Boarding a flight between Montreal and Miami yesterday I overheard a mother tell her son, who looked no more than 3-years-old, “Turn off your iPad.” She suggested, gently, that he take a nap until we were up in the air, at which time he could sign into the American Airlines’ (please don’t become United Airlines, service will suffer) wireless service and “play.”  I was immediately envious—I’m a digital junkie, lusting after the new iPad and couldn’t believe this 3-year-old kid (toddler?) had one! I don’t even own an iPad2—though simply an exercise in discipline because I can’t quite YET justify carrying around another device when the ones I have meet every need quite efficiently. (But if I won one in a raffle or a VMO fan would ship one to my door, I’d certainly accept the gift with gratitude!)

Still, as I looked around the economy class cabin, everywhere kids were tethered to some electronic device. We must face the fact: our kids are digital natives. They do not know life before the Internet and in many cases before mobile devices, which are now the literal center of their universe—even those as young as 3 years old! This WILL have an impact on how we deliver legal services in the next 10 years, maybe less as today’s teenagers, also digital natives, become entrepreneurs, inherit the family business or wealth, buy homes, pay taxes and more, and seek a different legal services model, yes?

The ABA Journal cover story this month, April 1, 2012 edition, profiled the “…Footprints of America’s Switched-on Lawyers.” Lots of interesting commentary, insight, and even techie confession in this article from folks like Richard Granat, Niki Black, Carol Elefant, and others.  I recommend reading it, after you finish reading this post, of course.   Then read Rik Myslewski’s, The Lifer column in this month’s Mac | Life magazine, “Take Time to UnPlug” for another piece of advice for those who still remember what it was like to listen to the sounds of silence or indulge in a face to face conversation!

DIGITAL DISRUPTION CONTINUES

The news here on this VMO post is that most of our kids today are completely programmed to easily adapt to evolving technology. When today’s adults are faced with the next disruptive version of the Internet, the Semantic Web, (coming soon to a connection near you, with lots of “scary” stuff that is sure to peak and freak any clear thinking adult’s privacy and security thresholds), our kids will take to it like fish to water.

They will likely not question a single sign on ID (that hackers could capture and do who knows what), and will likely readily embrace the concept of a “personal data locker” in the cloud. What’s that? Well, the personal data locker on the semantic web will be, for example:

1. “a portal to a world of custom-made products based on their personal ontology,”*
2. It will include a body scan, models of feet and hands, and even a biometric profile of how you move.
3. This data locker, containing your specifics, will enable suppliers to make or customize their product for you!
4. No more trudging through reviewer comments about size or fit of the jeans you’re longing to own on a retailer’s website!

According to this fascinating book, which I have been slogging through since 2010 because it is frankly mind-boggling, *Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business, David Siegel, November 2009, your ontology, the niche areas of your interest, will be stored in your “data locker” and will satisfy various kinds of semantically specified requirements, so it gets smarter and smarter in personal recommendations the more you feed it. Think Pandora or the new Google search engine. You will be able to add your “friends’” ontologies, with their permission of course, to your locker so recommendations can be semantically integrated with yours.

Your data locker will store your medical, tax, legal records and more, along with your social, physical, and educational records, and probably even an archive of who you voted for in every election. Your purchases, likes, dislikes, calendar, photos, groceries, friends, vacations, restaurant selections, repair bills—virtually EVERYTHING will be stored digitally on the Internet so it can retrieve and connect random bits of data to inform your next moves. And, if you believe what they are saying, it will make you life better, more efficient, and more customized—everyone will have a defacto personal assistant via the cloud. Despite the fact that we may be more vulnerable to nefarious activity, (or in some cases government interference), heck, we don’t have a choice, do we? The kids, our legacies, will embrace it and thus, while we are still around, we will be required to adapt–again! Don’t be caught sleeping may be apropos.

