Doug Cornelius .com

Jerry L. Anderson (Drake University Law School) has posted Comparative Perspectives on Property Rights: The Right to Exclude on SSRN. I found it fascinating article on a comparison of the right to exclude others from your property as a very American property right that has its limitations here and is not as true world-wide.

I was familiar with the Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp. It was one of the few Supreme Court Takings cases that is straight-forward in its rule and application. If the government forces you to allow someone to place something on your property, no matter how minor, this is a taking and requires compensation.

Professor Anderson compares this to Britain’s Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000, which declares private land that contains mountain, moor, heath or down to be “open country” on which the public is free to enter. Madonna had an issue with the public entering her 1000 acre estate in South Wiltshire. It seems her American sensibility of the keeping people off your land does carry across the Atlantic when she adopted her British accent.

The one part of the article that threw me off was Professor Anderson’s attempt to link American obesity to the lack of access. “Perhaps the right to exclude also plays a role, by increasing the difficulty of walking from one place to another and by placing some of the most inviting territory for a hike off limits. Would it make a difference if you could start a hike by simply hiking across the fields near your house, rather than having to drive to a park or nature preserve many miles away?”

Thanks to Ben Barros at the Property Prof Blog for pointing out this article.

Even with the warm weather here in Boston, the summer has ended. So I decided to look back at my survey of the summer associates. I posted the preliminary results a few weeks a go.

For those of you interested in viewing the detailed data you can download a file with the full results: Social Survey (.csv file)

I had 56 responses from the 75 summer associates.

77% had a Facebook account and most of them checked Facebook at least once a day.

Of those that checked Facebook at least once a day, the average college graduating year was 2004. For those who checked it less frequently or did not have an account, the average college graduating year was 2003.

Of those with Facebook accounts, 79% would use Facebook for business purposes.

There was a sharp drop off from Facebook to LinkedIn. Only 19% had a LinkedIn account. That does not surprise me. Facebook offers a much more dynamic way to communicate and network than LinkedIn. That is shown by their usage. Only 9% checked LinkedIn weekly, the rest answered rarely.

There were similar usage numbers for MySpace as there were for LinkedIn.

I would expect that the survey numbers were skewed downward on usage of these sites. In my request, I stated that the results would be anonymous (and they are). But, I think they may want to downplay their use of the site to appear more “professional” given the way many members of the media portray these social sites as frivolous.

To me it looks like next year’s lawyers are using Facebook actively and see it as a business tool. We better figure out how to meet their expectations.

knowledge management
facebook
linkedin

I felt a little bad about calling LawLink boring. Not because I said it was boring (it is), but because I did not give any advice for what would make it less boring. Since Steven Choi stumbled across this site, I might as well continue with my thoughts.

I found LawLink to be like an elevator pitch: “Let’s do LinkedIn just for lawyers.” As Steve Choi pointed out, there are only a few thousand members. It is shame that he did not give them a reason to come back after they joined.

Look at the ABA’s LawLink site: www.abanet.org/lawlink/. “Lawlink provides quick access to important legal information from the American Bar Association and other resources. Each site is selected and evaluated by a member of the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center staff. ” Now that is information that I would come back for.

Look at the LawLink for New South Wales: http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/ There is information worth coming back for. (If I was in New South Wales)

Steven said that I should promote the blog in the LawLink classifieds. The classifieds look pathetic with most of them devoid of entries. I would be embarrassed to post something in there. Frankly, I found the existence of a dating section in the classifieds section to be repulsive for site that is targeted for professional relationships. Yes lawyers need love, but it seems to clash with the LawLink Mission:

• To help attorneys build professional relationships with other attorneys.
• To help attorneys leverage their existing professional relationships.

I would be interested if there were an aggregation of blawgs on the site. That would provide at least some substance.

LinkedIn provides a way for you to upload you contacts and see who in the network. It also matches other contacts in the network you may know based on college and law school attendance. LawLink does not provide a way to start that hunt for people you know.

To fair to LawLink, LinkedIn is also pretty boring. There is not much to do except see if anyone new has joined the network and answer questions.

I missed the early days of LinkedIn and Facebook, so I do not know how they got people to come back after their first look. I assume that there was some interesting information, cool feature or string of communication that caught their eye.

I think LawLink suffers from the blank wiki page syndrome. You can’t just put up a blank wiki and expect people to contribute. You can’t just put up an empty social site and expect people to be social (especially lawyers).

Steven says that LawLink will be rolling out new features. I am still waiting for something to catch my eye to get me to go back.

According to this article in Retail Traffic Magazine, REIT Joint Ventures Unfazed By Credit Market Tumult.

I have done a fair amount of work with REITs acting as private equity managers, leveraging their portfolio with institutional investors rather than public equity.

As Andy Sucoff points out, the REIT typically puts up 15% or 20% of the equity plus a promote for beating a target IRR. They also use higher leverage ratios than they do in their portfolio to maximize the return.

According to the The LinkedIn Blog, starting on Friday the 28th you can start adding a picture to your LinkedIn profile: A Photo is Worth a Thousand Words.

“Adding a profile photo is one of the most commonly requested features for the LinkedIn profile, primarily because many people (like me) tend to recognize their colleagues and classmates more reliably by face than by name.”

I have been using wikis at the firm for the past few months. Here are three case studies that I hope will shed some light on factors that help wikis work or help them to fail within the enterprise. Since we are still working on our deployment of Sharepoint 2007 and its wiki capability, I decided to host these three wikis with an external provider (PBwiki.com).

