Title, Session Link and Slides: Search as Strategy - Creating 'Information Gravitation' in the Firm
Description:
Enterprise search is all the rage but much of the talk is about search as an “application.” Can search be more than just another entry on the shopping list of applications firms buy? Can it serve as a foundation element in an overall information strategy? Some firms are beginning to talk about creating a kind of “information gravitation” both inside the firm and across the firewall to clients. With such gravitation in place, the right information flows to where it is needed, when it is needed and often without need for discrete searches. Learn the role such information gravitation play in overall information strategy, the impact such a goal has on choices of technology, security and privacy concerns, deployment timeframes and on levels of investment. If that is the vision, how do you enlist the whole firm in it?
Speaker(s):
Derek Schueren — Recommind
Felicity Badcock — Mallesons Stephen Jaques
My Take:
Derek of Recommind is one of the more visionary of the vendor representatives out there. And Mallesons is by reputation one of the more innovative firms Down Under, having won the Innovaction award for their PeopleFinder tool. I was looking forward to this session and it did not disappoint.
Derek started with a wonderful quote from Aristotle:
"Suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need…that shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro…and a plucker play a lyre of its own accord.”
(A plucker here is not a person undressing a chicken but presumably the plectrum or "guitar pick" of the ancient world).
Relevancy is the ability to retrieve material that satisfies the need of the user. (I usually think of relevancy in terms of how search result ranking and how well the results compare with the search terms, but this definition appropriately puts meeting business needs over some abstract fitness).
Derek discussed how Google treats relevancy as essentially a popularity contest. The most popular web pages have more incoming links and few outgoing links. This works pretty well on the web, but, because there is no comparable source of relevancy information inside the enterprise, consumers don't have the same experience with search inside the enterprise.
One potential advantage for enterprises, however, is that Google does not take into account who is doing the searching. Search tools might be able to show different types of results for partners, associates, or professional staff.
Derek compared web search and enterprise search.
Web
The Web contains a huge store of simple content. Internet content typically lacks much context beyond what is linked within its pages. All information available is completley public. Who authored the content is generally irrelevant.
Relevancy is based on key word match over layered with popularity score
Enterprise
Enterprises by comparison have small content stores but much complexity. The lack of link structures mean relevancy needs to be computed in a different way. But content in enterprises does relate to other information inside and outside of the information (think for example of matter numbers). The authorship of content really does matter to content validity or utility, (at least to someone like a senior litigation partner looking at a first year associate's research memo).
Enterprise search tools must respect security.
Metadata in the enterprise is much richer. You can provide more context for the document in the enterprise. You can filter down on information post-query, and relevancy can extend beyond the primary object to related content.
Integrating Search
Concept searching allows you to find documents that may not have all the key words, but that are correlated (related) to the search terms.
Content linking will be key. You might want to see a lot more than just contact information for a judge, such as pleadings for matters before the judge, people who have appeared before the judge, and so forth. The Document Management System (DMS) has great content but it doesn’t have everything. Matter information isn’t in the DMS. Enterprise search needs to blend content from diverse locations. Search is an information layer rather than just a box that provides results.
An example of search as information layer is providing information about citations. If you filter and add in the statutes cited, and also possibly some other data (such as case validity) from another source, you get a much richer user experience. (see these posts on Lexis' recent work on adding citation information to search results, and this Caselines post from last year on Recommind's work with West KM on that front.)
Collaborative Filtering
How does Amazon make it easy for me to find what I want?
Amazon knows what I’ve looked for and also what people like me have looked for and found in the past.
Content Linking
Content linking will really take advantage of the information available in the enterprise.
Felicity Badcock / Mallesons
Felicity, a former practicing lawyer like me, has been working in the legal technology for twelve years, including five at Clifford Chance in London.
She addressed information gravitation in three areas, email, enterprise tagging, and people-finding.
Email Gravitation?
At Mallesons, they try to predicting the needs of the user through Decisiv. This application will make a guess at where the person will want to file the email. The rate of prediction success is quite high.
