This website is the hub for Jerry Lawson‘s legal tech consulting activities. Our Spotlight section contains our key content:
Jerry Lawson’s presentation at ABA Techshow 2020 explained how law firms can use pillar posts to improve their law firm’s Authority Scores, thus raising their SEO. The handout is available in PDF format.
Need help in implementing a pillar post strategy at your website? Contact us for a price quote.
Dennis Kennedy’s new book, Successful Innovation Outcomes in Law, demonstrates that he does not merely preach innovation, he practices it. Rather than go with a conventional book publisher, Kennedy self-published the book, working through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (includes option for on-demand paperback publishing as well as eBook).
I used to think of “vanity press” condescendingly, viewing it as primarily for authors whose work was not good enough to interest a “real” publisher. This book has changed my attitude. There are multiple advantages to self-publishing, including speedier development and reducing the cost to purchasers. It is yet another example of how the Internet enables “disintermediation,” or cutting out the middleman.
Kennedy is in a better position to self-publish than most authors. Having a respected third party (in this case, an established conventional publisher) select a book for publication serves a sort of credentialing function, “validating” the book for potential readers. Kennedy’s track record as a recognized expert and author allows him to “self-validate.”
Dennis found the results of self-publishing so beneficial that he explained in an interview posted at his podcast, the Kennedy-Mighell Report that the odds are 95% that he will self-publish his next book.
Changes in the book industry make self publishing an attractive option for many lawyers, including those who have a high profile that lets them self-validate and those who would improve their reputation by having a book in print.
No doubt, allowing lawyers and other contributors to law firm knowledge management databases via intranets and other techniques to “brand” their contributions by having their names attached is a powerful motivation technique. However, there are times when its complete opposite, anonymity, has greater power.
Some of your best lawyers may have great material, but be too cautious to post something they don’t have time to vet thoroughly. Maintaining an area of your intranet for anonymous contributions can make these lawyers more likely to contribute. It will also encourage those who fear that their supervisors may resent any time they spend contributing to a group effort instead of concentrating solely on tasks more likely to improve the supervisor’s next performance appraisal.
It’s true that anonymous information tends to be less reliable, but this need not be a showstopper. Many times lawyers just need a lead, a tip about a legal theory that would not otherwise occur to them. Once they learn about an idea, they can usually can confirm or refute it.
Good lawyers verify the most important information they use. Even authors of respected treatises can err. The fact that a source is anonymous merely serves as a reminder to do the vetting I would usually do with any other critical piece of information.
Internet Legal Research on a Budget: Free and Low-Cost Resources for Lawyers, 2nd Edition (ABA Publishing, 2020) by Carole A. Levitt and Judy K. Davis. 352 pages.
By Jerry Lawson
Is it time to cut your legal research expenses? New alternatives make this an intriguing possibility, especially for small to medium-size firms. The newest version of “Internet Legal Research on a Budget: Free and Low-Cost Resources for Lawyers” is the single best resource I know for lawyers interested in exploring this option.
Continue Reading Review: Internet Legal Research on a Budget, by Carole Levitt
My high school math teacher, Freida Riley, influenced me more than any other mentor. I acknowledge my debt to her in the preface to my new book about knowledge management for lawyers (June 2012 projected publication date). The preface uses things Freida Riley taught me to make a point about efficiency and lawyers:
PREFACE
I first learned about the joy of efficiency from my high school Geometry teacher, Miss Frieda Riley. On submitting a proof for her approval, her usual reaction would be: “It’s OK. Can you do better?” What she meant was make it simpler, more streamlined, more efficient. If better insights came to me, I would hear words every student yearns to hear: “That’s good, Jerry. That’s what we are looking for.” Miss Riley prized efficiency, what mathematicians call “elegance.” She showed me what poet Edna St. Vincent had in mind when she wrote “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”
Valedictorian of her high school and college classes, Frieda Riley could have been a star teacher at virtually any school in the country. She chose to return to her home in the southern West Virginia coal fields. She blessed the students of Big Creek High School with new insights, better ways of thinking and approaching problems. Freida Riley died of Hodgkin’s Disease at age 31. Today she is honored in the National Museum of Education, but her most important legacy is the countless students she inspired–and equipped–to meet challenges
Homer Hickam was one of these students. He escaped the coal fields to become a NASA engineer. Miss Riley played a prominent role in his memoir, “Rocket Boys.” It was later made into the 1999 movie named “October Sky.” Laura Dern played the Miss Riley role. Dern did a great job, but the real Miss Riley was oh so much better.
My Miss Riley-inspired yearning for efficiency accompanied me to many places, including a private law firm and later several federal agencies. I observed many attempts at knowledge management, good and bad. Efficiency was a rare commodity in most knowledge management efforts, effectiveness even more so. The main feature most had in common was a failure to meet expectations. Many were complete failures.
