Robert Ambrogi, the prolific host of LegalLine.com and other activities internetal (to coin a term), points out a useful resource for in-house attorneys.
In-house lawyers may want to learn from the published work product of law firms, but how do they find the needle in the haystack of “thousands of client alerts, briefing papers and memoranda on a range of corporate, regulatory and industry issues”? They would like it if “someone pulled together the links to all these materials and organized them in a way to make them more useful and more readily accessible?”
He discusses the recently launched site, myCorporateResource.com, which does exactly that. “The free site aggregates these law firm memoranda, summarizes them and then sorts them by industry, corporate role, area of law and geography. In addition, it provides more than 70 separate RSS feeds for each of these topics to provide notifications of new additions.”
Many in-house lawyers could benefit from such a service.
In the legal department of FMC Technologies, the lawyer responsible for a matter may not close it until he or she completes the “Lessons Learned” section. This method to encourage lawyers to record post mortem insights is more than a nudge; the elapsed time between opening and closing of a matter is also tracked, so the responsible lawyer wants to get that knowledge in and be able to claim completion. This technique comes from the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Nov. 2008 at 73.
A lawyer could mindlessly plug in some bland point – “ hire a good firm” – but at least the requirement not only pushes the lawyer to think a moment about insights earned but also raises the consciousness level regarding knowledge and its preservation (See my post of May 27, 2008: post mortems with 7 references.).
The champion of legal blogging, Kevin O’Keefe, published a wonderfuly informative post on June 16, 2009 about the number of blogs maintained by the US’s largest firms, the AmLaw 200. Having just written about one firm that monitors blogs and circulates references to itself (ironically, Wachtell is not listed by Kevin as blogging), I relish this empirical research and results. I have mostly quoted Kevin, but have combined some of his text.
41 percent of AmLaw 200 law firms in 2008 (82) have blogs.
15 percent growth in last 6 months in the number of AmLaw 200 law firms publishing blogs.
43 percent growth in last 6 months in total number of blogs being published by AmLaw 200 law firms (some firms have more than one blog).
The 82 firms were responsible for a total of 227 blogs.
186 of the 227 blogs were firm branded; the remaining 41 blogs were not branded. 'Firm branded' blogs are those where the firm's name and/or logo are prominently displayed, indicating that the blog is more a product of the firm than of the individual author writing it.
My point is that tremendous amounts of substantive legal material pours out of law firm blogs. In-house lawyers who want to take an inexpensive step toward learning more can use free tools like aggregators and search feeds to find material that keeps them up to date. Even better, they can ask questions and make comments, thus shaping the flow of educational material. Bloggers love input, and any in-house counsel who takes a few minutes to respond to a post or ask a question will find ample return.
Many of my 400-500 visitors a day come from a search on Google, bing or other engines (See my post of Feb. 11, 2007: “About 65 percent of my readers look at a post that came up on a search engine, mostly Google. About 20 percent come to the site directly such as through a feed and the remaining 15 percent visit from another blog.” Others come from a feed reader or aggregator site (80% from Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, and NewsGator, and approximately 580 in all according to Feedburner). Twitter is the source of some visits (See my post of April 28, 2009: Twitter and 6 references; and June 16, 2009: hits here from Twitter.).
Finally and very importantly, all kinds of blogs and websites entice their readers to click through to Law Department Management Blog. I thank them and plan to recognize other blogs that do the same. Each of these blogs has material that may interest in-house attorneys. Here are 14 from the past two days:
blicksteingroup.com (Brad Blickstein)
community.martindale.com/blogs
compliancebuilding.com (Doug Cornelius) corporatecomplianceinsights.com (Conselium) cttymetrix.blogspot.com
inhouseblog.com (Geoff Gussis)
ipengineservices.com/themiddleoffice (Stephen Seckler) legalitprofessionals.com (Rob Ameerun) mitratech.typepad.com/mitratech-blog
thecorporatecounsel.net/iclient (Broc Romanek)
Blog posts, the short-and-to the point way I write most of them, compress information significantly. In two or three paragraphs – my self-imposed limit – it is admittedly hard to do justice to complex topics, such as Poisson distributions, post-modernism, McKinsey’s 7S system, or ethnography, to pick some at random that I have tackled, but in 140 Twitter characters even the attempt is a joke. Even so, people visit here ten to twenty times a day from Twitter, and more if someone with a following – a noTweetable person such as Kevin O’Keefe or Ron Friedman – tips their hat to one of my posts and adds a tiny URL.
For general counsel, and much more for the generation on their heels, Twitter and its ilk serve as the canary in the coal mine, the reconnaissance scout deep behind the lines, the town crier of ideas. On June 15, 2009, from 8:45 AM until noon, a dozen people visited my site from Twitter or Twitter-related sites. I think I will go and tweet now.
“[B]ased on our research, we know 60 percent of legal professionals already use online social networks regularly,” according to an article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 72. I was dubious so I wrote one of the co-authors, Michael Walsh, the CEO of US Legal Markets And Global Legal Solutions at LexisNexis. The next day I received the 2008 research report that underlies the quote. Earlier, it turns out, I had reported on the press release from the study (See my post of Oct. 12, 2008: LeaderNetworks poll of 449 corporate counsel.), but this time I pored over the actual data. The study report does not say how the in-house counsel who responded were identified and contacted.
One question asked was “Are you a member of an online social network such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook or MySpace?” Of the corporate counsel, 48 percent answered “Yes.” Of that group, two-thirds of them who were 25-35 years old answered Yes, with a drop off in later age groups.
