Caselines

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Canadian Diplomacy and A Sense of Purpose

2011-06-22T11:43:00.000-04:00

Deb Lavoy of OpenText spoke elequently about enteprise purpose.

The ideal company no longer runs like a "well-oiled machine" but is a mesh of minds producing and learning. They can predict failure of enterprise application deployment based solely on whether the group has a strong sense of purpose.
Among people with purpose "Their common cores are aligned to a magnetic north. Personal politics takes a back seat."
The very handsome Tyler Knowlton of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canada told a great story about helping the G20.
One year ago--he was in Toronto working on G20 meeting, his team in charge of electronic / social communications. Working with the G20 is challenging. The subject matter is complex. G20 has a rotating presidency. Each host / president starts from scratch. The lack of a central repository was frustrating.

The central delegate was sick of dealing with long email chains, lists, versions, and so forth. The delegate wanted to apply some of the thinking of Tyler's team to the problem.
He said that if they could come up with it in one month, and it worked, he'd pitch it to the other delegates. They had to switch gears to get tied into the G20 institution.
Email was just the pain point that got the delegate thinking. What they really needed was a system for multilateral negotations, communicating and collaborating.

Three things changed.
First, his team became much more ambitious. They felt that they were feeding into the "big picture." The more work they got, the bigger their contribution.

Second, they became confident and critical.

Third, they became very creative. They had artists, political strategists, web developers. He's learned that parameters foster creativity. Forced thinking about what they had to do, quickly.
They developed something relevant, but also exciting (I wish he had talked more about what they actually rolled out).
They dealt with Korea, and are now talking to France, and are alreading talking to Mexico. The other G20 office was disbanded, but their work is continuing to contribute to the G20 effort.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Bert Sandie of EAI

2011-06-22T11:20:00.000-04:00

Bert Sandie of games maker Electronic Arts, Inc. talked about how to create a culture of collaboration at your enterprise.
What drives people to collaborate?

People who are really good at collaborating do a lot of things that motivate them. They want to learn AND be social, for instance. Motivators for collaboration includes a desire to problem solve, altruism, learning, competition, recognition, and more. Make sure they get an email back to them and their manager about contribution.

At workshops they get to have a good time, but they have to come back and share what they learned.

Are you hiring enough new people? Are you hiring people who are willing to share?

Create physical environments that enhance collaboration.

White boards
People sitting down
People sit in a "pod"
People move / change offices often
If you're more than 35 feet away, you might as well be in a different building.

Different things work for different people. You have to try a lot of things, and you have to fail.

Bring together special interest groups, run a workshop for 3 days, build a culture of collaboration around it (sounds like an old-fashioned KM Community of Practice!). When you know the people personally you can

The easiest way to collaborate is face-to-face.

Changing behaviors takes "heads, hearts, and hands." Changing the way people think, feel, and behave. Right when they walk in the door you can change their behavior.

We need to lead the change in our organizations. If you aren't the expert (in change), find the people in the company who are. Start with people, your organization, and your environment.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Evolution of Enterprise Collaboration (Ross Mayfield of SocialText)

2011-06-22T10:49:00.000-04:00

Ross Mayfield is a real pioneer among vendors--his SocialText is one of the best applications that integrates appropriately with SharePoint. He looked back at the history of enterprise social application evolution and talked about the differences between enterprise and internet adoption of such tools.

He's talking about evolution, not revolution, in enterprise social applications.

Much of the revolution has already happened. He used to have to explain a wiki. You can now say with some confidence that there is an established category of enterprise software and that it consistently demonstrate business value in specific use cases.

Ross reviews the history of social application development. SocialText tried to fit wiki behavior into an application you could install inside the firewall in 2002.

Microblogging inside the enterprise changed everything. It was a lot easier to deploy and people took to it very quickly.

In 2009 the "activity stream" became a dominant approach.

SocialText has tried to adapt web 2.0 tools. No matter how big your organization is, however, it's smaller than the Web. It's very different. If someone does something bad, you can fire them. Also, the scaling effect is not the same.

On the web, a core set of contributors is 1%, 9% actively use, 90% don't. In the enterprise, you have to bake it into the flow of work. For instance, in company 95% actively use it in the flow of the work.

Knowledge sharing is a by-product of getting these done in social systems. You have to accept that it will be imperfect. It doesn't matter so long as you are getting more of it shared.

You need to keep doing the security, IT Admininstration, reporting / auditing, and so forth.

Inside the enteprise, viral adoption generally won't happen.

SocialText provides a "social layer" where the existing enterprise objects (documents, projects, tasks, enterprise records) become a topic of conversation.

Discovering content through people and people through content is really powerful (agreed!).

In implementing better collaboration, focus less on technology and more on the goal.

Imagine a "Kickstarter" inside your companies that would let you quickly gain budget or backing for internal projects. There is more and more specialization on the web. They commonly add a slight amount of structure, organize people around a goal, but not too much.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Ming Kwan of Nokia

2011-06-22T09:55:00.000-04:00

It was good to actually have a woman presenting a keynote at the general session. There hasn't been good gender balance here (she is one out of six presenters in this first tranche). Her presentation focused mostly on how employees can obtain actionable information through internal collaboration, and share that through external social channels. I wish there had been a few more concrete examples.

Nokia want to get the right information into the right hands at the right time.

They also want to make it actionable. What can employees do with all of that information?

Their principles include transparency across the organization. Their company works in 120 companies.
Another key principle is accountability, by having people take ownership and recognition.
Taking action is another principle. It's not about the volume of interactions, it's the qualtiy.

Return On Investment

Nokia developed a "social marketing KPI" framework. It starts with awareness, then moves to appreciation, with highest level of engagement is engagement (action, purchasing for instance).

Having a set KPI framework gains clarity around the business's performance. Ideally the new information leads to awareness that leads to action.

Third Ecosystem

Nokia wants to create a "third ecosystem" with Microsoft (beyond those of Apple, and Google, although she didn't say their names). In order to do that they will need to collaborate effectively with their partners, including agencies and suppliers.

Nokia's "visualizers" helps managers identify what different teams are talking about (I didn't understand the value of having managers somehow be aware of what are no doubt thousands of conversations going on internally). Nokia's "Socializer" based on Headshift technology include tasking and pinging.

Nokia has had internal idea crowdsourcing for a while. They recently opened up crowdsourcing to the public.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Spontaneous Association and Tom Kelly of Moxie and Tony Martins of Teva Canada

2011-06-22T09:33:00.000-04:00

Tom Kelly from Moxie Software is presenting with Tony Martins of Teva Pharmaceuticals (disclosure: Teva is a client of my law firm's.).

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly first spoke in somewhat repetitive fashion about how he thought businesses should approach implementing social software.

The most exciting companies to work at were the one where people are engaged. The speed at which things are moving has changed in tennis and football just as in our businesses.

Three key elements of any social platform are simple design (simplicity), knowledge, and thought leadership.

Knowledge is the key part of what we are trying to accomplish. Knowledge is about sharing what different people know to accomplish a given goal.

How do you design software for how people work? People work in groups, on projects. It must have an interative process to bring innovative ways for people to work. It should not bankrupt company.

We do need to integrate into existing systems. Like Facebook and Twitter, you can add something simple that will let people connect.

We can change from ""push" model of major enteprise software changes every 18 months to doing something simple (he keeps saying that!).

Tony Martins

Tony Martins runs the supply chain for Teva Canada. He started exploring social business in 2005, with Wikinomics.

The key ingredient is "spontaneous association." Human beings have an amazing ability to combine their skills to resolve problems. We are born that way, and can do it as long as we are allowed to.

Teva has used this in the organization.

There are many changes in regulations, consumer behavior, and the world around the company. The challenges they are confronting are not what they expected would happen. For instance, managers at Teva were spending more than half of their time addressing unexpected events.

A small group of people can come up with solutions much faster than a traditional command-and-control approach where problems are kicked up the organizational chart.

Provide environments where people can bring their skills together quickly. Spontaneous association has to happen somewhere. Over time, Teva found that virtual collaboration spaces (based on Moxie Software) worked well.

What happened in those spaces was becoming aware of those problems, and leaving it up to the people involved to address.

His most recent experience with business value of this approach was that between January and April of this year (2011), manufacturing cycle time was reduced 40% and reduced face-to-face meetings by 50%.

He'll be presenting in a workshop later today (with Sameer Patel).

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Chris Morace of Jive Software

2011-06-22T09:12:00.000-04:00

My continued notes below--errors are below.

Chris is looking awfully corporate for a rep from a company with such hip-looking logos and video promos. This was a very interesting and well-paced presentation, however.

Enterprises are facing waves of disruption from changes in social, cloud, and other new technologies. We're all being asked to be more innovative, be more agine.

IT groups are increasingly feeling like more and more of their time is being spent maintaining antiquated enterprsie systems, and not enough times supporting business needs and innovations.

One conference attendee noted that he could talk to his children by video call from his hotel room, but couldn't get conferencing systems to work at most work meetings.

70% of employees are using unsanctioned cloud applications.

Social is "hot." There's social in Project Management, CRM, etc. etc. None of it integrates together. It creates new silos. IT professionals are going to be asked to address this system.

The app market is an example of the future of enterprise technology. Apps are easy to create, quite frictionless. It's pretty easy. Software is more of an impulse buy instead of a major decision. Each channel comes with millions of potential users and a distribution network. Apps are also integrated with the social graph.

Chris says we're moving to the "consumerprise" model. We used to have to explain why social apps were different from email etc. Now people get it because they are participating in their personal life.

To thrive in this area, you have to add value to the business AND protect it.

New models of consumption are critical. Need to be able to "pay as you go," very simply, so the app just "shows up." Less lockin for enterprise software. Vendors earn the right to have us use their product. We should be able to install an app with the click of a button.

The amount of time it should take to integrate a new system into the HR/ERM/ etc. enterprise system should be no more time than it takes to fill out a Help Desk ticket. It should also integrate with the internal social tools.

We also need easy ways to say that an app is OK or not. Maybe there need to restrict server location, internal or exterrnal storage, etc.

The policies of companies around personal mobile devices has changed. He thinks that companies will change their policies around new applications as well.

The seminal moment in the consumerprise was when Facebook opened up its platform.

There will only be a handful of winners. Christian Finn would call this a "nice dream."

Jive has a platform that can do much of this already. Hundreds of apps can work together. Jive will be the first to have an app market. This is a way we can get around the adoption challenges. We can really change the way people do business.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Lee Bryant on Social Business Intelligence

2011-06-22T08:54:00.000-04:00

I was not able to attend Day 1, except remotely via the live stream. Today I'm in person at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, my hometown and base for the Stanley Cup Champion Bruins (sorry, had to slip that in here somewhere).

Below are my notes for the first set of keynotes.

Lee Bryant of Headshift is first up.

"Social Business Intelligence: The Future of Listening"

He's talking about data-driven business improvement, the subject of a recent study by Andrew McAfee.

The term "Humanizing" the enterprise predates the term "Enterprise 2.0." All those using wikis, blogs and so forth are generating lots of data. How can this data be leveraged to help the business?

Some at this conference have already talked about "Big Data" "activity streams" "actionable insight" and mapping social activity to key business KPIs.

Social business is not just about direct collaboration with others. We're also interested in using signals and filters to share "ambient intelligence"

Lee's colleague Dave Gray is a "visual thinking" guru. He calls small teams with a high degree of autonomy "pods." Amazon is an example of pods. No team should be bigger than what you can feed with two pizzas.

Data is not just about aggregate measures, it's about specific insights into how teams behave.

We can leverage the analysis strategies that companies are using to look at consumer web behavior. The practice of social media monitoring in the past has been too narcissistic--"Do you love me" "Do you like my brand in this place" etc. We'll see a move to a more intelligence-driven approach. We should be looking at things the business can change.

People have been hiring "quants" primarily so far to "get people to click ads." This is not ideal.

Google person says that they have the data to predict divorce two years in advance based solely on spending (searching). It's not about showing off the size of your data (insert NY U.S. Congressional Representative joke here).

We can learn lessons for approaching data from sports. Two Red Sox championships were driven by "Moneyball." People are also starting to map soccer data. They track kilometers run "at top speed" versus "total amount run" because the former correlates with goals scored.

We need to immerse ourselves in the data. Insights too often stop at the marketing department, although they might not be in a position to make the changes required.

We need to move to machines that generate signals of key events, and pipe them around the organization, making sense of them with social analaysis.

Social analysis is applying "many eyes" to the data. How can we stimulate people to take action based on information derived from socially derived information.

Nothing motivates people more than feedback given in the course of the workflow.

He talked at a very abstract level. I wish there had been more concrete examples of social business intelligence and analysis in action.

ILTA KM Blog Launched!

2011-04-07T16:56:00.000-04:00

I have not been particularly rigorous about posting on Caselines of late. Part of that is some effort that I and others have been spending on gearing up for a new venture, the ILTA KM Blog. I'll be continuing to spend much of my blogging energies over there.

The ILTA KM blog will include posts by me and Patrick DiDomenico; we'll be managing it together. It will also include periodic posts from the ILTA KM Steering Committee, and from the ILTA PG membership, a diverse and smart group of people. I hope you will check it out and follow what's happening.

Defense Attorney In Court With iPhone

2011-03-31T12:07:00.000-04:00

Fastcase has been promoting a recent, dramatic story from the Pittsburgh Gazette in which defense attorney Marc Daffner, in the middle of a hearing, calls for a recess, whips out his iPhone, and views notes on the sentencing guidelines that by report led to a reduction of 5-10 years of sentencing.

I have a few comments.

I may of course not have the whole story, but if this made such a difference, shouldn't Mr. Daffner have done his research well in advance? That was a nice save, however, I wonder what else he might have missed.

I also couldn't help noticing that the newspaper misspelled the name of the vendor as "FactCase" in the story. And the vendor's link to the original story is broken. Technology doesn't always work as smoothly as the story implies.

I do agree that greater access to caselaw, statutes and regulations is a great thing, for lawyers and the public, and I appreciate Fastcase's efforts on that front.

I also appreciate that mobile device access is not only cool, it can also help peripatetic lawyers provide better service to their clients. Certainly law firm IT departments are receiving pressure to make the services they provide available to lawyers with such devices, because they are so easy to use and convenient.

Taming Twitter: Paper.li and Legal KM-ers

2010-12-21T15:30:00.001-05:00

Twitter is a great way to see what people in my and related fields are talking about today. But above a certain point (which may be as low as 50 or 75 followers), it is simply not possible, nor likely worthwhile, to try to view every tweet from every tweep. And I'm following over 700 people! I could simply stay clear and "dip my toe" in the twitter stream every once in a while, but then I get the feeling I'm missing out on my tweeps' collective wisdom.

Twitter has two "native" ways of coping with this situation, search and lists.

Search allows you to look for mentions of a specific hashtag (I look at #km periodically, for instance) or a specific person. It works very well, but of course you have to have a topic in mind before you begin.

Twitter lists allow you to group sets of followers and then watch the stream only from that subgroup. Among my lists is "legal-kmers", a group of tweeps I especially value because they are legal information professional like myself* and because they periodically post or link to valuable content.

Even at that level of specificity to my work, it's not easy to review the valuable posts that go by. That's where paper.li comes in. It allows you to point to a Twitter list and generate a newspaper-like view of all the links posted the previous day. The URL is simply paper.li plus your Twitter account name plus the name of the list, hence:

http://paper.li/kmhobbie/legal-kmers

If you don't want to leave this page, here's what it looks like on a specific day.

What makes it newspaper-like is that it includes the headline and a small amount of content from the article or other site to which my legal kmer has linked. That's hugely valuable for helping me identify something that speaks to me. Paper.li also sorts the articles "below the fold" into somewhat vague categories like Education, Technology, Crime, and Business. It also shows a scrolling version of today's legal-kmers posts. If you log in with a paper.li or Twitter account, the posts are interactive (i.e., you can easily re-tweet). Finally, Paper.li includes daily archives, in case you want to go back and look at a previous date's posts.

All in all, paper.li is a great addition to my collection of tools to "tame the information firehose." Who are your favorite tweeps? Who consistently finds the good stuff? Put them in a list and share them with me!

*not all are formally legal knowledge managers, however.

Document Assembly; Standard Approach and The Future

2010-10-15T14:23:00.004-04:00

This is another presentation report, my notes from a KM peer group meeting.

Document Assembly is a "hard nut to crack." It is one of the ways however that lawyers can greatly increase their productivity.

Enterprise search, document assembly, contract analysis, and proofreading are all key ways to increase productivity.

At one firm financial industry registration changes and a large amount of anticipated work led them to develop a document assembly package for the new registration forms their clients needed. A few attorneys were able to set up a tool that did a lot of work. One lesson learned was the necessity to set up at times complex processes to maintain document assembly packages. There may be either too high expectations or "blaming the application" for errors introduced after the documents had been generated.

It was a successful effort in that the efficiency gain made it possible to do a lot more work. It was easy to change the model, and quality control was improved. It's not "last deal done" sample use any more. The KM lawyer is very happy to have document assembly in her tool kit.

Joshua Fireman of ii3 looked at the KIIAC application (discussed by Peter Krakauer at the ILTA conference). It assesses the variations and extent of variation of agreements. The firm he was working with delivered over 100 share purchase agreements. The tool deduplicated and determined that there were "only" 55 unique documents. One document was identified as the "most conforming." The fourth on the list was a bar association standard form. The firm KM lawyer went through clause-by-clause and assessed which version would work better. It took him 4-5 hours to figure out KIAAC and another 4 hours to develop the purchase agreement model. Almost every clause included links to most-commonly used variant clauses.

Joshua thinks that KIIAC has some document assembly features but also has a strong quality component. You can compare documents against the "KIIAC standard." The tool can not just develop a model or document assembly package, but can also greatly reduce the time to turn around effective comments on a document received from other counsel. (I had not thought of this use, which further demonstrates that I am a litigator by nature not a transactional attorney).

KIIAC is a tool designed to be powerful rather than user-friendly. PSLs or KM attorneys might use it to set up document assembly but practicing attorneys would not use it that way. Perhaps PSLs could use the tool in the analytical "other counsel" scenario. This can position KM as a real competitive advantage. KIAAC may not be able to deliver a final model, but it can save tremendous amounts of time in the development of such models. It can generate a decent quality model or document assembly package in a very reasonable period of time.

KM and Legal Project Management

2010-10-15T13:08:00.005-04:00

These are my notes from a presentation on knowledge management and legal project management (LPM). The first half contrasted the purposes, tools, challenges of LPM and KM. The second half of the presentation covered an impressive, albeit soon-to-be released, legal service platform for delivery of commoditized administrative complaint legal services. It combines an effective workflow with KM and information-sharing of a very high order.

(As with the previous post, the specific presenters and firms are not identified under the rules of this meeting.)

KM Contrasted with LPM

While KM seeks to provide actionable information, LPM tries to provide more structure to what lawyers already do. Both seek to deliver more efficiency, and use software or business process changes. KM seeks to develop content (I note that some content is a by-product of LPM). It is not clear who can or should do legal project management at law firms. The PM role should be embedded within practice areas. Where LPM requires lawyers to create a plan and follow that plan, KM offerings are typically more voluntary. LPM requires a change in organizational methods, it is not simply "more structure."

A commentator noted that some KM practitioners are concerned with quality and consistency as well as efficiency. A project manager will typically balance quality as one component against time and cost.

Some KM practitioners are already concerned with process improvement. It may be time to "grasp the nettle" and get involved with these efforts. LPM is an opportunity

Clients will pay for planning if it is positioned properly.

Process Improvement

The CFO at one firm has been asking the KM department to identify or provide tools and mechanisms for process improvement and LPM. KM feeds into LPM very well. LPM helps you map the process. KM's job is to build the tools that support the processes.

This firm has set up a workflow for firm administrators to track intake on a certain type of administrative complaints that are filed against some clients across the U.S. KM provides forms, wikis, and information specific to the matter at the time that the attorney is drafting the response to the complaint or interviewing witnesses.

The firm has "flex-time" attorneys that can handle these matters. Other attorneys are supervising the matters and conduct or review risk assessments. (It strikes me that this model is flexibly expandable).

The recommendations of both as to how to proceed need to match (or, I assume, the file is escalated to the supervisor's supervisor). They are tracking metrics for frequency and cost of settlement that can be assessed at the flex-time attorney or supervisor level. All the status and monitoring information is available to the client. The client can also track metrics such as claims by location or by client's manager.

This approach is very effective for commodity-level work. You can control for the variables. It combines case management and document assembly. Multiple levels of supervision are critical for the quality control. The tool is not in active use yet but was started in January 2010. It took them two months to conceptualize the project and present to the client. They used an interim database to capture information before the full tool is rolled out.

Essentially the client is outsourcing much of the internal work that used to be associated with these matters to the law firm. The tool and processes (and the staffing model) enable mass-scale commodity work to be done by a large firm, with quality control.

Legal Process Management In Action

2010-10-15T10:27:00.006-04:00

Another presentation at a KM peer group saw real-life examples of project management in action at large law firms. Under the rules of this meeting, firm identities are not publicly acknowledged. As with the previous notes, these are my near-live notes of the presentation.

The two firms discussed are at different phases of development and adoption of project management. It was interesting to hear real-life examples of the processes and changes necessary in a more PM-oriented law firm.

One firm saw greater client interest in knowing costs in advance of project commencement. They felt that greater certainty and predictability of legal cost would be a market differentiator for them. Clients are also seeking more nonstandard fees. They want to move away from the "cost-plus" model. Capturing historical information about staffing and pricing can be used to provide good estimates for fixed fee or other types of AFAs.

They drew on an IT staff member with significant project management skills. The KM professional worked with this person to try to identify what additions lawyers might be able to handle in terms of additional structure to their work.

They first developed a training program and some proprietary software. A small pilot led to robust feedback about what was and wasn't useful in different ways in different practice areas. Many of the partners who participated became champions of LPM going forward. The pilot has also led to some real stories about improving efficiency that help with training.

They didn't have a KM lawyer on the initial working group. In the second phase they have more KM lawyers, who have made a significant contribution in the areas of information collection and linking existing firm resources into the templates. They have also helped with naming conventions and the technical aspects of information gathering that typical lawyers are not so aware of. The KM lawyer can be a bridge or "de-mystifier" to LPM processes. KM lawyers have also helped managed the breakdown of work.

Legal PM can borrow techniques that have been very successful in other industries for decades. Putting a structure in place for planning, and increasing accountability for keeping to the plan has led to higher standards for matter organization. The communication points are crucial and are reflected in the name of their program. They believe that will greatly reduce their firm's writedowns (writeoffs).

LPM can greatly increase profitability in a few different ways. If the right people are doing the work, you will have the best leverage model for that work.

AFAs can be intimidating for law firms. A historical database of matter information can let you see how you staffed it and priced it, and what you learned from previous matters.

A second law firm is involved in the ACC "Value Challenge." They created a project management office outside of IT. They all got certified in PMI and put formal processes in place. They hired a few PMs from outside. The firm has identified PM skills as a core competency. KM professionals are supporting the PM team but aren't driving the effort.

Their goals were to institutionalize the process of having "value conversations" with clients and to work collaboratively to acheive that goal.

They are doing both process improvement and LPM. They take out ineffeciencies and take out what the client doesn't want. They've reduced the cost of legal services. They have a structure of DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control), or "improve & control." For instance, they examined the matter intake process and found a five-day delay that could be eliminated by combining some forms and rearranging the conflict check process.

