Over the course of my career I have had the great fortune to work at several law firms and work with lawyers who made important contributions to  “the law of baseball.”
I thought it would be fun to celebrate the 2014 World Series with a LAW AND BASEBALL Crossword Trivia Contest.

 
Rules of the Game: The first person to send me a copy of the completed crossword (or a list of correct answers to the questions below) at jogdc@verizon.net will be declared the  “Dewey B Strategic  Law and  Baseball Trivia  Champion.” The winners name will be prominently displayed on this blog when the answers are posted at the conclusion of the contest.
 
Good Luck and enjoy the fun!

Please note: Due to a numbering error in the puzzle. I have had to regenerate the puzzle. The clues and answers are the same but the numbering is different than in the version which was posted this morning,

 
Access the Crossword Click  here to access an interactive version of the crossword.
 
The Clues:

Across
3. In testifying before Congress, this Supreme Court nominee compared the role of a judge to that of an umpire.

7. The baseball player and manager who was banned from baseball for betting on his team.
8. 19th century lawyer and US President who played an early version of baseball and built a ball field called the “white lot” behind the White House.
9. A 2002 study by this agency determined that metal bats are not more dangerous than wood bats. (abr.)
11. Players cannot prevent the use of their own names and statistics in Fantasy Baseball due to this Constitutional guarantee.
12. The first patent dispute involving baseball equipment related to this item.1
3. Major League Baseball had to purchase their current internet domain mlb.com from this Amlaw 100 law law firm.
17. The only lawyer to have a major league baseball stadium named after him.
19. If a pitcher intentionally hits a batter in the head with a baseball he can technically be charged with this crime.
20. The controversial reserve clause system which bound players to teams indefinitely was replaced by a new system called __________.
23. An early version of the rules of baseball were called the _______________ Rules.
24. The illegal practice of selling game tickets for more than their “face value.”
25. Movie featuring the trial of Shoeless Joe Jackson and other members of the Chicago “Black Sox’”.
26. He caught Barry Bonds 73rd home run ball…then dropped it. …then he sued Hayashi… then he sued his lawyer!
27. The World Series was cancelled in 1994 because of this players union action.
28. Lawyer and Former US Senator who led the investigation of steroid use in baseball.

Down
    1. The modern “right of publicity” was outlined in an opinion regarding these baseball related items.
    2. The only US President who was co-owner of a major league Baseball team
    4. This law school dropout was the first US President to be issued a Presidential Pass by MLB.
    5. Justice Holmes wrote that the Sherman Act did not apply to baseball because baseball teams were not engaged in_________ .
    6. Attorney J Bruce Henderson brought 17 lawsuits to keep this team from building their stadium.
    10. Supreme Court Justice who as a federal District Court Judge issued the injunction “which saved baseball”
    14. The legal principle which prevents a spectator who is hit by a baseball from suing the team or the stadium.
    15. Lawyer and former NY Governor who was signed as an outfielder for the Pittsburg Pirates before attending law school.
    16. Lawyer, baseball player and manager who pioneered the racial integration of Major League Baseball by signing Jackie Robinson.
    18. NYU Law Grad who started his sports broadcasting career with a radio show about NY little league baseball players.
    21. Public Law 105-297 is named for this baseball player.
    22. An “illegal” move by a pitcher that entitles a runner to advance.
    29. Lawyer who became the first commissioner of baseball.

The winner of the triva crossword and puzzle solution is posted at this link.

2014 Futures ConferenceLast Friday I had the honor of being named a “Fellow” in the
College of Law Practice Management at their annual meeting and  2014 Futures Conference at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.  The conference  examined the continuum legal disruption/dysfunction across law schools, law firms and pro bono/public interest law.
Change Hasn’t Come Easily
Michael Mills of Neota Logic summed up the challenge of dislodging paradigms:

