TechnoLawyer: Law Office Management

Originally published on August 18, 2008 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

I've been thinking about what to write this month. I could cover the proliferation of location-based networks (Brightkite, Loopt), or the surge of applications simultaneously living on the desktop and in the browser (Twhirl, TweetDeck). And of course, there's the iPhone 3G, which has helped liberate social networks and become an important new platform for application development.

But not every development in recent weeks occurred online.

This summer marked the first time in five years that I would not serve as chair of the practice management committee at the DuPage County Bar Association. To commemorate the event, I had a dustup last week with the new chair, a nice enough guy who politely warned me to stay the hell out of his way.

I guess now that I'd built up the committee and nearly sacrificed my practice and marriage in the process, it was time for someone else to take over. I was always the loudmouth kid at the bar association's grown-ups table. Now I was old news — look for me on the next episode of Where Are They Now? after the segment on Mindy Cohn.

Which got me thinking.

Bar associations will always be social clubs. They never have, and never will, give up their secrets or focus on merit, innovation, or transparency. That would undermine their power base, their cash flow, and the reason for their existence, which is to legitimize their members. Think about it — bar associations exist to congratulate their members for being ... part of the bar association.

It's a brilliant system, and like the profession itself it thrives on being exclusive and mysterious, but most of all it suppresses dissent or disruptive ideas. After all, if lawyers could form working groups, share information with the public, trade experiences with each other, or collaborate to save time and money without the need for bar associations, there would be no need for ... bar associations.

Could small firms and sole practitioners band together to mount a united, realistic threat to big law supremacy? With the advent of online tools, mobile devices, and cheap hardware, this scenario could occur in the right environment.

To get from here to there, I present this modest proposal for small firm lawyers — let's apply a sliver of our collective intelligence, numbers, vision, and money to secure a brighter future. Thus, let's:

1. Disband state and county bar associations.
2. Eliminate state-based regulation of lawyers.
3. Adopt a nationwide civil-law-style system.
4. Abolish state bar exams in favor of a national one.
5. Measure and regulate bar passage by population.
6. Mandate apprenticeships, public service, and CLE.
7. Mandate periodic retesting of lawyers.
8. Require LexisNexis and Westlaw to provide free legal research.

It's not a perfect proposal, but I'm working on it. You got a better one? Where's Jonathan Swift when you need him?

Written by Mazyar M. Hedayat of M. Hedayat & Associates, P.C.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a document management application that doesn't require a database (see article below), a business intelligence program that analyzes your firm's financial data, and litigation support software that handles discovery documents and deposition transcripts as well as trial presentations. Don't miss the next issue.

A Place For Your Stuff
By Peter R. Olson

The late comedian George Carlin had a famous routine called "A Place For Your Stuff" in which he made many keen observations about our propensity to collect "stuff." Law firms, of course, are notorious for all the "stuff" they collect. These days, much of it is electronic, but many lawyers still can't find anything. As it turns out, we don't only need a place for our stuff. We also need a better way to manage it.

Novabrain Business Explorer 4.0 ... in One Sentence
Novabrain Technologies' Novabrain Business Explorer 4.0 enables you to better organize, find, and share structured and unstructured data such as contacts, events, email, documents, and more on your own computer and across your firm.

The Killer Feature
Unlike most document management systems, Novabrain Business Explorer does not use a database to store your data. Instead, it uses XML files either on your local hard drive or a file server. As a result, you don't need a technician to get up and running.

Also, you need not upload email and documents nor must you check them out. Instead, you store everything where you normally store it, the difference being that Novabrain Business Explorer keeps track it. Think of it like iTunes for your email and documents.

Other Notable Features
Novabrain Business Explorer integrates with Microsoft Office, bringing with it a true client/matter classification system as opposed to the nested folders in Windows that many law firms use. Thus, you can save email and documents into Novabrain's index automatically by client and matter so that you can easily search for and find them later. Novabrain Business Explorer also provides version tracking so that you can access all prior versions of a document.

Novabrain Business Explorer's search goes beyond the many free desktop search tools that exist thanks to its context search capabilities. For example, instead of simply searching for a keyword, you can search for attributes such as matter and date range to improve relevancy.