By this point the more impatient reader will be asking, “What does one man’s idiosyncratic fetish for efficient knowledge management have to do with me and my law firm?” The answer is simple:Improved, more efficient knowledge management is probably the most promising way for most law firms to become more effective, to improve their bottom line.The grail of knowledge management is elusive. There are more potential pitfalls than easy shortcuts.
In this book I have done my best to provide tools that can help you find the best approaches, the ones most adaptable to you and your law firm. We hope you enjoy the adventure and find it rewarding. Our challenge to you is: “Can you do better?”
Is AI for Legal Research Ready for Prime Time?Book Review: Ann Walsh Long, A Short & Happy Guide to Advanced Legal Research (West Academic Publishing 2020). Available from Amazon and directly from the publisher.
Ann Long has a message for lawyers:
Over the last five years, legal artificial intelligence tools, such as data analytics and natural language processing have moved from science fiction to practical tools. Versions of these powerful tools are available in Fastcase, Judicata, Casetext, and sections of Lexis Advance, Westlaw Edge and Bloomberg.
Prof. Long’s new book, A Short & Happy Guide to Advanced Legal Research, contains good ideas about balancing quality, speed and expense, as well as a wealth of other insights on improving online legal research.
AI & Data Analytics
These increasingly sophisticated tools can give lawyers who know how to use them large advantages. In an age when each year’s new print volumes containing U.S. District Court opinions take up13.5 feet of linear shelf space, we need all the help we can get. The threshold problem has been that learning how to use these new tools is not simple, especially for lawyers more than a few years away from law school.
How can AI and sophisticated data analytics help lawyers? It could be something as simple as automatically adding the synonym “physician” to your research request concerning “doctor.” It could be as useful as quickly obtaining sophisticated analysis of jury verdicts and settlements in the relevant jurisdiction. It could be something as powerful as generating an extensive, easy to use analysis of the decision pattern of the judge who is hearing your case, one that takes into account the 98% of decisions that are not published. Prof. Long analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of these tools and explains exactly how to use them.
Balancing Quality, Speed and Cost
As valuable as the artificial intelligence sections of this book are, I like another feature even more: The emphasis on considering the cost and speed of various automated legal reference tools. Two tacit assumptions pervade much legal research instruction:
I’ve never met Prof. Long but she won my heart when she wrote “Legal research is costly in two ways: expense and time.”
Engineers joke about clients who insist “This project must have very quick completion, minimal expense and the highest quality.” The engineer’s punch line is “Well, between quick, cheap and good, you can only have two.” This concept is sometimes called “the triple constraint triangle.” Things can be quick and cheap. They can be quick and good. They can be cheap and good. They can’t be quick AND cheap AND good. Every day, in so many fields we juggle quality, speed and cost. Legal research is no different.
Legal ethics rules require our work products meet reasonable quality standards. They have to be “good.” This means that in practice lawyers must weigh time against expense. Can you compile a legislative history using only free tools like the U.S. House of Representatives version of the U.S. Code? Sure, but it will take longer than using proprietary legal research tools. Ann Long understands this.
A key feature of the book is the many charts analyzing research tools, first explaining why the resource is valuable (“good”) and then explaining how each is “cheap” or “fast.” One of the best examples: The chart on pages 53 through 57 containing a detailed chart analyzing Good, Cheap and Fast options for statutory research.
Serendipitous Benefits
One of the best things about this book is the author’s habit of almost casually dropping useful ideas that are probably nothing new to good law librarians but will be welcome novelties to most practicing lawyers. For example, absent this volume, I most likely would never have learned about Ken Svengalis’ Legal Information Buyer’s Guide & Reference Manual, an excellent consumer guide that I wish I’d had in hand when negotiating with the “big three” online legal research services.
Prof. Long’s recommendation of the browser extension Pocket may give me even more long-range benefit. Many lawyers will find this utility for organizing web research results quite valuable.
Organization
The seven chapters of A Short & Happy Guide to Advanced Legal Research can be divided into four parts:
A copy of the Table of Contents is available online. Things are changing fast in online legal research, which is why Prof. Long advises she will be making free updates available online.
Conclusion
Though originally intended for academic audiences, A Short & Happy Guide to Advanced Legal Research is an essential tool for practicing lawyers, especially for non-experts. It’s the best $22 investment practicing lawyers are likely to find. Highly recommended.
