ALMResearchBlog

ALM Economic Confidence Index

We are again recruiting participants for our quarterly Economic Confidence Index. 

Please take a moment to fill out the short survey here.

Here's an excerpt from the last results:

"In the December wave of ALM Legal Intelligence’s Economic Confidence Index, favorability of the current state of the economy still hovers in the low teens. But optimism that the economy will improve as we move into 2010 continues to hold fast, as the overall ECI spikes again to 143.

In the August and October waves, significantly more firms report that business conditions have improved since the benchmark wave of June 2009 (20%). December data also reflects that more than half anticipate that conditions will continue to improve in the next 6 months." 

You can download the entire December report here.

Reducing Costs by Greening the Law Firm

I thought I would share a couple thoughts on a webinar that I attended yesterday called Greening the Law Firm.

First a note about the technology – Shift Worldwide presented the webinar on their proprietary platform.  Actually called a Virtual Panel Discussion it features the speakers live from their offices / locations on the Virtual dashboard.  From a user standpoint, I thought it was very slick.  And was much more interesting than the usual slide presentation format.

What caught my eye about this particular vPanel was the topic.  “Green” seems like it went away for awhile as companies and firms hunkered down and focused on the economy.  It’s heartening to see that this topic (along with Diversity, Pro Bono and Associate Satisfaction) is continuing to get attention.  Secondly, I feel like there’s been a perception that “going green” would actually cost more than what currently being spent in operations, so this was an interesting twist.  Good for the environment and saves money.

Aside from the usual suggestions on how to make your office more green, I thought it was interesting how the discussion was framed.  i.e. there’s two main drivers to “go green”. 

Client-driven:   One of the panelist’s firms has a large environmental law practice; they wanted to ensure they could “walk the talk” and provided some good examples of implementing green practices that clients can see – specifically cups made of corn, biodegradable spoons, filtration systems to replace bottled water in conference rooms.

Cost-driven:   A firm that removes bottled water from offices can save approximately $10K.  Also putting permanent dishware in conference rooms, encouraging double-sided printing, the use of centralized printers, consolidation of data centers, unified communications, web conferencing, ability to raise conference rooms walls to best utilize space, have lights shut off after a certain amount of time/motion sensors.  Telecommuting for attorneys was described as “the wave of the future”.  It creates a more attractive situation for attorneys—billable either way; and it was said studies show people are more productive at home. 

Law Technology News Technology Satisfaction Survey

In response to many inquires and feedback that we received from law firm purchasers of technology as well as from vendors, we have recently launched a new survey to measure law firm satisfaction across several categories of technology.
 
When we have conducted the Law Technology News Awards in the past, questions from law firm purchasers inevitably arose after the results were announced around how the winners were picked, and what more information we could provide to help the firms in their decision making process.  Because the awards were based solely on the number of votes, we didn’t have any additional information to provide.  In addition, we heard that because of the nomination process, not all vendors and technology were represented.
 
To remedy that, and to provide more value to our customers, this year’s survey will attempt to gather additional information from respondents across 9 attributes in 25 technology categories.    We have pre-populated the categories with the last 2 years winners of the LTN awards, but we also are allowing write-in evaluations of products and services that are not listed.
 
The survey will be open to participants from now until the end of April, and is not limited to subscribers of Law Technology News.  I encourage you to participate.
 
We will be releasing the executive summary of the results at LegalTech West Coast in June.  Full results of the survey (including verbatim comments and analysis) will be available for purchase through the end of the year.  

From these results, we will be choosing the winners of the annual Law Technology News Vendor Awards.   

The survey can be taken here:  www.almlegalintelligence.com/ltn

 
Feel free to call or email me if you have any questions regarding this new survey.