Another Shakeup at Lexis Nexis

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.

If you believe that computer products, like people, have life cycles, the conclusion may well be that Time Matters has reached, or is nearing, the end of its natural life cycle.

Comments

[frank rivera]

Since no one will say it I will.

Charlie and Loretta may be the last of the original TM crew but they were actually new comers to TM when TM was sold to Lexis-Nexis.

If you want someone to blame for what Time Matters has become then look no further. Billing Matters was Loretta's pet project and a mess from the start. She was after all the product manager. Charlie was what I call a 90s salesman with little clue of what made Time Mattes successful. Release for cash flow sake, fix the bugs later was his approach. Funny thing about software development. You end up creating more bugs than new features. If you release too early ... well you know.

Charlie and Loretta were NEVER really team players and used every opportunity to undermine former CEO and Founder Bob Butler to further their own careers with Lexis-Nexis. Bob is partially at fault for not canning them when he had the chance. Their agenda was pretty clear to me and I only worked with Charlie for a short time. Back then I told him I'd give him a month. What I didn't know was Lexis was going to buy Time Matters which would give him and Loretta the the perfect environment to work in, chaos. After the dust settled after the merger they had Lexis fooled into thinking they were major contributing factors to its success even though they were relatively new hires.

The truth always seems to bubble to the surface and the company eventually makes the necessary changes in personal, unfortunately the product may never recover. During the whole negotiations with Lexis I had a strange feeling in my gut about the whole thing so I decided to ask for a lot to stay on and if they didn't agree I would leave and work for Sun Microsystems who had already made me an offer. The best decision I cold have made in my opinion.

Loretta's value to Time Matters would better be served working elsewhere. Beware of those who move up too quickly without a proven track record. They are usually over their heads and will do more harm than good.

Just my 2 cents

Frank Rivera
Former Software Architect Time Matters (before Lexis-Nexis)

[Brent A. Blanchard, Esq.]

I am still sticking with TM/BM 6 with all the patches, largely on a "devil you know" basis as well as a rationale of not wanting to throw good money after bad.

My problems included periodic database corruptions, eventually ending in discovering that about a DOZEN prior data backups were themselves corrupt and would not work at all. I lost several month's worth of data.

Other cute features have included data fields in my check layouts printing random dates and times the checks were printed (I wanted that data on my checkstubs). I ignore those printouts now.

TM *almost* had me at V8, but I was totally soured on acting as an unpaid Beta tester for too many other software products (notably MS software crashing MS operating systems, and vice versa), so I waited and closely watched the actual user reviews at TechnoLawyer (www.technolawyer.com). I ignored the Lexis-Nexis news releases.

Glad I did. Now I know the human reasons behind the inability of L-N to put out a truly FIXED TM/BM product. Thank you.