Digital Natives and LEGAL SERVICES

Legal services providers will have to face a new round of threats to discovery, confidentiality, pricing, delivery, and more… ARE WE READY? Digital natives, who know nothing other than transacting via the Internet, will demand that your services be available 24/7 and accessible via the net. Yes? No? Will the profession be forced to adapt? Can we envision this? Will the data locker be implemented while you’re still practicing and how will that look? Do you have plans in place? Are you watching this unfold or are you being proactive?

I think the “virtual” law firms, the lawyers that are adapting to technology, definitely have a head start. I’m not just talking social media for marketing, I’m suggesting this is a delivery and storage issue. After all, most courts have all their records digitized now and filing, researching, and more are all accomplished remotely. No more treks down to the courthouse to face a surly clerk and sort through paper files that result in paper cuts and disability claims.  Nope, records are available via the Internet and are being used  by paralegals and legal assistants as convenient and time saving developments. IT professionals are looking into the cloud for storage—are document storage facilities becoming extinct? And, proprietary software development companies, are they scared? Many are being forced to shift their business models in this new digital nation. The sky is falling…..

Social Media

Back on earth…following my most recent public speaking engagement at Legal IT 6.0 in Montreal – shout out to the event – it was amazing, one of the many astute attorneys attending the event came to me and commented on how refreshing it was to hear me propose that social media is not mandatory, but rather can be used as a complementary tool to our off-line business development and marketing activities. Seems, according to his observations, that many social media speakers are setting a tone of do-it-or-else-suffer-severe-consequences. This is never my approach. It has to make sense to the individual and be used in an appropriate context—at least for now.

BUT, I agree to a degree that ignoring the global marketplace found on the World Wide Web could delay progress for those who are in the transitional demographic—too young to retire in the next 10 years but too old to feel that the social web is the only means to new business.  For the digital natives…well, what else is there? Paper? Pencils? Crayons? Blocks? Globes? Balls? Roller skates? Hugs? Birds? Beaches? Bikes? Playgrounds? Nursery rhymes sung by a calming mother or father’s voice while falling off to sleep? Hmmm… Will that custom-fit pair of jeans be worth the exchanges? They may never know the difference…

The Semantic Web (call it Web 3.0 if you will) is both fantastic and, like most new technology, a bit scary: Do I really like the idea of every little move I make becoming data to be tagged and processed electronically? What if it ends up in the wrong hands?  And what to think of the “Big Brother” effect? Spooky right? On the flip side, how cool will it be when your calendar displays the photos you took on a particular day and time.

I’ve been reading a fascinating book on my Kindle, Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business by David Siegel. The author reveals, among other hard to imagine transformations that within 10 years my refrigerator will provide my grocery-shopping list—it will inventory everything I put in it. It will know when I take it out and not return it, or even return it half-full. It will know my recipes, too. When I’m shopping in a store, the semantic web will make information available in a format that the cart can understand. The cart will tally up my bill as I place items into the cart, also sending that information to the supply chain. (Some supply chain information exchange is already happening semantically.) It will know my driving habits, health issues, entertainment choices, and more. AND, not only will it have the information but it will help me do what I need to do with it. It’s not one way (web 1.0) or two-way (2.0) but 360 degrees of interactivity!  For the most part, on the semantic web our lives will be a living digital habitat. We’re seeing the tip of it as our conversations on the social web today are creating a web of data that returns personalized recommendations based on what our “friends” are buying or reading, or it can prioritize the mail in our in boxes according to our patterns. (Check out Google Priority InBox )

Yup, it’s exciting and scary.  What will life be like? Seems to me there will be a serious trade off of human interaction for the conveniences this artificial intelligence offers. But really, will we have a choice? This semantic world is moving very fast in business, science, and medicine. Read the book and be amazed.

Digital Storage

My recent move to a new home and office revealed how natural the progression may be. Here’s why.