They have done process maps for 70 different types of legal work. It's like static. If you know what's going to happen it will happen faster. The maps identify proper resources and task codes. The PM team sits down in "Kaizen Sessions" with a whole team and identifies what happens when (initially using sticky notes). Task codes are a very important piece to let them track how we are providing legal services.

KM "artifacts" are connected with particular steps. What do need at each step? A checklist? Template? Form? Get "brain dumps" for checklists. People from the team can see what they need for what step. Process maps are on their intranet. They are treated as "road maps." There is a time estimate in each step. They also have staffing suggestions (staffing is still under development). They have tools that identify where people are on the map.

They have a monitoring tool they developed in-house. They have created task codes for different areas of law and require all attorneys to use them. Time and expense against the budget is shown on their tool. Attorneys have to assess and add to the tool the actual "percent complete" at the specific phase level.

At the end of an engagement, this firm uses a scorecard and lets clients rate the firm on understanding objectives of the matter, legal expertise, efficiency, responsiveness, budgeting skills, and results, and asks "would you hire us again."

This firm has a "fixed fee" offering for single plaintiff (employment?) litigation. They have reduced the average cost of such matters almost by half by managing such matters more efficiently.

The PM team now consults with in-house counsel on effective process improvement.

They did not require the whole firm to adopt this approach. Attorneys are impressed with the mapping sessions. Clients like knowing that the firm is doing effective project management.

Firm culture has changed. It is a big change. People are understanding that they will have to change with the market.

Outside of formal PM processes, some people might be able to develop a time frame, staffing, and budgeting for a particular deal. But if it is not documented, these plans are not transferable, and can't be as easily reused. If the 189 steps of a deal can be documented it would make it easier to do the high-value work. If the tasking and scope is not confirmed with client, then changes to the scope (as with the discovery of another 400 boxes of due diligence documents) aren't so easily discussed with the client.

Legal Project Management

2010-10-15T09:11:00.003-04:00

Susan Raridon Lambreth of Hildebrandt Baker Robbins presented on legal project management (LPM) at a meeting of KM peers this morning. She is an effective (albeit extremely quick-talking) speaker, and seems to have found an effective approach to communicating LPM themes and approaches to lawyers.

What is Legal Project Management

LPM is a "disciplined approach to the management of legal matters." We have to acknowledge that lawyers have been successful in managing legal projects before the formal application of LPM. In training LPM don't suggest that they have been doing everything wrong. Emphasize that LPM will enhance communications with clients and managing client expectations.

Process Improvement and LPM

Process improvement might be better tackled before LPM improvements. Many law firms have gotten on the LPM bandwagon, perhaps because it is less threatening. You can "back into" process improvement after doing some LPM. Process improvement may lead to greater efficiencies faster.

Drivers

One of the trends driving LPM is client demands for "better, faster, and cheaper." Clients saw more serious economic effects of the recession than the legal industry as a whole did (referred to increased profits at AMLaw 100 firms). Clients expect costs to be lower every year. Clients are looking more for alternative fee arrangements (AFAs).

The profit equation is also changing. Billable hour productivity had been going down. Billing rates were driving increased profitability. This is now flat or down in many firms. Law firms have to get more profits by changing the way that they work. There is also more competition for legal work in terms of outsourcing and aggressive pricing (large firms competing with and sometimes beating medium-sized firms on price).

The procurement offices are also getting more involved in legal work sourcing. Procurement officers may be in a position to put more pressure on outside firms.

Increased client power is driving faster segmentation and devaluing. Work even within a high-priority matter might get broken out or segmented, so that "trusted advisor" work would be compensated or sourced differently than the due diligence or filings work. The more strategic, high-value work is not getting bigger and may be shrinking. Operational or routine work might be expanding. Lower-tier work can be more highly leveraged. Some litigation practices can be very profitable, with the right work / staffing structure.

She considers project management to be not a business-world "fad" (like TQM?), but a natural evolution of application of certain tools and disciplines, already in place at the practice or department level, to the matter level. Eventually it may be internalized and not broken out as a different aspect of work.

Two hidden benefits of project management are a greater emphases on professional development and knowledge management. It leads to a greater emphasis on training and development for younger attorneys. Associates like being part of a formal project team because of the higher level of communication and awareness of the bigger picture. We can enhance the professional development of lawyers as part of an LPM approach.

She referred several times to the ILTA White Paper on alternative financial arrangement.

You can train LPM as "delegation and communication" skills. HBR's approach to project management breaks down a project life cycle into five phases of Initiation, Planning, Executing, Closing, and Lessons Learned. It's best to teach LPM without using PM jargon. They had left in the term "stakeholder," and despite some objections at a NY meeting in June it turned out that lawyers didn't mind that term.

She outline four approaches to early adoption of LPM.

Training and Education

Early adopters of LPM are starting with training and basic education. A 2-3 hour session is not really training, it's more education about "what" than "how to." It's more effective to get people to volunteer for LPM training. It can also be effective to build LPM skills into competency models for lawyer development.

Pilots

Other early adopters are trying LPM in pilot practices, such as with commercial litigation or other specific practice group. Groups with more client pressure (as described above) are more interested.

Technology / Software

Only a small number of firms have effective budgeting or project management software. Some have done historic data / analysis and others have done several years of tracking with ABA task codes or e-billing vendor codes. Litigators seem to be more on board with this in many firms, because they've had to do a tremendous amount of budgeting. In many cases they have not had to stick to those budgets, until the last two years. Budgets are now treated by clients as fee caps.

Staffing

Full-time project managers are in place at a few firms.

Lessons Learned

Don't make LPM seem mysterious. Attorneys may need support like staffing, software, and other "handholding" before LPM can be broadly adopted. Training associates where partners are not on board can be really challenging.

Adjusting compensation structures may be necessary to reward efficient practices. Client and matter profitability is increasingly the focus of compensation committees. Having partners more accountable for the profitability of their matters is an increasing trend. Some have started by making the information available but not tied it directly to compensation.

For some partners LPM might seem like fundamental change.

Initiating

The challenge for law firms in initiating projects is to slow down and more thoroughly explore the in-scope / out-of-scope parameters of the engagement. An engagement agreement is equivalent to a project charter, although typically in law firms they are much less detailed than a good project charter would be. Exploring detailed client expectations such as "what does success look like to you" (or the in-house counsel's boss) is really important and often neglected.

Planning

Law firms have done a better job at budgeting than at planning. Developing a schedule is often not done well. They don't or can't look back at previous matters and figure out what went well and was completely in a timely fashion and what wasn't. Communications planning needs to be set up for contacts with the client and internally with the matter team.

She showed a couple of examples of "work breakdown structures" that tie into a detailed scheduling processes (like phases and tasks of a matter).

Executing

Avoiding conversations where attorneys talk about increased work with clients is really common. There often weren't conversations about monitoring schedule and expenses.

Closing

They have separated out closing from lessons learned because they deserve extra emphasis in law firms due to their culture.

Lessons Learned

An after-action meeting could be 10 minutes or an hour. Talk about what went well, what they could have done differently. It's hard because lawyers don't like critical feedback. Lawyers are afraid of what might be discoverable in a malpractice claim. Get them to look at how it helps their team or other teams in the future.

Challenges

Who will pay for time spent on LPM tasks? Will clients pay for it? (There is an ABA code, some clients are willing to pay if it LPM is actually being done). There is a sense that LPM will make the work more "cookie-cutter." The greatest motivator for lawyers is their relationships with clients and their sense of accomplishment and professionalism (though they are also driven by relative compensation).

Making "best practices" and sample forms available without much effort can free up lawyers to do more interesting and significant strategic thinking about their matters.

Getting lawyers to work teams can be hard because of typical lawyer personalities and law school training. They teach "anti-teaming" in law school. Lawyers are contrasted with "non-lawyers. She was asked "do you mean that I'll have some project management geek telling me what to do?"

The biggest change will be moving to profitability analysis for compensation, as old metrics of production and revenue will not be as effective.

Keys to Success

Train volunteers. Get firm management buy-in. Give tools and templates matched to their needs (basic versus sophisticated / challenging).

Social Media At ILTA: Sharing and Collaboration Explodes at Conference

2010-08-27T16:09:00.012-04:00

Four years ago, Kevin O’Keefe contrasted the social media activity that had already become prevalent at most technology conferences with the relative lack of such activity at the International Legal Technology Association conference. He noted some improvement in 2008, and in past years only a few sessions mentioned either social media or secure collaborative software.

This year ILTA conference saw an outpouring of social media activity in many different channels. Social media tools were embraced by the association itself, by conference co-chairs, by vendors, and by peer attendees.

There is still room for increased adoption and smart use of these channels (such as a more friendly and effective pre-conference wiki platform), but I believe that the benefits of social media to people who attended or who followed from afar were great, and that the refindability and reusability of all this content will continue to benefit ILTA members and the legal technology industry.

An earlier version of this post made invisible all but the Twitter section of this post, due to formatting errors.

Tweeting In The Halls

Perhaps the most visible change from previous years was the formalization and much broader extent of Twitter use. It was professional, not personal I’m-eating-a-sandwich tweeting. In addition to the #ilta10 conference hashtag, each session had a formally identified short and useful hash tag such as #km2; in some sessions as many as four or five people were highlighting and sharing key thoughts through twitter.

Legalerswelcom used What the Hashtag to graphically show the tweeting by day; each day with educational sessions had over 700 tweets, and there were over 3,000 for the week. I reproduce a picture of it here, because the WTH service shows the previous five-day’s tweets and the week's view will not be available soon.

And this was despite the regrettable absence of Jenn Steele, one of the twitter champions of previous conferences.

While it is essentially impossible—despite Mary Abraham’s impressive wireless keyboard-and-iPad combination—to capture as much content through tweeting as one can while live-blogging, tweets were nevertheless adequate to get a sense of the session, and to identify many of the key takeaways. Session tweeting also allowed people running late to find out which ongoing sessions had good content matching their interests. It also in many instances led to interaction between tweeters, or amplification by “retweet” by conference attendees or even those overseas of especially interesting comments or developments such as Peter Krakauer’s description of the KIIAC semi-automated agreement assessment tool.

Vendors did tweet about events and offerings, and there were some fun twitter-based giveaways / contests, but as you can tell from the “top 10 tweeters” list from WTH, above, there was not vendor abuse of the conference hashtag in any serious way.* Certainly the two on the vendor/consultant front on the "top 10 list," Legalerswelcome and InsideLegal, were adding rather than taking away value from the online conversation. I hope that such an approach will continue.

Twitter generated face-to-face social interactions as well as on-line activity. There was an initial, formal tweetup on Sunday, and a less formal but also fun “#tweetup2” on Tuesday organized by conference attendees rather than the conference itself.

Sessions About Social Media Or Enterprise 2.0

On the educational side, a dozen sessions covered social media and collaboration topics including:

Day 1, August 23

Social Media Policy Development by Julia Montgomery and Karen Sheehan.

Day 2, August 24

The Cloud and Law2020: Where Megatrends and Vision Collide, Super Session, Tom Kolopopulous
SharePoint 2010 for LegalServices, Julie Kremer, Microsoft
Transparency: Beyond the Extranet, featuring Deborah McMurray of Content Pilot LLC, Jon Parish of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, Julie Kremer of Microsoft, and Steve McHargue of Project Leadership
Smarsh Social Networking Compliance Solution, Stephen Marsh and Sam Kolbert-Hyle of Smarsh (vendor session)

Day 3, August 25

Improve Information Flow With Enterprise 2.0, Paul Domnick of Freshfields Bruckhaus and Mary Abraham
Managing Information Overload Through Personal Knowledge Management, Mike McBride and Sean Brady
Failure Leads to Success in Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
Meaningful Metrics to Quantify ROI for KM and Enterprise 2.0 Deployments, LTC Charlotte Herring and Clark Cording, Orrick

Day 4, August 26

How KM Supports Alternative Fee Arrangements
Open Text Social Workplace (vendor session)
Uniting Project Teams with Collaboration Sites

Blogging

Live blogging was made feasible, after Monday, by the generally high-quality wi-fi at the Aria resort. The conference organizers were refreshingly up front about the problems before Monday evening. Conference setup included “Click Zones” that were really designed to limit typers to a certain part of the room (understandable due to the tapping), rather than provide power. I eventually learned to simply open up a side panel in the session rooms, but it would have been better (and safer) to have power strips with taped-down extension cords available in “Click Zone.”

In addition to these other Caselines posts, the following are some of the blog posts covering the conference:

LegalCurrent blogged about Universal Search Implementations and the Metrics for Enterprise 2.0 session that I also addressed.
Ron Friedmann blogged about outsourcing and the keynote.
Jason Plant a/k/a NoOption blogged about Day 1, August 23 (keynote and Office 2010), Day 2, August 24 (iManage and search), Day 3 (August 25).
Legal IT Professionals provided a Vendor Response to ILTA Conference
Inside Legal provided a lot of online content including this Technology Purchasing Survey

Mike McBride has collected a number of conference posts at his Delicious account. I haven't tried to be comprehensive here--comments and additions welcome, of course. And the fact that it wouldn't be easy to be comprehensive is telling.

Videos and Podcasts

Vendors and consultants are leading the way in integrating video and audio content into conference.

Legal consultants ii3 professionally produced and made available hours and hours of high-quality video known as "ILTA TV," with chats hosted by Shy Alter. Day 2 for instance featured an interview with a visiting general, along with a discussion on KM supporting legal administrative departments with knowledge management attorneys Mara Nickerson, Rachelle Renegal, and a certain bass-voiced litigation knowledge manager (at about 120 minutes in).

Over at Legal IT Professionals, Christy Burke had a number of podcast interviews with a variety of vendors and peers broken down into Days 1, 2, and 3.

Kevin Hunt of Thomson Reuters also made a number of other podcasts, including a video interview of conference co-chair Meredith Williams; the post includes a link to interviews with Patrick DiDominico, Craig Ball, and yours truly.

I also made my first podcasts, releasing by Cinch (http://www.cinchcast.com/) a podcast about the initial tweetup and another short one about showing pictures of faces in Outlook and elsewhere based on a conversation with Mr. Alter. Cinch is a really easy way to record and share short audio recordings on the iPhone or over the internet.

*occasional exception aside.

ILTA Day 4--Using Business Process Management to Increase Matter Efficiency

2010-08-26T18:26:00.003-04:00

Session Materials

Formal Description:

"Managing individual matters is where firms can realize the biggest efficiency and cost gains. For firms that are serious about efficiency and alternative fee arrangements, this session will discuss the strategic application of principles from the fields of business process management and project management and highlight firms that have put these principles to work. While law schools may not have project management or business process classes, lawyers can still learn from experts in these fields."

For tweets see #info15.

Monroe M. Horn ("Monty")- CIO, Sunstein Kann Murphy & Timbers LLP, Boston IP boutique
Angel Garcia-Manso - Goodwin Procter LLP
Bill Decker - Hubbard One, a Thomson Reuters Business
Toby Brown - Fulbright & Jaworski

Disclosure; Angel is my colleague at Goodwin Procter. I know Monty personally, he's an outstanding tenor! Also, these are my unedited notes (live-blogged).

BPM in an IP Boutique

Monty started. Why BPM? Technology benefits come from integration and automation rather than new "killer apps." They determined it would be best to have apps that exactly met their needs. Most users are suffering from information (email) overload. Very often business processes involve sending and acting on email. Yet users often don't have the information they need to act on when they need it (this sounds like a KM problem to me!).

They chose to automate a client-facing business process, IP docketing. They rolled out in Beta using live data (in parallel). They've applied for a patent and are working with a vendor to commercialize it.

Key elements of successful automation are:

1. Filling in "white space" between application without changing the way people are working.

2. Provide rich user interfaces, especially to attorneys and paralegals. They are not tolerant of things acting clunky and not following Windows protocols. Usually BPM applications don't have to have that level of user interface.

3. Allowing users to organize and prioritize the work and tasks is really important. For instance, break out attorney's work by stage, by whether they are directly responsible or supervising, and so forth. Add "flagging" that people can leverage as they see fit [I'd advocate for tagging by keyword!]

4. Supervisory capacities need to be baked in.

5. Try to give them the information they need when they need it.

Bill Decker

He spent the last five years doing project management at a large law firm and is now at Hubbard One / Thomson Reuters. How can PM techniques assist attorneys with fixed fee arrangements?

Project has four (or five) phases. Project Initiation is for understanding what your goals are. Project planning is the most important piece. Identify (and document) the processes needed to establish the scope and the objectives. Project Execution (lumped in with Project Monitoring), then Project Closure, where you show that you did what you set out to do.

Communication is the key success factor. Poor communication is the primary reason why projects fail.

Traditional projects are similar to a legal matter in that they have definite ends and goals.

Attorneys do not accept that a legal engagement is unsuccessful if not completed within a reasonable time and under budget. Their goal is to win.

Project management and continual planning will prevent clients from being surprised by the last bill.

With AFAs you need to build models based on previous experience. Bill mentions that ABA codes as a possible source for matter planning. He notes that "CodeSense" has loaded the ABA codes into SharePoint to track status against different parts of the tasks.

AFAs at Fullbright & Jaworski

Toby Brown of Three Geeks and a Law is the alternative fee person at Fullbright & Jaworski.

He described the approval process for AFAs at his firm.

The first step is a "pre-approval" processes where partners seek information and have a dialog. Partners want to know what form of fee to use and how much to charge. Every RFP crosses his desk, needing AFA content.

The second step is the lawyer's preparation of an actual AFA proposal. They seek information about the client (e.g., financial information), the type of arrangements (looking at type, amount, metrics, and probabilities), and value (allowing lawyers to provide more context).

The third step is AFA analysis. Evaluating the margin of a particular billing partner is key. Partners will run the same type of margins. He will compare similar proposals. Toby is using Redwood analytics. Small changes in the leverage can have large variations in margin.

Fourth, a small group of partners approve the AFA. They talk with Toby about the matter.

Fifth, it gets set up as an AFA matter.

Sixth, the budget gets entered into a tracking system. There still needs to be a system for tracking progress against budget (?).

Seventh, monitor budget against performance. Send monthly and quarterly variance reports.

Eighth, report back on closed matters to the AFA system.

Budgeting and other Projects at Goodwin Procter

Angel counted nine sessions at ILTA addressing Alternative Financial Arrangements (AFAs.) Goodwin decided that doing budgeting would be an important step in addressing AFAs. They asked practice managers to talk to partners and break work they do in phases and tasks. They continue reviewing phases and tasks and improving the 70 matter templates.

The Goodwin budgeting system integrates with Aderant and the time-entry system. Goodwin will also be integrating with SharePoint and Goodwin's Matter Pages system.

(Disclosure: I have been a part of the AFA work at Goodwin).

The iStaff project is another example. Goodwin staffing managers help find partners the best associate for a given project. Each staffing manager was dealing with 40-60 associates and had to learn their experience and professional development needs, and wanted to match that with the jobs. They automated the collection of information from associates about their needs and busyness. It pulls in information from Expert, the HR systems, partners' input about what they need, and associate workload reports. The new system increased compliance (associate reports) 70%.

Another example is the IP Practice System. They interviewed attorneys over 10 months to identify process mapping. They identified inconsistent operations across offices. They built a couple of tools that helped people delegate work. They integrated all the different sources of information. It pulled in matter-centric iManage folders where they had scanned and filed the paper records. The case information can be forwarded to other attorneys. It also links to the PTO file and the Matter Pages system.

Partners reported that what used to take them 10 minutes now takes 10 seconds.

Questions

How did they get buy-in? Monty said they have a small shop; the firm decided to change the way it worked; and the paralegals liked it because they could prove they had provided the file(s).

Angel said that adoption depends on the sponsors. Demand for iStaff came from the directors in the firm and was heavily promoted by the staffing managers.

ILTA Day 3: Email Management Using iManage

2010-08-25T18:36:00.002-04:00

This was an interesting session devoted to email management success stories with firms using iManage. It highlighted three examples from different size firms.

Small Firm

Maritta Terrell is in a small firm in Austin, TX, about 85 users. [She is very engaging and I bet is a great trainer!] Some partners who had serious pain around Outlook performance and email folders led to implementation of a DMS. They now have 8.5 and set up MCC. Test test and re-test was key.

The Outlook speed problem led to some ideas. They had a contest with 1st and 2nd prizes. Secretarial help really shrunk Inboxes. "Stump the IT team" contest. Both approaches leveraged lawyer's competitive.

Training courses included:

How to clean up inbox
Preclass videos on intranet
Regular classroom classes
Email management

They also had "Room Service" classes--they put out a training menu like a hotel, they could ask trainers to come to them, even after hours "so no-one else would know."

They also sent around a poster with three points. You must file client email in a client/matter folder, administrative email in an admin folder, and everything else (is deleted or) stored in a personal folder.

Success measurement--email boxes reduced by 19%, may go to another 5% lower.

Mid-Size Firm

Fernando Monteleone ("Monty") works for Robinson & Cole.

Moved from DocsOpen in an April to September timeframe. They have a retention policy, all inbound messages filed or deleted within 60 days.

They chose to disallow flat filing (everything in a workspace). Send / Received dates are preserved in filing. The author in the DMS is that of the email author, not the filer. They created personal workspaces automatically.

Tried to keep folder design simple, about eight categories for litigation and another eight for business matters.

Their customization included a tool to reclassify matters, and run integrity checks. A utility created a project workspace with members listed and documents.

They went live over Labor Day Weekend, got to 8.5 by February. Filing 2500-5000 emails a day, half a million since the beginning of the year. Association of an email folder with a workspace in iManage was the largest method of filing.

Foley & Lardner

Dana Moore is the "Records & Information Compliance Manager."

Email became a risk management issue. Exchange servers were bursting at the seams. Under their RM policy, the electronic version of the email is the official version. They realized email needed to be part of the matter. It allowed document holds, litigation discovery, and file transfers to go smoothly.

They set up an ERM Validation Committee and a pilot group. 10% of the attorneys wanted to participate. They set up a communication plan from the top down. They were moving operations offsite.
They created an "Email Archive Repository." It's a DMS repository that only a few have access to. [Not great from a KM perspective].

F & L had a long implementation period. First communications in June 2007 were around "how much email can you delete?" Did lots of deleting for $50 gift cards.

Email really locked down--old email had to be retrieved through records managers, who kept it out of Outlook.

Filing is now a requirement--all in Inbox or Sent over 180 days deleted. The Delete box is on a seven day aged, with a 2 GB size limit. They do not delete from sub-folders.

There was a lot of bulk filing without classification, into their general personal numbers. It was still refindable even through others couldn't. People didn't follow folder naming conventions. There was some refusal and denial. Training was not required. She thinks mandatory training may not be impossible.

Have filed 27 million emails since 2007. All servers are centralized. Filing is a way of life for most.

Questions:

Some attorneys at Maritta's firm who can barely work with Word file email. Such attorneys had another set up the email filing links.

At Foley, going to the 180 day rule really helped adoption. The most appreciation is coming from the professional responsibility partners and the people looking for email as a result of litigation involving the firm.

They all analyzed how everyone managed their emails and adopted email filing to that behavior. They had to understand how many attorneys worked remotely.

ILTA Day 3: Metrics and ROI for Enterprise 2.0

2010-08-25T18:33:00.004-04:00

This was an interesting session that addressed metrics not just for Enterprise 2.0 but for knowledge management and technology projects.

