.html. I’ve added a free search engine to my site (I use Atomz at http://www.atomz.com/) which makes the searching of all past posts very useful.

2. Archiving of sites, pages or other web content of interest. Rather than simply bookmarking a page you’re interested in, Radio lets you annotate that link. When coupled with a search engine, you have a searchable archive of all sites and pages you’ve linked to in the past. This is far more useful than a standard bookmark system.

3. Outlining. The Radio application includes an XML-based Outlining application. Whether you use it stand-alone, or take advantage of Radio’s ability to allow others to “subscribe” to your outline (permitting others to see changes to your outline made in real time), the Outliner is a powerful tool for organizing your thoughts and publishing them to your web site for future reference.

4. RSS Syndication. Perhaps the most useful feature of Radio is its ability to monitor other news sources. One aspect of Knowledge Management is the ability to aggregate disparate sources of data and easily sift through for items that are relevant. Radio includes a “News Aggregator” that reads XML files known as “RSS” files (RSS stands for Rich Site Summary; it’s a standard Userland co-created with Netscape several years ago to streamline the management of news-oriented sites). Every hour, Radio scans the RSS “feeds” of sites you’re subscribed to. If the RSS feed has changed, Radio downloads the new content to your desktop, allowing you to browse the topic. If you want to archive that item, click “Post” and Radio takes care of publishing it to your own site. There are thousands of RSS feeds available, including feeds for Law.com, LLRX, and other law-related sites. This has radically changed the way I browse the web – now most content I’m interested in comes to me.

There are other elements of Radio that are valuable in a multi-user environment, but that’s beyond the scope of the question asked. Radio is a fantastic application – it is, without exception, the best $40 I’ve ever spent on software. You can see my weblog (created and maintained with Radio) at http://www.rklau.com/tins/ – you won’t see the application behind the scenes, but you can get a sense of what the end result looks like. Maintaining the site is trivial – Radio hides all of the technology behind the scenes so that all you have to worry about is typing in whatever it is you’re interested in. If you can use Word, you can use Radio.

As with any KM solution, recognize that your ability to succeed is as much dependent on the processes you build to support the application. Radio by itself won’t get you to KM nirvana. But if you give it some time and learn its strengths, I’m certain that you’ll be better off than you are without it. (And what’s to lose? Take advantage of the free 30 day download before committing the $40.)

Radio: A Personal KM Tool

As a follow-up to the last post about personal KM challenges, I thought I’d share this e-mail I wrote to the TechnoLawyer list several weeks ago. (It still hasn’t been distributed to the list for some reason, so at least now it has a home.) Might help some out there who are reading these blogs but not using the software understand why some of us are so excited by the possibilities.

Keep in mind that this is just one piece of what programs like Radio do for us, but it’s certainly a big piece.

Blogging as part of a personal KM strategy

I won’t include the entire post here, but you really need to read the entire thread (starting with Cory’s original post, Jenny’s follow-up, and then Jim’s wrap-up). One excerpt from Jim’s piece:

When we talk about learning organizations and about knowledge management practices, it can be easy to lose sight of this personal dimension. … Tom Davenport wrote an interesting piece on the notion of personal information environments in CIO magazine quite some time back. It’s still a good introduction to the notion, although I would take it up a level. Managing the details of your information life is a starting point,  but we need to do more if we take a knowledge perspective. [McGee’s Musings]

The Square Root Is....

I’m in San Antonio at the Association of Accounting Marketing conference, and was attending a session on evaluating the success of marketing plans. Given that this is an area of interest to me (if done right, strategic marketing efforts are supported by CRM systems that make the collection, distribution and quality of information much easier and stronger), I walked in hoping to learn about how accounting firms are doing things differently than law firms.

At one point in the presentation, the presenter said that to effect change in an organization, the number of people needed to participate is the square root of the total number in the organization. (It’s an interesting concept, though I have no idea what research supports the claim.) About five minutes went by, and a hand went up. “How do I know what the square root of the people in my company is? I’m just a marketer.”

This person works for CPAs.

I left the room.

