April 19, 2007  

Established in 1966 by the ABA, the ABA Retirement Funds' program (the "Program") provides full service, cost effective retirement plans solutions to law firms of all sizes, including 401(k), profit sharing and defined benefit plans. The Program is administered by State Street, a global leader in serving institutional investors, and operated with its affiliate, CitiStreet LLC. ABA Retirement Funds P.O. Box 5142 Boston, MA 02206-5142 Phone: 1-877-955-2272 abaretirement@citistreetonline.com www.abaretirement.com

ALA Currents is a free newsletter about management trends and innovations provided exclusively upon request to members of the Association of Legal Administrators.

News & Views

LAW FIRMS FACE MORE COMPETITION
FOR SUMMER HIRING

All of the markers that measure the strength of the hiring of new lawyers, such as recruiting for summer programs and summer program outcomes, have remained robust and steady over the last several years. Based on information provided by NALP members about fall 2006 recruiting, the market for entry-level legal employment has maintained the fast pace of the past few years. This is according to Perspectives on Fall 2006 Law Student Recruiting, an annual report on selected aspects of fall recruitment activity and the experiences of both legal employers and law schools published by NALP.

Overall, rates of on-campus interviewing (OCI) and participation in job fairs generally either increased or at least remained relatively constant. The average number of offers made by employers for summer positions remained at 37 offers per firm for the 2007 summer program, the same as for summer 2006, and the highest levels since hiring for summer 2001. Moreover, the acceptance rate for summer programs has dropped to the level of the late nineties, suggesting more competition for summer hires. Among the report's findings:

OCI Activity
About 40 percent of schools reported an increase of 5 percent or more in the number of employers on campus, but a nearly equal percentage, 42 percent, reported a change of less than 5 percent. These figures varied somewhat, but not greatly, by region. On the employer side, 42 percent reported visiting the same number of schools in their recruiting efforts. The nationwide median number of schools at which employers recruited was nine, with firms of 100 or fewer attorneys, and those reporting from the Southeast most likely to have maintained the number of schools they visited.

Job Fairs
Nearly all schools responding participated in one or more job fairs, and 49 percent participated in eight or more. Schools in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions were more likely to participate in eight or more job fairs, with 56 percent and 70 percent, respectively, doing so. In contrast, one-quarter of schools in the West reported that level of participation. Firms in the Northeast and West were most likely to participate in job fairs compared to those in other regions. About 20 percent of responding employers did not participate in any job fairs, but 61 percent reported participating in two or more.

Callbacks, Offers, and Acceptances
Most summer program participants (91 percent) received an offer for an associate position, and 73 percent of these offers were accepted. The median class size for summer programs was six; the average size was 11. Summer programs were the largest in New York City and in Chicago. Both the offer and acceptance rates were similar to those for 2005. Figures for 2006 thus suggest the same larger summer program sizes and similar outcomes seen in the prior two years, but at a level that has not yet matched the average of 14 and a median of 8.5 in 2000. The overall offer rate for the past three years has, however, again matched the 90 percent mark seen in the late 1990s and 2000. Acceptance rates continue to be well above the 66 percent rate of the late 1990s and 2000.

For more information, visit NALP’s Web site.

SURVEY: SOFT SKILLS TRUMP TECHNICAL SKILLS
FOR SUPPORT PROFESSIONALS

When hiring administrative staff, it’s tempting to focus on the technical expertise needed for the position, but a new survey shows that less tangible “soft” skills often are valued more. Sixty-seven percent of human resources (HR) managers polled by OfficeTeam, HR.com, and the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP) said they would hire an applicant with strong soft skills whose technical abilities were lacking; only nine percent would hire someone who had strong technical expertise but weak interpersonal skills. The overwhelming majority (93 percent) of HR managers felt technical skills are easier to teach than soft skills. The full survey results are reported in Fitting In, Standing Out and Building Remarkable Work Teams, a resource guide available from OfficeTeam.

“The results indicate the increasing complexity of the administrative function,” said Sandra P. Chandler CPS, IAAP 2006-07 International President. “Today’s professionals often negotiate with vendors, plan meetings and special events, create presentations, and interview and supervise other employees. While office technology skills are very important, excellent interpersonal abilities are invaluable and usually difficult to teach.” The managers surveyed cited the following soft skills as being most in demand at their companies*:

Diane Domeyer, Executive Director of OfficeTeam, said that while administrative professionals frequently focus on building technical expertise to advance their careers, they also should look at how well they work with others. “The ability to collaborate and build consensus on projects distinguishes top performers.”

