Knowledgeline

Observations from Computerworld's Premier 100 Conference

2010-04-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

It was quite a wake up call to attend a conference outside of legal and I was certainly woken up on several occasions at the Premier 100 conference put on by Computerworld Magazine. When you're in the same room with companies that have an IT budget that exceeds (gulp) 1 billion dollars, I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore. It was awkward to walk around and not know many people, but I did manage to find Melvin Evins (an ILTA member), the only other person from a law firm that won an award.

There were a ton of good sessions and while not all of them were always relevant to law firm IT or KM, I did take away some interesting concepts:

Ken Korless, Executive Director, Business Applications, from Accenture:
They espouse a fail cheap/fail often mentality. This is not to say they want failure on major projects, 'cheap' meaning that it be low in both cost and risk.

One of his right hand folks is actually tasked with having 10 failed ideas/projects a year. Again, these aren't failures on major projects, but smaller ideas. Their goal is that if they push the envelope and fail, through those efforts, they will hit a home run.

The acceptance of 'cheap' failure, they claim, helps drive innovation and creativity with the IT group at Accenture.

An example of a cheap idea that took off was a simple application they created based on an idea from within Google. Google has this tool that let's you see how many people were hired after you and then gives you a percentage, the higher the percentage the more people were hired after you. Because of the hiring pace at Google, people were interested in where they stood. Accenture IT thought this might be interesting as well, they built it within a very short window (less than a week) and didn't do much to advertise it internally. Within the first month, it was one of the most frequently accessed applications around the globe.

Bruce Michelson from HP: (view presentation)
IT standards should not be unilateral, but based on role. Investment in innovation (however they define innovation at HP) delivers a 30% ROI, while investment in infrastructure delivers an 8-10% ROI

Author and former CIO of EDS, Frito-Lay and Delta Airlines, Charley Feld (view presentation)

IT has advanced, but the common language between IT and management hasn't

Innovation can't happen in a 3 year cycle, you need to deliver it now

The CIO role should stand for Chief Integration Officer, with a focus on end-user intimacy and global leverage

Many IT organizations play not to lose, rather than playing to win.

Glenn Noga, CIO from Polycom:
A slight sales pitch as Polycom was one of the sponsors, but still a few interesting tidbits
They are delivering new technology that will cut the bandwidth needed for good video conferencing by 50%, down to 512k. Polycom feels that they've finally got to the point with this breakthrough that desktop video conferencing is ready and won't be as huge a network burden as it has been in the past.

Looking ahead, he mentioned delivering a better experience through the 'communication ecosystem', which includes suppliers, partners and customers. He talked about establishing direct gateways with key suppliers to facilitate desktop based video conferencing. Interesting to think about how we could do the same thing with key clients to further foster relationships.

Jim Fortner, Vice President Information Technology Development & Operations from Proctor & Gamble: (view presentation)

Over 4,000 people and a 1 billion dollar budget in their IT organization, which they DON'T call IT, they call it IDS (Information, Decisions, Solutions).

I like their focus on decisions. We serve up all types of data, but what decisions or actions can we better facilitate?

They spend a lot of effort taking reports that senior management get in excel or in a list view and creating 'cockpits' which are very visual dashboards. These cockpits help drive decisions based on the data presented in a much better, faster way then the excel spreadsheets management used to get before

General observations

Since the conference was centered on innovation, lot's of ideas on how to drive innovation from within the organization. There may be existing people that are innovative, but have yet to be tapped into for that purpose. One group started using the Kolbe index to help gauge and indentify personalities that might best suited to help drive innovation. Kind of interesting to think about using that not only for your existing folks, but also during the interview process of potential candidates.

Lot's of talk about the new generation coming into the workforce and what changes need to be made to accommodate how they work and leverage their strengths. Many companies talked about building out better internal social networking tools for use within the company. Think of an internal version of Facebook. Accunture and Deloitte both have very popular and widely used systems like this. Seems corporate america is a bit more concerned about accomodating younger talent than law firms generally tend to.

Slogging is the new black

2010-03-24T17:41:00.001-07:00

Well, like most good New Years resolutions, one that I've been slowly getting around to is trying to get a few more posts on here. While I've stated that I'm retired from blogging, you all saw through that as my excuse for not being more diligent in posting. It'll probably be more like slogging (slow blogging) . Not sure I'll ever get on Twitter, I doubt most of you care what I had for lunch today, what the weather is like here in LA (if you're unsure, it's a good guess that it's 75 and sunny), or what I did over the weekend. Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool, but I'll have a hard enough time getting a post up here with any kind of regularity.

Unlike the past, the posts you'll see from me won't go into great depths about what we're doing at the firm. Otherwise if I told you, I'd have to... well you get the idea. All kidding aside, I think we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift between what KM has been traditionally focused on and where we are headed. I'll save that rant for a separate post.

Mostly, it will be much more boring thoughts and observations about the legal industry and general thoughts about how KM ties into all of it. To the extent that I hitchhike my way to a conference, I'll try and report back on what's discussed, as I realize many of us have uber-tight travel budgets these days.

Okay, so it's been a while..

2008-09-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

It's a good thing I don't try and make a living as a blogger, my time between posts has been quite long - which is a good indicator of how busy we've been here. While every firm is grappling with the change in the economy, that certainly hasn't slowed us down with the projects we're undertaking at the firm. The two biggies this year for us are our rollout of FileSite and our intranet project.

You may have seen some press lately around our purchase of Recommind , ContactNetworks, and selecting XMLAW to help us with our intranet redesign effort. There's been a lot of discussion about our implementation of Microsoft CRM with the help of Client Profiles, which is being led by Victoria Gregory from our Marketing Department. She spoke at ILTA recently about the project. Having scars from my own CRM implementations, I'm confident that Victoria's approach to this rollout will lead us down a path of success.

Speaking of ILTA, our own Lisa Gianakos represented Reed Smith as we took home 1st place in the annual MCC design competition co-hosted by Baker Robbins and Interwoven. Our approach was quite different than some firms and we got excellent ideas from this year's GearUp conference, especially looking at what Faegre & Benson had done.

Powerful search changes the game dramatically. For those firms about to embark on an MCC project, your design should account for how people will organize/retrieve work product now that Interwoven has included the Vivisimo product with their core line-up. One partner at my last firm made the statement, "If I have good search, wouldn't I just need a folder for e-mail and one for documents?" While that may sound far fetched, it certainly got me thinking about the actual need for the granular level of folders we've seen in the past. In fact Justin North, of Janders Dean International, worked with Gilbert+Tobin to design their MCC implementation with something this simple in mind. While not a new trend, per se, I do think we're seeing more firms look at a clean, simple design.

Slow your roll on outsourcing?

2008-05-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

In an interesting twist, a Bethesda, MD firm has filed a suit in Federal court claiming that law firms who outsourcing their legal support services overseas could be jeopardizing their client confidentiality. This story was picked up by several news sources, including Law.com.

The main point of contention is that once the data leaves the US, the privacy privileges we enjoy go out the water and even claims the US Government might go out of its way to run surveillance on the data:

"It seeks this declaration knowing that foreign nationals who reside overseas lack Fourth Amendment protections," says the firm's complaint for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief. "It seeks this declaration having been informed ... that the United States government engages in pervasive surveillance of electronically transmitted data."

To add more fuel to the fire, the lawsuit names President George W. Bush as a co-defendant along with Acumen Legal Services of India and its U.S. subsidiary, Acumen Solutions of Houston, Texas.

I'm not an attorney, so I certainly don't have a legal opinion on this, but it certainly is something I hadn't considered before and is worth following.

Live from GearUp 2008

2008-04-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

So far this is been pretty informative. Guy Kawasaki kicked off the morning in the Keynote, if you've not heard Guy speak before, he's fantastic. Later in the morning there was a panel comprised of CIO/IT Directors from a range of firms, including Ashurt from the UK. No surprises, everyone was still very much challenged with how to manage e-mail. In a room with well over 100 people, only 3 hands went up when the moderator asked who had 75% or higher of adoption for e-mail filing. After lunch there were several breakout streams, I sat in the on the Business Strategy track where Neil Araujo and Rafiq Mohmmadi outlined the product roadmap for the next 12-18 months, including their discussions around version 9, code named 'Meritage'. Much like the fine wine that blends the best from many grapes, Interwoven's version 9 purports to be a totally new platform, leveraging a SAAS model, which they hope will allow them to extend their product line to smaller firms that have traditionally found the implementation a barrier to entry. The last session was conducted by Jerome Pesenti, Chief Scientist at Vivisimo, the makers of Interwoven's new enterprise class search product. In true scientific form, Jerome quickly went through a myriad of slides, it would have been nice to see a live demo, but I think the audience certainly is interested in seeing more.

Introducing the new Director of Knowledge Management at Reed Smith

2008-04-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all of you who either referred someone you knew, or applied for the position directly. We had a TON of interest in the position and there were many fine applicants.

I'm pleased to announce that Lisa Kellar has accepted our offer and will join Reed Smith in May. We are extremely lucky to be able to bring in someone of Lisa's caliber and experience.

Director of Knowledge Management opportunity

2008-02-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

For those interested, I am looking to bring in a right hand person to do "km stuff" :) Major initiatives this year include a MOSS rollout, Recommind installation, Interwoven/MCC deployment and a few other things I could tell you, but then I'd have to.. well you know how that goes. [UPDATE] A couple of points to address now, based on some of the questions I've gotten:

Although I'm based in LA, the preference is to have someone based in either Chicago, NY, DC, PHL, or PIT.
If you don't live in one of the cities where we have an office and are interested in the position, working from home or telecomuting aren't options. You'd need to be prepared to relocate.
If you're interested in the job, please e-mail your resume using the info below, don't email me directly as our HR folks have asked that everything go through them for tracking/reporting, etc. If you want me to know that you've applied, just cc me on the email.
The rollout of IWOV has already begun and both Recommind and MOSS are approved and FUNDED projects.
The is a Director level position and the compensation will be as such.

Here's a link to the job description, if you're interested e-mail your resume to jobs@reedsmith.com.

Cheers!

Tom

The Generational Divide..

2008-02-21T16:04:00.000-08:00

An interesting string started today on the ILTA listserves regarding the generational rift within IT Departments as reported in a recent CIO.com article. This falls in line with what we're seeing in all corporations, especially in law firms.

This also has an important impact on how technology is designed and how we go about training lawyers on technology. A great post by Doug Cornelius which discusses/defines the types of searches a lawyer conducts when looking for documents got me (abstractly) thinking more about this issue.

As we get more focused on the needs of lawyers in our design of systems, the knee jerk reaction is often to build to the needs of the Partners and rightfully so. They are the ones that ultimately employ us and bring money in the door. On the flip side, there's the possibility that you are building systems based on the wrong user group, if for nothing else, because many partners won't bother using the technology - regardless of how great and user friendly it is. You often hear the term "building to the lowest common denominator", which is a nice way of saying that we'll build something so even our least tech-savvy lawyer can use it. But, is that the right approach? Will your least tech-savvy lawyer even bother trying out what ever system you have built and if so, what percentage of your lawyer population actually falls in that category? Furthermore, how much longer will that crop of lawyers be at the firm? Conversely, tailoring your systems to the needs of young, tech-savvy, Associates might also be a CLM (Career Limiting Move).

