Law Department Knowledge Management News, Webinar, and Development

As suggested by reports from a recent roundtable moderated by Joshua Fireman and Ron Friedmann, law firm knowledge management, while not booming, is certainly increasing in its penetration among large firms, and continues to succeed in a variety of ways.

A few recent developments have led me to believe that a similar rise in legal knowledge management activity and interest is occurring in law departments (general counsel’s offices).

First, my firm’s knowledge management group was recently asked to (and did) present on our KM journey, and our thoughts on how to get started, to a few Massachusetts law departments.

Second, Linklaters released their nicely-packaged “Knowledge to Action” report, focusing on the value of knowledge management to general counsel (though it disparages the term “knowledge management” and the term “general counsel,” preferring “legal knowledge” and “legal risk officer.”).

Third, along with Robert Bell, Assistant General Counsel & Legal Knowledge Officer at RBC Law Group (Royal Bank of Canada), I have been asked to speak on Legal Department Knowledge Management by C4CM, also known as the “Center for Competitive Management.” (This webinar has been cancelled, however, but may run in the fall).

I have already been thinking some about the differences between legal knowledge management as practiced in law firms and in law departments (within corporations), and the conditions for the same.  Law departments have typically not invested significantly in knowledge management, compared to law firms, and have less advanced legal-related information access and delivery.  In part, this may be due to the traditionally smaller numbers of lawyers found in large corporations, compared to their outside counsel.

Law departments may also be different from law firms in the following ways, which impact the ability to initiate and sustain legal knowledge management efforts:

• General counsel have limited or no billable hour pressure; rather, they need to be responsive to the direct demands from the corporation and its employees, ideally as efficiently and broadly as possible.
• General counsel work for a single company, usually in one industry; they are often located in offices associated with different lines of business within a company, and as a result may be far more geographically separated from other attorneys than a law firm of comparable size.  They likely have fewer information needs around getting to know their industry—they deal with their company all day, every day—and more around connecting with and learning from other attorneys.
• General counsel’s office are only one (non-revenue-generating) part of a corporation; the general perception is that general counsel find it more difficult to obtain IT resources and attention than is the case in law firms, since the organization as a whole is not focused on legal work.
• While legal-specific technology investment may be limited, law departments may have access to corporate technology—particularly sophisticated enterprise social network and financial analytics software—not broadly available in law firms.  There may also be line-of-business knowledge management staff and processes that can be readily leveraged for the law department. 

It is perhaps unfair to compare so broadly, but I think this is a worthwhile discussion to have, and the rise of law department knowledge management is a very interesting development.

"New Professions Materialize For JDs" Article Published

I'm pleased to announce that my article "New Professions Materialize for JDs" in ILTA's Peer-to-Peer magazine has been released.  It addresses four career paths for people who have law degrees but do not have a desire to practice law, in the areas of knowledge management (of course!), practice / group management, pricing, and staffing. 

Unfortunately I have to admit that I had nothing to do with the charming goldfish motif.  Enjoy.

Ark Conference--The Economics of Law and the Future of Legal KM

I'm here at the ARK conference in New York.  It is quite well attended.
Toby Brown is giving the keynote, "The Economics of Law and the Future of KM."  I am live-blogging so there may be typos.

Toby challenges core principles of KM.  He wants us to do KM differently, where KM might be focused better.

Toby moved away from KM in his career when AFAs started to come up. He gave it up.  KM "came back to him" as he knew it would, as it underlies much of alternative fee arrangement work.

He started an AFA peer group about a year ago, initially with five people.  Now there are almost 120, and they've added legal project management into the mix.  The group's purpose is to increase professional development, have good conversations, and work with the vendors in the space.  Contact him to sign up.

What keeps law firm leadership up at night?  It's the economics.

Many people at law firms don't understand economics (this gap is his first challenge to KM).  How are people at our law firms going to understand and come to a clear definition of what is profit?

What is profit for a law firm?

Definitions of gross margin, contribution, and net margin go to what kind of behavior we are trying to motivate among the partners.  What's motivated partners in the past is hours and rates.

What drives profit?

We know what drives law firm profits--rates, realization, productivity and leverage.

Rates

Raising rates 1% typically rates profitability around 2% where realization is 90-110%.  The cost rate is hidden.   The cost rate (for non-partners) is the expenses (salary, rent) per timekeeper divided by a target annual hours (typically a rate change is around 50-80%).