The search will recommend searches based on the metadata in the email. Do you want to search for emails from the person who sent the email you’re on? Or to the company that received the email?
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking can help assess which content is worthwhile. You get the benefit of a large number of people who are also tagging and assessing relevancy.
Malleson’s “Scotty” system, in Beta, will generate tag clouds around content. It will have a firm-based taxonomy, but will also allow user-generated tags and ratings. (Tag clouds show the importance of the content related to the tag by the size of the tag word).
Visualization and People Information
Felicity described "visualization" as a quick way to display vast amounts of quantitative data such as business results. For instance, others have joined news mentions of disease outbreaks with Googlemaps in the disease finder, Health Map.
Malleson’s PeopleFinder (which, although Felicity modestly didn’t mention it, won the Innovaction award this year) pulls together data from a lot of sources.
It starts with a small box in the desktop bar that searches google, or Interaction, or what have you by letter codes like “c” or “g”. A Mallesons people result shows their current availability. The goal was to have fewer external calls go to voicemail. There are twelve different icons indicating the status, anything from "on extended leave" to "on the phone."
People are “available” if they are logged in to PC. Secretaries can use this to identify what to do with calls for an attorney. It saves tremendous amounts of time in not making or receiving calls when they can’t be dealt with. A “Communicator” status can be updated. A right-click can lead to a VOIP phone call, email, or IM. A full-screen view of a person record also shows their week's availability, as per their Outlook calendar. A right-click leads to a while range of options for communicating with the person, from dialing the phone, IM, or calendar appointment, to email. A click on a person's "floor" leads to a floor map highlighting the person's location on the floor.
A scaled-down version of the People-Finder was available through mobile devices. Mallesons is also contemplating making some aspects of PeopleFinder available to clients.
The next version will "push" information on a person's own home page or on their contact record, like the person's current matters, clients, documents, and so forth. This is delivering information, not in response to a user request, but in response to an anticipated need.
Information Gravitation
"Pushing" information in response to an anticipated (rather than expressly stated) need is one form of information gravitation. So is enabling navigation between types of information on a document search result, such as a link to a person or matter. Another form of information gravitation is accessing all the possible ways to contact someone from their contact record.
Ultimately "cloud" computing, where vast amounts of enterprise software and data are contained on giant server farms (as with Google or Amazon), may enable even more interlinking, pushed contents, and connections than is possible now. Aristotle's vision come to life?
Friday, August 29, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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:
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?
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
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.
Kennedy and Mighel on Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools--ILTA Wednesday AM
Title and Session Link and Slides: Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools (Blogs, Wikis, MashUps, IM, Text Messages, Social Networks and More)
Description:
Collaboration technologies help promote information sharing, efficiency, cost reduction and can provide competitive advantages. How does the legal environment deal with the information overload and the security of confidential information escaping the realm of the organization? What aspects of legal information need to be considered to help determine how collaboration tools should be utilized in the legal world (and when they should not)? What policies must be in place to protect the shared information?
Speaker(s):
Tom Mighell - newly of Fios
Dennis Kennedy - MasterCard Worldwide
Their new collaboration for lawyers blog
Description:
Collaboration technologies help promote information sharing, efficiency, cost reduction and can provide competitive advantages. How does the legal environment deal with the information overload and the security of confidential information escaping the realm of the organization? What aspects of legal information need to be considered to help determine how collaboration tools should be utilized in the legal world (and when they should not)? What policies must be in place to protect the shared information?
Speaker(s):
Tom Mighell - newly of Fios
Dennis Kennedy - MasterCard Worldwide
Their new collaboration for lawyers blog
My take:
There were two nice moments in Dennis’ and Tom’s presentations on collaboration today and yesterday. At the end of both, they had a “contest” to find the person who had most recently joined legal technology. Two people who had been doing legal tech for less than three months were selected, and received a copy of the collaboration book. That was the spirit of ILTA!