Going back to Doug's post and thinking about some of the comments by my good friend Beau Mersereau, perhaps you do both and build systems around "where they live". When you build document retrieval systems, you focus on the needs of the Associates, as they are the ones most likely to use a system like that. Partner's aren't usually taking a first cut at a MSJ (motion for summary judgment), or being asked to dig up a buyer-friendly asset purchase agreement, it's the Associates. On the flip side, when looking at implementing a portal, or Outlook integration, Partners have a greater need to aggregate information from various locations than Associates do.

Then you start looking at how we traditionally train lawyers. I'm still mystified at all the rollouts that rely on classroom training for lawyers. I guess we're all still stuck in the late 90's, when we could get lawyers to show up for classroom training for the WP to Word/DOS to Windows training. Ah, the days of watching people play Solitaire for hours on end while they "learned" to use a mouse.. That went out around the same time Pearl Jam stopped being popular, but we (much like Eddie Vedder) are holding hope that there are glory days still ahead of us.

Partners don't have the time (or desire) to spend an hour learning the latest and greatest tool being rolled out and the misnomer that food will bring them in is also a joke. These guys make plenty of money, they can afford to pay for their own Quiznos sandwich. Associates are equally pressed for time and many of them feel that they can usually pick up whatever new software you put in front of them within minutes. Unlike their senior counterparts, they were practically born with a keyboard in their hand and dismiss the notion that they need training on most anything.

This requires a shift in the way you deliver training to lawyers. This isn't to say that you stop all forms of classroom training, it's still a valuable tool - especially for staff. But, you can't rely on it as your only means of training the lawyers. Take the 1hr session and boil it down to what you can deliver in 10-15 minutes, usually the most relevant 5-10 features/functions that are critical for the lawyers to know. Walk the floors and make personal visits to every attorney armed with "Do you have 10 minutes for me to show you a new tool that might make your day a little easier?" Now, you're doing on their terms, in the comfort of their office and doing it in a timeframe that they'll accept. While this approach requires more people, time and effort, it's a sure fire way to optimize the acceptance and adoption of new tools.

Anyone know people that would be interested in our new Firmwide Director of Records position?

2008-02-21T16:01:00.001-08:00

While this is in poor form, it's my blog and I can do what I please.. I guess :)

In any event, this is a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor and be able to implement a new records system (Interwoven) along with new policies and procedures. We're also looking to go paperless, it's a very exciting opportunity for the right person. The person can be based in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh or DC. For more information look at the link below:

http://www.reedsmith.com/careers/job_search.cfm?cit_id=18688&faArea1=customWidgets.content_view_1&usecache=false

Meet the new CKO at Reed Smith...

2008-01-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

First and foremost I hope that everyone had a safe and fun Holiday season. For those of you that hadn't heard yet, I accepted the Chief Knowledge Officer position at Reed Smith effective January 7th. I've been in Pittsburgh this week to meet everyone here, it's been fantastic so far - everything I expected and more. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Sheppard Mullin and have fond memories, but I am really excited to begin working on all the various projects here at Reed Smith.

I'll still be 'based' in Los Angeles, which is where I'll be getting mail and having dust collect in my office, I'll likely spend more time in the Friendly Skies on United for the next few months, so I'm not sure how much I'll be writing here. For those that will be attending LegalTech NY this year, I look forward to seeing you.

Law.com article from Mark Gerow on implementing large-scale extranets with SharePoint

2007-11-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

Fenwick & West have long been on the SharePoint bandwagon and Fenwick's Mark Gerow has litterally written the book on SharePoint on extranets for a law firm. In this article, he covers the technical issues and the human element of building and rolling out an extranet with SharePoint:

"In this article I'll discuss how Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (SharePoint) has been used at Fenwick & West to meet the challenge of making extranets available for each and every matter opened. I'll also cover the key issues that must be addressed in order to scale to thousands of extranets and terabytes of data. At the conclusion of this article you'll have a better idea of what can be accomplished with SharePoint at your firm, as well as a road map to get you started. "

This is a great article for anyone interested in SharePoint, especially those thinking of using it as an extranet.

Sheppard Mullin case study gets a 'top 17' nod from Microsoft

2007-11-19T09:32:00.000-08:00

What do BMW, MTV, Enterprise Rent A Car, Mary Kay Cosmectics and Sheppard Mullin all have in common? We're all listed on the official blog for Microsoft's SharePoint Product Group as having top case studies for MOSS. While it's nice that our case study is part of this group, it's actually really interesting to take a quick peek at the other case studies. We can learn a lot from folks outside of legal.

Those of you looking to automate new hire intake will find MTVs case study of particular interest. They focused heavily on addressing many of the shortcomings for new hire intake and have found significant time and cost savings.

New site on the KM scene

2007-11-08T16:17:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, something comes along that is compelling to spend time with. Today I received an e-mail from Matthew Parsons with a link to his new site(co-authored by Neil Richards), Knowledge Thoughts. I'm hard pressed to classify it as a blog or a wiki, I suppose it really a bliki - combining elements of both. Here's Matthew's description of the site:

"Today Neil Richards and I are delighted to launch Knowledgethoughts.com, an open source resource for the KM and legal KM communities. This is a personal, collaborative learning effort, and is not associated with any organisation." more..

In my initial scan of the site, it's already rich with a variety of content for those seasoned vets in the KM space, or those just starting out and wanting to learn more. There's a wiki section with some terms classified such as CKO and PSL, along with selling points for those looking to add these roles to their firms. There's a section with a ton of rich media content, aimed at helping explain KM. Much of this comes from outside legal, which is a great thing. A section bound to be on everyone's "to be seen" list is their leading people and thinkers page. If you're looking for ideas to kick-start your knowledge management initiatives, there's even a thought starters section.

I'm going to need to sit down and dedicate some serious time to this site, there's too much to just quickly glance through.

Recap from the Legal Technology Exchange

2007-11-07T11:26:00.000-08:00

This was a great event, as it blended leading C-level folks from law firms as well as leaders from many major in-house legal departments. The speakers represented a great cross-section of in-house counsel and law firms. For me, it's always helpful to be reminded of the pain points our clients are feeling and try to identify ways we can help.

One of the main themes was the continuing pressure in-house counsel face to reduce legal costs. This is squarely in opposition to the constant rate increases many firms are pushing on their clients. You know corporations are serious about cost-cutting when companies like Citigroup have someone with the title of "Director Legal Expense Control". The salary of first year associates was brought up routinely. If we think it's an issue within law firms, it's even more of a problem for our clients. They view the rate increases solely as a mechanism to help absorb these associate salary increases, while maintaining what I like to call a law firm's "stock price"- profits per partner. Think your firm is different and really listens to its clients' needs? Check out this article from Bruce MacEwen's blog - there's a huge disconnect between how our clients perceive us and how law firms view themselves as it relates to outside counsel satisfaction. One more piece of evidence to demonstrate the disconnect is found in the InsideCounsel Magazine's 18th annual survey. Clearly there is room for firms to proactively go to their clients with ideas on how to reduce legal expenses:

Offshoring and outsourcing of low-level legal work (like first-cut document review) has been the fashionable thing to talk about lately, but when talking to folks at legal departments, they didn't seem all that interesting in their law firms doing it - at least some of them. Much of a company's comfort level with off-shoring legal work seems to be directly linked to the company's own use of off-shoring for other functions. So, before you go down this path with a client, find out if the company currently does any off-shoring, you might save yourself some grief as there were several companies in the room that would take serious offense to it.

However, I think there are opportunities to help clients reduce litigation costs in the document review area. McDermott fired the first salvo recently, by creating a new tier of associates. Think of them as permanent contract associates -- to handle lower-end tasks at lower billing rates. I was also told during the week that there is a surplus of lawyers in cities like Detroit and Charlotte, as a result you can get contract lawyers in those cities at rates not much higher than that of Indian off-shoring companies. I heard of one firm that setup an office in Charlotte simply to conduct document review, taking advantage of this talent surplus.

The takeaway for me was, and has been for a while, that we need to truly listen to our clients needs and pain points and take real actions to help them.

New Sedona Conference comments lend credence to new search tools

2007-09-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness there are lawyers out there willing and able to cull down commentary from the Sedona Conference into bite-sized morsels we can all consume. In this case, Ralph Losey has done a great job on his blog in summarizing the most recent commentary from the Sedona Conference, published in August of 2007.

What's interesting is direct verbiage from the Sedona Search Team almost admonishing the reliance on simple keyword search technology for the review of ESI:

. . . the experience of many litigators is that simple keyword searching alone is inadequate in at least some discovery contexts. This is because simple keyword searches end up being both over- and under-inclusive in light of the inherent malleability and ambiguity of spoken and written English (as well as all other languages). . . .

The problem of the relative percentage of “false positive” hits or noise in the data is potentially huge, amounting in some cases to huge numbers of files which must be searched to find responsive documents. On the other hand, keyword searches have the potential to miss documents that contain a word that has the same meaning as the term used in the query, but is not specified. . . .

Finally, using keywords alone results in a return set of potentially responsive documents that are not weighted and ranked based upon their potential importance or relevance. In other words, each document is considered to have an equal probability of being responsive upon further manual review.

But the Sedona Search Commentary does not end on a negative note; instead it discusses new search technologies that will significantly improve upon the dismal recall and precision ratios of keyword searches:

Alternative search tools are available to supplement simple keyword searching and Boolean search techniques. These include using fuzzy logic to capture variations on words; using conceptual searching, which makes use of taxonomies and ontologies assembled by linguists; and using other machine learning and text mining tools that employ mathematical probabilities..

The last tidbit Ralph brings to our attention is a call to action from the Team:

The legal community should support collaborative research with the scientific and academic sectors aimed at establishing the efficacy of a range of automated search and information retrieval methods.

Looking at these comments, albeit in a vacuum, it's astonishing to see such a clear line in the sand drawn by the Team. Clearly, reliance on simple keyword such isn't going to cut it for much longer. Vendors like Recommind, Engenium, Sygence, Content Analyst and the like will be drooling once word of this gets to them.

There's a lot more on Ralph's blog about this and he writes much better than I do, so I encourage you to read the post in it's entirety.

Australian Law Tech Summit - Recap

2007-09-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

On my recent visit to Australia, I spoke at the 2nd Annual Law Tech Summit in Noosa, Australia. Put on by the fine team at Chilli Marketing Solutions, it was a very well organized event, with a lot of great content. The highlights for me, were the keynote given by Richard Susskind who's concepts and theories have heavily influenced how I view IT within legal, and Peter Williams, a Partner at Deliotte and CEO of their web and software development business, Ecplise. I found Peter's views on how to rapidly experiment and implement technology very refreshing, as we often get too bogged down in the minutia of a project to actually get it off the ground.