Realization

A 5% discount will typically drive down profit 10% or more.

Discount, writedowns, writeoffs are three cuts at realization, each of which needs to be tracked differently.  Discounts typically reflect market prices; writedowns might reflect inefficiencies in work; and writeoffs reflect inability to collect.  KM should think about getting the firm to clearly differentiate between them and to track them separately.

Productivity / Utilization

Number of effective hours per timekeeper (billed and collected).   As hours go down, costs per hour go up.  Cost rates have less of an impact.

"The rule of three" is that the first third is compensation, the second third overhead, and the third third is profit.

Leverage a/k/a "The great equalizer"

Leverage is ratio of partner time to that other timekeepers (market standard might be around 25%).  The net margin for partners is typically negative.  This is not a bad thing as it shows that the other timekeepers are making profit that pays the partners.

Who is generating the highest net margin?

If you're leveraging well, you're moving the work down to the lowest appropriate level of staff.

What's happening with these levers?

Rates used to go up 8-10% per year.  These days increases are around 3-4%.
Realization has dropped from around 96% to 86% and dropping.
Productivity has dropped around 10%

Leverage--Most firms are overlawyered in the partner ranks.

Toby sees the legal market as competitive rather than a "buyer's" market.  He doesn't see the shift as a pendulum swing that will swing back.  We've cut costs and mitigated somewhat the usually run  in rates.    Rate increases have a delayed effect.

Demand for 2012 was up just about 1%, essentially flat.  Large law firms increased spend on technology and other matters around 6% with projects like Windows 7 and Office 2010.

bHe sees a huge opportunity.   This is not rocket science.  If we drive down the cost of providing legal services we can maintain profitability and provide work for less.

A lot of products and services will meet these needs, and some of them are KM driven.

LSA can read and analyze time entries and programatically put time entries on them (I've seen this product and I believe that it is able to task-code with somewhat more than 85% accuracy).

Sky Analytics provides analytics on billing information.  Initially they were working for law departments.  It can also look at the phases of work and identify the staffing by phase. It can identify timekeeepers repeatedly billing 8 hours a day or working on a lot of weekends.

Another KM opportunity is monitoring.  Compare how you said you were doing with how you did.

KM classically has been about documents and people.  This will turn KM more towards money, staffing, process, and other things it hasn't focused on to date.

Another KM opportunity is reviewing scenarios and identifying profitability for different phases of work.

Partners don't understand leverage and how increasing leverage can increase the firm's profitability and net margin.  This itself is a KM opportunity.

Basic KM tools can be put in place to share information about profitability.

The Finance people may feel threatened by KM efforts.  They are getting asked for more and more different reports and are underwater.   They need KM but may have a hard time getting out of their blinkered approach.

Redwood Analytics, Aderant, Data Fusion, and others can't present the phase/leverage/staffing information in a usable way.

Tom Baldwin--we need to connect the dots between our efficiency tools and the "soft spots" pointed out by finance and profitability analysis.

Finance people can spot the problems, KM can provide solutions

ILTA KM Blog Launched!

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.

Document Assembly; Standard Approach and The Future

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

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.

ILTA Day 3: Metrics and ROI for Enterprise 2.0

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.

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

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 KM Survey 2010

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"

Richard Susskind on "The End of Lawyering"

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 different kinds of work to English-speaking India or South Africa may be a real challenge to Western law firms.
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."

Decentralized and Personalized KM

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.

KM and The Modern Law Firm: Formal Law Firm KM Strategy

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

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

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!

Experience Management; Monday, 1 PM

Formal Title: Experience Management - Case Studies in Tackling a Difficult Challenge


Description and Session Link:

A request frequently made of KM or IS professionals in law firms is to implement a way to efficiently track and report the experience of individual attorneys. Doing this can help both sell work and deliver work. However, experience management has proven surprisingly difficult. Just defining the type of work to be tracked can pose a stumbling block, as it can be tough to find the "just right" level of detail between the "too broad" and "too narrow." This panel explores ways to manage law firm experience through case studies from firms who have made good progress. Each panelist will discuss the business challenge they faced, the tool they built or adapted to address it, the processes they deployed to ensure good tracking and reporting and the results realized.


Speaker(s):

Kathrine Cain - Winston & Strawn LLP
Stan Wasylyk - Michael Farrell Group
Douglas Cornelius--Goodwin Procter

My Take:

Kate

Kate is on the Practice Support team at Winston. She has a project management background and she gave her talk a fairly rigid structure, focusing on the process she used to craft an experience taxonomy. She provided no information about how the taxonomy was applied or searched, which was somewhat disappointing.

