Choose law affirmatively

Listening now to a webinar by Carolyn Elefant of My Shingle and Susan Cartier Leibel of Solo Practice University on “going solo.”

As someone who went solo in the practice of law back in 1994, then decided that legal tech was FAR more interesting, I like their perspectives.

I’ve been watching the growth of their blogs and reading them for quite some time, and I think they’ve both hit upon a communication style and have the reach to make them worth bookmarking.

OK, what I mean is that there are blogs that are worth bookmarking, and others which you can always find through blogrolls. Bloggers run in crews, so one gateway to the crew of Elefant and Leibel really only requires one bookmark.

My suggestion is that before you bookmark (or, even better add a blog to your Morning Coffee [hmmm name changed!]), you take some time to check out the blogroll. See if another blog in their crew speaks to your issues. if so, book mark that one.

For example, I separate them into these groups because if a blogger has bookmarked something, why should I? So, I often read blogs of Kevin O’Keefe’s clients, I bookmark at source, because I can always find his clients from there.

That and LinkedIn.

OK, so one comment that really made me want to blog is the perspective that people who go solo MUST have the proper outlook on their venture.

You’re not doing it because they’re something wrong with you. You’re not doing it as a placeholder until you can get a “real job.” You’re doing it because it suits you, you’re excited about it and you want to provide great service to clients in a new way.

Right now, they’re talking about not needing a year’s savings to do it. That’s funny. Other than the independently wealthy, and certainly in my case, a few month’s savings was more like it.

A law practice doesn’t require a year’s savings, it requires a client.

The one caveat, however, is that were I straight out of law school, I would NOT suggest opening up a firm. Why? Because there are plenty of older people out there who need your help and who can give you guidance. Confederate with an older lawyer and your practice will move along much faster.

I won’t recap the entire webinar, except to say that legal technology has indeed changed everything. This is the truth behind my early criticism of the argument that legal technology would allow BigLaw to obliterate small firm practitioners.

It kinda goes against the grain to recommend this, but in this case, I think a commercial “university” might be worth doing.

So, here’s the link: http://solopracticeuniversity. com

If you’re interested in solo practice, go listen to their webinar.

And then, read Carla Harris’ book and apply what she’s telling you.

Cataphora…Yummy! Part I

I’m in love with H5 and not just because of their killer website and name that has more cowbell than I can handle, but I also am having special moments with Cataphora.

In the run up to the Sedona Conference, I’m taking another look at legal tech from the perspective of what lawyers really need and I’m pretty sure that the teeny weeny email application I’m writing (prototype due out at the end of the summer) is on the right track.

That being said, Cataphora really does have the right approach and are FIXING IT! “It” being the way search and retrieval of meaningful content is and ought to be done.

So, understand their mission, if you choose to accept it (and you should):

Defining principle

Cataphora’s success and very existence are based upon one defining principle. This arose from a conceptual breakthrough that was simply stated, yet proved to be radical in its practical effects. This idea was that, in order to truly understand a document, you have to know about the circumstances in which it arose. In other words, you have to understand its context.

The negative

Ok, they’re a bit … oh, I don’t know whiny and snarky,

Trustworthiness is a core value in the legal marketplace and at Cataphora. We strongly recommend examining all vendor claims carefully. One way to do that is by looking at how their website used to look. The Wayback Machine makes that easy – just go here and enter the URL for the vendor in which you are interested.

I mean, really! Who CARES what a website looked like in the Wayback Machine?! Is this really part of the E-DISCOVERY dog/pony show to which unsuspecting clients are subjected? Didn’t think so.

If that’s the standard, then most legal tech projects would be doomed, because when some of us were using computers in litigation, some others of us were still in high school counting spots. And, of course, some others of us were practicing law and making googobs of money (ahem!). Besides, an appearance on the Brewster Kahle show is not really an indicator of algorithmic quality. It just means you’re lucky, really smart or have your own private Tardis.

OK, so I don’t think Cataphora folks are lucky. I think they’re really, really smart. Buuuut, it’s not exactly rocket science. Maybe it was 10 years ago, but not any more. Ever looked at Digg Labs?

Two Patents? Hmmm. Gotta think about that one.

I’ve read both, but now I’d better look at the pictures, because this is one area where I’m pretty sure there’s so much out there now that these patents may not hold much water. Not a huge fan of business method patents anyway, but when they involve stuff that seems to be open-sourced to the hilt, it gives me pause.

I could be so incredibly wrong, so I’ll take another look, but at first blush, what they write about on the site seems right out of Collective Intelligence, a book I keep next to the bedside, cuz I’m that much of a dork.

Back to the Positive

But, Elizabeth Charnock, the founder of Cataphora is a much bigger dork, said with all sorts of love, so I think worship might still be in order.

Plus, she’s a girl, and that makes her AWESOME! And, a little scary.

I love Cataphora because….

they “get” the wisdom of letting computers do what they do best. And, computers don’t really care whether you have 1 or 2 terabytes. Which means that you can leave your data unculled, and the computer will keep chugging along.

Not only that, but once the data has been marked as “non-responsive,” it can still be used for all sorts of things. Like weighting. And, making your useful dataset searching smarter. Wanna know how? I bet you do!

