Yesterday I was working along in my day and took a quick peek at some of the early tweets coming out of the LMA conference in Denver when this one by @melaniegreen caught my eye. (OK actually it also made me do a double take)

It costs about $300-400K to train each recruit & then we lose 85% of them by their 6th year. No other biz would accept. #LMA10

My immediate reaction, which I also tweeted in reply to her, is doesn’t that show that law schools are failing?

I would think it has to prove that. Seriously, how many professions can get away with hiring people who take years, and that kind of money, before they get up to speed and bring value to their employers? I can’t really think of many, can you? In my own IT world, I can’t see hiring a network engineer and then sending them to training for a couple of years before they get to actually take over the network administration, or hiring a production worker and waiting a few years before putting them on the production line. If their education didn’t train them to step right into the job, within reason, what would be the point of said education? I could hire anyone off the street and teach them to do the job over the course of a couple of years!

OK, so given, law schools are not doing a very good job producing graduates who are actually qualified to be a productive part of a firm right away. Why do firms continue to hire them? Why is the law firm recruitment process still exactly the same as it’s been for the last 50 (?) years? Here’s an idea, and if anyone actually does this, you owe me some royalties.

Instead of bringing in a new class of associates every year, fresh from law school, I’m not going to hire anyone right out of law school. I’ll wait and hire my new associates from the 85% that left your firm after you’ve already spent some of that time and money training them, and offer them something different than whatever it was that pushed them away from your firm’s structure in the first place.

Maybe it’s time law firms either demanded more from law schools, or moved to eliminate the monopoly on a law degree as a requirement to practice some types of law. (Like that will ever happen!) Again, given a couple of years and a few hundred grand, surely you can teach someone to practice certain types of law, and pay them a whole lot less since they won’t be paying off student loans. Let the market speak!

Of course, I say all of this knowing that I’m not a lawyer. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. If so, feel free to disagree!

In an otherwise maddening post about his experience with a law school student, Craig Ball makes an interesting “throw away” comment:

We look to the crop of eager young lawyers to be inherently more adept at e-discovery than we who preceded them. After all, they have iPhones.

Craig (who I assume was being facetious), is confusing the comfort level of using technology, with an understanding of technology. They are not the same. Younger attorneys may have an advantage when it comes to using their PC or smartphone to get work done, by virtue of having grown up in a world where this is the norm. Much the same way that older folks used to joke about getting their 9 year old to program the VCR, that doesn’t mean the 9 year old knows how the VCR works. She is just comfortable using the menu to program it because she’s never not had one. Expecting that, because this young girl can program the VCR means that she will, undoubtedly, also understand how video tape gets written to, how the VCR adjusts for different playback speeds, how the broadcast is received by the television, etc. is folly. The ability to use an iPhone has nothing to do with knowing how to create a data-map, a deep understanding of PST files, using hash values to locate duplicate files, an understanding of metadata and forensics, or the hundreds of other things an attorney may run into in the course of an eDiscovery project.

It reminds me of the many organizations who’s use of social media is being directed by a 20 something employee fresh out of college who happens to have 500 friends on Facebook or Twitter, as if that somehow magically qualifies them to direct marketing strategy. It’s simply not the same thing.

Both of these examples bring to mind something else that has bothered me for a long time about the “generational diversity” presentations that I know you’ve all heard over and over, and which was described so well by Manager Tools just last week. In this case, just because an associate is young, doesn’t mean they are better with technology. Some are, and some aren’t. They are individuals, not an composite of the “average” for people their age, or from their culture.

For example,  if you meet another 41 year old, male, white Litigation Support Manager, chances are, they are a lot different than I am, you might want to take notice of that. Heck, they are probably less grumpy, if nothing else!

So, if the trend for 2010 coming from LegalTech is toward efficiency, can we assume that law firms, finally, are starting to realize they are just like every other business?

Also, does the fact that the legal industry is just now starting to look at using technology to be more efficient prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that law firms typically lag behind other businesses? I think it does, after all the entire tech/internet revolution is about communicating and sharing information more effectively. Believe it or not, law firm IT departments don’t put in new infrastructure and tech tools just to make you uncomfortable, it really is to help the attorney’s they support work more efficiently. Other industries have implemented tools in the name of working smarter. law firms have typically lagged behind in that regard.

Then again, as someone who works with technology, I do have to wonder if we are keeping that priority at the forefront of our minds? Our job is not to limit the amount of network congestion, or make sure no possible harm can come to the PC’s that sit on the desktops of our users. It’s to make those users more efficient. I do wonder sometimes, when I talk to other IT pros, if that’s their first priority.