Moving your home and/or office is pretty stressful. Not just emotionally or financially, but physically. Unless you’re one of the lucky ones and can afford to hire someone to pack for you, you will TOUCH EVERYTHING IN YOUR POSSESSION. And sometimes you will have to LIFT HEAVY BOXES in order to move about as you are packing. While possessions are nice and they make a home, well, homey, when its time to move they are trouble.  For me, during my recent move, I toyed with the option to give them all away and start over at my new home.

This feeling started as I began going through my office storage closet. I had a least a dozen file boxes of articles, source material, and old hard copy conference handouts, forms, folders, and you name it that I was saving to reference some day.  I’d been lugging them around the past eight years—call me a nomad, this was my fourth move.

Sorting through the “stuff,” I realized how much great information I had stored away—and rarely accessed.

Needing to cut the baggage I reasoned:

Everything is digital these days in the form of blog posts, videos and podcasts. Everything I could possibly need in those hard copy archives could probably be found somewhere on the Web. Although I know there were classics and golden nuggets in those boxes, what goes around comes around again. So pitch them. Besides, in the past five years I’ve actually quit keeping hard copies of anything. I store and file snippets, ideas, receipts, forms, contracts, and more, digitally, on my Mac or in the cloud on deli.ci.ous, Evernote, or Google Docs: Lightweight, easy to access, and search from any computer.

When I got to box with the floppy discs, I wondered, where would I ever find a machine that could read them any more? And all those music CD’s? They’re heavy and I never use them now that I’ve transferred all the music to my iTunes—carefully backing up every thing to an external hard drive every 30 minutes all day long. (I remember when I packed up my LPs and stuffed them in the attic at my mom’s house thinking they’d be back some day…nah, except for collectors, keeping this “stuff” is just impractical if you want to fly light.)

I decided to keep hard copies of personal stuff like my Will, my family medical history and birth certificate, but in the back of my mind I thought…if they ever got lost how hard would it be to get a digital copy? Do I really need all this paper?

And photos. Over the years I’ve put more photos on my computer than in my photo albums. Plus when they are stored digitally, I don’t worry about them being damaged in a hurricane or God forbid a fire. So, I kept only those prints that seemed priceless (family history and all.) Besides, I love the feel of real photos. And Books. I love paging through a printed book and I hope they never go away. But, after schlepping over a half dozen HEAVY boxes of books this last time, I got to thinking when it’s time to move again I’d be glad to pack just one box—my computer.

All this to say, storing stuff in a digital environment is practical, the least of which is for moving and perhaps the greatest of which will be how the data will flow in the semantic web era.

I’ll be keeping an open mind on the semantic web for both personal and professional uses. I wonder how will it play out in the practice of law—beyond eDiscovery and virtual law firms? How will it improve the client experience or the flow and use of data in tracking cases, legislation, calendaring? We are only limited by our imagination as the technology is already way ahead of us.  Meanwhile, if there are any futurists out there: Penny for your thoughts?

The social Web has revolutionized the way consumers are learning about their health related issues and choosing professionals. There is a strong correlation for law firms. It’s all about the GLUE.

As Heather Milligan writes on the legal watercooler; the web enables Clients to get to know you before they ever meet you. The way in which people [companies] are learning about their legal issues and choosing legal counsel is often being vetting, first, via the search results from major Web engines. [Big Law is no exception!]

Health care.

While the corporate web site continues to be the center of attention for every “brand,” when it comes to health care, most people still prefer to get their health care information from a neutral third party, a trend that will only continue in the future, according to blogger Jonathan Richman in an article published on AdAge in the DigitalNext (August 3rd). As Richman looks at Pharma’s digital social future, he believes that to better enable the “neutral third party” concept, at least one pharma company will take a leap and completely eliminate its site and instead syndicate all of its content to a handful of the health-care-related sites that create personalization through aggregation.

The Practice of Law.

