Denise Howell is a seasoned appellate and intellectual property litigator based in Los Angeles. Denise writes one of the first and most popular law-related blogs, Bag and Baggage, coined the term "blawg" and helped pioneer podcasting for lawyers. Microcontent obsessed since 2001, she is frequently quoted in the media on legal issues involving intellectual property and technology law. "Sound Policy" is Denise's show at IT Conversations, and it's also what she hopes results from the briefs she submits to court. Email Denise at dhowell@gmail.com.
Dennis Kennedy is a computer lawyer and legal technology expert based in St. Louis, Missouri. An award-winning author, a frequent speaker and a widely-read blogger, he has more than 300 publications on legal, technology and Internet topics, many of which are collected in his e-books. Dennis has been described as someone who knows almost every rock song in existence and, more importantly, how they apply to technology and law. Email Dennis at his gmail address.
Tom Mighell is Senior Counsel and Litigation Technology Support Coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas. He has published the Internet Legal Research Weekly newsletter since 2000 and blogged about the Internet and legal technology at Inter Alia since August of 2002. With Tom's singing, Ernie on guitar and Dennis' encylopedic knowledge of rock music, we may have the beginnings of a good band, if this whole blog thing doesn't work out. Email Tom at tmighell@swbell.net.
Marty Schwimmer left a partnership in the largest trademark practice in the world and founded Schwimmer Mitchell, a full-service IP micro-boutique in Westchester County, New York, where he represents owners of famous and not yet famous trademarks. He founded The Trademark Blog, the first IP law blog and the one with the most pictures. He is the first to come in and the last to leave in his firm. Email Marty at marty@schwimmerlegal.com.
Ernest Svenson practices law with a mid-sized law firm in New Orleans, specializing in business-related lawsuits. Most of his practice takes place in federal court, especially the Eastern District. He is best known for his weblog Ernie the Attorney, which he started as an experiment. Like many experiments it got out of control. Nevertheless, he continues to practice law and, occasionally,
to seek enlightenment. Email Ernest at esvenson@gmail.com.
About this blog
Between Lawyers provides just-in-time group commentary on the issues
raised when technology, culture and the law intersect. We take you
behind the firewalls and conference room doors to show you how
experienced lawyers deal with these issues and help you prepare for
the new challenges we all face. For more, see our introductory post.
Also, if you'd like to learn more about the current discussion and debate on this issue, Om Malik has written an interesting post (that has gotten quite a bit of comment and discussion) on the interplay of splogs and Google's AdSense program.
If you have been looking for another good excuse to put off for another day, or until next year, something that you'd rather avoid, this one might be just the ticket.
Note that some experts are considering the 60 km Ethiopian rift simply the birth of a future ocean and not the splitting of the earth in half. However, experts may not yet have had the opportunity to put the two pieces of the puzzle together as Steve has done. Make your decisions accordingly.
"Last December and this January, the online community came together as never before to help in the aid efforts in South-East Asia. The lessons learned there were put to use, and improved upon, when the other tragic events of the year unfolded.
Can we harness that goodwill, that togetherness, that willingness to help once more?
There's still time to make tax-deductible charitable gifts for 2005.
Eric Mack has started a discussion on another of those seemingly simple questions about copyright fair use that ends up appearing to be far more complicated than you might initially think.
Here's the basic premise:
Eric wants to scan a textbook for a class he's taking and read and annotate it in digital form on his Tablet PC. He's already bought the book. As he started to think about it, he became concerned about whether he could legally do that. As a result, he's started a discussion in the comments to his post and plans to use this topic for a research paper. I encourage you to join in, because these straightforward, practical questions should not be so difficult for people who aren't copyright lawyers to determine.
I'd enjoy seeing whether Eric can get the publisher's answer to his question.
A few observations:
1. Is / should this be any different from underlining, highlighting and annotating the book itself?
3. This question raises the issues of time-shifting and personal convenience not in the areas of video or music where it has been traditionally considered, but in the classic book context. To use Nicholas Negroponte's "bit and atoms" framework, are we seeing copyright law written for a world of atoms run into difficulties as we move into a world of bits.
I invite you to read Eric's post, the comments so far, and add your own thoughts and analysis to the comments for Eric.