What Else Should You Know?
Novabrain comes in three versions — Free, Pro, and Enterprise. The Free version is for single users. The Pro and Enterprise editions include collaboration features and the ability to search across your firm. The Enterprise edition also includes document numbering, Microsoft SharePoint integration, and centralized administration and customization. The Pro version costs $199. The price of the Enterprise version depends on various factors. Learn more about Novabrain Business Explorer 4.0.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In A View from the Gallery, the classic television space opera Babylon 5 took a left turn and shifted the point of view to a couple of maintenance workers. It was a refreshing change of pace.

In Role of a Paralegal, Shapiro, Cooper Lewis & Appleton, a personal injury law firm in Virginia, uses the same device, showcasing two of its paralegals.

Shapiro, Cooper Lewis & Appleton has embraced videos to an extent few others have. For example, the principal partners each have a video bio on the firm's site.

Nonetheless, I found Role of a Paralegal disappointing. The concept is excellent. I think it's helpful for prospective clients to understand how a law firm works and the roles of those who work there.

The problem with this video lies in the script and production. Jackie and Roslyn, the two paralegals featured, provide a lot of helpful details about what they do, but their script meanders. It needs some editing to make it tighter.

The soundtrack needs some cleaning up (or the firm needs better microphones). Also, the b-roll that shows someone (Roslyn?) working in her office while Jackie is speaking practically defines the idiom "too little too late."

Shapiro, Cooper Lewis & Appleton has an excellent concept here. With a better script and better production values, it will have a first-rate video.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Coming July 11, 2008 to Fat Friday: Ross Kodner responds to Martin Dean's recent rebuttal regarding email confidentiality, Bruce Vermeychuk provides a brief history of WordPerfect and points to a free eBook about the early days of the company by one of WordPerfect's founding fathers, Andrew Weltchek discusses spam and challenge response software, Paul Lepine points to a unique mouse and shares two tips for more comfortable mousing, and Thomas Fitzpatrick comes to Apple's defense regarding its cinema displays and the elusive built-in iSight camera. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on June 23, 2008 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

So June is nearly over and TechnoLawyer expects me to submit a piece every month ... starting in April. They don't call me "Crazy Mazy" for nothing (or at all). Sure I "think different" as the famous commercial goes, but that's the problem. Let me explain.

Think Different ... But Not Too Different

In case you want to begin innovating in the legal space, let me stop you right now. Challenging the status quo over the past few years has cost me relationships with my employees, clients, and colleagues.

For example, take my oft-stated disdain for the billable hour. So sure was I of my position that I decided to put my money where my mouth was and wean my office from the teat of this scourge. Despite scratching out a reputation as a respectable trial lawyer over 10 grueling years and making a passable living by billing clients, I switched to value billing (aka the flat fee) to deliver ... well, value.

My theory was that if I had already been paid, I could concentrate on the work. This new tack would require that I avoid litigation, which often amounts to a bottomless pit for time. I took the plunge, began to rid my schedule of litigation, and felt good about it right away. For a while.

First the Good News ...

At first it was exhilarating not having to spend days writing up billing every few weeks, and the time it freed up on a daily basis was a bonus. Nobody would have to watch the clock. We could focus on our work and clients could call when they needed us ... and they did. Morning, noon, and night.

But that wasn't all. Many came in complaining of one problem for a given fee, only to sneak in new, often unrelated problems. Try explaining that distinction in an engagement letter or trying to charge extra for services under that circumstance.

Worse still, the complaints didn't stop. Our fees were still too high for their taste. As if. Value billing drove down cash-flow, depleted my savings, and resulted in defections or resignations by employees. But the fun was just beginning.

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning ...

The next casualty in my war on convention was the ability to repay creditors on time. Having built up the office, hired, and entered into contracts with vendors based on a steady diet of labor-intensive, hourly litigation, the switch to such flat-fee standards as bankruptcy, real estate, and immigration was ... not smooth.

