Archive for April, 2010
War of the Worlds: Librarians and Knowledge Managers Fight It Out
Posted by: | CommentsAbove and Beyond KM has an intriguing post up about the conflicts between knowledge management (”KM“) managers and librarians at law firms. The author muses that some of the conflict might be due to the caste system in the legal world, where lawyer KM managers look down their noses at “non-lawyer” librarians, and perhaps this struggle amounts to little more than the death throes of an obsolete system.
I think the caste system point is well taken. Interestingly, the caste system affects lawyer KM managers, too, as they usually have less status than many associates at a firm. The unspoken ideology seems to be that either you generate fees, or you do not, and, if not, then you have less status. Ultimately, the “death throes” issue really is at the fore here. Most of the issues I’ve found that librarians care passionately about in managing a collection simply do not overlap well with the daily knowledge acquisition and management needs of the firm. Consider:
- How often does a librarian spend extensive time cataloging material that is almost never used?
- To what degree are acquisitions focused on filling out a typical catalog versus aligning with KM needs?
- How strongly do librarians negotiate vendor contracts (in my experience, hardly at all)?
However, I will grant that KM managers may have blind spots as to certain important library needs. Ultimately, we need a more advanced system that takes into account all of these concerns.
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-25
Posted by: | Comments- Forbes releases metrics on all Major League Baseball team's finances – great to see the revenue differences – http://bit.ly/aeeBB7 #
- Remember the Elian Gonzalez fiasco 10 years ago? Insightful take on the whole event with pictures of him today – http://bit.ly/bqWcfe #
- Vatican has its own telescope in Arizona, nearby the U of AZ just launched their own telescope and named it "Lucifer"! http://bit.ly/99QW9r #
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-18
Posted by: | Comments- Cancer treatments only improve life expectancy by 3 months (1996-2006) – see the article here – http://bit.ly/9jdpSu #
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-11
Posted by: | Comments- Six Sigma software – how it can help you with contract decision making – http://bit.ly/civv6E #
- "Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now." http://bit.ly/ayGI4Y #
- How to understand what kills deals – remove social redundancy to speed along contract negotiations – http://bit.ly/9RcSlJ #
- Great new tool Tagxedo let's you build word clouds in a variety of shapes, check out my star shaped contract here – http://bit.ly/bwfGUp #
- Workers at Carsberg Brewery strike. Why? Because they're no longer allowed to drink beer at work outside of lunch! http://nyti.ms/b0BIzu #
Star Contract
Posted by: | CommentsI love technology that plays around with words. There’s a terrific new beta site up now called Tagxedo that lets you take text and form it into a variety of colorful word clouds and shapes. I thought it would be fun to try this out with our most popular contract, the Sample Services Contract over at WhichDraft.com (you can review it here). Here’s what Tagxedo produced. Pretty snazzy, no?
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Six Sigma Software
Posted by: | CommentsAs some of you may know from reading this blog, I have a green belt in the Six Sigma process improvement method and am a big fan of its benefits. Recently Cary Harwin of Catalyst Development reached out to me about their new product, ChoiceAnalyst, which is a decision support tool for Six Sigma. You can find more about it here, and the pricing and support fees are listed here. There’s a personal edition that handles one decision maker, and a standard version that can handle up to five decision makers. Cary also plans on rolling out an enterprise version that will include collaboration features.
If you are not familiar with Six Sigma, here’s a quick primer. Six Sigma uses a rigorous, scientific approach to figuring out why a problem occurs when the cause is not obvious. The process requires you to define the problem, measure it, analyze your measurements, improve the process that was causing the problem to prevent it from happening, and control the process so that the problem’s causes don’t crop up again in the future.
Cary was kind enough to talk with us today and provide the following interview, which I think you’ll find useful in getting a better sense of whether decision tool software such as ChoiceAnalyst can be helpful to you.
Why did you develop ChoiceAnalyst?
“In sorting through decisions involving multiple criteria with many alternatives, people are becoming much more comfortable with using tools to assist in those kinds of decisions. People often struggle with how to interpret multiple criteria in making a decision, and ChoiceAnalyst makes this much easier by automatically weighting criteria based on your rankings, presenting each criteria as a choice, and allowing you to then make an informed decision. It’s very difficult for an individual to hold several different permutations in their head at the same time. We make that possible. The user still selects, judges, and chooses key criteria to make a decision, we just allow people to use a computer to juggle all of them and weight them mathematically so the user can decide what’s important in making a decision, and how much more important one issue is versus others.”
What would be an example of how ChoiceAnalyst can help in the legal arena?