I learned a lot about the legal market, the economic climate and the 'proper' way to pronounce such words as aluminum and tomato, as well as certain acceptable words in the States that are off limits in Australia :)

"Brain drain" was a phrase used often at the conference. The country is experiencing a flight of talent, mostly to the UK. While wages appear to be decent for most tech-related jobs, the cost of living is very high (a Volkswagen Passat costs around $40k and a Snickers bar at a convenience store was $2.00 - food was particularly expensive) and as a result many of Australia's brightest young minds are taking their talent overseas.

More and more legal work is coming from all the growth from China. With construction comes a lot of legal work, especially litigation. One consultant, Justin North, suggests that the next large merger will not be "vertical" (NY-London), but "horizontal" (China-Australia), because of the synergies between these two countries and their respective economies.

Over the years, I found that there are a handful of highly innovative firms in Australia, such as Mallesons who have taken the Recommind product to new levels with their Decisiv e-mail management tool. While there are firms in Australia that are arguably more advanced in their use of technology than any firm here in the States, it seemed that firms are generally a bit behind what we are doing here as an industry. Many of the conversations were on topics we were dealing with 3-5 years ago.

There are also many thought leaders from Australia, both within law firms and on the vendor side. Justin North, who recently left Baker Robbins/Thomson to start his own consulting company (Janders Dean), is among those leading the charge on the innovation front - not only in Australia, but across the globe. Most recently, he's been working with a few of the largest firms on the planet on the selection and implementation of enterprise search.

All in all, it was a very interesting conference, well run, with a good mix of content and opportunities for networking. Anyone in Australia should consider their next event in 2008.

Blogging at ILTA's conference

2007-08-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

While I had a few posts from the ILTA conference, some seemed to be surgically attached to their PC while in sessions. It's amazing to see the amount of information spewing out from bloggers like David Hobbie, Doug Cornelius, and Monica Bay. I think folks providing near real-time posts are great for the industry. Daily headlines from Sean Doherty also let those not able to attend get some of the major highlights of the conference. Keep up the good work!

Enterprise Search, uncovered and revealed

2007-08-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

John Alber's recent article titled, "Search at the Foundation of the Enterprise", does a really nice job of explaining the business issues solved by enterprise search and goes on to discuss, in depth, the various types of underlying search technology used today. It's in plain English, so even I can understand it. John was nice enough to include pictures and charts to help explain set-theoretic models, algebraic models, and probabilistic models. Understanding these principles helps provide the basis for which John explores the pros and cons of search products like Autonomy, SharePoint and Recommind (which is what his firm uses). He finishes the article talking about how enterprise search technology can be best utilized within a law firm and a few plugs for Recommind :) A great primer for those embarking on enterprise search technology.

Live from ILTA

2007-08-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

So far, things are pretty interesting. KM tracks yesterday were well attended, so perhaps there is hope for KM, despite my earlier post ;)

Today the buzz is about OpenText's announcement around their SharePoint strategy. I was not in the session, as my firm is an Interwoven shop, but here is what I heard from others that attended:

There will be the option to have SharePoint become the main store for documents
OpenText is looking to extent beyond DM to more full blown matter/document lifecycle management, using Sharepoint to accomplish this.

The feedback around the show is mixed. Some are very excited by the news, while others wonder what this means in terms of their investment in OpenText's current product architecture.

Both DM vendors seem to be scrambling to respond to the product offering from StarLaw, which purports to have a more comprehensive solution for document lifecycle management (DM, RM, etc.), or as they put it an "intelligent Enterprise Information Management system".

Is KM Dead?

2007-08-17T14:39:00.001-07:00

That seems to be the question on the minds of many these days. Or more softly put, how do CKOs ( or other KM types) fit into a world with strategically minded CIOs and other IT folks. Technology has also gained a solid footing in the KM space and while there is debate as to how far technology can be taken to replace people (especially in PSL roles) it's certainly established itself as an important tool. I'm speaking at the Law Tech Summit in Australia this September and the Ark Group KM Conference in Chicago in October, and in both cases these concepts have been thrown around a lot. While I won't address this topic at length here, I do have some starting points.

While there are certainly both operational and strategic elements to what IT and KM do, there are different types of opportunities for each group. This idea was illuminated recently on a call with my friend (and idol) John Alber at Bryan Cave, one of the more innovative folks in the business. Furthermore, we might stop calling it KM and start calling it something else. All one needs to do is look at the titles of people performing relative degrees of KM duties these days:

Director of Practice Innovation
Director, Consultant Services/Client Advocacy
Director of Professional Services
Director of Practice Management
Director Professional Development
Director, Legal Business Systems
Director of Practice Systems
Director of Practice Support
Chief, Practice Systems & Services
Director, Legal Information Systems

Notice something missing from these titles? How about the word 'knowledge'? Personally I like the Director of Practice Innovation the best, very fitting. If someone were really bold, Director of Practice Enhancement might also be apropos, although it could lead to some interesting dialog with Partners who might not feel their practice needs 'enhancement'.

In any event, I look forward to seeing everyone at ILTA next week and stay tuned as we talk about this topic more in the months to come.

Microsoft worfklow gaining momentum

2007-06-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

In a recent roundtable, sponsored by e-Sentio, the topic was mainly focused on workflow. While some of the firms were looking at a few different solutions, many were looking at (or already building) workflow using Microsoft's suite of Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) and SharePoint 2007.

The popularity of SharePoint 2007 has exceeded even Microsoft's expectations and related technologies are coming along for the ride, with workflow being one of them. Cost, flexibility and the development environment seem to be the main factors for firms looking to leverage their SharePoint investment by building workflow. I've attached the PowerPoints slides from e-Sentio's presentation (with Nestor's blessing) and also attached an article I wrote highlighting some of the issues surrounding workflow development and the merits of Microsoft workflow.

I think that there are many opportunities to gain a competitive edge with workflow, as clearly illustrated in the number of workflow options spelled out in both e-Sentio's presentation and the article. There are also some unique challenges to be aware of in developing workflow and most of them are not technical, if you get my drift.

Free MOSS wild card search add-on

2007-05-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

For many, wild-card searching is a huge gap in the MOSS enterprise search product. Those of you that own the SPxConnect Enterprise Search product from XMLAW get the entire Ontolica suite, which is wrapped into their product. If you just want wild-card searching, Ontolica is now offering their wildcard add-on for free, I suppose a teaser of sorts to get you to buy their entire product line.

http://www.ontolica.com/Download/Request%20Product.aspx?prod=onwi&buy=0

Sucession planning and the war for talent

2007-05-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Dr. Larry Richard, who heads up the Leadership and Development practice group for Hildebrandt recently spoke at my firm's Partner Retreat, where he opined on a number of points.

One of the more interesting dilemmas facing law firms is succession planning for all the baby-boomer partners heading towards retirement. In his presentation, 'The Talent Challenge: Lessons on Lawyers and Leaders', Dr. Richard states that the 80 million boomers in our population represent 70% of law firm Partners and are starting to retire. The next generation, GenX only represents 40 million of the population and the group farthest from Partnership, GenY, has a whopping 80 million. Bottom line is that the bulk of partnerships at large law firms across the country will be retiring soon. I'm not sure how many firms really have a good grasp on how to transition the knowledge, but more importantly, the relationships and books of business these partners have.

It's also an intriguing study when looking at the various generations with in a law firm today and the generational differences. Dr. Richard was kind enough to let me post one of the slides from his presentation, which does a great job of succinctly outlining the 4 generations and their traits.

What's most interesting is the transition that has taken place in the perception of lawyers entering a law firm in their first year. The Traditionalists and many Boomers entered the legal profession with the mindset that the first law firm they work for will be their last - lifers. Gen Yers will likely have anywhere from 5-8 career changes and many leave law school with no intention of practicing law. They won't sacrifice their personal life for the sake of their career, a heretical concept to many Traditionalists and Boomers. The current vintage of young associates is a far cry from the ones currently leading most firms, which makes it all the more difficult for them to relate and properly motivate them. Given the growth of most large firms and the relative flat line of law school graduation rates, it's a sellers market for law schools grads and younger associates. Another great quote from Dr. Richard's presentation, summing up the war for talent, comes from Robert Sheehan of Skadden, Arps - New York, "It's a sobering thought that all of my assets go down in the elevator every night, and I can only hope that they come back up the next morning."

Faceted Search Is Coming for SharePoint 2007

2007-03-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

Many folks have asked about 'faceted' search, which simply put allows for easier filtering of results. While our full-text search of WorkSite content is still getting used almost 900 times per day, our lawyers have been asking for this feature, which is still in beta for us, but coming soon.

What you'll notice about this live screen shot (see items in RED) is that the search engine is still presenting results from our 3 million documents in WorkSite in tenths of seconds and the faceting is working as advertised. Much of the content was redacted out, but you can get the gist of how it works. This capability has been made possible with the help of XMLAW and is not standard, out of the box, functionality with SharePoint 2007.

Morgan Stanley Verdict Overturned...

2007-03-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

On a topic other than SharePoint...

It appears that the $1.58 billion verdict was overturned because of the plaintiff's inability to prove damages, despite the fact that the judge precluded any defense on liability. It likely won't affect the underlying e-discovery issues, but it's interesting that this was overturned after all the hoopla surrounding it.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,260172,00.html

Sheppard Mullin SharePoint Case Study

2007-03-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to the case study on Microsoft's site, which was just published today. If you'd like to download a cleaner version of this in Word, click here.

I hope everyone enjoys their weekend and has a pint or two of green beer :)

Tom

2007 InnovAction Award

2007-02-02T12:06:00.000-08:00

Looking to add more hardware to your trophy room? The InnovAction Awards is a worldwide search for lawyers, law firms, and other deliverers of legal services who are currently engaged in some extraordinary innovative efforts. The goal is to demonstrate to the legal community what can be created when passionate professionals, with big ideas and strong convictions, are determined to make a difference. Each year, the College of Law Practice Management presents the coveted InnovAction Awards to those unsung heroes and rising stars within the legal profession who dare to think differently and succeed by doing so.

For more information, go to their website.

Live on SharePoint 2007! Recap and Leasons Learned....

2007-01-22T16:10:00.000-08:00

Well, our portal was officially switched over last Tuesday, January 16th, 2007. We spent last week doing office-by-office roadshows, giving demos to both staff and lawyers. Because of how we designed the site, it was important to break out the training sessions and we used 'volunteers' from the audience to log in with their account so people could see first hand how the system would look to them.

The feedback has been overwhelming. Our targeting of webparts, quick access to financial data and WorkSite document search features are scoring big points with our users. Since going live, we are AVERAGING over 1,000 document searches per day. We wouldn't be maintaining that level of use unless it worked :) Stuff that we had in our old portal is now looked at as 'new' features because they're actually easy to find!