Call me! No, really: call me.

So, let’s get real: [ bold statement ] there’s absolutely NO real reason to cull ESI ! [ /bold statement ]

I found this really HYSTERICAL presentation the other day entitled The Real Cost of Privilege Review ( and here) and all it did was make me think of lollipops. Read it and weep.

I want to know who out there is wasting soooo much money…so I can sign them up as clients, because this sort of process is so yesterday, even your 10-yr old could probably re-engineer it to get better and more cost-effective results. I mean, hasn’t anyone ever played pick up sticks???

So, why am I adamant that people stop culling? Because it’s like trying to speak French without any understanding of grammar.

To be more precise, I’m advocating that lawyers stop culling at the first tier, as if their lives depended upon a massive reduction in terabytes. I’m suggesting that culling ought to be done by the computer, and that valuable metadata (in a really, really board sense) ought to be retained until the end of the project. I’m intimating that the document corpus is a body and it’s integrity depends upon the entirety of its members.

In other words, in Cataphora-lingo:

Cataphora is the first and only provider to develop deep analytics (not mere data statistics or simple email widgets) that give insight into the facts expressed by the ESI dataset. True analytics can (among many other things) detect individual and organizational “heartbeats” and de facto organizational substructures, evaluate typical versus anomalous behavior, assess consistency and variation in an organization’s processes, and detect patterns of data deletion.

If you’ve got lawyers doing the culling and searching, here’s yer sign: you’re going about it the wrong way. It’s like taking a hachet to an old growth forest of oak with no appreciation for the vital role played by acorns.

I say, hire yourself a legally-trained person who knows about taxonomies and understands the difference between DATA, INFORMATION and ARGUMENT.

Lawyers, do not. Not unless they’ve taken “Data 101.” They usually work bass ackwards and try to squeeze everything into theory, instead of first trying to understand what they’ve got.

This is where Cataphora’s mission is key: understand the forest before you start cutting trees.

Thus, sayeth the Mighty Snarker, thereby ending-eth the lesson!

Law school…a place for depressives?

I’ve stopped asking myself how I end up on the pages I do, but this was an interesting blurb:

4. Law school is a factory for depressives.

It used to be that if you had a law degree it was a ticket to a high salary and a safe career. Today many people go to law school and cannot find a job. This is, in a large part, because law school selects for people who are good with details and pass tests and law firms select for people who are good at marketing themselves and can drum up business. Law firms are in a transition phase, and they have many unfair labor practices leftover from older generations, for example, hourly billing and making young lawyers pay dues for what is, today, a largely uncertain future. Which might explain why the American Bar Association reports that the majority of lawyers would recommend that people not to go into law.

The speaker is a young grad student someone put out by the dim prospects for life as an adult in the working world. She lays out the worst case scenario of graduate school and one has to agree that her perspective is probably more accurate than someone who has been out 20 years or more.

Still, I can’t help but believe that what’s missing in her perspective in an understanding about the tools law school gives the lawyer. it’s not just a matter of being chosen for a top law firm and working at the local human society.

Think of the opportunities for growth lawyers would have if they were required to take at least one business course (not from lawyers, but from experienced business people) as well as a sociology course (again, from experienced professionals)? Imagine if there was preparation for a career in the medico-legal field that did not require a dual degree?

Young lawyers deserve a greater sense of reality than they currently receive. At present, the profession fails to take to hear the fact that there is a breadth to the practice of law that can hold a lot more people. Were law schools to step up to the plate and stop the chrade of superiority and ranking, they might just start to train people accordingly.

Until then, I encourage law students to ask people outside of academia about all the cool stuff you can do with legal training in your background!

Just don’t bet the farm on it.

TRECing along

Found an incredible site today, the H5 site.

It’s a lot easier doing this when you have 30 industrial-strength brains to my 1 eco-friendly noggin, but OK, I’ve never been put off by a [ huge freakin' ] challenge.

[sigh]

Anyway, through their site, I found the site I’d been looking for, which talks about information retrieval from large data sets. Thank goodness I was particularly curious today, or I’d have NEVER found it! …Well, I would have, but given that I’ve been looking nearly a year, that says something about either it or me.

What was I looking for? Well, it’s the TREC site. Looking for it too? Well, here ya go!

The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) workshop series encourages research in information retrieval and related applications by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. Now in its eighteenth year, the conference has become the major experimental effort in the field. Participants in the previous TREC conferences have examined a wide variety of retrieval techniques and retrieval environments, including cross-language retrieval, retrieval of web documents, multimedia retrieval, and question answering. Details about TREC can be found at the TREC web site, http://trec.nist.gov.

You are invited to participate in TREC 2009. TREC 2009 will consist of a set of tasks known as “tracks”. Each track focuses on a particular subproblem or variant of the retrieval task as described below. Organizations may choose to participate in any or all of the tracks. Training and test materials are available from NIST for some tracks; other tracks will use special collections that are available from other organizations for a fee.

Might be a way to get invited to Sedona…can I get a proposal together for the Legal Track in like 4 days? Hmmmmmm…