Formal Description:

"Proving return on investment is every bit as difficult for Enterprise 2.0 projects as it is for KM projects generally. Since we tend to get what we measure, what should we measure and how can we report the results in a fair and meaningful way? In this session, we’ll examine the basics of metrics, how to measure productivity rather than busy-ness, how to measure engagement, velocity and impact of information flows, and other ways to meaningfully mine data."

Session Materials

Presenters:

Clark R. Cordner - Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Charlotte Herring - Chief, Information Technology Division and Deputy Chief Information Officer, The US Judge Advocate General's ("JAG") Corps

Moderated by V. Mary Abraham

Lisa Denissen and Steven Levy both helped out with the presentation.

What Are Metrics

Clark introduced metrics as a way to "measure progress and demonstrate how your project advances firm strategy."

In terms of formal project management language, Steven Levy appeared by video, with permission. He used the example of the Soviet screw factory that makes giant screws no one wants because it is assessed by how much material it spends. It's an input metric not an output metric.

Substitute metrics don't measure exactly what you want. What you want and such metrics often diverge significantly.

A good client metric is the likelihood of reuse of your firm. Repurchase intent is not a substitute metric; client satisfaction is.

The question is what the correlation between the output and the objective.

Some things are very hard to quantify, and you may need to quantify using satisfaction surveys.

Mary said that too often KM practitioners consider metrics too squishy and fail to push the analysis and identify all the things that we could actually track.

Clark recommends the blog Adam Smith, Esq. who talks a lot about metrics. You have to be thoughtful about what you spend your time measuring and communicating. A metric is like a lens. It's like the optician who asks if a given lens is better or worse (*flick*), better or worse (*flick*).

Have clear objectives and ensure your effort advances those objectives. Measure the factor most likely to strongly correlate with "success." If your success is shorter cycle time on a document, then you measure that.

Business Pain Points

LTC Charlotte Herring says that the only way to have a successful KM program is to talk to lots of people in your organization. What are the pains? It's going to vary between the senior partner, the junior associate, the secretary, or the finance administrator. Come up with tools to focus on those pains. Then implement them.

The JAG Corps has had 650 attorneys deployed as a result of the Iraq / Afghanistan wars. They sometimes don't have internet access and can't always rely on technology. KM is not just technology. Some metrics have nothing to do with numbers. KM can consist of two people talking.

What denotes health and sickness? In a firm, it might be profit margin. The JAG does not track time and doesn't care about money.

Verifying Metrics

Consult with friendly people who can tell you if your metrics might make sense to your stakeholders.

Dangers with Metrics

You are only as credible as your metrics are reliable. Unconscious biases may lead you to emphasize the wrong thing. Be willing to acknowledge alternative interpretations. Numbers can be quite dangerous.

Practical Examples

1. JAG's Automated Trial Process

For the JAG Corps, criminal work is a statutory obligation. The JAGC Military Justice Online was a web-based enterprise application for military justice from investigation to post-trial.

She started developing this new application in 2007. Everyone moves every 2 or 3 years. Each move led to a a different set of rules since practices varied. The system was designed to establish one system across the JAG Corps.

Stakeholders were very broad. The client is the institution of the US Army. A particular commander is not the client.

The commander needs information sufficient to deal with the soldier. Congress wants to know numbers of offenses and convictions. The JAG Corps wants to track how the system is working.

They succeeded in lessening time it took to process a charge. Efficient JAG procedures are more just ("justice delayed is justice denied"). Quicker processing reduces error.

[It was really great to hear the JAG Corp perspective, so different from a firm litigator perspective yet still with the same client service and zealous advocacy orientation. I wonder if big firm pro bono work could benefit from analysis of comparable metrics].

2. Portal / Intranet Rollout Metrics

Most of the audience had some sense of how to analyze success of a portal. Typical metrics on the slide and/or raised by the audience included page visits, clicks on content, reduction in certain types of RFI emails, frequency of visits, number of unique visitors, and so forth.

Measurement of an Activity Stream (such as internal twitter, Yammer, Google Reader, or RSS feed system) is more exotic. One can measure Activity Streams by the number of users. You can also measure penetration to managers and other members of the firm heirarchy. You could also look at whether it is "flattening" the heirarchy. Could track virality, or usage over time. Demographics of adoption also matter. One could also measure the pace of conversations and the type of communication (social or professional). How does it stack up to email?

I suggested that you might measure success by the number of links sent. One can also track time of usage. Often people will send links during commuting time as part of the transition to home life. (I've found that I often tweet during commutes).

Clark also spoke briefly about metrics for Orrick's Public Finance's "Online Closing System." I did not catch the substance of it. If someone would comment...

3. Rice Metrics

Finally Mary raised a "bowl of rice" metaphor for thinking about metrics. It's easy to quantify a bowl or sack of rice in terms of the number of grains or the weight. It's more useful perhaps to think about the value of someone getting a meal, or the value that person fed can add as a result of being fed for however long.

Enterprise 2.0 Session--Improve Information Flow

2010-08-25T11:01:00.002-04:00

Formal Description:

"Enterprise 2.0 can help solve inefficiencies caused by the inability to locate accurate information. This session will discuss why a great search engine is not enough, and which data repositories need to be available to the enterprise search engine to ensure transparency, how to reduce information silos and redundant, contradictory, or inaccurate data, and how activity streams can enhance retrieval and access to more unstructured knowledge."

Paul Domnick, CIO, Freshfields Bruckhuase Deringer LLP
Jessica Shawl, Operations & Program Manager, Intel

Moderated by V. Mary Abraham (twitter) of Debevoise & Plimpton. Session Materials.

Missing was Sandy Owen, Operations Director, due to a work conflict. These are my unedited notes of a discussion of significant advances in Enterprise 2.0 activity and capability, particularly at Freshfields.

Mary introduced the session. "Time wasted searching for information"--50% of time devoted to information work. Working with greater transparency makes it easier to find information about others' work.

Three ways of getting to "Las Vegas."

1. "Straight Route" of enterprise solutions:

Social Stack (Headshift) includes personal km tools, group collaboration, blogs & networks, bookmarks & tags, and public feeds & flows.

2. Intel Route

Focused on personal content & solutions. They started developing a lot of point solutions to meet individual content management needs. Some pockets of collaboration & sharing started. Initially a "KnowledgeBase" linked to documents on shared drives. They eventually had developed 60-70 applications. Finally they brought in a document management system and

Intel has a corporate-wide wiki as well as a legal department wiki. They use IM a *lot*. Systems needed to "talk" to each other. They developed matter management, ebilling, DMS, and MOSS (Sharepoint 2007).

DMS was first, but was very slow. Litigation group didn't like the DMS, so they got another one [It makes sense that a company like Intel has all that amazing IT resources to do all this wheel-spinning!].

They set up a wiki to allow easier authoring. Finally they are creating a portal with information feeds.

Laying the foundation (slides)
Rethink offerings
Integrate solutions

Federated searching, portal,

One problem was a failure to update content on the static web sites. They made it easier for people to self-serve and update content. They added wikis and DMS. Because everyone is an author,

Intel used a "web jam," a place where people could go in and post an answer to a question, to determine directions to go with transparency. "How can we be more efficient"? It's like a message board, people can post additional ideas or comment on others thoughts. There was a time limit for contributions (two weeks). It was a great way to gather lots of ideas.

There is strong use of IM. It's especially helpful in negotiations where you want to share with a colleague.

Internal networking tools are used for blogs and internal profile pages in a Facebook style. There are forums on project management, legal topics, work-life balance, and so forth.

They are piloting a federated enterprise search. They have taken a more organized approach to wikis, for instance, with "playbooks" on the wiki outlining negotiation strategies for different situations. They have some automated contract-management systems.

They use "Flip" videos to record a "day in the life" of an attorney. They used them to evaluate work processes and to figure out how to make them more efficient.

They have corporate-wide blogging (from legal department?)

Lessons Learned

If you go too far out of people's normal business processes, they won't use it. If you have to train people on it, they won't use it.

Understand how people work at home and try to provide similar capabilities. Can you search from one place in the same fashion as Google)

People are using Facebook, Twitter, IM, texting externally. Why not use them inside?

Focus on finding content rather than enforcing rules of content creation.

They are also finding enterprise (federated) search extremely important.

Sometimes having technology available is not enough. You may have to talk to people 3 times to get what you want.

Leverage early adopters. When 16% of the population accepts your idea, it becomes unstoppable. Pulling people along instead of pushing people to use is much easier.

This worked great for wikis. One gung-ho attorney loved it and brought other people along with them [this has been my experience also]. Became unstoppable.

People finally saw the value of enterprise search.

3. Freshfields Route

They had some great successes with pressing needs, as met by two initial Enterprise 2.0 projects. Later projects have had more patchy success.

First, nobody liked their intranet but nobody knew what it should be. They no longer have a portal. They completely replaced it with a wiki (Atlassian's Confluence). All 6000 employees can post content.

Second, they created an alumni network for their 27,000 alumni. They created a social collaboration site with SelectMinds [I believe SelectMinds is also a vendor for my firm].

In three weeks they had 400 users of micro-blogging tool Yammer. People agreed to use it for three months every day. It now has a complete life of its own and the constant input is not necessary.

People found the wiki fairly hard to navigate. They created a Google-like search that links to wikis. Widgets related to specific clients, industries, or Freshfields attorneys can be dropped into the wiki. Their site map is now created dynamically.

People want push as well as browse. Information will be pushed to people's profile pages. People won't tell you how they actually use the social tools. People are on average very precise about where they go to get information.

A million page impressions a day on the wiki. Get from the needs to the wants by analyzing what people actually do.

They are now working on an external collaboration site with high design level based on Jive. Involve people in firms' "CSR Agenda" (?).

Structured information--opening a matter leads to creation of a wiki pages, feed of news from client web site, fee deal description, and documents.

Enterprise search is critical because the machine can't handle all of the matter related tool, but it can pull in information in federated way from inside and outside the firm.

The 20/80 rule instead of 80/20. Listening to what people want and knowing

If we can get something up & running and 20% of people adopt it, the risk is that it will get out of control rather than that it won't be adopted.

Match available tools to needs rather than waiting for the perfect solution.

You feel like a bit of a fraud talking about this because there is so much more that could be done. But don't go down the "exactly what we need" rabbit-hole. It works if you can explain to people the vision.

None of these tools completely replace earlier ways of doing things.

Three pillars of transparency are collaboration, mobility

They made their wikis work on Blackberries and iPads. Instead of Twitter this week has has been updating his wiki and then posting to Yammer on his iPad.

Cautions (from Intel and Freshfields)

You may have to fight bureaucracy. Everyone wants to have a say in how things are implemented. In can bog things down.

People may not want to wait for a strategy because of immediate needs. That's OK.

Giant strategy that will take three years might get side-stepped by home-grown solutions.

Expediting adoption might require close support.

It can be hard to get the business case right; that can be an iterative process.

Paul--beware of users who want new toys. People want Skype, but there are some complicated reasons why that's not a good idea.

A lot of Enterprise 2.0 tools aren't quite as friendly as consumer tools. They have more functionality and control. You might have to compromise and steamroller out some things you don't need.

Mobility experience is challenging. The vendor might not have thought through how something might work via mobile. E.g., Blackberry requires sign-on every 24 hours.

An audience member was using SharePoint and Confluence for communities. Also developed "Grapevine" for micro-blogging. He suggested that people are put off by techie aspect of Confluence.

Paul said that it is a blank slate. But they have a lot of macros that let you do things like tagging, news article creation, follow page, and so forth.

Yammer is used firm-wide for "do we do X" and "have you seen this article" posts. The KM community uses it for workflow.

AFAs and the New Billing Models--First Regular Session at ILTA

2010-08-25T09:25:00.005-04:00

I attended Dan O'Day's session on alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) on Monday morning. Dan is a Thomson Reuters employee, but his session was devoid of product-pitching and served as a useful overview of AFAs, including a useful analysis of the key characteristics of all of the major varieties.

Almost half of the audience was in IT, the other half was in finance (I was in the small minority not in either camp).

Twenty Years of AFAs

Dan turned back to the DuPont Legal Model (c. 1992) for background on the development of modern AFAs. DuPont wanted to have fewer firms working for it, with closer partnerships with the fewer firms, all tracked by metrics around spend, diversity, and IT. The goal was to cut costs, increase the productivity of the outside legal work, and provide easier access (from DuPont's perspective) to legal work.

As has been noted elsewhere, different AFAs address different client concerns, and have different risks for firms in terms of cost overruns, shared outcome risk, predictability of fee amount, and so forth. Dan pointed to a 2002 presentation developed for the Legal Marketing Association (.pdf, see p. 7) and its chart ranking AFAs by frequency and noting the various key characteristics of the different types.

The rarest AFA, which I was less familiar with, is "Value-Based" or "Retrospective Based On Value" billing. In this model the firm is compensated based on the value of the services to the client. Dan's first example was a firm that raises funding in Europe based on a law firm's relationships with capital sources. A firm might negotiate that it should obtain 1% of the that funding so raised. Or, a firm might provide a 25% bonus to a litigation matter's billings if the law firm is able to prevent the firm CFO's deposition. It truly aligns the firm's needs with the client's needs, but it remains the rarest in part because they are hard to negotiate.

Moving to AFAs

Dan, a lawyer himself, noted that one challenge to moving to and budgeting for AFAs is lawyer's characteristics. A study (?) indicated that unhappy people make good lawyers, and he suggested that lawyers as a whole are more critical and negative than the population as a whole. They are paid to figure out (and try to prevent) what might go wrong in a given business situation or litigation.

Dan suggested that expanding the extent of AFAs at a firm requires a great deal of analysis and preparation.

As to existing AFAs,

How many are there?
What percent of business do they represent?
How profitable are they?
Are there any patterns as to the frequency by practice area, jurisdiction, billing partner of particular types of AFAs?

Preparing to work in a manner focused on efficiency is challenging, and is a task made more challenging by lawyer's critical managing style noted earlier.

The business process structures and strategy required to handle AFAs are quite different from those needed to support only billable hour work. To use a casino analogy, what are the table limits?

Should the firm say that no fixed fee agreements will be allowed for 7-figure of 1,000 hour potential matters?
Should the firm exercise tight process and setup control over even the smallest matters?
How will matters be monitored?
How will attorneys be held responsible for cost overruns?
When in the course of a year is the profitability of unusual AFAs assessed?
More generally, what is the governance of AFAs? Dan recommended that the model of "permission not forgiveness" be adopted.

Marketing and AFAs

One audience member was a marketing professional who is jointly responsible with finance for addressing AFAs at her firm. She suggested that that is because in her role, she is highly aware of client requirements and needs, and because pricing can be a key part of marketing strategy.

Dan's session was at a fairly introductory level, but it was still quite useful because he was able to raise, if not answer, so many key considerations for AFA implementation.

ILTA Keynote--Jason Jennings on Values of the Best Companies

2010-08-23T11:36:00.002-04:00

The keynote session opened with a slick montage, a palindromic flow of phrases that was pessimistic going forward but optimistic (for legal technologists) going backwards.

Randy Mayes and then Meredith Williams and Maureen Babcock kicked off the formal sessions at ILTA.

The theme is "Strategic Unity"--aligning legal practice and technology, and bringing together lawyers and IT to meet the new challenges of this economy. Connectivity is the most valuable return from conference. We should return with "ideas, answers, and connections."

Jason Jennings was the keynote speaker. He described the "five traits shared by the world’s most successful people and businesses to embrace change, get everyone on the same page and make things happen." While his presentation had some consultant-speak, he also touched on aligning personal ethics and the business work we do in a way that ultimately was quite effective.

He asks three questions of most people he interviews:

1. Story of Your Firm
2. Your story (home town, family, etc.)
3. What is keeping you awake at night? What could keep your organization from succeeding?

Key problems consistently uncovered by his interviews with ILTA people are:

Getting people on the same page
Changing practices
Downward Pricing pressure
Getting faster
Coping with sheer volume of data

His first book addressed, what makes a company fast? His second, what makes a company productive? His third, what makes companies grow year after year after year. They've also looked at CEOs and screened in total more than 120,000 companies.

World's best organizations include:

Ikea
Smucker's
Office Depot
Koch Industries
Newcorp Steel

He said that these "best" (by the metrics) companies shared five key attributes.

Everyone Shares a Common Noble Purpose
Letting Go
Everyone Knows Strategy
Think & Act Like an Owner
Led by Stewards

Noble Purpose

What it is

It is not a "mission statement" or "vision statement." It is big and bold like Microsoft's "put a computer with Microsoft operating system on every desk in the world."
It is inclusive. It is a *non-financial* reason for doing what you do. Steve Knight of Nike got mad at him for asking what it was like to be worth $5 billion when it was all about "competing, winning and being better than anybody else."

It fixes what's wrong, like Walmart's credo of "getting average people to buy the same things as rich people."

It gives meaning to people's lives.

Effects

Provides direction, fuels passion, drives momentum

2. Letting Go

Most organizations Cannot Let Go Of:

Yesterday’s breadwinners
Ego
Same-old, same-old
Conventional Wisdom

The best example he gave was Jack Welch and GE Capital’s decisions to continue to pour $2 billion into Montgomery Ward seeking to protect their initial investment of $100 million.

Effects:

Organizations that can let go are better able to deal with change. They are more focused than their rivals and find it easier to innovate.

3. Everyone Knows Strategy

At Smuckers, all vendors and new employees spend a few weeks learning strategy of the organization. There's a book outlining what it is every year that they willingly share with all of these stakeholders and (apparently) with their competitors.

Effects

If people don’t know the strategy, they don’t know why they are coming to work and won’t get emotionally attached. There is no accountability under a regime of secret strategies.

4. Think & Act Like an Owner

Jennings spent four days talking to people at Koch Industries, then a last day with Charles Koch. Koch claimed that his company was superior because everyone there (99.9%) felt and acted like an owner of the business.

People want to improve, get better, and get "scores." People will act more like owners if they know how what they do create economic value, and are rewarded based on the economic value they create. (There was an unfortunate lack of concrete examples of how one can get a company to act like a Koch Industries--an evidently extremely rare alignment of the perceived needs of the people who work there and the needs of the business).

5. Led by Stewards

The best leaders in business see their role as being good stewards.

Stewardship values service over short-term self-interest. Does not embrace power over others. It preserves natural and human resources. It is nurturing and supportive.

Stewards share information. Knowledge is not power—it’s execution. All information is shared with the employees.

Stewards are accessible. They keep their hands dirty and get out their with their customers or clients. Stewards don’t simply keep things the same, they make things better.

Jennings closed by asking, "Why do you *really* do what you do?"

He said that the reason in most of these organizations is to make sure that the same opportunities for personal and financial growth and fulfillment will exist for others later on in the same organization.

Reaction

I really appreciated Jennings' discussion of stewardship. It really touched a chord in me, and also reflects some of the values of the knowledge management movement. Saying and affirming that sharing information and knowledge is a good and valuable thing, part of leadership and stewardship, is powerful, and an important lesson for organizational leaders of all kinds.

It clearly also hit the right notes with the audience of members at ILTA, I suspect because his description of the necessity for service, stewardship, and support of others is completely in line with the values of that organization.

ILTA 2010--Upcoming Panel--KM Supporting Alternative Financial Arrangements

2010-08-19T05:44:00.006-04:00

There is quite a bit of talk this year at ILTA about alternative financial arrangements. On Thursday August 26th at 10:30, Starvine 10, I'm presenting on how "traditional" KM supports the work on such matters (particularly that on fixed fee work) and the different risks and rewards in focused contrasted with broad-based knowledge management work.

With me on the panel are Peter Krakauer of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and Michael Mills of Kraft & Kennedy. Peter will be discussing how knowledge management skills and resources can be applied to the process of developing, understanding, and implementing alternative financial arrangements; Michael will be looking at some tools available in the marketplace that can assist firms with handling alternative financial arrangements. It should be an interesting session.

Formal Description:

"With all the buzz about alternative fee arrangements, you may be wondering how knowledge management can support them. This session will review how KM provides critical support for firms as they design, manage and offer AFAs. In addition to more traditional methods, such as model and sample forms, matter databases, and expertise location, KM supports AFA strategies through project management, financial analysis, business intelligence, and standardized information capture."

"How KM Supports Alternative Fee Arrangements." Session Description:

ILTA 2010--Email Management Panel

2010-08-19T05:09:00.002-04:00

I am returning to ILTA Conference, this year held in Las Vegas, and appearing on two panels. In both we'll be addressing a subject that I've been working with a lot this year. In this post I'll address email management, a huge KM concern.

Attorneys increasingly live in Outlook (sorry Lotus Notesians) and use it not just for tasks and team communications but to transmit key documents to clients and opposing counsel. Where those documents did not originate in client/matter-centric document management systems, vital context about those documents, and the documents themselves, are potentially lost as a searcheable treasure trove in the firm's collective information pool. While I believe that there are better ways of doing many things done by email (such collaboration, knowledge-sharing, broadcasting), the email dragon for client work is here to stay, not slay, and there is no getting around that. Making the email repository--or at least the client file portion of it--matter-centric is therefore a vital KM task. Matter-centric email should also go a long way to addressing the refindability and accessibility of email to the working attorney, an issue that many of them consider a major "pain point."

It's not just KM. IT also struggles with the sheer volume and size of email; and, it drives records and risk management people crazy.

On Tuesday morning at 9 AM, Ironwood 2, I'll be moderating a panel titled "Dreams Can Come True: E-mail Management Success Stories." Slides are already available. The panelists come from varied technological and business backgrounds, but have three intriguing success stories. They have started to accomplish the goal of creating a matter-centric environment in strikingly different ways, with none of them going the "plain vanilla" route of implementing iManage's "WorkSite Email Management."

The presenters are:

Ana Schuett, Practice Technology Support Manager - Hunton & Williams
Chris Romano, CIO, Ward and Smith, P.A.
Derek Schueren, Vice President of Business Development (Co-Founder)- Recommind

Hunton & Williams, a large firm, has leveraged Baker Robbins' FastFiler tool in conjunction with Autonomy's iManage document management system. Ward & Smith, a mid-sized firm, has implemented cloud-based email management through NetDocuments. And Recommind's Decisiv tool, which I believe can be implemented with or without a document management system like iManage, offers predictive filing and improved organization of email threads.

I hope you can join us!

ILTA Publication: Working Smart is Cheaper and More Profitable

2010-07-06T07:27:00.000-04:00

Late in June the International Legal Technology Association published its annual knowledge management "white paper," Knowledge Management: Bridging People, Information, and Processes . The issue was coordinated by Wilson Sonsini's Chris Boyd.

It contains two articles directly addressing knowledge management and alternative fee arrangements. My article, also published separately here , has the subject line title. I address how knowledge management people, tools, and approaches can support legal work in a business world in which an increasing percentage of even high-end legal work is undertaken on a fixed-fee basis. Peter Krakauer's complimentary article addresses how knowledge management can support a firm's efforts in addressing and adapting to alternative fee arrangements.

The overall tone of the white paper is hopeful. Both Peter and I, and the KM survey, suggest that knowledge management, with its focus on the need to make attorneys more efficient and effective, will be more prominent and of greater strategic value in a world in which a dollar saved is a dollar earned.

