Doug Cornelius .com

Rees W. Morrison has an article on Law.com: Cherish the Routine Legal Services.

He makes four points about commodity legal services

1. Recognize that commodity legal work is crucial for a company’s success.
2. Build on the fact that all legal services move toward commodity.
3. Apply technology and knowledge management to commodity work.
4. Reconsider where the work is done.

I was disappointed that he did not mention the use of document assembly systems when applying technology to commodity legal work. I find the use of document assembly can remove a lot of the drudge work from the commodity work, allowing the attorneys to focus on the aspect of the matter that distinguishes it from the rest of the matters in the commodity assembly line. I have found the attorneys to be ecstatic that they do not have to fill in the borrower’s name over and over again over the set of a dozen loan documents.

As I posted earlier, I sat in a session on Legal Ethics and Law Firm Websites. Here are few takeaways:

The bar regulators are way behind in figuring out how to regulate lawyers on the internet. Most of the analysis focuses around comparing the web activity to what you would do in print advertising or the phone.

Some bad internet activities such as pop-up ads and spam from lawyers are probably unethical, not just annoying.

You need a disclaimer on the website listing an attorney’s email address. I posted about this earlier in the context of the Massachusetts ethics opinion.

Lawyer matching sites are a problem. The law varies from state to state on what is permitted, especially when it comes to charging fees and holding someone out as an expert.

You may also want to look at the materials from a different session on Dennis Kennedy’s blog: Handout Materials – Ethical Issues for Law Firm Websites

Staying on this topic for a little bit longer, but I am currently listening to a webcast from ALI-ABA “Legal Ethics and Lawyer Websites.” They brought up the topic of revealing client names and I thought of my post on listing published decisions on a firm’s website.

They pointed out that ABA Model Rule 1.6(a) states: “A lawyer shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent, the disclosure is impliedly authorized in order to carry out the representation or the disclosure is permitted by paragraph (b).”

The published decision is a matter of public record so you are not necessarily revealing information. But there are ethical limitations, so as part of the process the law firm should get the consent of the client.

My colleague David Hobbie pointed out in my prior post that providing information on all of the published cases could make too much information available. Nobody wins them all, so there will be losers and winners in the list.

The cases are published and publicly available, so there is no issue with revealing client confidences. But both the client and the law firm would probably not want to display their devastating losses.

I would assume that the listed decision would go through a vetting process with the responsible attorney before it is posted. However, the marketing group could discover the information and initiate the process, rather than waiting on the attorney to provide the information. That removes one of the limitations in the system.

Should a law firm should post all of the decisions? the good and the bad?

There is a growing movement of transparency in the business world. In The Naked Corporation, the authors take the position that a business must make itself visible to its shareholders, employees and customers.

Wired Magazine had an article by Clive Thompson on this: The See-Through CEO. “Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info – so why not make it work for you. . . “

As the authors of The Naked Corporation point out, “Transparency means more than making things visible; it also means taking action on what you see. ” It is hard to show what action you have may taken from the problematic result in the final endgame that is a courtroom decision. You could point out that you learn as much from your losses as you do from you victories. Therefore, the law firm has experience in that venue and on that topic.

Are law firms ready for transparency?

I do not think that law firms are far enough into the internet age to be worrying about the spin of bloggers and online postings. A snippet from the Wired article sets the example of a blogger who wrote about terrible treatment by Dell’s customer service, their “posts were so gleefully linked to that for a while they appeared as the number one and two search results for “Dell.“”

Run a search a search against your law firm’s name and see what comes up. The results against my firm were pretty boring. Nothing bad. (Nothing all that good either).

I do not see the need to worry about the spin of bloggers or other online postings about the law firm. Yet.

There are ethical limitations on using a client’s name. See this update.

In my prior post, I pointed out that the biggest difficulty with implementing a system to display a law firm’s experience is extracting the information from the attorneys.

Over the weekend I thought of two areas that law firm can display their experience without relying on the attorneys: litigation and securities.

For a litigation practice, you can pull the published cases in which the law firm represented a party. Lexis and Westlaw can both do this. Then you can categorize them based on the jurisdiction. Sidley Austin LLP did something like this. They show their state court experience for their Products Liability and Mass Torts Experience. The map is short on the details of what they did in each jurisdiction, but it does show that they have handled some sort of case in every state. I could also see this tool providing a detailed list of the decided cases and appeals in each jurisdiction.

For a securities practice, you can pull the filings in which the law firm represented the underwriter or issuer. You will find this capability in Securities Mosaic and LiveEdgar. Then you can categorize the issuance by industry, since that will be listed in the filing. You can also categorize the issuance by whether the firm represented the issuer or underwriter.

These are two ways to provide a rich source of data for an experience system, without relying on the attorneys to provide it.

Update: Can You Share Too Much?

Law.com’s Legal Technology section has an article by Nancy Manzo: Data Sharing to Promote Your Law Firm’s Experience.

I put together a Google Maps mashup to highlight some of my real estate practice experience: Transaction Map. It is more about showing geographic diversity than a depth of skill. I had proposed a similar Google Maps mashup for all of the firm’s real estate experience to the marketing group.

I looked at the Hubbard One Experience Management Solution mentioned in the article several months ago. I was very impressed with what it could do.

Take a look at the Jones Day experience search. It gives you a great look at some of the firm’s experience. The only problem is that the results are very exact. If you run a detailed search with lots of criteria, you often get no results. It should return a longer list based on relevancy.

The key to an experience management system, as with any knowledge management system, is getting meaningful, up-to-date content. You need a flow of post-action information from the lawyers to populate the experience management system.

Lawyers are not very good at dealing with post-action reviews. Law firms typically demand a lot of information at the onset of a matter. But typically, there is no requirement across the firm for getting information at the end of the matter.

We have been slowly pushing a closed transaction notification process across the business law department. The real estate group instituted a policy of sending a closed deal email to the group. A team of KM administrators harvest that information into our matter information database. There are currently over 1700 closed matter descriptions in the system.

This would be a great feed for an experience search like Jones Day or even to combine with a Google map mashup.

Update: A follow up thought on providing information for a litigation practice or a securities practice.

Some articles on the business of law:

• Explaining the Value of Transactional Lawyering. Steven L. Schwarcz.
  An academic look at trying to find how transactional lawyers add value in their role in the transactional process. I was surprised that academics thought that lawyers add value by “renting” their good reputation to clients. The results of the study behind this paper debunk that theory.
• Women Lawyers and Obstacles to Leadership. Mona Harrington and Helen Hsi, MIT Workplace Center.
  The report is based a study of the surveys that show that women and men enter law firms in essentially equal numbers but women leave firm practice at every pre-partner level at a far higher rate than men. The primary reason is the need for more time for family than the firms support. Nearly 80% women who leave the law firm environment move to workplaces that do allow the time they need, even if they are working fulltime.