Dennis’ main thrust was that, because collaboration is no longer an option, we need practical approaches to addressing collaboration issues. Free internet tools make it easier to collaborate, perhaps without your knowledge.
Much of Tom & Dennis’ talk was at a fairly abstract level. Although they clearly knew their subject well, they didn’t have as many specific examples or choices of collaborative tools that lawyers might make as I would have liked. Perhaps it would have helped to focus on a particular aspect of collaboration technology, whether it be document collaboration management, wikis, social networking, or another smaller part of this large field, or to focus on collaboration at a particular type of firm, be it solo, small, large, or corporate. Even so, they did not address IP issues, discoverability, or contractual implications of collaborative lawyering.
There was a fair amount of interesting audience participation. For instance, they elicited that no one at the presentation had firm-branded blogs that allow comments. 10% or so of the people present had firm IM systems, or allowed external systems in. Tom mentioned that some firms are using IM-style messaging that lives wholly inside browsers.
Web 2.0 has allowed people to move from team collaboration to community collaboration. One example is Yelp. It is a site for food that lets you pose questions and get answers. Another example is delicious.
LinkedIn recommendations are an area of potential concern.
Google Sites lets you display calendars, financial information, and documents in one place “like Sharepoint.”
What can we do to select good collaboration tools? An example of how not to select a tool is “track changes” in Word. Once that cycle gets started, it’s hard to break out. IM methods should be secure. If you survey what people are using, you’ll be surprised at what you use. One can then start to guide people to the right tools to use.
Litigation support has been functioning as project managers for a long time. The new technology makes it easier to keep track of documents and what people are doing. The goal should be to enhance workflow.
We use email too much now as a collaboration tool. The ultimate goal is to have happier, more connected clients.
Loss of control is one common concern. Transactional lawyers are taught to control the draft. Working in Google docs does not provide that same feeling of control.
Tom said that “firms are starting to move to Google apps.” When I asked him about this after the formal session, he indicated that this statement was based on anecdotal evidence about smaller firms. Some attorneys think that having stuff on other people’s computers is more problematic. The reason seems to be that when your own machines fail and your data center goes down, you can do something about it. Personally, I’d rather have Google’s 500+ security engineers and global reputation worrying about my documents than the 2-3 people the firm can afford. Tom indicated that the Google brand makes people feel more comfortable about security.
Going outside the firewall inevitably raises security issues. Even a Service Level Agreement (SLA) will not protect you if the vendor goes out of business. Another issue with new collaborative tools is the process for allowing downloads of new software.
The two main technology use issues addressed by the ABA have been email and metadata. The ABA issued an opinion that email need not be encrypted to maintain attorney-client privilege. At least one state has found that lawyers should have some knowledge that metadata exists, and that lack of knowledge of that fact is a potential violation of their ethical violation. A Canadian opinion stated that attorneys should know the technologies that they are using to serve their client.
Appropriate balance between risks and benefits.
If the telephone was just rolled out today, some firms would consider it too risky. The risks should be compared with other existing risks. How do risks for wikis compare with those for existing documents? IM vs. email?
You have to go with the culture of the firm to some extent.
Cost of "Free" Collaboration Products
Security, backup, lack of guarantees, and hidden costs all make most “free” tools less than free. What additional hardware will be required?
Collaboration Choices
Firms should have a “basket” of collaborative choices. Some can be high-risk, high-reward options. Having an appropriate policy is important. You want to channel appropriate behaviors. Controls might cover things like blogging, use of particular sites, and assessing what programs are running on the firm systems.
Whatever systems firms use must have authentication and security features. Tom feels that there should be a blogging policy. You wouldn’t want to have unmoderated comments on a firm-branded blog. Taking a public position on a policy could lead to problems with a position taken in a future lawsuit.
The SLA with the collaboration vendor must spell out specific guarantees and what happens in the event of a breach or business failure.
Tom feels that the price of gas is one of the factors driving collaboration and videoconferencing.
Next Steps
Tom and Dennis left us with three recommended action steps to further our firms’ handling of collaboration issues.