Soon we began defaulting on obligations and ordering less from suppliers. Next, our credit lines were shut down one after another. Without lines of credit, it became risky to hire suitable employees to replace those who had departed for fear of a cash crunch. But not content (or willing) to complete the backed up work by myself, I hired less qualified, less costly replacements. That didn't work either, and in the end I fired even those employees.

The cycle was complete and I was alone. I had not been without employees for 10 years, but in one fell swoop I had reversed all hints of progress, all in the name of a better way to bill.

Epilogue (Don't Try This At Home) ...

For the past four months I've been putting in 12 hour days, working 6 and 7 days a week without any associates or clerks (except for an intern who has little to offer in the way of practical help). Instead of finding new work though, I have to fix or complete projects my employees claimed to have completed over the past 9 months. Yes, 9 months.

Sure, my life sucks. But it sucks slightly less than it did when I was throwing away thousands of dollars on employees that couldn't get things right or screwed up so badly that it cost me more to complete the project than the job was worth in the first place. Nor was value billing the answer because, let's face it, flat fees are just a way of saying "Here I am, use me!" Clients respond to that like wolves to red meat.

In the end I miss the billable hour. I admit it. I was too hasty in dismissing it. In the future, I plan to return to the practice of billing my time, and God help the next client that asks for a flat fee or the next employee that says they can do something they can't. They won't find a home in my office.

Oh, and by the way ... that's why this piece is late.

Written by Mazyar M. Hedayat of M. Hedayat & Associates, P.C.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming June 27, 2008 to Fat Friday: Martin Dean responds to Ross Kodner's recent TechnoGuide Post about email confidentiality, Carol Bratt provides some line and page numbering tips for Word and has a few words about so-called power users who are anything but, Philip Franckel provides two Yellow Pages advertising tips, Dwight Corrin suggests three more rules for modern day email etiquette (and we join the debate with tips of our own), and Fredric Gruder draws from 30 years legal experience to offer insight into why general counsel don't hire small firms. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a document grouping application to expedite the early stages of discovery (see article below), a service that enables law firms to accept credit cards, and an online store that can digitize your old photos, film, records, video tapes, and more. Don't miss the next issue.

Group Therapy for Discovery Documents
By Peter R. Olson

Let's face it — having your most junior paralegal handle the first cut of documents in your cases is probably not a good idea. But who else higher up in your firm would volunteer for this critical but grueling chore? No one is the likely answer. You need someone like Mikey — that kid who hated everything except Life cereal or in your case document review. Good luck.

Instead of searching for someone who doesn't exist, Clustify from Hot Neuron can help you with this task. Clustify groups similar documents into groups or clusters, providing quick insight into the contents of each document set. These clusters enable you to make decisions one cluster at a time instead of one document at a time, streamlining the document review that you and your experienced personnel conduct after the initial cut.

Whether used in Clustify's own user interface or within your preferred document review platform, Clustify identifies document keywords and then groups documents by keyword sets. You can sort by specific keywords, phrases, or even long passages. Clustify labels a "representative document" for each cluster.

Clustify offers a number of review tools. For example, you can compare specific documents side-by-side with Clustify's document comparison tool. Clustify highlights the changes for you. Clustify also offers custom tagging to categorize documents as you review them. Apply a tag to a single document, all documents in a cluster, or all clusters containing a certain combination of keywords. You can tag hundreds of documents with a single mouse click and link documents to other documents. This automated categorization improves the quality of document review because you can assign related documents to a single reviewer instead of having reviewers skip from one topic to another.

Clustify supports most document formats you're likely to encounter, including PDF, Microsoft Office, WordPerfect and HTML. Clustify runs on Windows and Linux. Learn more about Clustify.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

An ongoing discussion in our Fat Friday newsletter about large law firm recruiting and salaries brought back memories of an article published in the Winter 1997 issue of City Journal entitled My Life As An Associate.

Written by Jonathan Foreman, it struck a chord with me back then when I myself was a large firm associate, and remains in my opinion the best inside account of large law firm life I've ever come across. Foreman is a formidable writer who practiced law at Shearman & Sterling for two years before embarking on a career as a journalist.

I kept a copy of the article on paper for many years and eventually scanned it into PDF format. I read it twice a year at least — and I'm not one of those people who usually consumes media more than once (the movie Wall Street being the only other exception).