Ryan Paul has a great post on Ars Technica called "Congress Has Big Plans for Technology Reform in 2006." The post nicely summarizes the likely legislative proposals for 2006, all of which should be watched and some of which raise the question of what precisely the word "reform" means in the U.S.. Congress. It looks like there will be plenty to debate this year, although I question whether in an election year we'll see "technology reform" make it any further than "tax reform" or "social security reform" made it in 2005.
I like hyperbole as much as the next person (or maybe a little bit more), so I encourage electronic discovery buffs to take a look at Ephraim Schwartz's InfoWorld column called "Document Management Systems Go to Court," in which he reports on two proposed amendments to the federal Rules of Civil Procedure that one expert he spoke with called, if enacted, a "legal Chernobyl."
I've found the legal articles I've read on these proposed amendments to use much more measured and sober tones and analogies. I like this approach much better.
That said, I like the column because it looks at the impact of the rules on the IT departments and business departments of companies rather than solely from the view of lawyers. It's an eye-opening discussion of the practical concerns these rules might have.
I've been trying to take a less alarmist tone on electronic discovery issues (I don't think it's really helpful - I want to talk more about rolling up your sleeves and getting things done), so some of this article feels a little "over the top," but I recommend it especially for IT people who want to get a flavor for what may be coming down the road.
The (fun) money quote:
If you think calling the changes to Rules 26 and 37(f) “Chernobyl” is a bit of hyperbole, well then, you can always sit back, do nothing, and wait for the fallout.
Mining the Value of Metadata in Electronic Discovery
"Mining the Value of Metadata" is the new Thinking E-Discovery column from Dennis Kennedy, Tom Mighell and Evan Schaeffer over at DiscoveryResources.org. It's a wide-ranging discussion with quite a few practical pointers that may save you some future embarrassment.
To paraphrase Mel Brooks' definition of tragedy and comedy, an unlawful police state is when you read my email, and an effective national security program is when we torture you.
Practical Domestic Surveillance and Wiretapping Primer
I must confess that I find the legal analysis I've read on FISA, the NSA and the recent wiretapping news to be hard slogging indeed. Here's an example: "This is meant as an exceedingly tentative analysis, with the purposes of disaggregating the issues and of suggesting that there are several unresolved questions here." I guess so.
Something about this time of year (particularly wicked eggnog?) always gets me thinking about what the next year will hold. So far, I've decided the following are foregone conclusions:
These days there is a lot of hand-wringing about Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that --at least up til recently-- was editable by absolutely anyone. Predictably, this open-source information approach had some weak points. Some people trashed entries which then had to be restored from historical archives, and some people apparently edited entries about themselves to boost their reputation in ways that others regarded as unfair, improper, or misleading. Even the founder of Wikipedia is reported to have engaged in this sort of nefarious ego-editing.
Whether it has problems or not, a lot of intelligent people have started using Wikipedia. Even judges have cited to it in certain cases. Should we be concerned about this?
I had a similar experience recently to the one Ernie talked about in his post today about Martindale-Hubbell. I received the same type of rating letter as Ernie did. In my case, I found that I recognized only a few names in the three-page list and I simply did not know enough about them or their practices to rank them. So, like Ernie, I threw the letter away.
However, even though I kind of like helping with the rankings, I think that not evaluating lawyers I don't know enough about is much better than guessing about ratings or giving people low grades because I nothing about them. As Ernie mentioned, the ranking system is a little obscure and I'm not sure that what it would mean if someone got that "X" rating on ethics.
The ratings always have had a bit of mystery about them and, for many years, you weren't allowed to use your ranking in your marketing materials, not that putting a little "av" in your materials would mean that much to most people.
I've actually used the Internet version of Martindale Hubbell for many years. In most cases, I'm simply looking for the address, phone number or email address of a lawyer whose name I already know.
I've found two negatives in my use of Martindale.com.
First, it really is not a complete list of all lawyers and firms. Often, it seems, solo and small firm lawyers simply are not in the database and lawyers in corporate legal departments are especially hard to find (perhaps this is done intentionally to keep them from being bombarded with resumes). If lawyers are in the database, the amount of information that is available will vary, depending on the type of (paid) listing they have.
For example, I just checked, because I didn't know for sure, whether I am included in the online directory. It turns out that I am. Compare Ernie's listing to mine and you will see that Ernie's firm probably pays for a higher level of listing, because there is much more information about him than there is about me.
