Other Interests: pursuing your passion

Keeping in touch with the blogosphere

Technorati currently tracks 29 million blogs.

Of course not all of these are sites that I would want to track, if I ever could.

I currently track 93 sites through Bloglines, my newsreader.

One of those sites is Blawg Review which itself is a weekly review of the latest in legal blogs with the twist that each week's collection has a different editor/host who brings their own different perspective.

This week's host is De Novo who apart from linking to my post about Seligman (and suggests the real question is "Why are lawyers such pessimists?") reminds me that it's time to update my list of blogs that I refer to in the sidebar of this page. Will do!

PS I also read the The Carnival of the Capitalists for business-related blogs. This week it's at Ideologic.

Martin Seligman on why lawyers aren't optimists

I saw psychologist Martin Seligman speak today.

He observed that lawyers were generally pessimists.
Why? He said that negative emotions were associated with the law as it was a zero sum game:there are no winners. Positive emotion is associated with win/win scenarios.

He said there are 3 problems with modern lawyers:

1. Lawyers are selected for their pessimism. Lawyers have to be "prudent" and risk averse in situations where a loss could be catastrophic.They are able to think of any conceivable catastrophe.
2. Lawyers who aren't partners are pessimistic as a result of low decision making powers as well as high pressure from work.
3. Lawyers fail to use their key strengths: grinding documents can create pessimism in a lawyer with good social skills.

He also observed generally that it's easier to be creative in an atmosphere which is relaxed. In an atmosphere where the question is always "what's wrong" and focussed on correcting errors, feelings are likely to be negative.

Links: authentic happiness (find out your signature strengths), reflective happiness (take the happiness test)

UPDATE: Online journal The Submission has an article called Less Marble Tiles … More Happy Smiles- Saving The Practice Of Law by James McConvill and Richard Edney. They discuss Seligman's ideas in a lot more detail and consider Seligman's solutions. They also point to an article by Seligman on Why Lawyers are Unhappy in a special edition of the Deakin Law Review called Law and the Pursuit of Happiness: The Next Movement.

Pro bono work and charity: should it be used for marketing?

Businesses are important to the community: part of their profits should go to charities (either in cash, time or in kind).

But should those contributions be used to promote the business? Would those contributions have even greater merit if they were kept private?

Setting up alliances between charities and business has itself become a big business and businesses proudly promote their good works.

Evelyn Rodriguez talks about companies who publicise their tsunami relief efforts to promote their branding.

She describes her trip with the managing director and business development manager of a multinational company on a site visit.

• "We've turned down media attention."
• "We haven't ever advertised this project."
• "Our company isn't unique, really, hundreds of businesses pitched in after the tsunami. That's the story."

Judaism has a concept called tzedakah. Maimonides ranked charity in 8 descending levels (with 1 at the top):

1. Giving a poor person work (or loaning him money to start a business) so he will not have to depend on charity. This is because the person is now free from having to rely on charity. The giver has not just helped the recipient for the short while, but instead for the rest of their life. There are four sublevels to this:
   1. Giving a poor person work.
   2. Making a partnership with them (this is lower than work, as the recipient might feel he doesn't put enough into the partnership).
   3. Giving a loan.
   4. Giving a gift.
2. Giving charity anonymously to an unknown recipient.
3. Giving charity anonymously to a known recipient.
4. Giving charity publicly to an unknown recipient.
5. Giving charity before being asked.
6. Giving adequately after being asked.
7. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
8. Giving unwillingly.

Is charity something that businesses need to account for in their annual financial statements?

Is your business really focussed on your customers?

The cliche of the moment is "customer-centric" but most businesses that claim to be focussed on customer satisfaction will only in fact do what the customer wants if it fits within the business' own policies and processes.

Want help? Sure, but not between 1 and 2, that's our lunchtime. Want a fixed meeting time? OK but we might have to keep you waiting for 30 minutes.

I recently saw a presentation by Gail Kelly the CEO of St.George Bank. She said her bank was totally focussed on her customers. How did she know? She said that independent surveys of banks measured how many customers were thinking of switching to another financial institution. Whilst the average was around 18% , the result for her bank was NIL! She described how her bank was structured to achieve that goal. She talked about how she got the right people for the right job.She talked about her role as a leader to ensure the customer focus continued. And of course it reflected in continuing increasing profits.