Cisco Advances Collaboration; Law Departments Push Enterprise 2.0

2010-04-02T11:46:00.000-04:00

I've had this post in edit mode for far too long. I apologize for its lack of topicality, but realized that it can be useful to publish something even for use as a reference for myself (and perhaps others). I'm returning to this particular post despite the potential embarrassment because I feel it addresses a significant advance in the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities of a few law departments and also highlights one law firm's strong client-focused KM effort.

I attended a session formally titled Legal Technology and the Law: Collaboration Strategies in the Legal Marketplace at LegalTech in New York February 2nd that highlighted some outstanding collaboration tools and efforts undertaken by a few legal departments. In my view and based on my knowledge of private surveys others have done, they exceed in features and apparent extent of adoption those undertaken at any law firm. This is surprising when you consider that many attorneys who move "in-house" are perplexed by the absence of what at law firms would be considered basic legal IT resources such as an effective document management system with version control and so forth. It is less surprising when you consider that large corporations are far out in front of any law firm in terms of development and adoption of "Enterprise 2.0" tools such as IBM's "Connections" and Lockheed Martin's "Unity."

Cisco OnRamp Exchange

I was particularly impressed with the OnRamp Exchange ("ORX") developed by Risa Schwartz, Head of Knowledge Management, at Cisco. It's a central know-how repository built by Paul Lippe and others at Legal OnRamp.

I previously covered Risa's 2007 presentation what was then called the Legal Exchange Collaborative at ILTA. At that point she was working on a culture that encouraged attorneys to ask questions and pose learned answers, in connection with sets of information on different topics of interest to Cisco lawyers. The system they had then did not allow attorneys to interact via email.

Cisco and Risa has since worked with the folks at Legal OnRamp to develop a collaborative tool that threads discussions in email, provides notice to content owners or other interested people of changes, and spans the firewall. It's in use for substantive knowledge management purposes, managing Cisco's repository of contract language and negotiating advice, like a "playbook."

Moderated wikis contain negotiation guidance, grouped by topic such as "open source." Discussion forums are integrated with wikis and with email. Recent changes are listed at the upper right, new conversation threads lower left.

Posting a conversation must be started within the application and directed at the outset at two moderators. Mark Chandler (Cisco GC) wants to value moderators. Moderating is part of the annual review process and it has become a way of recognizing people who have done well. After the conversation is approved you can also add in others, even people outside the firewall such as outside counsel. Content development is tied very tightly to email. Anyone who has access to an email application or browser can edit the wiki. Email notifications link to a redline and contain an approval button.

(The ability to interact with a social collaborative space through email may seem odd to web denizens. I've repeatedly heard this as a feature request from attorneys I work with, however, even ones who are very technically sophisticated. Their work often takes them out of the office, or traveling, and they want to be able to accomplish their work whether or not they are sitting in front of a PC.)

Cisco Deal Rooms

Cisco also developed extranets, in particular, a Mergers & Acquisitions site is using MOSS Sharepoint (WSS).

They require the other side in a deal to upload document to upuload the documents Cisco needs. The targets know the information better.

Outside counsel are analyzing documents quickly on these deal to identify dangerous issues. Now counsel do the analysis on the site linked to the document. This allows more efficient analysis and recommendations. They worked with Fenwick & West (Mark Drose) on some custom development to make these work.

These deal rooms have significantly speeded up deals.

What Business Needs Drive Collaboration?

Another presenter addressed collaboration strategy.

Less money, too many providers, new fee arrangements and "convergence" are reducing outside providers.

Law departments want to restructure incentives so both sides feel like they are winning. Much less work is being done on an hourly basis.

Law departments can cut costs by sharing information, inventing it once and sharing many times. Taking steps out of business processes or automating steps saves people time and the company money.

Corporations are looking for 20-60% savings from law departments. They won't attain that unless there is a different working relationship with law firms. It will require greater mutual sharing of information. More investment in working relationships is required. Shared risk and investment is not possible with hundreds of outside counsel.

One key for collaboration efforts is clearly identifying the business needs of the legal department. They need to increase collaboration across geographically dispersed areas, between department and internal business clients, and between department and outside counsel. Within law departments there is a continued lament of "I can't find what we already know." You can't expect people to go outside of workflow to capture information.

Marketing is really key. Having senior management market the tools is just the beginning. Have users tell people how they are using it. Other groups wanted to use it in similar ways.

Adoption is a real challenge. You have to focus on business process and what you are designing for. Involve the people who will use the tool in the design.

Orrick's Global Corporate Secretarial Services

Clark Cordner, the "Director of Practice and Client Services" from Orrick presented on a system they developed with Cisco to help that multinational's business needs around global corporate work.

Cisco has hundreds of subsidiaries and is operating in more than a hundred countries. Challenges included operating in multiple countries with local regulatory changes, with local lawyers of varying levels of sophistication and unpredictable fees.

Technology Cisco had to address these challenges was not adequate. They did a traditional "gap analysis" (what do we have, what do we want, how can we get there) and ran a competitive bidding process, then customized the product of the winning vendor. Part of the program entailed an evaluation of Cisco's foreign counsel network in conjunction with Orrick's network (there was some merger between the two).

Orrick gets a flat fee for the costs of foreign local counsel and the technology. Cisco has seen a 25% savings over two years and it has worked well for Orrick. This kind of collaboration is only possible if client and law firm get really close and have a higher level of trust. The trust was developed partly through Orrick KM lawyers and others "shadowing" attorneys at Cisco who dealt with the corporate work.

Orrick is now providing this platform as a service and has about a dozen other clients.

GCSS addresses corporate, licensing, compliance tracking and assessment and covers entities, people, documents, tasks, and calendars. One function allows a view of corporate families.

A typical entry for a corporation includes information about:

Profile
Officers / Directors
Minute Books
Counsel
Business Entities
Tree Walker
Jurisdictional Requirements

GCSS and the process for developing it are a model (in my view) for new opportunities that law firms could be uncovering.

Google Scholar Follow-Up

2010-03-17T11:12:00.006-04:00

Lawyers I work with who have heard of Google Scholar find it a valuable tool because it provides quick, easy, and free access to caselaw that they work with every day. Cautions about the inability of Google to truly verify the validity of a case should not, of course, be ignored for those conducting legal research.

I previously posted about the recency of Google caselaw specifically with respect to updates from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial court. (To summarize; it knew of citations but didn't have full text of decisions issued as recently as three weeks before, and had full text of decisions from about eight weeks back).

Today I went back and reviewed the status of recent caselaw in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court archive as compared to Google's set of Massachusetts state caselaw on Google Scholar.

Google has the full text of the Kilburn case issued February 24, 2010, but not the pro se appeal of George Nassar issued February 26, 2010. The most recent case on Google is the White v. Commonwealth case from March 1 (now slightly more than two weeks ago) (n.b. future readers of this post, the "Nassar" case is a link into the Westlaw repository of SJC slip opinions, my non-Google source of SJC decisions, may break in the future).

To summarize, their coverage of recent caselaw is somewhat spotty for decisions issued within the last month, but the "delay" has been reduced significantly to, in one case, half a month or 16 days from date of issue. Google Scholar is not now somehow aware of citations in advance of having the full, formal opinion.

Turning Down The Information Firehose--ABA Article in Law Practice

2010-03-15T13:49:00.003-04:00

Today my article "Personal Knowledge Management: Turning Down the Information Firehose" was published in the Law Practice magazine of the American Bar Association. Much of my work focuses on how attorneys can do a better job handling information. For instance, I have a program targeting litigation partners that specifically focuses on personal knowledge management. So "PKM" has been an interest of mine and I am happy to have had the chance to refine my thoughts on it through the research, drafting and publishing process.

Research for the article was itself an interesting experiment in personal knowledge management. The most valuable resources were probably KM Lawyer Mary Abraham's post "Managing the Firehose", "PKM Professional" Harold Jarche's posts on Sense-Making with Personal Knowledge Management, Patty Anklam on PKM as the "Third KM," and the collection of resources compiled by a number of people on delicious at http://delicious.com/popular/pkm.

What led me to most of those resources was a simple question to peers on Twitter. Thanks twitterverse!

ILTA KM Survey 2010

2010-03-09T09:49:00.004-05:00

The International Legal Technology Association's Knowledge Management Peer Group Committee, of which I am a member, has released its annual survey of knowledge management efforts in law firms. The goal is to have one person respond from as many member firms as possible, whether or not there is a knowledge management program designated as such. You have to enter your email, but the goal of that is to avoid duplicate entries from the same firm.

Here's the announcement:

"The KM Peer Group is conducting its biennial knowledge management survey to probe the trends, hot topics and development of KM in the legal industry. Results of the survey will be published in the KM White Paper scheduled for publication in June. Please take five to ten minutes to complete the survey or forward it to the appropriate KM person in your organization (we only want one response per organization). As an incentive to participate, we will draw three names from our pool of respondents –– two winners will receive $500, and a third will receive his/her choice of $500 or a waived registration fee for ILTA 2010, the annual conference (a $1,025 value).

You can access the questionnaire at: http://iltanews.org/ve/ZZ6961slSC31v85F5/stype=click/OID=510382122118/VT=0, and the survey will remain open through March 26.

With regards,

Randi Mayes
Executive Director
International Legal Technology Association"

"Sharepoint Development Best Practices” at LegalTech

2010-02-01T12:17:00.004-05:00

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

2010-01-29T13:23:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-28T12:01:00.006-05:00

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

2010-01-22T16:57:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-17T19:53:00.008-05:00

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

2009-10-23T12:06:00.005-04:00

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

2009-10-23T10:27:00.005-04:00

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

KM and ROI

2009-10-23T08:54:00.006-04:00

I'm at an international knowledge management peer group meeting today, under the terms of which speakers and affiliations are not identified.

My subject line acronyms, standing of course for "knowledge management" and "return on investment," all too rarely appear together either in discussions or strategy. This was in some ways an introduction to ROI at a fairly basic level, but given the relatively woeful state of business analytics at most law firms, investigating ROI may be a real opportunity for KM programs.

People want to believe there is a way to comprehend any puzzling or momentous force. Convince them you are the key to comprehending it and you will gain great status.

Having a basic grasp of finance can give you a leg up in law firms over most people at the firm except perhaps the CFO or COO.

ROI was a misunderstood term of art. KM people took it mean "show us what you are likely to do and how it will help."

We are starting to see a trend of relating KM to profitability or even revenue generation.

As firms have begun to embrace professional managers, it's become much more important for KM managers to establish ROI.

ROI, defined as earnings per dollar of investment, compares solution cost to monetary benefits. Measuring ROI varies between industries. There will always be some black magic behind it. It does not take into account work-life balance. An ROI of 25% means that investment cost plus an additional 25% of the investment is returned.

ROI is calculated first by identifying the solution benefits, less the total costs (not just cash investments), x100 expressed as a percentage.

Utilization rate is the actual hours billed divided by target. So an associate who bills 900 hours with an 1800 hour target has 50% utilization rate.

Realization is collections divided by billings. So a matter in which $200,000 was billed but $100,000 collected would have 50% realization rate.

As KM managers are integrated more and more into the business discussions we need to have a better understanding of the language of business.

Process improvement helps cost savings when a better-articulated, well-documented, more accessible, and standardized best practices reduces the time required for a person to accomplish a goal or complete an activity.

For example, ask attorneys how much time they spend sorting / dealing with email.

It is not as simple as saying that an hour saved is an hour that would have been billed. Tie rather to a firm initiative such as business development investment time. Look for firm initiatives that set goals for new business acquisition, client outreach, cross-selling, and so forth.

Sales metrics; one large legal market vendor tracks sales activity down to the level of clicks in a demonstration. This is not inappropriate but rather is the type of business process necessary to survive in a global economy.

At one firm, five of six projects needed no ROI. On the sixth, the KM manager identified hours that could be used for something else with the new project and used that to successfully sell the project. Another firm will be requiring ROI analysis but has not identified how to do that.

Few firms have assessed ROI on business development.

Value can be defined in a lot of different ways.

The discipline that the "ROI game" imposes helps us better find the business objectives, articulate the goals and objectives of KM work, and communicate better to lawyers about it.

KM taking over the risk management at one firm led to cost savings in not hiring a general counsel. If practice area is servicing more clients in the same amount of time, then you've helped the business of the firm because the firm didn't have to hire more people.

"You will spend less time searching" or "you will spend less time doing X" gives the direction and lawyers intuitively understand that working more efficiently means more time for managing the business or delegating more. Firm leaders may not have spent the time identifying how people should be spending their time.

It drives smart people crazy when business processes are handled poorly. Setting a good example of doing something better proves your value.

One way to get some return on invesment is to do a survey about people's pain points and degree of contentment.

Another way to tie to think about ROI is saving moeny for the client.

One firm has a "precedents" library with metrics about popular precedents, popular users, and unpopular precedents. The parallel "research" library doesn't have comparable metrics. The KM manager's CIO from an accounting firm is asking for an ROI, although the project is required to be in place before metrics measurement can really be done (chicken-egg).

The "wild card" KM managers can play in ROI discussions is risk.

One financial measurement is risk and cost of being sued. Making substantive legal mistakes due to poor precedent or absence of search is a risk and potential cost of having a poor research collection.

KM managers can trace ROI by looking at usage of precedents, derivative works, number of searches, etc.

We can estimate software cost by figuring implementation and consulting may take about 1/3 of the annual cost. Focus on three year period as implementation costs drop off quickly.

Doing calculations can help you identify if your assumptions are incorrect. You won't actually get an ROI of 71% from implementing metrics assessment.

ROI analysis ties well into matter management and alternative fee arrangements.

A major benefit of ROI analysis is a more rigorous business approach.

One commentator said that our firms do not apply rigorous analysis to major business decisions. Most don't even do profitability analysis.

Wikis at ILTA 2009 Part 2, SmartSpace Integrates Wikis Into Leading Document Management System Platform

2009-08-28T14:18:00.005-04:00

SmartSpace

PBWorks is a tool squarely in the Enterprise 2.0 space. SmartSpace attempts to merge the traditional core document management system functionality of legal market leader iManage (Interwoven) with an enterprise wiki, or actually, thousands of wikis. To understand this tool you have to understand a little bit about how iManage's "matter centric collaboration" or MCC system works.

iManage Background

With MCC each legal matter or practice area is automatically assigned a "workspace" that contains iManage folders. These iManage folders function something like a Windows explorer folder, but are located essentially within the application (webparts allow folders or workspaces to be displayed in portals, however). To assign a matter number or other characteristic to a document or email, it is placed in a folder in a workspace. At the "workspace level" proper, however, no information is displayed and no documents can be located. Workspaces, like folders, can be associated with metadata like client / matter numbers, legal service codes, and practice areas.

Baker Robbins has leveraged the curious opportunity created by the "blank" workspace to create and display a workspace-specific wiki. As with any wiki, new pages can be linked and created on the workspace wiki. The home wiki page is currently somewhat "structured," such that documents in iManage can be added as part of a "briefing" at the top of the home wiki page.

Technically I understand that the SmartSpace wiki is hosted on a separate server and is displayed within iManage dynamically based on the workspace information (this suggests that it would not be challenging to show the SmartSpace alone on a portal, say in conjunction with one of the many Matter Pages intranet systems or in an extranet).

Document Management System Collaboration??

I think it is really interesting that a top consultant has figured out a way to add a matter-specific collaborative tool right into the main-line document management system. Providing attorneys and staff the ability to interact with and add context to the key set of documents they work with could very significantly enhance their ability to find and leverage work product, and also could provides an easy way for wiki knowledge-sharing and collaboration to be embedded in the normal attorney / staff workflow.

Suggestions For Improvement

The product was first discussed (released?) in June (2009) so, not surprisingly, I see a few ways that the current SmartSpace approach could be improved to make them more of a collaboration and communications platform.

1) Notifications (Signals)

Notification of changes is core wiki functionality, in my opinion, because it provides a signal of changes and allows the wiki to serve as a communications platform instead of simply an on-line database.

I did not see notifications built into SmartSpace. It should be easy to sign up for notifications of changes to the SmartSpace (and perhaps also the documents in the workspaces?). Notifications work best if the user can select the notification frequency, whether immediately, daily, or weekly digest formats.

In addition, the type of notifications provided can be really important. As noted by my former colleague in "Sharepoint Wiki Disaster," Sharepoint 2007 (a/k/a MOSS) provides the latest version of the page "entire," without a redline or indication of changes. This has limited (though not eliminated) the utility of those wikis.

Notifications are typically provided by email, or, in fully Enterprise-2.0-compatable organizations, through an RSS feed.

2) Ease of Editing

A wiki is supposed to be easy to edit. The edit button should be large, friendly, and inviting. That encourages people to start the editing process. Lowering the barriers to authorship enhances the opportunities for attorneys and staff to add value to the workspace wikis.

3) Structured vs. Unstructured Wiki Pages

Currently SmartSpaces allows users to right click on a document anywhere in iManage and add a document to a "briefing" section on the home page of a workspace wiki. I understand and applaud making it easy to add documents to these wikis.

I am concerned however that limiting where the documents go when they are added will dramatically reduce the opportunity for users to provide context to the documents through organizing and formating the page and set of pages to on which the document is linked. It is the ability of users to control and add to the context and organization of wikis that make them superior, from a knowledge management context, to traditional document databases.

One way to improve the flexibility would be to let users choose from a list which page on the wiki to add in the link. Another would be to have the right-click create the full link, complete with text, for addition into any place on the wiki. A third way would be to have the right-click simply identify and copy a unique URL for the document (this is clunkier).

4) Search

Another concern is search. An organization with enterprise search could readily search both the iManage system and any related wiki. Without federated search, however, the documents themselves and the context for the documents and the text provided by the SmartSpace wiki would need to be searched separately, which is problematic. And search within SmartSpace might be limited to that workspace wiki, or extended to all of the wikis.

5) Security

A separate system would need to map and abide by the same security settings found in the iManage workspaces. For instance, it should not be possible to even view the name of a workspace wiki if only certain people in the firm are allowed to access the matter (the names themselves can constitute information that needs to be kept from everyone except those on the matter team).

Conclusion

Despite these concerns, I am very intrigued by the concept of adding matter-specific wikis into the law firm environment. I have been looking for a wiki package that would allow automatic generation of wikis based on matter opening, and this system certainly fits that need. It remains to be seen if this system can meet enough other needs to rise to the level of a truly useful and adoptable tool.

Wikis at ILTA 2009, Part 1, Bracewell & Giuliani Litigation Knowledge Base

2009-08-27T08:26:00.010-04:00

Wikis (a significant interest of mine) came up in three largely unrelated contexts at the ILTA conference this year.

One law firm, Bracewell and Giuliani, is using an externally-hosted wikis provided by PBWorks for "core" knowledge management and retrieval in the litigation group at one of their offices. I attended an Enterprise 2.0 session on this on Monday as part of the Enterprise 2.0 track (more details below).

Second, I had a preview of an iManage-reliant technology called "SmartSpace" in developement by Baker Robbins that integrates wikis with iManage's matter workspaces (details in the second part). Increasing people's ability to easily add context through a wiki or other interactive tool like tagging has great potential to change the way that people work with and relate to the document management system. (Disclaimer: my firm has employed Baker Robbins from time to time).

Third, at a knowledge-management track session on Creative Adoption Techniques, I learned that another law firm is using Sharepoint wikis to store practice-area related information. I did not obtain any significant details about this and so have little to add to this tidbit. Wikis are clearly beginning to make some inroads for limited purposes even at firms not noted for Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

Bracewell & Giuliani -- Wikis as Litigation Work Product Research and Knowledge Sharing Tool

Bracewell's project was an outstanding example of leveraging the power of Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 tools to enhance a group's sharing and alerting of valuable core knowledge, for one litigation practice.

Background

The New York office of this firm has less than 30 litigators, yet they had difficulty finding legal research that had been previously carried out at that office. They did not have a work-product retrieval tool like West KM(TM) or Lexis(TM) Search Advantage. They did have an enterprise search tool but it was providing them with "too much information."

They were using a set of centrally-located research binders, but they were hard to maintain and keep current.

One of their attorneys heard that the U.S. State Department is using wiki technology to share and collaborate across the globe (through Diplopedia), and they have since investigated and adopted wikis as the primary way of storing and retrieving valuable work product (in that office).

They commented that if you can’t share the research it’s not efficient and makes the next attorney reinvent the wheel.

Tool, Form, and Adoption Techniques

They chose PBWorks as an easy-to-use externally hosted platform into which they could load the documents and create a browseable view of resources (PBWorks is the first E20 vendor to really focus on the legal market with its PBWorks Legal).

The B & G wiki focused on what NY litigators wanted. Their wiki covers areas such as substantive law of New York (the example they showed was contract law); civil procedure; and information about judges and courts (for instance, filing practices in particular New York Supreme Court offices). Each topic page enhances browsing by linking to related procedures, areas of law, and court information. Search on the wiki also works quite well because of the targeted nature of the content.

Their adoption approach leveraged attorneys' competitive nature. They set up a substantial reward for the most (real) new entries over a certain period of time. In 3 months they went from a handful of entries to hundreds of entries, with an especially numerous clump of entries on the (near-holiday) night the contest closed. They are now able to find valuable precedent through searching, or, just as often, browsing the wiki.

Outcome

They believe that an average successful search saves around 2 hours in fruitless searching or reinvention of work product. Theor wiki has resulted in more efficient service and cheaper client bills (happier clients).

The three attorneys who led the effort suspected that if a critical mass of information is built up, the information pool would reach at a certain point reach “critical mass” and be self-sustaining. As it turns out, the wiki has succeeded in terms of the number of users. Partners now will say “check the wiki first" or “just go to the wiki.” Partners have to answer for high bills and so they are driving use.

An additional goal is also to eventually provide the information on-line to answer questions, say, about liquidated and consequential damages under New York law from other Bracewell & Giuliani offices.

They find it much easier to post small bits of information on the wiki than to draft a formal research memo on a given subject. Attorneys can easily cut and paste an email into the wiki.

One paralegal was able to find a form for accepting assignment of a case to a mostly retired New York state judge on 30 seconds on the wiki, where it had taken two hours on the internet.

Alerts

Users get redlined changes of updates to wiki. This provides a way to educate all of them to keep up on new developments in the law.

Other Uses

While the litigation group's wiki was solely for internal use, they believe that the external hosting makes sharing the project wiki with the client a potential use for transactional work.

Reaction and Conclusion

At my firm we use West KM to retrieve previous examples of substantive legal research, and that tool works quite well for that purpose. We also use a collection of Sharepoint and Interaction lists and systems to track information about judges and courts. I am working on a Sharepoint wiki focused on federal civil procedure but Sharepoint's notifications limitations make it an inappropriate tool to serve as a tool for updating my department about developments in the law. And my systems don't currently provide an easy way for attorneys to capture knowledge contained in email or to contribute small bits of higher-level knowledge, such as the procedures and practices of a particular judge.

Litigation knowledge managers, practice support lawyers, and people with similar responsibilities inside law firms should look at the benefits that a substantive litigation wiki can provide their groups, and draw from this firm's experience with selection, adoption, and success.

ILTA 09 Panel--Technologies That Will Disrupt Traditional Legal Practice

2009-08-26T11:05:00.003-04:00

This was an excellent session that provided a good list with lightly described examples of disruptive technologies and three more in-depth case studies from two of the more technologically sophisticated firms.

I am putting up these notes with fairly minimal review as I am presenting on matter management in an hour.

What is disruption?