13 Takeaways/ Insights from the Law Futures Summit

  •    Law firms have been in the business of selling hours, not results. Clients are interested in  buying results
  •    
    Map your strategy to the clients values
  •      The law IS a code and it CAN be programmed.
  •    The marginal cost of delivery of legal services should be
    decreasing.         
  •    Innovation in law firms is met with “Massive Passive Resistance”.
  •    Law firms have been in the business of selling hours, not results. Clients are interested in  buying results
  •    It is time for law firms to embrace prevention over crisis management.
  •    Tiny law small consumer driven solutions. No
    lawyers involved. People make decisions differently than companies.
  •   Emerging Law  will prevent the
    need for high cost legal solutions. Move from fire fighting to prevention. Zero
    defects rather than heroic solutions.
  •   
    In house lawyers are the primary drivers of change in
    the legal profession.
  •  
    Performance metrics bring credibility, force discipline
    and precision.
  •  
    Define need, understand process, measure effectiveness,
    reduce risk.
  •  
    Legal Services for the poor.  Old Question was how do we pick the right 20% to
    serve. New Question – How do we serve them all?
The Law Futures “Shark Tank” 

 The most exciting part of the Futures Conference was engaging in a “Shark Tank” style team event focused on developing a new products to solve legal problems or improve service.
  It was a wild mash up of creativity: 
Flash-mob juries, crowd sourced legal solutions, flying
law squads, legal help kiosks on street corners or grocery stores, geospacially enabled self help and
legal referral, legal chat rooms, apps, self help diagnostic kits, freemium models, cloud based legal translations, virtual,
legal emergency rooms.
Think legal services with elements of Uber, Angie’s
List, Walmart and WebMD.
Decomplexification

Speaker Jeff Carr’s call for “decomplexification” of law became a recurring theme.The conference reminded me of environmental scientist  Amory Lovins  comment about the dangers of over executing solutions or “ cutting butter with a chainsaw.”  Could our civil justice system work better if there was more focus on preventing legal engagements and finding simpler, more immediate solutions for the middle class as well as  the hoards of people waiting in line for public service lawyers? In the words of Ron Friedmann it may be time to “practice less law” by inventing new solutions.

 “Works of Scholarship have
long cited primary sources or academic works to provide sources for facts to
incorporate previous scholarship, and to bolster arguments. The ideal citation
connects an interested reader to what the author references, making it easy to
track, down, verify and learn more from the indicated sources.” from Perma: Scoping and addressing the problem of link and
reference rot in legal citations.

 Link Rot and Reference Rot:
Beyond Inconvenience to Malpractice
  • Link rot
    refers to the obvious and easily identifiable phenomenon of broken links. When the
    linking page is missing we see the ubiquitous 404 error. message.
  • Reference rot
    is a more insidious problem. In “reference rot” the link still
    works, but the content of the page has changed. The principle or facts
    cited may have materially changed and new content may even contradict the original proposition being cited.

 In legal scholarship the
problem is confined to the (not insignificant) inconvenience of tracking down an unavailable
source. In litigation or in transactional practice, the inability to retrieve sources
of facts cited to support a client brief or transactional deal has serious
legal implications. Could a firm lose a case on appeal? Could a firm be accused
of malpractice? Could reputations and careers be hung on the frail branch of a
404 error?

 Until I read the “Perma” article this week I was only
aware of the concept of “link rot.” I had heard about the sobering
statistic that 49% of sources cited by the United States Supreme Court no
longer link to the original content or page.
But the concept of “reference
rot” made my hair stand on end…
the implications for academic scholarship are significant, but the
implications for law firms could be devastating. What happens when a law firm submits a brief citing a scientific study, a government report, an Open Web data
set or a press release from a company website that completely vanishes or is
materially altered? Can you imagine the young associate who has to face down
the withering stare of a partner as (s)he explains that a key source has disappeared
or contradicts the proposition for which it was cited? 

 Last March Jonathan Zittrain,
Kendra Alter and Lawrence Lessig published Perma: Scoping and addressing the problem of link and
reference rot in legal citations in Harvard Law Review. Contrary to popular belief, the authors point out that it is
sometimes easier to find print sources which predate the Internet than to
find  “born digital” references which no longer reside at their
original URL. The problems are not confined to the obvious scenarios: Companies
get sold and merge – and so do their websites. Private bloggers lose interest in their obsessions.
Non-profit organizations, lose funding or lose focus. A webmaster loses their job or gets promoted… Even government
websites as prestigious as the White House and the Department of Justice
have removed and altered web content without indicating that a
document has been revised and/ or replaced with a new version. The Internet
is littered with the equivalent of “space junk” and law firms — like
the Supreme Court will find themselves unable to easily locate or recover the
original Open Web sources, cited in their documents.

