These are my notes on an interesting presentation about an intensive investment in technology (specifically, SharePoint) and its impact on a firm.
Leona Blanco
Leona Blanco lays out a picture of what her firm Colin Biggers & Paisley was like in 2004.
They had 21 partners, 150 people, and 11 different numbering systems. They had no intranet or extranet, and no document management system.
Now in 2013 there are 2 numbering system, one style guide, and a standard cost agreement. They adopted SharePoint 2007 for intranet, extranet, and document management system. Their extranet "My CBP" was rolled out in early 2010. (Clifford Chance has since adopted SharePoint 2010 and has thousands of employees and documents).
In Australia, the Legal Profession Act requires alerting a client when a budget is threatening to be exceeded. CPB provides "Mercury Alerts," email notices of issues like these, internal information reports. Mercury Alerts have evolved to be the source of choice for administrative information, with many many customized reports.
Omni is the CPB data warehouse that feeds data to SharePoint, Mercury Alerts, and the like. No one knows about Omni.
They've rolled out SharePoint collaboration sites for specific practices that combine documents, discussion boards, articles, feeds, and the like. Client sites (actually a SharePoint site collection) also have matter-specific SharePoint sites. An "About the Client" section allows for client team members (usually the lead partner) to contribute information about key client contacts, billing information, staffing considerations, and industry background.
Each matter has a SharePoint site. There are now over 100,000 matter sites and 2 terabytes of data in CPB intranet.
SharePoint allows for alerts from any document or site.
They do a lot of litigation and are importing an historic litigation sample database. They are developing litigation forms that will auto-populate documents from matter-level information in the database (under development).
The system allows for customized matter metadata.
Implementing Technology
It has to work right. You have to have a trial run, focus groups and pilot groups. Make it cool to be a volunteer. Include a troublemaker, because if you win them over,
Some partners may not use the tools, which may be OK if it only impacts them.
Blathering at people in technical-speak is the quickest way to alienate them. Translate into plain English. IT is no longer optional.
Chris Latta
A law firm's greatest asset is its knowledge. It is subject to leakage through attrition and through people losing track of it.
The rate of production of knowledge is increasing.
If you're supporting a lot of people with a lot of data, you have to leverage technology. Increased capacity of technological production.
We're never going back to a point where efficiency is not important. Law firms have to actively plan to make their current work practices obsolete.
Commoditized work has different economies of scale.
Disruptive systems don't support the current ways of doing business and may not be deployed within the walls of ones law firm.
Access to justice is a significant problems. In England a million civil cases go unheard. In Australia legal service funds are being cut. We can automate dispute resolution.
If we don't disrupt our own markets, someone else will.
The KM system must have more knowledge than the firm. Contact Relationship Management is much more important in bigger firms.
CBP has a dedicated software development team.
Showing posts with label change management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label change management. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Bert Sandie of EAI
Bert Sandie of games maker Electronic Arts, Inc. talked about how to create a culture of collaboration at your enterprise.
What drives people to collaborate?
People who are really good at collaborating do a lot of things that motivate them. They want to learn AND be social, for instance. Motivators for collaboration includes a desire to problem solve, altruism, learning, competition, recognition, and more. Make sure they get an email back to them and their manager about contribution.
At workshops they get to have a good time, but they have to come back and share what they learned.
Are you hiring enough new people? Are you hiring people who are willing to share?
Create physical environments that enhance collaboration.
Bring together special interest groups, run a workshop for 3 days, build a culture of collaboration around it (sounds like an old-fashioned KM Community of Practice!). When you know the people personally you can
What drives people to collaborate?
People who are really good at collaborating do a lot of things that motivate them. They want to learn AND be social, for instance. Motivators for collaboration includes a desire to problem solve, altruism, learning, competition, recognition, and more. Make sure they get an email back to them and their manager about contribution.
At workshops they get to have a good time, but they have to come back and share what they learned.
Are you hiring enough new people? Are you hiring people who are willing to share?
Create physical environments that enhance collaboration.
- White boards
- People sitting down
- People sit in a "pod"
- People move / change offices often
- If you're more than 35 feet away, you might as well be in a different building.
Different things work for different people. You have to try a lot of things, and you have to fail.
Bring together special interest groups, run a workshop for 3 days, build a culture of collaboration around it (sounds like an old-fashioned KM Community of Practice!). When you know the people personally you can
The easiest way to collaborate is face-to-face.
Changing behaviors takes "heads, hearts, and hands." Changing the way people think, feel, and behave. Right when they walk in the door you can change their behavior.
We need to lead the change in our organizations. If you aren't the expert (in change), find the people in the company who are. Start with people, your organization, and your environment.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Launch of Enterprise 2.0 Task Force
After months of behind-the-scene work, an Enterprise 2.0 Task Force has finally been publicly launched at my firm, marked by the dissemination of an E2.0 survey on collaboration, an intranet web site, and a (scheduled) team meeting. It's worth a look at some of the groundwork that was laid to make this possible, and why we are starting now.