When asked which soft skills they would like to improve, IAAP members surveyed ranked analytical skills, verbal communication, negotiation, and problem-solving skills above others.

For more information, visit the Web sites of OfficeTeam, the International Association of Administrative Professionals, and HR.com.

Management Innovations

TYPES OF PEER-TO-PEER INNOVATION

“Point of view is worth 80 IQ points,” quipped Silicon Valley pioneer Alan Kay. One point of view that’s important to include in a comprehensive innovation practice is peer-to-peer innovation, a process that engages outsiders: suppliers, partners, even competitors. As experts in their own fields, says innovation guru Langdon Morris, their expertise likely will complement your organization’s existing knowledge. One common form of peer-to-peer innovation is benchmarking. Learning how others work – including those in other industries – can often inspire improvements in your own methods. Other common peer-to-peer communities are standards groups like ITU and IEEE. They establish standards that become the basis for inter-company collaboration as well as competition across industries. The rarest and most difficult form of peer-to-peer innovation are research partnerships between companies, even though they often deliver significant added value. In the end, says Morris, peer-to-peer relationships can accelerate or improve the products and services that ultimately go to market. They can also be helpful in building a brand. Peer-to-peer innovation can also be a significant stimulus to learning, and bring fresh viewpoints into your innovation process. Since accelerated learning is at the very core of all innovation efforts, Morris says it’s always beneficial to see what your peers are thinking about and working on. It may significantly alter your own visions of what is possible.

Real Innovation.com

INNOVATION AND SIX SIGMA: CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

Talk about an odd couple. Six Sigma’s passion is eliminating mistakes by focusing on operational excellence and “doing things right.” It has a low tolerance for risk because risk increases variation. Innovation, on the other hand, is sloppy by nature. It requires tolerance for risk-taking and even failure. How can they possibly co-exist in the same organization? Harvard Business Review says the solution may be an ambidextrous approach.

Separate innovation initiatives from ongoing continuous improvement efforts. This two-handed approach allows different processes, structures, and cultures to emerge within the same company. An Ambidextrous Organization’s structurally independent project teams must still be integrated into the existing management hierarchy. A tightly integrated senior team must be charged with overseeing both, to make sure the right hand’s activities aren’t at cross-purposes with the left’s. While both teams report to the same executive group, each is managed very differently. In one study, ambidextrous structures were successful an impressive 90 percent of the time. Other models, including cross-functional teams and unsupported Skunk Works-style groups, were successful less than 25 percent of the time. Jim Burnick, leader of Bank of America innovation efforts, is very enthusiastic about the commitment the bank has made to its simultaneous Six Sigma and innovation efforts. If managed properly, he says, Six Sigma and innovation can go hand in hand.

CIO Today, February 27, 2007

Building Buy-In

INTERVIEW WITH ANDY CONWAY
By Paul Trout

Andy Conway is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Princeton University. His observations on intelligence, prospective memory, and idea formation are mind-blowing (pun intended) and highly applicable to understanding how humans in organizations think. “One of the things I do is study individual differences in cognitive ability,” said Conway. Or, as he describes it, “individual differences in intelligence – why some people are smart and some people not so smart. If I say that I study intelligence then it opens up a can of worms.” Read on to find out what else Conway had to say about intelligence, idea generation, and even memory.

Q: How would you define, in your world, cognitive ability, if you couldn’t use the word intelligence?
A: If you couldn’t use the word intelligence, you could define it in a number of different ways: the ability to solve problems, to reason, and to comprehend. An important piece to intelligence is short-term memory and attention. There’s a branch of memory research called prospective memory, which is defined as memory for future events and intentions.

Recent work in prospective memory suggests that people with greater attention ability tend to do better in prospective memory tasks. They follow through on their intentions better than others and part of the difference is an “attentional” thing. It’s the same thing we see in terms of what I would call intelligence. People who are highly intelligent are very focused when they need to be.

Q: So they get things done?
A: They get things done, but they get them done because they have focused attention. As an example, a friend of mine would get so into a book he would be reading on the train on his way to work that sometimes he would miss his stop because his attention would become so focused he would block out everything else around him.

Q: Doesn’t that happen to everybody?
A: To different degrees.

Q: Depending on what they’re interested in?
A: Depending on what they’re interested in but also just depending on their abilities. Some people have a real difficulty doing that, and they experience mind-wandering much more often. They’re easily distracted. Lesser intelligent people are much more easily distracted, and I would predict that those are also the people who fail to follow through on their intentions.

If you look at people just in the workplaces during the day and how often they procrastinate from what their current task goal is, you can see it. They are supposed to be focused on their goals, but then go check e-mail or ESPN.com. A big part of intelligence is the ability to maintain focus on the goal.