Given the ubiquitous presence of FaceBook, MySpace and Friendster and other online watering holes among college students (and perhaps law school students), that nearly half of the in-house lawyers who responded belong to one sounds completely believable. It’s not 60 percent, but no matter.
To go further and claim that those former students, now practicing law in a company, use the networks “regularly” is a much further stretch. Likewise, whether they use those networks in connection with their work is unknown from this data.
At different sizes and times, founders and executives of companies conclude that they need an employee lawyer. Before that point, they hire law firms as they see fit, sometimes relying on one particular firm as their outside general counsel. Daniel J. Alexander II, a lawyer in Tustin, CA, fills an intermediate spot. He blogs at Outhouse General Counsel where he writes:
“As a business owner, you need an experienced business lawyer you can call on to handle these business/legal issues. That is why my partner and I developed our "Out-House" General Counsel practice with the goal of providing business clients with critical corporate legal services replicating, as much as possible, the methods, approach, and style of an "in-house" law department.”
Many lawyers offer to stand in like an in-house generalist lawyer for fledgling companies, but I give this nod to Alexander because he blogs about that role (See my post of Aug. 8, 2006: part-time general counsel; and July 11, 2008: Respironics and split GC role.).
Having hosted for more than a year discussion groups on LinkedIn about law department management and on Legal OnRamp about legal department operations, I can attest that very few in-house attorneys either start topics or comment on topics. Most of the traffic comes from the host (that would be me) or from consultants or vendors. Pecuniary gain motivates contributors, not sharing knowledge. The “gated communities” end up opening access to people who contribute for gain.
Nearly everyone of the hundreds who have “joined” my groups then disappear, as far as I can tell. Maybe the topic of how best to direct an in-house legal team doesn’t actually interest them. Maybe they are shy, reluctant to expose their writing and ideas, uncomfortable with English. Certainly time presses them. Maybe lurking is all they ever intended.
I can’t speak to participation levels for substantive legal topics, but I wouldn’t be surprise if the heavy writing is done by law firm partners (and some professors). Again, the active participants have a pecuniary interest.
The end result, no matter the motives, is that social networks for lawyers have a tiny fraction of the members who contribute and a the vast bulk who lie very low in the weeds (See my post of Sept. 22, 2008: social networks such as Legal OnRamp, with 7 references.).
I relish surveys and analyzing their methodology and findings (See my post of March 2, 2008: surveys of law departments with 72 references.). The most prolific survey for law department management data from this blogger’s perspective is certainly that of Serengeti Law, so I thought some public praise is well deserved.
As of today, I have cited the data accumulated by Serengeti, primarily through the hard work of Rob Thomas, at least two dozen times. During 2005-2007 I wrote about the surveys 11 times (See my post of April 5, 2005: lackluster responses to its survey; April 9, 2005: low participation rates in a survey; Aug. 5, 2005: estimates of savings from five cost-control methods; Nov. 6, 2005: budgets; Nov. 8, 2005: usefulness of requiring minimum years of experience for associates; Oct. 1, 2006: integration of service of process tracking; April 13, 2007: savings from matter management systems; May 9, 2007: response rates to legal department RFPs; May 11, 2007: minimum levels of associate experience demanded; Aug. 4, 2007: inside time spent managing outside counsel; and Oct. 25, 2007: prompt payment discounts.).
My pace of citations to Serengeti surveys picked up during the past two years (See my post of Feb. 17, 2008 #1: smaller companies spend more on legal as a percentage of revenue; Feb. 23, 2008: average annual increase in outside billing rates; April 8, 2008: reported savings from matter management; April 8, 2008: collaborative billing technologies; June 10, 2008: data on convergence; Aug. 15, 2008: compliance functions; Dec. 27, 2008: disappointment over convergence benefits; Jan. 22, 2009: top concerns of in-house counsel; March 5, 2009: “standard billing rates”; March 6, 2009: periodic written updates on matters; March 8, 2009: information about expenditures from accounts payable system; April 18, 2009: number of law firms typically used; and April 20, 2009: lower average hourly rates.).
A previous post offers 13 techniques to improve your performance if you moderate a panel (See my post of May 22, 2009: moderator methodology.). As I kept thinking about the topic, images popped into my head of moderator headaches. So, here are some bad situations to try to avoid.
Imbalance of rank on the panel. The lower-ranking people tend to remain quite. The best solution is to speak beforehand to the high-ranking person and ask easy questions of the lower-ranking members.
Too many panelists. The best way to cure this is to avoid it, but if you have 45 minutes and five people on the panel, designate a single point each speaker should make, impress on them the limited time they have, and if you have to, embarrass yourself and the speaker by interrupting.
Rambling statements by someone in the audience. You can try gentle humor: “And your question is?” or say something gracious like “Thanks for the comment, we’ll take another question.”
A loquacious panelist or one who hogs the questions. One way is to intercept. Repeat the question and say, “Perhaps Jim [a quiet panelist] would care to start us off with a response?”
Too little time. I find that often panels start late, speakers lack discipline and they usually squeeze out any time for the audience at the end. I try to remind the audience and the panel periodically how much time remains.
Platitudes. Pith to one listener is the pits to another, I have to remind myself. You can’t expect everyone to speak at the same level of specificity or conform to your sense of what is valuable to the audience. Still, I cringe at grandiose pontificating.