First, a team from the Knowledge Management Department, led primarily by Doug Cornelius of KM Space , educated themselves about Web 2.0 tools and techniques.
Because you can learn a lot by doing, and we should "drink our own Kool-Aid", the KM Team started using a KM team wiki for our projects (using pbwiki.com), set up a Delicious account for the team, adopted RSS feed readers for learning about new events, and two of us (Doug and I) started blogging. Many of us also signed up, or re-energized our accounts, at Linked-In and Facebook. The Goodwin Procter 2.0 Facebook group in particular has become a way for people at the firm to recognize each other's interests in these topics, as well as get to know each other better.
Second, we started to talk to people face-to-face at the firm about what uses these tools might have. Could a wiki be a useful tool for a litigation matter team? Would that extroverted practice area leader like to have a blog as a platform from which to orate?
Third, we drafted a SurveyMonkey survey (yes we used a wiki) to help us identify people interested in E2.0, including potential "early adopters", and to start to spread the word.
When it came time to go live, we were able to get a tremendous amount of information up in a very short amount of time. We have:
First, a team from the Knowledge Management Department, led primarily by Doug Cornelius of KM Space , educated themselves about Web 2.0 tools and techniques.
Because you can learn a lot by doing, and we should "drink our own Kool-Aid", the KM Team started using a KM team wiki for our projects (using pbwiki.com), set up a Delicious account for the team, adopted RSS feed readers for learning about new events, and two of us (Doug and I) started blogging. Many of us also signed up, or re-energized our accounts, at Linked-In and Facebook. The Goodwin Procter 2.0 Facebook group in particular has become a way for people at the firm to recognize each other's interests in these topics, as well as get to know each other better.
Second, we started to talk to people face-to-face at the firm about what uses these tools might have. Could a wiki be a useful tool for a litigation matter team? Would that extroverted practice area leader like to have a blog as a platform from which to orate?
Third, we drafted a SurveyMonkey survey (yes we used a wiki) to help us identify people interested in E2.0, including potential "early adopters", and to start to spread the word.
When it came time to go live, we were able to get a tremendous amount of information up in a very short amount of time. We have:
- Lists of who is blogging at the firm already, with links to the blogs;
- A feed of posts from the blogs;
- Links to a firm Facebook group;
- Links to a Facebook group that the last class of summer associates pulled together;
- A fairly extensive firm-specific tag cloud on Delicious of web sites to educate people further about Web & Enterprise 2.0;
- Descriptions, in terms lawyers can understand, of wikis, blogs, RSS, and social networking software, and how they might work inside the firm, with links to descriptive videos (thank you Common Craft); and last but not least,
- A simple non-interactive list of the task members, people already committed (to some extent) to Enterprise 2.0 tools and collaborative methods.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Session 3 of last day of ILTA: Training for Matter Centricity / Taming The "What's In It For Me" Beast
There were two substantive speakers at this session containing many tips and a fair amount of interesting discussion on training and change management issues relating to matter centricity (MCC) adoption in the Interwoven platform
Gina Buser, President of Traveling Coaches, Inc. (moderator).
Patty Stover, Manager of Technology Training at King & Spalding LLP.
Jeff Ward, Director of Application Support at Fulbright & Jaworski.
Fulbright & Jaworski
Documents from matters were being saved to multiple location. MCC works best when all documents from a matter are in the same workspace.
They structured the database based on the year the matter was started. The year is embedded in the matter numbers.
If they had left out MCC from the introduction of Interwoven "it would have been like ripping off the bandaid all over again."
FJ worked with Baker Robbins & Traveling Coaches to assess and implement change management needs. They had focus groups for 20% of the users over 2 1/2 weeks, video conferenced, and had an e-learning and training program. Attorneys won't go through the difficulty of dealing with a new system and workflow unless they understand the big picture. They did play-acting with lawyers and the staff. Jeff played a corporate attorney with an email problem and his colleague played another one with 4 tasks. They lined up the office administrators and partners in charge of each office behind the road show and had decent lawyer participation and very high admininstrative participation.
Partners were interested because of the email management problem. Other drivers included not having to do redundant printing.
They went with Filesite because they got mixed up between Interwoven and Interaction. "You can't flash-cut over humans." They had target goals for the first week:
Day 1: find documents
Day 2: file documents
Day 3: start with matter list
Lessons Learned
Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users. Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users.
Call it "Interwoven in Outlook" or "electronic file wrapper," not MCC.
King & Spalding
Practice support is not office-specific. They have six trainers plus a manager on their training staff. They started in August 2005 and finished rollout in January 2006. They did a staggered rollout, not just one office at a time but started with one as they finished with another.
