(This article is based on a talk that I gave at this year’s Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference.)

With online services accounting for an ever-increasing percentage of libraries’ budgets, it is important to be able to keep an eye on the usage of these services. Fortunately, a number of these online services offer usage reports. These reports allow the account administrators to get a clearer picture of how these services are used and how to get the most out of them.

Where to get usage reports

The availability of usage reports varies greatly from publisher to publisher, and . . . [more]

There’s been recent discussion about whether Legal Project Management is different from just regular plain ol’ project management.

It depends on how deep you want to look. Are a cat and a horse the same? They’re both mammals, right? Hair, four legs, warm-blooded…. But imagine if your sweet pet cat were the size of a horse. Her name for you would be “dinner.”

Likewise, at a superficial level Legal Project Management and traditional project management are the same. They have the same principles. They both seek to deliver work efficiently and effectively. They both are based on a combination of . . . [more]

We IT consultants are sort of a mystical bunch. People don’t seem to really understand what we do or how and in many cases we get called when people are desperate because all else has failed. Not many people call me when everything is working great. I want to take this opportunity to clear up three misconceptions people have about working with consultants:

1. We usually don’t need your passwords…and just as often don’t want them.

It amazes me how often I’ll show up at a site and the client will just hand me a sheet listing everybody’s account name . . . [more]

Research on the high degree of lawyer burnout, depression, substance abuse, divorce and suicide make for discouraging reading. Lawyers consistently score much higher than either the general population or other professions when it comes to managing the impact of stress on our lives. (Susan Daicoff “Lawyer Know Thyself: A Psychological Analysis of Personal Strengths and Weaknesses”.) It is one of the reasons that so many younger lawyers entering the profession are pushing back against what they experience as a highly stressful work environment that is dangerous to their health. It is not just the long hours that are . . . [more]

You can’t swing a dead cat [Fn. 1] on the Internet these days without hitting a lawyer or law librarian complaining about the never ending escalation of prices for legal content (print or digital), the unscrupulous business practices of certain legal publishers, and the ineptitude of member associations to address these problems (and more). [Fn. 2] And while all of this may seem new, it isn’t.

I don’t know when the distrust between lawyers and law librarians and legal publishers actually began, but the late Professor Roy Mersky once stated that lawyers’ displeasure with the tools . . . [more]

Most attorneys say that their business comes through word of mouth or referrals. But how do you keep those referrals coming? How do you establish and maintain relationships with referral sources and potential clients? Through effective networking. In the internet age, that means networking online as well as off.

A lot of the lawyers I speak to are still lost when it comes to using social media and networking online. It doesn’t have to be complicated. The same rules apply whether you are networking in “real life” offline or using social media and other tools online. 

Here are some of . . . [more]

The Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ) focuses its research on access to justice and legal services. The justice system in Canada is not, of course, one united system but a set of institutionalized processes with overlapping provincial, territorial, and federal jurisdictions. There are civil, family, criminal and administrative divisions and both substantive and procedural laws that must be applied to each situation. Courts and Tribunals attached to this system are increasingly dealing with problems arising from Canada’s failure to solve resistant social problems. Yet, to achieve access to justice for all Canadians, legal services must be delivered as part . . . [more]

I was interviewed recently on the topic of opening my own office. I had run a solo practice for years until mid-2010 when I accepted a position as in-house counsel, and had spoken and written about the advantages and disadvantages of running one’s own shop many times in the past.

In the interview, I mentioned that (more or less) many lawyers feel the need to have an assistant out of sense of ego, and that they feel that a lot of clerical-type work is either an inefficient use of their time or, quite simply, beneath them. I took a (justifiable) . . . [more]

There was a time when many lawyers, settled in their ways, thought that they could ignore alternative fee arrangements. That day is clearly gone. The 2010 Fulbright Litigation Trends Survey announced that 51% of the corporate counsel responding to the survey were using some form of alternative fee arrangements.

Why? They cite lower costs first, then predictability, and then risk sharing. So what kind of AFAs do they favor? It’s a very mixed bag with fixed fees, conditional or contingent fees, blended rates, capped fees and performance/reward-based fees. Clearly, there is a lot of exploration going on and a lot . . . [more]

At one time, only the public sector issued requests for proposal (RFPs) for legal services. Now, the financial services sector, publicly traded companies, and not-for-profit institutions are all issuing RFPs for legal work. In my last column, I talked about debriefing after responding to RFPs, whether you win or lose. There’s a lot to be learned from both successful and unsuccessful proposals. 

Another essential piece of record-keeping for proposals is finding out whether you won or lost. This is akin to closing a file properly after a deal or a case. Seems like a keen grasp of the obvious? You . . . [more]

Whenever I think about the effort that is required to go into implementing your firm’s strategic plan, I’m reminded of a particular business book title that grabbed my attention when I first saw it . . . Hope Is Not A Strategy! To effectively transform your best intentions into best practices, there are several common hurdles that you need to overcome. Thinking through the following will help you make the leap.

1. Move seamlessly from strategizing to implementing.

This is, from my experience, the most significant hurdle. Planning is not doing. Unfortunately, some partners believe that implementing the strategy and . . . [more]

There’s been a good couple of years since the credit crunch kicked in that Law Librarians News and House of Butter have really quite enjoyed reporting the business of legal publishing.

Revenues & profits down at the duopoly, talk of Google Law and more; as well as a host of new ideas and concepts for the future of legal publishing. OK some of those ideas were either over ambitious or a little bit crackpot, but fun to investigate and report.

At least though, it felt for a glorious 18 months or so that change was in the air.

And change . . . [more]