I really enjoyed this post by Kevin Eikenberry yesterday. Read This Before You Attend Your Next Training Session

It reminded me of many of my pet peeves when doing training internally, let alone now that I’m an outside trainer. See if this sounds familiar:

You send your folks out to a day of training on some software tool. They are very excited to be out of the office for the day! They spend an inordinate amount of time planning their lunch trip, or maybe their post training class group outing. On the day of the training, they are mostly concerned with getting done early. They don’t ask questions that might drag the class out longer, despite the fact that the instructor is now 5 steps ahead of them and there’s no hope they’ll ever figure out what they are talking about. Or, they spend half the day looking at their blackberry, keeping up with what’s going on at the office instead of the training you’re paying for, because you keep sending them messages.

Then they come back to use the new tool, only they really don’t know much more about it than they did before. At this point, two things happen. They decide the training was bad, and they hate the new tool. Your group never, ever, recovers from this and you wind up with a very expensive tool that your staff simply works around as much as possible.

I’ve seen this in my IT experience as well as in law firms. One of my first IT jobs as working for a small office that had spent a significant sum to implement a customer management database system about a year before I started. I soon discovered that everyone in the office hated it. They had organized training classes, and for whatever reason, everyone disliked the trainer, decided they didn’t want to pay attention any more, never learned how to use the system, and therefore they decided it sucked. I spent almost 7 years in that job, and never, ever overcame that with the folks who were there before me. I was successful, as we had new staff come in, in training them and getting them to actually use it more, but there was no overcoming the first impression of the others.

Now, as a trainer, I keep that experience in mind when I start with a new group. I don’t want to be the reason they hate our product.

The thing is, I have no idea whether the trainer they had was any good or not. I wasn’t there. It’s possible that this is all that trainer’s fault, but I can’t help but feel like the people who got the training, and the management of the organization also hold some responsibility. When you’re sent to training, you are there to learn. Be professional and put aside your personal feelings about the training and learn what you can, regardless of how much you may not like them.

Likewise, when you send people out for training, look for well-qualified trainers and demand they train your people. If there are problems, talk to someone and get them corrected. Secondly, if there aren’t problems, and your people come back without any evidence of having actually learned anything, hold them accountable as well. Find out why they didn’t ask the instructor, if the class was not structured to fit your needs, etc. It hugely inefficient to have expensive tools that your staff is doing everything they can to NOT use. There was a reason you made this investment, shouldn’t you be getting the most out of it?

Apparently, while 2011 was a year of huge changes for me, the changes just keep coming in 2012. I won’t be relocating again, but I will be switching jobs, and that is going to also impact what I’m doing on this site. I’ve accepted a Litigation Support Trainer position with AccessData. I’ll be based out of my home office, doing online training and various other projects from there, while also traveling to do onsite training, working at some of the various trade shows, etc.

I’ll also be contributing to AD’s eDiscovery Insight Blog (http://ediscoveryinsight.com/). In the interest of not competing with myself, or with the company that pays my bills, I will not be writing about the legal industry or litigation support on this site any longer, short of pointing you to things I write over there.

What does that mean for mikemcbrideonline.com? I think it goes back to being the blog it started out as all those years ago. A little tech, some geeky stuff, some personal lessons learned about careers and travel, and, of course, photography. I’ll still be sharing interesting articles in the legal and litigation support fields, here and on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, along with links to various other things I find interesting. There won’t be a complete purge of all things legal, but it certainly won’t be the main focus the way it has been for the last few years.

If you’ve been coming here for the litigation support stuff, I hope you’ll join us over on eDiscovery Insight, and I hope to be able to continue to share information and insights with you in various ways. If you’ve been following along for years and trying your best to weed through the boring legal stuff, I hope you’ll enjoy the new turn on the site. Just bear with me as I go through an adjustment period and figure out exactly what I’m doing around here.

On a personal note, I’m excited by this new opportunity. I’ll be working with a great team, at a very exciting time in the history of the Summation product line. I’ll be getting a chance to teach others, and help them understand this crazy world of eDiscovery, on a regular basis. It will certainly make for a different 2012 than I was expecting, but a very interesting one too!

Hopefully, I’ll even get a chance to meet up with some of you in my travels, or at trade shows, so stay in touch!

This weekend, someone sent me an email in response to this post about the lack of good job descriptions, pointing me to an HR tool that actually tries to solve this problem.

Halogen Software’s Job Description Builder.

Now, I have never used this software, and don’t know much about it, but in all honestly, our current systems for keeping up with job descriptions suck, so if a tool can help, great!

On the other hand, while the tool can be setup to require updates to job descriptions at set intervals, or require that those updates come from managers instead of the HR department, you have to make that part of your culture if you really want it to be effective. (Garbage in/garbage out and all of that..) Having a system that tells you when it’s time to update job descriptions doesn’t help much when the descriptions are just industry jargon with no real tie to the work being done.

Hmm, maybe what we need is a tool that would create a tag cloud of work done by someone in that job. For billable employees in law firms, it could look through billing entries, grab keywords, and show you where your description falls short.

Someone should build that, but in the mean time, HR folks, please use whatever you have to to help alleviate this problem!

I have to admit, I haven’t seen much coverage from blogs or Twitter about LegalTech. Part of that is my schedule being off from a typical East Coast work day, thus missing a lot of morning twitter traffic. Part of that may also be the lack of usable wifi at the hotel, at least from what I’ve been told by those attending.