Susskind recommends "The Innovator's Dilemma"; Christianson. Technologies that come and challenge the way that business works. What are the implications of disruption for market leaders? Often they dismiss these technologies when they first appear. Sometimes the innovators end up challenging the market leaders. For instance, Kodak ignored digital cameras and for a while were able to argue that film was better. They lost market but now are invested in digitial photography as well.

For Whom is it Disruptive?

For innovators, disruptive technology can lead to competitive advantage. Most law firms are far more afraid of being left behind than they are of leading the pack.

It's hard to motivate lawyers. It's more persuasive to say that other firms are doing this.

He's surprised by the persistance of the billable hour. He offered to pay his 12-year old daughter by the hour for a chore and she smiled and said "Well I'll take my time then." (You really have to say this out loud with a Scottish accent to get the full effect).

About 50% of general counsel are still comfortable with it.

Ten Disruptive Technologies

The legal world does change slowly. It will take 5-10 years.

1. Automated document assembly.

A lot of work is still hand-crafted. There us a fair amount in small shops with commoditized work. Automation has changed only a few sophisticated practices (European bond market).

Making them available on-line changes the ball game. You can go from a production level of several hundred to several thousand.

The automatic assembly of documents is disruptive because it takes the lawyers out of the business of producing documents.

2. Relentless Connectivity

We'll never be less connected than we are today. 24/7 availability is scary for senior lawyers. You need to put in place systems to have someone be responsive or accessible. Email is not going anywhere. "The calls on our time electronically are increasing."

3. The Electronic Legal Marketplace

We know we can auction services on-line. Clients can more quickly find out what services are available at what price. The idea that clients can find out about the availability of resources outside those of the law firm is fundamentally disruptive. Can a corporation find out that a law firm in Ohio has a week's worth of resources to throw at a due diligence project.

4. e-Learning

The romantic vision of bespoke services draws people to the law but does not reflect the current practice of law. How should we be training them?

There are simulation and learning techniques that afford a far more realistic view of legal practice. A lawsuit simulation might include a large filing the night before a scheduled oral argument that attempts to totally change the argument (which happens in practice but not moot court).

5. Online Legal Guidance

Current websites are fairly crude but still provide some information. There's great potential to provide legal services to a much broader pool of people, cheaply.

6. Legal Open-Sourcing

This will be more directed at citizens than at corporations. If people are networked together they can offer each other much in a community spirit. We'll start to see people coming together who have similar problems.

7. Closed Legal Communities

By and large there aren't many truly new problems. Big London banks collaborated to force law firms to deliver their legal know-how in a portal. Clients are also starting to come together.

8. Workflow and Project Management

We need to systematize and organize our project better. Rigorously apply well-tested techniques to project management. It is laughable to think that a lawyer can become a project manager by at most attending a 3-day training course.

Project management in principle and practice reduces the time and cost in providing legal services.

Project management becomes more necessary with multi-sourcing. Chunking up projects is a separate type of challenging task and needs to be managed.

Global tax compliance efforts are underway at large accounting firms. It's worth hundreds of millions. Accenture won it by saying that it was a complex project that needed a strong management instead of tax expertise (that was subcontracted out).

Are law firms ready to implement and train on project management? No, not currently.

9. Embedded Legal Knowledge

Rules are embedded in systems like computer Solitaire.

Self-monitoring and self-assessing legal systems will reduce need for lawyerly attention.

10. Online Dispute Resolution

He asks, "are courts a service or a place?" Cybersettle uses "double-blind bidding system." to resolve dispute. Over 30 days you negotiate until you're within 10%. The State of New York (?) has resolved hundreds of personal injury suits through such a system. Moneyclaimonline is a UK based dispute resolution.

********************

You know there are other ways to deliver legal services. The economy has catalyzed the uptake of new ways. There are radical new ways of delivering legal services that will be enabled by technology.

*********************

John Alber of Bryan Cave then addressed an online service his firm provides in the trade/export restrictions area.

Automating Low End Legal Advice

A good opportunity has:

a recurring legal problem (import/export restrictions),
perceived value/cost disconnect where paying for solving the same type of problem every day
high-energy practice group accustomed to tight publishing deadlines

The goal is to solve common problems and answer the "easy" questions. Clarifications provided at no additional cost. Typical pricing is an hourly fee.

Legal Advice for Clients: Import/Export Tool

They set up a client-facing decision tree tool for a client who needed information about import/export restrictions. Clients like it. They obtained all of the trade business for the first client. The service was completely repriced. They use it as a training toool.

Workflow for Due Diligence

They also applied technology to wireless spectrum sales. Radio station sales are very expensive, especially the due diligence.

They developed an automated workflow that walked 50 contract lawyers through a set of review steps and captures the information at issue. It has a significant reporting feature to track work. You can use Sharepoint workflow (it is not technically complicated). They put the people in large rooms and ran the paper flow through them.

The result is that the cost per unit of due diligence roughly by 2/3 and deal turn time is measured in months not weeks. Client's deal process is changed and they can do deals they could not have before. It's a real competitive advantage.

*****************

Gerard Neiditsch of Australia addressed "Mallesons Connect."

Mallesons did not want to provide "black box" services where what is happening with the matter teams is hidden from their clients. They are trying to provide greater client access to information about the work.

Clients most wanted financial information, project progress, and alerts.

They were also interested in current awareness and client training.

The security model is quite challenging. Making correspondence securely available to the client is critical.

They'll be introducing these "Dashboards" later this year.

At the top it lists the total and active matters (a number) and the number of unpaid invoices. Sometimes bills aren't paid because the general counsel doesn't know they are paid.

All links are active. Hovering over matter gives matter summary of financials. A person's availability (live!) is shown next to their name. Drill-downs also available.

a Search page provides access to drill down into projects through guided / faceted navigation (number of projects by category, location, partner responsible, etc.)

Financial information is shown in friendly form including "Aged debtors", 10 most recent invoices with a link to unpaid invoices, project estimates and which are over/under/near/ or no estimate. Making this visible makes project management start to happen inside the firm.

This was a very sophisticated approach to exposing client information, focusing on the information they expressed they wanted.

The project has seen pretty good adoption by clients. Using web 2.0 tool sets that are very rapid to fix makes it possible to change the technology.

*****
In the questions session, Susskind makes the point that you shouldn't base your decisions on having one reluctant client. If even half or three-quarters of clients want one of these then it is still probably worth it.

Rachelle Rennegal asked how Bryan Cave established pricing for the export tool. They now have sophisticated pricing tools. At first they took a guess at the economics and left the pricing flexible. The initial goal was to generate more high-end premium counseling business and break even on the software tool.

Susskind said that the skill and talent in chunking up the projects and planning outsourcing is significant.

Richard Susskind on "The End of Lawyering"

2009-08-26T07:29:00.003-04:00

Legal innovator and passionate speaker Richard Susskind spoke in a "super session" this morning at ILTA. He is also spoke on a panel titled "Technologies That Will Disrupt Traditional Legal Practice."

His point of view is "radically different" from that of other lawyers.

Post revised September 11 to link to later post and fix a typo or two.

The Future

Black & Decker doesn't sell power tools. It sells something customers use to make holes in the wall.

Lawyers deliver 1:1 consultative services now. But what is the real value we bring? For what are we paid?

"We exist to turn knowledge into value." We bring insight to bear on customer's problems.

By avoiding discussing the means of service delivery in defining what lawyers do, you open yourself up to new methods of providing service.

You bring knowledge and experience to the situtation. Methods of capturing and sharing knowledge are therefore critical. KM has had pockets of success but has not changed the whole profession.

He finds that general counsel "don't want dispute resolution, we want dispute avoidance." They want a fence at the top of a cliff instead of the ambulance at the bottom.

Knowledge capture and management and legal risk management are really important.

Automation v. Innovation

Automation is systemetizing some aspect of your work. Applying technology to preexisting processes is automation. The most dramatic impact of technology is where it has allowed you to do things that previously weren't possible. We're just warming up in legal technology.

We have to look at ways in which IT can change the way we do things.

The ATM is an example of an innovation. It was a very different way of delivering that service.

Our challenge is to change the way legal services are delivered.

The Client's Three-Part Dilemma

In-house lawyers have been asked to reduce internal head-count and external spend as well at a time when compliance pressures and changes in the law are raising the complexity of their challenges.

Clients Want More For Less

It is simply not the case that clients will be going back to the old ways, at least with respect to "shareholders at a board meeting."

How Can This Be Done?

Susskind belives that the two paths to providing more for less are the efficiency strategy and the collaborative strategy.

Efficiency Strategy

He believes that routine and repetitive legal work can be done differently. It doesn't need expensive lawyers.

In 1996 he said that email would be the primary way of communicating in law firms.

"Bespoke" services are those customized and tailored to the particular situation just as a spoke suit is tailored to the wearer.

Lawyers project the idea that most problems are bespoke. But clients come to you because you've faced similar problems before.

There are five levels on the path to commoditisation.

Bespoke / Standard / Systematised / Packaged / Commoditised.

Pckaging is a radical step. Packaging is the delivery of a system that lets the client come in and produce the solution or document required themselves.

Another example is the term sheet generator by Wilson Sonsini and Allen Overy.

Deloitte's tax practice lets their clients come in and use their tax system on a licensed basis. "We exist to turn knowledge into volume." Not the way we learned to practice but clients will go for it. Deloitte has 70 of top 100 clients using their tax software.

There is a red line in his diagram before commoditisation. The costs of commoditised work rapidly drop towards zero. The marginal costs of delivery are reduced as you move towards commoditisation. There are huge opportunities in the standardization level.

No decent firm is not standardizing.

Work can be "chunked up"

The clients want to move towards commoditisation because it enhances certainty of cost. Some clients want certainty of cost even more than lower cost.

Standardization can be of very high quality.

He's predicting a fundamental move of the amount of work towards commoditisation.

Collaborative Strategy

You can divide litigation into different chunks. It's hard to argue that a law firm is uniquely qualified to source all of them.

There are many ways of sourcing the work:

Multi-sourcing
in-sourcing
de-lawyering
relocating
offshoring
outsourcing
sub-contracting
co-sourcing
leasing
home-sourcing
open-sourcing
computerising
no-sourcing

Rio Tinto is requiring external counsel to work with *their* junior lawyers and is not paying for junior lawyers at firms. Axiom in the Netherlands is providing services at a 40-50% discount to typical costs as compared to 10-15% of most efficiency or cost-cutting approaches.

He recommends Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Here." We have an exponential curve in technology. Kurzweil claims we are in the "knee" of the curve.

By 2050 the average desktop machine has more processing power than all of humanity.

Web 2.0 and Disruption

Technology is now changing the way we relate and work. We've seen this most in social networking.

We're no longer passive recipients of news. We're now participants. He knows general counsel who are on Twitter. Half of the people in most firms are on Facebook (just not the partners).

Sermo

A hundred thousand doctors on-line, sharing knowledge in a cross of Facebook and Wikipedia. Clients and in-house lawyers are sharing costs in a similar way. These resources (Legal OnRamp?) may become the first place in-house lawyers go.

eBay

There are dispute resolution mechanisms on eBay. Why won't they spread?

India

Outsourcing to English-speaking India or South Africa may be

Cisco

85% of their external spend is fixed fee. When they negotiated the deal the external lawyers wanted to start attending meetings that involved legal risk. Cisco said that was what they wanted--to have the lawyers participate in managing risk and avoiding the disputes.

What is the profitability model?

Huge amounts of lawyers' work can be done more cheaply and effectively.

We can be confident that some lawyers are going to be adopting the new ways of doing business.

In this room, there are significant advances in technology that would already change the practice of law. These are just not evenly distributed yet.

Conclusion

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." It's up to lawyers to fashion their own future. The message today is to legal technologists. We typically support existing strategy. But now information technology can change the very business model that underpins law firms.

We live in a time of flux and pressure for law firms. Technologists can help our firms adapt. "Our time has now come."

iManage and Information Governance Strategy

2009-08-25T13:59:00.002-04:00

I'm republishing this post after some glitches with my blogging account. Apologies for any double hits on RSS feeds etc.

This session (moderated by Keith Lipman) featured Laura Bandrowsky of Duane Morris and Elizabeth Ellis (head of KM at Canadian firm Torys). It was very useful to hear the experiences of firms that have adopted matter-centric email filing (using iManage's document management system) for some time and are moving to the next stage of information governance, beyond "just" the client file.

Duane Morris has a very "locked down" approach to information governance where they prohibit USB drives, CD-ROMs, and export of .pst files. Torys is much more open.
Records management, risk management, and maintaining integrity of documents are concerns for client documents. Duane Morris locks down the folder structure.

For legal or administrative departments there is more flexibility.

Torys' motto is "a place for everything and everything in its place." The place is by default the document management system. Everything should be in the document management system.

Explaining the strategy is not sufficient to obtain adoption. It requires telling stories about successes and failures of strategies.

ESI should be managed outside the document management system.

The initial focus of their matter-centric filing systems was the client file. Then Torys turned its attention to the administrative system. Everyone in the firm can currently create workspaces although this may be changing.

Firm workspaces are organized by practice area or department. People have personal workspaces as well. Liz doesn't believe that personal documents should go on a personal drive because it's a good habit to file everything into the document management system. Look at the documents you have in your firm and have workspaces to go with them.

One practice area had a six-page description of how to manage their workspaces. This was probably not effective.

At one of these firms a document that was practically speaking inaccessible on an "H" drive (and had to be retyped) led to a strong message from a leading partner to his colleagues about putting documents in the document management system.

There was a useful story that encouraged people to put documents in the right place.
Duane Morris created artificial matter numbers for the practice areas and associated a "type of law" with each.

The more unique metadata you have about your workspaces, the easier it is to show them in Sharepoint. It should be easy to find all workspaces for a given practice area.

Keith asked "Where is the future of email archiving and maintaining complete client files?"

Laura wants to have a system that recognizes that a particular email is from a client and flag it for later review to make sure that it is filed in the DMS.

Liz says "managing email gives me a big headache." Think of different scenarios and events that you may have to deal with. Why are you trying to manage the email? No one has really figured this out.

You have to anticipate litigation against the firm. You have to anticipate the client asking for the file. Look at your personal email management. Can you find an email sent 10 years ago?

We are still not in a position to enforce a policy of filing email in the document management system. Don't just focus on client-matter email as there is a lot of other email that is really important.

The send-and-file utility and hammering home the lawyer's fiduciary obligation to preserve the client file are both important to adoption.

Duane Morris has become very collaborative with many cross-office matters. They are filing 18-24,000 emails a day. They have a trigger on a certain email archive size over which the partner gets a called in which the message about preparing for litigation is delivered.

It's better to make email management implementation prospective only rather than asking attorneys to file everything going back. The message was "if you want to go back and file you can."

Have they advocated for human support for email filing?

At Duane Morris the biggest need for that is in the lateral partner / attorney context. Duane Morris assigned people to help with the transition. They ran a provisioning program with preexisting matter/client workspaces, or in "to be filed" workspaces so that they could identify important email from their old firm.

At Torys there is no objection to administrative staff having access to email inbox. But then how are you managing confidential communications? The translation to electronic has meant a loss of some context and the assistants has less idea what is happening with the file.

How do we train lawyers to file correspondence? Laura says we need a shortcut key for inserting client / matter tag into subject line.

Keith believes that all lawyers are risk-averse.

Does the rate of subpoenas and litigation hold implementations effect governance? Yes, if information is not well organized and you have to look in multiple locations (file share, custodian's .pst files, DMS). One firm estimated that they were spending 30 hours of IT cost *per hold* at roughly $100/ hour. There is a similar cost when lawyer or client leaves the firm. A well-organized collection will take 80% less time. Some firms are up to 2 subpoenas a week.

File Shares

Inventory shared drives to see what doesn't go away. The inventory is partly for a business continuity perspective (it is not backed up the same way as the DMS). Is the initial reason for including that information in the DMS still valid?

Privacy

How do you manage information that could be useful for KM purposes or KM collections? Enhanced privacy concerns may require people to remove names from KM collections.

Massachusetts law is driving privacy compliance at Torys as it appears to be the strictest available. You have to assess where all of your information is stored (which is a good exercise in any event).

Paper

Paper files are much smaller but still should be stored offsite at the end of a matter. There is increasing digitization.

Exposing Email in a Portal

I asked if in the panelists' experience exposing matter email in portals or some other way had helpd increase adoption of email filing. Liz said that it's all about "how many clicks."

People like being in Outlook and the ability to batch-move email is very important. The email folder synching with the workspace is really important because lawyers are really comfortable in Outlook. Keith said that in implementations he has seen portal exposure has not significantly increased filing.

ILTA 09 Session on Extranets

2009-08-24T14:24:00.005-04:00

Rachelle Rennagel of Sheppard Mullin and Keith Lipman of Interwoven presented on different approaches to law firm extranets.

The session usefully focused on the three main use cases for extranets and also on factors and options that firms should focus on when considering implementing extranets. Keith Lipman was refreshingly clear of any apparent bias or pitch in his discussion of various approaches he has seen applied.

They identified three primary uses for extranets:

1) Client Extranet

The extent of client information might vary depending on the importance of that client relationship.

2) Matter Extranet

This is the most common type of extranet.

The two most popular matter extranets are those for due diligence and litigation.

In due diligence you are asking multiple people within the client or opposing side of the deal to check off that they have reviewed sets of documents.

Litigation extranets are typically about “give me a status.” Client wants to know for each case or matter what is the next thing to be done. With complexity of litigation these extranets are going to be more important and more complex.

A matter dashboard might include all matter-related documents, matter contacts, calendaring, tasking, and reminders, matter status updates, daily digests, and billing information.

Rachelle does not believe that extranets will work if you try to use them for document review. Use a custom-built web-based tool for that. There is an expectation from the lawyers (that has to be adddressed) that they can go to one place for the matter information and the e-discovery.

3) Knowledge Management Extranet

A rarer and potentially very effective form of extranet is for knowledge sharing. Clients may ask attorneys to publish specific types of information. Attorneys may provide "black letter" legal advice on common questions, online CLE or other training programs for law department staff, or knowledge management tools that generate a useful document (like Wilson Sonsini's term sheet generator).

Client-focused KM resources can be a driver for the brand and show off a firm's expertise, as when attorney-generated forms or procedural information is shared with the client.

One possible next step in this approach is to provide clients access to internal library resources, a firm’s news feeds, or other in-house databases.

Full implementation of effective extranets can generate a tighter client relationship and positions the firm as an extension of the general counsel’s office. Are you offering commodity work?

Concerns around Extranets:

Security

This must be the most important consideration.
How granular can you get? Can it be user-specific? Document level? Does your extranet expose who else is using or has access?

Hire black hats every few years to make sure that your system is secure.

Access

Who is managing the passwords? What happens when an attorney or client loses a password?

In-house v. ASP

This concerns whether the governing application is custom-built or provided by a vendor. Options for the latter include applications hosted by the vendor or applications hosted on a firm's own servers.

For smaller firms both presenters recommended the ASP model.

Infrastructure Requirements

The speed of page load can really matter. Look at factors that affect that. When it takes 4-5 seconds to load that’s a problem (users are used to Google).

Extranet management--Decentralized vs. centralized

Like most firms, Sheppard Mullen has IT resource constraints. Paralegals, secretaries, and junior associates manage the content and help set up various extranets. They can’t have a one-person bottleneck because it’s a matter of client service. A poll in the room established that most other firms do centralize extranet management (although I would expect that

Most extranet managers take pride in their extranet work and can also increase their interaction with a client, perhaps at a peer level.

Firms can have a centralized approach where an extranet is set up on request, or can automate extranet creation in parallel with the matter creation process.

General Considerations

Keep in mind Records and Risk Management Policies—align extranet management with records retention policies. Tell attorneys that sometimes they need to take it down. Have discussion with records people about length of time something should stay up. Addressing archiving means that you need to be aware of the export and import features of the extranet.

Test search engine extensively. How responsive. When maxed out. How long does it take to search all extranets.

Potential for integration with firm systems. Separating firm systems from extranets make it more challenging to add information to the extranet. Sheppard Mullin tracks in iManage when documents are exported to an extranet. Willing to take risk because of the burdens of

Can or should clients post documents to the firm extranet? At Sheppard Mullin clients can put up single documents but typically not a whole directory.

Keith believes that some clients use the same library for both draft & final documents, while some use a library for final documents only. The choice of extranet publishing model depends on attorney security concerns.

An extranet needs the metadata, audit trails, and security structure of document management systems. A right-click “Publish” that follows the firms business rules might make sense. Publishing to an extranet is comparable (DBH-but better!) than sending a long email

Can extranets be customized as firm or client-branded?

How are notifications structured? Daily digest? By matter? Can a firm person administer them? Email comes into play in reminders.

Rachelle reported that a client uses the firm's extranet as a contract management tool. They tie renewal of contracts into extranet notification system. (Their provider custom-built this feature for them).

A “Practice Template” is a set of features as set up for a real estate or other business deal or litigation. Can be a huge time-saver. Might be able to start with matter-specific template. How different do you want it?

Value-add or billable service? Most people don’t bill (poll in the room). Hosted deal rooms are really expensive. Is it possible to charge back to client? Per gig or storage fee?

If it’s free people don’t value it as much. Can you have a nominal one-time fee?

Vendors include

AMS Legal
WorkSite Web (iManage)

Sharepoint
eRoom
(I would add PBWorks as well)

Frame extranets in terms of the specific client. Firms might treat extranets as a checkbox on RFPs or as a central focus of the way that they manage client relationships.

ILTA Keynote Coming Up and Sunday Social Networking "Tweetup"

2009-08-23T21:51:00.006-04:00

Tom Koulopoulos, Founder of Delphi Group, is providing the Keynote Address tomorrow morning at the International Legal Technology Association 2009 conference, this year held in the balmy National Resort south of Washington DC along the Potomac.

Tom attended the social networking / "tweetup" event this afternoon. He seems very interested in Enterprise 2.0 and business and technology innovation and I am looking forward to his talk.

The social networking discussion that I heard at that event (I didn't get to the start) largely revolved around attorney's reaction to social networking or social media tools and processes, in particular, around attorney's concerns about the ethical and proper professional use of these tools as reflected in social media policies. Some bar associations are more restrictive than others around their attorney's use of these tools.

My belief is that these types of concerns tend to be greatly ameliorated as people get more familiar with these tools. Yes, the same types of communications that were improper or unethical if made by letter, phone, or email can be made via blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, Sharepoint wiki, or any number of other social media and Enterpise 2.0 tools. And some typical uses, such as LinkedIn recommendations or identifying oneself as an "expert" in a given type of law, may continue to be prohibited to lawyers under ethical guidelines, while remaining acceptable and appropriate for most other inhabitants of these realms.

But it should be the substance of the communication (such as one that makes the recipient reasonably believe the attorney is representing them on a legal issue when that is not the case) that is problematic, not the channel in which it appears.

A participant mentioned at the meeting that interesting examples of social media policies have been developed by IBM, the New York Times, and Intel. See also ILTA's own page on social networking, Doug Cornelius' posts on "Top Ten Mistakes Lawyers Make With Social Media" and Blogging/ Social Media Policy For a Law Firm, and the Legal Blog Watch on the Wall Street Journal's policy. There will be a session devoted to this topic on Wednesday at 1:30 (at the same time I am speaking, unfortunately) at which V. Mary Abraham, Mary Hoskins and Honora Wade are speaking.

