April 27, 2006

When Wikis Suck and Don't Suck For Law Firms

After posting about why wikis suck for law firms, I'm finding my concerns both ignored, addressed, and transcended. But one use of wikis that I did not consider was to do cross-firm collaboration on legal matters. Thanks to Evan Schaeffer for promoting this to my attention.

I have also had a little more experience with wikis since my original post, and would like to modify my thoughts regarding their use. Mainly, wikis work best when they create a resource for a group, rather than replace, supplant, or build off of existing resources.

That's my experience with smaller (< 100) groups using wikis. When your group is greater than 100 (eg wikipedia), then the criteria shifts to making a resource organized and accessible for the entire group. Hence, for small wikis in a traditional law firm environment, wikis won't create original resource (in most cases. I’ll examine the exceptional cases, where wikis could create a resource, in a later post.).

Here’s a red herring: ”We don't do wikis because we have no control over them.” Control may be distracting, but its not a worthwhile objection. All but the most Enron of places want to leverage the skillsets of their employees. Sorry, that's my attempt at corporatese. Anyway, once you frame social software in terms of knowledge management and project collaboration, the red herring of control dries up.

Posted by Noel at 05:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

IT: We Understand Business

I have been surprised over the last couples of months to find out that there are IT departments and consultants that don’t really understand how their law firm does business. In some of these places the standing excuse uses the size of the firm (> 200 attorneys, etc). Whatever; that's not how we roll here.

That's a bit of a crow for me, but to be transparent my naïveté is due to the unquestioned commitment of my coworkers and managers to accurately capturing, understand, and wisely implementing business processes and requirements for IT initiatives. In my experience, the software we write is only as successful as the business process it embodies. When we are off the mark or the process is broken, our software is a mangled zombie corpse. When the process is good and our software captures that, it sings a sweet aria.

Towards reflecting the importance of correct understanding of the business of law firms, Adam Smith, Esq revises the list of top CIO traits to put understanding at priority #1.

Posted by Noel at 05:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2006

Brainstorming the Social Bookmarking Law Firm Intranet

How can social bookmarking benefit the lawyers and their staff? Thanks to Jon Udell for asking the question. My beginning thought is this: if I gave my users a social bookmarking button on their IE toolbar (no, not those buttons), what would compel them to begin using it, and what sort of compelling network effects would emerge upon use?

Posted by Noel at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 09, 2006

Job Opening: Network Systems Engineer

NETWORK SYSTEMS ENGINEER- Local law firm seeking a professional to fill a Network Systems Engineer position. Candidate must have good written and verbal communication skills, 5 years relevant experience, be a responsible and motivated individual, and well versed in all aspects of Windows and IP networks.

Also, the servers have to like you as a person. As do we.

The office in question has a window with a nice street view.

Leave a comment if you have a lead, or email noel dot elissa at gmail dot com.

Posted by Noel at 05:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 02, 2006

Hair Stories V

From: Noel
Sent: 12:31 PM
To: Zaphod
Subject: FW: I signed YOU up for this one...

OTOH, all my other friends had to *cut* their hair when they worked for a law firm.
I'll probably start getting better service at Lupi's too.
Still, I feel...used.

N

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Zaphod
Sent: 12:31 PM
To: Noel
Subject: FW: I signed YOU up for this one...


I told you that you are a valuable member of our team. Here's proof.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Ford
Sent: 12:27 PM
To: Zaphod
Subject: RE: I signed YOU up for this one...


I plan to grow diversity by forbidding Noel to cut his hair, thereby having one IT member with an Afro.

--Ford

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Zaphod
Sent: 12:10 PM
To: Ford
Subject: I signed YOU up for this one...


Women and Technology: Dream, Code, Run
Day/Time: Tuesday, September 13 11:45 AM- 1:00 PM Room: 402 AB
Session Type(s): Lunch Session
This panel covers how women have used their intelligence and creativity to excel in the software industry. Hear from women IT professionals who are successful in a male-dominated industry. Learn, connect, and engage at this networking panel where your questions drive the agenda, and hear tips and tricks on how to succeed as a woman developer or technical professional in the computer sciences and technology marketing. Both men and women are invited to join in the conversation, and learn from each other about how to grow diversity in the IT industry.

--------------------------------------------------
Zaphod Beeblebrox
IT Application Developer
Ext. XXX
--------------------------------------------------

Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

You're Welcome For the Fish

My boss, who I've blogged about before, is leaving our firm for the big-city life in Chicago. He's accepted a position with a remarkable firm as their Product Architect. I have mixed feelings about this, and will definitely miss his rare mixture of technical ability, managerial vision, and trust. We’ve lost half of a developer, a designer, lots of vision, and a friend. Godspeed.

My head will be down the next few weeks as the rest of the team picks up various pieces of the heavy load he capably carried until now.

Posted by Noel at 05:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 06, 2005

Wikis Suck For Serious Business

We've been kicking around using wikis as ad-hoc KM/collaboration tools for the firm. My boss and I discussed it at a bit of depth on a fine sunny day this last summer as we drove to one of our other offices. We both concluded that, as they stand, wikis are not ready for the sort of use we want out of them.

