"Sharepoint Development Best Practices” at LegalTech

These are my notes from my first session at LegalTech in New York, a session on the Advanced IT Track. It is a major experiment in terms of connectivity for me—I hope this looks all right as it is being moved around between three devices to get posted.

Overall the session was quite informative and addressed some innovative ways of using SharePoint as a platform for internal and external content sharing and development.

Presenters:

• Guy Wiggins, Director of Practice Management (and KM expert) at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP
• Bob Beach, HubbardLaw
• Steve Fletcher, CIO, Parker Poe

The session description:

"Industry leaders discuss how their firms are leveraging SharePoint technology to serve clients and bring value to the firm."

"Panelists share lessons learned and suggestions for best practices."

The introduction noted both general the hash tag #ltny and a session-specific one #ait1

Sharepoint for Business Development at Parker Poe

Steve Fletcher said that Sharepoint is not just an intranet for HR forms or for office pages. It can be used for client service and business development. Sharepoint is used to generate targeted news and events.

Parker Poe is a 225-attorney firm with offices in the South. They compete with much larger firms.

The Parker Poe intranet "Parkway" is a significant business development tool. Their attorneys show it to clients.

Parkway is used for Client Service teams, for instance, for targeted clients, that have news and information about that target.

They do resort development work in the Caribbean. From the main practice screen for the Resort and & Hospitality page you can browse to different regions ("Caribbean") and then islands/countries (e.g.,"Anguilla"). The site pulls in weather and local news through RSS feeds. There are separate sections for resorts, golf courses, articles, legislation, local contacts, development resources, local contacts (from Interaction). Organizes firm information around "Location." They use it as a client development tool and show it to clients to identify how they work. The sites have won the firm business.

The resort sites are run by one technically savvy person located in the Resort & Hospitality area. It was developed by a team of five people including individuals from Research & Library Services, IT, Business Development, and a Practice area rep.

This firm also has dynamically created "Client Sites."

"Client Sites" provide links to unpaid invoices, invoice history, and relationships from Interaction. You can look at individual matters, documents created for the client. A News tab goes to an RSS based on the top 3-5 articles using client name as a search. He plans to bring in West Monitor information in another tab. West Monitor shows client company information identifying what type of legal work that client has, which law firms they are using, litigation/judges, and a lot more.

They also publish their own news through Business Development. One of the keys to success has been a joint venture of Business Development, Marketing, and IT. BD is responsible for delivering news and vets / targets the news. Can limit news to particular groups of attorneys (e.g., partners). They use the vendor"ShiftCentral" to serve as a source of edited news about practice areas or teams. It comes in as an RSS feed, delivered to a particular practice area.

People will use a portal if the information there is timely and creative and useful.

Steve Fletcher has a business development background and it showed in the skill with which his firm has provided BD-appropriate information to his firm. "Parkway works as a business development tool because Business Development helped develop it."

AMS Legal, a big vendor in the space, is Parker Poe's choice for extranets.

Parke Poe uses XMLaw webparts to display iManage folders.

They are using Yahoo weather and a Caribbean news site's RSS feeds. There is no central repository or control over the feeds and they sometimes break. ShiftCentral providing targeted news is some of the most valuable.

Guy Wiggins on Provisioning Made Easy

Provisioning refers to the process of supplying and maintaining passwords. Make it as easy for the end user as possible. Letting paralegals and site administrators add users without IT is a basic requirement. You need to have separate Active Directory structures.

His firm decided to use "Epok for SharePoint." Site administrators can invite people to the site. They then get a page providing provisioning training and letting them create their own passwords. It's a two-step verification, first of the email address, then another email has the link to get them in.

Epok has password reset ability. Microsoft IAG Gateway provides good access to Microsoft.

A best practice is to require legal terms of use that contain disclaimers and limit liability. Epok has an audit trail for acceptance of terms. Sites can expire automatically.

A big consideration in designing the extranet is site collections. The best practice is to have a Site Collection for each extranet. Automatic site provisioning is possible but only necessary if there are hundreds of sites.

If you'll have a lot of documents, data, you should create a dedicated SQL database to that site. No SQL database should be over 100 gigs.

Do you need detailed reporting on visitors and activities? The best practice is to be aware of auditing processes and turn it on if needed. What you can audit is limited in WSS; there are good examples of code if you have a good programmer who knows Sharepoint.