Experience management requires integrating information from different systems.

What questions can't you answer now? What are the business needs of the practice? What do your clients need that you can't provide? Who is being asked for reports? Conflicts? Accounting? Business Development? Who is asking, and what is actually being used? How is it being used?

Are clients asking for the information in RFPs? Are they using it to restructure their practices?

Defining the business needs should be the core driver of the initiative. With any experience search based on a taxonomy, you have to balance a desire for detail with the needs and capacity of practicing lawyers.

Their first trade showed that different facets of their work were exposed. Practice divisions, type of work, type of party were all represented in different levels of the practice description. Similar terms should be standardized or consolidated (i.e., Corporate IP / Trademark Litigation vs. Litigation / Trademark).

The experience identifications should be independent of the organizational or political structure.

Any experience taxonomy needs to be validated against people's expectations and reactions.

A question pulled out that Kate is using a SQL database on the back end. The "capturing information" is a custom asp.net application, not available for public display.

Winston has a corporate archive of matters. They have an internal and external descriptions for matters.

Stan

One goal was to staff people regardless of organizational or geographical boundaries. They wanted to improve productivity by balancing pro bono and billable work. They also wanted to aid the firm's diversity efforts.

Challenges:

Information was scattered between and maintained by different organizational units, but there was no information about forward-looking attorney "utilization."

Technical Approach

The three main components were a data model based in Maven PSA, a forecasting tool, and a search /presentation tool. They piloted in the fall of 2007 with an 81-attorney practice area.

The GUI presents a tabbed view of all the information about the attorney, based on the source (such HR, education, hours). They also had a tracking system where the practice group leadership ranked attorney's experience on a scale of 1-3, 1 = some, 2=proficient, 3=expert. A matrix lets practice area leaders check marketplace needs compared with what your attorneys have.

The forecasting tool uses regression analysis to guess at lawyer availability based on a years' worth of billing records.

His sample query is "who has argued trial motions, has worked in biotechnology, and speaks French?" The hidden questions are "When are they available?" and, if you get two people "How do their skills compare?", i.e., "Who is better?"

The search displays multiple fields at once, like an August 2008 Interwoven DMS search. Search results has an "availability" assessment over 6 weeks. Another shows relative skills.

Lessons Learned

It's hard to teach lawyers to do new things. Senior management sponsorship helped this project significantly. Associates wanted to make themselves more visible. The "operating layer" of partners who actually were going to call the associates did not ultimately buy in, however, and the project has been put on hold.

Doug*

At many firms some associates get too much work, some get too little, and staffing is chaotic. At Goodwin Procter, there is an intermediate level of staffing managers that acts as a shield and buffer between the people who need to get the work done and the people who will do it (associates).

Goodwin's iStaff application lets associates submit their own workload reports, indicating how busy they expect to be next week, and their availability for short and long term work.

The "requestors" don't fill out the details on the request. Rather, the staffing managers who do this.

The iStaff attorney profiles shows biographies, hours YTD, and self-reported availability. Hours reports for an individual shows when and how much attorneys have billed, and also shows ratio of billable to pro bono work.

The application has been succesful. Managers have a much easier job. Associates feel they get better work. Partners are happy with the associates they are getting too.

Goodwin Procter also has an experience search that combines the firm biographies with matter descriptions. It works well for uncommon terms ("Puerto Rico real estate") but much less well for common terms like "real estate."

Mary Panetta spoke up and indicated that at her firm Akin Gump they keep a running tally of what percentage attorneys work in a given industry or matter type, over the last two years.

Following a question about marketing information, I gave a shameless but quick plug for my session tomorrow, which will address in some detail Goodwin's approach to capturing matter experience for marketing and many other purposes.

*Doug and I both work in the KM Department at Goodwin Procter.

What's So Special About Litigation Knowledge Management?

A few weeks ago I posted a reply to an International Legal Technology Association "KM Forum" question. While the questioner remains anonymous under the ground rules of that forum, I thought it would be useful to post my (slightly updated) answer here to the question, "What makes litigation knowledge management different from other kinds of legal knowledge management?" Lit KM is after all my job.

I see five primary differences.