He made two points. One, current wiki UI is not lawyer-friendly. WikiWords are stupid, especially to a profession who trades in fine wordings. HTML-like markup and syntax are usable for only those who are already geeky enough to know the real deal. Once you can get the UI of a wiki to the level of Word, then we can talk. Hmmm, I smell open source project idea. Two, wikis are knowledge sinkholes. Getting data into them is kinda easy (see One), but getting data out of them is hard. I know Jotspot is working on that, for one, but when you are trading in PDFs and Word docs, XML export doesn't cut it (at least not currently).

I made a single point that sort of gets at both of his. Wikis are great for ad-hoc arrangement and re-arrangement of data, but they don't respect existing data. And with 2-million-plus documents in dozens of formats sitting in our document management system, we need to respect existing data. Wikis will be useful to the extent they enable us to re-use, remix, reorganize, review, and extend those documents. What is needed is a wiki that is created, edited, and saved in Word.

Posted by Noel at 05:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Technical Managers, or, Why I Like My Job

"Technically competent, technically current managers are rare. If you work for one, do whateer you can to keep your job. It's an unusual treat."

--Steve McConnell, Code Complete, p. 686.

Posted by Noel at 05:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 08, 2005

Seven Lessons Learned From Outlook/Mailsite Migration

This summer, I helped migrate our firm to Interwoven's Mailsite/Worksite Web product, magically turning our KM into a matter-centric maven. Here are seven lessons I learned, in short snappy form.

Posted by Noel at 05:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 09, 2005

The Partners, They Are A-Changin'

It occurs to me that I am working with perhaps the last generation of lawyers (and any other white-collar, services-based type of person) who are technologically disabled. When these guys (yes, males, as a rule, except for the few members of the pioneering generation of women in law) die off, there will be no one else to ask what 'copy and paste' means, or not be able to accomplish the same abstract task using different programs. I won't have to show another Of Counsel where the Reply button is located in Microsoft Outlook, having changed locations and icons from Lotus Notes. There will be no more web-based evaluations printed out, hand-filled, and sent across cities and time zones to the evaluation supervisor to input into the 'Internet'.

Heck, the amount of paper consumed by law firms everywhere will drop by 75%, at least. In my mind, there's the diminished, hoary, antediluvian lawyer who says to his young paralegal, "Do you know anything about this 'Internet', son? I heard Old Crotchitkins mention it to Knoobly-Knees at the [Ye Olde Closed-Membership] Clubb yester-evenin'. Said you could find out just about anything on it regarding my favorite pass-time of dominos. Also said that his son even found out the Anneballon's secret mint julep recipe. I've been trying to get that out of that son-of-a-gun for years." The bow-tied-one coughs. "Could you go and print out that 'Internet' for me so I can read up on it?"

But that just might be the last time that request is ever made. Strange to think that we might have to shift from dealing with an extreme lack of savvy to an extreme over-use of savvy, like those enterprising Stanford applicants who are now calling up their 2nd-tier schools. Just something to think about.

Posted by Noel at 05:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 07, 2005

Hellfire.

"Well, hellfire!"

--Unamed Of Counsel (and ex-Judge), upon opening his new Outlook email client for the first time.

Posted by Noel at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 13, 2005

Quantifying Work

I received an interesting email last week that prompted a much more detailed response than was probably anticipated. It is a complex question asked, though, and I will share it and my response with you (obfuscating certain details, of course).


To: Noel
Subject: question

I am working on the overhead calculations for the firm and need to know the amount of your time that you spend working for the other offices. For some of the other IT staff, we use 75% Magrethea, 15% Orion and 10% Betelgeuse. Would you all say this is accurate for yourself? If not, let me know how you would break out your time. Thanks!

Trillian



To: Trillian
Subject: Re: question

My main job is writing software for the firm as a whole, so I'm not sure I could quantify my time quite like you are asking. I make logical distinctions in the software (extra features for secretaries or attorneys, an application for Accounting, etc) that affect how much work I do, but I don't really do anything that is specific for an physical office. I suppose we could quantify the effect of writing software for more than one location (by the additional location and size complexities that multiple locations bring), but in that sense the offices are just a design specification along with everything else. What I write can potentially be used firm-wide, or just in one office location--the usage has little effect on my time.
My minor focus is giving occasional support to people for their software applications, and again, since everyone in the firm uses certain software for certain jobs, there's not really an easy quantification to make for splitting how that support time is spent by me.
I haven't answered your question yet.
Splitting equally between offices would seem the right way to interpret my work, so I'll say 33.3% each for Orion, Magrathea, and Betelgeuse. Another way to quantify would be to say that I spend an equal amount of time on every person in the firm, and since the distribution of people among the three offices is 24% Betelgeuse, 42% Magrathea, 24% Orion, and 0.42% Other, that is how to divide my work up as well. Another way to put it would be that I spend time in proportion to how much overhead is generated by each office. But then we have an infinite loop!
If you have a better way to quantify, go ahead and use that. I'd be interested to know if you do. Let me know too if you need me to explain my answer some more.

