Despite the fact that I’m remodeling my house and completely replacing all of my audio visual infrastructure, my friend Ryan has just gone through a horrific experience buying a television online.  Ryan, glad you are finally up and running.

While cruising around looking for accessories for my new favorite gadget, I stumbled across some interesting pricing regarding a couple of iPhone accessories. 

While looking for a bluetooth headset, I notice the same headset available on both the Apple site and the AT&T Wireless site.  On the AT&T site, the same headset is $30 more expensive!

Similiarly, the dock for the iPhone on the Apple site is $29 bucks, while on the AT&T site it is $49 bucks.  Might be a slightly larger dock, but functionality looks the same.

Note to self… Never buy accessories from AT&T.  Wow. 

If you’ve been following along my series on Law Firm 2.0, you’ve probably noticed that I advocate decreased billings to clients, more efficiencies in some types of transactions as well as finally addressing the associate retention issue. One reaction could be that I advocate a transfer of wealth from law firm partners to their associates and clients. This isn’t the case.

What I advocate is that law firms start running their businesses more efficiently. Partners can retain and / or increase their compensation and clients can pay less. One area to focus on is the legacy cost structures that have been put in place.

Probably the biggest area for improvement is in real estate holdings (see: Brobeck). Why do law firms have large, expensive, fancy offices? Who are they for? They certainly aren’t for the clients, although I can only speak for the corporate side of the legal house.

I took a straw poll of 20 corporate lawyers or so (yes I realize that this is a biased sample, but it is still informative) and asked them “how many times a month do you see you clients face-to-face in your own office?” The vast majority of the answers were “uh, none.” I then asked how many times they “saw clients face-to-face in a conference room at their law firm” and the answers ranged from 0-3 times a month.

Times have changed. This isn’t a face-to-face business anymore. And the very few clients who ever step into their lawyers’ offices – are they more impressed with a fancy building or controlled costs? Lawyers who represent start ups are frequently at the company’s offices for board meetings and the like, so why do firms have to have these massive offices?

And what’s worse is location. Think of how many lawyers are commuting hours a day to get to offices in locations where they don’t want to live. The firms are paying for office space for people who don’t want to be there. What?

Why not go to a more distributed work force with cheaper satellite offices in locations where folks want to work? Why not let folks work from home? Concentrate on having conference rooms in smaller, cheaper offices and go to cubes and or small private offices. Not only would the firms save a ton on real estate costs, but improve morale and help some of the associate retention problem, as folks would not be commuting so much. This is especially true in the Silicon Valley. I realize that each lawyer would need some time at the main office for training purposes, but why is a competent mid-level or senior associate being dragged down to Palo Alto every day to work in an office that they’d rather forget? And we all know that firms have partners and other counsel working out of their homes with local phone numbers, so let’s just be open about it and let everyone do it.

This model works well for investment bankers and consultants, why not lawyers?

Moving away from the real estate considerations, let’s look to perhaps the most inefficiently used resource at law firms today: the legal secretary. Once upon a time, these professionals were used for nearly everything. These weren’t menial tasks, rather things like document production and other high value items. Today, everyone types and many lawyers simply use their assistants to answer phones and calendar items. As email has become pervasive, phone calls have dramatically decreased and calendaring can be done by the lawyer. What about bringing them back into the high value fold and have them perform the closing mechanics of financing deals? Several comments to this series have said if VCs want to save on costs, than VCs should act as closing agent on their deals. (FYI, not going to happen, but nice try). Instead let’s have the secretaries trained to do something they are more than qualified to do. While they are at it, they can also create the transaction binders (or pdfs) of the deal documents. Why are billable folks performing these tasks at all?

There are also other expenses that I believe outweigh their returns to the law firms. Summer associate programs, firm retreats, etc. all are expensive propositions. I believe that some firms have tailored these back to rational levels, but some are still pretending like it is the late 1990’s all over again.

This is just a short list of things an outsider sees. I’m sure there are other areas that are ripe for improvement, but this would be a good start.

While at lunch today with Ryan, we began a discussion about the debt markets (not good) and how this might affect private equity shops.  I had heard rumblings from my hometown of Detroit that Cerberus Capital might be a little light in the cash flow department with respect to its investment in Chrysler. 

It was at that point that I admitted to Ryan that I really didn’t know how to correctly pronounce the name "Cerberus" and asked for a little guidance.  Ryan, being the ultra-nerd that he is (and I love him for it) began to tell me that Cerberus was the name for the Hound of Hades.  Cerberus stood at the gates of hell with its three heads and guarded the place.

Which led me to the question of "who exactly are they trying to keep out of Hell?  If there was one club that I thought would always offer me membership, it was that one."

Ryan didn’t know the answer.  Now I know how his son, Quinn, must feel.    If you know the answer, please let us know.

I mean it.  Really.  And this comes from a guy who hated the first version and stuck with his Windows 6.1-enabled Motorola Q2.

