Doug Cornelius .com

It has been a month since I have turned from a provider of legal services at a big law firm to a consumer of legal services from big law firms. I thought I would share some of the things I have found.

First, I was surprised that the firm I left did not do anything to bridge the gap of information flow. Law firms should think about getting their departing lawyers set up with relevant newsletters to be sent to their new jobs. I have been getting more alerts (and more information) from other law firms than the law firm with which I have the closest bond.

One law firm asked me to set up a password-protected account to subscribe to alerts. But someone decided it need to be a complicated password with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter and a number/symbol. For a newsletter?!? That password is more complicated than the password for my bank account. I did not bother completing that subscription.

The general counsel forwarded me an law firm interesting newsletter: Privacy and Security Alert. Unfortunately when I went to that firm’s website to subscribe, it was not one of the choices. I have noticed this with a few other law firms. If a law firm is going to label a newsletter, that label should be one of the subscription options.

All firms seem to break their publications into different chunks that make no sense to me. What is the difference between a publication, a newsletter and an alert?

If your answer to this question is no, perhaps you should take a look at the website for Hill| Holiday. For those of you outside of Boston, Hill | Holliday is a PR/marketing firm with clients that include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Chili’s, AOL, Anheuser Busch, and Dunkin’ Donuts.

The home page of the Hill| Holiday website is a blog. You can even scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the “proudly powered by WordPress” designation. They even have comments activated.

Is your marketing group still unsure about whether blogs are useful? The biggest marketing firm in Boston thinks a blog is a useful marketing tools for themselves. Does you marketing group know something that Hill| Holiday does not know?

Thanks to Stewart Mader at WikiPatterns for pointing this out in his Random Things he reading this weekend post.

The controversial Avvo.com has come to Boston (and the rest of Massachusetts). I have heard about the reviews and the law suits filed. It looks like the early rating system had some problems with gathering information and weighting the information that Avvo was able to find. As of April 2, they have added Massachusetts.

Since I am a lawyer in Massachusetts, I figured I would check out my profile: Doug Cornelius on Avvo.
At first, I achieved the “No Concern Rating.” There is a process for claiming your profile. After doing that, I got a 6.2 out of 10. That did not seem very good. So I added some publications, speaking engagements, employment, etc. That got me up to a 6.5.

According to their description of how the ratings work, if you add more information to your profile then your numerical rating should increase. I also jumped into the questions feature of the site and answered a few real estate questions. Answering questions got me a badge of Level 3 Contributor, but did not seem to help my rating.

I am all for public disclosure of information, especially public information like attorney discipline. I find Avvo to be an interesting exercise, but I am still not sure where it fits into my public profile. It certainly has a marketing twist to it. Is it any more useful than this blog on law firm knowledge management or Real Estate Space, my commercial real estate finance blog?

Personally, I find the numerical rating to be distasteful and somewhat random. (Admittedly, I might not take that position if I had a rating of 10, or at least above 9.) The information is clearly more robust than the rather sparse information in Martindale: Doug Cornelius in Martindale.

I will continue to keep an eye on it and see what happens.

The folks over at Lexblog decide to interview me on Real Lawyers Have Blogs: Doug Cornelius of Goodwin Procter [LexBlog Q & A].

Thanks to Rob La Gatta for making me sound reasonably intelligent and Kevin O’Keefe for putting me on the interview list.

As reported in The Lawyer . com, the Eversheds has grabbed a big chunk of legal work from Tyco. It sounds like the key to getting the work was putting an electronic approval process in place. Using their Global Account Management System (GAMS), which requires the lawyer at Eversheds to fill out a quick form in GAMS before starting a new project for Tyco. Then, the general counsel signs-off on the work before the lawyer starts work.

It looks like integrating the law firm’s technology and integrating the law firm’s business process with the client’s technology and business process can get work for law firms. Sounds like a great case for law firm knowledge management.

It is award season. After Dennis Kennedy honored me with a Blawggie, our friends up North handed me a CLawBie. Steve Matthews put together the Canadian law blog awards.

Jason Eiseman and I are co-winners of the “Friends of the North Award” for reading, commenting and linking to Canadian law blogs.

Toronto has a great law firm knowledge management community that I have enjoyed meeting with in person. I equally enjoy reading what they have to say on their blogs.

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?