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I had lunch the other day with a lawyer from a large firm, who was shaking his head.
Bob (not his real name) said that his firm had spent tens of thousands of dollars to implement a network and enable access to the Internet, so that every lawyer had e-mail available from the desktop and could browse the World Wide Web.
Why was he shaking his head? "All this money we spent to put ourselves on the Internet hasn't paid off yet," he sighed.
"We haven't been able to cut one secretarial position." Whoa! Time out.
Was that the purpose of getting everyone online? "Oh, no." was the answer. "We wanted to give our clients better service." That was better; at least we were on the right track, and I dug a bit deeper.
Are the lawyers and clients using e-mail to communicate with one another? Yes, that's working well. Are you more productive? Yes. Are the clients happier? Yes, they seem to be happier.
Okay...if that's the case, then why is the firm using a human resources headcount as the measuring gauge for its technology plans? I definitely stumped him there.
One reason could be that the beancounters at the firm know how to measure things like square footage, billing hours and employees, and have trouble with less tangible assets, such as firm reputation and quality of service.
Another reason could be that Internet is still an experiment for the firm, and what constitutes success for an experiment is different from what it would be for a fully-integrated firm system.
The reality is that the "success" of putting the firm on the Internet will be judged differently from office to office.
Take a website, for example. We know, from surfing the web, that many firms and individuals have gone to great pains to create extensive websites of varying descriptions.
How do they justify the time and money? Are these websites all a success, and if so, how? One conventional measure of success that was adopted early on is the award system.
If your site comes to the attention of the right people, you can win a place on someone's list of the top 100 websites.
A website may earn a four-star rating from some self-appointed Internet reviewer, but let's be clear on the value in that. An award will mean recognition and publicity, valid goals in themselves but not the same thing as success.
Clearly the criteria used by visitors to justify their time browsing a site differ from those used by the sponsoring organization justifying the expense to create and maintain it.
In some ways, a web award is like winning a beauty contest: what counts is not what works well for the contestant but rather what impresses the judges.
In another arena we have the ticket counters, hoping for audience share and growing amounts of traffic at the site. In this game you need a report generated of who visited which page when, and the one with the most stubs at the end of the day wins.
To sponsor the event, your service provider will furnish more lines of statistical data about your website than you will want to look at in your lifetime.
Really, though, mechanical statistics are the least useful evaluation tools. Take counting hits, for instance.
Dale A.J. Dietrich is a lawyer at Smith, Lyons in Toronto, and the firm's webmaster. When Dale reviews the reports of hits on the firm's pages, he properly discounts images and other non-content transfers.
Getting ten thousand hits a month means nothing when a page is comprised of several small pieces and each is counted as a separate hit.
When I analyse hits at my site, I ignore hits on the homepage and look instead at how busy each subpage is.
Even so, since I'm not out to win a popularity contest, I don't use the number of hits as my gauge of success.
Webmasters wonder whether they should be monitoring (1) how many people visit their site, (2) how long people stay before moving off, or (3) how often they come back.
But those figures are all meaningless without some indication of what one hopes to achieve with the website.
If you're creating an Internet presence to attract new clients, what does it matter how often the same viewers return month after month?
If you're throwing articles you've written onto the web to help establish you as an expert in your field, what does it matter whether you win the award for Keenest Lawfirm Website?
Smith, Lyons' website starts with a clean, simple homepage that guides you to different subpages embodying an enormous collection of links to Canadian, American and international legal resourses, a special IT section, and the firm's virtual brochure.
Dale reports getting regular positive feedback from net surfers, and about 50% of this feedback is that the site is "fantastic."
The information he can glean from these visitors is far more useful than the tally of hits. On the other hand, Dale is disappointed that his site is not getting more exposure from the Canadian legal media, who focus more, he feels, on glitz than on guts.
To a large extent he's right, and I'm just as guilty of that as anyone, since in this article I single out his site and thereby overlook dozens of other excellent websites by firms all around the country. But so what?
A mention in a magazine column may be a feather in the cap of the webmaster, and maybe the partners will slyly consider it a victory over the firm down the street, but it's not a measure of success unless attracting media publicity is one of your goals.
If we accept, then, not to gauge success by counting the popular vote or getting gold stars, where do we look?
Dale's website is used by dozens of the firm's own lawyers, students and library staff, and its legal links are the starting point for their ever-increasing Internet-based legal research.
That fact alone may justify the work put into the site, if it helps the members become more efficient researchers than they otherwise would be. The firm will leverage the effort even more in the future.
Dale has an ambitious plan to help the firm take better advantage of its existing technology by creating an intranet. Since the Internet pages are already formatted in HTML, they will form the foundation for the firm's internal database.
You could set up a website that is no more than a homepage, listing your firm name, address, telephone and fax numbers, and directions to your office.
If your goal is to free up your assistant by reducing the number of those four inquiries that steal time every day, and those inquiries are reduced in frequency, then I'd say your website was a success.
Most law firms-Smith, Lyons included-consider the bottom line of success to be whether or not the website generates or maintains legal business for the firm.
Fair enough. The key to measuring success, then, is to ensure that we have some way of tracking that information.
If a client comes to us, or uses us more, or uses us again, or even refers someone to us, because of something we're doing on the Internet, we need a mechanism for obtaining and recording that information. Those statistics are definitely worth keeping.
© 1996 Lewis S. Eisen