Jeff Brandt asked on Twitter at the end of the conference if the educational sessions or the networking opportunities were more valuable from the conference. I my 140 characters on Twitter I replied that I thought the networking was more valuable, but the firm wanted to see the quality sessions for the money spent. I wanted to take a minute and explain that in more detail.

Obviously, the organization paying to send you to ILTA, or any conference, is going to be looking for those quality educational sessions, and what information you bring back from those sessions that add value to them. That’s expected, and ILTA provides plenty of great sessions. I know I’m bringing back some ideas I will be implementing from the sessions I attended, and think they will provide great benefit to the firm.

At the same time, though. I am also bringing back lots of little tips and ideas that I picked up outside of the educational sessions, from conversations I had with folks, sometimes well into the morning hours. While those tips I picked up informally might not quite equal the value of the formal educational sessions, those conversations do something that the sessions could never do, they formed connections, or enhanced existing connections, that I will take with me going forward. These are folks who I will continue conversing with, even if it is just online, sharing information, ideas, tips, stories, etc. The educational sessions, good as they were, are done. The relationships are not.

I know that some of the folks I met for the very first time this past week, I will continue to be in touch with, and continue to gain knowledge from being connected with them. That’s a value that may be hard to put a dollar amount on, but it’s much higher than any one week’s worth of sessions could hope to be.

I’m looking forward to continuing the conversations.

Just wanted to toss out some links to some more stuff from ILTA this week. I will have another post with some thoughts about the benefits of the conference, but for right now, I have a couple of things I wanted to get out to folks.

First of all, if you attended our ILTAU session on Weds. morning, and were as disappointed as I was that there was some Outlook configuration issues that prevented us from really digging in to that PST by creating rules to filter things out of the inbox, I did go back to the documentation site that Sean Brady started for the session, and add some documentation on using Rules, and the Organize function in Outlook 2007. Check it out, or if you weren’t able to make it, check it out for some information on what we talked about.

Secondly, I had the pleasure of doing a quick interview with Josh Gilliland, of the Bow Tie Law Blog, about Social Networking benefits, and the e-discovery issues with social media. It was great to finally get to meet Josh after many years of “knowing” each other online, and the having some discussion was fun, and a good example of exactly the sort of benefits you get from the conversation at ILTA, above and beyond the educational sessions.

Lastly, for those I met at ILTA (and there were more people than I could possibly name!), or those who I didn’t get a chance to see in person but have connected with online, I wanted to share the places where you can connect with me, beyond the blog.

LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemac29

Twitter – http://twitter.com/mikemac29

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/mikemac29

But, enough about me.

Well, technically Sunday was day one, but Monday was day one of the educational sessions, so I’m calling it day one.

Jason Jennings got things going, with a great keynote where he discussed the “5 Secrets to Put Strategic Unity on the Fast Track”. Among the many good points made by Jason, one of the things that really caught my attention was his description of the shared traits of the leaders of the best companies in the world, and how those traits affect the rest of an organization. For example, these leaders were happy to share their plans, their knowledge, and their strategy. They wanted everyone in their organization, and everyone they did business with, to understand the purpose of their work, and their place within the overall purpose. Given that, I couldn’t help but wonder if those of us who are practicing this whole idea of sharing and learning from one another in the online world, are in fact, practicing leadership?

We are, after all, on the forefront of sharing ideas and knowledge openly. We’re open to new ideas, and also open to letting go of old ideas as we acquire more knowledge. We’re accountable to the folks we share with, they’ll know if we start passing off bad information, or straying from the truth, and they will call us out on it. I also like to think that those of us living in this space, who really want it to benefit our careers, are also good stewards, both of the information we have and share, and also of the attention and time spent by those who follow us.

Social Networking as part of leadership training? Maybe, it’s worth thinking about anyway.

The rest of the day for me was spent in the Litigation Support track, and the one thing that really jumped out at me in those sessions, and also from a breakfast discussion at a Cowen Group event this morning, was the things that need to be in place before we can even think about implementing project management disciplines. Simply put, legal project management depends on measurements and workflow processes. You have to define the processes and document the work well before you can think about what to measure, and how it fits into a project management process. Same thing goes for making technology and strategy decisions, you have to understand how you work, what work you do, and what your end result looks like before you can make the correct decisions. It’s an idea I’ve been working on quite a bit, and one I’m determined really takes quite a bit of time. Others are further along this process, but it takes work, and it takes buy-in from management, which can only come from having good measurements to show the value. So we measure and document and try to spot the trends and the patterns that will inform us of the best way to plan for the future.

Good data can only help, right?

As always though, above and beyond all of the educational sessions, having the chance to catch up with old contacts, meet some online friends in person, and make new connections is the biggest benefit to being here. Again, it’s that network of folks who are willing to share what they know that is the best resource we walk away from at the end of the week. I look forward to building it even more!