As I spend much of my time trying to come up with ways to market the Litigation Support services we provide to the attorneys in our firm, I keep coming back to this idea. How do I convince them not just that the tools we have are solid, and useful, but that they do, in fact, help them be more efficient in their work? It’s a tough sell, but one I have to make if I’m going to get any of them to reconsider how they practice and how technology might help them. If anyone has had some rousing success with that, leave a comment and let me know what you did! I can always use the suggestions.

In all of the recent discussion about creating a certification for Litigation Support professionals to measure their proficiency in working with electronic discovery, I’ve always felt a strong push against the idea, but could never really articulate what about it bothered me.

Today, in reading Chris Dale’s blog post about it, it clicked for me. Here’s the relevant part to this discussion, but you should go read all of it, and the post he links to that started this conversation as well.

My own contribution to the article goes more to the distinction between education and the need for a piece of paper to show that you have been educated. I see it as a costly barrier to entry in an area which needs recruits (nursing is the obvious parallel in the UK) and as something which aims at the wrong target. It is not the litigation support people whose actions or inaction cause the problems, but the lawyers.

I’ve seen Chris write about it being a barrier to entry and thought that, while I see his point, and it’s something that will need to be addressed, it didn’t quite hit me where my gut was on this, but the second part of this paragraph definitely does.

Here’s the situation as I see it. There are folks who work in this industry who want to be taken seriously by the rest of the legal industry. Of course, other areas of the legal industry have certifications, so we should have one too. Let’s put together an ediscovery certification to prove that we’re experts in this new and exciting area.

There’s just a couple of problems with that. Chris points out the first one, many times in a law firm, it’s not the Lit Support folks who are advising clients on collection, or writing ediscovery requests, it’s the lawyers. Yes, in a perfect world they are including the Litigation Support folks in that process, but we are far from a perfect world. The real world contains plenty of lawyers who don’t actually know enough about ediscovery to even realize they should be looking for technical expertise. Having a certified ediscovery person working in Litigation Support doesn’t mean anything if the lawyer above them is clueless about ediscovery and doesn’t get them involved. From a clients perspective who do you want to deal with, the outside firm that has a Litigation Support person who’s certified, or the firm that has an attorney who’s an ediscovery expert? It’s the attorney who’s going to be appearing at conferences, writing your requests and responding to requests, advising you on proper collection, representing you to the court, etc. The Litigation Support folks may have some input into these things, but I know which one of the two I’d want to be an expert! Unfortunately, the push for certification seems mostly to be aimed at the Litigation Support people, which is not where it will have the most impact.

The second thing the post brought to mind, for me, is that ediscovery is not the end-all be-all of working in Litigation Support. In fact, how much of the day-to-day work is dealing with ediscovery can be very, very different from law firm to law firm, or between different corporate law departments. In some firms, a litigation paralegal might be much more involved with helping the attorney with case management, and the Lit Support folks may do the heavy technical lifting, while in other firms, it’s the Litigation Support folks who are doing the work with ediscovery strategy while the paralegal works on more administrative things, and the IT department does more of the heavy lifting in terms of handling data. It’s not a one-size fits all discipline. I know, speaking for myself, that while I do deal with handling ediscovery and getting it into review platforms and production sets put together to send to opposing sides, etc. that its not the only thing I need to know about to do my job well. My job also involves quite a bit of technical work with Excel, Acrobat, Powerpoint, etc. I do a fair amount of training, and internal marketing. I work with video and audio files, I put together presentations and setup presentation equipment. Being a certified ediscovery expert doesn’t guarantee that I’d be any good at any of these other things, which are still very much part of my job as a Litigation Support Pro. Other people in this industry are responsible for some of the same things I am, and some are responsible for doing things like programming, that I don’t do at all. It’s a real mixed bag.

Do I need an understanding of ediscovery? Absolutely. I also need plenty of other things. Are there resources out there to educate myself about ediscovery? Tons! Does having a certification program offer me anything that these resources don’t already? I’m not seeing it, outside of the piece of paper I can take back to my firm as “proof” that I have worked at being educated. Maybe that has some value, in some circumstances, but I don’t see that it’s a huge priority item for many of us. We’re already swamped with work, and do our best to stay on top of things and keep informed. Many of us hold certifications that are directly related to the tools we use, and the way we work. I don’t think adding yet another, very broad, certification is going to do more than add another expense at a time when we are cutting them every way we can. Personally, if given the choice, I’d rather spend my educational budget on something else, something specific that our firm can use right now, not on getting a certification that doesn’t mean anything to our clients.