Just now, for example, I checked Marty's listing (Marty, you've never mentioned that you went to Harvard), Denise's listing (Berkeley law school - I assumed one of the Southern California schools), and Tom's listing (OK, I knew the Texas undergrad degree, but wasn't sure about UT as well for law school). I would not have guessed Ernie's law school correctly. Memo to the Between Lawyers group: maybe we need to learn a few more details about each other. I also noted that Lawyer X is not listed in the directory.
Which brings me to my second observation: I've found that, invariably, once you get into the Martindale-Hubbell directory, you get distracted and spend time looking up friends, old classmates and the like.
So, over the years, I found that I preferred the West Lawyer Digest (now part of FindLaw) to the Martindale Hubbell database. However, in many instances, I ended up using both.
These days, I tend to do the quick Google search, but even there the results can be unsatisfying, especially if you are looking for a lawyer with a common name or, more likely, the lawyer's firm has done a poor job in managing its Google rankings. And then there's the all-to-common problem of law firms making it way too difficult to find mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of their lawyers. (Memo to law firms: the danger of losing potential business is much higher when you hide lawyers' email addresses than any potential danger of increasing the the amount of spam you might get by making the email addresses readily available).
All of which leads to the reason for this post, which is that you will definitely want to read the Wired GC's post called "Law 2.0 Through the Martindale-Hubbell Telescope" in connection with Ernie's post, my post and any comments on them. The Wired GC has a fascinating take on this issue and I highly recommend his post.
It's also intriguing to think about these issues in terms of Web 2.0 applications. Imagine using the Martindale database in connection with the Google Maps API to map lawyers with "av" ratings (or matching other criteria) in your geographic area. Or, how about using the Rollyo search engine tool to create mini-search engine that searches only from a limited set of legal directories?
The other day I got a 'personal and confidential' letter from Martindale Hubbell. My name and address appeared at the top, but the letter was addressed "Dear Legal Professional." It asked me to anonymously assign rankings to 55 attorneys who practice law in New Orleans. I've filled out many of these surveys in the past fifteen years, carefully pondering what rank to assign to each attorney. This time I quickly scanned over the 3 pages of names, concluded I didn't know enough to make judgments about most of them, then tossed the survey into the garbage.
". . . intervention in a partisan conflict in the Texas House of Representatives using the resources of a Federal agency, the Federal Aviation Administration. This action raises serious concerns under House standards of conduct that preclude use of governmental resources for a political undertaking."
How did President Bush and other high-ranking officials respond to this mis-use of governmental resources?
Did they say something along the lines of: "This is wartime - the government is asking for unprecedented powers over the citizenry, therefore those in government must do their utmost to uphold trust that it will yield power responsibly. Congressman Delay's actions erode that trust"
Resistance to heightened governmental power is not based on a desire to coddle terrorists, but, among other reasons, on a fear that these powers will be abused. These fears are not hypothetical.
Dion Hinchcliffe has supplemented his great list of Web 2.0 apps we mentioned a while back with a post called "More Great Web 2.0 Software. Great stuff and a great starting place to find Web 2.0 apps to test.
Tom and I (Dennis) have been working on two articles on Web 2.0 for the legal profession that will appear soon in this month's issue of Law Practice Today.
"Web 2.0" is one of those classic Internet phenomena where one group of people are calling it yesterday's news or even dead, while another, much larger group are hearing the term for the very first time. While generally it means that we are pretty far into a trend if lawyers are writing about it, the apps and ideas that generally fall under the category of Web 2.0 will, I think, remain quite interesting for quite a while longer, despite reports of the death of Web 2.0. As they say, "Web 2.0 is dead! Long Live Web 2.0!" Don't get hung on the label - look at what is happening and how it might be useful to you.
There's a cautionary tale well worth your consideration in The Wired GC's post and it will help all of us who are trying to determine what Web 2.0 applied to law (or Law 2.0) will look like.
Gary Stein writes about the end of blogs as we know them. He believes that next year this whole blog phenomenon will fold back into the Web, and become part of the plumbing, like RSS. More people are going to read the content published on blogs, but they may not know where the actual content is coming from. That reminds me of a recent Yahoo! survey that found that while a small percentage of Internet users knew about RSS and used it on a daily basis, 27 percent of Internet users consume RSS content through sites like My Yahoo! and My MSN.
There are some great things to think about in this article, such as the rise of syndication and blog networks, as well as the effect of advertising on weblogs.