ILTA Conference 2009; Enterprise 2.0 and Matter Management (presentations)

2009-08-13T06:20:00.003-04:00

I will be presenting again at the International Legal Technology Association Conference, this year held just outside of Washington DC at the Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center, August 23-27. ILTA is without peer because it is peer-organized, not vendor-dominated, and covers such an incredibly broad range of technology, leadership, strategy, and knowledge management issues. I'm really looking forward to it.

There is a fancy (if non-interactive) program guide that has all the details. A less-green .pdf is also available (don't print all 231 pages you tree-killer).

Enteprise 2.0

The first and most prominent session where I'm presenting is titled "Enterprise 2.0: What It Is and Why You Should Care," which accurately suggests that we'll be sprinting over the whole scope of Enterprise 2.0, from social collaborative software to mashups to cloud computing, in one hour and half session on Monday morning August 24 at 10:30 AM in "Maryland A" among the "Chesapeake Conference Rooms."

I'm presenting with Kevin O'Keefe, of leading law blog vendor Lexblog, veteran blogger himself and a social networking expert (on Twitter as kevinokeefe).

The E20 presentation proper is already up on the ilta conference site; the final version may be slightly different.

We're trying to highlight the origin of Enterprise 2.0 as a reaction or followup to the massive success of Web 2.0 technologies and businesses. I'll review some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 that led to this success and show how some of these same capabilities for creating, sharing, and alerting people to new knowledge can have tremendous value for law firms as business and knowledge enterprises.

We'll drill down into Enterprise 2.0 broken down into three areas; social collaborative platforms such as wikis, blogs, and social networking; mashups, which at ILTA are represented by sessions leveraging Sharepoint; and cloud computing.

It's great to be part of an introduction to these ideas, especially where most of the individual topics I have to essentially gloss over will be covered in depth in subsequent targeted sessions. I could (and have) spent an hour talking just about wikis, for instance, but the folks at Bracewell will be addressing their experience with PBWorks in depth along with Minter Ellison on their modifications to Sharepoint wikis at 2:30 on Monday.

Matter Management

I'll also be presenting on matter management on a panel with Kathrine Cain of Winston & Strawn and Lisa Kellar Gianakos of Reed Smith Wednesday 8/26 at 1:30 PM in "National Harbor 2 & 3." Essentially we'll be talking about ways to capture, search through, and report on matter information.

I'll be focusing on matter reporting (my firm has spent some effort in developing a sophisticated albeit complicated tool for reporting on matter information). I'm looking forward to hearing from Kathrine about how they have leveraged matter information and more for their experience search and from Lisa about their experience with exposing matter information in dashboards (a lot more attractive and accessible than the reports I work with!).

LinkedIn for Lawyers--Doubling Every Six Months

2009-07-17T13:44:00.004-04:00

An attorney at my firm recently asked me, in effect, if I thought LinkedIn was sufficiently professional that it would not embarrass her if she joined.

I answered that, yes, it was pretty far along, and that I thought there were several hundred thousand lawyers on that service.

(I have also suggested to a KM colleague looking for work that before she did any more research or on-line work she should get herself a Linked-In profile, as the absence of one might hurt her.)

I knew that my firm had its own company profile (which has 930 current employee members, plus former employees and other hangers-on) I wanted to check my math and found this useful and graphical post from Steve Matthews at Stem Legal Web Enterprises, suggesting that there were 840,000 people in the "legal practice" category in LinkedIn as of June 2009, up from some 406,000 in December 2008.

LinkedIn is not limited to the U.S. by any means, so I ran my own search and identified 627,302 U.S. people in the "legal practice" and "legal service" industries.

Let's assume that half of these people are IT, administrative, or marketing staff (a conservative assumption, for instance, at my firm more than half of the people are lawyers). So that leaves something north of 300,000 lawyers on LinkedIn (yes I pat myself on the back).

To put that large number in context, the ABA reports (based on reports from state bar associations) that were are a total of 1,180,386 lawyers in the U.S. at the end of 2008. So we are at around 30% adoption--well past the "early adopters" and into the "early majority," the middle of the adoption curve on LinkedIn. And the rate of growth--doubling every six months, four times that of Moore's Law--cannot be sustained, because we will run out of lawyers in about a year!

I have found that LinkedIn has greatly improved lately through introducing status updates, useful groups of various kinds, and good guesses at who else I might want to be connected to. These Web 2.0 features and its ubiquity help explain its success.

Article on Legal Matter Management published in ILTA White Paper

2009-07-17T13:36:00.001-04:00

My article appropriately if plainly titled "Legal Matter Management" has been published as part on an otherwise outstanding edition of the annual International Legal Technology Association's Knowledge Management White Paper, titled "Knowledge Management: More Than the Sum of Its Parts."

In my article I address why matter management is important; the types of information captured shared and leveraged through matter management; and the possibilities for enhanced practice efficiency and more through a fully developed matter management system.

Article Published in KMPro Journal

2009-06-09T21:34:00.005-04:00

My article "Enterprise 2.0 at Goodwin Procter" has been published by KMPro Journal, of the Knowledge Management Professional Society (no subscription required).

http://www.kmpro.org/journal/KMPro_Vol_6_No_1.pdf

In the article I contrast some traditional knowledge management practices and the greater degree of communication and engagement possible with Enterprise 2.0 tools; address some of the many uses to which wikis and blogs have been put at Goodwin Procter; and discuss some lessons learned.

It was a really enlightening experience to put down my thoughts about Enterprise 2.0 and the progress made in adoption of these tools at Goodwin. My thanks to Deb Wallace and Mary Lee Kennedy for their helpful edits and guidance, and to Doug Cornelius for starting me and the firm down the Enterprise 2.0 path.

Legal KM Survey from the International Legal Technology Association

2009-05-07T11:20:00.002-04:00

This spring I joined the Steering Committee for the International Legal Technology Association's Knowledge Management Peer Group (see also their FAQ).

If your firm is an ILTA member, please take the one-page survey and help us evaluate how KM is doing.

Here's the official message:

"Dear Colleagues,

Our KM peer group will be producing a white paper in the near term, and we are gathering some important data to assist in reporting to you on the status of KM within our community. The link below will walk you through a very brief questionnaire. As an incentive for your response, your name will be entered into a drawing for a waived conference registration fee!
Your business e-mail address is required so that we can remove duplicates and enter you in the drawing. Complete anonymity is guaranteed, and your identifier will be removed from the "normalized" data before it moves into analysis. And you'll see a report on the findings in our white paper, scheduled for distribution in June.

Please provide your input at: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2294Z23BDUY.The survey will be available through close of business May 6, 2009.

Many thanks for your participation!"

Corresponding with Cornelius on Collaboration with Clients

2009-04-08T20:52:00.004-04:00

In a post earlier this week Doug Cornelius (now over at Compliance Building) hit the extranet nail on the head by identifying the primary obstacles and benefits to extranet collaboration. His post sparked a flurry of activity with Luis Suarez of IBM making enticing comments about LotusLive (I have yet to check it out although I do note that now it is, in fact, live).

At ILTA 08 I heard of some firm-provided extranets through which clients obtained some access to up-to-date billing and fee information. Although it had to be done on a one-off basis, the clients who received that information valued it highly.

In addition to the instance of the large deal that requires very detailed item-level security access control, products liability litigation provides another extranet use case. There a whole set of cases revolves around a recurring group of experts, expert reports, plaintiff's attorneys, coordinating counsel, and local counsel. From the defense perspective, there is great value in aggregating information from many different people (such as local and coordinating counsel from law firms) who are repeatedly interacting with the same players and some of the same documents; you would think that could happen more easily on an extranet, though perhaps the logistical issues you note are a challenging barrier.

For their own marketing and KM needs, firms such as mine may already have collected information about the matters that clients also need and would like to have. If firms can aggregate and display (on an extranet) in a robust way rich sets of information about a lot of cases they handle for a major client, they are providing more value to the clients. That may initially be more of an information-gathering and reporting problem, but even this type of information could be made more useful through an interactive and collaborative online environment.

Upcoming Conference on "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter"

2009-03-24T17:00:00.003-04:00

The Boston KM Forum is putting on a longer, more involved set of discussions around the business advantages of Web and Enterprise 2.0 tools, a subject near and dear to my heart, at Bentley College next Tuesday, March 31st. I'll be there.

The speakers and talk titles are:

Soaring with Virtual Teams: How Working At-A-Distance and Across Boundaries Can Outperform Face-to-Face, Jessica Lipnack - CEO of NetAge and co-author of Virtual Teams; see her free webinar on the same subject.

(I've enjoyed Jessica's presentations at Enterprise 2.0 Boston and elsewhere, with her trademark of "stand up and tell us who you are!")
IBM’s Grounds-Up Social Software Transformation, recently married Suzanne Minassian (twitter)- Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM

(Lotus Connections is one of the leading Enterprise 2.0 products (or sets of products) and I look forward to hearing some more stories of its implementation.)
Vital Catalyst: Social Media is Holding and Growing Audiences,
Ken George, New Media Manager, and author of The Converstation, WBUR

(I don't know Ken but WBUR has a quite sophisticated web presence and set of podcasts.)
Give to Get: Real-World Dividends from Social Networking, Sadalit Van Buren, Knowledge Management Associates

(Sadalit is the author of A Matter Of Degree and is a real expert in making the most of Sharepoint's Enterprise 2.0 features.)

"Emergence" at the Boston KM Forum

2009-03-23T10:53:00.003-04:00

Last Thursday I attended a Boston KM Forum talk titled "Emergence—Get with it or fade away" by veteran social networker and knowledge worker Dan Keldsen (http://twitter.com/dankeldsen, blog at http://www.BizTechTalk.com). Dan is a good speaker as well as the only person I know of whose Twitter profile picture is skewed sideways.

He was also kind enough to share his interesting slides on Slideshare. Jack Vinson has also posted on the event, in a fashion that compliments what I do here.

What is Emergence?

Emergence is not a great term because people don’t necessarily know what it means. A better term might be “viral success.” The main focus of his talk was about social media applications that have enabled such success, and how you can either take advantage of those systems directly yourself, and perhaps even structure your next effort to try to make it "viral."

He mentioned at the outset Andrew McAfee's seminal article on Enterprise 2.0 titled "The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration." and its SLATES acronym of key features that allow knowledge workers to organize their work in the way that fits them best, i.e., that support and enable emergent behavior.

He recommends “Emergence” by Steven Johnson (reviewers on Amazon were not so kind, I have to point out).

One feature of "emergent" practice is, how easy is it people like customers, employees, and partners to understand what you’re doing and “spread the word.” Are you providing a path for community feedback?

Quantitative Analysis of Emergence

Dan explained the simple underpinnings of "viral loops" or other behavior that will multiply and spread over social networks. He drew on a presentation by "Arch Viral," http://www.slideshare.net/Startonomics/arch-viral-creating-social-apps-for-social-platforms-presentation .

First a user issues an invitation to participate to "friends" (in Facebook parlance) or others to whom that user is known. Some percentage of those friends accept (the "install flow"), and some percentage of those friends go on to issue additional invitations (as part of the "engagement flow"). If the average number of friends invited times the average percentage of acceptance with initial or later add-on activities is greater than 1, then you have a viral application.

(For the math-challenged, here's an example; if a new user asks 5 friends to join, and an average of 22% of them accept, then the "viral factor" is 1.1, and the application is viral. If only 18% accepted, the "viral factor would be less than 1, and the application would not be viral).

Multiple invites and “bites at the apple” will increase the rate of viral adoption. Small changes can have a big effect (like the wings of a butterfly).

This part of the presentation struck me as the most directly useful to my knowledge work. Correlating Facebook applications to the spread of Enterprise 2.0 is not at all intuitive.

But inside the enterprise, relatively small barriers to adoption of social adoption can potentially destroy the viral spread of potentially useful applications. It behooves us then to make the barriers that new groups and employees have to hurdle to get to the tools as low and as unbureaucratic as possible, and to find ways to get "second bites at the apple" that mimic the
continuous engagement and reward that the more successful social applications provide.

My other main takeaway was Jack Vinson's comment that one should be able to discover or uncover the networks and effects that could let power of emergence affect the enterprise.

Emergent Social Networks

In Dan’s last transition he was able to tap into a rich vibrant network because of his work with LinkedIn, his blog, etc. People could Google his name and find out a *lot* about him. He also leveraged his extensive LinkedIn connections in his last trip to Denmark.

Dan is another musician, albeit from the rock & roll side of the tracks. He showed Blip.fm as another social web application with excellent user feedbacks that enhance emergence. For instance, you get “props” for promoting things that people like. In turn you can give out “props" and you eventually get “badges” that show rank. You can also “reblip” someone's "blip" and if they do the same to you, you get more credit.

Slideshare is another emergent social tool that shows how many times each presentation has been viewed. Dan’s slideshare on “Maps, Concepts, Process” has been seen 9,423 times (actually 9,485 as of this writing!) His presentation “Who’s The Boss, MOSS?” has been seen 5,917 times after an initial audience of "only" 100.

How to Enhance Emergence and Make it "Go Viral"

Blip taps into people's interest in game-like interactions with personal rankings, and also the social need to give and get respect. Other applications might tap into the competitive instincts by showing daily, weekly, or "all-time" rankings.

Slideshare similarly gives its users feedback about how many times their presentations have been viewed, with feedback allowed at the contributor or presentation levels.

The more detail you provide in your online interactions, the more likely you will be able to connect with people of like mind and similar interests.

Why tap into emergent platforms?

You may find something rich that you wouldn’t have found otherwise, along with new ways to learn information that you can share. Having more connections expands the potential of what you can accomplish.

Normally professional organizations would serve some of the functions that LinkedIn is now. These organizations represent professional contact networks and may be in trouble unless they adapt.

Participant-driven platforms are another communication revolution. What kind of meaningful mechanisms will make them more useful and avoid us getting swamped?

Summary

Enable easy sharing of posts, information, or whatever else your application addresses (Twitter, Facebook, "Add This" application)
Set up reward systems that will draw on competitive instincts and show progress (any online game, Blip.fm)
Count hits, downloads, views, and such to show people how much of interest others have taken in a piece of news or application (Youtube, Amazon)
Enable a friend or follower system that will let people connect to each other, give them some idea of who else is around, and share their interests (Facebook, Youtube, etc.)
Tags to let people identify for you, rather than coming up with your own terms (Facebook, Delicious, #twitter)

The best social information applications combine all of these characteristics.

As Jack says, let people "Find, Share and Compare."

Decentralized and Personalized KM

2009-03-11T09:41:00.006-04:00

Following a recent post in which KM practitioner Larry Hawes was contemplating valuing KM by its cost (not a good idea since its value added can be so much more dramatically greater), Christopher Schmaltz made the following comment:

We are moving away from a centralised KM to a more decentralised, self-service, personal KM. Employees decide what information they want to subscribe to. They decide who they would like to follow in their network, which interest groups they would like to subscribe to.

This wonderfully concise statement sums up part of my vision for KM at my law firm, in particular, the neccessity to make the information presented that most likely to be relevant and actionable to users.

A partner logs in. She is presented with the matters she's worked on recently, her top clients, and today's news and alerts about new litigation filed related to those clients. She also has previously selected receipt of alerts about significant changes in stock price or quarterly filings for those clients. Her one calendar shows her upcoming litigation deadlines, online CLE, and internal meetings for her practice areas. She can link directly to a place for her to review those associates who have worked with her most recently, and shows her how she's doing in terms of work in progress, accounts receivable, and her own billings for the calendar year versus targets.

As someone interested in financial industry regulation, she has chosen to receive an alert when a piece of work product receives a "Regulation FD" tag, or when someone's profile receives such a tag.

It's about pulling together the information that we already know relates to each person, plus the additional information or alerts that they have chosen to receive.

LegalTech Report: Online Networks and the Twitter Backchannel

2009-02-04T12:10:00.006-05:00

Moderator:

Robert Ambrogi, Journalist

Panelists:

John Lipsey, Vice President, Corporate Counsel Services, LexisNexis
Vanessa DiMauro, CEO & President, Leader Networks
Eugene M. Weitz, Corporate Counsel, Alcatel-Lucent
Olivier Antoine, Counsel, Crowell & Moring

My overall impression is that, not surprisingly, lawyers and firms are way behind the rest of the business world in terms of knowledge, comfort, and implementation of the new forms of social networking, as through LinkedIn, Legal OnRamp, or other similar platforms.

I had a vivid conversation after the session with Niki Black, a social-web-savvy food-loving attorney from Rochester NY. As was also apparent from her Twitter stream, she relayed to me she was unpleasantly surprised at the limited understanding and resistance to social networking displayed at the session. She may have had this reaction in part due to audience questions such as “What about conflicts”? and “What about attorney-client privilege?”

Other posts on this panel come from LawyerKM, Kelly Talcott, John Lipsey (podcast included),

I've collected my notes on this interesting panel organized by speaker; below that is a brief discussion of the "back channel" that arose on Twitter.

Bob Ambrogi

If you just looked at this conference, the hottest topic in technology looks like e-discovery. But outside of LegalTech, social media is an important topic. Even companies without a formal policy have employees using social media.

Of companies that have adopted it, 2/3 see improved customer satisfaction, and 2 in 5 can associate increase in sales with adoption of social media.

Only 2% of lawyers think that social media is a valuable tool for client development. Bob thinks this low percentage is due to a misunderstanding, as social media can include client recommendations, alumni relationships, publishing, and more.

Vanessa DiMauro (wikipedia LinkedIn)

Vanessa comes from the Enterprise 2.0 / academic & corporate space rather than the legal side.

She asked, what does social networking mean in the business context?

There have been many new tools emerge—it’s been the “Wild West.” We have had an opportunity to measure it effectively, and can start to move away from the tools towards the values that it can deliver.

There are different rules of engagement on social media sites.

Social and professional networks appear similar, but have very different purposes. With social networks you might want to share pictures or connect with former classmates. With professional networks the goals are to “evangelize your thought leadership” or perhaps make collective decisions. With both you want to make meaningful connections. With both you care about what kind of club you’re joining (remember the Marx brothers-- "I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member.").

Yet some of the same social rules we already live by apply equally in the online world. If we know someone personally we may be more comfortable reaching out to them. Space out interactions. Give three times per “ask.” Don’t wait to reach out to your LinkedIn connections until you need them.

Vanessa thinks there are opportunities to find the best of breed from other industries, that have already addressed social media. There is a road map and set of best practices around the most effective use of social media adaptable to the legal industry.

John Lipsey

He is developing “Connected” for Martindale Hubbell (I’m calling it MH Connected but that is not its brand name), a social networking site to be released later this quarter.

His core stakeholders are corporate counsel. How do we get beyond the “tip of the pyramid”? How can we tailor social media to their existing needs?

Key elements of social and professional networking include group and individual discussions (blogs and wikis) and relationship connection / identification. (I would add status updates).

What are the opportunities to provide more value to lawyers in social media? What do lawyers want? He thinks authentication and validation are really important. It may not matter so much that someone on Facebook is who they say they are. But it really does matter where attorney advice or referrals may be at stake.

For instance, you can’t be anonymous on MH Connected because that would destroy the trust model.

Every network in the world is looking for a critical mass. MH Connected is trying to identify relationships using their existing information such as working for same firm, being on a published opinion, or graduating law school together. MH Connected is trying to make it easier to get people together by suggesting people they may know (LinkedIn and Facebook already do this, through formal groups based on education or employment, and by allowing creation of groups by users interested in a particular topic or united in some other way).

Can social networking help in-house counsel manage “preferred provider” programs?

You can’t build this out for the early adopters. It has to help lawyers in everyday practice, including authentication, trust and so forth. What are the technologies that will engage your practitioners?

Conflict or attorney-client privilege risk can be addressed through thinking, what kind of group am I addressing? What is the audience?

John has a decent grasp of social networking principles, and some interesting ideas for what may connect lawyers in particular. It remains to be seen if the previously ossified Martindale Hubbell will truly be able to become a useful and valuable destination for lawyers.

Olivier Antoine

Social networking brings key information for inside and outside counsel. The new value being generated is the new type of information, such as who is connected to who, who has recently looked at your profile, and so forth.

Law firms are conservative environments and are very slow to adopt new ways of doing things, as is required to some extent for social networking.

Understanding who knows who can be important for the substance of the work he does (he defends companies accused of price-fixing, which entails understanding all of the information being shared between parties about prices).

Olivier recently noticed that a number of firm lawyers had linked to a lawyers at a firm being acquired just a few weeks before the deal was announced. Social networks make it easier to share information; the type of risk and precautionary steps are may be the same, but the magnitude of the risk greater.

Social media adoption is unavoidable. It has to be addressed.

Eugene Weitz

He compartmentalizes his business and personal connections. In either case, what is the value compared with the amount of time required?

Alcatel Lucent is a “global law division” of over 200 people, all over the world. As part of their knowledge management program, they are trying to figure out better ways to communicate.

In-house counsel have to stay current on the law and have to know the business. Martindale Hubbell and LinkedIn offer ways to communicate with the outside world. He’s also with a NJ counsel organization that is all about in-house lawyers talking to each other.

They choose to have discussions only with certain people. He doesn’t want a direct sales pitch from outside counsel, but he does want discussion and information sharing.

He works in the field of IT. He wants to know what the market is in outsourcing or other trends. If social media can help inside counsel understand law, benchmarking, and communicate, it will have a place.

Eugene expects that there will be substantive legal content on MH Connected in the same way that there is content on law firm web sites. The difference is that it will be collected and shared in one space.

I was surprised there was no mention of Legal OnRamp, which purports to provide similar functionality in terms of sharing online content. Doug Cornelius, who has previously posted twice on that platform, came through on Twitter however.

Live Discussion

John thinks that the value proposition might vary greatly between in-house and outside counsel. Eugene identified what in-house counsel want. Outside counsel want to attract people to them and build business through demonstrating expertise.

Bob said that beginners should look at LinkedIn simply as an online directory of professionals. You need to be in many different places to be visible as part of a high profile.

We’re getting to the point where the social media tools can be matched to the particular business or strategic goal.

Twitter Discussion

Mary Abraham has posted on how interesting the "back channel" of Twitter discussion became. At one point she relayed live a tweeted question from Doug (who was in Boston). I agree with her that it provided a whole new perspective, hitherto unavailable, of an audience's reaction to a session. It's a step up from blogging in terms of immediacy, but a step down in terms of thoughtful analysis.

You can see most of the posts on this session by searching Twitter for #LTNY and networking.

Obviously these are not my posts, but I thought it would provide readers some insight into the audience reaction to see some of the spicy comments on Twitter that arose during the session.

GabeAcevedo #LTNY online networking panel. This is not what I expected. Must either leave/kill self soon as possible.
nicolecaccamo: And that "safe" networking would exclude us non-lawyers presumably - missing out on a lot of value/connections #LTNY
CherylMcKinnon: #ltny John Lipsey - authentication and validation needed for safe professional networking
brucecarton: Uh oh, bloggers getting restless. RT @GabeAcevedo #LTNY networking panel. Martindale mentioned now 10 times in martindale sponsored panel.
dougcornelius: @VMaryAbraham #LTNY Social networking is about community. You want to hang with your friends. Are your friends in that site? Connected?
dougcornelius: @kdtalcott "Best Practices in Online Networking"? But Legal OnRamp is already doing what MH Connected wants to do #ltny
CherylMcKinnon: #ltny John Lipsey - authentication and validation needed for safe professional networking [This post was "retweeted" or rebroadcast within a few seconds by two others]
kevinokeefe: Session re online networking & social media has had 25% of audience leave. Turned exciting topic into something boring. #LTNY

LegalTech: KM from a Client Services Perspective

2009-02-02T17:14:00.000-05:00

The importance of client service in retaining clients and growing the practice
Growth of KM approaches from internally focused needs to effectively playing a role in serving client

Meredith Williams, Director of Knowledge Management, Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz

Todd Mattson, Director of Practice Systems & Services, Covington & Burling LLP

Attendance has been thinning out somewhat since the heavily-attended morning session.