1) Court Filings And Data Are Usually Public

Much of litigator's final work, if not actually out in the open, is publicly accessible. That means that it is possible to cross-check or pull in relevant, helpful documents from outside the firm (the other side's position might well be yours in the next case).

It also means that effort spent on tracking some types of information, like who in your firm has appeared before a particular federal judge, can better be spent elsewhere as it may be available through services like Lexis' Courtlink.

Down the road, as I have commented earlier, there is great (as-yet unrealized) potential for caselaw search based on free public access to court opinions.

2) Calendaring / Docketing Really Matters

Calendaring is much more important for litigators than for people who make deals. We even have a special name for it--"docketing", which technically refers to either filing of a pleading or motion in court or the entry of a deadline for the same type of activity (or a discovery deadline) on an internal calendar. Some large law firms even have centralized "Docketing Departments."

Obviously there are deal deadlines, but there are so many more deadlines in court, and missing them can be so harmful, that deadline tracking systems, technological and otherwise, are of critical importance.

3) Practice Areas Don't Matter (as much)

My firm is organized (in descending level of order) around Departments (two), Major Practice Groups, and Practice Areas (~35--the smallest unit). While different practice areas on the business side of the firm have quite different knowledge management needs, litigation groups have largely compatible knowledge management needs.

For instance, litigators want to be able to find all firm work product that cites to a particular case or statute (thank you, West KM!). They need to track ongoing trials as a group, and so on and so forth.

Practice-area specific KM is certainly viable in litigation, but many of the most effective KM efforts benefit the entire litigation department rather than a particular litigation practice area.

4) DMS Use Differs

Document management system use is also slightly different. While litigators negotiate documents outside the firewall, it is not the main thrust of our efforts. Therefore, versioning, redlining, and importing files from outside as new versions of DMS documents all tend to be less important than they are on the corporate and real estate sides of the firm. Final versions of documents are available from courts and pleadings systems, as well as from the DMS. Another DMS difference I've developed at Goodwin is pulling in "forum" matters data directly into the DMS for use by our litigators. I'm not aware of any comparable business-department-wide piece of matters data.

5) Bleak House vs. Let's Make A Deal

Litigation cases on average take much longer than deals. With the amount of work being relatively equal, that means that A) there are proportionally fewer litigation matters than deal matters and B) different time horizons have to be considered for all kinds of support systems.

**********

There may also be some difference with respect to reliance on case law, though I am less certain of that proposition. It may be that business lawyers rely on cases as much, but simply don't like to use Bluebook form in their cites).

Caveats

The above are my opinions as a litigation KM practitioner. These general distinctions tend to blur in the context of high-volume, commoditized litigation, and where deals blend into dispute resolution and administrative agency work.

A two-headed violinist; Attensa and What I Share I Know

I couldn't resist this post from enterprise RSS vendor Attensa discussing how internal collaboration started at one an anonymous firm.

One reason I couldn't resist was the cute--but not too cute--acronym / motto "Wiki - What I Know I Share" that said firm developed through an internal competition. If it's an acronym, though, shouldn't it be "WIKIS"? Or perhaps without the all caps, "Wikis"?.

The other reason I couldn't resist was the charming picture of the two men playing the violin, one bowing, one holding and fingering (if you've never tried this, take it from a violin performance expert, it's quite difficult to carry off). I'm so used to bowing and "fingering" at the same time that only doing one is quite an odd feeling. By contrast, the collaborative software I've been exposed to thus far does not really create a feeling of novelty, at least for a person used to shopping on the web and writing email.

The primary thrust of the article seemed to be that for knowledge sharing to truly add value to an enterprise, parallel efforts to A) establish technological sharing and dissemination channels and B) encourage a culture of sharing are necessary. Certainly that's a key realization and "lesson learned" of early knowledge management efforts, although it comes close to a truism as it leaves somewhat undefined what a culture of sharing would look like. Here's the key quote:

"[U]sing technology to channel information is only part of the solution. The greater challenge is creating a collegial culture that better serves the real world information needs of the enterprise. While their technology integration is focused on developing a collaborative environment where people can easily share their expertise, their cultural initiative is focused on encouraging people to do so."

Branding and slogans like What I Know I Share are the kind of rallying points that people need to develop a common set of goals and beliefs.

Enterprise 2.0 and face-to-face interaction

These days, knowledge management practitioners work on computer technologies day-in and day-out. I think it is fair to say that without the power of technologies, starting with email and moving on up to collaborative technologies like blogs, wikis, and Sharepoint lists, many of us might not have jobs.

