"Think before you tweet" - George Monbiot
Design plans for the 'offices' of Legal Force @LawInspiring How all law firms should be!? Lawsomeness!! pic.twitter.com/deDt9tHFDK
— Paul King (@PaulKingCEO) November 10, 2013
“@jbell_counsel: @PaulKingCEO we can often learn a lot from law firm 'graphics'..... pic.twitter.com/o23vSzrzeo” Quality!! :0)
— Paul King (@PaulKingCEO) September 22, 2013
@tim_forte I am the very definition of a modern full-service barrister
— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) December 11, 2013
"I started as a clerk at a Wall Street firm worked my way up to partner and loved every minute of it – right up until the day I was fired. But getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I had tried to convince the firm to develop new technology to deliver financial information faster and more efficiently. But companies, governments, unions, and schools tend not to like disruptions to their business models. And that’s exactly why new technology is so important.
Technological disruption drives innovation. And the more disruption there is, the better markets perform and the harder it is for monopolies to survive. The idea that you can find a way to do something better, faster, and cheaper has driven American innovation for centuries."
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| Richard Susskind with Brian Spencer at Titanic Belfast. |
One: That technology doesn't matter and we can get along with it.
Two: Some have idolised technology and technological innovation for its own sake.John Larkin elaborated. On the first error made, he said: Those who ignore tech advance will soon realise the error of their ways in the exhaust fumes of their competitors. On the said error made, he said: The second is a subtler risk. Technological advancements for lawyers cannot be an end in itself. It can only be better so long as we can use it to better serve our clients. There is little value in wielding a technological masterpiece if we cannot be sure of its reliability.
"And it’s a way I can still contribute to debates in Ireland as well as in the UK, even though I am now institutionally located in the UK. I can engage with a Minister, or a TD or a Senator so easily through twitter and connect them into my research in a way that was previously almost impossible for academics to do,” she says. But she adds “you have to be quite good in figuring out how to boil a message down”."Limerick solicitor Rossa McMahon writes on clatterofthelaw.wordpress.com said:
"I used to work in Dublin in a big firm where I had a lot of colleagues and now I’m in a much smaller situation and I find it quite a good way of keeping in touch with other people. Sometimes you know someone through it and then privately bounce ideas off them or see what they think about particular things."Rossa McMahon commented on the business development potential of social media, saying: "From a marketing point of view, I couldn’t necessarily say that I gain anything specific, although I have gotten bits and pieces of work out of it."
"I consider that it is a very important part of my academic work to make my research and arguments available and to engage in discussion and debate online is just another means of disseminating research and engaging in discussion."Eoin O'Dell explained that his blog posts tend to be “considered discussions” of 500 or 600 words in length. He also explained that his Twitter account is used to share interesting items with his 2,200 plus followers and to respond to comments. He also said: "I think it’s a good thing and I think it is increasing the direction in which we are going."
"We as humans must upgrade our skills as regularly as we upgrade our technology."He continued:
"Digital technology has fundamentally reshaped the world in which people of all ages make sense of, connect with and engage with society each other. Although the pace and speed of change can be bewildering the need to up our game is absolute."More:
"We are and always have been change resistant. This is troubling because I believe the world is shifting on its axis and because of the impact of digital technology this is happening significantly faster than most people seem to be prepared to acknowledge."
"How can you build your organization’s ability to sense and respond to rapid improvements in technology? Many large, successful companies are creating offices in California’s Silicon Valley to spot big new trends and learn how they can transform their organization in ways they couldn’t otherwise imagine. It’s no longer good enough to wait for change to come to your industry; you need to be out there where it’s happening. And a lot is happening in Silicon Valley."Read the original article in full here.
"The NewLaw business model for professional services is now the subject of intense interest. The Schumpeter column of The Economist on September 21, 2013 addressed ‘The future of the Firm’ with the upper case ‘F’ reserved for McKinsey. Schumpeter cited an October 2013 Harvard Business review article, Consulting on the cusp of disruption, by Clayton Christensen and others. For Australian start-ups challenging parts of McKinsey’s business, have a look at Vumero and Expert 360, both following in the e-steps of the Gerson Lehrman Group, a premium virtual platform for connecting clients to experts and their insights."