- assemble whatever firm policies may apply
- look at collaboration tools in use (through a survey?)
- sketch out the main issues in a potential collaboration tools policy
Follow-up on IT Payoff and Project Management Post
In remarkably timely fashion, the ILTA Project Management Steering Committee has released its 2008 update to a 2007 survey. Now less than 2% of the 141 respondents indicated that their firms had no project management capabilities, down from 17% a year ago. Respondents still had significant concerns about the effectiveness of project management.
Not surprisingly, the larger the firm, the more likely it is to have a formal project management office (PMO).
For more context about the cost- and results effectiveness of project management, see my post on yesterday's CIO panel.
Not surprisingly, the larger the firm, the more likely it is to have a formal project management office (PMO).
For more context about the cost- and results effectiveness of project management, see my post on yesterday's CIO panel.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Update on Lexis & Interwoven Universal Search
I was very impressed early this morning by a demonstration of many of the capabilities of Lexis' new search, created in partnership with Interwoven and its Universal Search product. See my colleague Doug Cornelius' post on the breakfast and announcement (I had to present shortly after the breakfast and couldn't liveblog it).
Litigators think in terms of case citations and common citations to statutes, so it is good to see Lexis and Interwoven "getting it."
Litigators think in terms of case citations and common citations to statutes, so it is good to see Lexis and Interwoven "getting it."
CIOs on IT Payoff and Project Management
Formal Title, Session Link and Slides: CIO Roundtable - Challenges in Demonstrating IT Payoff
Description:
Being asked to demonstrate the business value of IT to your firm management? Join an international group of CIOs from three ILTA member firms for an interactive discussion on how IT service value may be evaluated when compared with leading financial performance indicators. Examples and ideas on determining key performance metrics, measuring and tracking trends, working with firm management to develop financial performance indicators, as well as mapping existing technology to key business processes will be explored.
Speaker(s):
Janet Day - Berwin Leighton Paisner
Peter Bier - Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
Brent Snow - Baker & McKenzie
David Cunningham - Managing Director, Baker Robbins & Company
The main lesson of this excellent sesssion, moderated by David Cunningham, was that CIOs can use project management implementation to greatly reduce the amount of time and money that they and their staff spend on infrastructure, basic support, and other "plumbing," and should use the resources thus freed up to concentrate on areas that more directly benefit the firm such as business process improvement and lawyer efficiency. In corporate terms, they should try to move from "keeping the lights on" to "Research & Development."
Model of IT Advancement
David lay out a basic framework, adopted from Carnegie Mellon's Capability Maturity Model Integration (R) or CMMI, of five-stage legal IT development. The slides at the presentation and as attached above were essentially illegible, but the basic idea is that IT can be ranked in the areas of people, programs, technology, and facilities, along a sophistication scale. The lower the rank, the more reactive and less proactive the area is. The higher, the more sophisticated the IT business processes and project management implementation. Law firms typically are not above stage three. Most are at stages 1 or 2 in these four areas.
Baker Robbins has surveyed is that law firms fall into three categories. One-third have a “low-cost, high-risk” approach. Only one person knows how to do things, little project management, and so forth. Low cost would be ~$6,300 per employee, a high cost would be ~$14,000.
A second third spends a lot more but is still high-risk because they spend a lot on operations.
The panel is more in the last third, where as firms get more into Levels 2 and especially 3, the IT costs per employee start to come down. Then IT can start focusing on projects. As technology companies mature, PM and quantitative skills start to be more valuable. Reskilling happens more than dropping total head count. They are fighting fewer fires. IP people start to move from infrastructure skill sets to business analysis or Project Management roles.
Janet Day
Janet's firm has very strong business process management. They have binders and binders full of documentation of their business processes and projects. Project management include rigorous change management and measurement of return on investment. Her bailiwick is a little larger than a typical IT director's, and extends to such functions as facilities, know-how (KM), and copying.
The extensive documentation extends to people. Each IT staff person has a publicly exposed career development framework.