Since going live, we have learned a few things. First, those of you on previous versions of SharePoint should proceed with caution if you're converting over webparts that worked in '03, looking to buy webparts from vendors converting their webparts from '03, or any freeware webparts. We were running webparts from '03 for MONTHS on our SharePoint 2007 environment with any issues and only found problems as the load begin to reach critical mass. So, don't be fooled into thinking that just because you didn't get an error right from the start that your webparts are safe.

Make sure to properly “dispose” of SharePoint objects when programmatically accessing the API to avoid excessive memory consumption and performance/stability problems.(see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms778813.aspx)
Make liberal use of caching in memory, particularly of objects resulting from CPU or memory intensive processes, such as XSL transformations or disk access, but must also be mindful of caching or session state across processes (in a “web garden”) or across servers (in “web server farm”).(see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313997/)
Load test and look for memory leaks or process hogs *before* going live to identity potential problem areas. For example, a bug in the .NET Framework was causing a memory leak in XSL transformations that used inline script, which in turn was crashing the IIS worker processes and stopping the server. After a simple rewrite of these XSL transformations, memory usage returned to normal and stabilized the server.(see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316775/EN-US/)

The feedback from our users has been awesome and the folks from XMLAW were instrumental in our success. I hope that all of you doing SharePoint 2007 deployments are as fortunate/lucky as we've been :)

See the Sheppard Mullin SharePoint 2007 portal live!

2007-01-05T16:27:00.000-08:00

On January 18th, ILTA will be sponsoring a webinar in which we will be demonstrating our SharePoint 2007 portal, featuring XMLAW. Non-ILTA members are also welcome to join, the connection fee is very reasonable.

To listen to the recording of this webinar, click here. You should just have to enter your name and then click View Recording (the key isn't required).

Enterprise Search at Mofo - AnswerBase

2006-12-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the generous contribution of Oz Benamram, we've been given some insight into their amazing tool at Mofo, AnswerBase. Built on the Recommind search engine, AnswerBase is the most comprehensive search tool built by a law firm (at least as far as I'm concerned). It aims to make it easy to find and drill down on anything relevant to a user's search term. It goes beyond searching the full-text of documents, finding related documents by industry, experts on the particular legal topics involved, etc. Click here to download the viewlet which gives a nice overview of the tool.

I'm shooting for "Oz-light" with our SharePoint enterprise search initiative, wish us luck!

SharePoint 2007 Enterprise Search: Screenshots

2006-12-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

We're very close to launching our new portal, but to give our users a sense of what it will look like and to test performance, we launched a separate 'search site' on Tuesday. This site doesn't have any of the core portal navigation, it's a simple search page for searching our collection of documents in WorkSite (using xmlaw's stuff for indexing WorkSite). There were over 1,100 searches run during the first two days and the built-in reporting for tracking and monitoring searches is actually not bad.

I was asked to show some screenshots of our 'search site'. As you'll notice, there isn't a left navigation menu and the Practice, Department, Office and Team horizontal navigation links that are available on our main portal don't show up either. The drop down list is pretty straight forward to select what criteria you want to search.

Here you'll see the search results page (I had to redact out a few things). Notice that over 1 million documents came back in the result set, in UNDER 1 SECOND. Using the xmlaw toolkit, we're able to index and display profile data from our DMS and the search term used is shown in the document abstract. So far, we are getting amazing feedback from the lawyers and staff:

"WOW! JUST DID A COUPLE OF SEARCHES - VERY, VERY IMPRESSIVE"
"It is like having our own personal Google! Worked great, document opened directly from the link."
"Wow - that's FAST. I just put in "bulletin" and got 8,448 hits in .33 seconds...I couldn't believe it!"
"it's really quite an improvement."
"Wow. This is amazing! I just ran a search for a very common name here in the office and got 6,656 results in 0.31 seconds!"
"After a couple of quick sample entries, all I can say is -- HUGE improvement! I typed in a word or short phrase and actually got a series of pertinent topics -- fast!"
"Search on Steroids - Magnificent!"

Lawyers constantly complain about the built-in search within DM systems. This is a quick win and something worth looking into if you want to ease your way into using SharePoint. I can foresee the MOSS enterprise search giving Recommind a run for its money.

SharePoint 2007 Update - Enterprise Search Rocks!!

2006-11-14T09:43:00.000-08:00

So, we are now less than a month away from going live on our SharePoint 2007 portal. Practice, Office, Admin Department, Client, Matter and personalized home pages are almost finished. We are using audiences and content targeting to deliver webparts and data on everyone's home page. We have ported over the CMS.Net reporting, so we have a decent amount of financial reports available and our firm directory is coming along nicely. Our content administrators are getting trained to start publishing content to their respective pages (we have content admins for virtually every page on the site) and our beta group is gearing up for testing within a week or two.

You've likely seen my previous posts on Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), which has been a huge boon for us, now let me introduce you to the next new feature of SharePoint 2007 which I think is reason enough to make the switch, the new Enterprise Search engine.

Previously, the enterprise search in SharePoint had some limitations as far as how much data it would handle (scalability) and how well it actually found the stuff you searched for (relevance). Microsoft addressed this issue in spades with the 2007 release, so much so, that they are actually breaking out search as its own SKU in the event an organization hasn't already licensed SharePoint and would like to buy it separately.

With the help of XMLAW's web part for Enterprise Search within WorkSite, we pointed the SharePoint 2007 Enterprise Search engine at our DMS and let it rip. With almost 3 million documents firmwide, it didn't happen overnight, but soon we had access to all our documents via the search engine. Most search results come back in under 1 second, with more complex searches taking less than 3 seconds. We can also search WorkSite profile data, the search terms are highlighted in the search results and relevancy has been fantastic. Initial testing by our lawyers has produced rave reviews and we're actually rolling out a 'search site' with access to just the DMS prior to our firmwide portal release. This will help introduce the portal in an easy way and begin providing the lawyers a feature they have been longing for, fast searching on the DM.

The Enterprise Search engine with SharePoint 2007 can do lot's more than just search documents in your DMS. Using the BDC (Business Data Catalog), we're able to point this search engine at any database we want to. So, for example, if a lawyer wants to know how much time has been entered by x lawyers, to y client over z time frame, we can give them interface into this via SharePoint. While not as feature rich out of the box as something like Recommind or Autonomy, it can likely do 70%-80% of what those systems can offer at a fraction of the cost. So, for those of you looking to make an investment in an enterprise search tool in 2007, you should really take a long look at SharePoint Enterprise Search before moving on to other high priced options in the marketplace.

Live from the Chicago Ark Group KM Conference

2006-10-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

Among other sessions, I will quickly blog about a panel currently going on, being moderated by Ron Friedmann with partners from Goldberg Kohn, Kelley Drye and Burns & Levinson. While the last two days have been focused on presentations by KM folks, this an interesting panel bringing to light the opinions of lawyers about KM topics and if it's really as relevent as WE think it is..

Does KM matter seems to be the overarching question. The lawyers agree that there is important in concept, but there isn't any agreement upon what it really means to them, which shouldn't be a shock.

How to coax lawyers to contribute or adhere to KM systems/policies was discussed with approaches that might work in small groups, don't might not scale well across the entire firm.

There's some debate about the value of finding documents fast, one partner noted, "our clients don't pay us to find documents more quickly" in response an audience member said "but they won't pay you to retrieve and produce documents more slowly" touche!

Lexis Nexis Announces atVantage, while Thomson Acquires LiveNote

2006-10-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

I was recently invited to an 'Advisory Council' meeting by Lexis to discuss their future plans with InterAction and how to better leverage content within it. This meeting was on the heels of their announcement regarding atVantage, a new iteration of Market Intelligence.

Lexis has begun to realize the power of pushing content into InterAction and atVantage is the first attempt to do just that. They briefly showed us some screen shots of the new system and spent a lot of time getting feedback from the group as to the direction they should take with the product. I was encouraged that it truly wasn't a sales pitch, they really wanted to hear how they could better meet the needs of large law firms. The main take away from the session was that there is a lot of data that lawyers need to see related to a contact. Some data is generated by the firm and some sits externally, Lexis needs to figure out how to aggregate the data and present it in an easily consumable format for the lawyers. It may take a while, but it appears that Lexis is on its way towards a better, more information rich InterAction product.

Meanwhile....

Thomson announced last week that they have acquired LiveNote. I truly marvel at the Big 2's appetite for buying companies and then figuring out how to make it work in their product structure. Given that Lexis has the Applied Discovery offering, it shouldn't be long before Thomson/West look to also acquire a company that provide an online review tool for e-discovery.

Applied Discovery Fires Back at Law.com EDD Article

2006-08-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I received an e-mail from Miranda Glass at Applied Discovery, attempting to present their side of the story published in the August 10, 2006 online issue of Law.com titled, "Software Glitch May Have Erased E-Mail Text in Enron Suits.", which was also quickly found and distributed by Monica Bay.

Here's the e-mail:

On Friday, August 10th, Law.com published an article that, without some clarification, we believe has the potential to unnecessarily scare anyone who works on electronic discovery matters, regardless of whether using in-house solutions or any outside service provider. In case you were one of those who may have been alarmed by the article, we wanted to share with you the Letter to the Editor Applied Discovery submitted to Law.com in response.

August 11, 2006

Dear Editor: We would like to address a number of factual errors contained in an article published in the August 10, 2006 online issue of Law.com titled, "Software Glitch May Have Erased E-Mail Text in Enron Suits."

This story alleges that "a software bug may have erased text in emails produced for electronic document production being handled by Applied Discovery in the Enron civil suit." In fact, the Microsoft Outlook 2003 bug in question does not erase anything. The bug causes Outlook 2000 emails to appear blank on computers without a patch that Microsoft issued as part of its Office 2003 Service Pack 2 in September 2005. This bug affected what appears to be less than one-tenth of one percent of email documents.

To set the record straight:

No data was lost as a result of this bug. It did not erase anything but simply caused the text of emails to not be displayed. The data is present and can be viewed by applying Microsoft's patch to address the error.
In the Outlook 2000 emails affected by this bug, the To, From, Subject fields and attachments are 100 percent viewable.
Less than .01 percent of the email documents involved were affected and 99.99 percent of all email materials were correctly identified and fully disclosed in the discovery process. No other materials appear to be affected by this bug.
Applied Discovery does not use Microsoft Outlook to search email. Rather, Outlook is used to help display emails.

Applied Discovery has been working closely with Microsoft throughout this situation to address the needs and concerns of our clients and maintain the sanctity of our e-Discovery process. Microsoft has expressed confidence that this Outlook issue has been fully resolved. We encourage clients with lingering questions to contact us.

4th Socha Gelbman EDD Report Published

2006-08-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

Law Technology News recently published a brief synopsis of the annually anticipated EDD survey findings from George Socha & Thomas Gelbman.

