When I am not working on something related to litigation support, I enjoy reading non-litigation support material as a refreshing change of pace. I usually end up filtering things though the perspective of litigation support. Here are some books I’ve read that I found interesting and what I have taken away from them that is relevant to litigation support.

The Wisdom of Crowds
By James Surowiecki
This book develops two seemingly contradictory but ultimately complementary themes: groups of people who are diverse and independent but with a kind of decentralized organization producing decisions that are superior to those made by any individual member of the groups. Members can collectively produce more options and can have more ways to evaluate options than any one member alone.

Groups comprised of individuals who are dependent on one of the members, and who value conformity over diversity, can become progressively less able to investigate alternatives and can make really bad decisions. New approaches can be disregarded or rationalized. “Deliberation in a groupthink setting has the disturbing effect of not opening people’s minds but of closing them.”

The Take Away: The Wisdom of Crowds articulates what I see as one of the tremendous benefits of ALSP — the broad diversity of its members and their viewpoints. It also offers good food for thought on how we operate our individual businesses or sections. It begs the question, have we become so good at what we do that we stop looking for better ways to do things? Do we tell our supervisors or clients what we think they want to hear or are we willing to step up with some fresh alternatives?
 

Predictable Irrationality, The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions
By Dan Ariely
Ariely develops the theme that humans are influenced by many things when they make decisions — those influences can cause them to make decisions that may appear irrational from the standpoint of traditional economic models but which are consistent and predictable. One of the phenomena he describes is “herding” where we make decisions based on what others decide, not based on our own analysis. He also talked about the role of expectations and stereotypes.

One of the examples explored by Ariely was the treatment of angina pectoris with a surgical procedure called mammary artery ligation. This involved opening the chest at the sternum and tying off the internal mammary artery. It had been used for 20 with years with an apparently high success rate. However, in 1955 Dr. Leonard Cobb tested the procedure by actually performing the surgery on one test group but then just leaving incisions on the chests of patients in the other group. The outcome was that both groups reported the same sense of relief followed by a recurrence of the symptoms in three months. A different set of doctors demonstrated similar results with orthoscopic surgery commonly used to treat a particular arthritic condition of the knee.

The Take Away: Maybe we ought to test or validate the approaches we take to common problems and see if we’re needlessly operating on our patients/clients. For example, I am suspicious of the quality of review provided by manual discovery reviews. I believe that metrics on the current consistency or inconsistency of manual reviews would be very illuminating in the debate about whether other automated and less expensive approaches could provide better or comparable results for less money and less delay.
 

Blink, the Power of Thinking Without Thinking
By Malcolm Gladwell
The first half of this book talks about how powerful first impressions can be — especially the impressions of people who have developed an expertise in a particular area. Gladwell spends the second half of the book discussing how first impressions can get in the way of making the correct decision. One of his examples related to “screened” auditions for orchestra position tryouts. The gender barrier that held back female musicians was broken when the musicians applying for openings tried out from behind a screen where the orchestra leader couldn’t see the gender of who was playing. The net result is that orchestras now produce better music than they did before when they were in effect keeping out half of the qualified applicants.

As another example, Gladwell talked about how car dealers quote higher prices to comparably qualified car shoppers depending on their race and gender. One of the people he interviewed was a leading car salesman who built an enormously successful business by deliberately not basing his approach to potential customers on his preconceptions on what they can afford or what he thinks they want.

The Take Away: This makes me want to take a closer look at how I might be using biases (which we all have) in a way that keeps me from getting the most out of the people I know and work with. In an era of downsizing and restrictions on filling job openings, it’s imperative we get the most out of everyone available to us.
 

The Long Tail, Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
By Chris Anderson
Anderson’s main point is that businesses are now able to use technology to store and deliver product in a way that makes far more options available to the consumers and that enlarges the businesses overall revenue and profitability. He uses the examples of Amazon (online and electronic book publisher), Ecipse (digital jukebox) and eBay. A Barnes & Noble superstore carries about 100,000 titles, but over a quarter of Amazon’s sales come from products that are outside its top 100,000 items. The “long tail” refers to the type of frequency distribution where there is a long tail trailing off to the right from the “head” of the graph created by the most popular items. Businesses are selling more items at lower individual volumes.

The Take Away: I have often thought that the real growth in litigation support will lie in lowering the transaction costs associated with automating individual cases or portions of cases. This will make it possible to implement best practices approaches to all cases, not just mid-to large-sized cases. It wasn’t that long ago that only the largest cases in which automation was used were the largest cases involving the largest corporation. Remember the whale — it’s the largest mammal on earth and it got that way eating plankton. A steady diet of small to mid-sized matter is probably better for the people in a litigation support department than the feast-or-famine work cycle associated with large and mega cases. We just need to make it as easy for clients to have data processed as it is to order a book on Amazon. The prevalence of electronic data ought to make it possible to achieve orders of magnitude reductions in processing costs.

Kindle
I’m coming clean and admitting I’m hooked on Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader. It includes no-fee wireless connectivity that lets me receive electronic versions of books I order on Amazon, literally within a minute. Amazon also offers an economic incentive to use Kindle — I read each of the above books on my Kindle and each of them cost less than $10. Plus, I can keep them all on my Kindle where I have full text search, highlighting and annotation capabilities. My reading habits have grown to include far more non-fiction than I used to read. On business trips I am usually reading one book on the outbound leg and another on the return leg — I used to buy books in airport news stands where the total selection might be as low as 50 books or as high as a few thousand. Now I can peruse over 100,000 titles and have immediate access to them.

The Take Away: Kindle sets a high bar in terms of customer convenience and providing a whole new delivery form. We ought to consider the Kindle model as a challenge to come up with ways to improve our own offerings by a comparable order of magnitude.