Q: How are ideas generated? Humans come up with lots of ideas that generate lots of memories. Why do they remember some ideas and not others?
A: It depends on whether you’re retrieving an old idea or generating a completely novel one. These are two different processes in terms of the neuromechanisms. The first is a lot easier to handle – it’s just memory retrieval. We can map out brain regions that are particularly important for that. To understand why some memories are retrieved and others “forgotten,” you basically just need to identify the right retrieval queue.

For me odor memory is the one really gets me. You walk into a building and you smell a smell and you think, “God, this reminds me of my high school.” It’s just that odor is a retrieval cue.

Memory retrieval in that sense is actually pretty well mapped out in terms of cognitive neuroscience and psychology.

Q: Going deeper, I’m wondering if there’s a difference between memories that are recollected that you actually experienced versus ideas that you never experienced but have thought about.
A: That’s where I was going to go next. That’s the more difficult topic, because how does a completely novel idea come about? There are different schools of thought on this. One idea is that any “novel” idea is really combining old thoughts in a unique way. I could form a new sentence, “I wore a green t-shirt and black boots and ate tuna fish last Friday.” That might be a novel sentence in the history of the world but the pieces aren’t novel.

Q: So an idea is constructed from real experiences in the past?
A: But combining past experiences in a unique way.

Q: So would a person with a high cognitive ability be a person who has experienced many different things and is able to put those things together in unique ways?
A: Yes, and I would say the experience would be more important than the high cognitive ability. The moral is you don’t necessarily have a genius IQ to generate new ideas – it helps. But what’s more important is garnering a lot of different experiences.

Q: There are a lot of things that are proposed within organizations to people, both formally and informally, but what makes other people – within an organization or otherwise – remember an idea that was proposed against the context of the clutter of messages they hear every day?
A: It all comes down to distinctiveness. The main reason that we forget things is interference. We have so much information that we perceive and encode throughout days, weeks, and years that we can’t distinguish one episode from another episode. There’s just too much interference built up so if you can have some level of distinctiveness, you’re going to stand a better chance of having your idea being remembered.

Paul Trout is a Partner with Akina – a firm that helps clients improve their sales, marketing, and leadership effectiveness. This column is an excerpt from a book he is writing on Building Buy-In. He encourages readers to submit case studies, learnings, or questions about Building Buy-In, which may become part of the book and appear in a future column. Contact him via e-mail or by phone at (312) 224-8028.

Caucus Insights

This section features condensed versions of recent discussions in ALA’s Large Firm Administrators Caucus ListServe, which is exclusively for people working in firms with 100 attorneys or more.

THE TOPIC: FORCING PASSWORD CHANGES AT SYSTEM LOGIN

We are probably late in doing this, but we have decided to require changing log-on passwords at regular intervals, which reduces opportunities for inappropriate access to our network. We will start at 180 days. I am just looking to do a quick survey:

1. Do you do this?
2. If so, at what interval?

SELECTED RESPONSES:

Approximately 25 percent of the responses to this question indicated that the firms in question were not presently forcing password changes. The following responses are typical of those who responded affirmatively, and illustrate various approaches and intervals.

1. 45 days. The user starts getting pop-up reminders at 30 days. There was very little complaining when we instituted it three years ago.

2. 90 days. The new one can't use any of the last four passwords that they had used.

3. We enforce password changes every six months. No password can be used again. The password requires eight characters that must include one number, one capital letter and one lower case letter.

4. Yes, every 90 days. A notice appears every day at log-in beginning 15 days before expiration.

5. We require a password change every six months. Following are the standards:

   Passwords must be at least seven characters in length; passwords cannot contain all or part of the user’s login name; passwords must contain characters from three out of the four following categories:

   - Upper case characters (A...Z)
   - Lower case characters (a...z)
   - Numbers (0...9)
   - Special characters (!, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *)

   No part of the password can spell a word found in the dictionary, and no part of the password can be a proper name.

6. We force a change only once a year in January.

7. We require password changes every 90 days, and the password must be at least eight characters in length with at least two of the following: a capital letter, a number, or a punctuation mark. There is a system prompt beginning 14 days before the expiration of your password, reminding you that it's about to expire, and giving the number of days until the expiration. We've done this for years, and receive no complaints.

ALA’s Legal Management Resource Center (LMRC) also has several articles related to this topic. Click here, to learn more.

Special Note: ALA members have free access to the ALA Reference Desk. Send any question on legal management here. Staff will conduct personal research on each question.

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