These rigorous processes have led to clear documented savings. One example she gave was an office move from one city to another in a foreign country. Where it might have required several IT staff to be present for a few weeks before, now they only had to be onsite for three days, because everything they needed to do was mapped out in advance. Another documented success was the implementation of time entry through mobile devices, which broke even after "29 days" where she was expecting it to do so after six months. ROI there included the 12 minutes (0.2 hours) each attorney had to spend to learn how to use the new system.
She is assisted in measuring ROI by her staff accountant. She also obtains sign-off for large project's proposed ROI from the finance chief.
Peter Bier
Peter ran a professional services firm in the technology space before coming to his current law firm. The IT organization had been focused 95-99% on operations / plumbing. He runs the project management office, which is a separate organization, as well as IT.
He is trying to work at role definitions. The wrong mentality is “I sit at my desk until I get a call.”
He sold the idea of having a chief architect as part of his interview process. He hired one to set up a good process, and develop longer-term vision for IT. His information architect looks at issues like data in more than one place and overlapping functionality. He wanted to make sure that all of the designs were being reviewed by one person. It was harder to sell the position to the rest of the IT team than to get the position approved. It’s a risk management issue for him.
They had data centers in each office, but are centralizing them. People information was scattered in 25 silos, may have been inaccurate in some of them.
They’ve split off some people into a project services team. Some IT staff will be more applications experts, some will become project experts. The project people develop the requirements first and then later get the high-powered tech people involved. People can’t all be involved in all the projects.
He has taken over the intake process on projects. He was able to start pushing back on projects that IT couldn’t do or that didn’t have business value. Some projects are clear & simple to do. It’s better to get out in front of what attorneys are asking for. They have some Microsoft project software. It manages intake, review, approvals, and status reporting after project is complete. They are progressing in IT, but the business side of the firm is moving a little slower.
He’s had to sell the concept that projects are a way of adding value to the organization. People take a long time to get this, and are used to working in the old reactive way.
He thinks that law firms are behind corporate America in incorporating architecture and project planning into their work.
All the managers and directors have been sold on project management skills, and took 5 2-to-3 hour project management classes (10-15 hours).
The Project Management Office is one person. Project Management is embedded in every project. Each “large” project has a dedicated project manager.
Brent Snow
The global Baker & McKenzie operations does an audit of each area every few years. They’ve centralized information management on a global basis. It has worked really well.
They are using Sharepoint to develop workflows. Staff intake and departure processes are both getting set up in Sharepoint.
He gave as a sample facilities project their server virtualization project that started in January 2007. (They moved from a level 2 to level 3 on the CMMI scale). They needed to scale up staff to support virtualization, and hired staff with experience in that process and invested up front in lots of training. It was hard to measure time-based ROI because the “virtual” servers are all mingled together on hardware. There were clearly saving financial benefits and attained a 10:1 server ratio, whatever that is.
Another benefit was 83% power savings. They develop data on carbon footprints, but Brent couldn't reveal how the calculations were made.
His office virtualized every server but those for Elite and DMS. They have virtualized their SQL databases.
Brent developed his own office's project management complete with dedicated project coordinators. Project sites set up in Sharepoint. Things are centralized in one place. They’ve sent all management staff to project management training. PM is getting pushed onto IT. One person oversees tracking of all projects, but the project coordinators are responsible for the projects.
This was an outstanding session, with real CIOs talking about real issues they faced and overcame. I called my firm's resident project manager into this session from another one, and he was quite happy that I did so, even though he only caught the last 40 minutes.
Description:
Being asked to demonstrate the business value of IT to your firm management? Join an international group of CIOs from three ILTA member firms for an interactive discussion on how IT service value may be evaluated when compared with leading financial performance indicators. Examples and ideas on determining key performance metrics, measuring and tracking trends, working with firm management to develop financial performance indicators, as well as mapping existing technology to key business processes will be explored.
