It seems that I’ve always had a “thing” for knowledge management and in my last two years at Heller Ehrman I was involved in building KM repositories in Sharepoint 2007.

There is a great blog run by Doug Cornelius, KM Space, which contains a KM search tool he built using a customized Google search.  Check out the post and the list of sites being searched with the tool. 

A great post over at Chris Baggott’s Guide to Blogging on using blogs as a law firm strategy.  I’m glad that Chris mentions the concept of “best practices” since many law firms seem to be skittish over the blogging concept.

Check it out!

Like Heather Milligan over at The Legal Watercooler, I’ve not only become hooked on Twitter and the concept of micro-blogging, but the concept of how it can be used in law firm marketing becomes clearer each day.

As Heather states, Twitter seems to level the playing field and allows all levels of global law firm players (partners, the geeks in IT, support staff, marketing, service providers) to converse, swap ideas, keep tabs on hot issues and more.  And better yet, as time goes on and you follow more users and users follow you, it is only natural to branch out to other non-legal industries and seek out others with similar ideas, tastes and issues.

While law firms are notoriously behind the curve in terms of adapting and adopting new technologies, I hope this isn’t the case with Twitter and other social media apps.  I know that the first hurdle will be handling the risk management issues involved but once that and other minor issues are dealt with, it should be easy and only natural for Twitter to be quickly embraced.

I want to give a shout out to a great legal technology blog that I’ve been following recently - 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.  

With the byline “A law blog addressing the foci of 3 intrepid law geeks, specializing in their respective fields of knowledge management, internet marketing and library sciences, melding together to form the Dynamic Trio,” I have found that many of their posts are spot on especially when it comes to the current law firm management practices being employed by most of Biglaw.

Check it out: http://geeklawblog.blogspot.com/

This is a bit of an odd post for me since it is a bit of “psychology-in-practice.”  You see, I’ve been operating a successful blog for ex-employees of a global law firm for the past two months - and doing so under a pseudonym for that entire time.  I’m at a point now where I can thankfully merge my ego, Thomas MacEntee with that of my alter ego, Heller Drone.

I created Heller Highwater on September 15, 2008 as a means of dealing with the down-spiral of a 118-year old law firm, Heller Ehrman LLP where I had worked for the past eight years.  Since mid-2007 and perhaps earlier, there were signs that all was not well in Heller-land: large groups of partners/shareholders were leaving the firm.  And when partners leave, not only does their capital contribution go with them, but they also take their book of business, clients and even associates, paralegals and staff.  As 2007 finished and 2008 started, merger rumors began flying around the Internet and law firm blogosphere - first it was Winston Strawn, then Bingham, then Mayer Brown.

I was terminated from Heller Ehrman on October 10, 2008 along with more than 100 other employees.  Over the following weeks, most if not all of the remaining employees, close to 700, would be let go.  Partners would take off to new firms and, if the fates were kind, associates, paralegals would go with them.  Being in the Information Technology department, I was not so lucky.  Plus, after working for BigLaw for the past 20 years - all the while taking full-time positions over the consulting route - I’ve decided that there really is no security in working full-time for a large law firm.

It used to be that when you worked for these big firms, you’d be courted with offers of three weeks vacation your first year, generous benefits, a transportation allowance, 401k with profit sharing, etc.  The trade off was being on call 24/7 (at least in my positions in the IT field) and having to deal with some pretty horrendous egos.  I know as a legal technical trainer the torture called “attorney training” - especially when you are having to deal with people who are always the smartest ones in the room.  And now with my previous experience with Brobeck, now with Heller and seeing similar firms like Thelen painfully progressing through dissolution - and mostly on the backs of their loyal employees - I decided enough.

So, that’s how I started Heller Highwater  and now with Thelen The Pain I seem to have created a genre of “disgruntled law firm employees” blogs as one reader has put it.  My take on it: when you work as a loyal employee for many years and can’t even find out basic information such as whether or not you’ll have medical coverage or access to 401k accounts, someone has to provide an environment for such information.  And if that environment can also offer assistance be it job postings, advice, how tos etc., then even better, I say.

Heller may have been the first big law firm to collapse in the New Economy as some are calling it (Heller was always ahead of the curve on so many things, by the way) and Thelen won’t be the last.  But as firms collapse, partners leave for other firms without looking back to check on employees, and dissolution firm attorneys resort to vile practices such as not paying back wages or accrued vacation, let’s hope these firms are also thinking about how they’ll continue to operate over the next five years.  I can tell you this now and feel confident in making this prediction: the firms still standing in 2014 will be charging less for their services, will have fewer leases and real estate strangulations, will have more attorneys and staff working from home, and will have to come into the 21st century in terms of technology as well as embracing Web 2.0 and what will then be Web 3.0 practices.

Related posts:

Welcome - What Are You Thelen?

Heller Drone’s True Identity Revealed

Robinson & Cole/Heller Drone Comes to the Aid of Thelen Attorneys

As someone who has been able to see the personal and professional benefits of telecommuting first-hand, and given today’s economic situation with increased commuting costs and the cost of providing office space to employees in a central location, it seems to be a “no brainer” when considering a company’s next move in terms of letting employees “work from home.”

It is that term - “work from home” - that irritates and even galls most managers or business owners.  Middle management types used to having “face time” or hanging over an employee’s cubicle wall, need to understand the costs that go along with such a management approach and they also need to ask themselves, “Is such management behavior really productive?”

My experience over the past four years at a recently-shuttered global law firm - Heller Ehrman LLP - demonstrates the efficiencies achieved for the company and the proficiencies achieved for the worker.  In June 2004 I began teleworking for Heller in San Francisco, CA from my new home in Chicago, IL.  

Startup expenses for the firm: provided me with a Dell D600 laptop and subsidized my high-speed internet costs each month.  That’s it.  If I needed to replace printer cartridges or had an overage of minutes on my cell then they would have reimbursed me for those costs as well.