Worst of all –a cited website
could potentially include altered content which contradicts the
statements for which was originally referenced. There is a risk
management/malpractice elephant in the room. 
No one has yet developed software to redline and track changes on the
Internet, but law firms need to consider what processes or tools they can
employ to mitigate the consequences of the mutable and transient ocean of web content. Products such as Icyte, capture copies of
web pages which you can store in a personal account, but what is a complex
organization to do?

Possible Implications: 
1. It is time to require citations to open web sources
to have date and time stamps.

2. The Internet can’t be
continuously ‘redlined” to highlight changes over time, someone needs to
develop this killer app.

2. Associates need to read and
validate all cited authority. They may get to the website and find that the
content has changed.

3. Law firms need to develop
standard protocols for preserving cited pages. If Open Web sources are
used they should be preserved as a PDF-type file  and associated with the citing document.
4. Do we need a “citation
exception” to copyright law? Maintaining access to a source could require the copying
of a volume of source material beyond what is normally considered “fair use.”
If we can’t count on website owners to preserve access  to digital content
or to “redline” changes we need a legal way to preserve  whole websites, treatises, documents
and datasets.

5.Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Lexis, Westlaw,
Wolters Kluwer and BLaw offer  a mighty
bulwark against an ocean of 404 errors. Their ability to offer permanent access
to multiple versions of cited sources will provide an important value add over
Open Web sources.

6. Digital Object Identifiers may
offer a solution to determine if  a
source has been replaced.
7. Bad URLs and transient web
content will increase demand for librarian
sleuths and knowledge management professionals.
8. The Perma Project is targeted at creating permanent access to legal documents. Law firms face the challenge of cobbling together technologies and processes which will assure permanent access to wide universe of non-legal content which they rely on in the course of litigation and transactional analysis. Information professionals should be tasked with developing standard protocols by examining practice needs, processes and available technologies to assure preservation of cited sources.

 Learn More About Link and Reference Rot

On October 24th Georgetown Law
Library is hosting a program:404/File
Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent. Speakers include  Jonathan Zittrain one of the authors of the Perma article, Roger Skalbeck of Georgetown, Ed Walters of Fastcase and Mary Alice Baisch, Superintendent of Documents of the USGPO.  Unfortunately I will travelling
and not be able to attend this program.   Roger Skalbeck   has agreed to author a guest blogpost on this very important Conference.

__________________________________________________________________________

A Researcher Finds the Following notice for the www.ssnat.com website which was cited in a Supreme Court Decision:

404 Error – File Not Found

Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this webpage in the Supreme Court Reporter at Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 131 S.Ct. 2729, 2749 n.14 (2011). If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would long since have disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain in order to make a comment about the transience of linked information in the internet age.

And if you quoted this in the NY Times, will you do a correction for the now changed text?

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The October Issue of Practice Innovations has been released. Great mix of articles on distruptive forces and innovative approaches to the practice of law.

Until last week, I never thought of Joan Rivers as a brilliant taxonomist. I was a fan  of Rivers back in her “can we talk” days, but I hadn’t really followed the recent “red carpet” phase of her career.  In the deluge of tributes and remembrances since her passing, I did a “double take” when one of her friends described her amazing catalog of jokes.  She was reported to have written, collected and cataloged over a million jokes during the course of her career. Apparently each joke was assigned descriptors and filed in in a massive catalog which resembled a traditional library card catalog. So I did some research. Not only had she developed a personal knowledge management system, but she did it the old fashioned way… no keyboards, no network, no database. A lot of sweat equity invested to stay “at the top of her snark.”

A Tumblr site from Austin Kleon pointed me to this clip from a documentary called Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.

GQ even posted a selection of her typed cards.


Bob Hope’s Joke Vault  ( LOC exhibit c- A Leibovitz)

 

Do comedians take KM more seriously than the average attorney?

Apparently Milton Berle and George Carlin had also developed sophisticated systems for organizing and retrieving their jokes. Bob Hope had what was called a “joke vault.”

Lawyers like stand up comics live by their wits and have to be prepared with their “best material” in every context. The average 21st Century lawyer has the advantage of access to sophisticated technology, yet they remain largely adverse to contributing even the most basic descriptive  attributes (e.g. a meaningful  title beyond the word “memo” or ” contract”)  for documents they may have invested weeks in drafting. In large firms, lawyers have knowledge professionals ready and willing to help them select, vet, normalize and code documents as exemplars for future use. Lawyers still don’t “get” the dramatic impact that  even small amounts of curation effort can have on improving access to “their best material.” So why is it that stand up comics appear to have a penchant for knowledge management that evades many lawyers?