If a bank can do it, why can't professional service firms?

Matt Homann has 3 great posts by Ron Baker : 1 on what it means to have a customer and 2 on repositioning professional firms (starting with pricing in The firm of the past and The firm of the future) so that they are truly customer focussed.

And even though Baker discusses the need to move from hourly billing to value pricing, it's not just about the money element. It's about looking at things from the customer's point of view: what are they getting from you, not time but a result. Not efficiency but effectiveness. A customer's measurement of satisfaction is different from that of most professional service providers. Until a business's KPI's for customer satisfaction are the same as the customers' how can they claim to be customer-centric?

Do you have the strength and courage to do the right thing?

It's been said before: people only change if they want to, no matter how much they "know" they should.

David Maister is a successful professional services firm adviser who has made a life study of what people want and what firms need to do to be chosen to provide their services.

His new blog gives a clue to his findings: it is entitled Passion, People and Principles.

A recurrent theme in his work is that firms need to give away information in order to gain people's trust as a precursor to forming a relationship.

He argues that firms can be more successful and people can enjoy their work more if they do what they do with integrity and with passion, for clients they are interested in. This is a paradox because most businesses are tempted to take whatever comes in the door, whether it is work they specialise in or not, whether it is a client in a sector they want to work for or not.

Maister's site is full of articles, podcasts and videos and other information.

If you want a great introduction watch his video Think of Work on the videos page.

But he knows that personal change is critical to organisation change: we all know the right thing to do but don't always have the strength and courage to do it. To live for the long term, rather than immediate gratification. Watch his Fat Smokers video.

The tyranny of office time

How do you value that inspiration you had in the middle of the night? Or the time that your subconscience is thinking about a client's problem whilst you are trying to attentively listen to your child?

Are these moments any less valuable than non-productive "Face Time"?

Bruce McEwen discusses this Business Week article and cites a lawyer bemoaning that he doesn't have time to reflect and consider problems any more, clients want instant answers.

There's no doubt that the idea of being chained to a desk ignores the fact that people can't be productive for hours on end.  It also ignores the fact that clients just want to be communicated with: as long as they understand the problem and what you are doing to solve it, they are willing to give you reasonable time to do so. That assumes there is a relationship of trust between you.

Thoughts on the legal profession

Even though I've left  the "big law firm" I manage my new consultancy and therefore still read about professional service firm management (as well as business management generally).

So I've collected some links to articles about the legal profession I've bookmarked recently. They look at the profession from both sides, internally at how lawyers practice, and externally from the clients' perspective.

While they're mainly US articles, the issues they raise apply to Australia.

The Tyranny of the Billable Hour gives a historical overview of time billing and looks at the recent ABA Commission on Billable Hours.

Some excerpts:
“The unending drive for billable hours,” said the ABA Commission on Billable Hours, “has had a negative effect . . . on family and personal relationships.” The result is that “many young attorneys are leaving the profession due to a lack of balance in their lives.”

One of the major problems with the billable hour system, as the ABA commission pointed out, is that it is “fundamentally about quantity over quality, repetition over creativity. With no gauge for intangibles such as productivity, creativity, knowledge or technological advancements, the billable hours model is a counter-intuitive measure of value.”

What Do Your Clients Really Think Of You looks at the service clients expect from their advisers.

This article from the New York Lawyer discusses an age discrimination case against a major US law firm. The interesting thing  is that the prosecution is arguing that law firm partners are merely employees:

In an opinion by Judge Richard Posner in 2002, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that the EEOC had sufficiently shown that the affected lawyers could be considered employees in order to proceed with its investigation and subpoena the firm.

Judge Posner pointed to the highly centralized management of the law firm, in which partners never voted on issues, and a self-selecting executive committee that made all major decisions, in suggesting that the partners could, in fact, be employees.

Adam Smith Esq discusses which profession is most likely to suffer from stress, depression, and alcohol or substance abuse?

The Tech Evolution: Change Or Die by Laura Owen, the Legal Services Director of Cisco , challenges lawyers to collaborate more and share knowledge with their clients. She gives some examples of "how to do it".