As I wrote in ‘Factories’ and ‘Brain Surgeons’ last year, firms like McKinsey are “self-generators of IP and have alliances with leading academic institutions; they don’t need scale”. But crowd-based providers meet many of the same needs at lower price points. And there’s excess capacity. These are the antecedents of disruption.
Like butterflies in the Amazon, virtual and crowd-based professional services firms are starting to disrupt. They are leading the rise and rise of the NewFirm business model."
"My own approach is I'm just a thinking out loud person. I'm a conservative who is attacking [George] Bush which is putting me in a strange position. The limitation of a blog is that it has to be instant; which means it can't be a terribly considered judgement. But it's also deep because you can have hyperlinks that link the reader to original sources and original texts. So readers, unlike TV, or even unlike newspapers, readers can look at my opinion and then they can go to the original source and make their own mind up. That is enormous depth."In full here. Previous blog on Andrew Sullivan and legal blogging here.
"You tut if you want to, the [legal] market is for turning."
LAWYERS MUST CHANGE message from lawyer. Lawyers should stop being "long winded" and "brim full of trickery and foolishness" Cicero, 63 BC
— Gary Slapper (@garyslapper) October 14, 2013
"The best merchants are the ones who dictate the future, not the ones who predict the future."
RT @LDN: (on the) street art in #Shoreditch http://t.co/3lPXeymWvB pic.twitter.com/d1HVovgADh
— Rocket Lawyer UK (@RocketLawyerUK) August 30, 2013
Ben Wilson cheers up our street in @TechCityUK on a rainy day with his chewing gum @UKStreetArt. Thanks Ben pic.twitter.com/bvB8nDQjZb
— Rocket Lawyer UK (@RocketLawyerUK) August 22, 2013
"How do you appear, as a lawyer or law firm, if you fail to embrace the methods other businesses are using to network, nurture relationships, and build reputations? Not only are you making it difficult for those whom you’d like to do business with to connect with you, but you are also looking old and behind the times.
If every lawyer in your law firm lost their cell phone today, you’d have them replaced by tomorrow, no questions asked. I’d act with the same sense of urgency in getting your lawyers using social. It’s just as important for long term success as a cell phone."
"This idea applies with equal weight to law students. Sure, we don’t have to worry about being the “go to” lawyer (yet), but we must be tuned in to what is happening in our industry; now more than ever. Ultimately, students need to assess their own situation and the opportunity-cost of forsaking social media and blogs. For me, the cost is too high and it is a risk I am not willing to take."
"Powerful position. The cost of forsaking social media and blogs is too high, a risk this law student is not willing to take."In order, here, here and here. My previous post on the low uptake of career-minded social media use among students is here.
"Some of the big themes from business and commerce that are most relevant to future lawyers have nothing to do with law, but they have everything to do with the successful practice of law in the new market emerging. They are common-sense principles that have been applied in most other sectors of the economy, excluding much of the public sector, for decades. The future will see legal businesses and large organisations pay a premium for pragmatic, IT literate, numerate and commercially aware advisers who can communicate succinctly, play as part of a team and problem solve…oh, and who just happen to have a legal qualification (not necessarily achieved via university!). The skills they will need include:
1. An ability to be proactive and pre-emptive:lawyers tend to be reactive, responding to client requirements. But increasingly they will need to take the initiative too, demonstrating that their input pre-empts future risks and costs.
2. IT and social media savviness:Legal businesses and in-house functions will need to invest significantly in automation if they’re to drive efficiency, improve processes and transform their relationships with their customers.
3. Management information capabilities:Lawyers will need to be able to capture, interpret and apply data and trend analysis to their clients benefit. Customers take it as read that lawyers know the law, so lawyers need to ask themselves what other value-add can they bring.
4. A customer service ethos:Lawyers really will need to pay more than lip service to building customer-focused service delivery and pricing models."