 

David Perla at the BBNA “Wall of Firsts” c.BBNA
On July 14th, Bloomberg announced the
appointment of David Perla as the new President  of Bloomberg BNA Legal.
Perla was a fascinating choice given his path from corporate lawyer (Katten
Muchin) to in-house counsel (Monster) to outsourcing pioneer  (Founder and
co-CEO of Pangea3) to CEO (Matterhorn Transactions). ABA Magazine named
Perla one of the year’s “Legal Rebels” in 2011 and American Lawyer named
him one of the top 50 legal innovators of the past 50 years.  He has sat on many “sides of the table”
… in the chair as the  provider, the consumer and the disruptor  of
legal services. This will give him a unique perspective on how Bloomberg BNA can
pursue its’ intent to rewrite the rules  of engagement between law firms
and legal information providers. I might as well brag that I got the first
post-hire interview with Perla and a shot of him standing at the “Bloomberg
BNA Wall of Firsts” at their headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia.
Bloomberg Disrupted
Financial Reporting – Perla Disrupted Legal Practice

I examined the
evolution of the Bloomberg empire  in an earlier post.  Bloomberg
was created when Michael Bloomberg looked at the dominant financial data
service Dow Jones Telerate and wondered why it couldn’t do more than spit out
stock and bond prices. From  the simple insight of adding math functions
to the  data reporting,  Bloomberg has built an unparalleled media
empire and Telerate has been swept into the dustbin of forgotten products.
Perla likewise looked at the legal marketplace and recognized that in-house
counsel didn’t like to pay “Wall Street” rates for repetitive legal processes
and set out to prove that certain  functions could be done both reliably
and more cheaply by lawyers in India.

He developed
one of the most successful legal process outsourcing companies, Pangea3,
which was ironically sold to Thomson Reuters, one of Bloomberg
BNA’s main competitors.

Both men
were inspired by insights into business process improvement. Legal process
improvement is on the radar of managing partners if not yet fully impacting the
practice of law. Law firm leaders are hungry for new solutions. Can Perla and Bloomberg
BNA deliver? Should Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and Wolters Kluwer be worried at this high voltage disruptive pairing?

I met with Perla in one of the
signature Bloomberg BNA glass conference rooms. Bloomberg has a famously “open
plan” work environment which has transformed the BNA offices following their
acquisition.  Perla explained that his first priority was getting to know
the Bloomberg BNA teams. He recognizes that Bloomberg BNA is a unique
organization which was born of two distinctive cultures and  legacies of
professional excellence. Bloomberg brought strength in technology and business
analytics and BNA staff brings premier legal analysis.   He is
confident that the combination of these two legacies will enable Bloomberg
BNA to solve  emerging challenges facing the legal profession better
than their competitors.

The Interview

 

JOG: Having
been in the role of both inside and outside counsel, is there a difference in their
information needs?

 

Perla:
Outside counsel are expected by their clients to be masters of their areas of
expertise.  This is the traditional role of outside counsel. But today,
outside counsel need to be able to obtain, understand and analyze strategic
business information, both because their clients want this and because the
lawyers need this mastery in order to both remain competitive and/or
differentiate themselves.  So mastery of a particular legal area is no
longer enough – understanding of, and some mastery of, business information is
now critical.

 

JOG: .What is
your  vision for BLaw?

 

Perla : My
vision is for Bloomberg Law, along with the full suite of Bloomberg BNA Legal
offerings, to be the go-to information solutions provider for the legal
industry, and to be the first source lawyers turn to in looking for solutions
to information driven problems.”  Bloomberg BNA and Bloomberg are widely
regarded as experts in matching technology, information and products with the
needs of their clients.  So Bloomberg Law will leverage that expertise in
matching technology, information and products to solve the various pain points
of its legal industry clients.

 

JOG: Do you
think that Bloomberg BNA has a unique opportunity for growth as the result of
the changes brought on by “The Great Recession?”

 

Perla: Law
firms today understand that they are practicing in a new environment, and that
the practice of law and business of law has changed.  Bloomberg BNA and
Bloomberg Law, in serving those law firms, provides tools for both precedent
retrieval and analysis AND market data precedent analysis.  As a result of
this combined expertise, we are uniquely positioned to address law firms’ legal
and market data needs and demands. 

 

JOG:
Based on your experience in-house, do you plan to expand marketing of BLAW
to in-house counsel?

 

Perla: This
is an ongoing initiative, with a continued and growing emphasis.  I spent
nearly five years at a Big Law and another five-plus years in-house, and have
spent the last decade serving in-house counsel and the law firms that represent
them.  So in-house counsel is a unique area of expertise for me.
In-house counsel have specific legal needs, but also have extensive market
information needs that are different than the needs of their outside counsel.
Because of the depth of business information that Bloomberg BNA and Bloomberg
Law are able to offer our clients, we as a company are uniquely situated to
solve and address those market information problems and needs.

 

JOG: How much
will your experience/insights  at Pangea3  impact your vision for BLAW
Products and services?

 

Perla:
As I mentioned, I spent a decade between Big Law and in-house, and then another
decade serving those groups.  As a result, I bring a unique insight into
how both sets of clients operate, and into their needs and goals.  That
insight influences both my vision for our products and solutions, and the way
in which we offer those products and solutions to our clients. 

 

Perla’s
First 

 

Since I met
Perla in front of the Bloomberg BNA ”wall of firsts” I began wondering what
Perla’s “first” contribution might be.  In preparing for the interview it
became obvious that Perla comes to Bloomberg BNA with a  significant
social media footprint. Here is my “first” observation about Perla.  He  is
the first major legal publishing executive  who is a “social media
native.”  His hefty digital  “footprint”  is proof that he is  “engaged with” rather than an “observer of” new
media. This is an important and distinctive asset in a chief executive. This is likely to inform his
vision of Bloomberg BNA’s place in the evolving digital world.  In one of
his previous video interviews he talked about the importance of “clear
intention” in leading Pangea3.  He is fond of repeating a wonderful adage that one should “never confuse a clear vision with a straight line.” So I think it
is fair to expect that both Perla as a leader, and Bloomberg BNA as a company
are likely to explore some uncharted territory at the frontiers of legal
innovation.

Related Posts:

Welcome to Bloomberg Law, No Deals, No Discounts, No Apology.
Bloomberg Law Takes on the Titans.

Big Data Hits a Wall c. J O’Grady

The disruption of access to court dockets through Pacer has implications beyond the retrieval of dockets and documents.

The  Administrative Office of the US Courts announced on August 11th that archival dockets from 5 federal courts would no longer be available through Pacer. I contacted the Office of the US Courts and they explained that the problem was in fact the courts themselves. The courts including the Second Circuit had failed to upgrade their platforms and the older data was residing on a platform that was no longer compatible with Pacer.  The data which was no longer available from Pacer could be obtained directly from the courts.

The Big Data  Hits A Wall. The most shocking thing to me was the fact that a significant archive of federal court data was suddenly less available to the public for historical “big data” trend analysis.  Lexis, Westlaw and Blaw all have tools
for litigation analysis and trending which can be used to create charts and
analytics showing litigation trends by jurisdiction, judge, cause of action,
law firm. Big data is an increasingly valuable commodity. In law firms it is a valuable source of competitive intelligence. The federal government has recently recognized the value of “big data” in public administration. In this case the Pacer data should be useful for the analysis and judicial administration and workload. Why are the courts failing to recognize the importance of maintaining robust archives of litigation data?

 Pacer has just handed legal publishers  a marketing strategy.  Commercial online services will have the complete archive which Pacer can no longer offer. In other words – you get what you pay for.  I contacted representatives from Lexis, Westlaw and BloombergBNA. Each  vendor had previously created their own archives of Pacer data so they will be able to continue to make all the data available in one place. The one exception they cited was older cases which  are currently active– but this appears to be a small number of cases.
The more law firms focus more on efficiency, the less attractive the cobbling
together research results from “free resources” becomes. Yes
free research resources have a place in legal research but premium resources deliver robust and reliable access.The removal of Pacer data is a powerful illustration of the value of commercial publishers in maintaining access to data when public authorities fail to do so. Not only will the major vendors be able to provide access to the dockets and the documents, but they will have complete data archives for analysis of litigation trends. These comprehensive archives allow custom reports combining  data elements extracted from dockets: including judges rulings, company litigation, law firm representation, causes of action and jurisdiction. 

