Monthly Archives: September 2017

Sep 15

Don’t Be a Hostage to Your Vendor

By Michael Feit | Contract Negotiations , Sole Provider , White Papers

Perhaps your firm or organization has always operated with both Lexis and Westlaw. The option of eliminating may seem foreign. For other firms or companies, perhaps the idea of eliminating a vendor came up to close to negotiation deadline.

There are options! You don’t need to be a hostage to your vendor if you have enough time to evaluate the options. The evaluation process in itself can prove fruitful, sharing pertinent information that can be used in the negotiation process.

There are a great number of elements to examine, from contracts to content, not to mention the strong reactions of users to fundamental system changes. Lexis and Westlaw have both successfully infiltrated law firms’ cultures and infrastructures over their many years of service.

Where to start:
1) Get the pricing intel to determine your pricing is favorable. Compare contracts with market intel in Feit’s white paper, Optimizing Legal Information Pricing.
2) Assess the viability of the sole-provider option. Evaluate the option at your organization. Develop a business case. If needed, check out this resource, the Sole Provider Viability Decision Guide.
3) Execute and implement. Consider hiring a consultant to manage the process.
Exploring the sole-provider option is a healthy step in revising your legal-information strategy and can provide insightful information for contract negotiations. If you choose to do it alone, these resources are an advantage to legal-information decision makers on what steps and considerations should be made in the process.

 

Sep 06

Leveraging LinkedIn for Law Librarians

By Michael Feit | Best Practices , Librarians

Consider the value of using Linkedin, the largest professional network, as a tool in the modern library arsenal for both research and professional development.

Locate expert witnesses. Both Lexis and Westlaw have robust expert-witness information tools, but LinkedIn can supplement that research.  In the general search box, type “expert witness” and select people with the skills, which will pull up a listing of expert-witness profiles. You can then narrow your search by keyword, location, industries, etc., to help you find relevant profiles. In most cases, they will have a profile photograph. In addition, you can usually see their connections to better gauge if there might be a conflict of interest in hiring them.

Build your professional network. Add your colleagues, associates, and clients. Stay apprised of your connections’ updates, position changes, and work anniversaries. Need an introduction at a company or firm? Search for the company to see if you have any first-degree connections, and ask them for an introduction.

Perform due diligence on individuals. Many .aw librarians assist with performing background checks on potential clients and new employees. LinkedIn can be an important tool in that process. Depending on an individual’s content and volume of activity, you might gain powerful insights. Don’t forget to consider the candidate’s online recommendations, featured skills and endorsements.

Professional Development. LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to stay abreast of the latest trends and news in your field and beyond. Follow companies, associations, and thought leaders/influencers to ensure your feed is full of relevant updates to keep you in the know.

Competitive Intelligence. Follow a company’s personnel announcements and highlighted new product features and introductions. Examine job postings for company growth. Don’t overlook LinkedIn for intel on private companies. By examining the number of employees listed and their titles and positions within their profiles, you can develop core insights into hard-to-find data.  

Determine who the employees were at a certain time in history. Have you been asked to find out who was working at a company or organization during a particular time period? Use the general search feature and filter by “past companies”, which will focus on all employees who worked at a particular entity. You can then cross-check the dates on individual profiles to determine who worked at the company during that time.

Join groups or create your own. Follow group conversations and chime in. This is a great way to showcase your expertise and contribute to the law librarianship field. If you don’t have LinkedIn Premium, join groups! This is a great workaround to be able to send free messages to people on LinkedIn within the same group that you aren’t connected to. There is a limit. You are only allowed to send 15 free 1:1 group messages to fellow group members each month. And if you create a group, group managers can send up to one group announcement per week to members who have chosen to receive such emails. Groups are also a great place to advertise job openings.

Client Development. Follow your firm’s top clients and any prospective clients to keep on top of any news they share via LinkedIn. Furthermore, receive alerts when they are mentioned in news articles. Monitoring client activity underscores LinkedIn’s worth as a cost-effective current awareness tool.

Identify contacts. Search for a company, and see a listing of employee profiles. You will be able to do a keyword search (title, first name, location, etc.) of all of its employees who have LinkedIn profiles.

Pull clean copies of an individual’s profile. Need to pull clean copies of profiles for a case, interview, or upcoming meeting? When you are in an individual’s profile, simply click on the three small dots to the right of the profile and click “save to PDF”. You can download this clean PDF, which contains a person’s educational background and work experience. Please note that this will not include the person’s profile picture.  

Create and share content. Share updates, photos, interesting articles or write your own. Use hashtags to optimize your user audience (e.g., #lawlibrarians). Hashtags are indexed by the social network and become searchable/discoverable by others.

Use LinkedIn Jobs. Need to post a library position? You can pay by setting a daily average budget, and you will only be charged for the number of job views you receive. Even if you aren’t in the job market, the job descriptions in job postings can give you ideas on how to innovate within your own organization. Have you had the same job title for the past 20 years? Maybe it’s time for a change. Job postings can give you great ideas.

Sep 05

Budgeting to Maximize ROI

By Michael Feit | Budgeting , Modern Law Library , Resources

Will you play it safe or take a risk for greater returns?  

The Modern Library requires individuals to change their mindset from maintaining the status quo and becoming open to new ways of doing things. Budget season is here. Now is the time to consider how you will shape your budget with new solutions to your organization’s anticipated changes in 2018.

Checklist of budget items to consider adding or changing in your 2018 budget:
  • ERM (Electronic Resource management system): If your firm doesn’t already have an ERM, it may be time. Read more here.
  • Content Aggregators: Influencing the firm’s bottom line with current awareness on clients and potential business.
  • Library Membership Fees: Save on subscription costs, fill content gaps at a lesser cost, access to archival and historical collections and just-in-time document delivery.
  • New Software: Consider software that offers newer efficiencies, extensive analysis and taming big data.
  • Outside Services: Budgeting for value-added insights on those special projects, allocating funds for consultancy services or to purchase resources that will provide critical insights on pricing, creating efficiencies and library modernization to name a few. Tap into Feit Consulting’s white papers or other consultants’ resources.
  • Conferences and Events: Be smart in which topic class or conference you decide to attend. Think about who may also attend as networking is as valuable as the content offered. Specialized topics covered by ILTA or the Ark Group offer valuable takeaways on timely topics that will affect your bottom line. Discounts available for multiple attendees from your organization.
  • Staffing: Do your foresee a need to add staffing capacity? Will it be a short-term need or long-term? Hiring temporary or permanent staff is one option as well as outsourcing depending on how each option delivers return on the expense.