Client Team Site.

For one of my client teams, I had started a practices and procedures memo. Initially, I converted the practice and procedures memo into pages on the wiki site. Then I decided to create a wiki page for each transaction. The transaction page consisted of notes, a status chart for diligence items and a status chart for the loan documents. The idea was for the team to be aware of changes and updates to the client relationship and each transaction. I was tired of getting so many emails.

The client team site was imposed by me, as the team leader, by fiat. The wiki is how I want to distribute changes to the practices and keep up to date on the status of each transaction.

The team is coming along, but coming along slowly. Mostly because nobody else is interested in learning this new way of sharing and communicating information. This will be a success, eventually. Mainly because of my ability to impose my will on the team.

Practices and Procedures Memo.

I stumbled upon a practices and procedures memo for another client that I am supporting on the knowledge management front. The memo was a lengthy MS Word document that had lots of information and cross references back and forth throughout the memo. It thought it would be a great fit for a wiki. What sold the idea of using a wiki was a question from one of the team members: “How do I know when the procedures change or the memo is updated?” A wiki’s RSS feed would do that.

There are links to key documents in our document management system (the links only work if you access the wiki from inside our firewall.) There are 32 pages in the wikis, so there is a lot of content. But the content was easy; we just pasted sections of the memo from MS Word into the wiki, adding the cross references and links to the document management system.

Edits to the wiki are few and far between. This is particularly problematic because the procedures memo was out of date when it was transformed into the wiki. This was a dark omen that I ignored. I hoped the wiki technology would remove whatever barrier existed that inhibited people from updating the procedures memo. A classic example of needing the business process and group motivation, more than the technology.

Project Team.

The third wiki was the site for our knowledge management department. Another member of the department and I thought it would be a good way to share information and updates. Too much information was being scattered about by emails.

As of today, we have 58 pages in the project team wiki site. There are several edits each day in the wiki pages. That alone indicates success.

We passed a key success milestone last week when we had our first discussion on governance of the wiki. Once you have enough content then people start focusing on how the wiki is organized and how particular pages are organized.

This site worked because two of us decided to use it as a medium to capture and share information with each other. Once we decided it worked for us, we asked the whole team to join and got the director to go along with this idea. The sales pitch was that wikis were coming into the firm as part of SharePoint 2007, so we better learn how the work and how they don’t work.

One of the key factors was getting the agenda for the team’s weekly meeting into the wiki and maintained in the wiki. This created better collaboration, because it was easy for team members to add items to the discussion.

Success Factors.

In looking at these three case studies, I see three critical factors.

First, there needs to be a reason to go to the wiki site. The information needs to be better organized, more functional and more findability than the existing methods of sharing the information.

Second, you need more than one person to be dedicated to using it as the communication/collaboration tool. Neither person need be top level management. The important factor is a group willing to share information. Management will come around.

The third critical factor is avoiding the empty wiki syndrome. The wiki has to have better information than any other location. An empty wiki is like an empty nightclub. If nobody else is there, you begin to think that maybe you should not be there either. There needs to be compelling reason to stay, look around and interact with other people.

On Monday October 1, I am heading out Waltham for the Boston Knowledge Management Forum at Bentley College.

One of the speakers is Dave Snowden, formerly a Director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, who is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge. He along with Kate Ehrlich of IBM Research, Kathy Curley of BU, Joe Horvath of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Eric Lesser of IBM Consulting, and Mike Zack, Associate Professor, Northeastern University, College of Business Administration will be presenting on “KM: then, now, and in the future.”

Stephen Colbert finds this new Bingham McCutchen print ad to be disturbing. This video from Colbert Report mentions Bingham ad at the 1:30 minute left mark.

Its great that the ad attracted attention, but it does not convey what Bingham does. Colbert assumed Bingham was a consulting firm.

“Let me consult with you: Should I give my baby to a grizzly bear? Yes, but first rub him with honey and salmon.”"

I just finished reading the Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. (If you are one of my Facebook “friends,” you already know that.) The seventh law is emotion: “more emotions are better than less.”

One story jumped out at me. Mr. Maeda tells the story of his daughter sending him emails with text of all sizes, colors and caps. “

Does not the phrase “I love you!” have so much more meaning when typed:”I LOVE YOU!”? Think of it typed at 36 points in pink and bright yellow and it really can go over the top.”

He then contrasts this message with one of his students. She never smiled when communicating with others because she didn’t “want to look unprofessional.” He reflected on his attempts to project professionalism by being stern and authoritative. He did not like it. So now, when nobody is looking, he replies back to his daughter in all-caps and colorful letters: “I LOVE YOU TOO!!!”

It dawned on me that being professional and being personable should not be exclusive. One of things I like about this blog, Facebook and other social media is that it allows me to be personable.

If you are interested in the ten laws of simplicity, here they are (linking to his website.):

So I read this article on Law.com by Jessie Seyfer about LawLink – The Attorney Network. I was interested (mildly) in what a social network site of just lawyers would be like.

It was even more boring than I thought it would be.

I uploaded my picture. I added my bio. That was about all I could do. There is no way to find people that I already know who may be in LawLink. Facebook and LinkedIn both allow you to upload you contacts and see if any of them are in the system. I tried searching for my firm name, but I am the only one who came back.

It seems to be a similar feature set to LinkedIn, but limits its users to lawyers. So what does it offer than LinkedIn does not offer? Why should I use LawLink?