Regular readers will note that we published a story earlier this week about an employee at LN in the US
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Who posted a piece (now removed) on JobVent.com about what it’s like working at LN.. describing the environment there like “Living in the French Revolution”
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On that individual’s request we have now removed the story.
What worries us though, is the culture at LN that puts such fear into employees.
So much so that the individual has “begged” us to remove the story because of fear of losing his/her job at LN and thus losing much needed health insurance for a family member.
Although this says a lot about the US healthcare system, we won’t get into that…Obama has more than his fair share of problems dealing with that at the moment.
It says a great deal more about a work culture at LN. A culture that seems to terrify a great number of employees into compliant silence. This particular individual made a few comments, we should imagine out of complete frustration with endless management politics and silliness and now fears for their employment status because of some fairly light criticism.
We’ve heard exactly the same complaint from endless Lexis Nexis employees and ex employees over the years. So, what was being said isn’t at all unusual, just indicitive of a companywide culture.
We wonder whether senior management at some stage will try to make a concerted effort to try and change the culture of the company worldwide. Maybe introducing a flatter management culture to try and lessen the politics which as far as we can wiork out takes up a lot of the energy of managers and employees at LN. Imagine if all that energy could be directed towards innovation, in house product development, better customer service and client development.
It does amaze us sometimes. LN is a company with an incredible product base, worldwide dominance in the legal information and now practice management markets. It has a huge wealth if inhouse knowledge (we wonder how much of that is exploited) and the opportunity because of it’s dominant position to grow markets and innovate further .
Yet every time we come across people who have worked at Lexis, people we should add, who have? tended to? go on to fairly senior positions at law firms or other professional organisations or have built new businesses in the legal information arena. They have all complained of the same thing…. that in the end it was the inane internal politics at LN that drove them from the company.
We can’t imagine that every Lexis manager is of the opinion that the law of the jungle is the best way to do business and deal with employees especially in a market that may for the first time mean that they start to lose market share. We hope that these managers whoever they may be, stand up and champion the death of career politics. And instead think about the future of the company and the opportunities presented by the current changes in the legal information markets.
We can give one quick for example…About 10 days ago Martindale’s? social networking site “Connected” sent out a press release singing its own praises telling us that they now had more lawyers in the network than any other dedicated legal networking site. We don’t disbelieve their claim.. with the full weight of LN’s client base it would be hard for them not. This week we noticed a number of posts on Linked In’s “Legal Blogging Group” by members of Connected who having also received the press release decided to revisit the site. Their responses as you will see in an earlier HOB post were underwhelming. None of them complained specifically about the site but the general feeling was.. it’s not giving us anything new, interesting or exciting enough to make us want to be involved.
If that’s the case rather than hiring yet another A type manager full of “good ideas” to sex up the site and then spend the rest of their energies protecting their new “role” we suggest to Connected’s managers to eat a little humble pie and? go to the bottom of the feeding chain – the account managers, the jr IT people, editors and yes even support staff and ask them for their opinions and ideas on how to turn plain old vanilla into a Ben & Jerry’s creation. This would save the company money, improve relations between management and staff and most importantly make those at the bottom of the chain actually feel they have respect and a valuable position in the company. It’s just an idea and probably a stupid one but it might just be the kickstart that Connected needs to make it a service that lawyers want to use but also becomes a byword for legal social networking.