But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what our clients want to see, the piece of paper, even if it’s not in the hands of the attorney who works directly with them!

Kevin Eikenberry posts some interesting thoughts in video form about what will happen when the job market starts to recover, positing that your best and brightest will be the first ones out the door.

I actually tend to agree. I’ve been thinking, for quite awhile now, that when the job market bounces back and people start to feel a bit more secure in looking around, there’s going to be a mass exodus, especially from the legal industry. You can’t go a week or two without reading about law firms cutting staff, cutting associates, limiting pay, and cutting all sorts of expenses, and legal is hardly the only industry getting hit with cuts like this.

So the question is, in the midst of all these “cuts”, what are you doing to keep your best people engaged and on board? If nothing, do you really expect they won’t be looking to leave at the first sign of openings?

I was able to spend my lunch hour yesterday taking in this webinar by Kevin O’Keefe, and I have to say, it was pretty good. I thought Kevin did a good job tying social networking and blogging with traditional business networking, and also giving folks who are looking for ways to get their firms and attorney’s interested in blogging some good ideas to mull over.

The big takeaway, for me, was that blogging for the firm is similar to blogging here, but also not. Here, I really am just trying to share information, and learn from other folks who either leave comments here or have their own blogs and continue the conversations there. I have developed lots of relationships with people in a variety of areas, most of whom are not potential clients of my firm, but who do have a lot to offer me in terms of ideas and tips. When I talk to an attorney about blogging, for them, it really is more strategic than that. The number of page views don’t mean anything if the people reading aren’t potential clients that you are connecting with, and no matter how great the content may be, it isn’t going to foster those relationships that bring in business if it’s not the information these folks want to know. You have to know who you want to reach, and what they want to read, in order for the blog to be useful to them.

Anyway, that was my quick highlight, you can check out the recording and grab the slides for yourself, Kevin has the links,  if you’re interested.

That’s the idea that was presented a few days ago by Confused of Calcutta, and one that I kept finding myself considering after reading about it.

You might recall over a month ago that I wrote about non-lawyer staff and the marketing of a firm, and the importance of bringing more to the table than just doing your job, because any good employee can do your job, a great employee becomes a resource for the firm in many more ways than just doing the assigned work.

That could explain why I see much to like in this idea of coming in to a job and bringing your own identity, using the tools you choose, etc. You don’t stop being you between the hours of 8-5, and you don’t stop being an employee of the firm at 5. That’s not the way the world works any more. Certainly there is much to be said for work/life balance, and I am a big believer in having a healthy balance between work and fun, but at the same time the best source of customers for any enterprise are the people your employees are talking to and interacting with. I know my impression of many companies has been based on what the people who work there have said about it, or experienced while working there, but it’s something I don’t think many companies think about, and dare I say, it’s something very few law firms have stopped to consider. Oh, many will take great pains to not get a negative reputation among lawyers, but don’t stop to think about all of the potential clients their support staff is also connected with. The wild world of Web 2.0 is starting to change that perspective, but slowly. It’s now easy enough to see how connected many of the people who work for you are, and not just the potential damage that can be caused by disgruntled employees, but also the opportunity that having truly engaged employees brings.

Staff members who are proud of the firm they work for are, generally, more than happy to tell the people they know about it. That can’t be a bad thing, can it? Unfortunately, too many places will never know, because they live in abject fear of what their employees might say if they were given the freedom to do so. That’s too bad, and just might be an indictment of how they treat these non-attorney staff members. Not so much as people, with rich, full lives, relationships, and many things to offer, but as cogs in the machine, there to do your bidding for 8 hours per day and nothing more.

I know which kind of environment I enjoy working in more. I’d bet I’m not alone.

I found it somewhat interesting that both of these articles came to my attention yesterday, as they both deal with something I haven’t seen many people talk about, let alone firms that actually embrace the idea. They both mention the importance of non-lawyer staff of law firms in building relationships, networking, and attracting clients to the firm.

Kevin O’Keefe, naturally, looks at it from the Social Networking aspect in After hours use of social media by law firm employees key to client development.

Meanwhile Melissa from Paralegalese has a post by Jay Fleischman titled Why Paralegals Need to Help Market Their Law Firms.

Both posts fit in to what I’ve been saying for a long time about Social Networking and why you should actually encourage it. It’s networking, and networking, assuming you’ve hired good people you can trust, is always a plus for your organization. When the good people you hired go out and represent you, they make your organization attractive to potential clients, potential hires, and the public in general. In turn, during a time when it’s absolutely vital that you can show your value to your organization, what better value can you bring to the table than attracting new clients or good hires to your employer?

