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 commoditization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commoditization. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Friday, October 15, 2010
KM and Legal Project Management
These are my notes from a presentation on knowledge management and legal project management (LPM). The first half contrasted the purposes, tools, challenges of LPM and KM. The second half of the presentation covered an impressive, albeit soon-to-be released, legal service platform for delivery of commoditized administrative complaint legal services. It combines an effective workflow with KM and information-sharing of a very high order.
(As with the previous post, the specific presenters and firms are not identified under the rules of this meeting.)
KM Contrasted with LPM
While KM seeks to provide actionable information, LPM tries to provide more structure to what lawyers already do. Both seek to deliver more efficiency, and use software or business process changes. KM seeks to develop content (I note that some content is a by-product of LPM). It is not clear who can or should do legal project management at law firms. The PM role should be embedded within practice areas. Where LPM requires lawyers to create a plan and follow that plan, KM offerings are typically more voluntary. LPM requires a change in organizational methods, it is not simply "more structure."
A commentator noted that some KM practitioners are concerned with quality and consistency as well as efficiency. A project manager will typically balance quality as one component against time and cost.
Some KM practitioners are already concerned with process improvement. It may be time to "grasp the nettle" and get involved with these efforts. LPM is an opportunity
Clients will pay for planning if it is positioned properly.
Process Improvement
The CFO at one firm has been asking the KM department to identify or provide tools and mechanisms for process improvement and LPM. KM feeds into LPM very well. LPM helps you map the process. KM's job is to build the tools that support the processes.
This firm has set up a workflow for firm administrators to track intake on a certain type of administrative complaints that are filed against some clients across the U.S. KM provides forms, wikis, and information specific to the matter at the time that the attorney is drafting the response to the complaint or interviewing witnesses.
The firm has "flex-time" attorneys that can handle these matters. Other attorneys are supervising the matters and conduct or review risk assessments. (It strikes me that this model is flexibly expandable).
The recommendations of both as to how to proceed need to match (or, I assume, the file is escalated to the supervisor's supervisor). They are tracking metrics for frequency and cost of settlement that can be assessed at the flex-time attorney or supervisor level. All the status and monitoring information is available to the client. The client can also track metrics such as claims by location or by client's manager.
This approach is very effective for commodity-level work. You can control for the variables. It combines case management and document assembly. Multiple levels of supervision are critical for the quality control. The tool is not in active use yet but was started in January 2010. It took them two months to conceptualize the project and present to the client. They used an interim database to capture information before the full tool is rolled out.
Essentially the client is outsourcing much of the internal work that used to be associated with these matters to the law firm. The tool and processes (and the staffing model) enable mass-scale commodity work to be done by a large firm, with quality control.
(As with the previous post, the specific presenters and firms are not identified under the rules of this meeting.)
KM Contrasted with LPM
While KM seeks to provide actionable information, LPM tries to provide more structure to what lawyers already do. Both seek to deliver more efficiency, and use software or business process changes. KM seeks to develop content (I note that some content is a by-product of LPM). It is not clear who can or should do legal project management at law firms. The PM role should be embedded within practice areas. Where LPM requires lawyers to create a plan and follow that plan, KM offerings are typically more voluntary. LPM requires a change in organizational methods, it is not simply "more structure."
A commentator noted that some KM practitioners are concerned with quality and consistency as well as efficiency. A project manager will typically balance quality as one component against time and cost.
Some KM practitioners are already concerned with process improvement. It may be time to "grasp the nettle" and get involved with these efforts. LPM is an opportunity
Clients will pay for planning if it is positioned properly.
Process Improvement
The CFO at one firm has been asking the KM department to identify or provide tools and mechanisms for process improvement and LPM. KM feeds into LPM very well. LPM helps you map the process. KM's job is to build the tools that support the processes.
This firm has set up a workflow for firm administrators to track intake on a certain type of administrative complaints that are filed against some clients across the U.S. KM provides forms, wikis, and information specific to the matter at the time that the attorney is drafting the response to the complaint or interviewing witnesses.
The firm has "flex-time" attorneys that can handle these matters. Other attorneys are supervising the matters and conduct or review risk assessments. (It strikes me that this model is flexibly expandable).
The recommendations of both as to how to proceed need to match (or, I assume, the file is escalated to the supervisor's supervisor). They are tracking metrics for frequency and cost of settlement that can be assessed at the flex-time attorney or supervisor level. All the status and monitoring information is available to the client. The client can also track metrics such as claims by location or by client's manager.
This approach is very effective for commodity-level work. You can control for the variables. It combines case management and document assembly. Multiple levels of supervision are critical for the quality control. The tool is not in active use yet but was started in January 2010. It took them two months to conceptualize the project and present to the client. They used an interim database to capture information before the full tool is rolled out.
Essentially the client is outsourcing much of the internal work that used to be associated with these matters to the law firm. The tool and processes (and the staffing model) enable mass-scale commodity work to be done by a large firm, with quality control.
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