Speaker(s):
Janet Day - Berwin Leighton Paisner
Peter Bier - Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
Brent Snow - Baker & McKenzie
David Cunningham - Managing Director, Baker Robbins & Company
The main lesson of this excellent sesssion, moderated by David Cunningham, was that CIOs can use project management implementation to greatly reduce the amount of time and money that they and their staff spend on infrastructure, basic support, and other "plumbing," and should use the resources thus freed up to concentrate on areas that more directly benefit the firm such as business process improvement and lawyer efficiency. In corporate terms, they should try to move from "keeping the lights on" to "Research & Development."
Model of IT Advancement
David lay out a basic framework, adopted from Carnegie Mellon's Capability Maturity Model Integration (R) or CMMI, of five-stage legal IT development. The slides at the presentation and as attached above were essentially illegible, but the basic idea is that IT can be ranked in the areas of people, programs, technology, and facilities, along a sophistication scale. The lower the rank, the more reactive and less proactive the area is. The higher, the more sophisticated the IT business processes and project management implementation. Law firms typically are not above stage three. Most are at stages 1 or 2 in these four areas.
Baker Robbins has surveyed is that law firms fall into three categories. One-third have a “low-cost, high-risk” approach. Only one person knows how to do things, little project management, and so forth. Low cost would be ~$6,300 per employee, a high cost would be ~$14,000.
A second third spends a lot more but is still high-risk because they spend a lot on operations.
The panel is more in the last third, where as firms get more into Levels 2 and especially 3, the IT costs per employee start to come down. Then IT can start focusing on projects. As technology companies mature, PM and quantitative skills start to be more valuable. Reskilling happens more than dropping total head count. They are fighting fewer fires. IP people start to move from infrastructure skill sets to business analysis or Project Management roles.
Janet Day
Janet's firm has very strong business process management. They have binders and binders full of documentation of their business processes and projects. Project management include rigorous change management and measurement of return on investment. Her bailiwick is a little larger than a typical IT director's, and extends to such functions as facilities, know-how (KM), and copying.
The extensive documentation extends to people. Each IT staff person has a publicly exposed career development framework.
These rigorous processes have led to clear documented savings. One example she gave was an office move from one city to another in a foreign country. Where it might have required several IT staff to be present for a few weeks before, now they only had to be onsite for three days, because everything they needed to do was mapped out in advance. Another documented success was the implementation of time entry through mobile devices, which broke even after "29 days" where she was expecting it to do so after six months. ROI there included the 12 minutes (0.2 hours) each attorney had to spend to learn how to use the new system.
She is assisted in measuring ROI by her staff accountant. She also obtains sign-off for large project's proposed ROI from the finance chief.
Peter Bier
Peter ran a professional services firm in the technology space before coming to his current law firm. The IT organization had been focused 95-99% on operations / plumbing. He runs the project management office, which is a separate organization, as well as IT.
He is trying to work at role definitions. The wrong mentality is “I sit at my desk until I get a call.”
He sold the idea of having a chief architect as part of his interview process. He hired one to set up a good process, and develop longer-term vision for IT. His information architect looks at issues like data in more than one place and overlapping functionality. He wanted to make sure that all of the designs were being reviewed by one person. It was harder to sell the position to the rest of the IT team than to get the position approved. It’s a risk management issue for him.
They had data centers in each office, but are centralizing them. People information was scattered in 25 silos, may have been inaccurate in some of them.
They’ve split off some people into a project services team. Some IT staff will be more applications experts, some will become project experts. The project people develop the requirements first and then later get the high-powered tech people involved. People can’t all be involved in all the projects.
He has taken over the intake process on projects. He was able to start pushing back on projects that IT couldn’t do or that didn’t have business value. Some projects are clear & simple to do. It’s better to get out in front of what attorneys are asking for. They have some Microsoft project software. It manages intake, review, approvals, and status reporting after project is complete. They are progressing in IT, but the business side of the firm is moving a little slower.
He’s had to sell the concept that projects are a way of adding value to the organization. People take a long time to get this, and are used to working in the old reactive way.