“Wrongful discrimination lawsuits can be handled effectively by referring to documents that demonstrate a good faith basis for termination, such as written evaluations. If you can make this decision using a decision tool, you can understand what processes you need to put into place to define this kind of problem, measure the rankings of the most important causes of the problem, print out a pdf report showing you all of the scoring for all of the criteria, and then have that for analysis, improvement and control, you can fulfill a Six Sigma approach in properly managing your employees.”
Give us a specific example of how ChoiceAnalyst can help your clients?
“We remove buyer’s remorse. If a customer finds multiple products that meet their needs, how do they choose which one is the best? By calculating a result based on key criteria chosen by the customer, the customer can then ensure that it has made the best possible decision using a methodology that provides a sense of confidence that everything has been considered in arriving at the best choice.”
How can ChoiceAnalyst help with more effective contracting processes?
“We can help salespersons sort through the most important contract terms that cause problems for their customers, and properly draft a contract that best alleviates customer pain and allows them to make the decision to buy with the least amount of contract review and negotiation.”
Thanks, Cary.
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requests(at)whichdraft(dot)com (973) 457-1186
Is the Focus on Shareholder Value Hurting Law Firm Performance?
Posted by: | CommentsIntriguing post up today by Robert Sawhney, who asks here:
“[W]ho said that shareholder value was the primary objective of any firm? The well known and outspoken economist Milton Friedman was a vocal supporter of shareholder value as the primary objective of any firm. He claimed ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase profits’. That may be so and I am not here to argue the ins and outs of economics, but surely the objective of any business is to enhance client value and create economic value through innovation. Not only that, but economic value should be based on innovation and not destruction. Within the law firm environment and professional service firms in general, we are sorely lacking an alternative view of capitalism.”
I certainly agree with Robert that the leveraged law firm model is an entrenched system that does not do a very good job of creating economic value through innovation.
I would take issue with the comment regarding Milton Friedman, as I don’t think he would have ever said that creating value for customers through innovation is in opposition to shareholder value. Friedman’s core message was quite the opposite, mainly, that focusing on shareholder value pushes firms to compete to provide the best possible products at the most affordable prices, and they do this by innovating under competitive pressure. However, I think Robert does a strong job of pointing out how law firm path dependence creates a big problem for Friedman’s supposition, because law firms’ laser-like focus on profits per partner leads to poor, short term oriented decision making and worse allocations of resources which result in unnecessarily costly services that are often not provided with optimum performance.
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Strategic Sourcing Legal Services – Key Bullet Points
Posted by: | CommentsMany people within companies are looking for persuasive arguments as to why they should shift to alternative billing arrangements with outside counsel, particularly to radically reduce expense. Here are some of the key arguments that I find to be most persuasive:
- Too Much Legal Expense. Most companies are spending way too much on legal services. Moving away from the billable hour and turning towards alternative billing models focused on results creates a significantly better return on investment.
- Standard Procurement Fee Reduction Efforts Fail. Procurement departments routinely make the mistake of using a strategic sourcing manager without a strong understanding of the legal field, which makes their effort to cut outside counsel fees fail.
- Unique Nature of Legal Services. Legal services are a unique animal. In legal procurement, a strategic sourcing manager must dispense with the normal approach of treating a law firm as one company, as a law firm is not much more than a group of diverse people, each with a book of business, and the lawyers and staff that support each book.
- Use of Statistics. As a result, law firm wide statistics and quality management are often unhelpful and do not drive across the board quality improvement and spend reductions. You are much better off measuring the performance of the handful of lawyers who are controlled by the equity partner who manages your relationship.
- Year Over Year Fee Targets Don’t Work. You cannot set a target of year over year reductions in legal spending because the law department often has no idea, for any given year, what may materialize. A sudden class action lawsuit could be filed, a major construction vendor may walk off the job, or a sexual harassment lawsuit could result. Insisting that the law department spend less money than the previous year without taking this into account alienates the lawyers who are already reticent to support any kind of spend management.
- Compare Apples to Apples. The better approach is to compare apples to apples, and try to get year over year reductions in purchasing the same kind of legal service that was previously acquired, as well as looking into whether a particular legal service is needed in the first place.
- Where to Start? The best areas to target include M&A, labor and employment disputes, regulatory research, commercial real estate, and litigation amenable to alternative billing models that use clearly defined objectives and efficiency bonuses to drive results oriented, more efficient legal services at lower fees.
You can read more on these issues here and see all of my strategic sourcing posts here (scroll down).
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-04
Posted by: | Comments- In 1798 President John Adams signed into law a health insurance mandate – see the law here – http://bit.ly/aqi6Fy #
- Key issue for health insur. constitutionality-Is an affirmative requirement not allowed when Congress prohibitions are-http://nyti.ms/a4HlIg #
- Wouldn't it be great if NYC had electric car charging stations? It did, 100 years ago – http://bit.ly/dnhaPq #