Finding lawyers on the web is EASY, but getting the right information to choose a lawyer takes a little more work. Smart lawyers are building their brand via a social footprint on the web giving many more people than they could ever hope to speak to in a life time a 360 degree look at what they do, how they think, write, interact, who they know, and what others think about them.  Before you even speak on the phone, your social footprint can help clients choose you.

You don’t want to get left behind. Start building your brand now. It takes a while, and you have to know the ropes, but it will set you up for success in the near future – I can promise you that!

Pharma

Like the legal industry, currently the pharmaceutical industry is sorting through some restrictive regulations. Once we get past all that, we’ll see how the interactive web, especially the next generation of the web, will open up many layers of information, some that already resides on the web, to give patients, clients, corporate or individual, a better opportunity to make informed choices when hiring legal counsel or purchasing medicines. A real good reason to take a hold of your individual online brand, now.

Your online brand.

The web presents more opportunities for companies and individuals to learn about who they need to represent them via a simple Google search.

And lawyers have more opportunities to make sure they are everywhere, demonstrating their substantive knowledge, contributing to discussions and showing savvy about the social web.

In two years -probably less, it will not matter whether or not a law firm chooses to engage in social media. The semantic web and decision engines will make you irrelevant if you don’t have a credible, professional footprint. Think I’m crazy? I could give you at least a dozen examples of how it works, but I’ll stick with one sort of “out there” example that I predict will be the next must have. [It may not be this one, but there will be one!]

Glue.

To see how this might work in action, check out GLUE.

Think of Glue as a portable version of your social network AND a decision engine.  As you navigate around online, Glue automatically displays reviews and recommendations from your group of trusted friends based on where you are right now.

In the health care or legal environment, eventually, patients or clients can take their social networks, and their opinions with them because every site becomes a social media experience yes, even your corporate site. People will share their comments about your services and discuss them with others — all without your involvement.

Another good reason not to ignore online social strategy. Start now to engage with your clients, keep them close. Meanwhile,  join me on GLUE.

No question –Linkedin is a valuable service that enables people to expand their business networks beyond physical limitations. However, it’s even more fascinating when you realize that it is one of the most powerful, mega directory databases at your disposal; even surpasses Google and Yahoo! in several ways.

In a 2008 interview [saw it on American Airlines “CBS Eye on America” and can’t find the video on YouTube], Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, predicted that Facebook would become our primary decision engine; a trusted source for search and for making purchasing decisions. Why? It is because we have access to tons of data from our trusted friends, family and friends of friends on Facebook.

Trusting Your Network

Did you ever notice how car brands tend to “stay in the family?” Grampa drove a Pontiac, Aunt Mary drove a Pontiac, Mom and Dad drive them, and so does brother.  [I like to break rules: I drive a Volkswagen.]  Most of us trust our families to give us their unguarded opinion about something they tried, so we often rely on that feedback. Social networks are like extended families. And, if you’re filling yours up with real relationships, not just trying to punch up your numbers of followers, friends or connections, your networks should be fairly trustworthy. What better place is there to get broad feedback from people you know, like and trust?

And so, to my original point, at least where business is concerned, LinkedIn has incredible power as a directory, a referral source and decision engine because the source data has been vetted through people in our network that we “trust.” LI has arrived in the Semantic Web generation, I believe, faster than Facebook.

What’s in your Network?

LinkedIn has an amazing architecture and algorithmic search function running in the background. Just the other day while coaching an attorney in setting up his account on LinkedIn, we added all his groups and associations (not LI groups, but the bricks and mortar type) to his profile.  It’s a list separated by commas in a textbox, not separate fields for each entry. He hadn’t yet uploaded his contacts from Outlook, so he only had one connection, another attorney from his firm. Still, when we clicked on his Connections tab the database had already grabbed the keywords from the Groups and Associations text box and served up some suggestions of people for him to connect to.  I was surprised to find that these suggestions were people with these groups and associations in common. While it is not surprising that the service reads and connects data from prior employment or schools that are database fields,  the fact that it read the text entry and processed it that quickly was amazing.