"Returning to the 1980s for a moment: I really wish I’d known that many of my friends would end up as senior and managing partners in law firms. Given what we’re doing now I’d have kept in even closer contact with them than I have. Which brings me to one further really big point of advice for aspiring and young lawyers: even in a fast moving, social media-enabled world, never ever underestimate the power of relationships and personal networks. It’s amazing how often these come into play and, with hindsight, I wish I’d invested more time in maintaining my legal network."
"The market will change, and when it does it will change fast. There are a lot of people who do not use lawyers because they cannot afford them. That's the prize."
"This fracturing and reorienting is happening in the corporate world as well. Turn to manufacturing and note that supply chains first shifted from vertical to horizontal, in-house to global. Then they moved from chains of contracted suppliers to networks of peer producers. Boeing refers to its global "value webs," an approach that turns managers into systems integrators. Large factoring companies assemble networks of designers and producers; they look for "network orchestrators." And as many companies begin outsourcing at least parts of their R&D, they are creating space for professional "inventers" operating through websites like Innocentive.
When I was in law school in the 1980s one of my favorite professors pointed out that the entire world of law was being turned upside down by the advent of Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw on line. For generations West Publishing Company had published all U.S. cases and had decided how to organize them in meta-categories such as torts, contracts, civil procedure, criminal law, property, etc., and sub-categories within each of those. Those were the fields of law — as taught, practiced, studied. With the advent of Boolean online searching, however, a researcher could suddenly find all cases of every type pertaining to horses, or basketball, or diamond necklaces. Law could be divided and sub-divided in an infinite number of categories, depending on what was actually useful to lawyers, judges, clients, and anyone else creating value out of legal texts.
Something similar is happening to all our professions. Information and communications technology is blowing the old categories into bits. But countless new jobs will be created connecting those bits in unexpected but useful ways. And who better to name them than you?"
"With twitter, once its out there & you try to remove tweets, it's like trying to taking piss out of a swimming pool."
"The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance... When presented with a new discovery, we automatically try to press it into our existing belief-system; if it doesn’t fit, we question the discovery before the belief-system. Sometimes, this habit leads us into error. But without it, we should hardly survive at all. As Edmund Burke argued, life would become impossible if we tried to think through every new situation from first principles, disregarding both our own experience and the accumulated wisdom of our people."
"I do think that there’s not a business out there – politics, marketing, commerce, whatever – that doesn’t require in this day and age a lot of technology. And so like in the US, it just turned out that the US was no different."
1. Technology invented before you were born which you don't think of in technology. Like sewers and paper.
2. Technology invented between the ages of 0 and 35 which you get super excited about. For many, this is the Internet, mobile phones, etc.
3. Then there's the technology developed after you're 35 which you see as pointless and which makes you angry.
“Like everyone, I know some big words, but I try my damndest not to use them.”
- Emmanuel Carrère
I have left @NewStatesman to join the @FinancialTimes to blog on legal and policy matters. First post will be on 16 September.
— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) September 3, 2013
I will be doing a regular in-depth fully linked post on a legal or policy topic at @FinancialTimes, usually on a Monday. Am delighted.
— Jack of Kent (@JackofKent) September 3, 2013
My post at Conservative Home on the awful lobbying bill being debated today: http://t.co/WgcGTBYeqS very bad legal drafting here.
— Jack of Kent (@JackofKent) September 3, 2013
The mark of Twitter is that many at the Bar who were dismissive & snobbish of Twitter 3 years ago are now tweeting like Nightingales.
— John Cooper (@John_Cooper_QC) September 3, 2013
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| Justin Green on the right pictured during another interview. |
"For young journalists it's the greatest networking tool in the world. It's how I got my start in DC. You follow someone and interact with them; if they like what you're doing they'll follow you back."Justin then explained how exactly Twitter has served him personally. He said:
"It's how I started with you [Matt Lewis]. It's how I got started working with my current boss David [Frum] (Justin is no longer with the Daily Beast)."
"Mirrors and cameras each took a generation or more to catch on as widespread foundations of our culture. It's not surprising, then, that so many people fear social media. It's about us, and when we're on the hook, in front of people we can't know or trust, we hold back. For a while. And then we don't."
