I will be presenting again at the International Legal Technology Association Conference, this year held just outside of Washington DC at the Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center, August 23-27. ILTA is without peer because it is peer-organized, not vendor-dominated, and covers such an incredibly broad range of technology, leadership, strategy, and knowledge management issues. I'm really looking forward to it.
There is a fancy (if non-interactive) program guide that has all the details. A less-green .pdf is also available (don't print all 231 pages you tree-killer).
Enteprise 2.0
The first and most prominent session where I'm presenting is titled "Enterprise 2.0: What It Is and Why You Should Care," which accurately suggests that we'll be sprinting over the whole scope of Enterprise 2.0, from social collaborative software to mashups to cloud computing, in one hour and half session on Monday morning August 24 at 10:30 AM in "Maryland A" among the "Chesapeake Conference Rooms."
I'm presenting with Kevin O'Keefe, of leading law blog vendor Lexblog, veteran blogger himself and a social networking expert (on Twitter as kevinokeefe).
The E20 presentation proper is already up on the ilta conference site; the final version may be slightly different.
We're trying to highlight the origin of Enterprise 2.0 as a reaction or followup to the massive success of Web 2.0 technologies and businesses. I'll review some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 that led to this success and show how some of these same capabilities for creating, sharing, and alerting people to new knowledge can have tremendous value for law firms as business and knowledge enterprises.
We'll drill down into Enterprise 2.0 broken down into three areas; social collaborative platforms such as wikis, blogs, and social networking; mashups, which at ILTA are represented by sessions leveraging Sharepoint; and cloud computing.
It's great to be part of an introduction to these ideas, especially where most of the individual topics I have to essentially gloss over will be covered in depth in subsequent targeted sessions. I could (and have) spent an hour talking just about wikis, for instance, but the folks at Bracewell will be addressing their experience with PBWorks in depth along with Minter Ellison on their modifications to Sharepoint wikis at 2:30 on Monday.
Matter Management
I'll also be presenting on matter management on a panel with Kathrine Cain of Winston & Strawn and Lisa Kellar Gianakos of Reed Smith Wednesday 8/26 at 1:30 PM in "National Harbor 2 & 3." Essentially we'll be talking about ways to capture, search through, and report on matter information.
I'll be focusing on matter reporting (my firm has spent some effort in developing a sophisticated albeit complicated tool for reporting on matter information). I'm looking forward to hearing from Kathrine about how they have leveraged matter information and more for their experience search and from Lisa about their experience with exposing matter information in dashboards (a lot more attractive and accessible than the reports I work with!).
Showing posts with label matter management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label matter management. Show all posts
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
Article on Legal Matter Management published in ILTA White Paper
My article appropriately if plainly titled "Legal Matter Management" has been published as part on an otherwise outstanding edition of the annual International Legal Technology Association's Knowledge Management White Paper, titled "Knowledge Management: More Than the Sum of Its Parts."
In my article I address why matter management is important; the types of information captured shared and leveraged through matter management; and the possibilities for enhanced practice efficiency and more through a fully developed matter management system.
In my article I address why matter management is important; the types of information captured shared and leveraged through matter management; and the possibilities for enhanced practice efficiency and more through a fully developed matter management system.
Monday, February 2, 2009
LegalTech report--KM from a Practicing Attorney Perspective
- High value KM approaches
- KM tool evolution
- How KM helps attorneys practice more effectively
Scott Rechtschaffen, Managing Shareholder, Littler Mendelson
Rachelle Rennagel, Chief Knowledge Officer, Sheppard Mullin
This session conflicted with most of the "What is Twitter and How Can I Use It" session. LawyerKM and Mary Abraham deserted me for there, so I'm staying on the bridge.
Rachelle Rennagel
Rachelle wanted to present some thoughts and techniques that she's used to further KM at Sheppard Mullin. She provided some excellent strategy and tactics but did not go into much detail about the pieces of her particular projects.
