"Sharepoint Development Best Practices” at LegalTech

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

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

Presenters:

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

The session description:

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

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

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

Sharepoint for Business Development at Parker Poe

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

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

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

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

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

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

This firm also has dynamically created "Client Sites."

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

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

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

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

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

Parke Poe uses XMLaw webparts to display iManage folders.

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

Guy Wiggins on Provisioning Made Easy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing information from internal to external

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

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

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

Bob Beach

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

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

• Fresh and Relevant

• Vetted (manually or through workflow)

• Categorized (by practice, department, office)

• Targeted (by user, internal or external)

• Prioritized / highlighted (by importance, timeliness)

• Readily Available (no manual effort)

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

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

Content Management in MOSS

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpening Sharepoint; Four Firms Implement SP Intranets

Title and Session Link: Sharpening SharePoint - Real Views from Peer Firms on Getting the Most Out of MOSS and SPS 2003

Description:

SharePoint is now widely used by law firms for numerous projects ranging from RM to DM and becoming the defacto standard for collaboration. What exactly does this tool provide and how can it be best utilized for your firm. Take this opportunity to learn what other firms are doing to sharpen their competitive edge using SharePoint.

Speaker(s):

Michael Williams - Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, L.L.P.
Sam Shipley - Ulmer & Berne LLP
Chad Ergun - White & Case LLP
Paul Phillips - Nixon Peabody LLP

This excellent session had top technologists at each of the firms frankly laying out the trials, tribulations, and successes of their implementations of Sharepoint for their portals and much more. What was especially interesting is that each of the speakers stressed in their implementation a different aspect of this powerful platform.

Mike Williams

Mike focused on Sharepoint's ability to pull in and flexibly display in one place information from a wide range of firm information sources, and to show information that took into account the person who had logged in. It also reflected very well an intranet design principle I've become familiar with; an intranet must account for both people who are members of a particular group or team, and want to use it in the course of their daily work, and those who are simply "visiting" the site and want to learn more about that team or group, or perhaps accomplish something quite specific.

The main "home page" he showed had three key tabs---My Links, My Matters, and My Worklist. Each tab would take up about two-thirds of the total width of the page. The matters tab automatically pulled in information from financial, billing, docketing, and document management systems. Other information on the page, such as some of the navigation and available applications, varied depending on the user's practice area and role.

Mike's firm's practice area pages have lots of links to external resources. Each practice area also has locked-down private area. Might have case result information or other information useful for marketing or internal organization.

Science Advisors (!) have their own portal page (I was amused as I set up a basic page for our science advisors just last week). It included information about what they do, experience, FAQs, “Ask the Scientists.” They also have an internal page, some project management.

Technical and Content Management Approach

They’ve assigned content managers to particular pages. They partnered with Handshake to integrate into their core systems, but also wrote some of it themselves. The IP group and insurance litigation groups have benefited more from the Sharepoint portal so far. He has a staff of two developers.

Paul Phillips

Nixon Peabody demonstrated an adoption of Sharepoint's MySite "social networking / personal portal" features that, next to Deloitte D-Street's approach, is perhaps the most involved and effective SP social networking of I've seen or heard of in a professional services firm.

They tried Plumtree portal but migrated to Sharepoint, moving in 2005. They are (mostly) in SP 2003. Settled on SPS ’03 medium farm and WSS 2 sites. New sites now use WSS 3, so they have wiki and blog capability. It sounds like growth of those tools has been fairly slow. New sites are created by KM team, which also is the team that handles staff and lawyer demands for new tools.

They’ve brought in third parties in specific areas. They’ve worked with Handshake, and have adopted Recommind. It is delivered only through SP.

They’ve adopted MySite, and push extensive numbers of web parts based on practice area and role. They also have a webpart gallery and allow simple user modification. They’ve removed some modification abilities. “It’s a combination of what we give them and what they can add to it.” Users click on a "change this site" button, and then have to make only one more click to add a web part to their MySite. They have a “top zone” MySite that the user can’t modify. That one includes billables, collections for partners. The gallery of iGoogle-like parts includes Mealey’s reports, “My Collaboration” sites, “NCAA Tourney Links”, “My docket”, and so forth. User MySite content is recorded in an NP specific data table.