These articles are just a sampling: there are many people discussing different models of how lawyers can best serve their clients.

For example, read the [non]billable hour and My Shingle in addition to the above.
 

The Legal Profession

Via the [non]billable hour and Three Years of Hell To Become The Devil in a discussion of things to improve in law schools, comes this link to On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession written by  Patrick J. Schiltz, an Associate Professor at Notre Dame Law School in 1999.

It's quite an amazing, well researched but emotional and personal article directed at law students about their future in the legal profession. Whilst there are blogs that are clearly satiric in their analysis of Big Firm Law (eg  Anonymous Lawyer), Schiltz wears his heart on his sleeve in his assessment of the happiness, health and ethics of lawyers in big firms (and firms who wannabe big firms).

The data on health, depression and alcoholism is US based but there is no reason to suggest it would not be similar in Australia.

That's not to say that there are not people in the legal profession with a strong community and justice focus. But the business of law can sometimes clash with the needs of clients.

Value billing

Travelling with an associate gives you time to talk to them about things that you don't have time for on the job. He expressed his frustrations about time-costing (billing by the hour); I told him about value billing. I've given him Burying the Billable Hour by Ronald Baker (via the [non] billable hour).

Brief Banks

LawLibTech discusses work product retrieval and supports the tech solution rather than the people solution.

The Future of Legal Technology

Law Practice Today (April) features a transcript of a presentation at the ABA Techshow by Lou Andreozzi, President of LexisNexis North America, and Mike Wilens, President of West.

For me the second half which features comments by Wilens is the most interesting as it analyses how lawyers work anbd what technology needs to do to help lawyers help (and attract) clients.

Some of his observations include:

"Everybody wants to analyze workflow. Now, lawyers in this respect are no different than other knowledge workers in our society. And you come back with these really nice workflows. You know, they work on Matter A for the three steps of Matter A. Then they work on Matter B for the three steps of Matter B. Well, you actually go out and watch them work, okay? It has nothing to do with any linear process. It’s extraordinarily non-linear."

New Legal Tech Articles

Dennis Kennedy has 2 articles worth reading at Law Practice Today: one on Legal Technology Blogs and the other on
2004 Legal Technology Trends.

As usual there are also other goodies this month.

More KM

Ron Friedman from Prism Legal Consulting asks What’s Your Strategy for Collecting and Cataloging Documents?

He views automation and manual collection as opposite ends of a spectrum and discusses the benefits and disadvantages of both.

Knowledge Management and blogs

beSpacific has pointed me to Making sense of weblogs in the intranet (What they are, why people are using them, making them useful for knowledge management) an insightful and practical 52 page presentation by Michael Angeles.

He shows how k-logs are used at Lucent in different ways by different users to achieve knowledge sharing.

It just shows that technology should not be strictly controlled and people should be allowed to use it to suit their needs.

Knowledge transfer

LawTech Guru's post on Why Content Management Fails has general application to any knowledge management exercise in an organisation.

Technology is not the answer to building an intranet, web site or a team blog. Technology is an enabler which needs to be supported by a culture that values knowledge management. Put another way, IT can provide the tools but it is people who do the work.

The same issues arise when developing precedents or compiling newsletters. Some people understand the importance of leveraging their knowledge and experience; some people want to keep it confidential.

All firms get to the point where they say "if only we knew, what we know".

Some firms send out collectors. Some invite donations of everything for sorting out at a later stage.

In summary:

1. To be successful, knowledge management requires a combination of people, processes, content and technology.

2. The success of a system in an organisation reflects its core values: is it "dog eat dog" (no sharing) or global responsibility (sharing)?

Simplicity

Steven Keeva's article "Back to the Basics" is similar to other Turning Point stories.

Essentially, lawyers are knowledge workers who continually think and do their core job. Once in a while, just as you do at work, it is critical to speak to others in our life to see how we are doing. If we don't, life has a way of giving us a rude awakening.

New Articles in Law Practice Magazine

These articles in the April edition of Law Practice Magazine strike a chord with me (plus there are other great articles as usual):

Asking your firm for accommodation; and
Transition programs for senior counsel.