I spent some time today reading posts on Rob Hyndman's excellent blog and was well-rewarded for my efforts. As sometimes happens in blogging, I also noticed I had been unknowingly echo-blogging some of the same things he's been posting on. I recommend that you take a visit to his blog and subscribe to its feed.
In particular, note well his post called "Community Review of EULAs, which points to EULAscan, a new service that is starting to collect community reviews of End User License Agreements (EULAs).
Even if you don't get that whole wiki thing, put your imagination to the potential benefits of online repositories of comments, tips and pointers about certain types of agreements, legal situations, issues, forms and the like that would provide some helpful basic guidance and education. That's part of the notion of open source lawyering and Rob is one of the lawyers who has blog the most frequently about the open source lawyering concerpt.
On a related note, Tom Mighell pointed out to me a while back a software tool called the EULAlyzer (free personal version available), which will analyze the clickthrough agreements that pop-up in front of you everywhere you turn these days. The EULAlyzer doesn't, at this point, provide a lot of helpful legal analysis (at least in my opinion as someone who reviews these types of agreements), but that's not its purpose - it focuses on highlighting some of the interesting surprises you might find in EULAs these days.
I'm fascinated by how the EULAlyzer suggests a foundation from which a much more interesting legal tool set could be created. Imagine that kind of tool on the web as a service and you will get an idea of some of what people have in mind when they talk about legal apps in a Web 2.0 world.
In the kind of story that fuels the general level of suspicion many people have about advice from huge consulting firms, I saw that CNET has an article called "Gartner's advice: Halt BlackBerry deployments" that makes the usual advice you get from lawyers seem clear and concise.
I can't resist quoting:
The research note advises enterprises to "stop or delay all mission-critical BlackBerry deployments and investments in the platform until RIM's legal position is clarified," because "U.S. BlackBerry users would lose messaging services...and international users would lose message service while traveling in the U.S."
However, Gartner expects the two companies to reach a settlement within three weeks because an agreement would be "in both companies' interests."
There is a possibility that RIM could bypass the patent dispute by deploying a workaround, but Gartner said this path could be "highly problematic."
"RIM claims its workaround is legally sound, but its history in the courts does not inspire confidence. Moreover, end-user validation and implementation would take time, resulting in a temporary loss of service," the research note said.
Gartner advises enterprises "not to sign any agreements that could involve them in the RIM-NTP dispute" and "demand that RIM discloses its workaround plans."
If RIM deployments are not mission-critical, Gartner said, enterprises could take no action for the moment but rather "assess the potential impact of operation outages of unknown duration."
I believe that advice covers every possible side of this issue and hedges every bet.
In fairness, I read only the article and not the full research report.
Perhaps this is the best summary of the report:
"If you read it closely, we're telling people to sort of take a break here and wait until this case settles within two to three weeks," Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told Reuters.
Of course, if you expect the case to settle, as everyone seems to believe these days, why report that the sky is falling?
Between Lawyers's own Tom Mighell has published an excellent, succinct explanation of basic Web 2.0 concepts, along with a great set of examples that might be used by legal researchers and lawyers. Get the details here.
Tom and I (Dennis) also participated in a roundtable article in the new issue of the ABA's Law Practice Today that a group of us created using the Web 2.0 tools at Writely.com. The article, "Looking Back and Looking Forward" looks at some of the technology tools we used and liked in 2005. The issue had a "Best of 2005" theme and Tom and I also polished up Tom's "Strongest Links: Ethics" column from earlier in the year, and added in some new, interesting ethics sites. The new column can be found here.
I'll note that there's been a lot of discussion about wikis and some new legal wiki projects announced in recent days. It's an area to keep your eyes on.
It's highly likely that we will be putting together a roundtable article about the potential uses of Web 2.0 tools in the legal profession for next month's issue of Law Practice Today. If you are interested in being a contributor to that article, please let me know.
Like AKMA and Dennis (and probably everyone who posts with any degree of regularity — and my regularity is anything but), I too get asked about time, time, time, all the time. No one has time. I'm certainly no exception.