These technologies are so powerful in part because they enable communication in multiple ways. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, a presenter opined that communication technologies could be broken down by the number of communicants on each side of the transmission:

• One person to one person: telephone, IM, email.
• One person to many people: intranets, (email), blogs.
• Many people to one person/company: RSS, message boards, suggestion boxes.
• Many people to many people (web 2.0): video teleconference, face book, wikis, del.icio.us, blogs with actual comments.

(I wish I could identify who said this, but I wasn’t doing live blogging then.)

I think these technologies are amazing and would reject any suggestion that I am a Luddite, ready to toss my laptop. Yet much suggests that the most effective communications occurs face-to-face (a/k/a F2F, F/F) and not through any of these methods.

For instance, LucasFilm has moved its special effects, animation, and computer gaming groups under one roof at the Presidio in San Francisco—even these technologically savvy people say in Business Week that with their projects requiring high-level collaboration, “there's no substitute for face-to-face interaction for their team-oriented projects.” (“The Empire Strikes at Silos”, August 20, 2007).

Looking back over my fairly brief time in the field, I have found that face-to-face training and approach has been a critical part of most KM successes I have had. Once I build trust with attorneys through face-to-face interactions, I can be much more effective in transmitting skills and information to them.

Why is face-to-face so much more effective? There are lessons from the science and KM literatures, art, and the law.

One of the most recent scientific or business literature articles to address the uniqueness of face-to-face was an article in the August 2007 issue of “Scientific American Mind” (free preview, but registration required) which suggested that a different set of neurons is activated when we think we are face to face and responding to another person. Carol Kinsey Goman in the May/June 2007 KM Review (article not available on-line) also opined that a “in face-to-face meetings, our brains process a continual cascade of nonverbal cues that we use as the basis for building trust and professional intimacy—both of which are critical to high-level collaboration, negotiation, and communication.” (I especially like her phrase “professional intimacy”, which seems contradictory at first but comes to make sense as you think about it).
More broadly, there is a perception, backed by some studies, that people are best at learning through not just one but a broad range of methods. In addition to the obvious preferences for visual or audio, some people have to do it to learn it (“experiential learners”) while others prefer abstract or theoretical approaches. Working face-to-face may provide each of the different kinds of learners with the type of learning experience that they need; in fact, a good teacher may well consciously or unconsciously be able to adapt the approach to the audience, based on live feedback.

My experience as a long-time classical music performer provides another answer. While a high-level audiophile might disagree, there is no question in my mind that the immediacy and raw power of the sound a live performer makes, working his magic (or not) directly in front of you, cannot be matched by a recording, no matter the depth of the sound. That is true as well for any decent speaker as well.

Another lesson from my musical background is that drama and excitement arise merely from seeing the person sweat (and possibly fail) in the performance—whether a literal high wire act, or violinistic pyrotechnics, or anything that is live and difficult. The listener identifies with the performer and thrills as the performer vanquishes the difficult run in the concerto (or, more pessimistically, feels schadenfreude or sympathy should the fingers slip). There is usually no such gripping drama in any electronic medium—while we know that theoretically there is a possibility of failure through such communications, experience has taught us that by their nature these are carefully vetted and approved well before they are displayed to the world. An exception that proves the rule are the highly promoted product demos, such as Steve Jobs’ spectacular iPhone demo or Bill Gates’ Windows 98 implosion.

There is another lesson from art and theatre. By coming to the event, the audience has already demonstrated a communal commitment to the message or the event. They are no longer passive recipients of a message. In a very real sense, even if (like all internal company events) it is “free”, they have paid for the message, through investing their time and energy in attendance, and they are wanting something back.

My background in law is in litigation. In most cases, people or their representatives actually get a chance to stand up in court in front of a decision maker (such as a judge or arbitrator) who, by law and tradition, is neutral in the dispute. Making the plea in person, or perhaps even better yet, paying someone more eloquent than you to stand up in court, provides this opportunity. We also feel that we can better assess credibility in person, through our assessment of the veracity and likeability of the witness. The face-to-face “plea” satisfies the litigant that at least their voice has been heard. A comparatively anonymous written submission might not.

So what can the practitioner draw from the significance of face-to-face?

