Robert Lemmond Appointed President & CEO of Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. Promises “Customer First” Strategy.

 This week Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory announced the appointment of Robert Lemmond as President & CEO of Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. Lemmond, joined Wolters Kluwer in 2011 as Vice President of the Law & Business Legal Markets Group. He previously held executive positions at several content and software companies including IHS, Primark, Disclosure, Northern Light. He replaces Mark Dorman.

Why this is good news for Wolters Kluwer

Robert Lemmond

Over the past decade I was slowly coming to the conclusion that WK  had seen its best days. They were destined to be bought or slowly fade away. They had good solid products but they seemed to be losing momentum. The Standard Federal Tax Reporter retained iconic status for tax lawyers. WKs suite of business titles were solid staples for securities, banking, trade and host of other practices. WK was one of the first major publishers to digitize their publications with the release of cd-roms in the early 1990s. They purchased Loislaw a low cost research alternative to Lexis and Westlaw in 2000. They owned a suite of esteemed treatises from Aspen Publishing. But the 2009 release of the Intelliconnect platform was a disappointment. Their biggest limitation was the absence of a full blown citator system to help lawyers verify that the cases they were citing had not been overturned. When Bloomberg Law was released in 2011, Greg Lambert in his 3 Geeks and a Law blog  pointed out that Blaw had stepped in and made the move everyone was waiting for Wolters Kluwer to make. WK owned lots of great pieces but couldn't seem to weave then into a whole.

 The Problem Wasn’t Just the Products Over the years I had found WK pricing and contracts to be stubbornly out of touch with the law firm demands for efficiency and cost control. They tied online contracts to the retention of print. The pricing structure was opaque. A law firm couldn’t cancel a print subscription even when it was no longer needed. There seemed to be no way to cut the WK spending short of cancelling everything and returning as a new customer.  It really got ugly following the 2007 financial crisis. Law firm attorney counts were falling and budgets were being slashed. Many publishers agreed to suspend or modify existing contracts as an investment in future "good will." Not Wolters Kluwer! They were spectacularly indifferent. An executive agreed to meet with me at  the annual AALL conference so I could plead my case in person. He reacted as if I was reading him a page from a phone directory. It was a brief, polite and yet pointless exercise. I walked away wondering if he had heard a word I had said.

Bob Likes to Listen Since Bob Lemmond arrived at WK in 2011 he has been on a mission to learn about customers. He likes to listen to customers! He created advisory councils of librarians and attorneys. He traveled around the country meeting with key customers. During a call this week, Lemmond said he is especially interested developing a close partnership with the librarian community because they have such deep research expertise and are focused on the quality of information.  In the past two years there has also been a steady stream of changes in the tone of client communications, the introduction of new products, innovative licensing schemes and new pricing models for products. Lemmond doesn't take credit for all the changes but the timing is curiously aligned.

 Recent WK Law & Business Initiatives Include:

• Establishing Insight Leaders Councils  
• Expanding the new RB Source platform which is more intuitive than Intelliconnect 
• Releasing a series of practice dailies which are clearly positioned to compete with the Law360. 
• Offering pioneering licensing models for the newsletters which allows lawyers to share content with clients and post certain content on the law firm website. 
• Entering  a relationship with Thomson Reuters to distribute WK newsletters on the Westlaw platform 
• Offering new pricing options which anticipate the ongoing shift from print to digital and which allows customers to permanently migrate lawyers off of print resources.

The War Between the SuperSystems For the past 2 years everyone has been watching the 3 way tug-of -war for market share between Blaw, Westlaw and Lexis. I suspect that WK is not going to jump into that end of the pool. During this week's call Lemmond indicated that there would be no major change in direction for WK. However, he was confident that the company had the right pieces in place to expand market share with practice focused workflow solutions which enhance productivity and provide expert guidance.

Budgets are still tight in law firms, so focusing on productivity focused expert systems instead of competing directly with the SuperSystems may provide the right lever for growth in the current market.

Keep the phoneline open. The next voice you hear may be Bob Lemmond calling.

___________________________
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American Lawyer Media Releases White Paper on the New "Hot Job" -- Pricing Professionals in Law Firms.

American Lawyer Media Just released a special report on "Pricing Professionals" in Law Firms: Here for Good -- Pricing Professional in Law firms and This Impact on Clients and Firm Business.

In the five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, both law firms and clients have been whipsawed by the economy. Corporations have interposed Procurement Officers between General Counsels and even long time outside counsel. Law firms have sought the advice of a new breed of internal pricing professional to help the firms respond effectively to the Procurement driven demand for high quality legal work at the best price.  Lawyers went from a century of  using the reliable hourly billing rate to facing a complex array of alternative fee arrangements, involving, discounts, caps, project management and performance metrics.  ALM released a report on AFAs in May.

According to the Pricing  survey, most lawyers don't have a strong interest in mastering the mechanics of pricing out an RFP. Enter the pricing professional!

Toby Brown a pioneer in the pricing arena, summarizes the problem in the Foreword to the report. He points to the lack of  information as the greatest challenge to pricing. "Too many decisions are made in a vacuum, with only intuition and anecdotal stories for guidance."

It is rare that we get to trace the development of a new niche profession in law firm management from its inception.The report does not focus on how firms are actually setting the prices. It is an peek at a "work in progress." There is no wide consensus on how to define the functions of the pricing professional  or where  the function should reside in the law firm. But we rarely see the emergence of a completely new role which is both so widespread and about which there is so little consensus.

Organization

67% of responding firms indicated that they had a pricing officer. 50% of the respondents report that this function is less than 2 years old. There is no template here.  31% of the pricing officers report to "other " which means that pricing professionals appear all over the org chart. But 29% report to the CFO. 23% are part of the Knowledge Management department.

When pricing has its own department, it is relatively small . 44% have no direct reports. 22% have 1 report and 34% have 2-5 direct reports.

Pricing officers work most closely with lawyers and only 27% report working closely with clients. The report raises the question about whether this should be a more external client facing position.

 The Question of Authority. It is not clear how much authority the pricing officer has. Partners want to "own" their relationship with their clients. I imagine that the pricing officer may have an easier time influencing the pricing for a new client via an RFP process than intervening in between a partner and an existing client. But consider the challenge of intervening in the prized partner-client relationship either way! Partners need to believe that this new role will in the long run strengthen their client relationships, but that may take time.

Oddbits

• 43% regard financial analysis as the most important skill of the pricing officer.
• 55% the % of RFPs referred to the pricing officer
• 68% the pricing officer doesn't have defined performance metrics
• 30% of Pricing Officers has been at their firms 10 years or more. Which means that they have evolved from another role into this recently created position.
• 58% of Firms with pricing officers have project management function within the pricing department. But only 7%of pricing officers are responsible for project management. 
• 11% of firms give the pricing officer final authority in pricing a matter.

Pricing "Officer?"

I recently reviewed "chief "titles In the AmLaw 200  and didn't find one "Chief Pricing Officer" yet this report repeatedly refers to the "pricing officer."

I like the word "officer" it lends an air of gravitas to any position. So I have to hope what when the ALM releases  it's Annual library survey in July, librarians and information professionals will also be  granted the  "officer" honorific and be referred to as information and knowledge "officers," regardless of their actual titles.

Bye Bye Bender Online: LexisNexis Shifting Digital Treatises to Lexis Advance and eBook Platforms

Matthew Bender Online was one of the earliest digital successors to legal treatises on cd-rom. When it was released in the early 1990s, MBOnline offered an elegantly  simple interface and eliminated the technical  idiosyncrasies ( I almost wrote atrocities) of managing networked cd-roms. It allowed lawyers to have digital access to multi-volume treatises. But it was on a separate platform from LexisNexis and could be accessed without having to put in a client number. It could provide lawyers and law firms with a custom library of treatises. But according to Lexis executives, the platform hasn't really evolved in the past 2 decades.

The Letter is in the Mail. Over the coming weeks LexisNexis will begin notifying customers that Bender.com in person or by mail that the product will be phased out by the end of 2014. They stopped selling the product to large law firms 5 years ago. They are planning to help firms transition to the treatise platform on LexisAdvance or the LexisNexis eBooks platform.

According to Karin Lieber,  Vice President Large Law Segment at Lexis Nexis there are several reasons that Lexis Nexis has decided to phase out this product at this time. Bender Online is based on an old "flat file" technology and the product is no longer being enhanced. LexisNexis is focused on enhancing treatise research on Lexis Advance and on their Overdrive eBook platforms. Both platforms will offer enhanced functionality which is not available on the current MBOnline platform..Ebooks are navigable like a book but are also searchable, portable and can allow lawyers to highlight and annotate the book and link to primary sources with a login to LexisNexis.

Shabeer Khan, Director of Information Services at Kaye Scholer has had access to both the Bender.com and LexisNexis eBook library. When I asked him which platform was "better." he responded that the question of "better" doesn't apply. They are "different." and each has it's strength. Khan pointed out that there are advantages to interacting with a the eBook medium because it mimics the look and feel of an actual book. In addition, the Lexis eBook platform with uses the Overdrive system, offers more functionality and works on mobile devices. These features were never available on Bender.com.

What about eLibraries? Karin Lieber, assured me that LexisNexis will continue to support the eLibraries or Custom User Interface (CUI) Libraries which many large law firms have access to through their LexisNexis contract.. eLibraries are custom portal based libraries that allow anonymous authentication within the firm This means that lawyers have unlimited access without having the charge a client. The firms custom interface may provide access to treatises by jurisdiction, topic, or alphabetical list by title. A lawyer can search one title or all titles. Lexis Nexis is committed to supporting this platform for Lexis Nexis subscribers. But they are actively working to transition the elibraries from  Lexis.com to CUI libraries based in the Lexis Advance platform.

Matthew Bender print Not Impacted. Matthew Bender print titles will not be impacted by these developments. Well, that is what they said. I think the truth is that Matthew Bender treatises have already been impacted. Matthew Bender, founded in 1887 was a family owned company and one of the countries largest law book companies. It was sold to the Times Mirror Co. in 1963 and then sold to Lexis Nexis, a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier in 1998. In January 2013 it was reported that the company was laying off over 200 employees at their office in upstate New York. There is no question that law firm economics and advances in technology have in combination accelerated  an unprecedented decline in the demand for print treatises.

More to Come Lexis Nexis will be announcing a new set of eBook enhancements in July at the AALL conference.

The Evening Law Student Solution:An Overlooked Asset in the New Legal Marketplace.

Last  week I attended the 100 Year Anniversary of  my alma mater  the Fordham Law School Evening Division.  When Fordham was planning an earlier reunion, Assistant Dean Robert Reilly discovered that the school didn't even keep a separate list of evening division grads. The school regarded the day and evening divisions as equivalent programs. Everyone got the same degree. A 2012  article in Fordham Lawyer highlighted the many notable evening division grads who include the late Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman ever nominated to run for Vice President. But  law firms often take a dimmer view of night programs. Evening Law students are generally not courted by large law firms, a fact which has always baffled me. Is it not obvious that night students have a very special capacity for endurance? .... but it baffles me even more in the current legal market. 

The Night Student Advantage. In fact, night students are probably better suited to work in the today's efficiency driven law firm than most full time students. A recent article in Law Technology News  Big Law Whipped for Poor Tech Training underscores the advantages in hiring students with more sophisticated technical experience and attuned to the need for efficiency.


Here are just a few of the advantages of evening program law grads:

• They have a high tolerance for pain
• They are experts at multi-tasking 
• They have demonstrated mastery of time management 
• They know all about working 2,200 hours a year. 
• Their mutual need to survive makes more collaborative and they are less likely to regard classmates as "the competition."
• Having worked in a business environment they will arrive with  a skill set and industry     knowledge that can be leveraged in both practice and client development.
• They likely have spent more time using their computer for Excel than for Facebook.

A Word About Teamwork One of the key characteristics of  night school students is their willingness to help each other out rather than viewing each other as "the enemy."  They tend to have empathy for each other's unique "juggling act." There are the famous stories of vicious competition among day students. That is not at all common among  night students who develop a very unique bond and special forms of team work  to help other "cross the finish line." Night students excel at  collaboration which is a touted as a key strategy for law firm success.

The Night School Grind. In retrospect I do wonder how I spent 4 years leaving home at 6 am carrying 20 pounds of books to the train, worked a full day as the Director or Legal Information  Services at Shea & Gould,  attended class and returned home at about 11 pm.  Night school is not for the "faint of heart."  People who attend night school are not about the glory. But too often in fact we simply "get no respect."
 

At the reunion, one classmate recalled going on "white shoe" firm interview. The partner asked her why she had no extra curricula activities on her resume.  When she responded that her "extra curricula activity" was her day job, he quickly ended the interview. Now she is a General Counsel in a corporation and I couldn't help but chuckle to myself  at the prospect of the tables being turned.

 

 

Are the Tables Turning? She like many other evening grads had ended up "in-house."  The shoe is on the other foot now as partners compete to gain favor and business from GCs.  Let's hope she is more open minded than the white shoe partner if he shows up to pitch work to her.

In light of the market upheavals, it may be time for law firms  to seriously consider the advantages of evening  law students as strategic assets in the "new normal."

Bloomberg Law Not Impacted By Bloomberg Terminal Privacy Breach. But Can We Ever Stop Worrying About a "Big Data" Hack of a Legal Research Provider?

Last week Bloomberg acknowledged that Bloomberg reporters had used the infamous "Z"  and  "UUID" functions on the Bloomberg terminal to access "customer data."  Reporters had access to the names of users at an organization, how long the account had existed, when the account was last used and what broad categories of data they had accessed, e.g. news, bond data, etc. My reaction was "huh?" Given the shrillness of the press reports I assumed that that reporters were seeing actual search queries or trades. That kind of knowledge could be a real "market mover" but that was not the case at all. According to a  story in the New York Times, reporters had used account inactivity to prompt a question to Goldman Sachs about whether a partner had been fired. A recent Washington Post story said that the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are now examining whether their employee's activities were also tracked by Bloomberg reporters.

The Ethical Wall in Newsroom. The real controversy is not the extensiveness or the granularity of the data - which as quite limited - but the very fact reporters were able to cross the ethical threshold into accessing any customer data at all. In fact, the same data should be accessible to Bloomberg customer support personnel. Bloomberg has now disabled the "z"  and "UUID" functions in their newsroom only.

The Bloomberg Response. Dan Doctoroff CEO of Bloomberg is quoted in the Times story: “To be clear, the limited customer relationship data previously available to our reporters never included access to our trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter or other related systems or our clients’ messages,”  The Times story, also notes that Bloomberg recently centralized its data security efforts, including the appointment of Steve Ross, a senior executive, to the newly created role of client data compliance officer.

 No Impact at Bloomberg Law. According to Greg McCaffery, CEO of Bloomberg Law, reporters have no access to the Bloomberg Law user data. Bloomberg Law resides on a separate cloud platform, not on the same platform as the Bloomberg terminal data. Bloomberg Law doesn't even have the same "command" functions which the reporters used to access customer data. He also pointed out that the Bloomberg BNA reporters who write the Bloomberg BNA newsletters have no access to the customer data. McCaffery stated that "Bloomberg Law takes the privacy of its customer data very seriously. To be clear: no journalists at Bloomberg News or BNA have ever had access to customer research activity on Bloomberg Law.

There are Bloomberg Business Terminals in Law Firms. The fact is that there are law firms which subscribe to Bloomberg business terminals under separate contracts from Bloomberg Law, so presumably reporters were also able to view the limited account activity described above. The Bloomberg business terminals are generally used by researchers and not law firm partners, but we now have assurance that reporters can no longer access any law firm Bloomberg terminal customer information or usage. However, Bloomberg does need to do some outreach and provide assurances to law firms with "the terminal."

