Gina Buser, President of Traveling Coaches, Inc. (moderator).
Patty Stover, Manager of Technology Training at King & Spalding LLP.
Jeff Ward, Director of Application Support at Fulbright & Jaworski.
Fulbright & Jaworski
Documents from matters were being saved to multiple location. MCC works best when all documents from a matter are in the same workspace.
They structured the database based on the year the matter was started. The year is embedded in the matter numbers.
If they had left out MCC from the introduction of Interwoven "it would have been like ripping off the bandaid all over again."
FJ worked with Baker Robbins & Traveling Coaches to assess and implement change management needs. They had focus groups for 20% of the users over 2 1/2 weeks, video conferenced, and had an e-learning and training program. Attorneys won't go through the difficulty of dealing with a new system and workflow unless they understand the big picture. They did play-acting with lawyers and the staff. Jeff played a corporate attorney with an email problem and his colleague played another one with 4 tasks. They lined up the office administrators and partners in charge of each office behind the road show and had decent lawyer participation and very high admininstrative participation.
Partners were interested because of the email management problem. Other drivers included not having to do redundant printing.
They went with Filesite because they got mixed up between Interwoven and Interaction. "You can't flash-cut over humans." They had target goals for the first week:
Day 1: find documents
Day 2: file documents
Day 3: start with matter list
Lessons Learned
Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users. Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users.
Call it "Interwoven in Outlook" or "electronic file wrapper," not MCC.
King & Spalding
Practice support is not office-specific. They have six trainers plus a manager on their training staff. They started in August 2005 and finished rollout in January 2006. They did a staggered rollout, not just one office at a time but started with one as they finished with another.
The strategy was determined by the need to finish the switch before the move to a new office.
They supplemented training with 4 additional trainers--2 in classroom and 2 on floors. They could receive an on-line program customized to the different products (30 went through this way) and the rest got classroom training.
Lessons Learned
They made it too complicated. The words "matter centricity" scares them. Call it foldering or "workspaces." Foldering will help them in a flexible fashion according to how they do their work. People in her firm stored email in Outlook folders already. Foldering is an extension of that idea. Foldering is part of getting them organized and sharing their documents with their peers. It lets them share Outlook folders.
Partner with the records, the library, and practice groups.
They developed an online training capacity that allowed preintroduction and post-testing.
Success was measured by the number of attorneys using the folders. One program was called "the trainer is in." They spent 1/2 a day on the floor and tried to find out what people needed. Sat on the floor with paralegals and secretaries and learned about the "unarchive" problem." Has tips of the week for attorneys, and for two months everything was about workspaces.
In-house people trained the attorneys, others trained by vendors. Staff could receive follow-up classes the next week.
She did not expect people to go back and move documents from their matters. "As you open or reference a document, file it."
Another person mentioned that they used "orphan document" filing problems to identify file needs.
Patty said K & S encouraged "to be filed" folders, especially for attorneys who weren't comfortable with filing themselves. Jeff said FJ did not allow "to be filed" and cautioned that there will be people who dump-file into the wrong matter, and you have to look out for them. A commentator mentioned that her firm forced people to file new documents into a matter workspace and did not allow them to file documents through filling out profiles.
They have workspaces set up for nonbillable administrative work.
I asked Patty what King & Spalding is calling the DMS. She thought that you need to call it "Interwoven" even though some people call it "iManage" (they have not moved to FileSite yet). Another commentator said they started calling it "the DMS."
You have to market the benefits. She creates special introductions to what she is doing. "This will teach you how to..." Give them an introduction to better profiling or organization by doing a webinar as they eat lunch at their desks.
A commentator (with a British accent) from a major international law firm mentioned that they haven't had problems getting documents into matter workspaces and that they have "personal" and "pending" folders. The biggest pushback has been on email.
Patty said that they have a policy that all documents have to be electronically filed. Filing could be in an Outlook folder. They didn't want to advise people to copy emails into workspace folder. They also established that 2 months after the matter is closed, the emails have to be out of Outlook.
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