Nixon Peabody has adopted a search strategy that indexes all the DM content (as many as 60 million documents?). Since 2005 they’ve had some growth in sites and upgrades.
They don’t use SP search. Recommind respects network security and DMS ethical walls. “Publication” of document in a KM system boosts its relevancy. Users can rate content on a 1-5 checks. KM documents gets a “Gold Star.” Some partners didn’t think that anybody should be rating documents.

They have a financial dashboard with network and internal security. Their dashboard updates at night, and at intervals throughout current day. A “Management Reports” site links to standard reporting. Users only get links to targeted reports. One set of data supports all outputs.

Dashboards shows last three years’ finances, by month. I was especially impressed by the attractive and easy-to-read billing information charts.

Things they did well:

• He challenged any requirement for customization.
• Gladly copied concepts successfully executed elsewhere.

If they did it over

Would have said no more often.

Might have asked less of some of their vendors. The vendor might have taken some of the requested options as an absolute “requirement,” i.e., the out-of-the box functionality might have worked well enough.

What is the adoption rate of personalization of MySite? They maintain metrics on who is adding what?

Sam Shipley

Sam's firm was not as far along in Sharepoint implementation, but had an excellent story about meeting the firm's most important needs (displaying accurate and up-to-the-hour financial information) and doing it well.

They wanted to replace the old intranet and daily newspaper.

They didn’t want a KM solution. They have an annual event where they invite vendors. They weren’t making a connection between the firm’s vision and strategy and their vendors.
The 2005 session led to a call to increase productivity, improve quality of service to clients, and manage growth.

They focused on productivity and the idea of a digital dashboard. It publishes firm performance indicators, at the firm, practice area, and attorney levels, with a “real time” mentality. Show them “how bad they really are.” If you show attorneys that they are at the bottom of a list, they’ll try to get off of it.

Sharepoint is really the delivery vehicle for the financial information.

When Marketing got involved in the design aspects of their intranet, it took some time to educate IT about what Marketing thought was important and educate Marketing about what IT could do.*

They finally decided to stop worrying about that and focused on financial reporting first.

They had a simple dashboard showing YTD, goal for year, amount of last year’s billings. They exposed comparative numbers for practice groups. The practice group leaders could drill into attorney records of billable hours and rates.

Each attorney also could see their targets and actual billables. They built a data warehouse separate from ancient accounting system that had real-time results. Let attorneys affect their ranking in real-time by entering time.

Administrative departments are starting to have their own pages. Goofy content drives people to the site.

What they did well.

• Tied work to management objectives.
• “Just did it.”
• Added goofy/entertaining content (take advantage of someone with a good sense of humor)
• Piloted in one practice group where the practice area leader was really pushing performance.

What they missed

• They haven't gotten major announcements moved out of email.
• Listen to what they want—birthdays! Needed to add it directly to front page. It drives people to the content.

Frustrations

• MySite has some things that aren’t valuable. They use SP “audiences” to target messages. But nobody in the firm understands it.
• He is working on security.
• Wishes firm had a communications plan. Need a standard way to communicate a given type of message. Email is the default.

Chad Ergun—“Attorney360”

Although Chad was technically the moderator he couldn't resist a few slides and a few minutes about his firm's sophisticated information display system.

For the "Attorney360" project White & Case built a “data mart” based on Handshake that is updated every 45 minutes. Billings, time entries, matter profile and description information gets pushed to internal RSS feeds. Chad later told me that they are using a combination of the built-in Sharepoint web part reader and some custom-designed RSS feed readers. They built an individual expertise system that assesses your time entry. The intranet shows “top matters.” Their intranet also shows current (online) status of attorneys on a particular matter.

The theory here is that by leveraging the login, you can display information that the attorney is likely to need, at or near the time it is needed. A "push" model instead of a "pull" or "go find it" model.

They did a survey of attorneys and assessed what they do when they aren’t billing. They learned a lot about what is difficult to do and what wastes attorney time.

*Note revised per comment from Sam.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action and RSS Learning

Tomorrow is the Enterprise RSS Day of Action. Because I can't link to it enough, by way of background, I'll post again to Common Craft's basic but brilliant explanation of RSS in Plain English.