The strategy was determined by the need to finish the switch before the move to a new office.
They supplemented training with 4 additional trainers--2 in classroom and 2 on floors. They could receive an on-line program customized to the different products (30 went through this way) and the rest got classroom training.
Email
Gina Buser, President of Traveling Coaches, Inc. (moderator).
Patty Stover, Manager of Technology Training at King & Spalding LLP.
Jeff Ward, Director of Application Support at Fulbright & Jaworski.
Fulbright & Jaworski
Documents from matters were being saved to multiple location. MCC works best when all documents from a matter are in the same workspace.
They structured the database based on the year the matter was started. The year is embedded in the matter numbers.
If they had left out MCC from the introduction of Interwoven "it would have been like ripping off the bandaid all over again."
FJ worked with Baker Robbins & Traveling Coaches to assess and implement change management needs. They had focus groups for 20% of the users over 2 1/2 weeks, video conferenced, and had an e-learning and training program. Attorneys won't go through the difficulty of dealing with a new system and workflow unless they understand the big picture. They did play-acting with lawyers and the staff. Jeff played a corporate attorney with an email problem and his colleague played another one with 4 tasks. They lined up the office administrators and partners in charge of each office behind the road show and had decent lawyer participation and very high admininstrative participation.
Partners were interested because of the email management problem. Other drivers included not having to do redundant printing.
They went with Filesite because they got mixed up between Interwoven and Interaction. "You can't flash-cut over humans." They had target goals for the first week:
Day 1: find documents
Day 2: file documents
Day 3: start with matter list
Lessons Learned
Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users. Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users.
Call it "Interwoven in Outlook" or "electronic file wrapper," not MCC.
King & Spalding
Practice support is not office-specific. They have six trainers plus a manager on their training staff. They started in August 2005 and finished rollout in January 2006. They did a staggered rollout, not just one office at a time but started with one as they finished with another.
The strategy was determined by the need to finish the switch before the move to a new office.
They supplemented training with 4 additional trainers--2 in classroom and 2 on floors. They could receive an on-line program customized to the different products (30 went through this way) and the rest got classroom training.
Lessons Learned
They made it too complicated. The words "matter centricity" scares them. Call it foldering or "workspaces." Foldering will help them in a flexible fashion according to how they do their work. People in her firm stored email in Outlook folders already. Foldering is an extension of that idea. Foldering is part of getting them organized and sharing their documents with their peers. It lets them share Outlook folders.
Partner with the records, the library, and practice groups.
They developed an online training capacity that allowed preintroduction and post-testing.
Success was measured by the number of attorneys using the folders. One program was called "the trainer is in." They spent 1/2 a day on the floor and tried to find out what people needed. Sat on the floor with paralegals and secretaries and learned about the "unarchive" problem." Has tips of the week for attorneys, and for two months everything was about workspaces.
In-house people trained the attorneys, others trained by vendors. Staff could receive follow-up classes the next week.
She did not expect people to go back and move documents from their matters. "As you open or reference a document, file it."
Another person mentioned that they used "orphan document" filing problems to identify file needs.
Patty said K & S encouraged "to be filed" folders, especially for attorneys who weren't comfortable with filing themselves. Jeff said FJ did not allow "to be filed" and cautioned that there will be people who dump-file into the wrong matter, and you have to look out for them. A commentator mentioned that her firm forced people to file new documents into a matter workspace and did not allow them to file documents through filling out profiles.
They have workspaces set up for nonbillable administrative work.
I asked Patty what King & Spalding is calling the DMS. She thought that you need to call it "Interwoven" even though some people call it "iManage" (they have not moved to FileSite yet). Another commentator said they started calling it "the DMS."
You have to market the benefits. She creates special introductions to what she is doing. "This will teach you how to..." Give them an introduction to better profiling or organization by doing a webinar as they eat lunch at their desks.
A commentator (with a British accent) from a major international law firm mentioned that they haven't had problems getting documents into matter workspaces and that they have "personal" and "pending" folders. The biggest pushback has been on email.
Patty said that they have a policy that all documents have to be electronically filed. Filing could be in an Outlook folder. They didn't want to advise people to copy emails into workspace folder. They also established that 2 months after the matter is closed, the emails have to be out of Outlook.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
ILTA Conference Report, Day 2, Session 3: Improving Operations Through Matter Life Cycle Management
Dan Safran, Project Leadership Associates, Inc.
PLAI is the largest group of legal-focused technology and business consultants in the U.S.
"Matter lifecycle" is a paradigm that helps us understand how lawyers work.
There are four aspects to the cycle:
Matter Creation (prospecting, opening files, receipt of client records);
Matter Management (the bulk of time: manage client, matter relationships);
Matter Closure (declare, catalog records, Q & A etc.); and,
Matter Archival (safe destruction on expiration, monitoring dates).