Navajo Code Talkers Break 60 Years of Silence

Navajo Code Talkers Break 60 Years of Silence

“Their tale begins in 1942. After discovering that U.S. military codes were routinely deciphered by the Japanese, Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran and son of missionaries to Navajo country, suggested devising a system from the ancient language that few Navajos had ever bothered to write down… [USA Today]

Links for further information about the Navajo code:

• Navajo Code Talkers: World War II Fact Sheet
  
• Navajo Code Talkers’ Dictionary
  
• The Navajo Code Talkers
  
• Navajo Code Talker GI Joe Figure

[The Shifted Librarian]

A cool extension to My Weblog Neighborhood

http://www.pipetree.com/~dj/cgi-bin/ bdexp?url=http://www.rklau.com/tins/

I’m intrigued, as it extends the value of the Weblog Neighborhood to include Blogdex’s info. (And if you’re not already participating in Blogdex, you should be.) More info is at DJ’s weblog.

My Weblog Neighborhood

Update: (corrected URL – one more time!) My Weblog Neighborhood. I haven’t had time to fully digest what it all means, but I now am using the new Blogroll macro to manage my blogroll, and have created my Weblog Neighborhood. Hopefully it’ll sink in later this week.

Things that make you say, "Hmmm...."

I can remember when Arsenio was a threat to Jay – so much so that Leno’s manager, Helen Kushnick, blacklisted any guests that appeared on Arsenio’s show.

Now Arsenio is doing guest spots for Jay. (He’s broadcasting tonight from the NBA Finals.)

Hmmm….

Why Implement Knowledge Management?

Joy linked to an article written by my buddy John Hokkanen in Managing Partner magazine. But MP Magazine doesn’t publish their content online (at least they don’t try and prevent people from linking to it; they just don’t put it online). So I hopped over to John’s personal site, and saw that John published a variation on the article in ABA Law Practice Management magazine in March. Shame on me – I write a regular column for the magazine and can’t believe I missed such a great article. Fortunately, Joy saw it and had some good things to say.

Allow me to quote one excerpt that I think makes a lot of sense (and not just because it promotes a concept my company, Interface Software, focuses on):

… Customer relationship management (CRM) systems … are clearly KM systems, because they seek to capture, maintain and leverage lawyers’ knowledge about current and potential clients. By knowing who knows whom and who has talked to whom, the firm is better able to manage its client relationships, cross-sell its services and connect with prospects. There is something of an arms-race quality to these systems: If a firm’s major competitors have committed to CRM systems, can a firm afford to forego one? Maybe it can, but these systems, like fax machines and e-mail, are driving client-service levels to a new standard and thereby becoming unavoidable business expenses.

“Unavoidable business expenses” are one of four ways Hokkanen sees that firms can justify their investment in KM efforts. The rest of the article is well worth reading – further evidence of John’s leadership in this area.

In a separate post, Joy asks:

The issue remains – how do we get the lawyers at firms like BigLaw to share their tightly guarded contacts? Will they ever share their contacts in a CRM system?

(She then goes on to cite an article from last spring featuring a customer of ours who has had success implementing InterAction a little creatively.)

The answer is, in a word, yes. They will share. But they need a reason to. Simply promote it as good for the firm and you’ll have a bunch of people opt out. If they’re partners, there’s little you can do to force the issue (another sad byproduct of the decentralized management structure in most firms).

Ultimately, the difference in CRM for law firms, accounting firms, and other professional services firms versus a traditional CRM implementation is that services organizations are culturally challenged in ways that product-oriented companies aren’t. I wrote more about this generally a few months ago; but it boils down to compensation and organizational barriers that don’t exist in corporations. CRM system successes depend in part on the organization’s ability to align compensation with participation in the CRM system. Management must support the initiative (vocally) and all stake-holders need to understand why the firm is moving forward. (Lawyers are funny that way: we assume we learned everything we ever needed to know in law school – tell us something is a necessary cost of business and we’re going to at least want some inkling of why.)

For more on some of these issues, check out some of the recent articles on the subject. (Strangely, they all seem to mention InterAction. Wonder what’s up with that?) (Side note: strangest article placement has to be the article in eWeek, a Tier 1 technology pub, that resulted from an article I wrote for Peer to Peer, a magazine for LawNet members. The journalist must have just done a Google search and read my article, since he never talked to me!)