However, it appears that Lexblog has me covered in terms of gathering up a bunch of coverage and letting me flip through it in one place. Looking forward to doing just that!

V. Mary Abraham wrote about making KM a force multiplier in your law firm on 2012 today. While I wouldn’t say that you could take this exact framework and turn Litigation Support into a force multiplier, I think there’s quite a lot in this article that does apply to making better use of your Litigation Support tools and staff within a firm.

For that matter, this serves as a nice framework for anyone looking to make sure their team is focusing on the things that really matter in 2012. It’s a good reminder to not get bogged down in putting out fires every day, but to keep your eyes on the ultimate goals on your department. Check it out and see how it applies to you!

My wife has written an interesting perspective on the huge waste of time that is created when a job description is vague and doesn’t really identify the job you might be applying for.

It struck a chord with me not only from previous job searches, but also from things I’ve seen and heard in both the technology and legal industries. (Especially in the legal technology area!) It seems all too common for there to either be “formal” job descriptions, that describe the job as it was done the last time someone in HR got on the everyone needs a formal job description bus, no matter how many years ago that was, or something thrown together at the last minute by people who have never done the job they are now advertising for.

The latter situation comes about because of a pure lack of planning. Someone resigns and everyone is caught by surprise. There’s no succession plan, no cross-training has been done, and there’s no clear immediate steps identified for replacing that person. It usually takes longer than the two weeks notice to even make any sort of decision about hiring a replacement, therefore there’s no input on what to look for from the person who has actually been doing the job.

On the other hand, the former situation comes about because there was, at one time, an attempt to develop succession plans, and identify the steps necessary to assure work continues to get done in the interim, but those plans have not been updated in years. Things change, quickly, in any technology area. New tools are brought in, roles change, staff members assume new responsibilities, etc. Dusting off the years old descriptions is not going to give you a clear understanding of the skills you are currently looking for.

In both situations, you wind up reviewing resumes and maybe even interviewing a lot of people who aren’t good fits at all for the job you currently need to fill.Wasting your time, and theirs.

IT Elf: “Santa, you have 3 billion unread emails”

Santa: “Can you print them out for me?”

Who knew Santa was an attorney?

From one of my blog posts during ILTA11 in August:

Back to the HP-Autonomy appliance rumor, if the market for legal technology is headed toward direct purchase by clients, and away from law firms, I can’t help but think that HP is not trying to build a better legal platform for lawyers, but a better legal platform for companies to use inside their own organizations. Imagine a company with litigation readiness needs. Now imagine that they could buy an appliance that would give them the ability to search across their organization for relevant material, archive it, and then make it available using Autonomy’s Introspect platform for attorney review, and all you have to do is plug it in. HP will build it and configure it for you.

From Legal IT Professionals today:
Autonomy and HP Deliver Archiving, eDiscovery and Search Appliances:

eDiscovery Appliance – provides end-to-end eDiscovery capabilities, including identification, preservation, collection, processing, analysis, review and production. The appliance also includes a dashboard that provides visibility into each phase of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, and analysis of critical data points, including case status, cost, data volume and litigation trends.

Firms might want to start getting used to the idea that they will simply be accessing their clients data remotely, and that the whole process will be controlled by those clients, not themselves.

According to Ralph Losey it’s:

The secret has now been told, once again. Most lawyers are not competent to handle electronic evidence. The lawyers who do know how to preserve and find electronic information have a distinct advantage over their technophobe colleagues. This advantage is growing every day.

Despite this unconverted fact, the primary coping mechanism of trial lawyers remains avoidance and denial. That is where gadflies like me, Craig Ball, and Judge Facciola come in, to point out the obvious and chide them on. So to do the next generation of young Turks, the twenty something baby trial lawyers who know how to do e-discovery. And I mean really know how to do e-discovery and take advantage of others who don’t. I hear the stories my students tell. The next generation of wiz kids are out there shamelessly running circles around their elders, much to the delight of their clients.

But here’s my question. As a non-lawyer working in the legal industry I have heard over and over again that the lawyers will only listen to other lawyers. That you need a practicing attorney to get their attention and educate the rest of the firm, it can’t be done by non-lawyers. Since these practicing trial attorneys who really “get” ediscovery are so few and far between, why not pay attention to the folks who might not be lawyers, but understand ediscovery much, much better than the vast majority of lawyers?

I’d love to hear what Ralph, or anyone else, has to say about this seemingly accepted reality of law firms. Is it really true, and if so, why?

This is where I work almost 40% of my work hours, in my new home office. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned anywhere on the blog that particular change in my position. Basically, I spend about 5 hours at the office each day, drive home on my “lunch” hour and spend the evening hours (the hours where I’m supporting our West Coast offices until 5PM their time) working from home. The schedule allows me to have a quick dinner with my wife when I get home, at a somewhat normal dinner time, then retreat to the office to get back to work, and then already be home when my work day ends.

As with everything else involved with this schedule, this does provide some interesting challenges. First and foremost was creating a good work environment within our house. I think we’ve accomplished that.  It’s comfortable, but also in it’s own space within the house, away from the temptations of home. So far, it’s working out well.

I’m sure, as I go forward, I’ll be blogging about some of the other challenges, especially about how working in a centralized location, for a firm with offices all over the country, and then on top of that, not being in the office a significant portion of the day, presents challenges with building an internal network. I’d be interested in hearing any ideas for handling that challenge. If you’ve been in a similar situation, please leave a comment. Or, if you have any advice for a part time, first time, telecommuter, feel free to leave a comment too. I’m always open to suggestions!