Which is why I thought it was pretty funny when Sandra Rosenzweig, the California Lawyer's technology editor, included me in her send recently to "the ten most efficient people I know." (Sandra, we need to see about getting you out more often.) She's doing a story on time management and wanted tips. When I got a little time, I sent her some. Here they are:
Pick the 1 or 2 devices you like best and consolidate your
activities on them. If you can manage most aspects of your life with
one or maybe two devices, you can do almost anything from almost
anywhere and make efficient use of downtime. In my case they're a
cell phone and a PowerBook. You could get away with a laptop alone,
using Skype or Gizmo to handle the phone part, but WiFi penetration
isn't yet ubiquitous and cheap enough to make that work well, and I
spend too much time in the car to make the laptop my only means of
audio communication. Key to this is getting a phone that is both full
featured and easy enough to use that the features don't just languish.
Aside from its traditional function, the features I use the most on
my phone are email and the camera. With this system, I've never felt
the need for a Blackberry or a Treo.
Get a Gmail account. If it makes sense, get several. Eliminating time once spent searching for and/or attempting to organize email is
enormously helpful.
Try making all online communications (e.g., writing and responding
to emails, blogging) a secondary priority, turning to them only when
the day's "offline" communication tasks (meetings, calls, errands) are
complete. Most online communications are meant to be asynchronous
(i.e., unlike offline communications, the participants need not
participate simultaneously). Take advantage. (Can you tell I'm not a
big IM-er? This is why.)
Make your errands come to you rather than vice versa. E.g., four
words that will change your life (if they have not already done so):
home delivery dry cleaning.
Read The Support Economy, then
do your best to help it along (both in the services you use and in
those you may provide).
So that's how I find the occasional two minutes to blog. Tiny investment, immediate dividends. Speaking of which, thanks Sandra, for getting that bloggers who contribute to such pieces are genetically hardwired not to wait for the print production schedule to run its course before posting their bit; that's what the next two spare minutes are for.
Definitely worth a read, as is every post from AKMA. It's almost like a magician revealing how magic tricks are done to non-magicians. ;-) By the way, this post just barely missed the number AKMA mentioned.
If you are interested in reading one of the best blogging about legal blogging pieces I've seen in a while, check out Professor James Maule's The Whys of Blawgs. His blog is another favorite of mine.
And in the Redaction? What Redaction? Department.....
CIA Realizes It's been Using Black Highlighters All These Years
"A report released Tuesday by the CIA's Office of the Inspector General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of thousands of pages of critical intelligence information with black highlighters."
The Grateful Dead ended the controversial reversal in policy made to their long-time concert recording and sharing policy that I mentioned here a few days ago. In other words, the reversal was reversed, as Fred D. mentioned in the comments to my original post.
Fred Wilson sets the story in a traditional holiday framework in his "A Deadhead Carol."
David Hudson's article, "Florida Muzzles Pit Bull Ads," in the ABA Journal eReport tells the detailed story of the recent Florida Supreme Court ruling that the law firm Pape & Chandler's use of a marketing logo and campaign featuring the image of a pit bull violated Florida's Rules of Professional Conduct. It does a great job of talking with people involved in the case and analyzing the arguments and the ruling.
I mention this decision because it iillustrates how difficult it is for lawyers and law firms to do "creative" advertising and, indeed, use the normal types of advertising techniques that are commonplace in advertising for other goods and services. This case should show those outside the legal profession why lawyers seem so reluctant to try standard advertising and marketing approaches and why many inside the profession think the rules create a minefield of potential problems for both the unwary and the well-intentioned.
The money quotes;
[T]he Florida Supreme Court reversed the referee’s ruling, finding the pit-bull ads "demean all lawyers and thereby harm both the legal profession and the public’s trust and confidence in our system of justice."
The state high court relied in part on the comment to Rule 4-7.1, which provides: "A lawyer’s advertisement should provide only useful, factual information presented in a nonsensational manner. Advertisements using slogans … fail to meet these standards and diminish public confidence in the legal system (Note: emphasis mine; quoting the material quoted in the article, which uses the ellipsis)."
The law firm plans to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. It might be interesting to hear Judge Alito's answer to a question about this type of regulation of the legal profession.
My own opinion, for what it's worth, is that rulings such as this one provide a real disincentive for lawyers who want to innovate in almost any aspect of the practice of law, whether they are in Florida or elsewhere, because of the "chilling effect" that they create. I'm curous what others think.
The opinion does seem to only address actual advertisements. As you may have noticed, many law firms have marketing slogans these days. It'll be interesting to see how other Florida firms change their ads in light of this ruling.