What can we do given the reality of the economy?
Rachelle also provides litigation support and supervises e-discovery.
As CKO she does not "know everything" but she supports lawyers and other operational gruops. She "helps speak the geek" for the lawyers and "speak the lawyer" for the geek.
She has four mantras:
- Make firm-wide knowledge more accessible
- Train, train, train
- Cultural sensitivity and generational leverage
- Serve the law firm client by increasing efficiency and profitability
Work within existing firm processes. Gradually erode less efficient processes.
Two primary KM opportunities are supporting alternative billing arrangements, and attorney prospecting/opportunity management. "This is the year of client development."
KM can supply the answer to the question, "How do we make sure that we are making money under alternative arrangements?"
In this economy it is getting easier to find people to contribute to formal knowledge-sharing programs.
Sheppard Mullin is using client dashboards to push data to lawyers about clients and prospective clients.
There remain aspects of their current software (e.g., Sharepoint) that they haven't fully leveraged.
She gets on partner meeting schedules and presents on a topic they care about; she meets with the executive committee. She also does one-on-one meetings with lawyers to get them to understand email risks.
Rachelle thinks this is also a good time to be addressing risk management technology like records management, email management, and litigation holds. Attorneys use email to store advice to clients and more.
She is working with their electronic librarian to create an internal RSS feed for their lawyers.
They are working on "ShMutter" (Shepard Mullin internal Twitter).
Workflow is an amazing effective process. How do we automate new hire or matter intake processes? Spending time keying in the same information multiple times in the HR process is not efficient. She also works on contract management.
Rachelle appears to be taking the approach, be useful and helpful where she can, regardless of how close or far that activity is to traditional knowledge management activities. More power to her for that.
Scott Rechtschaffen
From my perspective, for a U.S. firm of its size, Littler has an unusually large and succesful knowledge management team. This may be due in part to their focus on labor & employment work, in which "traditional" KM organization and knowledge-gathering efforts may be more succesful. Their team's success is also no doubt due to the energy and acuity of the team leader.
Scott said that Littler attorneys are "scattered" throughout many offices in many states. They have 9 dedicated KM attorneys, including an attorney elevated to the partnership through the KM track. He does not expect hires to be tech-savvy.
He works most closely on IT/Web Development, client relations/marketing, and professional development. Clients are increasingly wanting to see depth of content as a way of establishing expertise.
Their KM attorneys are:
- Trainers
- KM concierge
- KM evangalists
In the concierge role, if an attorney is too busy to find something, or don't know how, the KM group does. One attorney is assigned as gatekeeper. They tracks number of attorney inquiries (3,000 last year).
Small low-hanging fruit can advance the case that KM should be a part of the operations (management?) of a law firm.
One example is an arbitrator database and an international lawyer database. Who knows X arbitrator in St. Louis?
They are using customized software to manage class action discovery (interviews) and generate interview templates. DealBuilder is being used to generate case-specific information off of a standardized form.
Littler Mendelson has a large subscription-based client-facing KM project on a number of employment law toics; it includes action items. It works because clients know it's reliable, they aren't paying by the hour, and clients can brand it themselves. The KM group also publishes hard-copy and CD on international employment and labor law (and also guides to particular states). They put out about 15,000 pages of content all told. Their class action practice just published a book. It's a great tool for the practice. He would like to eventually move some of these to a wiki. They also do "ASAP" client alerts. There are four firm-sponsored blogs.
Littler Mendelson was an early contributor to Legal On-Ramp. KM attorneys act as mediators and engagers, alerting attorneys to particular on-line conversations relevant to their practice.
LM has an alumni site. It is interactive--they run MCLE programs for alumni through this site.
KM can help enable quick and accurate responses to client inquiries.
Attorneys want to find people with particular expertise. As firm grows it's harder to know who is the resident firm expert on particular topics.