I was one of the few people in the country who had a great iPhone experience.  I showed up at my local Apple store on Saturday morning at 9:30am.   There was a six person line and they had units in stock.  The sign up process was easy and there were no software glitches as widely reported. 

So why do I absolutely love this device?

1.  Keyboard:  I hated the previous version.  I don’t know if it is the software or hardware, but suddenly I can type with acceptable accuracy.  The predictive text software really works well.

2.  Phone call quality:  Much improved over the previous version and light years better than my previous phone.  The speaker phone works great and you can even listen to music on it. 

3.  GPS:  The mapping programs works great, but several other applications also use the "where am I now" feature, from yellow pages, to weather, to Twitter clients to taking photos.  There are others, too.  I’m a fan of the device being truly location sensitive.

4. The App Store:  This is the winner.  Even without the first three factors, this alone is the game changer in mobile hardware industry.  The apps are high quality, reasonably priced (or free) and I’m just starting to use them.  Early thoughts:

- Pandora:  If you read my prior post on Pandora, you know that I’m a huge fan.  I lamented the fact that I don’t have Pandora in my car.  Now because of my iPhone, I do.  I’m stoked. 

- Texas Hold ‘em:  I’ve played for years.  This is the first good mobile version that I’ve ever played.

- Facebook: Incredibly slick implementation. 

- Shazam:  I’ve seen magic.  This program may top them all.  You hold your iPhone up to any musical source and it tells you what song you are listening to.  For years I’ve seen companies try to solve this problem.  This is the first to do it.  It really works.

- NetNews Wire:  Our buddies at Newsgator have really something special on their hands.  Check out Brad’s post.

YI haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the App Store, so who knows what I’ll find tomorrow.  It’s only day number two, but I’ve never fallen so heavy and so hard for a piece of equipment before.  Wow.  Bravo, Apple.

Sounds like the next album from an up and coming indie band, but no, it’s called Colorado, it’s called today and it happened while making the ascent to Mount Belford.

I’m on vacation in southern Colorado hiking with my good friend Eric Jensen.  Yes, you can tease me for being on my computer, or you can go rob my house, either one is acceptable (please don’t take the cat or let her out). 

That being said, nothing quite makes my day like waking up at 3am, hitting the trail at 4:30am and then having near white-out conditions at 7:30am while you are at 14,000 feet. 

In a future post, I’ll share some pictures of "beautiful" Mount Bedford and of Mount Yale, which we bagged yesterday under great conditions. 

For those of you familiar with Mt. Belford, you’ll want to know if Mount Oxford was part of the day.  Uh, no.  Just happy to get safely back to the car.  Not today. 

Given my passion for all things music, I’ve always wanted to find a great VC deal to invest in.  Ryan and I have spent about 7 years looking for one and finally found what we think is an amazing company.

See our Foundry Group posting on the investment.  Needless to say, I’m totally geeked. 

Along with venture capital, music and stirring up some occasional controversy, I also have a passion for food.  

Born and raised outside Detroit, I can’t honestly say that I was brought up a "Foodie," but I certainly can’t complain about mom’s cooking.  The ten years that I spent in San Francisco Bay area definitely honed my culinary acumen.  To which I decided to start posting some review on restaurants I hit in my travels.

Last night, I had the pleasure of dining with Mike Steinberg at Cut in Beverly Hills.  It’s part of the Wolfgang Puck empire and normally I’d be a bit suspicious.  My previous Wolfgang Puck experiences included the awful Spago in Palo Alto, CA (thankfully now deceased) and the wretched Wolfgang Puck Grill in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.  Plus, despite my proclivity to watch Iron Chef, I have general negative connotations about celebrity chefs.

Well Cut changed all that.  Wow, what a great meal.  It’s a steakhouse, but might be the best one that I’ve been to.  They bring out the beef to the table and show you raw, what you are about to eat.  Mike and I split a wonderful and highly tastes Blue Fin Tuna Tartare and then at Mike’s suggestion ordered the Butter Lettuce Salad. 

Butter lettuce salad you ask?  How boring?  Uh, no.  It was perhaps the best dressing that I’ve had on a salad (champagne herb vinaigrette, if you must know).

Next came the big boy toys – the meat.  We decide to go Kobe beef, one American from Snake River Farms in Idaho and one a true Japanese imported steak from Kyushu.

I’m a huge Kobe fan and was shocked when both Mike and I preferred the American version over the Japanese version, although both were superlative.

With any great steak, a nice Cab is in order and we did ourselves proud with a 2005 Ghost Block.  Yummy.

Dessert was the cheese plate, which was wonderful and some crazy banana thing that I shouldn’t have ordered as I was full.

Service was wonderful, too.  Friendly, not stuffy and very competent.  I’m sold.  If you can get in, go for it. 

We just posted a blog on Gnip, one of our latest investments over at the Foundry Group site.

I’m really excited about this company.  As a heavy web applications user, my marginal enjoyment of these applications has begun to decrease as scalability issues have exponentially increased.  Take a read, it’s really a great idea and we are fortunate to be part of their venture syndicate.