LinkedIn Does the Work for You

LinkedIn as a directory is also a great Rolodex. Your connections keep their contact information up to date for you and you even get notified when they do; perfect excuse to reach out to someone when they add a new email or place of employment.  I often now find myself reaching for my LI pages when I want to get a current address or title for someone. Filters work great too. Go to your Connections, hit advanced and you can filter by industry or location. Perfect for those out of town trips when you’re looking for people in your network to visit in person.

The Keyword Search for Companies and People is very useful, too.  Company search provides a great snapshot of demographics.  Of course it’s limited to who’s on LinkedIn, but it still gives you way more information than most other directory services.  AND, you can actually do something with the information, easily and seamlessly.

There are tons of other things LinkedIn does as a directory; these are just a few. Do you use LinkedIn as a directory? Any suggestions you can add?

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• Yahoo Pilots Social Experience Search; Updates Other Services (marketingvox.com)

If you are still questioning the effectiveness or the role of social networks in “real” business transactions, just ask some of the the 32 law firms that have made it to the next phase of FMC Technologies, Inc.‘s law firm challenge:

• Abbott Simses (a 16-lawyer firm in New Orleans)
• Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld
• Andrews Kurth
• Beirne Maynard & Parsons (a 60-lawyer firm based in Houston and Dallas)
• Brown McCarroll (a 120-lawyer firm based in Texas)
• Drinker Biddle & Reath
• Fulbright & Jaworski
• Law Offices of Tom Fulkerson (a four-lawyer firm based in Houston)
• Howery

to name just a few.  Notice this example includes both BigLaw and LittleLaw, RegionalLaw and BoutiqueLaw.

Over on the Watercooler, Heather Milligan is talking about the new developments in business development;  opportunities for regional, boutique and small firms to participate in some corporate legal department RFP competitions for outside counsel typically open to only a handful of BigLaw firms. Writes Heather;

“Whatever the reason, what I read in these stories is that the door is now wide open to a whole new crop of firms. Small. Regional. Boutique. It no longer matters. The questions are now: are you a good fit for the client? Can you meet the clients’ needs? And, that’s sounds good to me!”

FMC Technologies, Inc., the Houston-based oil and gas equipment company, named by FORTUNE Magazine as the most admired company in the Oil and Gas Equipment, Services industry,  wants to hire tech-savvy, innovative firms that are open to alternative billing arrangements.

FMC Technologies, Inc. is, well, tech savvy and innovative too.  And, they turned to social networking for help in finding the right match.

They used Legal OnRamp, the social networking site for lawyers, to spread the word last month. Firms were invited to download the RFP and submit it.

General counsel Jeffrey Carr says here, in a Law.com article, that:

He’s pleased with the response. “About 50 firms downloaded a questionnaire from the site and then submitted the forms to FMC. Of those, 32 will take part in the next phase of what Carr calls the FMC Technologies 1˚ Law Litigation Value Challenge.”

According to assistant general counsel Mark Wolff,  the cut wasn’t easy.  Those that didn’t make it were excluded for a variety of reasons including those that  didn’t offer electronic billing. “In this day and age, that’s very surprising,” said Wolff in the same Law.com article.

Technology Levels the Playing Field

Technology has always been the great leveler allowing firms to compete on efficiencies and convenience rather than merely numbers. But today, in this economy with companies looking for value, expertise and innovative approaches it is urgent that firms adjust their business processes and communications tools to encompass all that technology offers.

A few things about this news I find remarkable and maybe even revolutionary include: the fact that a company the size of FMC would invest the time resources in vetting 50 responses from otherwise unvetted, random law firms who saw the request on a social networking site; the fact that there is an element of transparency to the process, an RFP being reported in the media because it took place on a social site; and the fact that this little tiny step, posting an RFP on a social site,  has given FMC Technologies so many more choices than before. Firms they probably never heard of nor had the inkling to check out, are now positioned to compete and perhaps provide them the most valuable legal counsel they’ve ever had.