Their matter page / team site (built on Sharepoint 2007) integrates RSS feeds. Partners wanted a box to identify the objective / strategy of the matter in a few sentences. It also shows the (sharepoint) task lists, a piece of functionality I've been investigating.
Their document management search integrates Recommind and West KM. The people / expertise search integrates DMS documents, bios, narrative time entries, and industry information from Elite.
They will be requiring that any event with 20+ attorneys to be listed on a firm-wide calendar.
Scott's grasp of metrics and results show that he has no difficulty in proving value to his partners and his firm.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
ILTA Conference Report, Day 2: Innovative Use of Technology in the Law Department
This session was ably moderated by David Rohde of Baker Robbins (he got the heck out of the way.). Each of the three case studes was interesting and effectively presented. More like this ILTA!!
David introduced with a discussion of the drivers of innovative technology, including:
Pfizer has 1000 outside counsel in many countries, spends $500 million in legal fees per year. They use a matter management system, TimeConnect, Hyperion Planning for budgeting, and also IP Master for patent / trademark management. They were having a hard time getting reports out from each system and a harder time reporting across different system; it was taking days to get one report out.
A data warehouse keeps information from a set of transactions and allows for quick reporting. You will need to spend the time to develop a good up-front plan as to how the data will tie together.
The application was developed by Oracle, and Pfizer also used Informatica for most Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) routines and Business Objects for report, dashboard, and ad-hoc development. Oracle "leverages a typical star schema with a small number of fact tables linked to various hierarchical dimension tables to support drill down via dimensions such as date/time, department, geography, patent family, matter, etc."
Results
The system they developed allows for monthly or quarterly canned reports going across multiple systems. They initially promised to create any report that was needed, but after more than 200 reports were developed in the first month, they learned to keep the number of available reports down to a couple of dozen that people will want to use.
The executives wanted the ability to see graphic dashboards that would identify problems and allow them to drill down into the data behind problem areas. Ad hoc reporting has been used because the reporting tool is simple to use. People have been using the new reporting system rather than the underlying source systems because the reports are easier to generate there. Paralegals, administrative staff, and some attorneys use the system.
Liberty Mutual
Mike's group handles 1600 law firms that are sending e-billings, but they still received 10,000 page bills, and up to 6,000 paper invoices per month. They wanted to automate the paper billing process, which they did by setting up a business process that converts the paper to image and manages the workflow of the billing, exception, and payment process.
The new system was built using internal IT resources, following a six-sigma review of pain points in the billing process.
The technology used Documentum WebTop to capture key metadata or attributes of the invoices and Adobe Acrobat Standard (6.0 Professional) to comment and otherwise handle the invoices.
The paper invoices are shipped to their pdf vendor with a bar-coded cover sheet that is supposed to indicate what is in each box. The vendor destroys the invoices after 90 days so Liberty Mutual doesn't have to store it. LM also gained a lot of floor space from eliminating office paper shelves.
The new system includes a help-desk style contact or reporting system that identifies the chain of events on a particular bill including logging calls from firms about bills.
Speakers were:
- Peter Vissicchio, Business Technology Senior Manager at Pfizer.
- Risa Schwartz, head of Knowledge Management at Cisco Systems.
- Mike Russell, Strategic Legal Technologist at Liberty Mutual Insurance.
David introduced with a discussion of the drivers of innovative technology, including:
- need for cost savings,
- decline and obsolescense of legacy systems,
- new business needs,
- new regulatory needs such as the FRCP,
- risk management,
- usability improvements, and
- drive to continually improve business processes (Six Sigma etc.)
Pfizer has 1000 outside counsel in many countries, spends $500 million in legal fees per year. They use a matter management system, TimeConnect, Hyperion Planning for budgeting, and also IP Master for patent / trademark management. They were having a hard time getting reports out from each system and a harder time reporting across different system; it was taking days to get one report out.
A data warehouse keeps information from a set of transactions and allows for quick reporting. You will need to spend the time to develop a good up-front plan as to how the data will tie together.