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Noel
Application Developer
x42

Posted by Noel at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 06, 2005

Die Spam Die

After spending twenty minutes deleting 65 comment spams upchucked by louts who are catering to a particularly loathsome form of cretin, I'm hopping mad and ready to fight. Here's my beef and my idea.

I'm not mad because these are offensive comments per se. Moderating the conversations that occur on this blog is part of the game, and I enjoy or at least tolerate that admin duty.

What I am angry about is that certain parties are attempting to use my work, this blog, and my name for their own profit, without my permission, and further that their actions affect my reputation and cause me emotional, mental, finanical, etc., harm.

These spammers are hijacking my digital identity, swipping my google juice, and impinging my good name. See, I have spent a lot of time and effort constructing the reputation and character of this site, and by extension my person. These comment spammers are defaming me and libeling me by manipulating search engines to suggest that I am either involved in or engaged in uncommonly vile activities. My good name is violated by this.

If, as I believe, blogs are a way of participating in a conversations, and one of the conversations that this blog is a leader in is my name, and if comment spam can be demonstrated to be defaming, libelious, or something else bad, then don't I have a civil case to make in court?

Can I sue comment spammers?

How does the copyright issue of blog comments affect me?

Are there other legal strategies that work towards the same goal?

Is this a matter that the Bloggers Legal Defense Fund would like to assist in? Seems up their alley. Blawggers, IANAL, but you are. Thoughts? Help?

Posted by Noel at 08:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2005

Watch My Eyes

My boss and I have been flinging ideas back and forth about how to emulate a google-style search in our custom crm software. Two articles I've noted and used as fodder. How to display results based on how users look at google results, and how much guessing the search should make at what the user wants since they probably will only type in one or two terms.

Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 11, 2005

Have You Hugged Your Favorite Federal Judge Today?

If you remember, I introduced you to my favorite Old White Land-Owning Male blog a while back, the Becker-Posner blog. Two federal judges blogging about the Important Issues of the day make twice the fun!

Well, it seems that the Honourable (or is it Honorable? God save the Queen!) Mister Posner (or is it Becker. Viva la revolution!) is quite down in the dumps about the success of his blog. Read his letter to my favorite funny lawyer, and be sure to send him a nice note with furry bunnies and puppies to brighten his day.

Posted by Noel at 08:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 01, 2005

Transparency & The Atomic Bomb

I first learned about transparency from Photoshop. Beginning in version 3, Photoshop's editing metaphor became layer-based. Images are 2-D, and in Photoshop each image becomes a 2-D layer sitting in a z-axis stack of layers. Play now with many layers stacked on top of each other. What good is this? Well, if part of a layer is transparent, you are able to see the layer underneath (and if that layer is transparent, the layer underneath that continued). So if you make the background of a layer transparent, the foreground will be set in the background of another image. Repeat about ten times and mix with vaguely medieval religious imagery, and you're well on your way to becoming a mid-90s graphic designer of the Seattle grunge style!

Transparency, I've come to realize, is vital in more than image-editing. It's a fundamental ethical virtue. The present moment hosts a struggle between transparency and opacity that must galvanize us into living more transparently and calling for more transparency from our institutions. Government, business, education, and science must be transparent in important ways for their future fundamental integrity.

Korby Parnell tells a motivating tale of transparency at work in the splitting of the atom. But significantly, other institutions must act transparently as well. Higher-Ed springs to mind, perhaps from recent experiences. So does Enron, WorldCom, Google, and Microsoft. There's varying degrees of transparency in each of those companies (and varying degrees of failure therein). For lawyers and their firms, there's even less transparency, as Evan Schaeffer humorously relates.

Transparency. Not like a Johnsone-esque glass house, but like a piece of open code. Transparency over processes, models, and compliance. Not over execution and decision-trees. Think about why I believe it to be so important over the week.

Posted by Noel at 05:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 30, 2004

AL Is the New Bobby Fischer

The latest post to Evan Schaeffer's blog points to this question: has the Anonymous Lawyer become a folk hero? Evan claims that he and the AL have been in contact about a book deal. True, I'm given to think. In fact, Evan turned his blog into a post-for-book-deal icon.

But really, can I take that seriously? AL is so popular, and cynical and recondite, that anybody claiming to be him or to be in contact with him has a mountain of post-90s cynicism to clamber atop. The AL himself has shoveled a few more heaps onto that mountain. His identity has everyone guessing--even Evan Schaeffer himself. Saying you're working with AL is like saying that you're playing online chess with Bobby Fischer, or working with 2Pac on his comeback record. It may be true, but it's an Andy Kaufman-esque joke as well.

I am Superman. I am the walrus. I am Elvis. I am the anonymous lawyer.

Funny, funny stuff, online identity is.

Posted by Noel at 02:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack