We had over 40 new corporate counsel members register in the last week of our 2010 Get Connected for a Cause Campaign, which benefits Smile Train.
Registered members of Connected can click the links below to meet our new members and welcome them to the community. If you are not yet a member of Connected, registration is free and easy, sign up today.
We highlight companies on this post who had the strongest showing in Connected for the week. This week it is the Rite Aid Corporation that takes the honors. Here is some information from their company website:
Rite Aid Corporation is one of the nation’s leading drugstore chains with more than 4,900 stores in 31 states and the District of Columbia, with a strong presence on both the East and West coasts, and 109,000 associates. Rite Aid is the largest drugstore chain on the East Coast and the third largest drugstore chain in the U.S. The company is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker RAD.
Here are the companies who joined Connected in the last two weeks:
Last November, we presented the newly transformed Martindale-Hubbell Ratings at the ABA Law Firm Marketing Strategies Conference. All the major U.S. ratings and ranking services, including Avvo, Best Lawyers, Chambers, Lawdragon, Martindale-Hubbell and Super Lawyers, were invited to present their ratings methodologies and share how the resulting ratings and reviews provide value to users. (Chambers declined to participate.)
Following the presentations, program attendees, a broadly qualified audience of lawyers that included a dozen in-house counsel from large corporations such as GlaxoSmithKline, Toys “R” Us, Comcast and Boeing, completed a questionnaire about law firm ratings and rankings. Among the key findings, the ABA reports, “Martindale-Hubbell was given the most credibility among lawyer respondents.”
We’re excited and proud to have such significant recognition from an audience whose opinions are among the most valued by our business. As I mentioned in previous posts, last year’s ratings transformation was designed based on extensive research and feedback from the legal community, whose thoughts and input inform our business decisions every step of the way.
Now the community has spoken, and what they say validates what we have long claimed: Martindale-Hubbell Ratings are a credible and reliable tool to evaluate and select lawyers and law firms. In fact, in a head-to-head comparison by our most informed audience, Martindale-Hubbell comes out on top.
Read more about the ABA Ranking the Raters; Rating the Rankers program:
If you have been following our @MHTweets account on Twitter, you have probably had a chance by now to hear about our monthly Connected events, where we host numerous experts on a specific topic, to discuss their subject matter of expertise, either via blogging, forum discussions or a webinar.
If you have not heard or participated in such an event before, let me give you a flavor of what’s a Connected event: You can think about an event as a mini conference – focusing on a specific topic, it offers ‘panelists’ in the form of guest bloggers and webinar panelists, a ‘main event’ in the shape of a webinar, both of which automatically bring up lively discussions about the topic. Each Event is hosted in a specific Connected Group, where the discussions, blogs and webinar keep on living after the event has resumed.
Since July last year we have been dedicating each month to a specific event, some of the events we discussed: Social Media Policy and how to set it up in your organization ; NAWL 2009 survey results; Inside/Outside counsel relationship; how Social Media changed the way lawyers do business; Legal Marketing and Navigating Social Media ethical pitfalls and the current event, What In House Counsel Want. Some of the upcoming events are Standardizing Litigation Guidelines: A Case Study from the Insurance Industry and International Expansion, stay tuned for details.
We heard great feedback on these events and would like to create more that suit your interests – we want to hear from you which topics should be discussed more. If you have any idea or a suggestions for different event topics, please contact Rory, Mike or me.
Fortune has released their 2010 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, and this year six law firms made the list. According to a press release from Bingham McCutchen, FORTUNE picks the companies for the list by conducting an extensive employee survey. The “Trust Index” makes up two-thirds of a company’s score and is composed of a sample set of random answers from employees who are asked questions about “management’s credibility, job satisfaction and camaraderie.” The “Culture Audit” makes up the rest of a company’s points and asks employees about “pay and benefit programs and a series of open-ended questions about hiring, communication and diversity.”
We would like to congratulate and highlight three of the firms who are part of the Martindale-Hubbell family:
- Bingham McCutchen - with one of the best law firm websites I have ever seen (great design, navigation, and information) Bingham McCutchen is a firm that thinks about the now and the next. Based on the principles “Work Hard,” “Make Sure Your Eggs Are In Multiple Baskets,” “Remember the Business Cycle,” “Understand Your Clients Well Enough to Invest in What they Need,” and “Be Patient” they make firm values sound cool, something you’d expect from Google, who famously incorporated the business motto “Don’t Be Evil.” With a large and talented staff, Bingham serves the many needs of 10 primary practice focuses: (1) Corporate, (2) Finance, (3) Securities, (4) Litigation, (5) Legislative and Government Affairs, (6) Environmental and Real Estate, (7) Telecommunications, Media and Technology, (8) Insurance, (9) Industry Practices, and (10) Estate and Charitable Planning.
- Arnold & Porter – a true thought and practice leader, A&P produces a wealth of podcasts, articles, presentations, webcasts, and other materials all available for free on their website and on Martindale-Hubbell Connected (registration required) where members can interact with the authors. With a global reach and a history that spans the best of 80-years, A&P has a profound commitment to pro bono work (averaging 150 hours per year per lawyer), client results, and innovation as seen by their multimedia contributions. Specializing in 20 distinct areas of law, from Antitrust and Competition to FDA and Healthcare to Subprime Lending Regulation and Enforcement, A&P offers a range of trusted expertise and experience.
- Baker Donelson – they put clients first. Read the firm description and you’ll see the first three paragraphs are dedicated to talking about how they do that. By reaching across offices and borders in a diverse legal practice, Baker Donelson does what is necessary to serve their clients. As an innovator and technology leader, the firm developed BakerNet to connect the nodes of their offices and share knowledge. I counted up to 36 distinct practice areas with many subcategories that the firm specializes in from Gulf Coast Recovery to Business Technology. Truly a champion of diversity through the provision of scholarships, support to causes dedicated to eradicating racism, and providing opportunities, Baker Donelson practices what they preach and “is committed to recruiting, hiring, training, retaining and inviting to Shareholder status attorneys from under-represented groups.”
Congratulations again to these firms on such a tremendous achievement!
On January 22 at ACC San Diego’s 7th Annual GCRoundtable, I moderated a Session entitled “Taking Control: Meeting the Challenges to Becoming a High-Performance Legal Team.” Alan Tse, GC of LG Electronics Mobilecomm USA, was the featured panelist.
Alan covered a wide variety of issues around building out his high-performing legal department. He stressed such topics as defining goals and objectives of the business; cost cutting; managing outside counsel; measuring successes of the department and communicating them to the larger team; hiring the best “athlete” — entrepreneurial types capable of learning new areas and excelling; providing challenging work and growth opportunities, and many other topics.
One particular area that garnered a lot of interest and input was in the area of benchmarking. Alan is a big believer in measuring results against goals. Annually, he surveys his internal clients to gauge how LG’s lawyers are doing in areas such as speed and timeliness of service, quality of service, quality of the interaction, usefulness and ease of use of the legal services provided, and overall satisfaction.
Given the high level of interest in the benchmarking survey, Alan generously allowed us to upload his survey into Martindale-Hubbell Connected (Registration Required). Corporate counsel can access a copy of the survey here, in the In-House Counsel Group File Library. Since sharing his survey, Alan Ong, GC of Nokia Oyj in Finland has weighed in, and shared the survey he uses.
We encourage other corporate counsel to share their client satisfaction surveys in this confidential inhouse group.
How are other legal departments building high performance teams and measuring their successes? Join the discussion.
Here I am at Legal Tech. 24-hours of travel from Jerusalem, two-hours of sleep, a cup of coffee and a NY Bagel. I’m ready! So what is going to wow me today? There’s plenty of marketing from the competition, from free coffee (I got mine elsewhere) to big displays, but the most exciting thing I’ve seen so far is Lexis for Microsoft Office.
Lawyers live in Outlook. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it is the truth, (we also frequent Word, Excel, and Power Point). Between all these programs there is search. So at the most basic level, lawyers (1) get a communication, (2) identify action steps, (3) research for context on how to proceed, and then (4) compose a response. This process can take hours and often involves using new associates to research and create the response for a partner who has bigger fish to fry. Lexis for Microsoft Office takes the four steps above and creates 1-experience. Let’s take a sneak peek at the Outlook integration.
Outlook Use Case: the partner at a law firm gets an email about a pending litigation involving a major corporate client in a case about defective tires. He has a few choices at this point: (1) drop everything and start looking into the case, (2) delegate the task to an associate, or (3) click “Background” in Lexis for Microsoft Office. Choosing option “3″ will highlight terms in the email that relate to the case and opens up a side panel with research results including documents from the Lexis system, firm articles, and web results, all in context.

Without ever leaving Outlook a lawyer can have hours of research presented to them with the click of a button. If the lawyer wants to suggest a term that wasn’t bubbled up by the tool, they can do that too and get even more results, which can then be filtered in context for what needs to happen next. The outcome is that the partner can hand over a focused stack of results to an associate. The associate is saved the tasks of figuring out where to start, researching, and culling results allowing them to do some real analytical work on what has been presented before handing it back to the partner for sign off.
Savings in time equals savings in money for law firms and the corporate counsel that hire them. Integrating Lexis tools with Microsof Office means a world of possibilities. Imagine if the results also included information about user generated posts from Martindale-Hubbell Connected, and gave you links to the profiles of the people posted them. Now, you are not only accessing information, you are creating a relationship around it. This is just one idea of many to come. What ideas do you have for this tool? What would you like to see happen?
If you are at Legal Tech New York (#ltny) come by the Bryant Suite to see a demo of the tool. You can also enter to win an XBox 360 Elite (awesome!). Hope to see you there.
Next week LegalTech, one of the most exciting, awaited for conferences, is going to kick off in NY as Mike Mintz shared with you in the post from yesterday. I really enjoyed attending last year’s LegalTech and am eagerly waiting for it this year as well, and if you are planning to attend as well, I’d love to connect and meet.
On a separate but related topic, earlier this week Martindale-Hubbell Connected welcomed its 25,000 member, a very exciting event considering Connected was launched to the public less than a year ago. Thinking about the variety of conferences available to legal profession, and the thriving of Connected Network sharpens the notion of the Online Legal Network as a Conference that never ends, and from which you can choose to dip in and out of, as you wish. Looking at the Connected Members Directory [you need to be a member to view this page] and going through the variety of roles and enormous pool of people and organizations the network offers, I can’t help but compare Connected to ‘an always-there conference’:
- a place where you can ALWAYS meet that one person you have been trying to contact during or outside the conference (Even more than that, Connected offers a special pool of suggested connections, which you can use to enhance your network and make connections, with one single click) ;
- a place where you can develop strong relationship with that one person, by reading his/her blog and learning about their interests and thoughts and engaging in conversation with them in shared groups;
- a place where you can control when and how you communicate with your target audience – there is no limit to space and time;
Connected also offers an extremely wide range of legal professionals:
- Members are from 139 countries
- Members from companies such as Lenovo, AOL, Microsoft (see who joined recently)
- Over 200 Law Schools Alumni Groups
- Hundreds of User Created groups focusing on Legal World (and yes you can definitely find groups of personal interests, like Books Fanatics)
Connected, growing and developing, has also had its share of growing pains, getting mixed reviews and defining moments such as changing registration following feedback. Every feedback, comment or review – we take to heart and mind, and more importantly – to code. The question constantly on my mind is how can we make this ‘always there conference’ work better for you? That’s why in the past few months we have been working on usability tests that will feed into an improved site, as Jon shared here early December last year.
Here is your chance to let us know how can Connected change to serve you better , it’s our chance to listen to your feedback - join the hundreds who have voiced their opinion and feedback, to make a better service for you.
If you’re not a member yet – this is your chance to join.
While we have all read the headlines about the devastating earthquake in Haiti, it can often be hard to put a human face on the disaster. Even in the legal community, there are law firms and their staff that have been heavily impacted. LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell has nine law firms in Haiti as our customers. We have reached out to them to ask if we can be of any assistance in letting the legal community know if they are okay and are still operating their business.
Below are responses from three of our law firm customers that give a glimpse of the difficulties that they are currently facing:
We are truly grateful for your kind words and your generous offer. Fortunately many of our immediate families are safe but we did lose some staff and relatives in the earthquake. Our office suffered some damages but this is of lesser importance compared to the Human toll we have taken. Although we are striving to resume work, we had to halt for a while to honor those fallen, assist those in need and to care for our respective families.
We plan to fully resume work this coming Monday and we would appreciate the posting in the site and network to that effect. As you have guessed, none of the phone numbers work but I am listing all of our working cell phone numbers which can be posted to our account and in the post:
Gary Lissade: 509-3454-7815 / 509-3558-6212 / 509-3725-7989
Salim Succar: 509-3452-2287 / 509-3558-8365
Regards,
Louis Gary Lissade
Cabinet Lissade
Lissade Law Firm
8, rue Louissaint, Bourdon
Port-au-Prince, Haiti HT6111
Thank God we are alive and our law firm is still operational. However, some lawyers in our firm have lost their houses. Most of them are temporarily lodged at the office. Many lawyers in Port-au-Prince Bar Association are victims. We would like to help them. Our law firm is ready to receive any aid to distribute it to our colleagues.
As proposed you can post a message informing our law firm is operational, the mailing address is the same.
Thank you for your help
Sincerely yours,
Patrick
Cabinet Patrick Laurent et Associés
105, Ave Lamatiniere ( Bois Verna )
Tel: (509) 3 558-9095 / 2 244-9873
Sibylle Théard Mevs of Théard & Associés tell us that after a few days of restoring electricity and communications to their firm, Théard & Associés is fully operational.
Théard & Associés
31 avenue Charles Sumner
Port-au-Prince, HT-6113
Haïti
LexisNexis employees are also raising funds to help Haiti and LexisNexis is matching employee contributions to help in the efforts. To date, as a company we have raised over US$150,000 in donations which has been distributed to various relief organizations.
We are continuing to reach out to our remaining customers and will provide updates as we hear from them and share their stories.