Bloomberg Thumb Scanner

Bloomberg is No Stranger to Privacy and Confidentiality. Bloomberg is the last information provider I would have expected to be accused of violating privacy. Bloomberg is all about closed systems and  being locked down and buttoned up. They are unapologetically restrictive in how their subscribers use their products. When you subscribe to the Bloomberg business terminal they retain the right to come to your office and inspect the installation. The earliest version of Bloomberg Law used the Bloomberg terminal platform, but required a lawyer use a biometric card which validated their thumbprint in order to logon to the terminal. I repeatedly warned them that biometric card was "thumbprint too far" for most lawyers and they now use a more traditional username and password approach.

The Big Data Question  The recent  Bloomberg privacy issue is really a journalistic ethics issue about the wall which has always existed between news reporting and the  newspaper or news service subscriber data. I believe there is a bigger issue lurking out there for all the large legal research providers. What really scares me is the prospect of a rogue internal or external hacker who could analyse all of the search queries of a law firm and draw some conclusions about things like M&A activity, litigation research or government investigations.  Law firm research queries are a treasure trove of leads... pretty innocuous standing alone - but probably an interesting "data map"  of law firm client support activity if  viewed in the aggregate. In 30 years I have never ever heard of a breach  or misuse of this kind of data at LexisNexis Westlaw, Wolters Kluwer or Bloomberg but I think it is time that these companies provide more information to customers about how they protect law firms and their clients from the threats of a "big data" hack.

Bloomberg Is On a “What’s Wrong with Big Law?" Roll

This morning I attended a  presentation at Bloomberg HQ given by Bruce  “growth is dead” MacEwen. He has so many unique insights I definitely recommend reading his book to absorb them all. He showed some amazing slides on the  configuration of the legal industry before  and after the  2007 crash.

 One interesting “aside,”  focused on the corrosive effect of “profits per partner.” The PPP ranking was created the American Lawyer and is a  metric which is particularly susceptible to manipulation. Yet it has become the vehicle for not only measuring success, but also a key driver of rampant lateral poaching, which in turn has contributed to the cratering of many firms.

One  partner in the audience only half tongue in cheek suggested that it was time to move up the alphabet and perhaps a legal publisher name starting with a “B” should create a new  and more reliable competitive metric for   measuring the success of law firms.

The Bloomberg BusinessWeek issue of May 12^th sported a cover “What do you do with 176,000 lawyers lying at the bottom of the ocean?” Howrey's Bankruptcy and Big Law's Small Future. 

The article focuses on the collapse of Howrey, but predicts continuing disarray in the legal market. And oh by the way, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that  by 2020 the US economy will create 73,600 lawyer positions and law schools will graduate 24,000 new lawyers a year. This they suggest will result in  176,000 excess lawyers. But is not the real problem that law school are grooming lawyers for the 20^th Century Law firm instead of the 21^st century law firm?

 Bloomberg Law TV Interviewed Richard Susskind on May 2nd:  With Radical Changes Law Firms Can Beat the Recession.  Last week Lee Paccia interviewed legal "futurist" Richard Susskind who had  a completely different take. Here are some surprising "take aways" Outsourcing is Temporary and  Technology is the Future. We don't have an oversupply of lawyers we have an undersupply of legal knowledge engineers!

Why Now? There is a further irony that Bloomberg has chosen to enter the legal information market at a time of such wrenching displacement in the legal market... unless Bloomberg has calculated to enter the breach and take advantage of the disruption.

News You Can Use! Wolters Kluwer Continues to Bring Sanity to Digital Licensing and Oh Yes Releases Two New Daily Newsletters (Banking & Finance and Products Liability)

 News You Can Use! For those of us who toil at the intersection of copyright and human behavior, any publisher who keeps making it easier to legitimize the natural impulse of lawyers to embrace every venue for highlighting their accomplishments and share news and insights with their clients gets my endorsement. Last July Wolters Kluwer launched a new series of daily newsletters, The Wolters Kluwer Daily Reporting Suite which allows subscribers to forward stories to clients and colleagues. Today Wolters Kluwer is expanding their policy by granting a license allowing law firms to post Daily Alert stories which mention the firm or individual lawyers on the firm's website and to include reprints of these stories in promotional materials 7 days after the initial publication. I once again applaud Wolters Kluwer for respecting the integrity of their subscribers enough to allow the reuse of these stories. This is a great business strategy which in marketing terms, creates "stickiness" between the publisher and it's subscribers. It creates enormous good will by supporting the marketing and business development needs of firms.

