Does It Compute Blog Reveals Cracks At LN’s Practice Management Division

Once again, Lexis Nexis has undertaken a significant shakeup of its Practice Management division. The heads of Front Office and Back Office, Charlie Rodgers and Loretta Rupert, respectively, are out or sidelined (Loretta is reportedly in “social networking” whatever that is – besides spending your day on FaceBook). So whatever you thought of Charlie and Loretta, the last remaining “industry people” at a management level in the Time Matters structure are gone. Rob Metcalfe, who was brought in to “integrate” PCLaw is gone. The “Global” practice management group, headquartered in London, is dissolved and has been brought back to the US. The various Front Office/Back Office subdivisions have been fused and are now headed by Jacob Paransky (who knows nothing about the actual programs). Initial reactions to the new overall head of Practice Management, Phil Livingston, seem to be very positive. Livingston remade himself as a money man and CFO after being a third string tackle on the 1981 Oakland Raiders SuperBowl team who according to his bio “specialized in the practice squad” and is not even listed on the 1981 Oakland Raiders roster.

This is yet another sign that LexisNexis is absolutely clueless as to what to do with Time Matters (relatively speaking, PCLaw is in much better shape). Just about everybody at a managerial level with industry experience is gone, and the marketeers and bean counters seem to be in charge. So, a piece of advice: when you have a ship drifting in the middle of the ocean, rudderless, the way to fix it is NOT to bring in a bunch of (say) automobile engineers and bean counters who don’t even know what a rudder is (replacing the rudder will be expensive, after all). One of the smartest things the new managers and executives could do would be to schedule and take the 3-day Certified Independent Consultant class. It would teach them the product and also some of the issues involved in getting the most out of it.

The more serious issue, however, is whether Lexis has lost control of the Time Matters code, which seems increasingly likely. What does this mean? In a large, complex program such as Time Matters, any particular line of code is linked to, refers to, and has an effect on, other parts of the code. These links are known as dependencies. So if you change one line of code to fix a bug, you have to look at all the dependencies to see what other effects that change may have. Losing control of the code means that you have no way of knowing when making one apparently small change to fix a particular problem will have much larger and unexpected effects elsewhere, essentially creating new bugs. (The “butterfly effect” applied to software.) This is manifestly what happened in the infamous 9.3 service release, where “fixes” wound up corrupting data.