One point, ironically, is to keep an eye out for technologies that replicate some of the key aspects of face-to-face, like Cisco’s Telepresence (disclaimer: Cisco is a client of Goodwin Procter.) While I have not seen a demo, Telepresence comes closer to in-person communications by allowing much of the same type of interactions, such as non-verbal cues. The video is high-definition, and replicates the direction of a speaker’s voice; it is also at face level, not up on a TV-like screen. Another (more limited) F2F technology is the Lotus Webconferencing System that via a web connection shows a picture of all participants on an audio conference and indicates via a visual cue who is speaking and who is moderating. And trainings, even stored presentations, should include as many aspects of in-person communication as possible, whether that is video or audio.

A second point is to keep traveling. Integration across offices is a major challenge for all sorts of firms, and all of this makes plain that real integration requires cross-office travel by all sorts of people, in order to build the necessary “professional intimacy” at different operational levels. KM professionals should try to meet as many people as possible in their travels, not just those that they have appointments with, to broaden their personal network and effectiveness.

A third point, a professional development remark, is that KM practitioners should do everything they can to become more effective speakers. A small amount of study in effective speaking can provide a remarkable degree of improvement. The best communication teachers are those who make their living through the voice; actors, directors, and singers. I will always remember the effective coaching I received during a certain transitional period from Michael Allosso, a stage director in the Boston area. I know it helped me tremendously in several job interviews (admittedly a very specialized type of F2F), and I've also sent friends to him, also with good results.

Finally, as noted in the LucasFilm article and in a June 2007 post from my colleague Doug Cornelius, firms can enhance a culture of knowledge-sharing and collaboration by creating a flexible set of spaces within the workplace where people can meet face-to-face. While my current firm has wonderfully large and naturally-lit conference rooms, for more formal business interactions, I have noticed a deficiency (compared to previous firms I have worked) in informal spaces equivalent to coffee shops, eating places with banquettes, or markets. Some ideas for spaces like this would be: extend existing coffee / kitchen space by addition of tables & chairs, have more employee “lounge”-type areas, add a firm cafeteria as these Boston firms did. Even a firm apparel shop (selling branded clothing, mugs, and so forth) could be another such space.

ILTA Session Report, Day 3: Current Awareness: Critical Information Management Tools

Speakers:


Doug Hoover, Thompson West
Dennis Kennedy, http://www.denniskennedy.com/.
Meredith Williams, Director of Knowledge Management at Baker Donelson

The goal of this session was to get enough background to make an informed decision about current awareness technologies. The speakers were well informed and current and this was a useful session. The information about collaborative information technologies was far from comprehensive, however, and omitted discussions of wikis, blogs and tags.


Dennis Kennedy started. There used to be a sense that the cyberspace was separate and apart from us; now it feels more that we are part of the cyberspace.

We might have a surfeit of information generally, we don't necessarily have the information we need when we need it. We are overloaded, have to wade through too much spam, and generally have information overload.

We suffer from "continuous partial attention" (also defined as the look on a person's face the second time their Blackberry has vibrated (or beeped) while they are talking to you.)

How can we bring information to us in a way that lets us get to the stuff we actually want to take action on? Dennis proposed an evolution:

• Search;
• Email newsletters or alerts; then,
• RSS feeds; then,
• The "Daily Me"; then,
• Actionable intelligence.

"News that comes to you." "Newsreaders let you triage and manage information and bring you information you can act upon."

Dennis introduced RSS as "Really Simple Syndication" and with the wikipedia definition; technically speaking, it is a format specified using xml. RSS separates the content from the manner it is displayed, so people can choose the way they want the information displayed. An RSS feed is consumed by an email application or by a reader. It is put out by a blog or news.

"Outgoing" RSS feeds allows people to push out content.

Google Reader, which I use, is now the classic or accepted way to start getting sets of RSS feeds. The default view within Google Reader is the most recent posts--called the "river of news." You can *star* entries and also set up a feed on sets of shared items. Techies can even import an "OPML" file to obtain sets of RSS feeds. A law firm could develop sets of feeds for its clients, or a vendor could develop sets of RSS feeds from different sets of internal training or support resources.

Feedreader gives you better control of views of the feeds, but doesn't automatically refresh. It lets you can download everything at one time so you can work off-line. It is more powerful, but costs $29.

Shared feeds give a social context to RSS. You can have documents such as a podcast fed into a feed.

Dennis believes that RSS can greatly enhance the quality of information that attorneys receive. RSS can bring you information in a form that you can use it right away.