Sharing information from internal to external

Guy claims (without strong certainty in his voice) that XMLaw is the only vendor known to have synced up a legal intranet and an extranet. Extranets should reflect the client's look and feel. Another "best practice" is to set up alerts on key lists so that the client knows when new content is being added (this is the aspect of Sharepoint most like a wiki or other Web 2.0 platform).

Where you can, create a custom solution that solves a particular client problem. Even legal departments in big publicly traded companies may lack IT resources to do such things themselves. A good extranet site can lead to more work for your firm.

Resources include Codeplex External Collaboration Toolkit; XMLaw/Hubbard One Oneview Extranet; and EPOK Edition for SharePoint. Guy does not recommend that small firms undertake this, or that anyone undertake it lightly. It's best if you can leverage existing SharePoint skills and knowledge.

Bob Beach

Bob is often surprised at how little thought goes into providing meaningful content through the portal.

Bob has a six-point bulleted list titled "5 Rules for Great Content." (He made fun of himself for this so I don't have to). Great content is:

• Fresh and Relevant

• Vetted (manually or through workflow)

• Categorized (by practice, department, office)

• Targeted (by user, internal or external)

• Prioritized / highlighted (by importance, timeliness)

• Readily Available (no manual effort)

An extranet is a real opportunity to interact with your firm. Having a place to grab a document is not achieving the "enhance client relations" goal. Vetted content is much more effective. News stories should provide distinct value for that user. You have to deal with information overload. Personalization helps address that. iGoogle or myYahoo are really good for users. Attorneys would rather have someone else think about what information they need. Must be able to tag or attach metadata to the content.

Capturing blogs, wikis, discussion threads is happening. Categorizing and tagging it will help make it great. (I agree but in SharePoint 2007 there is no effective way to have cross-site or even cross-list tagging. You certainly can't look at who made what tags or use the categories on any but the site you are on).

Content Management in MOSS

Site columns provide consistent possible source of categorization, tagging, and metadata.
Content Types lets you define "classes" of communications with common attributes and policies. Can define the metadata and workflow/retention policies. He considers these an important part of configuring a robust content management capability.

User Profile data can drive targeting and what news shows on a portal page.
Presentation can be as important as the data itself. Browsing for content is still really important for people.

Sharepoint 2010 will have some improved content management capabilities. Metadata and taxonomies can be defined for the whole enterprise. You can navigate through categories. There will be better blogs and wikis for capturing information. Social feedback will allow rating of documents, discussions, posts, and so forth.

User profiles are more scalable, as are lists and libraries.

The panel feels that Extranet & Intranet usage analysis is a significant weakness of SharePoint.

Posting from iPhone

I have mentioned that I'll be presenting at LegalTech. I'll also be
blogging. That explains this post, which is a test from my iPhone.
We're on our own for wifi so I hope to transfer from laptop to phone
and then here.

My apologies for the complete lack of substantive content.

PreCydent Folds

I was sorry to come across this post on the Law Librarian Blog about PreCydent going out of business. As I noted in 2008, the company had an impressive search engine with outstanding relevancy ranking compared to other tools. I imagine that the entrance of Google into legal research, and perhaps the onset of Westlaw and Lexis new search engines as profiled in the New York Times earlier this week, were contributing factors.

There's an awful lot of law out there, and more is coming out all the time. It's not easy to compete with the big boys.

Legal Tech New York 2010; Using Internet Resources To Your Advantage

I'll be presenting for the first time at LegalTech New York 2010, on February 1 in "Sutton South."

It should be an interesting panel, moderated by Rob Saccone (very formerly of my firm and now head of XMLaw), with Patrick DiDomenico a/k/a "LawyerKM," and Tom Baldwin.

We'll be discussing how various web-based tools and approaches fit into knowledge processes of increasing awareness and gathering information, storing information and resources so they can be effectively reused, organizing information so that it can be found and sparks connections, and sharing information.

In other words, How do you get the right information at the right time? How do you reduce noise and find what's really relevant to you in your daily work? How do you sort the good stuff from the bad and make sure that you keep the good stuff?

We're not limited to one side of the firewall here. I'll be discussing the use of social collaborative tools for knowledge sharing at my firm, and also how I use Twitter and the related phenomena of hashtags, lists, and Twitter applications to stay on top of developments in my field.