Many of the industry's household names were consistently ranked in the top 5 of various categories, along with some new players. I found it interesting that the market will continue to enjoy double digit growth, but they do forecast a slight decline in growth in the coming years. It was also interesting to note that "do-it-yourself" firms and legal departments accounted for over 90 million.

The survey, and results, in its entirety can be purchases for $5,000. Go here for more details.

More merger talk as Hummingbird mulls Open-Text bid...

2006-07-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

I read this article today on Law.com and was a bit surprised that the Symphony bid didn't go through already. For a change of pace, at least it's not West or Lexis trying to acquire Hummingbird :)

LexisNexis acquires Dataflight including its flagship solution, Concordance

2006-07-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

I just received word from our Lexis rep today that they are acquiring Dataflight, the makers of Concordance. This is the latest, in a string, of acquisitions by Lexis to provide total practice management solutions to the legal community. I'm still not convinced that the legal market is better or worse off by the acquisitions of Lexis and West. Take for example InterAction, which was purchased by Lexis. They've had the product now for over a year and still haven't gotten their 'content enabled' CRM system, which purports to integrate InterAction with content from the Lexis 'Company Dossier' product, off the ground. Then look at Prolaw's docketing application, which was purchased by West. We're now told that they are throttling back support of this program (docketing, not the entire Prolaw package), leaving Compulaw with little competition.

The marketplace does not thrive without a bit of competition, and in my humble opinion, the acquisitions taking place aren't helping drive innovation, simply limiting our choices. Perhaps Lexis will somehow be able to leverage their Applied Discovery unit for the greater good of Concordance clients? I guess we'll all have to stand by and see what happens.

SharePoint 2007 is full of surprises – let's talk workflow!

2006-06-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

I will be periodically blogging about our firm's venture with SharePoint 2007 (SP07). Our initial interest was to use this in replacement of our current intranet/portal, LawPort, but as we've begun to explore its capabilities further, there are some truly hidden gems in SP07.

We've had a workflow solution collecting dust for a while and we (like many firms) have significant need for an automated way to address a number of workflow related issues. Historically, getting a BPM system up and running has been a Herculean effort, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and required highly specialized development talent.

SP07 comes with WWF (not to be confused with the old World Wrestling Federation), which stands for Windows Workflow Foundation. Before we gave up on our investment, we thought we'd try a simple proof of concept. Within a couple weeks, using WWF coupled with SharePoint Designer we have already created a simple sequential workflow, which was more than we'd done in 2 years with our other workflow product. The workflow utilizes a Form Library list with a custom content type (InfoPath 2007 form - opened in the web browser using Office Forms Services). The workflow engages and creates a task for each step of the workflow with custom data collection in the task. We used custom views on the library list in order to display the pertinent properties of both the workflow and the task list. Keep in mind this is all beta code, so it's sort of slow going, but the good news is that we're 100% confident that this solution will handle ALL our workflow needs. Beside the software being included in SP07, development can be done by someone with SharePoint or .Net skills. AND InfoPath form creation can be done by a non-developer. Needless to say, this was a great unexpected benefit of SP07 and one we plan on leveraging for a number of needs within the firm.

On a related note, we plan on sharing our portal requirements document (well, a redacted version) to all ILTA members, which we've developed with the help of Microsoft and a local Microsoft partner. You can get even more info at the ILTA Annual Conference this August, where we will be co-presenting with xmLaw on SharePoint.

Microsoft finally enters the KM space with Knowledge Network

2006-05-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Bill Gates announced yesterday at Microsoft's annual CEO Summit, their first product targeted towards knowledge management, more precisely centered on expertise location called Knowledge Network, which will be a part of SharePoint 2007. There's a brief blurb about it here on a ZDnet page from the UK. I've already got it on good authority that there's an API developers will be able to tap into to extend the functionality of this tool (which predominately mines e-mails and contacts to help determine expertise in certain subject matter). Knowledge Network technology looks through workers' email and other data and then automatically generating working profiles of expertise. The software also takes a page from social networking sites in the way that workers get matched up with in-house experts. The software can see if the information seeker and expert have any worker friends in common who might be able to make an introduction. Workers can also choose whether they want to be open to being contacted directly.

Out of the box, I'm sure this tool will need a lot of work to truly help mine experience and expertise within a law firm, but it's good to see Microsoft enter the KM arena.

ILTA KM Session - KM 101: The Three Stages of Knowledge

2006-04-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

This is the first session spawned from the new KM Peer Group for ILTA. You do not have to be a member to attend this session.

Join us for an overview of Knowledge Management focusing on the three stages in the KM Systems Maturity Model. This will be a discussion on what a firm just beginning a knowledge management program should focus on to develop a successful program and things to consider in developing projects for intermediate and advanced knowledge management programs.

Our Speaker:
John Szekeres is the Assistant Director of Knowledge Management for Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP. John has worked to develop the firm’s Intranet as well as various knowledge repositories including discussion forums, deal tracking databases and precedent databases allowing practitioners throughout the firm’s 12 offices to collaborate and share their knowledge. He has worked with the lawyers at the firm to develop methods and techniques to enhance collaboration, workflow and the transfer of knowledge. Prior to joining Cleary Gottlieb, John was with the legal publishing company of Matthew Bender & Co. Inc., a part of Lexis-Nexis, where he helped to develop CD-ROM libraries and later publishing on the Internet He is the Vice-Chairmen of the Electronic Communications Task Force Committee (ECTF) of the New York State Bar Association and was a member of the executive committee of the Law Practice Management Committee. John has served as a speaker for numerous seminars in the area of knowledge management and Internet research for lawyers.

Fee: The fee is PER CONNECTION and is $25 for ILTA members and $75 for non-members. You will receive connection (both phone and internet access) information upon receipt and processing of payment.

REGISTER online under the Meetings page at ILTA's website (http://www.iltanet.org/).

Questions? Please contact Peggy Wechsler at 210.481.5451 or peggy@iltanet.org.

Getting lawyers hooked on EDD processing, the paper v. plastic dilemma

2006-04-19T09:12:00.000-07:00

While much has been made over the last 12 months about e-discovery, Zubalake and Morgan Stanley, the reality is that many lawyers and their clients are still a bit naive and shocked about the costs involved in properly handling e-discovery. This is especially true when you talk about the cost to processing e-discovery, with prices as high as $2,000 per GB. In many instances the costs to simply process the data can seem extremely high in comparison to the legal fees billed to handle the matter. For example how does a lawyer handle 10GB of e-discovery, which isn't a particularly large amount, when they'll likely bill less $50,000 to the client? Sending this to a vendor could cost as much as $10,000, which would be 20% of the fees billed.

What often happens in these cases is that the lawyer ends up forgoing the 'proper' method in an effort to save money and asks 'just to take a look at what's inside all these PST files'. Which means pulling them into Outlook, not the most effective platform for review. More firms, including ours, are looking to bring some of this in-house to offer more cost effective solutions for our clients, but at the same time, vendors are beginning to lower their rates to stay competitive.

We just started a 'paper v. plastic' roadshow to help illustrate the differences between handling electronic discovery the traditional way (printing everything out) and keeping it electronic. One of the most compelling demonstratives we used in the presentation was a visual of what a CD worth of printed material can potentially look like, since this is often what they lawyers are produced and their knee-jerk reaction is to just ask for it to be printed. What had a local vendor bring us 20 empty boxes and stacked them up in the conference room. While a bit over the top, it made the point to those in the audience that if they are asked to have everything printed from a CD, this room full of boxes could be the result. It was very effective at getting their attention and helping illustrate the need to keep things electronic.

We're hoping that by bringing this in-house (for small to mid-sized projects only) we'll be able to keep our lawyers from printing everything and ensure they are using the best tools for the job. While I'm optimistic about this project, we'll see how many of the old dinosaur lawyers we can get off of their paper and into the digital age :)

Knowledge Management v. Practice Enhancement

2006-02-21T08:03:00.000-08:00

In recent years, I've struggled to try and define knowledge management. I actually joke about it when partners at my firm ask me "What does a Chief Knowledge Officer do anyway?" and my response is often "When I find out, I'll let you know" - which is usually followed by a chuckle. I used to give this long winded, jargon filled response that would typically make a lawyer look at me the same a dog does when you've said something they don't understand - head tilted sideways with one eyebrow lifted. I know that it's been commonly stated that KM means different things to different people and if you pressed me for an answer I guess I'd say that KM ultimately means getting the right information to the right people at the right time. But, does that really help a lawyer understand the value you bring?

I've always felt what we do, at least at my firm, isn't so much 'knowledge management', we're really focused more on what I'd call 'practice enhancement'. This should not be confused with 'practice support'. I think the tools and services most firms offer these days are no longer really in support of a lawyers practice, but truly enhance the way they practice.

Evidence of this shift can be seen in several areas, even in the upcoming Ark Group KM Conference in NY. There's a session titled 'Is KM Morphing into Practice Support Consulting?' Ron Friedmann (Prism Legal Consulting), David Hambourger (Winston & Strawn), and Eugene Stein (White & Case) are presenting on the topic. And while I would debate that what most firms are doing isn't supporting, but enhancing their firm's practice, the point is that more and more firms are starting to look at KM in alternative ways. And if you look at the agenda, many of the sessions are focused on breaking out of the traditional KM topics.

Hunton and Williams, Alston Bird and several other firms have a team of business analysts or consultants that are dedicated to KM or practice support functions. Sonnenschein has someone on their team with the title of "Director of Consultant/Client Advocacy" (I'm jealous).

While I'm not quite ready to dump 'knowledge' from my vocabulary, I am ready to put my focus on enhancing the way my firm's lawyers practice law.

The Best KM Software Yet? Yahoo 'Answers' the Question

2006-01-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, so if you've noticed, most of my posts don't talk about traditional KM systems (if there is such a thing), but I think I've found something very interesting that Yahoo has in beta now, http://answers.yahoo.com. With a Yahoo account, you can start using the system right away. The interface is very easy to use, allows you to associate your question to their taxonomy, tracks and rewards the number of questions you post and respond to and provides additional 'points' when your answer to a question is deemed the best by the asker. If you ask too many questions without responding to any, you eventually run out of points, which is a good way to ensure people contribute. The more points you rack up, the higher your rating is in the system. The system also allows you to browse questions by topic, conduct full-text searches among questions and check the status of questions you post or respond to. You'll also get e-mail notification when your questions are answered.

The methods and principles used by Yahoo Answers are basic and straightforward. Anyone with a sharp developer could build something similar to help capture and retrieve information at their firm, rather than this information being lost in the "All Attorney" e-mails that go out.

A nice compliment to CRM - Social Networking

2006-01-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

For those of you lamenting over the level of effort required to keep your CRM systems up-to-date or the lack of use by lawyers, these new tools may be the answer.