Ready, Willing and Able; Client Awareness in US Law Firms
Doug Hoover, Thompson West

Doug's background is in business or competitive intelligence. While Dennis is very comfortable using feeds to triage information, attorneys don't want to do that themselves. They want to know what other firms, attorneys, and practice areas are doing. Most importantly, attorneys want to know what is happening with their key clients.

West's "Firm 360" product is one attempt to get this set of information ready for attorneys.

The typical business intelligence process is depicted as a "wheel" of information collection, starting with data collection, and moving on to information analysis, knowledge assessment, intelligence, decision, and finally, hopefully, results.

Usually primary data collection is done by the marketing department (as with client surveys) and the library (who accesses primary information). Finance and business management is outside this circle.

You can get attorneys' attention by delivering them timely significant information about their clients.

Who is responsible for client awareness and market intelligence? Thompson ran surveys, broken down by the size of the firm, that suggested that the responsibility does not lie in just one department (often split between marketing and the library). Some of the "mid-size" (150-500 attorneys) firms have some of the best competitive intelligence practices. Once a firm has a full time employee dedicated to this job, the demand increases sharply, and more than one employee is hired.

The most sophisticated firms or "reactive analyzers" are constantly proactively gathering information about clients and competitors. Does the firm know which are its most frequently contacted clients?

The most popular use of current awareness was helping attorneys prepare for client meetings. The next most popular was helping the firm prepare RFP responses.

Doug showed a map (not with his slides for proprietary reasons) that showed sources, identified responsible people, and analyzed a firm's collective intelligence processes, with particular output and recipients established. They calculated how long it would take to collect, digest, and analyze the necessary information for the necessary number of practice areas or attorneys. It did not escape this attendee's notice that this sort of process could easily be used to justify a certain level of current awareness or competitive intelligence staffing.

Meredith Williams then addressed competitive intelligence iniatives at her firm, Baker Donelson.

KM is involved in competitive information because their job is to make the attorneys more efficient. KM helps the bottom line by providing the key decision makers the information they need when they need it.

Meredith demonstrated BakerNet, their LawPort set of matter pages, containing financial information and so forth. It integrates information on the number of proposals sent a particular client.


The Firm 360 product pulls publicly available information from Westlaw. Graphs help attorneys identify if the type of work they do is increasing or decreasing. You can drill down to see who else is representing the client on what types of matters. It also links to case dockets. A client site also searches publication mention history, lawsuit filing.


Partners can subscribe to an RSS feed that will provide an email if the client site changes. No monitoring is required once set up. They can also set up "target client" sites.


Practice group sites have Lexis feeds of relevant news, practice guides, dockets, and so forth. Attorneys are relying on the information to serve their clients. They have another page on ediscovery with live feeds.


Lessons Learned:

• Make everything seamless, with no passwords required.
• Keep it simple.
• Keep it low maintenance for your team.
• Make it a part of their daily practice (as with pinging email.)

ILTA Conference Report, Day 2: Innovative Use of Technology in the Law Department

This session was ably moderated by David Rohde of Baker Robbins (he got the heck out of the way.). Each of the three case studes was interesting and effectively presented. More like this ILTA!!

Speakers were:

• Peter Vissicchio, Business Technology Senior Manager at Pfizer.
• Risa Schwartz, head of Knowledge Management at Cisco Systems.
• Mike Russell, Strategic Legal Technologist at Liberty Mutual Insurance.

David introduced with a discussion of the drivers of innovative technology, including:

• need for cost savings,
• decline and obsolescense of legacy systems,
• new business needs,
• new regulatory needs such as the FRCP,
• risk management,
• usability improvements, and
• drive to continually improve business processes (Six Sigma etc.)
  

Pfizer case study: A robust legal data warehouse for advanced analytical reporting.

Pfizer has 1000 outside counsel in many countries, spends $500 million in legal fees per year. They use a matter management system, TimeConnect, Hyperion Planning for budgeting, and also IP Master for patent / trademark management. They were having a hard time getting reports out from each system and a harder time reporting across different system; it was taking days to get one report out.

A data warehouse keeps information from a set of transactions and allows for quick reporting. You will need to spend the time to develop a good up-front plan as to how the data will tie together.

The application was developed by Oracle, and Pfizer also used Informatica for most Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) routines and Business Objects for report, dashboard, and ad-hoc development. Oracle "leverages a typical star schema with a small number of fact tables linked to various hierarchical dimension tables to support drill down via dimensions such as date/time, department, geography, patent family, matter, etc."