The application was developed by Oracle, and Pfizer also used Informatica for most Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) routines and Business Objects for report, dashboard, and ad-hoc development. Oracle "leverages a typical star schema with a small number of fact tables linked to various hierarchical dimension tables to support drill down via dimensions such as date/time, department, geography, patent family, matter, etc."
Results
The system they developed allows for monthly or quarterly canned reports going across multiple systems. They initially promised to create any report that was needed, but after more than 200 reports were developed in the first month, they learned to keep the number of available reports down to a couple of dozen that people will want to use.
The executives wanted the ability to see graphic dashboards that would identify problems and allow them to drill down into the data behind problem areas. Ad hoc reporting has been used because the reporting tool is simple to use. People have been using the new reporting system rather than the underlying source systems because the reports are easier to generate there. Paralegals, administrative staff, and some attorneys use the system.
Liberty Mutual
Mike's group handles 1600 law firms that are sending e-billings, but they still received 10,000 page bills, and up to 6,000 paper invoices per month. They wanted to automate the paper billing process, which they did by setting up a business process that converts the paper to image and manages the workflow of the billing, exception, and payment process.
The new system was built using internal IT resources, following a six-sigma review of pain points in the billing process.
The technology used Documentum WebTop to capture key metadata or attributes of the invoices and Adobe Acrobat Standard (6.0 Professional) to comment and otherwise handle the invoices.
The business process entials 3 steps, intake, scanning and review / pay. The firm scans in all invoices into pdfs and imports them into Documentum. People are using dual and triple monitors for better switching between pdfs and Excel tracking sheets.
Documentum view breaks out key data about bills. It cannot generate checks due to SOX issues.The paper invoices are shipped to their pdf vendor with a bar-coded cover sheet that is supposed to indicate what is in each box. The vendor destroys the invoices after 90 days so Liberty Mutual doesn't have to store it. LM also gained a lot of floor space from eliminating office paper shelves.
The new system includes a help-desk style contact or reporting system that identifies the chain of events on a particular bill including logging calls from firms about bills.
The system also includes a help-desk style contact or reporting system that identifies the chain of events on a particular bill including logging calls from firms about bills.
The goal was to automate the workflow as much as possible. While they didn't invent any new technology, they twisted their document management system to treat bills as documents.
Lessons Learned
Thorough process-mapping is necessary and effective. Focus on the staff's pain points.
Cisco
Mark Chandler is a real proponent of using technology innovatively. Cisco has 230 legal staff in 72 countries. They have 130 lawyers in the Silicon valley area.
They use DealBuilder, and have also developed a home-grown contract management system. This system has 26 guides for major contract types, formerly in paper binders.
The Cisco attorneys needed to talk to each other. They were in so many different time zones that phone calls didn't work, and email traffic wasn't getting into the resource.
Cisco is seeking to move to a more collaborative, less command-and-control system.
The solution to the issue was to build a collaborative system akin to a bulletin board that allowed comments and questions. They moved the information into a "Legal Exchange Collaborative" bulletin board system. Users can post questions in the particular section and choose to email one or more groups. Conflicts between comments are allowed. Incorrect comments can be removed.
Use has been high, particularly in the sales group where the VP mandated its use.
Unfortunately the emails do not currently contain the question or the subject, just a link. This has posed difficulty with off-line or airplane use. They want to have email comments flow right into the bulletin board. They are considering using wikis for this purpose.
Risa does not believe that wikis can handle back-and-forth conversation very well. [She should also be aware of Vic Nishi's Orchestra product for this purpose.]. She does not know if the new approach will work. She will be happy to have an ILTA webinar on legal wikis. Some of the wikis developed at Cisco look like highly functional web pages. Wikis have also helped people develop flexible and quickly updated agendas for international meetings.
Risa's success in KM projects has come from recognizing how attorneys are currently working and adapting any changes to conform with those existing methods.