So imagine my excitement when I discovered that City Journal (an excellent publication incidentally) now has all of its past issues online for free in an easy-to-read and printer-friendly format — including Foreman's article. Here's a taste of Foreman's take on large firm life in the mid-1990s:

"Our corporate culture required the show of enthusiasm in all circumstances. A partner would come into your office and ask if you had any plans for the weekend. The correct answer was "no." And you would then be given an assignment to fill your empty Saturday and Sunday. The first time I was asked the question, I mumbled something about having hoped to go to Vermont. The young partner, who was nicknamed "Dave the Barracuda," looked at me with a combination of incredulity and sympathy, as if I had just confessed to a subnormal IQ. "It's a rhetorical question," he explained with an exasperated sigh, before proceeding to assign me 20 hours of research.

"Every week we had to fill out a form saying how many hours we had billed the week before and for which client. If you put down a number that suggested you had enjoyed an easy week, the assignments partner would soon wander through your open door and ask if you were busy. It was another rhetorical question: it meant that you were about to become extremely busy. It also meant that there was an incentive not to work too fast. The idea was to charge as many billable hours to clients as would seem reasonable sometime in the future. If you worked too fast, the firm would not be getting its money's worth, and you would be rewarded immediately with another assignment. So our progress was sedate even when we were billing over 100 hours a week.

...

"It seemed that only law students and their parents thought it was a big deal to work in a Wall Street megafirm. Anybody who had had the slightest contact with corporate law, from investment bankers to secretaries to dancers-cum-proofreaders, just felt sorry for us. Our amazingly high turnover meant that over two years most of the people I liked quit or were fired.

"Others, the real unfortunates, were broken to the system. Once the cream of the Ivy League, they had been told too often that they were useless, that they were lucky to have a job at all. Years of semi-brainless paperwork while their college peers were starting businesses or making movies had dissolved their self-confidence. After three or four years the outside world had come to seem a terrifying place. Some claimed they were trying to get out, but one look at their eyes told the whole story."

Read Jonathan Foreman's My Life As An Associate.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Coming June 3, 2008 to TechnoFeature: What can a law firm learn from an automotive manufacturer? A good deal, according to law firm management consultant and blogger Bruce MacEwen. In this article, Bruce discusses how the much-heralded Toyota Production System, which has helped Toyota dominate the industry, can facilitate strategic planning at your firm. Specifically, Toyota's approach can make your lawyers and staff feel less like a cog on an assembly line, and more like an integral, valued part of the team. The only problem is that incorporating TPS is about as "easy" as exercising, losing weight, and quitting smoking. But if you can do it, Bruce believes you can leave your competitors in the dust.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

We have a vending machine in our office.

Popular items such as Peanut M&Ms disappear in a day or two after a refill yet the company that "manages" (I use that term loosely) the machine inserts the same number of packages each time rather than devoting an extra row or two.

What's worse, the vending machine often sits half empty for weeks before being replenished.

Yes, half empty as in half full. I think the Almond M&Ms date back to the Eisenhower administration.

So what can a poorly managed vending machine teach you about managing a law firm?

1. Capitalize on Definitive Trends: When a fad becomes a trend, jump on it. The earlier, the better though the greater the risk. Timing is everything.

Example: Twitter URLs may become as important as domain names, and generate trademark-related work.

2. Meet Deadlines: Obviously, you already meet court deadlines, but meet self-imposed deadlines as well — even something as simple as a promised phone call. When you announce a deadline and meet it, you foster trust, which results in more opportunities.

3. Walk a Mile: Try to view the world from your client's perspective. Don't offer what you want, but instead figure out what your clients want. They may not know so asking them may not help. At least, not directly.

Example: Lots of firms mail boring memos about new laws to their clients. Instead of writing a legal analysis, write the memo from the point of view of your clients, especially the non-lawyers. Work with a graphic designer on a layout that enhances comprehension. A better understanding of a legal issue by your clients may trigger a heretofore unknown legal need.

One last tip. Lay off the Sunkist orange soda. I recently noticed that it doesn't contain any orange juice.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.