Results

The system they developed allows for monthly or quarterly canned reports going across multiple systems. They initially promised to create any report that was needed, but after more than 200 reports were developed in the first month, they learned to keep the number of available reports down to a couple of dozen that people will want to use.

The executives wanted the ability to see graphic dashboards that would identify problems and allow them to drill down into the data behind problem areas. Ad hoc reporting has been used because the reporting tool is simple to use. People have been using the new reporting system rather than the underlying source systems because the reports are easier to generate there. Paralegals, administrative staff, and some attorneys use the system.

Liberty Mutual


Mike's group handles 1600 law firms that are sending e-billings, but they still received 10,000 page bills, and up to 6,000 paper invoices per month. They wanted to automate the paper billing process, which they did by setting up a business process that converts the paper to image and manages the workflow of the billing, exception, and payment process.

The new system was built using internal IT resources, following a six-sigma review of pain points in the billing process.

The technology used Documentum WebTop to capture key metadata or attributes of the invoices and Adobe Acrobat Standard (6.0 Professional) to comment and otherwise handle the invoices.

The business process entials 3 steps, intake, scanning and review / pay. The firm scans in all invoices into pdfs and imports them into Documentum. People are using dual and triple monitors for better switching between pdfs and Excel tracking sheets.

Documentum view breaks out key data about bills. It cannot generate checks due to SOX issues.

The paper invoices are shipped to their pdf vendor with a bar-coded cover sheet that is supposed to indicate what is in each box. The vendor destroys the invoices after 90 days so Liberty Mutual doesn't have to store it. LM also gained a lot of floor space from eliminating office paper shelves.


The new system includes a help-desk style contact or reporting system that identifies the chain of events on a particular bill including logging calls from firms about bills.

The system also includes a help-desk style contact or reporting system that identifies the chain of events on a particular bill including logging calls from firms about bills.

The goal was to automate the workflow as much as possible. While they didn't invent any new technology, they twisted their document management system to treat bills as documents.

Lessons Learned

Thorough process-mapping is necessary and effective. Focus on the staff's pain points.

Cisco

Mark Chandler is a real proponent of using technology innovatively. Cisco has 230 legal staff in 72 countries. They have 130 lawyers in the Silicon valley area.

They use DealBuilder, and have also developed a home-grown contract management system. This system has 26 guides for major contract types, formerly in paper binders.

The Cisco attorneys needed to talk to each other. They were in so many different time zones that phone calls didn't work, and email traffic wasn't getting into the resource.

Cisco is seeking to move to a more collaborative, less command-and-control system.

The solution to the issue was to build a collaborative system akin to a bulletin board that allowed comments and questions. They moved the information into a "Legal Exchange Collaborative" bulletin board system. Users can post questions in the particular section and choose to email one or more groups. Conflicts between comments are allowed. Incorrect comments can be removed.

Use has been high, particularly in the sales group where the VP mandated its use.

Unfortunately the emails do not currently contain the question or the subject, just a link. This has posed difficulty with off-line or airplane use. They want to have email comments flow right into the bulletin board. They are considering using wikis for this purpose.

Risa does not believe that wikis can handle back-and-forth conversation very well. [She should also be aware of Vic Nishi's Orchestra product for this purpose.]. She does not know if the new approach will work. She will be happy to have an ILTA webinar on legal wikis. Some of the wikis developed at Cisco look like highly functional web pages. Wikis have also helped people develop flexible and quickly updated agendas for international meetings.

Risa's success in KM projects has come from recognizing how attorneys are currently working and adapting any changes to conform with those existing methods.

Attorneys can have a hard time publicly posing questions because "they are shy" (and don't want to appear uninformed). Risa tried to raise awareness of the 20-50 questions per month via a newsletter for KM that included indexed links to the newest questions and answers. Cisco has learned that attorneys have enhanced their reputation in the organization through learned responses to questions.

Risa mentioned that she had developed a dedicated referrals database at Wilson Sonsini. [We have something comparable at Goodwin Procter for real estate local counsel, local counsel, litigation experts, translators, and other outside resources.]

Lessons Learned

"If you build it, they will come" does not work for attorneys. Bring the right attorneys to the table at the outset and ask them, "tell me use-case scenarios" [what you need and how you would use it]. Attorneys and administrative staff need to be sitting near IT people even with KM people around to translate. Secretaries have great suggestions and are great prosletyzers.