Social networking has been around for a while. Personal products like Plaxo, Spoke and LinkedIn have millions of users and offer several nifty features. For example, LinkedIn has an optional plug-in that will mine your e-mail traffic, create Outlook Contacts and upload them to your LinkedIn account, hosted via an ASP. While this type of mining may be okay for individuals, I doubt most firms would be interested in something that requires you to upload the firm's contact information to a public ASP. However, the concept of mining e-mail has emerged in two products which do allow you to host the software on your own network, Contact Networks and Branch-IT. Visible Path is also a really interesting product, but they only work on a ASP model.

What I like about Contact Networks and Branch-IT is that these products address two crucial shortcomings of traditional CRM systems. First, because they mine your firm's e-mail server and create individual contact records from e-mail your lawyers send and receive (filtering out spam and other junk mail) there's absolutely ZERO data entry required by lawyers or their secretaries - genius. The second thing these systems do is offer various access levels to contact information, which can provide lawyers a much greater level of control over the use of their contacts then in a traditional CRM system. Contact Networks takes it a step further and maintains their own database of companies, along with the executives of those companies, and the system will attempt to match up (based on the domain of the e-mail) an e-mail address not only with a company, but with an individual person. Their database also tracks what industry/SIC code the company is in, which is great information hard to manually keep in CRM.

That being said, these systems aren't meant to replace CRM, they are simply meant to offer a supplement for the all important 'who knows who' questions that arise. CRM still is needed to manage mailing lists, track opportunities, etc. But, if you're firm is serious about leveraging its relationship capital, these tools shouldn't be overlooked.

Law Firm Inc. Recognizes Blogging Trend

2005-12-21T11:47:00.000-08:00

Business Week magazine ran a May 2, 2005 cover story on blogs, Webster proclaimed that the word 'blog' was the most looked up term in 2004, so it was only a matter of time before blogging make its way to the cover of Law Firm Inc. Vickie Spang, our CMO, and I made the cover. Good thing I asked them to airbrush some extra hair on for me :)

The article in print provides an overview of what we've done at Sheppard Mullin, but also a very nice summary of other law firm's blogging initiatives. The online version is a bit more condensed. It does include some good quotes from partners at our firm who've been involved with blogging as well as law firm blogging veteran, Kevin O'Keefe, CEO of Lexblog, whom we use to design and host our blogs. If you're just starting out with blogging, or want to understand what's involved to get a blog up at your firm, this is certainly a good primer to get you started.

Knowledgeline makes Technolawyer's "BlawgWorld 2006" list

2005-12-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

From the Technolawyer site, "According to various studies, approximately 80,000 new blogs launch every day, including dozens of legal blogs (blawgs). No one knows how many blawgs exist, but whatever the number, monitoring them would amount to a full-time job.

For this reason, we've published BlawgWorld 2006: Capital of Big Ideas, a TechnoLawyer eBook designed to take you on a journey through 51 of the most influential blawgs."

Knowledgeline is one of the 51 blogs profiled in this eBook. This is free if you're subscribed to Technolawyer, click here for more information.

Richard Susskind's Slam on US Firms

2005-11-28T09:36:00.000-08:00

Richard Susskind recently authored an article in the Times Online titled, Backroom boys lead 'positive disruption'. In the article, he briefly talks about US firms general lack of interest in innovative technology. He correctly points out the historical void of client pressure, cultural indifference and huge profitability which leaves US law firms basking in the glow of their own success and not motivated to change direction or embrace new technologies. Probably my favorite quote from the article,

"Without hunger for change, without the worry of being left behind by the competition and, vitally, without clients clamouring for new forms of service, it will be business as usual for the US legal behemoths for many years yet. They will wring every last cent out of the increasingly unsustainable practice of hourly billing and will steer well clear of innovative IT."

While I regard Mr. Susskind as one of the most gifted and brilliant thought leaders on Legal IT issues, I do feel he's a bit short sighted in his view of US law firms on the whole. In the article, he points out one US law firm (Davis Polk & Wardwell) that he thinks demonstrates client enabling technologies that are innovative. While DPW may be the firm with the most visibility in the UK, there are many more state-side who have shown the desire and dedication to client-facing, innovative technologies. Ron Friedmann's excellent source (while slightly dated) lists many examples of UK firms implementing interesting technology, but also a drove of US firms. A few examples:

Baker & McKenzie's implementation of BakerMAKS a KM system with document assembly capabilities.
Bryan Cave's No Trade Zone helps obtain accurate, up-to-the-minute legal advice and opinions regarding specific international trade transactions.
Dykema Gossett automates commercial real estate lending for all parties involved with Streamloaner.
Foley & Lardner's web-based document drafting for IP, varied resources for HR, patent application software
Littler Mendelson online compliance training.
Mayer Brown's Securitization. Net service which offers resources for structured finance industry
Morgan Lewis & Bockius' HSRscan® - Morgan Lewis provides clients with access to our searchable database of Hart-Scott-Rodino Act informal interpretations and related information
Orrick's online compliance training program, WeComply.

There are even more listed on Ron's site and I'm sure that just scratches the surface of what's out there. Not everyone is willing to share their 'secret sauce' when it comes to innovative client-service projects.

I do believe that UK firms have historically been a bit more leading in the area of client-service technologies, firms in the US have quickly made ground in this area and do see the value in what they offer. While our business model may not support an army of PSLs running around gathering documents for a KM system, US firms are innovative and many are dedicated to providing client-facing systems that add value and create a competitive advantage.

Podcasting, the next big thing?

2005-11-17T07:16:00.000-08:00

With blogging becoming a bit more mainstream, well at least at my firm, the next frontier for lawyers to get their message out might be podcasting. Like blogging, the barrier to entry for podcasting is minimal. With a voice recording device (handheld or through your PC), a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and software and a website or blog to publish it to, and you're all set. Some lawyers even take advantage of their commute and author their podcasts while on the road. Reed Smith intellectual property lawyer and popular blawger Denise Howell's podcast features insightful talk about the ways in which advanced technology can help lawyers on the job. She produces her podcasts by recording herself on a cell phone as she drives to work. Let's hope she doesn't cause any major pile ups on the freeway!

What's compelling to me about this medium is that it's easy for lawyers to use and is richer than text for delivery. People can get feeds via RSS, which makes it even easier to get the word out about your podcast. From the consumer's perspective, you can download this to any MP3 player or your laptop and listen to it at your convenience.

Here's what you need to get started listening to podcasts. There are a number of free podcast clients available for download. The two most popular are iPodderX (available for free at ipodder.org) and Apple Computer's latest version of iTunes (Version 5.0; also a free download). Also a great article on Law.com (subscription required) which talks about this in more depth.

I'm not sure how far this will go, or if it's a fad, but we're certainly looking into it further.

And the Legal IT Innovator of the Year award goes to..

2005-11-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

You guessed it! The blogging initiative we've put together at Sheppard Mullin was submitted to the Legal IT Forum for consideration of an award. This award could be not entered directly. Instead, the judges looked through all the entries and rewarded any special projects or initiatives that we deemed to deserve recognition.

From the Legal IT Forum announcement, "The winner demonstrated a striking piece of lateral thinking by shifting away from standard e-newsletters to the world of Blogging. From an original readership of 10,000, the winner's blogged content has surpassed 1,000,000 hits and averages nearly 10,000 hits per day and consistently appears on the first 5 hits for relevant search terms in Google and Yahoo. The winner of Legal IT Innovator of the Year is Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer at Sheppard Mullin Richter Hampton, LLP."

This project really was a classic example of IT and Marketing working together. Our Chief Marketing Officer, Vickie Spang, took this idea and ran with it. Without the collaborative efforts of her group and mine, this project would have never been the success it is. My post on this idea months ago kicked started our efforts, but our Marketing group was instrumental in the adoption of blogs here at the firm.

And yes, that's me in the middle donning a kilt for the event. More pictures (thankfully none that are blackmail worthy) can be found here. If you haven't attended the Legal IT Forum, it's an excellent networking event, for senior level IT professionals at firms across the globe.

New KM Survey

2005-09-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

A group of KM professionals recently gathered by conference call to discuss the need and interest of forming a national/international group focused specifically on legal KM. We agreed that it was logical to form such a group but wanted to solicit feedback and gauge interest from a larger segment of KM professionals before taking the next steps at organization. Please take a few moments to complete this survey and provide your opinion. Thank you.

Survey Link
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=827061357009

Building e-Discovery Teams

2005-08-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

There has been tremendous coverage, almost ad nauseam, about e-discovery issues lately. Vendors are popping up all over the globe to process data, on-line review tools are being heavily touted and more additional forums are now available to 'get religion' on e-discovery.

What I find to be disturbing is that very few people are talking about how to practically apply and disseminate this information within their firm. All the software in the world won't prevent a lawyer from accepting discovery via e-mail and expose themselves and their firm to potential spoliation. The best e-discovery processing tools can't ensure that the collection efforts are solid. In a word, we need to educate.

What firms need to do is take a slightly more proactive approach to this issue. Getting your lit support staff and a couple lawyers trained will not be enough. Look to go deeper and the results will be amazing:

Build an e-discovery team composed of Partners, Associates, Paralegals, Lit Support and IT.
Be sure that you have someone from each office and practice group that handle litigation on the team - you want geographic and practice area coverage. Some lawyers will want to deal with someone 'down the hall', others will want someone who knows their practice.
Put them through a certification program, Kroll and Applied Discovery both have excellent ones.
Commit to meeting monthly to discuss new updates in case law, technology available and any real life situations in your firm.
Once the team is up to speed, go about educating the rest of the firm - don't stop with your team. Setup an office-by-office road show, buy lunch and invite all your litigators and paralegals for 1-2 hour overview of the key issues.
Publish regular newsletters on e-discovery.
Create a page on your firm's intranet with practice guidelines, checklists, form documents and other on-line resources so that any lawyer can get some basic information in a pinch.
Some firms even have e-discovery blogs they maintain.

Once you've gotten to this point, you've not only taken precautions to help your firm avoid e-discovery liability, but you'll be well on your way to creating competitive advantage for your firm.

9-year-old earns accolade as Microsoft pro

2005-07-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this is a bit off topic, but I couldn't resist... An MCP at 9 years old? I know that kids this age are now getting cell phones, IM'ing each other, etc. but come on. I was trying to master my Atari at 9... I've got a 2 1/2 year old at home, I'm wondering if she's ready for MOUS certification?

For more on this wiz kid with no future of a social life, click here.

KM Competitive Advantage Matrix

2005-05-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

One of the first projects I undertook here at Sheppard Mullin, was to develop a 'menu' of potential knowledge management projects that a department or practice in the firm could take interest in. Often times lawyers would ask 'What can my department do with knowledge management?' The menu, or KM Matrix, was designed to give the lawyers some starting points. I worked with Mark Keller, a consultant with a lot of experience in these projects, to help define the matrix and also attach a level of 'competitive advantage' to each project. While subjective, it would at least help guide them to projects that would potentially yield the greatest return.