 

 

 

It is an understatement to say that Ravel Law is not your father’s research platform.
You are not just using a new product, you are entering the “world of Ravel”… and you need to check all your preconceptions about legal research at the door.

Ravel Law makes me feel old. It has some similarities to Fastcase but also some major differences. Both  products are the brainchild of young lawyers hellbent on reinventing legal research. Both developed their own innovative search engines and visual approaches to  displaying search results.

I have often wondered how young lawyers will understand legal research without benefit of taxonomical hierarchies, digests and headnotes. Only time with tell, but I have to give the Ravel innovators the benefit of the doubt and celebrate something that may “speak the language” of “born digital” generation of lawyers.

The Ravel Research Universe


Daniel Lewis co-founder of Ravel Law grew up in a family of
lawyers. When he attended Stanford Law School he became convinced that the
legal profession needed a new approach to legal research. He and  co-founder Nik Reed, a fellow Stanford law school alum
developed Ravel in collaboration with students from the Design School at Stanford.

Lewis describes the Ravel Law platform as offering a new kind of
analysis by using machine computing and data visualization. Ravel built a platform to appeal to younger
lawyers. 

For those of us who learned research using taxonomical
hierarchies, viewing research results on Ravel is like landing in an alternate
universe. Interpreting  Ravel search results requires the learning a
“visual language.”  Lewis believes that  Ravel’s landscape — the
visual display  of search results –conveys more information than can be displayed by  the traditional “results list of cases.” This may be true but first you have to learn their “display language.”

Key to the Ravel Universe:

  • Each circle represents a case
  • The size of the circle represents its importance
  • The Line is the citation
  • The thickness of the line represents the depth of treatment.
At the bottom of the screen you can display the chronology
which shows the evolution of the law. The timeline  shows the whole universe of
cases related to a search. Filters allow you to limit results by court level. 

The Radical Ravel Leap. Here’s where Ravel breaks with the competition. Ravel only displays the top 75 cases which result from the search. The
assumption is  that the algorithm has gotten you the best cases in the top
75. This breakpoint  forces the  researcher to focus on the most highly
relevant cases. It also requires complete trust in the search algorithm.The researcher can continually expand and refocus the search to include more cases.
  

Case with citation history display

Jump Cite Ranking. A “jump cite” refers to a reference to a specific issue within an opinion. The citators on Westlaw and Lexis both have systems for locating cited principles within a case, neither has developed a system for ranking these  specific internal citations. Ravel has developed a unique system for
ranking jump cites.

Star Reading system. Ravel highlights the most relevant
text in the jump cite in order to show the
relevance of a particular page in a particular case. Lewis describes this as  “building out good and bad law on a
page by page basis.” The star reading system assigns stars to each page of a case using a 1 to 5 star scale, depending on how many times that page has been cited to by other cases. A one-star page has been cited to at least 5 times, and a 5 star page has been cited to at least 2,000 times. The cases that get listed as citing to a particular page can then be ranked in two ways: 1) by date, 2) by rank (which means how many times that case has itself been cited).  

“Killer Ap” Coming Lewis gave me a preview of an exciting
new feature which is not currently offered by any competitor. It
is the kind of feature that law firm partners are likely to  want on their desktops. This new feature will  use a “big data”  analysis to  fill one of the voids  where lawyers rely on intuition and anecdote because they are lacking objective data.

Interaction vs Reading. Ravel unravels every preconception you have about legal research. The thing that will most likely  appeal to young lawyers is that Ravel begs you to interact with with it rather than read. The law still requires deep reading, analysing, distinguishing finer points of arguments. Will it seduce lawyers away from reading into focusing on narrower and narrower slices of text? The optimal legal skill set of the future will require both the ability to engage in visual data manipulation and reading full cases.

It is exciting and  also humbling for me to witness the birth of a new generation of legal research platforms. Ravel offers legal research reimagined … untethered from the inherent constraints as well as the familiar conventions of research systems born of print…. Ravel Law opens up a brave new world of legal research for exploration…

The knowledge-enabled productivity and financial rewards of radically redesigning law office space promise to be significant for law firms that have the courage to change.