Attorneys can have a hard time publicly posing questions because "they are shy" (and don't want to appear uninformed). Risa tried to raise awareness of the 20-50 questions per month via a newsletter for KM that included indexed links to the newest questions and answers. Cisco has learned that attorneys have enhanced their reputation in the organization through learned responses to questions.
Risa mentioned that she had developed a dedicated referrals database at Wilson Sonsini. [We have something comparable at Goodwin Procter for real estate local counsel, local counsel, litigation experts, translators, and other outside resources.]
Lessons Learned
"If you build it, they will come" does not work for attorneys. Bring the right attorneys to the table at the outset and ask them, "tell me use-case scenarios" [what you need and how you would use it]. Attorneys and administrative staff need to be sitting near IT people even with KM people around to translate. Secretaries have great suggestions and are great prosletyzers.
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.
ILTA Day 2, Session 1 (August 21, 2007): Economics of Law Firms
Speakers were Bruce McEwan, a very well-known law firm economist and author of Adam Smith, Esq., and John Alber, KM Partner for the forward-looking firm Bryan Cave.
This session started with CISCO GC Mark Chandler's statement on failures of current economic model:
"The present system is leading to unhappy lawyers and unhappy clients."
Current Market conditions:
This service was presented as an example of client-driven change. It is driven by AmLaw100 firms Orrick, Pillsbury, and Baker & McKenzie (and corporations like Cisco or Sun) and is designed to provide answers to fairly generic questions. It is a work-in-progress, and has social networking features. If you log on, it is presence-enabled, so the user can see if anyone who is a friend is online.
Law Firm Responses To Economic Conditions
· Technology;
· Some growth in fixed fee engagements, risk sharing arrangements;
· Creative technology responses including increased use of business analytics tools to refine pricing, staffing models.
IT people can help lawyers start to understand economics of the practice.
"Trade Zone";
This application is a decision tree addressing international trade issues. While it cost cost $200K /year to run and keep up-to-date, Bryan Cave obtained all of the clients' business, about $1.5 million a year.
Bryan Cave also implemented a Redwood-designed "Attorney Dashboard."
This business analytics package lets a partner plan or budget an engagement by selecting available lawyers, and by automatically calculating rates and leverage, shows profit margins depending on the selection of who does the work. The Attorney Dashboard takes every dollar of expense and compensation and allocates to every fee earner to generate a gross margin.
For instance, an "unleveraged" deal where are a partner did 30 hours of work and the associate 70 can be directly compared with a leveraged deal where are the partner works 10 hours and the associate 90. The margin doubles when the work is leveraged.
Many lawyers assume that if the partner does most of the work, they'll make more money. But the reverse is true.
The Dashboard has apparently functioned as an effective training tool as well as a line business tool. John Alber reported that Bryan Cave's rollout of the Attorney Dashboard has had a measurable increase in leverage, and hence firm profits, among partners who have used it.
If attorneys understand the economics of practicing law, they will have a better access to fixed fee arrangements.
This session started with CISCO GC Mark Chandler's statement on failures of current economic model:
"The present system is leading to unhappy lawyers and unhappy clients."
Current Market conditions:
- Average margin is high 30s;
- Clients are thinning the ranks of firms they choose to hire;
- Creation of very small panels;
- RFPs and tenders are becoming routine;
- Due to extraordinary price and budget pressure, clients are driving change;
- Clients are starting to band together on issues like associate compensation (for instance, Credit Suisse will not pay bills from 1st year associates); and,
- Big clients are starting to reduce the number of firms they work with from 100 to 50 or 20.
Bruce believes that the economics of the business may completely change soon. For instance, two Australian law firms recently announced that they are going public (Slater & Gordon went public May 21, 2007; see also Bruce's own interview with its managing partner, Andrew Grech. ).