It is difficult to estimate the number of articles and blog posts that have used as an example,the way the Grateful Dead allowed its fans to record concerts and share those recordings. Often, the Grateful Dead's approach was used as a counter-point to the "aggressive" policies of the RIAA. Some even suggested that this approach pointed us toward a future "enlightened" approach to fair use and other copyright policies toward music that reflected the ways people actually used and wanted to use music, especially as part of a community. Some even argue that the approach points to a highly-effective alternative business model for musicians.
Recently, Deadheads and more than a few pundits were surprised by a drastic change in the Grateful Dead's policy.
Dave Bollier's post called "The End of a Long, Strange Journey" does a nice job of summarizing the story (and launching a flurry of references to Grateful Dead song titles).
He reports:
As reported in today’s New York Times (November 30, 2005), they are trying to stop downloads of Dead music from an independent website that has made thousands of recordings of Dead concerts available. The band has asked the Live Music Archive – part of the indispensable Internet Archive run by Brewster Kahle – to make the music available for online streaming only, not downloads.
This has enraged many fans, who consider this move a deep violation of trust with the community of fans. They consider it a betrayal of the band’s deepest ideals. A petition drive has been launched calling for a boycott of Grateful Dead recordings and merchandise unless the decision is reversed.
Yes, in other words, and here comes the obligatory Grateful Dead title reference, the fans plan to keep on truckin' this petition until the policy gets changed.
Why is this important? As Bollier says, "The long, strange journey of the Grateful Dead has taken a new twist, one that forces us to ask – Who really owns music, the artists or the fans? Who owns the value (and values) generated by a band and its fan base, and how should that “wealth” be controlled and allocated? "
And the money quote:
A band spokesman, Dennis McNally, told the Times that Internet music-trading is radically different from the previous kind of sharing because the former does not build community: “One-to-one community building, tape trading, is something we’ve always been about. The idea of a massive one-stop Web site that does not build community is not what we had in mind. Our conclusion has been that it doesn’t represent Grateful Dead values.”
For a band that once celebrated its mystical idealism and blithe defiance of mainstream culture, this explanation has the whiff of lawyerly b.s (emphasis mine). Market control and profit maximization were never high on the list of Dead values. The band was cavalier about intellectual property because its members reaped an ample livelihood, not to mention great fun and joy, by concentrating instead on their be-here-now performances and humanity. The Dead’s franchise was based on their passion and purity, forged in collaboration with an adoring fan community. This not only made them a legend. It was a fantastic business model.
Has that been jettisoned by what remains of the Grateful Dead, who now want to cash in on their archives? Is this the real end of the long, strange journey – a fork in the road that the fans will reject?
The outcome of the dispute will say a lot about who really exerts control in the networked environment and where value resides. It’s a struggle that is playing out in countless permutations in other corners of the Internet. For myself, I’m betting that the Deadheads are likely to be the more enduring and powerful champions of Dead values than the band itself, R.I.P.
That's a big question: Who really exerts control in the networked environment and where does value reside? Another big question is whether our current copyright laws balance those interests and answer that question in a way that makes sense in our networked environment and reflects people's reasonable expectations and, in this case, a pattern of practice upon which people have relied?
In any event, I could not agree more with Bollier that "it’s a struggle that is playing out in countless permutations in other corners of the Internet."
It also raises one of my favorite questions: why isn't it OK to purchase/own a recording of a live concert that you bought a ticket for and attended?
Expect fans to be living under a dark star until this issue gets resolved.
I recommend that you read the whole article and the accompanying survey results, but let me highlight two things that struck me about what Brenda described as the "upbeat" results, at least if you are not an associate, of this survey:
1. "Firm leaders still aren't spending much time getting feedback from their clients. Forty-eight percent said they had met with five or fewer of their 20 top-billing clients in the last 12 months to discuss the firm's performance. Six percent said they hadn't met with any."
2. 99% of the responding firms plan to increase billing rates for 2006. "Billing rates will continue to go up. Fifty-three percent of respondents expect to increase billing rates by 5 percent or less; 46 percent anticipate raising them by more than 5 percent."
Food for thought: the combination of these two factors in most, if not all, other businesses would be a recipe for disaster.
Of course, there's much more information to consider in the article and survey results, but I think I might have gotten your attention with the two quotes I highlighted, eh?
Denise Howell
Dennis M. Kennedy
Tom Mighell
Marty Schwimmer
Ernest Svenson