Some KM initiatives have universal appeal, while others naturally lend themselves to benefit specific groups. This menu of KM options was designed to expose the world of possibilities within Knowledge Management. The idea was that we would identify projects of interest to a practice group, prioritize the various initiatives and build a KM Project Plan for the firm. The menu is not meant to be all-encompassing of every conceivable option within KM, but provide a starting point in the process.

I've attached the menu, but have omitted much of the detail as it's our IP. What's not included is more detailed descriptions of each project, highlighting the pros/cons, business issues addressed, level of attorney involvement, etc. I included the first few, so you could see what details we tried to include for the lawyers.

Mea Culpa

2005-04-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

It's been almost a month since my last post. We've been extremely busy around here and sometimes my day job does actually get in the way of me being able to discuss new and interesting developments in our industry :)

That being said, there are several new projects underway here that I'd like to share.

1) We are in the final beta testing phase for our new custom built extranet tool. A lot has been made about the false hopes and promises of extranets. From first hand experience, the right extranet tool deployed in the right way can help create advantage for your firm and generate a LOT of new business.

2) MOVING FROM INTERACTION. This information was made public recently, but I thought I'd elaborate on it a bit here. InterAction is a fine product and has done a great job getting CRM into the minds of many people within legal and even into the hands of a few lawyers :) However, we felt that Aderant's direction aligned better with our business objectives for CRM. The tight integration with our accounting system and VERY CLEAN user interface were huge selling points for us. The product roadmap is well defined and as hard as it is to believe, we won't be sacficing any function points by going to Aderant's CRM package. In fact, they are providing very similar functionality to that of ReAction Server, as far as contacts being able to update their own information via the web. We'll have a lot more to talk about later this year when we anticipate being live on Aderant's CRM system.

Wish us luck!

New Google mapping tool

2005-04-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

dodgermapdetail
Originally uploaded by tbaldwinusc.

While not a pure law firm technology tool, the new Google Mapping tool is just too amazing to pass up. The core technology behind this is based on a product called Keyhole, which Google recently purchased. Keyhole is basically Terraserver on steroids, it provides satellite images of the entire globe, the ability to 'fly' from one point to another, and the ability to drill down to very fine detail. As the site says, "you can fly through 12+ Terabytes of Earth imagery and data spinning, rotating, tilting, and zooming. Think magic carpet ride".

This technology is available through Keyhole directly for a fee, but you can get access to a 'lite' version of it through Google Maps. Leisure travelers will enjoy being to 'see' exactly how a hotel is laid out, or how close it is to the ocean. For business use, many real estate lawyers will find this tool invaluable when making a personal visit to the site is not feasible, cost effectively or timely. To see an example of the Google Maps tool, take a look at the satellite image of Dodger Stadium.

ILTA Staffing Survey Results Now Available

2005-03-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

As one of the author's of this survey, I'm proud to announce that the results have now been made available from ILTA's website. Mal Mead was the mastermind behind the rich and in-depth analysis that is provided. This was our first stab at a survey of this kind, so there will probably be some tweaks to it the next time, but overall we are very pleased with the results.

Fellow blogger Ron Friedmann conducted additional analysis of the results on his blog. One quote sticks out, "For anyone interested in the details of law firm IT operations, the survey is a must read."

Blogs to replace newsletters?

2005-02-14T09:29:00.000-08:00

While I've tried to refrain from touting specific projects at my firm, this one I just couldn't resist. We finally made the plunge and spun up the first, of what should be many, blogs for the firm. As has been discussed before on Ron Friedmann's blog and Dennis Kennedy's blog, we felt it was time to take the next step in our marketing efforts and this seemed like the most logical choice.

Like many large law firms, we send out thousands of e-newsletters every month on behalf of various practice groups. Our greatest gains will come from an organic growth in readership, better search result ranking on Google, reduction of spam to our clients and a better delivery engine then e-mail. Also, because of the ease of use, getting posts on the site is much easier than in our previous newsletters incarnations. In less than a week of going live, the site has already had over 16,000 hits...Stay tuned, as we plan on having blogs setup for our labor, finance and technology groups.

Aderant (formerly CMS) enters the CRM space

2005-02-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

In something that was probably long overdue, Aderant recently announced its intention to enter the 'FrontOffice' space with its first foray being CRM. While this can be viewed as a move to counter what Elite has long had available with its case management and Apex product, the timing is interesting with the recent Lexis acquisition of Interface Software. The product roadmap they've outlined in their release certainly is appealing, especially for those who are Aderant clients. When you factor in the luke-warm adoption CRM has received by lawyers, it's a risky move, but could be an industry shaker if Aderant can help shift CRM into the hands of lawyers.

Desktop search gains momentum

2005-01-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

E-mail has become a most unwieldy tool. Much has been made about this in various blog postings, legal technology conferences and within the hallways of most law firms. Firms worry about e-mail retention and due to the popularity of e-mail, many firms find themselves exceeding Microsoft's long standing limit of 2GB per mailbox. More pressure is being put on lawyers to clean up their mailbox. But, part of the problem is that Outlook's built-in searching is very weak and makes it hard for lawyers to quickly find e-mails and then move them to folders outside of the Inbox, Sent/Deleted Items.

To address this glaring problem, Microsoft purchased a company called, Lookout Software, who built a really nice (free) plug-in for Outlook that makes searching a breeze. Most of us have heard of Google's desktop search product, you can download for free. In their salvo, Yahoo recently announced their partnership with X1, to provide a 'lite' version of their desktop search product for free.

Having evaluated all three, there is a real upside to these products and they will be greatly welcomed by your firm.

Lookout's newest version makes it easy to deploy in large environments and while it lacks some of the slick features of X1, if you're on a tight budget, this will be a huge leap forward for your users.
When I downloaded Google's product, it seemed very interested in wanting to 'monitor' my activity. While this feature could be disabled, I was weary of what Google's real intent was with their product. I uninstalled it after a couple days of using it.
I did not evaluate the Yahoo branded X1 product, but their full featured version which is not free, at $79/user (retail) but also had the most functionality. They have very innovative technology which instantly begins to return search results with every letter you type. The system also has hit-highlighting and a preview pane. In addition to full-text search, you can quickly search on e-mail fields. X1 also seems to be moving towards other enterprise products as well.

With the evergrowing amount of e-mail, these tools will certainly become a necessity. I recently traveled to another office without my laptop and when confronted with life sans my desktop search tool, I felt almost crippled and went through a brief period of withdrawals. It's probably the next-most addictive thing to the Blackberry!

Project Management, why aren't more law firm IT departments doing it?

2005-01-06T17:15:00.000-08:00

A while back I attended a webinar titled "How to Create a Successful Project Management Environment". The webinar was hosted by Sally Hatchett, the Director of Project Management for Bingham McCutchen. Project Management (PM) has been an effective tool for many years, and thankfully is now slowly making its way into law firm IT departments. It couldn't be coming any sooner, as PM has been a glaring hole in most law firm IT Departments. The need for PM is even more important as IT moves from 'plumbing' related projects, the level of sophistication rises and as with most firms the department is asked to juggle more projects without increasing staff.

The upcoming LegalTech NY Conference will hold another session on project management, sponsored by ILTA (formerly known as LawNet), as part of their Advanced CIO track. While the LegalTech conference sessions cost a few hundred dollars, ILTA members can attend this Advanced CIO track for free.

Extranets help separate firms, for now

2005-01-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

It looks as though collaboration tools, such as extranets, are not only on the cusp of becoming an integral part of how law firms work with their clients, but also as a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

If you've ever looked at the 'pitches books' law firms put together for prospective clients, it's no wonder something like an extranet can help set them apart. Most often a law firm's proposal boasts of a blue-chip roster of clients, touts the pedigree of their lawyers, trumpets the many successful cases/deals won for their clients and talks about their commitment to excellent client service. Virtually every law firm still in business can tell similar tales to one another, especially larger full-service firms who typically compete with other full-service firms. There's very little that helps a law firm set themselves apart when employing this standard RFP response. To that end, I once heard a client tell a group of lawyers that something as basic as publishing their rates in a proposal would be considered avant-garde.

While some are impressed with such basic things, more and more corporate legal departments are raising their expectations of what their outside counsel offer. Just ask Laura Owen, Director of Worldwide Legal Services, at Cisco Systems. Her recent article The Tech Evolution: Change or Die highlights several key trends:

Commoditize routine legal transactions
Create consortia to share needed work
Move your legal work to low cost firms located in other regions away from high cost centers
Use technology, not lawyers, to perform legal work
Move 80 percent of your fees to a non-billable hour basis

While her thoughts are progressive, it certainly will only be a matter of time before more and more consumers of legal services start to see the wisdom in her approach. This is especially true if her concept of consortium for shared legal work takes off. Can you imagine the buying power large companies like Cisco, Ford, 3-M, Dupont, etc. could exert if they were to band together for joint RFPs?

If you analyze her points in detail, most of them are addressed through collaboration tools and technology. Firms that are currently able to provide these tools set themselves apart, but if Ms. Owen has her way, it will only be a matter of time before we all have to answer the call to better client service.

Speaking of mergers...

2004-12-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

Pretty soon, everything will either be owned by West or Lexis, with Lexis just announcing their buyout of Interface Software today. Forget 31 flavors, we'll be confronted with the question of 'Would you like chocolate or vanilla?' As a consumer, I have yet to see real benefit come from any of these recent acquisitions and truly question the value they bring to anyone other then the two parties involved. Perhaps Lexis will be able to offer more content to contacts in InterAction through their Company Dossier product and with Factiva moving from OneSource to Lexis later in 2005, Dossier will have even more to offer.

What do mergers really mean to the industry?

2004-12-09T09:03:00.000-08:00

Is merger mania still alive and well? The recent UK/US merger creates one of the world's largest law firms with more than 2,700 lawyers. This merger came on the heels of the Piper-Gray Cary deal in October and got me thinking about how mergers affect those other then the lawyers.

In the legal technology vendor community, there has been mass consolidation over the last few years, which has mirrored the trend for law firms to consolidate and merge. The vendor consolidation, in my opinion, has yielded mixed results as far as the benefit to the law firms who purchases these products and services. One thing is for sure, there are fewer options then ever for several major product lines and a couple companies are bordering on a monopoly at the rate they are going.

While law firm mergers look great on paper and in the press, they invariably cut jobs, many in the IT arena. I know of several very talents CIOs that are out of work simply because they were the smaller of two firms merging.

While law firms and technology vendors can't worry about these issues, a by-product of mergers and consolidation is less choice and job opportunities.

Southern California Regional Event

2004-12-08T08:12:00.000-08:00

On December 16th, ILTA is sponsoring an event on Intrusion detection and Wireless Networking Security. The meeting is being held at Manatt in West LA. For more information or to RSVP, please click here.

ILTA (formerly known as LawNet) Announces Dates for Their Annual Meeting

2004-12-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

One of the most eagerly awaited announcements has come. ILTA just announced today the dates of their annual conference and in conjunction with that, the hotel hosting the event (Scottsdale JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort and Spa) is now accepting MEMBER reservations (no vendors yet). The conference, ILTA 2005: An Empowering Experience, will be held August 22 - 25, 2005.