Todd Mattson

Practice Systems groups comprised of library, paralegals, and litigation support teams. He sought to define KM with reference to improving firm performance.

Example #1--Policy Advice for Large Pharma Company

There were many different types of documents, many different firm offices involved, and many different client participants. The client was driving need for organization.

They developed an extranet that lets everyone track projects, documents and deliverables. The view looks like a basic browsable folder tree, although some of the items are projects rather than documents.

Example #2--Coalition Representation & Management

These coalitions are comprised of 8-22 U.S. and international companies (say, a trade or manufacturing group). They need both substantive and procedural documentation.

Example #3--Digital Case File Sites

Most of these are digital repositories for pleadings and other case materials. They expanded to include patent background data.

Lessons Learned

They focus on the matter and the practical needs/wants of the clients. They don't charge for the actual web site, but the work is done for a particular matter and so is billable.

Meredith Williams

What are the internal activities that drive client acquisition?
How do KM activities affect the bottom line?
How do we promote and market these activities inside and outside the firm?

Focus moved from better information sharing to efficiency and then to marketing and business development. KM is very much integrated with the marketing team.

What can we build that the client will see and appreciate? What KM can we sell as a commodity?

West KM is integrated into their enterprise search (Microsoft's?).

For a practice group, ask what will help them service the client better? Work product and feeds of external resources such as docket/case alerts. They have a direct integration with Courtlink, based on say type of law.

They have a personalized "My Site" that graphically displays the attorney's lists of matters and most recently modified documents.

Baker has industry and client service teams. Industry teams can start to identify opportunities in new types of work. They pull in large amounts of information from West Monitor. West Monitor serves up business news and analysis organized around particular industries.

They have client and matter intranet sites. Some client sites can be shared with the client. Client sites show financial information, documents, and emails. Matter sites show .pdf copies of actual bills (not difficult to do, great reward).

"Advanced" client sites bring in information from West Monitor. Dashboards show news items, stock price information, and so forth. Some have blogs. (The client does not see the blogs). She had a big success with a client who moved business to the firm after seeing the externally facing client site. Client productions and interrogatory responses are going to be searcheable.

The KM group offers clients CLE on West KM and Westlaw.

She's integrated KM with the "four pillars" of the firm's business plan. Meets with practice and industry teams every quarter. Asks them what their needs are, KM figures out "how" and delivers.

Keys to Success

Serve as many groups as possible
Communicate with administration about successes
Brand everything that you can

Questioning brought out that some clients of both firms have asked to post documents to the client's extranet or database.

LegalTech report--KM from a Practicing Attorney Perspective

2009-02-02T16:09:00.000-05:00

High value KM approaches
KM tool evolution
How KM helps attorneys practice more effectively

Scott Rechtschaffen, Managing Shareholder, Littler Mendelson

Rachelle Rennagel, Chief Knowledge Officer, Sheppard Mullin

This session conflicted with most of the "What is Twitter and How Can I Use It" session. LawyerKM and Mary Abraham deserted me for there, so I'm staying on the bridge.

Rachelle Rennagel

Rachelle wanted to present some thoughts and techniques that she's used to further KM at Sheppard Mullin. She provided some excellent strategy and tactics but did not go into much detail about the pieces of her particular projects.

What can we do given the reality of the economy?

Rachelle also provides litigation support and supervises e-discovery.

As CKO she does not "know everything" but she supports lawyers and other operational gruops. She "helps speak the geek" for the lawyers and "speak the lawyer" for the geek.

She has four mantras:

Make firm-wide knowledge more accessible
Train, train, train
Cultural sensitivity and generational leverage
Serve the law firm client by increasing efficiency and profitability

Work within existing firm processes. Gradually erode less efficient processes.

Two primary KM opportunities are supporting alternative billing arrangements, and attorney prospecting/opportunity management. "This is the year of client development."

KM can supply the answer to the question, "How do we make sure that we are making money under alternative arrangements?"

In this economy it is getting easier to find people to contribute to formal knowledge-sharing programs.

Sheppard Mullin is using client dashboards to push data to lawyers about clients and prospective clients.

There remain aspects of their current software (e.g., Sharepoint) that they haven't fully leveraged.

She gets on partner meeting schedules and presents on a topic they care about; she meets with the executive committee. She also does one-on-one meetings with lawyers to get them to understand email risks.

Rachelle thinks this is also a good time to be addressing risk management technology like records management, email management, and litigation holds. Attorneys use email to store advice to clients and more.

She is working with their electronic librarian to create an internal RSS feed for their lawyers.

They are working on "ShMutter" (Shepard Mullin internal Twitter).

Workflow is an amazing effective process. How do we automate new hire or matter intake processes? Spending time keying in the same information multiple times in the HR process is not efficient. She also works on contract management.

Rachelle appears to be taking the approach, be useful and helpful where she can, regardless of how close or far that activity is to traditional knowledge management activities. More power to her for that.

Scott Rechtschaffen

From my perspective, for a U.S. firm of its size, Littler has an unusually large and succesful knowledge management team. This may be due in part to their focus on labor & employment work, in which "traditional" KM organization and knowledge-gathering efforts may be more succesful. Their team's success is also no doubt due to the energy and acuity of the team leader.

Scott said that Littler attorneys are "scattered" throughout many offices in many states. They have 9 dedicated KM attorneys, including an attorney elevated to the partnership through the KM track. He does not expect hires to be tech-savvy.

He works most closely on IT/Web Development, client relations/marketing, and professional development. Clients are increasingly wanting to see depth of content as a way of establishing expertise.

Their KM attorneys are:

Trainers
KM concierge
KM evangalists

In the concierge role, if an attorney is too busy to find something, or don't know how, the KM group does. One attorney is assigned as gatekeeper. They tracks number of attorney inquiries (3,000 last year).

Small low-hanging fruit can advance the case that KM should be a part of the operations (management?) of a law firm.

One example is an arbitrator database and an international lawyer database. Who knows X arbitrator in St. Louis?

They are using customized software to manage class action discovery (interviews) and generate interview templates. DealBuilder is being used to generate case-specific information off of a standardized form.

Littler Mendelson has a large subscription-based client-facing KM project on a number of employment law toics; it includes action items. It works because clients know it's reliable, they aren't paying by the hour, and clients can brand it themselves. The KM group also publishes hard-copy and CD on international employment and labor law (and also guides to particular states). They put out about 15,000 pages of content all told. Their class action practice just published a book. It's a great tool for the practice. He would like to eventually move some of these to a wiki. They also do "ASAP" client alerts. There are four firm-sponsored blogs.

Littler Mendelson was an early contributor to Legal On-Ramp. KM attorneys act as mediators and engagers, alerting attorneys to particular on-line conversations relevant to their practice.

LM has an alumni site. It is interactive--they run MCLE programs for alumni through this site.

KM can help enable quick and accurate responses to client inquiries.

Attorneys want to find people with particular expertise. As firm grows it's harder to know who is the resident firm expert on particular topics.

Their matter page / team site (built on Sharepoint 2007) integrates RSS feeds. Partners wanted a box to identify the objective / strategy of the matter in a few sentences. It also shows the (sharepoint) task lists, a piece of functionality I've been investigating.

Their document management search integrates Recommind and West KM. The people / expertise search integrates DMS documents, bios, narrative time entries, and industry information from Elite.

They will be requiring that any event with 20+ attorneys to be listed on a firm-wide calendar.

Scott's grasp of metrics and results show that he has no difficulty in proving value to his partners and his firm.

Blogging at LegalTech--A Different Environment

2009-02-02T13:01:00.004-05:00

Last year I remember a distinct lack of blogging resources. There were no power strips, and connectivity was also a problem. Last year's blogging breakfast was a highlight, however, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow's as well.

This year is quite different. As promised, there were *ahem* free passes, blogger tables, and powerstrips. Wifi must be purchased, but there are a few plugin connections available (at least in my session).

There are also more of us. Just at my table was Securities Docket guru Bruce Carton, LawyerKM, and Mary Abraham.

So, my thanks to LegalTech, Monica Bay (allegedly behind this warm welcome,) and Jill Windwer, VP of Digital Products at law.com.

LegalTech KM Session--"How Integration Drives KM"

2009-02-02T11:30:00.000-05:00

KM1: How Integration Drives KM

Early approaches to KM
Individual, highly customized systems
Commercial applications
Benefits of powerful combined approaches

Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer, Reed Smith

Preston McKenzie, Vice President and General Manager, Business of Law @ West (Thomson Reuters).

******************************

It's a full room here the first KM session at New York Legal Tech (for Twitter followers, #LTNY not #NYLT as I earlier thought, plus #KM).

Oz Benamram, of White & Case, introduced the session. He is on the conference committee; his goal was to make presentations here more interesting and less vendor-focused. Tomorrow's Web 2.0 session is also relevant to KM.

Preston's Talk

Preston runs Thomson Reuters/West's "business of law" functions, in the client development / client-facing KM space. Products he deals with include Hubbard One, Contact Networks, West Monitor.

Productivity is a key interest because smart firms must "do more with less." He analogized driver behavior with gas at $4/gallon to what law firms have to do in operations, litigation, and lawyer support.

Law firms face three different levels of complexity; information is more complex and spread across systems, law firm organizations are more complicated geography and structure, and the markets are more complicated (diverse).

Westlaw is trying to make available the strength of relationship assessment of, say, people at your firm with a particular judge. This leverages your firm's unique information. West is (appropriately) trying to have an open architecture, allowing integration for instance with Sharepoint. They recognize that we will have more uses of integrative information than they can imagine.

They are putting together all of the desktop software applications such as LiveNote, West KM, and so forth into one package. Large software implementation are rarer if they happen at all.

Preston discussed West KM. Smart firms are thinking about capabilities rather than products. This allows you to integrate best-of-breed aspects of a product's capabilities. For instance, Westlaw can be leveraged in the online research service Westlaw.com, through an intranet portal, and through an application like Microsoft Word. The real value of West KM is its combination of converting documents into HTML, full-text search ability, keysearch classification, and citation extraction (linking) and validation. They are breaking out pieces of functionality, for instance, for use with another search or a document management system.

An example is leveraging West KM in Microsoft's Sharepoint search. This turns the West KM classification scheme into metadata that Sharepoint can display. The categories are not just a one-way feed. Another example showed integration of West KM with Recommind's MindServer Legal; for instance, a document preview in a search result shows the West KM validation and hyperlinking of a case citation.

Tom Baldwin

Tom is one of the KM leaders, having joined Reed Smith from Sheppard Mullin in 2008. Tom is a self-avowed "slogger" rather than a blogger since he hasn't posted since September.

What does 2009 hold for KM programs?

We need to do more with less. Drive your "ATV" through more "Awareness" "Training" and "Visibility." Driving awareness of your firm's capabilities would make life better. Yet lawyers won't go to a classroom any more.

We need to demonstrate value and show how we're helping "the cause."

How can we make KM systems be viewed as "vital" to the firm's processes?

Find your "Al Gore"--a project sponsor, someone who embraces the new ideas/application.

When you get positive feedback, get the attorney to send it to your boss. Try to gain trust of lawyers to get into a client-facing role and leverage any positive feedback you get (one example was use of surveymonkey.com to help a client address their HR surveys).

We need to hide the fact that there is more technology and less time for training.

Tom has previously been out front in his leveraging Sharepoint as a law firm portal and information access point, and it looks like he has done it again at Reed Smith. This intranet is called "ouRSpace" (RS="Reed Smith"). It requires XMLaw, Recommind, and Sharepoint to work together. It rolled out recently.

There is one navigation bar, with pictures for applications.

Sharepoint and ouRSpace lets you dynamically drive content to lawyers and staff depending on office, role, and title.

One fancy trick is an interactive time zone "slider" that lights up the slice of a world map and highlights the Reed Smith office(s) in that time zone.

The ouRSpace "digital file" search scope includes documents from the document management system, intranet content, and West KM, with the docs from West KM always coming up higher. The search directly leverages the metadata in West KM such as case and statutory citations, and exposes the case validation and linking features of West KM in an HTML view of the results.

Person profile exposes education, direct reports, roles, and billing rates. The search for "German" worked to find people who speak German.

Home news pulls in headlines from U.S. and international versions of the Wall Street Journal.

They are trying to pull in video. Professional quality videography is not cheap or easy to coordinate. They are doing it cheaply using conference equipment and Silverlight. They are doing videos for office managing partners and other leaders.

They lock down the "all users" email address. Instead they have a set of blogs, which use the content-targeting feature to limit the audience to those in a particular office or practice. Blogs are a great way to engage people with a steady stream of communications.

The users' home pages has a "library" tab that knows your practice area and provides links or resources specific to that area. Its "stats" tab shows timekeeper information such as billable hours worked, hours billed, and utilization percentage, again, with the amount of information varying by role.

The Office ouRSpace pages have a chat feature through a "Collaborate" tab. Each practice area has a template, with little custom content (primarily news). Each practice area page displays financial information for that practice, top clients, know-how, library, and collaboration. They started from persona development, through requirements gathering (interviewed 120 people at all levels and every geographical area).

I don't know if I would do everything as Tom has done at Reed Smith, but pulling this amount of information and displaying it in a fairly user-friendly way is an impressive achievement. Adding value indeed.

Blogging from LegalTech 2009

2009-01-30T16:43:00.004-05:00

I will be posting from LegalTech next week February 2-4.

I'll be focusing on the Knowledge Management track on February 2nd, which starts with "How Integration Drives KM", courtesy of Tom Baldwin and Preston McKenzie.

This is followed by "KM from a Practicing Attorney Perspective" with Scott Rechtschaffen and Rachelle Rennagel.

The next session I will attend is a doubtless very popular general session on "What is Twitter and How Do I Use It," a panel moderated by Monica Bay with Matthew Homann, Kevin O'Keefe, and Chris Winfield (I've linked to their Twitter profiles. Mine is at KMHobbie. Hash tag should be #NYLT, but probably is really Legaltech.) You can follow LegalTech Twitterers' tweets at http://www.lextweet.com/groups/1 . Then stop spitting feathers out of your mouth.

The last presentation on this long day, and the last one of the KM track, will be "KM from a Client Services Perspective" by Meredith Williams and Todd Mattson.

Wikis In Law Firms

2009-01-20T15:00:00.000-05:00

In early October 2008, with another legal KM practitioner, I gave a presentation on wikis to an experienced group of legal knowledge managers. Although about a third of the audience had wikis internally, there were still some people without significant practical experience with wikis.

The talk was organized in three parts. I started with an introduction to wikis, starting from the beginning, and highlighting their key features. My colleague then presented on her firm’s innovative use of Thoughtfarmer wikis. Then I discussed how my firm is leveraging Sharepoint wikis.

An Introduction to Wikis

I began with the definitive origin of the word "wiki" as I am often asked where the word came from. Wikipedia has the answer--the Wiki Wiki bus at Honolulu Airport was Ward Cunningham's alliterative inspiration for his WikiWikiWeb application, the first wiki created. Ward wanted "the simplest online database that could possibly work," and it appears he succeeded!

(I did not report that, unlike most wikis I've encountered, apparently the Wiki Wiki buses are being retired soon as "not only...somewhat inconvenient and uncomfortable" but also "a huge strain on the building structure due to their weight and level of activity.")

The word "wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian. On a wiki, you can quickly edit, save, link, and restore.

Edit -- Wikis always have a large friendly Edit button somewhere, and the whole point is that wikis are available to an entire group (or anyone who sees it).

Save -- There is normally no moderation before the edit takes place. On Wikipedia articles that have an established history of unproductive editing or great controversy are “locked down,” but that is not the norm.

Link -- There are two kinds of links in a wiki.

As in any HTML-based platform, adding a link to a web site or other URL-related resource is a matter of selecting a word and hitting a button or a keyboard command such as “Ctrl.-K” (Hopefully this shortcut is becoming this decade’s version of Ctrl.-C “copy” Ctrl.-X “cut” and Ctrl.-V “paste.”)

Additionally, one can create a new web page by creating a link to it (the exact procedure varies from wiki to wiki). Easy page creation is a key feature because it enables editors to add structure to the wiki and to limit the amount of content displayed on a given page. (Usability concerns mandate avoidance of “walls of text,” even in a content-rich context like an encyclopedic wiki.) Once one creates a page it is easy to create another link to it, either from a drop down or by some use of the page name. Easy interlinking greatly enhances the ability to relate different topics within a single wiki.

Restore -- A wiki captures each page version and allows reversion to a previous version (the reversion becomes the latest version).

Modern wikis also serve not just as living documents, but also as communication platforms because they have built-in notification of changes of one kind or another (ideally RSS, but often email as well).

The communications aspect of wikis leads to wiki happiness, contrasted with the email sadness from wasted time sending documents as email attachments, editing, saving them, sending them again, rinsing, and repeating.

Another way that "wikis" is a wonderful word, as I have previously blogged, is that it forms a KM acronym (knacronym?):

What

Know

(Thanks to Attensa and Patrick Slesinger of Wallem Group for that one!)

Thoughtfarmer—Wikis as Intranet and DMS

My colleague then presented on her firm's innovative use of Thoughtfarmer wikis. Thoughtfarmer comes complete with cutting-edge (for a law firm) Enterprise 2.0 features like tagging and commenting, Her firm did not have either a formal DMS or an intranet, so they used practice-specific wiki pages as a means of organizing documents as well as other substantive and practice-related content. Hers was the kind of presentation that makes me wonder how a large organization would organize its information if it could start from the ground up with cutting-edge technology instead of having to address the innumerable complexities of legacy systems.

Sharepoint Wikis at Goodwin Procter

I then turned to what we have been doing with Sharepoint wikis at my firm. Sharepoint “native” wikis and blogs are actually part of the reason why I became interested in blogs and Enterprise 2.0 in the first place. They come built-in to Sharepoint, and my firm rolled Sharepoint / MOSS 2007 in late spring 2008.

Unfortunately, due no doubt in part to the necessarily long development cycle (they may have been state-of-the art in 2004), Sharepoint wikis have their weaknesses. The alerts of changes are horrible (see “Sharepoint wiki disaster”). Sharepoint email alerts send the whole page, worse than a simple notice of the fact of a change and much worse than a display of the change to the page as we had been accustomed to from another wiki platform. Furthermore, a surprising “simultaneous editing” flaw allows multiple users to edit the same page, but gives priority to the person who saves first.

Sharepoint wikis also have two strengths compared to some other wiki applications. It is really easy to get started with a Sharepoint wiki; the page linking in particular is simple, intuitive and effective (just put [[double brackets]] around words to link or create other pages). And because, under the hood, Sharepoint wikis are built on the powerful if complex Sharepoint “lists,” there is a huge variety of categories and metadata that can be applied to a page.

Wikis For Project Management

This last feature gives Sharepoint wikis strength in one of their most prominent roles inside my firm—project management. In my KM team’s wiki, many pages embody KM projects; these pages are tagged with the names of project participants, and also with a status tag like “Active” “Completed” “Subsidiary” and so forth. My boss or I can quickly see my active projects at any time by looking at a view of the pages in the KM team wiki, showing only “Active” pages tagged to me and sorted by most recently edited. I learned this week that is even possible to display the content of a wiki page in a view of pages like this.

On a given wiki page devoted to a project, it is easy to record and share the latest project status, with project goals, business plans, and links to related projects, people, and resources.

At my firm, project management-style wikis have spread to a number of administrative groups including professional development, recruiting, and legal department management.

Meeting Management

The KM Team also uses wikis to manage its meetings. An agenda on a wiki does not just list what team members wish to discuss; it can link to the project or discussion page and thereby avoid the necessity for giving background information about a new item at the meeting. Wikis are also used on occasion to take notes at a meeting.

Discovery Sharing

One litigation-specific use was sharing and developing a nucleus of facts arising out of discovery in related cases. An early adopter used a wiki to share information among many people on different matter teams. The cases had different procedural aspects and parties, but shared a common set of underlying facts about the technology and related patents that were developed through discovery. Not surprisingly, this wiki had a very steep uptick in use as it got started, and then, as the discovery period wrapped up, use slowed down again.

Success?

As a project management tool I think Sharepoint wikis have been a qualified success. Despite a complete absence of any sort of internal marketing of this tool, there are now over 900 wiki pages (compared to ~500 pages on our long-developed intranet), and I am getting requests for specific targeted uses of wikis. The jury is still out on the other uses, which are still arising as use spreads.

Lessons Learned

The relatively primitive nature of Sharepoint wikis means you have to manually add in some features that are automatically generated in other platforms. One of these is simply a link [[Home]] to the wiki’s home page. Similarly, in wikis with what are substantively subsidiary or tiered groups of pages the navigation to and among those pages needs to be manually generated.
There is a built-in “help” page that is automatically generated for every new wiki; we’ve replaced it with a link to set of help pages in a central location.

As with other wikis, we’ve learned not to let a wiki page be a dead end. Find and link to other related wiki content.

Finally, show users what will happen when they click on a link beforehand. If the content is not another intranet, internet, or wiki page, you need to prepare users by indicating the document type (.doc .pdf). Where linking to a document in our DMS, we indicate the document number as that insures against link breakage and misspelling.

Obama Inauguration

2009-01-20T13:52:00.003-05:00

I can't let the day go by without pointing to the full text of President Obama's brilliant inauguration speech on CNN, and quoting a few of his lines that may have some resonance for those of us working with new tools in the workforce.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true.
They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

I've studied the history of the civil war, World War II, and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. This inauguration has to rank among those great and paradigm-shifting events.

The First Enterprise-Class Social Search For Law Firms: Interwoven Universal Search & Lexis Search Advantage Come To Market

2009-01-20T08:08:00.004-05:00

I saw an updated demonstration of the Interwoven Universal Search / Lexis Search Advantage (IUS/LSA?) search product in early December 2008. An excellent lunch by Radius was part of the inducement to visit.

IUS is powered by Vivisimo's enterprise-class search engine. I was pleased to be able to see a more fulsome demonstration of the IUS/LSA product following on the demonstration at ILTA, now with the addition of a potentially powerful social search component for the law firm market.

Background

IUS/LSA is a feature-rich, complicated product. I don't mean to imply that it would be difficult for users to understand, although certainly getting them to use the social search features would be a challenge just like rolling out any new business process is a challenge. I've therefore identified some previous posts in the next paragraph, should you like some background information on enterprise search, social search, and work-product retrieval search.

I first blogged about Vivisimo's social search in October 2007, covering Vivisimo's initial announcement, Lyndo Moulton's framing of social search from a "traditional KM" perspective, and then a live demo of "Velocity 6.0" as that product is called. In August 2008 I also blogged about implementations of IUS (without a social search component) at three law firms; I also noted the rollout announcement for IUS / LSA, again, without a social component, largely by reference to my former colleague Doug Cornelius' highly favorable post on KM Space. For more see my posts with the "enterprise search" tag.