Previously published in Attorney at Work, reprinted with permission.
eLawyering is having a moment. Several factors, including the success of Jack Newton’s book The Client-Centered Law Firm, are drawing new attention to the idea of using the Internet to create and service new pools of clients for lawyers. In a recent Twitter thread Caitlin Moon and Dennis Kennedy expressed disappointment with the results of the American Bar Association’s e-Lawyering task force:
I was a member of the ABA’s e-lawyering Task Force from around 2000 to about 2003. My experience may have some relevance. Sometimes you have to know what happened, good or bad, to steer a better course in the future.
ABA President Bill Paul created the Task Force in order to develop ways of using the Internet to provide better and cheaper legal services. This move was largely inspired by the ideas of Richard Susskind, who developed the idea of “the latent legal market,” i.e., those with some type of problem who could benefit from a lawyer’s help but are who are not presently receiving help from a lawyer.
The eLawyering Task Force mission was widely misunderstood. It was not a charitable, pro bono-type project. The goal was to help lawyers make money by better serving middle class Americans, people who could afford to pay something for legal services.
The two-fer concept of helping the middle class while creating new profit centers for lawyers had great appeal, but I liked it more than most. I believed that if the project were successful, there would eventually be trickle-down benefits to the decidedly non-middle class people I grew up with. I was all in on eLawyering.
Richard Granat, the group’s first chair, thought ideas in my first book, The Complete Internet Handbook for Lawyers, might possibly help advance the project’s objectives. At ABA Techshow1999, before the group was formally operational, he invited me to join the Task Force.
One of my first steps was to create a private email mailing list to facilitate the group’s work. We had conference calls and occasional meetings during ABA events, but I thought we needed better internal communications. We did not have the same sophisticated collaboration tools available today so mailing lists were state of the art.
Since the ABA’s official website had little or no information about the eLawyering project I created a website at my own expense to increase public awareness of the initiative.
From the first I was a consistent but naive advocate for aggressive action. Probably too aggressive.
I was not familiar with the ABA’s culture. Richard spent lots of time patiently explaining why my suggestions were impractical working within the ABA framework. Every explanation made sense but the overall picture was frustrating.
Sometimes rebels can be more trouble than they are worth. Eventually a fellow Task Force member suggested that I should be satisfied even if the group could only make incremental progress working within the ABA. With some regret, I decided to leave the group.
In the end my combination of ambition and naïveté about working within the ABA structure accomplished little. That doesn’t mean nothing was accomplished.
The more active members of the group promoted its goals though articles and presentations. Some traces of these efforts can be found here and there through searches on Google, Bing, etc. The ABA’s Online Legal Services section provides random links to traces of a few such efforts, but there is no central repository of the group’s activities, for reasons explained below.
The 2003 ABA House of Delegates approved the group’s set of best practice guidelines for legal information web sites.
Dennis Kennedy has suggested the group’s biggest success was creating a place where innovators could get to know each other and share ideas. Some people might take this remark as snarky, damning by faint praise, but from working with him over the years I know Dennis was serious and he has a point. Networking matters, and the residue of this is probably still providing at least some benefits today.
After a few years the ABA sunsetted the eLawyering project. Some of the project’s accomplishments have not survived the sunsetting:
With these accomplishments understood, it’s fair to ask whether the eLawyering Task Force could have accomplished even more.
I don’t believe the group’s leadership was to blame:
If the people were not the problem, then why didn’t the Task Force accomplish even more?
The ABA’s culture and organization were a handicap. The ABA is fundamentally a trade association. While it sometimes undertakes activities intended to create public benefits (like supporting pro bono projects and vetting judicial nominees) its primary reason for existence is advancing the interests of its members. Given this context, the fact that some perceived eLawyering as a sort of do-gooder program was probably a drawback.
Rocking the boat is seldom popular, especially when some perceive the project’s purpose as being something other than making life better for lawyers.
The fact that ABA presidents are limited to a single one year term was another handicap. I understand the desire to bring in new blood and fresh ideas but the lack of continuity makes long range initiatives difficult. When a president leaves his pet projects slide off the priority list.
Did the eLawyering Task Force achieve what I and others hoped it would achieve? No.
Did the project achieve everything it could achieve working within the ABA structure? Probably.
I think the eLawyering project’s biggest benefit was just putting the ideas of eLawyering into play. Seeds were planted. The ground was too dry for them to fully blossom then, but attitudes and receptiveness evolve over time. Would Jack Duncan’s book be provoking so much discussion if not for the Task Force’s groundbreaking work?
While the ABA eLawyering project’s contributions should not be underestimated, I agree with Cat Moon and Dennis Kennedy that it’s time to consider alternatives to the institutional approach.
The objectives of the eLawyering project still matter. I’m just as much a rebel today as I was 20 years ago. The only difference is that today I have a better idea of how real innovation is possible.
I will be sharing my thoughts here and at a new website I am developing: eLawyeringinnovation.org.
Jerry Lawson