Speaking of Twitter, I've seen some confusion around the hashtag--people are converging on #ltny however.

Hope to see you there!

Google's New Caselaw Search

Google's massive size and repeatedly demonstrated ability to move into and dominate new areas of information and search suggest that any effort by it even to dip its toe into the ocean of the law should be taken seriously.

As such, as has been amply noted by many others, and as officially announced in its blog, Google's new case search should be examined as a free source of many years of federal and state appellate caselaw. To access it, go to Google Scholar, and select the "Legal Opinions and Journals" button, or just search, caselaw is now included.

Below I quickly address the new tool's coverage of recent cases; its relevancy ranking; potential use of the case hyperlinks; and pin cites.

Scope of Search

As pointed out by Carole Levitt of "Internet for Lawyers," Google has buried some information about the scope of the search on its Google Scholar Help page:

"Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read opinions for US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791 (please check back periodically for updates to coverage information). In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available."

I'm a Massachusetts lawyer, so of course today I assessed its recent coverage in an area I know something about, Massachusetts case law. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court archive allows free access to recent opinions: Google Scholar contains the Commonwealth v. Avila case issued September 15, 2009 (roughly two months ago) but not the Commonwealth v. Odgren case (available temporarily free from Westlaw here) issued October 15, 2009 or the Massachusetts Appeals Court case Sheriff of Suffolk County v. AFSCME COUNCIL 93, LOCAL 419 (temporarily here) issued October 1, 2009. Oddly Google Scholar knows about the Odgren case as a citation--perhaps more functionality will be unveiled about this aspect of the tool in future months. Similar treatment is found for the even more recent SJC slip opinions, that is, Google Scholar knows about the citation but not the case.

Relevancy and Case Significance

The commentators have noted that Google is not simply turning its regular algorithm loose on the text of legal opinions. Rather, the relevancy ranking clearly shows that some serious thought and attention has been paid to how the legal system works. My search for in personam jurisdiction produced results similarly impressive to those I had seen with Precydent. I would guess that Google tracks the number of citations in other courts to a given case and factors that into its algorithm.

Case Hyperlinks

I noticed that each case has a unique not-horribly-long URL. For instance, the URL for Cement-Lock LLC v. Gas Technology Institute, 523 F. Supp. 2d 827 (N.D. Ill. 2007) is:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15113571434740791015

The broad coverage and solidity of Google technology suggests that such hyperlinks may be an excellent tool in the kit of those who write in about legal issues in HTML-enabled text, such as legal bloggers and lawyers working with internal blogs and wikis. No login is needed to access the case (thanks Ernie the Attorney for pointing that out).

Pin Cites

I've previously noted in my review of PreCydent that pin cites are really important for legal research and writing. Google Scholar cases indicate where the page breaks are in the original text.

Client-Facing Knowledge Management

I'm continuing in a KM peer group meeting in a discussion on client-facing knowledge management. There was a good presentation about client facing KM including a very impressive instance of law department and law firm collaboration in KM, training, and beyond.

How can client-facing KM add value and get clients to work more closely with the firm?

KM is perceived as delivering value to internal clients. It can also be structured to deliver value directly to clients.

Our natural tendency may be to focus on the internal clients but there are opportunities with external clients.

It is hard to identify value--"one man's meat [tofu] is another man's poison." Qualitative measurements of value are more appropriate but entail repeated conversations. Ask if particular KM initiatives are delivering value.

What will value look like in the future? Is the recession a temporary dip or a transformational event?

Clients' demands have clearly changed as a result of the recession.

There are three tiers of client-facing opportunities. Every client expects firms to have models, samples, and extranets as commodity services. Above that some KM initiative have brand distinguishing initiatives (e.g., "Blue Flag"). Above that are "bespoke" KM tools such as expert systems that can identify answers or advice to clients through a dialogue (as those discussed at ILTA). Bespoke systems are the most challenging and the most rewarding.

You can't charge for commodity level of services.

Quoting the ACC Value Challenge, "corporate clients want and need value driven, high quality legal services that deliver solutions for a reasonable cost and develop lawyers as counselors (not just content-providers), advocates (not just process-doers) and professional partners." "The problem is not cost per se, but the fact that cost is disconnected from value."

GCs historically have not had good answers when asked for a definite number for annual legal spend. It is not always the lowest cost that a GC looks for, as a predictable cost is of high value to them as well.