I've been up to my elbows in Enterprise RSS as my firm has been evaluating various vendors and I've been making presentations to groups and individuals about RSS over the last two weeks in particular.

I view RSS as a key technology for taking advantage of the tremendous wealth of fresh information available on the Web. Because RSS is based on the flexible .xml standards, RSS within the firewall has tremendous potential to solve some existing problems and enhance knowledge sharing.

One of the existing problems is corporate "spam" or irrelevant, bothersome email. Email comes in a glut into my Inbox and I have to do something with it--mark it as read, or delete it, at a minimum, which means to pay some attention to it because I don't know what it's about until it's in there. By contrast, an RSS feed comes into an Outlook reader already categorized by the type of information it belongs to, whether a litigation victory announcement, lost mail, conflict check, or whatever else. I choose when to pay attention to that category of information instead my having to pay some attention to whatever's there, lest I lose something that is actually directed to me in the flood of emails.

Enterprise RSS can enhance knowledge sharing. It will inform you if a change is made to an internal wiki or blog--critical for quality assurance on these internal knowledge sharing platforms. As the KM team I am on has learned through use of pbwiki.com, such a notification also greatly enhances the project management use of a wiki.

This week I have been learning more about the power and flexibility of RSS. See this excellent post on how to mash up and otherwise play with RSS feeds. Not all of the services described here are 100% reliable or necessarily useful for enterprises, but I don't think it would take a genius to figure out how some of these "tricks" could apply within the firewall.

Today to my delight I learned from LifeHacker how to convert an email subscription to an RSS feed, using mailbucket.org (tip of the hat to Damon Jablons*). Getting email subscriptions out of my Outlook Inbox makes me really happy. It may let me help others overwhelmed by email.

If you want to learn more about RSS, I recommend you check out the popular Delicious tags on RSS.

*name previously misspelled.

What a feed reader can do for you

A Google engineer has posted on the many sources of news and information that can be tracked using Google Reader (or any other RSS feed reader, for that matter.) The list ranges from classified ads of a particular type (say, apartments in Brookline under $1500 /month) to weather to finance and news reports, to saved searches.

The list is far from exhaustive, and I think more and more information, litigation-related and otherwise, is going to be "subscribable" like this list. For instance, in two minutes I just set up this search for Patent Litigation in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts through Justia.com. The results page had this RSS feed result. This is close to a direct feed from PACER, the federal courts electronic filing information system.

For enterprises, it will be increasingly the case that RSS will be the method of sharing and keeping track of content. Because it is inherently flexible and allows for the addition of faceted information like tags and practice areas, it can be particularized to the internal needs of the firm. Sharepoint 2007 has taken advantage of this power by having RSS feeds available from any page, list, wiki, blog, or other content repository. Too bad the Sharepoint 2007 is completely inadequate.

I noticed today that the Google Reader in particular has a useful "Discover" feeds tool, located right next to the "Add subscription" button.

It apparently compares the types of content that I regularly follow and finds other feeds (mostly blogs) that match that same type of content. The number of Google Reader subscribers is listed so hopefully I can tell if a feed is completely bogus. I found KM leader Tom Davenport's blog that way, and I re-found contrarian and search consultant Stephen Arnold's blog, Beyond Search, which started in January 2008 without an RSS feed.

I recall hearing Stephen's entertaining and informative closing remarks at the 2007 Enterprise Search Summit in New York (just before I began to live-blog), and also posted on the Enterprise 2.0 discussion that Anrew McAfee and Tom Davenport had this past fall. I'm glad to find out another source of information on them. Thanks Google.

As a side note, like many people, I have saved searches for my own name feeding into a reader and also an email alert. It turns out there's another David Hobbie who works for the Army Corps of Engineers in Florida, and who I suspect has more control over the water levels in Florida's swamps than any other single individual in the country. There also is another one, a business student who works for Thomson Financial. Watch out world--me and my doppelgangers are taking over!

Launch of Enterprise 2.0 Task Force

After months of behind-the-scene work, an Enterprise 2.0 Task Force has finally been publicly launched at my firm, marked by the dissemination of an E2.0 survey on collaboration, an intranet web site, and a (scheduled) team meeting. It's worth a look at some of the groundwork that was laid to make this possible, and why we are starting now.