I’m not saying this takes the place of doing a good job. Not by a long shot, but in a tight budget tough decisions about who gets promoted, or who gets a raise, or even who gets laid off, have to be made. Whenever you can bring in a little extra value, you have to try and do it!

Let me give you an example. Last year, we were facing a tough budget decision about whether I would be able to go to the ILTA Conference. No one questioned that there would be value in me going, but how much value was another question. However, when I was asked to speak, suddenly, there was no question. Now, not only was I getting the value of attending the conference and all the networking that goes with that, but I was also publicly representing the firm as a speaker. That extra value really helped clear the way to me going, and of course, that speaking opportunity was brought about by connections I’ve made through online networking.

Of course, I’ve also been heard to say that clients don’t hire a law firm because their tech guy is so good, even in Litigation Support. I do still believe that in general. If a lawyer is a jerk, me being a nice guy and great at what I do isn’t going to help push a client to hire us. Still, if a decision is being made between two otherwise equal attorneys, if the Lit Support person that you know you’ll also have to work with to some degree is someone you have interacted with already, that can help push it in the right direction for you. Sometimes, it really is just the smallest little “extras” you bring to the table that make all the difference.

What do you think? Should firms embrace the idea that even non-lawyer staff represent them and should be encouraged to engage online? Or is that still too scary for most?

Later this afternoon I’m going to be doing a presentation/demonstration of Social Networking Tools for a firm committee. I’m using this post to demonstrate how you can write in one place, and then use the power of RSS feeds and the tech/social media tools that exist to have that post appear in many different places.

So, if all goes well, by the time I show this to the committee, this should have already posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a handful of other places, all without me having to engage with any of those sites, and those of you who follow me or are connected to me will have had the opportunity to see it, read it, and maybe even respond to me, without ever having come to my blog to do so.

That’s how you leverage technology to improve your social networking contacts when you’re crunched for time!

I know I said that I loved the entire post I pointed you to earlier from Stop Blocking, but there’s one line that really resonates outside of this particular issue.

Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway? I’m not sure when supervisors and HR abdicated this responsibility to IT, but IT is simply not qualified to address employee productivity.

It immediately reminded me of something that I hear often from the Manager Tools guys, that there are so few people in management who really understand and work at being a good manager. This task of addressing productivity fell to IT because no one else has any idea of how to address productivity. Actually taking the time to set the expectations to the people who work for you, figuring out how to measure their performance and holding them accountable for meeting the goals you set out for them is quite a bit of work. I know, as a new manager I’m still struggling with figuring out how to do it! So, it’s awfully tempting as management to start blocking things that would cause distraction, as if you could block every potential distraction!

It also reminded me of a post from this past summer about dropping billable hours and how you would measure the work of associates:

“Then how do you know if your associates are working?”

I lean in, like I’m going to let them in on my secret formula.

“By managing them.”

As I look down the list of reasons not to block social media, I’m struck by how many of them fit this very point. If you are effectively managing the people who work for you, they understand the consequences of failing to meet expectations and not being productive, they understand the appropriate ways to interact online, and what sorts of things are frowned upon by the organization. They know better than to disclose confidential information, and they know with certainty what will happen if they do. They understand that being careless with malware will hurt their productivity because they’ll be without their PC while it’s getting cleaned.

As I look back on 20 plus years of working myself, and all of the conversations I have had with others, there’s something that really runs true here. There really aren’t very many good managers. I find that many, not all, managers are in management just because they were the last one standing when others moved on (ed.- he says fully self-aware).

Most people are thrust into management because they’ve been good at a job, and a manager left, so they got the promotion. Not because they showed managerial skills, and they probably weren’t given any managerial training either, they just happened to be good at one thing, so they got the spot. Is it any wonder then, that they surrender responsibilities to the IT Department? They don’t know any other way to deal with the risks of something like social networking. They don’t dare rock the boat by trying to be innovative, because being innovative requires confidence, and people who have never been groomed to be managers, yet find themselves in that position, lack the confidence to do things differently!

Seems to me that, instead of constantly worrying about what your people might do, with any tool, organizations might be better off training their managers to be effective, and innovative. That innovation will trickle down and take care of many of these issues. Right now, we’re not seeing a lot of turnover in many industries, and it may be harder to spot bad management, but I guarantee you, when the economy shows signs of turning around, and people start to feel more confident in their job prospects, you’ll see scores of unhappy, and very talented, people moving elsewhere. Finding quality and innovative management might keep a few of them around.