 

 

 

And they also released 2 New Newsletters in the Wolters Kluwer Daily Reporting Suite

Today's release expands suite of current awareness products which are focused on the "hottest"  and most complex practices. The Daily Reporting Suite now includes: Antitrust, Securities Regulation, Health Law, Employment Law and Intellectual Property, Banking and Finance and Products Liability.

The Press release quotes WK Legal Market Leader Robert Lemmond:

“The response to our Daily Reporting Suite has been extremely positive and we are pleased to be expanding the topics to include the key areas of product liability, insurance and banking and finance. Legal professionals consistently tell us they need a reliable news source to keep them fully briefed on breaking legal news, court decisions, and legislative and regulatory developments that impact every aspect of their practice.  At Wolters Kluwer, our team of attorney-editors have enabled us to expand our Daily Reporting Suite and continue to make the critical challenge of staying up-to-date with relevant cases, statutory changes and new rulemakings a much faster and more streamlined process.”

The Content.  These daily news services will deliver breaking news from both the federal and state level, the latest rulemaking and updates on litigation as well as a complete summary of the daily legal news. legislative and regulatory activity and highlights of state agency enforcement activity.Access to all links to cases, state laws and regulations,and other primary source documents.

 

Banking and Finance will cover all of the hot issues of interest:

 

Bank Secrecy Act , Volker Rule,Capital and Basel Accords, UDAAP,Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ,Truth in Lending, Dodd Frank Act,  Securities and Derivatives Enforcement Actions, Equal Credit Opportunity, RESPA, Fair Credit Reporting, Identity Theft, Mergers and Acquisitions, The Federal Reserve Board

 

Products Liability Law Coverage includes:

•  Full summaries of products liability decisions issued by federal and state supreme, appellate, and district courts, including the presiding judges and names of the attorneys representing the parties
• Consumer Product Safety Commission and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulatory and administrative developments, product recalls, agency enforcement activities, and more
• Access to all links to cases, Federal Register Issuances and other primary documents
• Federal consumer product safety legislative activity

Products Liability Law Daily Topics include:

Design, manufacturing and warning defects, Defenses to liability, Damages, Expert Evidence, Preemption, Consumer product and motor vehicle recalls, CPSC settlement agreements, Product testing and certification, Motor vehicle exemptions and Import rules

 

Mobility Rules The products will be delivered via email, RSS feed, and mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.

Here are the standard Daily Report features: 

• Daily email summaries written by knowledgeable attorneys and industry experts with links to the full text of any new cases, regulatory or statutory developments, and breaking news 
• Seamless access to information from ANY mobile device without being prompted for logins/passwords. Other legal news services require logins creating unnecessary time delays.  
• The ability to customize content by topical area and jurisdiction so users can view the content that is the most relevant to them 
• Built-in copyright permissions that permit legal professionals to instantly share information with clients or colleagues without having to download or reassemble information. 
• Time-saving mobile apps with customizable home page, ability to filter by topic/jurisdiction, note-taking capabilities, favorites folders and email functionality 
• A searchable archive on Wolters Kluwer’s proprietary online content delivery platform, IntelliConnect.

In the Pipeline  Wolters Kluwer is also planning to release a daily insurance product in June.
 

Wolters Kluwer continues its assault on the  topical legal "newsletter" niche which has been  dominated by Bloomberg BNA and Law 360. However WK seems to have an edge in customization of both content and delivery. They are remain  ahead of the entire market in advancing policies which allow lawyers to legally "socialize" their content and maximize it's marketing value for the law firm... which is no small benefit in this fiercely competitive legal  market. Time will tell if these distinctions and the quality of the WK proprietary analysis translate into market share.

 

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