He thinks that law firms are behind corporate America in incorporating architecture and project planning into their work.
All the managers and directors have been sold on project management skills, and took 5 2-to-3 hour project management classes (10-15 hours).
The Project Management Office is one person. Project Management is embedded in every project. Each “large” project has a dedicated project manager.
Brent Snow
The global Baker & McKenzie operations does an audit of each area every few years. They’ve centralized information management on a global basis. It has worked really well.
They are using Sharepoint to develop workflows. Staff intake and departure processes are both getting set up in Sharepoint.
He gave as a sample facilities project their server virtualization project that started in January 2007. (They moved from a level 2 to level 3 on the CMMI scale). They needed to scale up staff to support virtualization, and hired staff with experience in that process and invested up front in lots of training. It was hard to measure time-based ROI because the “virtual” servers are all mingled together on hardware. There were clearly saving financial benefits and attained a 10:1 server ratio, whatever that is.
Another benefit was 83% power savings. They develop data on carbon footprints, but Brent couldn't reveal how the calculations were made.
His office virtualized every server but those for Elite and DMS. They have virtualized their SQL databases.
Brent developed his own office's project management complete with dedicated project coordinators. Project sites set up in Sharepoint. Things are centralized in one place. They’ve sent all management staff to project management training. PM is getting pushed onto IT. One person oversees tracking of all projects, but the project coordinators are responsible for the projects.
This was an outstanding session, with real CIOs talking about real issues they faced and overcame. I called my firm's resident project manager into this session from another one, and he was quite happy that I did so, even though he only caught the last 40 minutes.
ILTA talk on Social Networking -- Boon or Boondoggle; Tuesday afternoon
Title and Session Link: Social Networking - Marketing Boon, Malpractice Nightmare or Simple Boondoggle?
Description:
The recruiting manager has created a firm FaceBook site. The marketing director is encouraging all the lawyers to join LinkedIn. The firm's general counsel is freaking out over the possible ethic violations and malpractice possibilities. The older lawyers simply aren't sure what to do. The younger lawyers are wondering what all the hoopla is about. We explore social and business networking, the potential problems and rewards and what you can do about it.
Speaker:
Jeffrey Brandt -(yes he's on LinkedIn), brande new CIO / CKO of Crowell & Moring LLP
His favorite definition of a social network tool was that it is simply a "phone book or directory."
Jeff tells a story of encouraging attorneys to join LinkedIn, then have the risk management people at a firm he worked at flip out. ILTA has a LinkedIn group, Jeff runs it. He has 918 connections, over 7,000,000 people "three degrees of separation" away from his connections. He only has 18 Friends in Facebook. "So I'm a geeky person with very few friends."
Only 5-6 people in the room were not in LinkedIn.
Jeff identified the leading social networks as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Second Life, MySpace, plaxo, jigsaw, Flickr, and YouTube.
Social Networking is Not Just for Kids
Facebook has 110,000,000+ users. It is the 4th most trafficked web site in the world. Several US law firms have facebook pages, but many employers block access to Facebook.
499 of Fortune 500 companies have director-level profiles and higher on LinkedIn.
Second Life and LinkedIn are Not Fads
SecondLife is a virtual world. You can drive cars, live in a house, buy things, and so forth. Sun Microsystems has world-wide meetings in SecondLife. The rule is, your "avatar" has to resemble a human being at the meeting. Intel held a seminar on software development on Second Life.
KMLegal magazine had an article about attorneys (solo practitioners) setting up virtual offices in SecondLife.
Policies
Less than 10% of firms have formal policy on employee participation in social networks. One audience member indicated the basic policy was to allow participation, but restrict it to personal use (no reference to clients). Another said no chat rooms.
Description:
The recruiting manager has created a firm FaceBook site. The marketing director is encouraging all the lawyers to join LinkedIn. The firm's general counsel is freaking out over the possible ethic violations and malpractice possibilities. The older lawyers simply aren't sure what to do. The younger lawyers are wondering what all the hoopla is about. We explore social and business networking, the potential problems and rewards and what you can do about it.