First, a team from the Knowledge Management Department, led primarily by Doug Cornelius of KM Space , educated themselves about Web 2.0 tools and techniques.

Because you can learn a lot by doing, and we should "drink our own Kool-Aid", the KM Team started using a KM team wiki for our projects (using pbwiki.com), set up a Delicious account for the team, adopted RSS feed readers for learning about new events, and two of us (Doug and I) started blogging. Many of us also signed up, or re-energized our accounts, at Linked-In and Facebook. The Goodwin Procter 2.0 Facebook group in particular has become a way for people at the firm to recognize each other's interests in these topics, as well as get to know each other better.

Second, we started to talk to people face-to-face at the firm about what uses these tools might have. Could a wiki be a useful tool for a litigation matter team? Would that extroverted practice area leader like to have a blog as a platform from which to orate?

Third, we drafted a SurveyMonkey survey (yes we used a wiki) to help us identify people interested in E2.0, including potential "early adopters", and to start to spread the word.

When it came time to go live, we were able to get a tremendous amount of information up in a very short amount of time. We have:

• Lists of who is blogging at the firm already, with links to the blogs;
• A feed of posts from the blogs;
• Links to a firm Facebook group;
• Links to a Facebook group that the last class of summer associates pulled together;
• A fairly extensive firm-specific tag cloud on Delicious of web sites to educate people further about Web & Enterprise 2.0;
• Descriptions, in terms lawyers can understand, of wikis, blogs, RSS, and social networking software, and how they might work inside the firm, with links to descriptive videos (thank you Common Craft); and last but not least,
• A simple non-interactive list of the task members, people already committed (to some extent) to Enterprise 2.0 tools and collaborative methods.

We timed the launch for February 2008 because implementation of Sharepoint 2007 is not far off. Sharepoint's internal communications abilities, wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds from every imaginable page or webpart, should let us implement some of the ideas the task force will develop.

McAfee on Enterprise 2.0 In Law Firms

Leading Enterprise 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee (he coined the term a few years back, to Davenport's disgruntlement) has taken a look at some potential implications of Enterprise 2.0 in law firms, should they move away from a billable hour-based business model. He suggests that attorneys and others at firms could be given credit for engaging in collaboration through Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, mashups, and prediction markets. Moving away from the billable hour could help knowledge workers contribute productively "in the flow", instead of having a separate track for KM or collaborative activities.

I agree with McAfee that succesful adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies will require embracing these tools "in the flow." Having separate silos for knowledge sharing work and "normal" work can be a recipe for ignoring the former. The most succesful knowledge sharing tools I've seen, such as West KM and Interwoven, rely on a tiny amount of input up front, but only such input as is demonstrably to the user's benefit. For instance, a user will put in a matter number when saving a document to a DMS because it helps the user find that document again when they search by matter. Doing so also lets us KM types bring over a lot of other context from other systems for that matter.

I'm not so sure that law firms will need to move away from the billable hour in order to be able to achieve some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. Picture a wiki that is used on a particular matter team's work, with RSS feeds and the entire team always able to access the deal or litigation status, history, and context. Or a blog by a practice area manager used to update attorney internally on the latest decisions, briefs, and practice area numbers. Even complicated systems may be adopted, if it is easy to prove to both the line-level users and the supervisors that the benefits will greatly outweigh the hassel.

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.

New CommonCraft Video--Social bookmarking

CommonCraft Video has the best training materials I've seen on social collaboration tools. See for instance Doug Cornelius' KM Space posts on Wikis and also on RSS feeds, "RSS in Plain English."

Their next video educates about the power of social bookmarking:




Last month in Pivoting In Delicious I dug down a little bit more into the social collaborative aspect of the tagging than Lee Lefever does here. In particular, I explained how you can examine others' Delicious tags for a particular URL, and, how useful that social context can be.

Last ILTA Session: Sharepoint 2007 at Sheppard Mullin

Tom Baldwin, ILTA Regional VP, Chief Knowledge Officer at Sheppard Mullin, and blogger.

Sheppard Mullin has 500 lawyers and 1,000 users. They have 10 offices (including Shanghai).

Microsoft's Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (I use "Sharepoint" and "MOSS 2007" interchangeably to refer to this software) includes six pieces; workflow, business intelligence, collaboration, portal, content management, and search. Sheppard Mullin is "eating most of the pie" except for business intelligence.