I recently published  an article   Law Firm Space Planning as a Knowledge Management Strategy in the July issue of Thomson Reuters Practice Innovations.

 

c. Thomson Reuters

Just as firms have been grappling with the billable hour for the past
decade, the coming decade may be marked by the struggle to redefine the
legal workplace. Office rent has been the second largest expense for law
firms. Firms outside the US have already made significant strides in
developing innovative space strategies. While cost reduction may be the
primary incentive to reinvent the law office, firms should not overlook
this as an opportunity to create “knowledge enabling” work environments…Read the complete article HERE.

_____________
This article was inspired by a presentation by Ivan Ross of Geyer Architects at the 2013 Janders Dean Knowledge Management Conference in Sydney, Australia. Additional thanks to Steve Martin of Gensler Architects for sharing his time and insights on space planning and design in US law firms and to Russ Weber my first architectural mentor.

American Lawyer Media Legal Intelligence released the 2014 Law Librarian Survey data earlier this month.


Library Chiefs Continue to Rule Contract Negotiations


In reviewing the data I continue to be struck by the terrific challenge library chiefs face in the current environment. Law firm profits are reviving, lawyers continue to demand the best and most strategic information resources for their practices and yet library chiefs have succeeded in

containing costs. The survey give clues how they achieve this. Librarians are sharp negotiators who assess not only price but the comparative value and usability of the content. They also employ sophisticated tools for analyzing the ROI for the resources they invest in. These talents are paying off big time for the firms which employ these experts. It would be interesting for ALM to track the comparative outcomes when firms retain consultant-contract negotiators vs. the library chief with or without the assistance of the internal procurement officer.

The Big Movers

 Embedding, Competitive Intelligence, Social Media Monitoring, Centralization, Billable hours, Sole source for online research.
 

A Sampling of Key Trends From the 2014 Law Library Survey

  • 58% of Library Chiefs are responsible for overseeing Competitive Intelligence

  • 73% report that the volume of Competitive Intelligence research has increased

  • 40 % of Library Chiefs are responsible for Knowledge management

  • More firms were purchasing eBooks.　

  • 86% report that they achieved better deals from online providers

  • 81% of are embedding librarian in practice groups up from 14% in 2012.

  • 49% publish business intelligence newsletters. 

  • Manzama a social media monitoring tool retained the top stop of news aggregation tools and is used in 49% of the responding firms.

  • 72%  report that recovery for online research is declining.

  • Lexis is winning the sole provider, but spending on WL is almost double the spending on Lexis. It is likely that the decline in cost recovery is accelerating the move to sole provider. Firms have to reduce cost in order to offset lost revenue. Spending on BLaw remains flat.

Questions that Disappeared Last year there were several questions on complexity of research and research shifting from lawyers to information professionals. I do not see those questions in the 2014 survey. This is an important issue and should have been retained.

 Outsourcing and Centralization



For several years Library Chiefs has been spearheading initiatives to streamline library operations through centralization and outsourcing administrative operations.　 I am uncomfortable with the results reported regarding centralization and outsourcing. For the second year in a row the ALM data actually suggests both centralization and outsourcing are declining. Centralization was down in in all categories except Contract negotiations. This doesn’t seem likely.


Low Cost Centers

There have been some high profile big firm relocations of back office staff from NY, DC or LA to Florida, Ohio, Kentucky or West Virginia. Library chiefs should realize that  there is an alternative path to  achieve  similar savings. Some firms already have offices in low cost areas and cost saving benefits can be achieved by simply centralizing administrative processes in those cities.

The Long Slow Death of Cost Recovery

In just 5 years there has been a dramatic decline in the number of firms which recover more than 60% of their online costs. In 2009 51% of firms reported recovering more than 60% of their online costs. In 2014 it is down to 17 % of responding firms. This is no doubt due in part to the growth of AFAs and client demands for cost reduction.
 

Recommendations

Since this survey covers the Amlaw 200, I recommend that ALM add questions on resource expenditure per attorney and staff to attorney ratios. These would provide valuable metrics for benchmarking.　I would like to know the   dollar amount of print  resource spending. Yes it will be a kind of deathwatch. Given the increase in sole online provider contracts, I would like to know if the abandonment of access to Lexis or Westlaw forces firms to rebuild print collections of core treatises which are no longer available online or in eLibraries due to the cancellation of the online contract.