#legalaid I was asked to write an article expressing some of my views on the JR legal aid reforms. Here it is. http://t.co/xEMYrxJkEU
— Henry Brooke (@HenryBrooke1) August 8, 2013
“I look at the tax profession. I look at the way they handle tax risk, the way they identify, control, manage, hedge, monitor tax risk: they use sophisticated tools and techniques to help clients, not simply resolve their problems, but say, on the horizon are 4 problems you’re likely to face and here’s how you can manage and control these risks."James D. Zirin then breached the email-hysteria topic. He asked Susskind:
"You’ve been working in this area for about 30 years. When you got started there was considerable resistance at the English Bar to your ideas, isn’t that true – that the Law Society (what we in the US call the American Bar Association) didn’t want you to speak in public?”
"If my clients are sending out regular messages of about what they're doing, where they're going and what they're doing, I would want to be part of that; even if the mechanism of communication is a daft name."
"In 5 years time we'll have embraced [social media]... I'll just take you back to 1995 when people were sceptical about email..."He also made an interesting point about how junior lawyers use social media:
"To be fair most junior lawyers don't use [social media] for business purposes..."
"If I am a lawyer looking to use social media effectively, I am listening to key words and key phrases relevant to my area of law and the industry I represent. That’s in addition to the obvious ones – my name and the url of my blog.
I want company names, case names, regulations, and the names of other thought leaders. When such names are mentioned in influential sources – trade publications, blogs, Twitter, newspapers, and other mainstream media, I want it fed to me. I also want to have RSS feeds set up from relevant blogs and other influential sources. Twitter lists with the influencers and thought leaders are also critical.
With that sort of listening environment, I pick up a 360 degree assessment of the relevant discussion in my field. I can now strategically share what I am reading and engage in the conversation through my blog and other social networks.
Without such an environment, I am operating in a vacuum and totally in-equipped to take part in social media. Heck blogging and using Twitter without monitoring like that could be considered just making noise, rather than partaking in a conversation that builds trust, relationships, and a reputation."More here.
"But the “system” to which Hamilton refers does not any longer reflect reality. The nexus between public opinion, the media and the administration of justice is no longer where it was 13 years ago when it was held that the former taoiseach could not be tried, putting him in effect beyond the law.
Experienced prosecutors are of course right to raise these issues. When and if charges are finally brought to full hearing, claims of prejudice and bias will be among the earliest hares to be coursed by defence lawyers. It will be pleaded that such has been the intensity of public anger, so vile have been the media in their coverage, and such has been the popular rush to judgment that it will be impossible to empanel jurors with open minds.
Hyper-connected world
But in the hyper-connected world of today it is unrealistic to expect that a panel of intelligent adults, possessed of reasonable deductive capacities, can be found who will not to some degree have “internalised” (Brian Cowen’s term) the shocking performance of the Irish financial system and of Anglo in particular. Nobody living in this State has been unaffected. So can prosecutions proceed only where jury members can be shown to have been living in some sort of cocoon? Taken to its logical conclusion it would suggest the criminal courts as a whole should be shut down."
We are living in an American world with 150 of the top 200 firms having their head offices in the USA. Next up comes the UK with 27 global firms, followed by Continental Europe with 15 firms (Germany, Spain & the Netherlands each on 3) and then Australia with 5 firms. However China (2), Canada (1) and South Korea (1) also make the list.
"Courtrooms in England and Wales will be fully digital by 2016, the government says, ending what it described as "an outdated reliance on paper"."
He continued:
"It is part of a wide-ranging £160m plan to improve the speed and efficiency of the criminal justice system."
And this is interesting:
"Measures will include secure wi-fi in courts so lawyers and judges can access all necessary documents."
As are the comments from Justice Minister Damian Green:
"Justice Minister Damian Green said the plan would turn the courts system into a "modern public service"."
"It will take a least an hour a day of their time and it will take six months to a year before you build any kind of momentum. If you're prepared to accept that, then it's a nice communication tool to have, but it's certainly not yet essential or any kind of magic bullet." Here.