Sheppard Mullin gets more use out of search than any other features. Microsoft has invested a huge amount in search.

Sharepoint acts as the initiator and host of workflow processes, but Sharepoint is just the front end of that (you'll need something else at the back end).

By contrast, the collaboration tools in MOSS 2007 are limited. In particular, Tom mentioned that the built-in RSS feed only has the capacity to capture one fee, and that it was not easy to customize the blogs. At Sheppard Mullin they used the "discussion thread" aspect of MOSS 2007 instead. Blogging is limited as only three blog posts fit on one page. SM lawyers had some practice area requirements, like the ability to post a document to a blog, that didn't work out of the box. An attendee cautioned that Sharepoint wikis and blogs use a completely different set of master pages, so branding has to be recreated.

MOSS 2007 led to savings in maintenance, enterprise search, and workflow at Sheppard Mullin.

Lessons Learned

They almost had too tight a conception of what they wanted. Sharepoint 2007 is very different from 2003. It can take a developer a few months to get up to speed on sharepoint 2007.

Tom suggested starting with search. It's easier to get buy-in.

Try to figure out how to consume data from as many different data as possible. Rollout of a new application might mean simply adding a new tab to a user's home page.

Microsoft may not have understood the massive scope of Sharepoint 2007 adoption across the business world. Getting support can take a while.

What Sharepoint Does For You

They wanted to provide some level of personalization for the lawyers. The portal looks at practice group, office, and title to dynamically dictate content.

A "My $" tab has partner's WIP, A/R and so forth.

There is a "My Library" list that shows research sites most relevant to that practice.

Search

The default view on the result list is by relevancy. The other option is by date. In collaboration with XMLaw, Sheppard Mullin enhanced document search results with links to relevant metadata like matter, client, and author. Sheppard Mullin's search requires licensing from XMlaw.

They have adopted matter centricity for email with Interwoven. Each matter space has documents, including emails from the matter workspace. Search may be driving import of emails into workspaces some.

The seach crawls Ceridian (HR/firm directory), accounting, and the DM.

Financial Information

They have drill-down into matter financial information through Aderant. Partners can get to pdf copies of the bills from the finance.

Knowledge Management / Expertise Location

They have a self-sourced attorney information data in a directory in Sharepoint. This was a highly-customized aspect, drawing data from 3 sources. The screen shot shows a mug shot, contact into, education, language, and bar admissions, and can be refined in faceted fashion by attorney type and practice area.

Extend Sharepoint

The standard firm home web page shows news and events are tailored to the individual--from their office and practice group. There were too many "attaboy" announcement. They now have a "vanity page" that lets the marketing department filter events. Two or three of the announcements cycle with forward/back and pause. Each office page has 10 tabs including Hotels, Restaurants (with reviews), Floor Maps, Cars, Directions; the office manager's secretary usually is the publisher.

The rollout of Compulaw will lead to the addition of a "My Docket" tab, targeted to the practice area (i.e., a transactional lawyer wouldn't see it). Tom has abandoned classroom training. Firms are adding applications at an alarming rate.

Partners have a "CFO Reports" tab that has the most current version of financial information for them.

Another "Contacts Network" application is mining email to show who at the firm knows who, with a particular focus on outside contacts. A comparison between that product and the firm's more traditional contact management software showed roughly a three-fold increase in the number of relationships exposed.

Tom has one full-time developer and there is one more in IT who deals with workflow. Apparently, in selecting developers, ".net" and Sharepoint knowledge are not good enough; Sharepoint 2007 developers also need XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language).

Usage Tracking

Tom looks at who is and who isn't running searches. He bought a separate reporting module from Microsoft (for not a lot of money). Most people providing add-ons are quite inexpensive.

West KM

It is a challenge is getting lawyers to use any separate search. Sheppard Mullin wanted to integrate West KM into their advanced search. They have been working with Thompson to get some of the functionality of West KM into their document search results.

By way of background, West KM uses some of Thompson West's well-known search technology, first to vet, and then to search a firm's internal work product.