And as long as I’m shamelessly promoting my company while trying to actually respond to Joy’s utterances (!), let me point out that Interface Software was named last week to the Upside 100 list of hottest technology companies in the country. Criteria?

This year’s Hot 100 comprises companies with promising technologies, solid business models, and meaningful growth over the past 12 months – a monumental achievement in this economic climate.

Nice.

Excited Utterances

Joy London works with Chris Smith at “BigLaw” (they prefer to keep the name of their firm quiet, which I’ll respect). I discovered her site after seeing a link at Chris’s site, and I’m hooked. Whether it’s the title (“Excited Utterances: More than just an exception to the hearsay rule”) that I find terribly clever (it’s a lawyer thing), or her posts on KM, CRM, or law firm culture, I’ll confess to being hooked. If you’re reading this site, chances are you should swing by Joy’s site and spend some time. You’ll be glad you did.

Joy: individual replies to a few of your posts is coming. I’m just trying to get out from under this mountain of e-mail and Radio updates (7 more tonight? Who are they kidding?) so I can get back to posting here…

Fill out those forms

“Ernie The Attorney sends a comment that answers my desire for an Identity Manager! This may not have everything that you are looking for, but I use it and like it. It’s free and it’s name is….? Roboforms I hope it helps. I can’t imagine living without it.

Thank you Ernie! RoboForm looks pretty cool. In fact, I see that Discover is using it for their Deskshop product. This will definitely be getting a trial on my machine in the near future. These weblogs are great! Why do I blog? It enables others to help me solve problems.” [On the Mark]

A cool tool I’ll have to try, now that I’ve given up on Gator. Mostly I’m highlighting this for Kate, who desperately needs to get rid of Gator. Oh, and Roboforms is free.

Now, if I could just solve my problem of getting Dreamweaver MX to search an Oracle database using ColdFusion MX…. (If you’ve done this successfully, please contact me!!!!!)

[The Shifted Librarian]

What a great pointer from Ernie, via Jenny who picked it up. Thanks!

Where in the world... are you?

There are no original ideas anymore. I’ve been thinking about trying to locate other blogs by location – to see who’s in what region, get a feel for how their location might affect their writings, etc. A while back I wrote about getting a group of us Chicago-ans together (I’m very impressed wtih the name I gave it, too – Prairie Blogs), and then I saw the NYC Bloggers site, which is very cool.

And I kept coming back to: how could you code this to make it easy to do a meta search on things like location? Looks like Phillip Scott has given this some thought, too. Neat idea – he’s new to the blogging game, and I think his idea has merit. While I wouldn’t put this at the top of Userland’s priority list by a long shot, it’s not a bad idea. Wouldn’t others appreciate the ability to look for bloggers based on location?

(And don’t get me started on classification of blogs by interest, subject area, etc…)

You Need a Portable DVD Player for Your Car

I followed the NY Times bit on movies in the car, then saw Jenny’s comments on the same. These were quite timely, as my wife and I hit the road Saturday morning for the Chicago to Philadelphia drive. It’s an 800 mile drive, and with a 2 year-old and a 2 month old, we were not too excited about the 14 hours in the car. So, based in part on Jenny’s recommendation, we headed over to Target Friday night and bought a portable DVD player.

Jenny is right: if you have kids, you need one of these. We ended up getting the Audiovox VBP4000 ($399 at Target), and it is spectacular. It runs off the cigarette lighter, has a detachable monitor, and can support two separate monitors. Each monitor can take separate video feeds, so as the kids get older they can either watch movies or play video games. The detachable monitor rests on the rear of my headrest, so the screen is at eye level. It’s all contained in a small bag, and is just a great little piece of electronics. One advantage to being portable: it’ll go on airplanes, to someone else’s house, etc. And it’s at least half of what you would pay if you wanted to get one permanently mounted in the car.

Thank you, Jenny. You helped make our trip east much more bearable!

Weblog Neighborhood

Mind-bomb: Weblog Neighborhood Tool.   [Scripting News]

Now how am I supposed to keep up with all this stuff if they keep updating the software every week fer crissakes?

Nice work to the folks at Userland. I’ve downloaded a bunch of stuff this morning, and will likely work on it tonight and tomorrow. I leave the family tomorrow to start my business travel, so I’m going to have more time to look at this tomorrow night.

Can’t wait!