In the span of two days this week, I’ve noticed that Seagate is coming out with a 3TB drive for $250, and then over at the Bowtie Law Blog, a challenge to make using hosted ediscovery review tools less expensive.

So let’s see, I can buy 3TB worth of storage for my machines, for a measly $250, but if I get sued and need to send my documents to an attorney to review, it’s going to cost me $760 per month for just a few GB? (Using Josh’s estimate, which doesn’t seem far off compared to what I’ve seen quoted)

Does anyone else see a problem here? Technology is making it easier, and cheaper, to store data. The legal industry, however, is making it more and more expensive to be involved in civil litigation, mostly due to the amount of data there is. Somehow, our industry needs to catch up and find efficient ways of dealing with data. The lawyers and vendors who do this, will survive, while those who don’t, simply won’t.

Still think you can continue to practice law the same way you have for 20-30 years? Not likely.

The conference session schedule was released today, an yup, not only will I be attending, I’ll be speaking a couple of times as well.

In looking over the details, obviously I’m drawn to the Litigation Support sessions at first, and frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed by the titles. Seems like some of the same topics we talk about at every conference every year, but then again it’s fairly obvious that many, many firms still don’t really get it. I’m hopeful that as the details get fleshed out, we hear some fresh ideas. There are certainly enough quality speakers in that track’s sessions to give me hope that there will be!

As far as my own presentations, the session content is still in the very early stages of being developed, but I’m excited about the topics. On Tuesday, Aug 24 Ill be on a panel discussing The Power of One: Adding Value to Client-Focused Practices and on Weds. the 25th I’ll be taking part in a double session in the ILTAU hands-on lab talking about Managing Information Overload through Personal Knowledge Management. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about both of these topics, and am looking forward to really getting those thoughts organized and presented. You might even see a blog post or two discussing specific thoughts in the meantime, since you guys make a good sounding board and always let me know when I’ve got something wrong.

Hopefully, we’ll all be able to have some good discussion around the topics, either here on the blog or in person at the conference.

So if you’re going to be at ILTA, look for me and say hello, and whether you are or not, what pops into your head when you read those session titles? What would you tell a room full of folks, or want to hear about? I’d love to read your thoughts!

Earlier this week I was reading Kevin O’Keefe’s post about what you really learn about blogging from lawyers who give it up, and I was reminded about some conversations I had about this time last year.

As I was preparing to talk at the ILTA09 conference about social networking, I had many conversations inside and outside of my firm about the concept. One of the things that struck me was how many people looked at Twitter or Facebook and just dismissed them out of hand. Generally this was followed by a comment along the lines of “I don’t care what anyone is doing, why would I spend my time reading that!” (aka “I don’t care what you had for lunch”)

What occurred to me as I explored the reasoning behind those sorts of comments was that, frequently, these people didn’t really see the benefit in networking offline, let alone online. Yes, social networking tools allowed them efficiently connect with more people than had been possible, but these people didn’t really understand the benefit of being connected to people in the first place. No wonder they thought online networking was a waste of time. To them, it is!

So if you’re trying to be you firms champion when it comes to blogging and social networking, it might not hurt to remind people of the basics of networking in general. You’d be surprised how many people don’t really get that.

Since I have to update my Trial Director Certified Trainer certification, today I got to take part in a webinar/conference call training session on what’s new in Trial Director version 6. As I’ve mentioned before, there are a number of new features that make me quite happy (Pack and Go, callout zoom on video, Print workbook contents to PDF, etc.), but today I realized for the first time that they also removed a couple of features.

No, before I go any further, I totally understand why they removed these two annotation features in particular. They are somewhat redundant. You don’t really need layers when you can save any number of revisions of an image. They do basically the same thing. I also get that the hot-spot for one-click script also was probably redundant, since you can create a workbook to simply run as a script, and can organize a workbook to bring up a document without making a clickable area on the existing document to bring up another document.

On the other hand, I actually use that feature a lot. Not necessarily for trial presentations that I’m running, but for ones an attorney will run themselves. Here’s the typical scenario. At the last minute, someone helps the attorney create a timeline, in Excel or PowerPoint, and they send it to me to add as an exhibit, along with a request to “make it interactive”. Which, in lawyer speak, means to make it so I can click on each event in the timeline and open “x” document. Typically, I can do that really quickly in Trial Director 5.2 by using hot spots and defining what document to open when it’s clicked. I keep the timeline in a workbook by itself, so that I can easily go back to the timeline by hitting the space bar.(Click the event, show a new document, hit the space bar, and you’re back at your timeline, it’s a nice workaround to having another program open to accomplish the same thing.)