Sheppard Mullin will be adding a tab to the results that targets "premium" content from the separate West KM document repository; documents found through this tab have a "KM Preview" option. (Tom mentioned aftewards that they might also decide to have the KM Preview be the default search tab). The "KM Preview" shows an HTML representation of the document, complete with the West KM treatment of case citations. This means:

1. a live check of a KeyCite flag (indicating whether or not a case remains good law, per Westlaw's databases);
2. a hyperlink to the full KeyCite, from Westlaw;
3. a separate hyperlink to the case authority itself; and,
4. a "km" icon to link you to all other internal firm workproduct that cites to that case authority.

[West KM is a key piece of knowledge management software for litigators at my firm. I'm impressed with Thompson's willingness to open up and work with Sheppard Mullin to integrate West KM functionality with Sharepoint search, without having the West KM logos all over the place. Of course, it is in their interest to have the West KM technology spread as far as possible, since it tends to drive people to use Westlaw research tools. They were smart to do this with MOSS 2007 since, per the general impression I received at ILTA, it looks like it will eventually be the dominant platform in the legal market.]

Pivoting in Delicious; Litigation KM and Social Tagging

Before I first started using Del.icio.us last week (yes I am a connectivity software newbie), I questioned the value of tagging. I thought tagging would merely help me find web sites that I was interested in, and that other people's tags would be of comparatively little interest. Since I was fairly happy with storing web sites I used in the IE "Favorites" list, I didn't really see why I should bother.

Count me in as a convert. The power of site tagging is not simply that it helps me find and logically group my own sites. Since so many people are using it, Delicious also provides access to a very substantial collective intelligence about topics I care about, simply through the happenstance of having tagged web sites with the same or closely comparable words.

But as an incredibly important bonus, the tags not only lead you to the web sites, they also point to the delicious accounts of the people who made them. In other words, tagging has uncovered not just the information, but the people who are interested (and may be working on) the same things that I am working on. You can mine other's delicious pages to see not just the tags that you have in common, but the other words and sites that they think are significant.

The example that educated me was the tag "enterprise2.0."

I had tagged the website for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference that I caught the tail end of last week with the logical tag "Enterprise2.0." When I went back to my delicious site, and clicked on my "enterprise2.0" tag, I saw that I could view others' use of that tag, either the most "Popular" uses or "All" uses.

Delicious cleverly puts these "popular" and "all" tags into readily comprehensible and recreatable URLs, such that you can see the page for the enterprise2.0 tag at http://del.icio.us./tag/enterprise2.0 and the popular tags for "Enterprise2.0" at http://del.icio.us/popular/enterprise2.0.

Next to each of the sites listed, Delicious identifies the number of people who have tagged that site (the pink lines).

Each of these pink lines is in turn a hyperlink to the Delicious page devoted to that link or resource (with an indecipherable URL, in this case http://del.icio.us/url/59d38fef1d29b2b73e9b2d5add9e1d34) .

The presentation at this "URL" or "link" page is different; it is now easy to see who has tagged what, and to jump into the user profiles, since the tagger's name is listed beneath their tags and description of the URL, if any. For understandable reasons, however, doubtless having to do with spammers and privacy, you cannot actually contact or reach out to the other Delicious users. I had hoped that there would be some way to direct a comment or reach out in some way to the Delicious users with whom I apparently have a lot of interests in common.

In effect Delicious lets you "pivot" and explore idea categories (tags), those who created them (the users) and the resources themselves (in this case, web links).

Circling back, what does this have to do with litigation knowledge management?


Imagine that a tagging system for documents and URLS is implemented internally at a law firm, such that others in the firm can see what you call another document, can see your tags, and aggregates the tags. It would be significantly easier than it currently is to identify and find:

1. the documents that people go back to again and again (a/k/a exemplars, forms, models);
2. what people think documents pertain to (removal, subject-matter jurisdiction, pulp plants);
3. who is concerned with which issues and trends (Joe Partner in DC, Amy Associate in NY).

I am trying to provide these same resources day after day to the attorneys in my firm, which is possible through my extensive time investment in the available search technologies and databases that my firm offers. With social tagging they wouldn't have to call me, but could take advantage of other's perspectives.

Social tagging has the potential to allow attorneys to add rich context to their work product and search efforts, and to lower the effort required to take advantage of the work of others in the firm.