Revolutionary? You bet. This development may change the way companies buy legal services. As more companies seek to cut back on legal expenses and take a pass on the notion that the only choice is the “safe choice,” more general counsel may find the “best choice.”

Social networks are becoming the new global business community. Yes, even Facebook is evolving in this direction. Social networks have been a place to connect with new people, share content, participate in a virtual think tank, and now we’re seeing more often it is a place where opportunities for actual business transactions surface. (Not just the few examples trotted out by social media experts!)

I’m an optimist. It’s only going to get better. The communities will continue to evolve organically, the applications will improve, and within the next few years the Semantic Web will add a whole new layer. Meanwhile, don’t skip version 2.0. It may be difficult playing catch up.

Do you have any stories to share? Have you transacted a business relationship via a social network? How are you using social networks?

When I was a kid our family traveled to the New Jersey Shore (….capitalized because if you’re from anywhere near Philly it’s a formal noun) at least twice every summer on a Sunday get-a-way. Just after we crossed the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge I imagined sand on the road shoulder.  And then it began, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” Drove my parents crazy.

Note taking during sessions that addressed social web stuff during the annual Legal Marketing Association conference last week was frantic.  Although not revolutionary, law firm marketers and the lawyers they work for have become “interested.”

A generally conservative industry, the business of law is rarely first at anything. “We want to be first to be second” is one of my favorite quotes from a legal administrator I spoke with a few years ago. It rings true.

A-list law industry blogger Bob Ambrogi was interviewed at the ABA Tech Show last week and he concurs that interest is peaking. Here is a short video clip recording his observations of the evolution of social media in the legal industry compliments of LexConference.

Law firm leaders who originally dismissed social media now want to understand it.  Bob gave a decent off-the-cuff, interviewesque description, but in case you, the CMO or marketing professional in your law firm, is looking for a clean definition that you can adapt for your purposes, I offer a  version by Stowe Boyd (one of the top ten analysts blogging today, according to Technobabble ) that I think captures it pretty darn good.

“Social Media are those forms of publishing that are based on a dynamic interaction, a conversation, between the author and active readers, in contrast with traditional broadcast media where the ‘audience’ is a passive ‘consumer’ of ‘content’. The annotations or social gestures left behind by active readers, such as comments, tags, bookmarks, and trackbacks, create an elaborate topology resting on the foundational blog posts, and this enhanced meta-environment, the blogosphere, is the context for and the realization of a global collaboration to make sense of the world and our place in it.”  Stowe Boyd

This definition may be too philosophical for general usage within the law firm context, but it definitely describes one of the key tools, blogging. I think it rings true for social networking too, and all the tools that comprise the Web 2.0 wave. However, if you need a simpler way to introduce and help the peeps in your law firm understand the differences, here’s another version I use.

(This was inspired by something I read but I don’t have the reference anymore. My apology, and if the individual steps forward I would gratefully attribute.)

Social networks  – Web based services that provide a platform for the development of online communities. The communities typically form around shared interests or exploring opportunities.

Social media -(which includes blogging) is any service, site or Web based application that enables the publishing of content and allows open commenting – read/write web.

So, now to connect the thoughts.  While I totally embrace the opportunity to introduce others to the good stuff of the social Web today, I’m freaked out to admit that I’m already asking, “Are we there yet?”

The answer is no, not yet. I’m knee deep in trying to understand the next generation of Web applications  -Web 3.0 -the giant global graph that links users, actions, knowledge, companies, and etc.  The tools that will offer frameworks for corporate applications allowing enterprise social networking, business intelligence, watching, monitoring, communities of interest, practice and processes integration are on the horizon….approaching the shore.

I am NOT a Trekie, I am NOT a Trekie, I AM not a Trekie. Admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion is the first step. Am I there yet? Probably not….