IUS/LSA combines "work product retrieval" and "enterprise" search. As quite nicely explained by Cindy L. Chick in this 2004 post on the subject, these two have been essentially different categories of search products, with the the former sharply focusing on a limited pool of internal (perhaps highly vetted) precedent, and the latter "federating" or broadly combing different pools or silos of enterprise information. Typical content "sources" for enterprise search include a document management system, intranet, and traditional enterprise database such as Expert/Aderant.

The rest of this post discusses particular features of IUS/LSA.

Case Linking and Validation

A key feature of IUS/LSA is its outstanding case validity check (through signals from Shepard's case updating service) and citing references links. The search identifies cases and statutes present in the content and takes that reference information to Lexis' enormous database, containing information how courts have treated each published decision (i.e., citing favorably, overuling, etc.). It returns a signal to the search engine, which is visible as a flag of some sort in an HTML view of the document from within the search (on a click).

Case validity tells attorneys reviewing work product that the cases (or statutes) are or are not valid; citing references provide an extremely efficient way to find or collect all of the work product on a particular topic, by linking all of the work product that cites to a particular case or statute.

The significance of case validation for busy attorneys cannot be overstated. Litigators are constantly weighing the strength of their arguments, based on the facts at their disposal and the extent to which those facts mesh with a legal theory. Legal theories themselves carry varying degrees of authority or persuasiveness—compare for instance the complete invalidation of slavery under the XIII Amendment to the US constitution with the Supreme Court rulings on the validity or invalidity of various race-based affirmative action plans. Case validation allows lawyers to tell at a glance if they might be treading on shaky ground in citing to a particular line of cases.

The "citing references" ability (my term, not theirs) allows researchers to quickly find other work product resources that cite to the same case law or statutory resources. Since lawyers making a legal argument ethically must cite to the leading authority in their jurisdiction on a given point, even if to distinguish its application in the present instance, finding other instances of case citation can quickly lead you to other instances where other lawyers have made the same arguments (or argued the same point from the other side!). Examining work product that cites to less significant authority can also be very productive, since this authority may be one of a line of cases on the your side of a particular issue.

Both of these features are found in West KM, although West KM is not currently bundled with an enterprise search tool as powerful, versatile, and social as IUS. In particular, the ability to cluster results on the case and statutory authority is extremely powerful.

Social Search

The newest aspect of IUS/LSA is Vivisimo’s cutting-edge social search features taken from Velocity 6.0. These have been officially released, although I do not personally know of any law firms that have actually implemented these features in production (they have been available in the broader business community for something less than a year, I believe).

Once results are found, users can tag, rate, or comment. The main initial use of tagging is to help individual users refind their documents and create personal precedent collections. The magic of tagging is that each tag in turn enhances findability of documents (they directly effect relevance ranking) and expertise. Users can also tag into "shared folders," say by practice area.

Furthermore, users can identify who applied the tag and see all of a users' tags. Pivoting on known user information is a big advantage of tagging inside the enteprise (as compared to anonymous social tagging such as available on delicious).

One of the truly powerful aspects of integrating tagging into search (tags are applied at the time a search result is displayed) is that it integrates tagging into normal work flow. Users search all the time; they don't have to go a separate system to enter a tag, and the tags are immediately displayed and available for their own use the next time around.

I am a huge fan of social tagging . It is a key aspect of Enterprise 2.0, will greatly enhance findability for individual users, and then will only get better as more and more people add their own targeted markers of significance and relevancy. Ranking and commenting also have great potential for enhancing search inside the enterprise.

Guided Navigation

Like other enterprise-class search tools, IUS displays sets of results clustered by key metadata alongside a directly accessible relevancy-ranked set of search results. Where a collection contains significant metadata, drilling down into a set of search results through clusters of metadata is much more effective than a simple ranked list, because it lets users identify resources with directly relevant attributes or whose attributes are close enough to be useful. It also might let a searcher exclude large sets of returned documents.

For instance, a litigator looking for a Markman brief in patent litigation where guided navigation is available might search across all courts, but then drill down into the particular jurisdiction or into jurisdictions in the same federal circuit.

Semantic or Concept Clustering

In addition to clustering into categories predefined by DMS administrators, the Vivisimo engine has the remarkable ability to group documents into clusters based on concepts extracted from the documents. Vivisimo's "calling card" is its ability to generate clusters of documents based on similarities between groups of documents; at the same time, it identifies the groups by what it determines to be key characteristics of that "cluster." Depending on what the settings are, there can be clusters within clusters, allowing you to drill down into the set of documents most relevant to your search (instead of starting the search over when you get too many hits).

See for instance this clusty.com search for "senators", which lists "members" (of Congress) "Ottowa Senators" (the hockey team), "Legislation, Law" (which includes state senate information), and so forth.

Expertise Identification

The out-of-the-box people search looks at document authorship and official firm website biographies. Expertise can also be identified through looking at who is tagging what, which is exposed both through the lens of individual tags and through a view of a user profile. I suspect it would be also possible to use IUS/LSA to incorporate and analyze billing and matter records to further refine the people search.

Searching Across Silos

A key challenge for KM and information management strategy is the distribution of enterprise content across mutually exclusive “silos” of information. A matters database might have information about the general type of work being done on a particular deal and the partner who opened the matter; a document management system might have documents tagged with those same matter numbers; a separate system might contain final pleadings or vetted content; and a billing system might indicate who has worked on that matter the most. Typically the three sets of data never meet, and certainly cannot be leveraged in any reasonably user-friendly manner.

Enterprise search, of whatever platform, provides the “glue” that can bring all of these pieces together. A search for Delaware patent litigation briefs through such an engine might identify not just the Markman brief that the attorney was looking for, but also patent matters and people who with previous experience from that jurisdiction. In some use cases an enterprise search might even extent to designated or licensed content from the internet or proprietary databases.

IUS/LSA clusters based on source as well as documents' content and metadata.

Spotlights

IUS also has "Spotlights", very much like “Best Bets” or canned prepared sets of responses to particular queries. Knowledge management or other firm groups can promote particular sets of precedents or practice guide. In the demo, a search for "motion philadelphia" gets "How to file a motion in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas."

This kind of spotlighting ties in well with efforts to provide procedural guidance for litigators, or deal checklist assistance to junior business lawyers. I am engaged on a wiki-based project to gather just this kind of information (on the litigation side).

Metadata

The search previewed here will also add metadata about court and judge to that about cases and statutory references. This is through a trick known as “entity extraction”, where key parties or case numbers from the documents are matched up with party, case, and judge information from Lexis’ massive databases. I am not sure if this feature has been publicly released.

Profiling

They also demonstrated automatic document profiling, through which documents can get assigned document types such as memo, pleading, correspondence, and so forth, based on their content and similarity to comparison sets of documents. I do not believe this feature has been publicly released either.

Information Gravitation

Some clients are using search to populate client pages that combine information from internal sources and saved searches of the web, in Sharepoint web parts. They have a federated search connector for Google, or, can search particular sites.

Such pages highlight enterprise search's ability to expose and make useful content previously buried in unconnected databases.

Tjaden on Litigation Knowledge Management

2008-11-19T15:27:00.003-05:00

I recently came across Canadian Knowledge Manager and Librarian Ted Tjaden's post on Slaw about his presentation on Litigation Knowledge Management. at the Canadian Law and Technology Forum. Given his audience, he understandably painted with a broad brush.

I enjoyed Ted's take on the synergy (and contrast) between litigators' varying needs for internal information (such as a previous brief arguing for assertion of a federal court's personal jurisdiction over the defendant) and external information (Moore's treatise on civil procedure, including federal courts' treatment of personal jurisdiction). In my firm, KM supplies the former, the library supplies the latter; in each case, the information professional should have awareness of and access to the other type, in case it is a better fit with the attorneys' needs. Where the professional wears both hats, that synergy is easier to work.

I have previously addressed here what distinguishes litigation knowledge management from general law-firm or business law KM.

Ted's post reminds me that I am somewhat embarassed I haven't blogged yet about my presentations at the Chicago Ark conference. Ted himself has blogged about the conference. I'll publish my bit soon, I promise.

Ark Conference, Is KM converging with Litigation Support, Risk Management, and Client Services?

2008-11-05T16:30:00.002-05:00

Moderator:
Craig Carpenter, VP Legal Solutions and GC, Recommind

Panel:

Brent E. Kidwell, Chief Knowledge Counsel, Jenner & Block LLP
Stacie Capshaw, Firmwide Records Manager, Kirkland & Ellis LLP
Joshua Fireman, Vice-President Development and General Counsel, ii3

Here are a few key points from this panel of experienced KM and Records folks.

KM As Mediators and Glue

One type of “convergence” is the role KM can play in mediating or “glueing” together different administrative and legal groups. In many firms KM has had a role as the “lawyers who talk to IT,” or at least as people whose job it is to facilitate communications between lawyers and IT managers at law firms. By virtue of their expertise with improving knowledge and information handling, KM often has projects with many different administrative groups, and can lead the discussions between the different functional areas. I have certainly found that KM has a broad range of contacts and activities compared to other administrative departments at my firm, particularly as we start to leverage Enterprise 2.0 technologies like wikis and blogs.

KM can serve this role better once it has obtained the trust of other groups through successful programs.

Brent gave the example of office moves. KM can play a role because it can assist in the transition away from paper files.

KM and E-Mail

Email is the most pressing issue in records management, because of the immense volume and significance of the content. Stacie believes that email is a “necessary evil”, like dial tone, but that it also saps lawyers’ productivity. KM should address better email behavior. Joshua said that we need to break down all forms of communication, including email, into streams, and then figure out how can you syndicate the information. How would I like to use this information? How would I like to know about the relationships? The value and utility of email should drive how we are looking at it.

Strategic & Stealth KM

“Stealth KM” was another topic of discussion. Some panel members approached projects without needing to brand or label them as KM projects. One audience member chimed in and bluntly addressed the need to “have a strong partner in your corner when the chips are down” and argued instead for highly visible KM. Such a partner is not likely to be a user of KM tools; they will base their opinions on those of the mid-level and senior associates.

Another excellent strategic point made by another audience member is that KM should be strategically focused on those practice areas that are growing, rather than those where adoption may be easy.

KM and Modern Law Firm: Strategy and Operations for IT and KM

2008-10-30T15:53:00.002-04:00

Presenters:

Peter K. Kaomea, Chief Information Officer, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer, Reed Smith, LLP
Stuart Kay, Director, Global Information Systems Projects, Baker & McKenzie

This high-powered panel focused on the possible tensions and synergies that arise between IT and KM departments. My basic takeaway is that there are so many dramatic changes in the competitive environment and technology that KM and IT have to work together. While there may always be some sort of tension between the two, it is KM’s responsibility to engage with IT, and to learn something about it.

Stuart mentioned that in his current position, KM acts as the “public face” of IT, representing its abilities to lawyers and in effect “selling” new systems to the firm. KM can avoid tension with IT by demonstrating its value on a daily basis and talking to them a lot.

Peter suggested that some tension or conflict can be avoided simply by setting the framework in a way that cuts to the responsibilities at issue rather than ownership of a project or piece of information. Break out what aspects of “ownership” you care about. If you ask “who owns” an information security project, you are setting up a turf war. It is easier to ask who wants to be responsible for entering and updating particular pieces of information.

Tom Baldwin comes from an IT rather than a legal background. He believes that KM is very much IT-driven in the U.S.; by contrast, it is more driven by Practice Support Lawyers (i.e., people like me) in the U.K. and Australia where there are many more PSLs. He believes that law firms haven’t been able to treat technology strategically until quite recently, as “ripping and replacing” whole systems is no longer necessary and the basic infrastructure is more stable.

Where there is a successful KM project, there is often a heavy dose of IT. IT does not get kudos for making the “plumbing” work (“Hi, this is the managing partner. I’m so glad my phone is working today. Thank you very much.”) Yet (Stuart suggested) it is much harder to make a business case for a precedent database than an email or phone system, because it is harder to prove an indirect profitability driver than a to establish a direct negative impact.

Some of the more interesting side discussion was about identifying what lawyers want out of IT and KM. Ron’s basic answer—“Ask them.” Peter reported from his previous experience that U.S. Defense Department generals want IT and KM provide them with a way to be more competitive, for instance, by making their decision-making cycle quicker than the other side’s.

This was one panel I wish had had much more time to drill into their topics. They were just getting warmed up when the time was up.

KM and The Modern Law Firm: Formal Law Firm KM Strategy

2008-10-30T15:27:00.003-04:00

The next session at the Ark KM Conference saw Mark Young, Managing Partner, and John S. Gillies, Director of Practice Support, at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP address development of a KM strategy. I very much appreciated having the perspective of a managing partner on a firm’s KM initiative.

My firm recently went through a similar process. The Cassels Brock KM Strategy built on the firm’s Business Strategy, which conveniently was completed just about the time that John was hired. Cassels Brock has grown significantly through lateral hires in the last five years. As a result there is a relatively large set of younger partners. Their KM strategy focused on this group as they were believed more likely to embrace technological change.

I asked Mark how a strategy that required enhanced profitability justified KM investment, as more efficient work logically reduces the billable time associated with a particular task. He indicated that he often hears partners claim they could get more work in the door if they had more time; KM offered them more time, and hence more opportunity for more business. He also feels that KM provides an opportunity to demonstrate greater value to clients. Tom Baldwin of Reed Smith mentioned at this point that for some clients, predictability of fees is really important, and that the matter and document classification features of many KM approaches can help address that concern, and, again, bring in more business. If KM enables accurate cost prediction, it can also help firms move to a value-based, non-billable hour model. Linking back to KM Strategy, if a KM program can demonstrate enhanced value of work, and enhanced profitability, it will be less likely to be put on hold.

John outlined some specifics of the firm’s KM Strategy. The three primary prongs of their plan were an effective Document Management System (DMS); a way to manage precedents; and good DMS search.

They chose Interwoven for their DMS and adopted a unified “folder structure” as a way of fostering collaboration between practice groups. For their search, they used comments from focus groups and the strategic plan to develop a 100-feature set of requirements, with each of the requirements weighted ranking from 1-5. Despite the extensive quantitative work, the two competitors, Recommind and Interwoven Universal Search (IUS), came out with an identical ranking. They went with IUS because of its tighter integration with Interwoven. John mentioned that Recommind did a better job of expertise identification, but that this feature was less important to them as a one-office shop.

First Day of Ark Conference—Knowledge Management and the Modern Law Firm

2008-10-30T15:22:00.002-04:00

This was the 9th Legal KM Forum put on by the ARK conference group. I hope it is not the last as I found it a good experience in three ways. For people fairly new to KM, it was a good place to get up to speed, to some degree, on techniques used by other firms to enhance collaboration, efficiency, and knowledge-sharing within the organization. For more experienced folk, it was a chance to discuss where KM might be going. It was also an opportunity to obtain an overview (albeit at warp speed*) of traditional knowledge management principles and practices as they continue to be implemented in the corporate world.

On Monday, Ron Staudt, Professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, led off with an interesting overview of his work history. Ron has been a leader in the “KM for Legal Aid” arena, coordinating legal aid internet portals for attorneys, volunteers in every state in the U.S. Following some work at Lexis-Nexis on the HotDocs document generation application, Ron has also helped develop a user-friendly document generation platform, “A2J Author,” that walks members of the public through an internet interview leading ultimately to the generation of a set of papers that can be filed in court. The basic principle of the legal aid work is to treat the 5,000-8,000 lawyers in the main legal service organizations as one firm, the idea being that they are inundated with prospective clients rather than competing for them, and to provide them with the level of IT support one might expect for a firm of that size.

I have a small amount of experience as a temporary legal aid lawyer at Greater Boston Legal Services, and am too familiar with the unmet needs addressed by legal aid organizations. I wish Ron’s continued work on these projects all the best. I also hope that these portals take advantage of social collaborative software to enable even better knowledge and experience sharing, especially between the legal aid lawyers, as they go about their work. I can readily imagine a social network site for legal aid lawyers that could leverage the tremendous intellectual and people power of these attorneys through forums, wikis, blogs, alerts, and document sharing.

Two conference themes Ron proposed were, one, in this time of economic turmoil, KM must be more strategic than ever, and two, KM is evolving to support more aspects of the firm than before, including client service, risk management, and practice support.

* Star Trek reference entirely intentional Josh.

Presentation to ARK Group Law Firm KM Conference

2008-10-17T16:50:00.003-04:00

On Monday, October 27, I will be presenting on Day One of the Chicago Ark Conference on "Knowledge Management in the Modern Law Firm," at the Gleacher Center of the University of Chicago.

I'll be addressing two related topics.

The first talk is a panel on litigation knowledge management. I'm appearing with two other litigation KM practitioners (a rare treat!), Mary Panetta of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and Amy Halvorson of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. We'll be discussing strategies for handling litigation precedent collections and also collecting information about a law firm's litigation experience.

The second talk, titled "Fostering and Nurturing the Research & Development Function at Your Firm" focuses on how to enhance adoption of good KM tools.

I hope to see some of you there!

Search Strategies & Law Firm "Information Gravitation"--August 27 at ILTA

2008-08-29T15:30:00.004-04:00

Title, Session Link and Slides: Search as Strategy - Creating 'Information Gravitation' in the Firm

Description:

Enterprise search is all the rage but much of the talk is about search as an “application.” Can search be more than just another entry on the shopping list of applications firms buy? Can it serve as a foundation element in an overall information strategy? Some firms are beginning to talk about creating a kind of “information gravitation” both inside the firm and across the firewall to clients. With such gravitation in place, the right information flows to where it is needed, when it is needed and often without need for discrete searches. Learn the role such information gravitation play in overall information strategy, the impact such a goal has on choices of technology, security and privacy concerns, deployment timeframes and on levels of investment. If that is the vision, how do you enlist the whole firm in it?

Speaker(s):

Derek Schueren — Recommind
Felicity Badcock — Mallesons Stephen Jaques

My Take:

Derek of Recommind is one of the more visionary of the vendor representatives out there. And Mallesons is by reputation one of the more innovative firms Down Under, having won the Innovaction award for their PeopleFinder tool. I was looking forward to this session and it did not disappoint.

Derek started with a wonderful quote from Aristotle:

"Suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need…that shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro…and a plucker play a lyre of its own accord.”

(A plucker here is not a person undressing a chicken but presumably the plectrum or "guitar pick" of the ancient world).

Relevancy is the ability to retrieve material that satisfies the need of the user. (I usually think of relevancy in terms of how search result ranking and how well the results compare with the search terms, but this definition appropriately puts meeting business needs over some abstract fitness).

Derek discussed how Google treats relevancy as essentially a popularity contest. The most popular web pages have more incoming links and few outgoing links. This works pretty well on the web, but, because there is no comparable source of relevancy information inside the enterprise, consumers don't have the same experience with search inside the enterprise.

One potential advantage for enterprises, however, is that Google does not take into account who is doing the searching. Search tools might be able to show different types of results for partners, associates, or professional staff.

Derek compared web search and enterprise search.

Web

The Web contains a huge store of simple content. Internet content typically lacks much context beyond what is linked within its pages. All information available is completley public. Who authored the content is generally irrelevant.

Relevancy is based on key word match over layered with popularity score

Enterprise

Enterprises by comparison have small content stores but much complexity. The lack of link structures mean relevancy needs to be computed in a different way. But content in enterprises does relate to other information inside and outside of the information (think for example of matter numbers). The authorship of content really does matter to content validity or utility, (at least to someone like a senior litigation partner looking at a first year associate's research memo).

Enterprise search tools must respect security.

Metadata in the enterprise is much richer. You can provide more context for the document in the enterprise. You can filter down on information post-query, and relevancy can extend beyond the primary object to related content.

Integrating Search

Concept searching allows you to find documents that may not have all the key words, but that are correlated (related) to the search terms.

Content linking will be key. You might want to see a lot more than just contact information for a judge, such as pleadings for matters before the judge, people who have appeared before the judge, and so forth. The Document Management System (DMS) has great content but it doesn’t have everything. Matter information isn’t in the DMS. Enterprise search needs to blend content from diverse locations. Search is an information layer rather than just a box that provides results.

An example of search as information layer is providing information about citations. If you filter and add in the statutes cited, and also possibly some other data (such as case validity) from another source, you get a much richer user experience. (see these posts on Lexis' recent work on adding citation information to search results, and this Caselines post from last year on Recommind's work with West KM on that front.)

Collaborative Filtering

How does Amazon make it easy for me to find what I want?

Amazon knows what I’ve looked for and also what people like me have looked for and found in the past.

Content Linking

Content linking will really take advantage of the information available in the enterprise.

Felicity Badcock / Mallesons

Felicity, a former practicing lawyer like me, has been working in the legal technology for twelve years, including five at Clifford Chance in London.

She addressed information gravitation in three areas, email, enterprise tagging, and people-finding.

Email Gravitation?

At Mallesons, they try to predicting the needs of the user through Decisiv. This application will make a guess at where the person will want to file the email. The rate of prediction success is quite high.

The search will recommend searches based on the metadata in the email. Do you want to search for emails from the person who sent the email you’re on? Or to the company that received the email?

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can help assess which content is worthwhile. You get the benefit of a large number of people who are also tagging and assessing relevancy.

Malleson’s “Scotty” system, in Beta, will generate tag clouds around content. It will have a firm-based taxonomy, but will also allow user-generated tags and ratings. (Tag clouds show the importance of the content related to the tag by the size of the tag word).

Visualization and People Information

Felicity described "visualization" as a quick way to display vast amounts of quantitative data such as business results. For instance, others have joined news mentions of disease outbreaks with Googlemaps in the disease finder, Health Map.

Malleson’s PeopleFinder (which, although Felicity modestly didn’t mention it, won the Innovaction award this year) pulls together data from a lot of sources.

It starts with a small box in the desktop bar that searches google, or Interaction, or what have you by letter codes like “c” or “g”. A Mallesons people result shows their current availability. The goal was to have fewer external calls go to voicemail. There are twelve different icons indicating the status, anything from "on extended leave" to "on the phone."

People are “available” if they are logged in to PC. Secretaries can use this to identify what to do with calls for an attorney. It saves tremendous amounts of time in not making or receiving calls when they can’t be dealt with. A “Communicator” status can be updated. A right-click can lead to a VOIP phone call, email, or IM. A full-screen view of a person record also shows their week's availability, as per their Outlook calendar. A right-click leads to a while range of options for communicating with the person, from dialing the phone, IM, or calendar appointment, to email. A click on a person's "floor" leads to a floor map highlighting the person's location on the floor.

A scaled-down version of the People-Finder was available through mobile devices. Mallesons is also contemplating making some aspects of PeopleFinder available to clients.

The next version will "push" information on a person's own home page or on their contact record, like the person's current matters, clients, documents, and so forth. This is delivering information, not in response to a user request, but in response to an anticipated need.

Information Gravitation

"Pushing" information in response to an anticipated (rather than expressly stated) need is one form of information gravitation. So is enabling navigation between types of information on a document search result, such as a link to a person or matter. Another form of information gravitation is accessing all the possible ways to contact someone from their contact record.

Ultimately "cloud" computing, where vast amounts of enterprise software and data are contained on giant server farms (as with Google or Amazon), may enable even more interlinking, pushed contents, and connections than is possible now. Aristotle's vision come to life?