LegalOnRamp.comThis service was presented as an example of client-driven change. It is driven by AmLaw100 firms Orrick, Pillsbury, and Baker & McKenzie (and corporations like Cisco or Sun) and is designed to provide answers to fairly generic questions. It is a work-in-progress, and has social networking features. If you log on, it is presence-enabled, so the user can see if anyone who is a friend is online.
Law Firm Responses To Economic Conditions
· Technology;
· Some growth in fixed fee engagements, risk sharing arrangements;
· Creative technology responses including increased use of business analytics tools to refine pricing, staffing models.
IT people can help lawyers start to understand economics of the practice.
"Trade Zone";
This application is a decision tree addressing international trade issues. While it cost cost $200K /year to run and keep up-to-date, Bryan Cave obtained all of the clients' business, about $1.5 million a year.
Bryan Cave also implemented a Redwood-designed "Attorney Dashboard."
This business analytics package lets a partner plan or budget an engagement by selecting available lawyers, and by automatically calculating rates and leverage, shows profit margins depending on the selection of who does the work. The Attorney Dashboard takes every dollar of expense and compensation and allocates to every fee earner to generate a gross margin.
For instance, an "unleveraged" deal where are a partner did 30 hours of work and the associate 70 can be directly compared with a leveraged deal where are the partner works 10 hours and the associate 90. The margin doubles when the work is leveraged.
Many lawyers assume that if the partner does most of the work, they'll make more money. But the reverse is true.
The Dashboard has apparently functioned as an effective training tool as well as a line business tool. John Alber reported that Bryan Cave's rollout of the Attorney Dashboard has had a measurable increase in leverage, and hence firm profits, among partners who have used it.
If attorneys understand the economics of practicing law, they will have a better access to fixed fee arrangements.
Friday, August 17, 2007
ILTA Conference Report, Session KM 2; Stories from Client-Facing KM Implementers
Clint Moore has been with Littler Mendelson for 5 years as "Manager of KM Technologies." 8 KM attorneys in his firm, he is a technologist, looking for 1 more; 7 web developers. KM is not part of IT, they work closely with the library. The KM attorneys have a revenue goal, which they meet through selling subscription tools to "Littler Monitor" and Littler GPS.
The "Littler Monitor" service provides a method to monitor wage legislation and regulation in 50 states; provides action items and an indication of whether legislation is pending.
Littler recently launched Littler GPS, 50-state surveys on discrimination, employment benefits, unemployment, and so forth. Littler also has a collective bargain agreement service. Two models of subscriptions--17 of most popular surveys, or they can pick some they care. It takes 40-100 hours.
Chard Ergun is Manager of Practice Management Systems at White & Case, a firm with 2,135 attorneys world-wide and 38 office in 23 countries. White & Case has PSLs in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, "Knowledge Resource Attorneys" in Americas. White & Case has a system that tracks model documents called "Knowledge Bank; the KRAs are part of practice groups and are responsible for "sanitizing" or cleaning up monitors. The external resource is called "White & Case Universe," an application that "assists clients in implementing and coordinating their compensation and benefits, global employment, and labor strategies around the world." Access is subscription-based; there is a free public section including a demo. A built-in workflow process ensures that only partner-approved content gets posted. Firm attorneys can subscribe to particulary types of content or regional activity. The application was developed in coordination with clients. There is some "push": clients get notice of new content directly from the site. Site also leads to client-specific extranets.
Menus of resources are country-specific and are managed by the attorneys. Attorneys were nervous about sharing everything because they feared clients weren't going to call them. It didn't work out that way and in fact led the clients to the right attorney more quickly.
Fiona Gifford is International Development Manager at Freshfields. She worked at White & Case as an arbitration lawyer, and is now on Freshfields' central KM team. Europe has a large number of knowledge lawyers. Freshfields has an integrated KM and business development function. 80 knowledge management lawyers, with 5-10 years client experience, as well as 70 knowledge management assistants, organized by practice groups and sector groups. Total related staff is over 400, including library and information services. Most KM teams are based in practice groups, but there are also central KM staff who help spread knowledge across and between offices. Freshfields reorganized recently due to extensive overlap with business developments in areas such as Client Alerts and Pitches. They combined the two into a "KBD" (knowledge and business development) department. What we see as adding value is what clients expect "at 600 pounds an hour."