Speaker:
Jeffrey Brandt -(yes he's on LinkedIn), brande new CIO / CKO of Crowell & Moring LLP
The real theme of Jeff's talk was not that social networks are a boondoggle but that they are here to stay and that attorneys and law firms had better get used to it and adapt. While Jeff had some good information about some of the possible pitfalls of social networks for lawyers and law firms, and some good statistics about adoption of social networking, he never really answered the question, "Why do people do business social networking?" (The answer I think is that they provide a varied and complex way to share information about one's life, in a way that lets you keep connected with people and learn what "light connections" you might have with people you are already working with).
Despite that shortcoming, I very much appreciated Jeff's openness to comments and contributions from the audience, in the spirit of Web 2.0. Some of the content identified below was in fact contributed by various audience members. I'm sorry I can't give audience members specific credit as I don't know their names.His favorite definition of a social network tool was that it is simply a "phone book or directory."
Jeff tells a story of encouraging attorneys to join LinkedIn, then have the risk management people at a firm he worked at flip out. ILTA has a LinkedIn group, Jeff runs it. He has 918 connections, over 7,000,000 people "three degrees of separation" away from his connections. He only has 18 Friends in Facebook. "So I'm a geeky person with very few friends."
Only 5-6 people in the room were not in LinkedIn.
Jeff identified the leading social networks as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Second Life, MySpace, plaxo, jigsaw, Flickr, and YouTube.
Social Networking is Not Just for Kids
Facebook has 110,000,000+ users. It is the 4th most trafficked web site in the world. Several US law firms have facebook pages, but many employers block access to Facebook.
499 of Fortune 500 companies have director-level profiles and higher on LinkedIn.
Second Life and LinkedIn are Not Fads
SecondLife is a virtual world. You can drive cars, live in a house, buy things, and so forth. Sun Microsystems has world-wide meetings in SecondLife. The rule is, your "avatar" has to resemble a human being at the meeting. Intel held a seminar on software development on Second Life.
KMLegal magazine had an article about attorneys (solo practitioners) setting up virtual offices in SecondLife.
Policies
Less than 10% of firms have formal policy on employee participation in social networks. One audience member indicated the basic policy was to allow participation, but restrict it to personal use (no reference to clients). Another said no chat rooms.
A woman mentioned that her firm had tried to shut down access to social networking sites, but they found out that some attorneys were using the systems to get information about their clients on SecondLife and LinkedIn.
Attorney Profiles in Social Networking Sites
Reed Smith has 498 profiles; Jones Day & MoFo each have 520; Crowell & Moring has 249 profiles.
A person from Baker & McKenzie in the audience said that they had 780 in Facebook last year, and by this year it had doubled to 1580.
Legal OnRamp
This directory structured exclusively for attorneys includes an e-commerce component and a large amount of substantive legal content.
Marketing Benefits of LinkedIn and Social Networks
- Raise the personal profile of the lawyer.
- Raise the firm profile through raising the profile of its lawyers.
- Identify additional "who knows who."
- Good information update tool.
Martindale Hubble and Interaction are both hooking into LinkedIn.
Jeff did not get his current job through LinkedIn. But he has heard of changes to vendor representatives before the vendor CEO did, and has heard of people getting jobs through LinkedIn.
Jeff feels that involvement in social networking sites by firms qua firms may be driven by their recruiting needs.
Malpractice
Jeff half-jokingly claimed that the level of perceived risk can be seen by the length of the law firm's disclaimer. Some firms have very long disclaimers.
Client Relationship Creation
Can you inadvertently create a client relationship by linking or answering a question? I think that answering a question posed on LinkedIn in a way that addresses the particular factual situation of the questioner might well (and maybe even should) create an attorney-client relationship. One of the problematic features of LinkedIn and other social networking sites is that they are internet-based, and content never ages out or goes away on the internet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)