Granted, there’s nothing all that special about this, and it actually makes more sense to simply put copies of each document in between copies of the timeline graphic in a workbook and simply space-bar through each document, or to space-bar through the event documents while keeping the timeline visible in one of the screen zones, but there’s just something about that point and click that really excites the attorney’s I’ve dealt with. They’re going to be disappointed when that goes away.

Of course, given the hefty system recommendations for 6.0, and the lack of a budget to replace all of the older machines in our current trial laptop pool that may have problems, I may just have a few copies of 5.2 available for cases where this might be needed for a little while! We’ll see how stable it is in my testing once I get this re-certification finished up before making any decisions on using it live in a trial. I definitely want our first live experience with it to be with me using it before I trust it to anyone else!

I’ve got 2 days to complete the exam and get it submitted to inData, I’ll keep you posted!

Had an interesting discussion the other day with someone who works in this industry about cases where a firm agrees to an alternative fee arrangement (i.e. a flat fee) that sparked some further thoughts about a problem that we all see in the Lit Support world all too often.

Here’s the issue with flat fees, as I see it. In theory, I totally understand the idea, it’s great that an attorney will meet with a client, get a grasp of the issues and come to an agreement on how much it’s going to cost the client. In practice, that attorney is, more than likely, less than savvy when it comes to understanding the e-discovery requirements, or costs, associated with a case. So, in the real world, the attorney and client agree on the fee, and then the discovery process begins, only you discover that there’s a whole lot more to this than meets the eye, and now you’re looking at review, processing or hosting costs in regards to all that data that far exceed the original fee agreement.

Potentially, this is a disaster waiting to happen for many firms. On the other hand, it’s a golden opportunity for Litigation Support professionals. Nothing gets an attorney’s attention more than losing money on a matter. They aren’t going to want to do that, so you have the opportunity to step in and be taken seriously when you talk about ways to cut ediscovery costs, like culling data through search terms or doing a native review instead of processing everything to TIFF images, etc. Then, if you really can come through with those cost savings, they’ll be much more likely to get you involved ahead of time and avoid this sort of situation on future cases.

Being able to get involved and out ahead of cases when they come in is a huge win for us, even if it takes a crisis to get there. We may not like to think of our offices as political places, but they are, and wasn’t it a politician who said to “never let a good crisis go to waste”?

An alternative fee agreement that didn’t take into account e-discovery costs might just be the crisis that you can use to prove your value.

According to the AJC, Small perks carry weight around the office. That got me thinking about what I hear from friends and acquaintances about their workplace, and how they’ve handled the current economic recession. In the midst of budget cuts, it’s important to find ways to show your employees that you value them.

It seems like everywhere I turn companies are cutting out benefits, dropping perks, freezing salaries, and maybe even laying off some of their people. And in the midst of all of that they are going back to their best performers, the people they rely on to keep things running, and telling them they should feel lucky to have a job.

Now, don’t get me wrong, with this economy we are all lucky, to some degree, to have jobs, I admit that. And budget cuts are certainly needed. On the other hand, if you really expect your best people to simply sit and accept that while you continue to offer them nothing, you’re crazy. These people know they are good at what they do, and they know they have a job not because of luck and your generosity. You’re running a business, not a halfway house. They have a job because they bring value to your business. If you don’t offer them any incentive to stay, don’t engage them, and don’t show them some loyalty, someone else will. Granted, the opportunities open to folks in a recession are limited, but it only takes one for them to be gone. Can you really afford for your best folks to go to work for your competitors?

Maybe you should do more that tell them how lucky they are. They’re not lucky, they’re good, and you need to find some way to appreciate that.

I’ve been doing a bunch of demo’s of Trial Director around the firm lately, and getting some pretty decent response from the folks who see it. The demo’s do prove a couple of things to me though, especially as compared to Summation demo’s I’ve done for these same people.

1. You can’t possibly know how someone else will use a given tool until you present it to them. Just because Trial Director is designed to present and mark up documents at trial, doesn’t mean that’s the only place it can be used to do that. Even folks who don’t go to trial have come up with ways the tool might be useful to them when they take a few moments to get past the name and consider what it does. There might be a lesson there that extens far beyond Trial Director, and into the many random software programs you currently have sitting on your computer.

2. There’s something to be said for programs that help people do something they want to do, compared to helping them do things they don’t want to do. Bottom line, attorneys don’t find document review all that exciting, so the tool that helps them do that is never going to get the same response that a great presentation tool that they can take to court does. I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to push attorneys to use Summation, and think about ways it can help them without realizing that the biggest hurdle is the fact that it helps them do something that isn’t fun, isn’t “sexy”, but is necessary. It’s like being shown a tool that will help you dust, but you still have to dust. Blah, boring. Summation helps you get through that boatload of documents, but you still have to go through them.

Of course, now that I have become aware of these things, the next question is figuring out how to adjust the approach to incorporate this knowledge. I’m still working on that, but it never hurts to have more knowledge.