What can KM do?

A specific client will have a specific view of what KM can do for them. One classic challenge is resistance from the relationship partner in getting information about what the client needs. Can you proactively get information about KM needs of client? KM managers would have to pitch the internal client. You need to be persistent. It's acceptable to start with small initiatives and build from there.

Case Study

A large company had a GC who had come from a large firm with a strong KM program. He wanted to build a stronger legal department that would allow the in-house team to do more of the legal work themselves. They developed a KM strategy for five business units in six weeks.

Initiatives included a portal, knowledge bank, matter management, expertise management, and enterprise search. They needed some place where the hundreds of in-house lawyers could share knowledge. They created a global knowledge management officer. The GKMO built a global network of "knowledge champions" in different business units. The law department had set of objectives that, after the GKMO came in, included concrete KM goals. KM was seen as a way to link outside counsel and the law department. They have built out four of the five systems (leaving matter management for future development). The company now has sophisticated internal knowledge management.

Their goal was to integrate law department and law firm systems seamlessly through a personalized portal. It's hard for clients to have a view of the law firm's work if they have to visit multiple portals each with their own passwords. They want to be able to search their internal and law-firm created content in their own portal. They also wanted a comprehensive training portfolio.

The value they were seeking was in making their lawyers more effective and efficient; managing their legal spend; improving their lawyers' skill levels; and expanding their knowledge repositories.

One law firm that had a large client team for that company was asked to provide a training program. The discussion started with substantive KM (forms, models and samples) but expanded into communication models, e-billing, and more.

After some development the two had a day-long summit with extensive participation by senior leaders on both sides. The goals for the summit was to deepen the relationship, find some mutually beneficial outcomes, and become a higher performing virtual team. The firm developed bios for the law department staff. The conversation was very valuable. The summit gave each side a better understanding of the drivers in each enterprise. There are now formal client team coordinators for other clients.

The law firm's KM team had been formulating its strategy for providing KM support. The big connection was on the training front. KM had involved training, both substantively and in terms of training processes. KM participated in trainings by including model documents in them and by quarterbacking the communications (with the marketing department). The firm has also proposed managing CLE credits for the law department. They also found third-party trainings that law department staff might be interested in and also found and listed law department staff's speaking engagements. Increasing awareness of the law department staff's activities led to more potential contact points.

Future challenges include a client request for concise regular updates on matter status and very targeted, edited current awareness information, based on what client's issues are.

The partnership is a success because both knowledge initiatives were trying to be stronger. The training program has met the law department's needs for developing their own skills (a corporate initiative that has fed into the legal department's initiative). They have complex multifaceted training goals. And the law firm lawyers have been showcasing their expertise in the trainings and through the forms and samples, as well as keeping the firm on the increasingly shorter list of outside counsel.

Success factors were:

• Client's specific need
• Firm skills and resources that met the need
• In the law firm, lawyers, IT, KM, Business Development, and Professional Development worked in partnership
• Client perception of value added

Usability and Usability Professionals

The next presentation at this KM peer group meeting was on web design and usability. I've found myself doing a fair amount of work that implicates usability, as one of my firm's main methods of providing information is through its intranet and KM has a role to play in some aspects of that intranet.

People who are involved with usability might be called visual designers, interaction designers, information architects, or user experience researchers. The real value is in combining these roles.

Identifying pain points becomes more anthropological.

People who are good at usability need to:

• Not mind asking dumb questions
• Be fascinated with human behavior
• Focus on task, try to keep people who aren't actually end-users from interfering
• Customer service oriented
• Eye for detail
• Enjoy complex problem-solving

If 80% of your audience is satisfied with what you build, you can withstand the 20% with gripes.

Design mistakes:

• Filling all white space
• When in doubt add News
• "Useful Links" or even "Very Useful Links"
• Equating "easy to build" with "easy to use"; usability must be balanced with ease of design
• Equating you with your audience; avoid by getting proximity and facetime with users

Good design approaches:

• Research first
• Build prototypes through web applications such as AXURE--more than wireframes; can make entirely clickable sites
• NPS score-a subjective means of providing quantitative information. Ask likelihood that someone will recommend that site. Do before and after measurements.
• Personas
• Card-sorting-- put names of pages on index cards and ask users how pages should be organized (or use Optimal Sorting)
• User testing