Element 55: Attention for Attorneys

Well, this is timely, given last night's post on attention in the enterprise:

Josh Porter points to Element55, which has developed Legal55 Automatic Time Capture Enterprise Edition, a system for use in law firms and other professional settings which logs time spent on a wide range of personal productivity applications (including web browsers), phone calls, knowledge management systems and other tools.

My wife practiced law for six years, so I know what a pain in the ass it is for attorneys to track time spent on multiple projects for different clients. Josh and I (and Alex Barnett, among others) are confident there's going to be a substantial market for enterprise attention services like Legal55 because they solve a very painful problem for professionals whose time is highly valuable.

That said, there are still plenty of interesting issues that need to be worked out. For example, Josh feels that attention tools that rely on implicit gestures such as a user's clickstream (like our Attention Recorder) are problematic because, "You can’t tell much from clickstreams: no motivation, no intention. You can’t figure out why someone does something by looking at their clickstreams," and he feels that one of Legal55's strengths is the ability for users to act explicitly by making decisions about the data before it's sent to the service.

I personally believe that widely adopted attention services will rely upon some combination of implicit and explicit gestures, but I question Josh's assertion that you can't infer intention from attention data. I'm not certain that you can, but I don't think we're yet in a position to say that it's impossible.

In contrast, I am certain that explicit gestures are always subject to gaming, which means that although they can add potentially value to the data by providing contextual meaning, they can diminish its value as well if that meaning is misleading, intentionally or not. How do we solve that problem?

And as I asked last night, "Who owns attention data when it's created in an enterprise setting? The employee? The company? Both?"

But putting these differences aside, the larger point is clear: "attention" isn't just a geeky buzzword anymore, and attention services providing tangible value in the real world are here, even if their own developers aren't yet using the term. (Small world: At Tuesday's Attention Meetup I talked with a guy who's interested in creating an attention service for attorneys focused not on time management per se, but tracking browsing habits in order to learn which authors and websites are influential within a firm. Perhaps that's just a new feature for Legal55.)

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data josh+porter element55 enterprise