If you're a Member, please consult the recent 'LawNet/ILTA News Briefs' e-mail sent by Randi Mayes for more information on making reservations.

If you're not a LawNet member, I would encourage you to check out their website. The organization is by far the largest for law firm IT professionals in the world and their annual conference is usually the talk of the industry.

More on knowledge repositories

2004-12-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, I talked about a webinar detailing the pros and cons of various storage/retrieval methods for knowledge. It got me thinking about it in more detail and as a result I wrote a brief article on the topic.

At the end of the day, we have a hard enough time getting lawyers to contribute/use any form of KM system, so why make it any harder than necessary?

Hummingbird loses three clients while others progress to rollout

2004-12-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

While on the topic of DMS, I found this article in the UK magazine, LegalIT, very interesting. That along with numerous posts on various listserves, leads me to believe that Hummingbird is losing marketshare. While probably not all that surprising to most, this article is one of the first where firms openly talk about their problems with Hummingbird.

Full text searching of iManage or Hummingbird

2004-11-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or is it too much to ask that a DMS would actually allow you to do enterprise-wide full text searching without choking? I recently got a demo of iManage v8, which purports to address this issue by taking advantage of the Verity search engine which they use. Unfortunately, it still doesn't do the basic things like search result ranking that many need. Firms have been relegated to acquiring full blow versions of Verity, Autonomy, Recommind and other 100k+ products to meet this very basic goal. Hopefully, either the vendors themselves will address this, or a 3rd party tool will come to the forefront that firms can buy, which doesn't cost six figures to address this problem.

Does anyone out there have any success stories to share?

Guiding Principles of Knowledge

2004-11-19T08:34:00.000-08:00

When brainstorming with my colleagues came up with a list of things that we felt were the guiding principles of knowledge. When coming up with knowledge initiatives we tried to stick to these guiding principles in our designs.

Knowledge is information in context.
Information should be easily shared with and collaborated on by clients
Knowledge is: what, how and educational
We should learn from our mistakes
We should formalize and disseminate the things that work
Ease of access and use is part of the value of knowledge
Practice group and local/regional boundaries should be removed
Knowledge is to share, not to horde for personal use
Capture knowledge when it is fresh -- know when it is stale
Principles should not compromise activity/results
Focus should be on supporting the core Business strategies

After Action Reviews

2004-11-18T13:33:00.000-08:00

Every firm should implement After Action Reviews as a tool in which they do business. The concept is relatively simple and easy to implement. Some groups like the United States Army honed it into a science. Wonder how come the Army send Apache helicopters into a n Iraqi city and get them torn up and later bungles an assault into Falluja, but does not repeat that same mistake at a later date? The answer to this is AARs. Officers up and down the ranks in each engagement wrote reports that told their version of what happened after each action. They informed central command what went wrong and what went right. Central command pulled these reports together and created common themes to repeat, things that went well, and to never do again, things that went poorly. They then got these things out into everyone’s hands. Not just bad things are AARed. Everything is. The Army is in a constant state of learning and tries very hard not to make the same mistake twice and even harder to make sure everyone knows how to do the right thing based on experience.

So what is an AAR? In its simplest form it is a wrap-up of an action that just occurred. It asks three simple questions and then demands follow-up. The first question sets the boundaries to the discussion, what are we reviewing? The second establishes a positive light on everything, what went well? The last delves into the mistake, what could have gone better? Asking these questions correctly and keeping the meeting from dissolving into a forum for he said she said complaints can be difficult, but can be done. Here are some tips for conducting this kind of review:

Use a third party that is familiar with the process, but wasn’t directly involved.
Time Box long discussions.
Do not allow personal attacks or he said she said situations.
Stick to actionable items.
Keep everything positive by asking negative questions in a positive way.
Leave rank or hierarchy at the door.
Get everyone to contribute by directing questions to the quiet ones.

Once the review is done it is time to take action. Items that are actionable within the groups should be assigned and followed up on. Someone should review what is happening in the field to pout best practices in place and to eliminate mistakes that are constantly made. While there are many places that AARs can be inserted into the day to day life of our attorneys, but a few obvious starting points are mentioned here:

Business Development is an obvious starting point. It is amazing to me that I could interview attorneys after losing a deal and they could easily state to me what the client did and didn’t like about them. Yet, these same attorneys didn’t realize that other attorneys lost similar deals for the same reason and took no action to improve in areas that caused them to falter. So, add in AARs after any client facing meeting, presentation, RFP, and Win/Loss. Note what the client likes or liked and be cognizant of what is not resonating well. Now take action at the group level that did the review and pass off the report to the firm. The firm can review these AARs and look for themes like, our clients think we are great Tax attorneys, but think we don’t have great Banking expertise. The action might be to do better in the future to show to clients that we are great at Banking also or if we really aren’t great at Banking plug that gap. Learning why you win or lose business will only strengthen your company.
Next you should implement AARs around Matters. Use a simple phase based or meetings based approach. Break down the meeting using the simple 3 questions and review how the matter phases went under the same model. Things that are working well that can be reused should be moved off to best practice for other groups to learn from and working poorly should be addressed if they can be. Remember, you don’t have to wait until closing to do this. AARs are not Post Mortems that are done at matter closure. They are active meetings that happen continually and help projects move forward.
Finally, develop a pool of people who are good at moderating AARs and create incentives for them to do more of them across the firm. Have them own and guide the process. Have them report trends that they are seeing to executive leadership. Most of all give them the tools and support they need to make this successful.

For more information on AARs and how to do them successfully check out these links: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadaar.html and http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army/tc_25-20/guide.htm.

A favorite quote

2004-10-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

Just when you feel like the cycle of projects never ends, keep this quote in mind. I'm not sure who was first to use it,

"The rewards for doing something well is the opportunity to do it again."

Stop-gap disaster recovery for e-mail

2004-10-22T08:44:00.000-07:00

Very few things come along that are 'no-brainers' as far as technology goes, this product is certainly one of them.

Many firms are still trying to figure out what their disaster recovery/business continuity plans will entail. Hundreds of thousands (in some cases millions) of dollars are involved in implementing these systems and it take months to get them on-line. In the interim, most firms are still very vulnerable to even the most simple power outage or other type of disaster.

This is where MessageOne comes in. Their system should not be intended as a full-blown DR solution, but certainly something that everyone should look at for providing almost 100% uptime on e-mail. At the LawNet annual conference recently, I heard the Technology Partner of an AmLaw 100 firm say, 'After seeing this, I would be committing malpractice if I didn't show it to my firm's Management Committee." Pretty strong words.

For more information, contact Russell Sachs:

Vice President, Legal Solutions
MessageOne
(212) 812-5017
russell_sachs@messageone.com

Voicemail discovery, the next wave of liability

2004-10-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

Now that law firms and corporations are just getting their arms around e-discovery and how to implement the proper retention policies, voicemail is entering the scene. What is making voicemail such an easy target for discovery is the advent of technology which allows the use of the internet as a means of distribution, most commonly voice-over-IP or, voIP. With additional technology, people can receive voicemails as e-mail attachments and can even have voicemails transcribed into text automatically. Once in e-mail, a voicemail's life expectancy is much longer and creates yet another feeding ground for those looking for the 'smoking gun'.

A article posted on the Lexis web-site gives a very good primer on the issues surrounding voicemail discovery.

Outlook as a knowledge hub

2004-10-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

Last week consulting firm ii3 hosted a session discussing the merits of using Outlook as a respository for knowledge. It was refreshing to hear two sides to the issue, including some perspectives from outside legal. I'm not sure if they recorded the roundtable discussion, but here's the link to the webinar, http://www.ii3.com/webinar/101404/overview.html.

One of the more interesting opinions came from Theresa Grote, CIO at Dinsmore Shohl. While she acknowledged Outlook as a primary tool for lawyers, she was wary of depending on Exchange to act as a central repository, essentially letting technology drive her decision to move more towards Sharepoint. Her firm has done some nice things with various integration points to Sharepoint, but I still wonder ultimately if Outlook is not the place where all roads will eventually meet.

More postings on this topic from Ron Friedman's site, http://www.prismlegal.com/wordpress/index.php?m=200409#post-210

IT staffing ratios and budgets

2004-10-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

Just in time for everyone's budget planning, LawNet published a staffing and budget survey this week. LawNet reports that the results will be posted in early November and available at no charge to its members. Hildebrant used to conduct a staffing and budget survey, but for the last few years they haven't and there hasn't been any good benchmarks to work from. Recently, Baker Robbins & Co. Solicited the AmLaw 250 to participate in a similar survey, but was asking for $2,500 per firm. What I liked about the LawNet survey, which the BRCO survey didn't have, were questions that allowed the responding firm to 'define' what functions fell under IT and assign FTEs to each function. This was intended to address the common problem of comparing apples to apples, not just in terms of the size of the firm and number of attorneys, but what functions one IT staff was handling versus another. LawNet plans on distributing the survey results in a summary form, but also in Excel to allow for further analysis and comparison.

When the results are in at the end of October, I'll create a link to it.

Blawgs v. Traditional E-Newsletters

2004-10-14T07:50:00.000-07:00

I recently looked at a product designed for lawyers to start their own blogs, http://www.lexblog.com and initially thought it might be a hard sell to larger law firms and that the tool was really more geared towards smaller firms and solo practitioners. But, after looking at how some law firms sends out its newsletters, this quickly became a no brainer (at least to me). Many firms send out newsletters once a month/quarter, are either sent within the body of an e-mail or as a PDF and are typically 10-20 pages long.

This creates several problems.

In many cases, the information is already dated by the time the newsletter is sent.
As we all know, e-mail is a tool that no one can live without, but is also becoming an information glut. News items sent via e-mail on a monthly basis are often not read.
10-20 pages is a lot to digest in one sitting.

A blog offers several advantages to the traditional e-newsletter. The anti-spam benefits alone are great and this is a major consideration if your firm's marketing department sends out thousands of e-mails a month. The length is a much more digestible for the audience of the typical marketing e-newsletter. The information is 'just in time' and current as opposed to monthly/quarterly newsletter. The target audience can also decide how they want the content delivered, via e-mail updates, RSS, or simply visiting the site every so often. Getting newsletters only via e-mail is like the morning paper, just because it comes at 6:00am doesn't mean that's when you want to read it. These various delivery options are a great feature and free up the e-mail overload. Because the content is on the Internet, it's indexed by search engines like Google, making the growth of readership almost organic. We've experience exponential growth in readership and enjoy high rankings on Google for many of our blogs. We can analyze traffic patterns, see who our visitors are, what the most popular 'posts' are and other classic website traffic monitoring reports. This type of site analysis is not possible with traditional e-newsletter formats. In addition, our marketing department isn't spending days creating the newsletter in Quark, saving it to PDF, only to have lawyers make last minute change upon last minute change. Posting is simple and fast.