Each of these areas ties to and is driven by records management, document management, knowledge management, litigation responsiveness, and litigation prepardness.
Question for the session is, "How do we add value through technology?" Dan provided a hypothetical framework for identifying and implementing improvements to the matter lifecycle business processes. Unfortunately, his presentation was fairly short on specifics (I understand that a firm partner who was going to present on actual changes made was going to be the co-presenter, but had canceled.).
Dan claimed that the potential business benefits of matter management include:
To find pain points, figure out who owns different aspects of the matter lifecycle.
What do people hate doing? What wastes lawyer time? What makes lawyers work after hours?Which processes are only partially automated, which technologies are disliked by lawyers or staff, which technologies does the firm not have.
Next identify issues and propose solutions. For instance, every function should have an "owner,"; or, lawyers haven't received enough training in a certain type of activity. Start with statistics or metrics to show the problem, because you'll need to identify how to fix it and how much it will cost.
What kinds of projects are practical opportunities to improve matter lifecycle management?
Practice-by-practice: securities document support, litigation docket, litigation support alignment, client / matter practice dashboards.
Enterprise-wide: matter centricity, DMS, Records Management, email, litigation preparedness.
Both: docket or schedule management; enterprise search; case management.
Lawyers are living in email. Firms need to control email and the documents lawyers work on. Large or medium firms should build resources that are focused on and support practice groups.
IT people can add a lot of value by evaluating business strategy and understanding business processes in the firm. Benchmark time, cost, value, quality, or risk, measure at the beginning, and then measure at the back end to see the improvement. Get a lot of feedback.
I asked for some examples of changes to the intake process. Dan said that big firms might want to set financial limits, practice areas, or target certain types of clients to improve profitability. An efficiency sell might draw on a metric for how fast a matter is opened. There also may be risk mitigation opportunities in the matter opening process (a business or credit check).
Sell efficiency generally through framing as a quality of life issue. You can also sell efficiency through discussion of reducing the nonbillable portion of the work, as by leveraging the administrative staff better.
PLAI is the largest group of legal-focused technology and business consultants in the U.S.
"Matter lifecycle" is a paradigm that helps us understand how lawyers work.
There are four aspects to the cycle:
Matter Creation (prospecting, opening files, receipt of client records);
Matter Management (the bulk of time: manage client, matter relationships);
Matter Closure (declare, catalog records, Q & A etc.); and,
Matter Archival (safe destruction on expiration, monitoring dates).
Each of these areas ties to and is driven by records management, document management, knowledge management, litigation responsiveness, and litigation prepardness.
Question for the session is, "How do we add value through technology?" Dan provided a hypothetical framework for identifying and implementing improvements to the matter lifecycle business processes. Unfortunately, his presentation was fairly short on specifics (I understand that a firm partner who was going to present on actual changes made was going to be the co-presenter, but had canceled.).
Dan claimed that the potential business benefits of matter management include:
- Improve profits;
- Acquire / retain clients;
- Reduce risk;
- Improve quality of life;
- Boost speed;
- Improve efficiency;
- Improve quality of life;
- Enhance legal skills; and,
- Reduce costs.
- Gather requirements;
- Look at pain points;
- Develop hypotheses; and,
- Test them.
To find pain points, figure out who owns different aspects of the matter lifecycle.
What do people hate doing? What wastes lawyer time? What makes lawyers work after hours?Which processes are only partially automated, which technologies are disliked by lawyers or staff, which technologies does the firm not have.
Next identify issues and propose solutions. For instance, every function should have an "owner,"; or, lawyers haven't received enough training in a certain type of activity. Start with statistics or metrics to show the problem, because you'll need to identify how to fix it and how much it will cost.
What kinds of projects are practical opportunities to improve matter lifecycle management?
Practice-by-practice: securities document support, litigation docket, litigation support alignment, client / matter practice dashboards.
Enterprise-wide: matter centricity, DMS, Records Management, email, litigation preparedness.
Both: docket or schedule management; enterprise search; case management.
Lawyers are living in email. Firms need to control email and the documents lawyers work on. Large or medium firms should build resources that are focused on and support practice groups.
IT people can add a lot of value by evaluating business strategy and understanding business processes in the firm. Benchmark time, cost, value, quality, or risk, measure at the beginning, and then measure at the back end to see the improvement. Get a lot of feedback.
I asked for some examples of changes to the intake process. Dan said that big firms might want to set financial limits, practice areas, or target certain types of clients to improve profitability. An efficiency sell might draw on a metric for how fast a matter is opened. There also may be risk mitigation opportunities in the matter opening process (a business or credit check).
Sell efficiency generally through framing as a quality of life issue. You can also sell efficiency through discussion of reducing the nonbillable portion of the work, as by leveraging the administrative staff better.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)