The KBD department is treated as a business service---they have KM business plans that are supposed to align with the overall business goals of the different practice areas. Training department is folded into KM at Freshfields.
I appreciated the opportunity to meet Fiona after the formal session. The London firms have so much more advanced KM groups in terms of numbers of personnel and resources that it is always interesting to hear what is happening with them. Fiona opined (based on her own experience as a PSL lawyer) that part of why KM has become KBD may be that the PSL lawyers, unlike the centralized business development staff, were very close to the practice areas and in some cases the clients, and so were in a position to intimately know exactly what the practice areas in particular offices needed.
Client facing KM is in three strains, current awareness, client training & seminars, and KM consulting,
Freshfields produced about 150 Client bulletins. They also put out newsletters, extranets, and online services. Clients really care about format, and try to tailor information to show how it affects a client's particular needs. Some sites like "FSnet" provide financial services information. Some clients have encouraged Freshfields to work collaboratively with other firms (example: banks) in a "BLT."
Freshfields will do tailored training for business and legal teams. First, the relationship partner needs to ask the client what they want.
Clients with large KM teams or legal departments are also looking for help with their own KM.
Freshfields has tried to bring in KMLs into U.S. offices but client expectations have dampened that effort.
The "Littler Monitor" service provides a method to monitor wage legislation and regulation in 50 states; provides action items and an indication of whether legislation is pending.
Littler recently launched Littler GPS, 50-state surveys on discrimination, employment benefits, unemployment, and so forth. Littler also has a collective bargain agreement service. Two models of subscriptions--17 of most popular surveys, or they can pick some they care. It takes 40-100 hours.
Chard Ergun is Manager of Practice Management Systems at White & Case, a firm with 2,135 attorneys world-wide and 38 office in 23 countries. White & Case has PSLs in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, "Knowledge Resource Attorneys" in Americas. White & Case has a system that tracks model documents called "Knowledge Bank; the KRAs are part of practice groups and are responsible for "sanitizing" or cleaning up monitors. The external resource is called "White & Case Universe," an application that "assists clients in implementing and coordinating their compensation and benefits, global employment, and labor strategies around the world." Access is subscription-based; there is a free public section including a demo. A built-in workflow process ensures that only partner-approved content gets posted. Firm attorneys can subscribe to particulary types of content or regional activity. The application was developed in coordination with clients. There is some "push": clients get notice of new content directly from the site. Site also leads to client-specific extranets.
Menus of resources are country-specific and are managed by the attorneys. Attorneys were nervous about sharing everything because they feared clients weren't going to call them. It didn't work out that way and in fact led the clients to the right attorney more quickly.
Fiona Gifford is International Development Manager at Freshfields. She worked at White & Case as an arbitration lawyer, and is now on Freshfields' central KM team. Europe has a large number of knowledge lawyers. Freshfields has an integrated KM and business development function. 80 knowledge management lawyers, with 5-10 years client experience, as well as 70 knowledge management assistants, organized by practice groups and sector groups. Total related staff is over 400, including library and information services. Most KM teams are based in practice groups, but there are also central KM staff who help spread knowledge across and between offices. Freshfields reorganized recently due to extensive overlap with business developments in areas such as Client Alerts and Pitches. They combined the two into a "KBD" (knowledge and business development) department. What we see as adding value is what clients expect "at 600 pounds an hour."
The KBD department is treated as a business service---they have KM business plans that are supposed to align with the overall business goals of the different practice areas. Training department is folded into KM at Freshfields.
I appreciated the opportunity to meet Fiona after the formal session. The London firms have so much more advanced KM groups in terms of numbers of personnel and resources that it is always interesting to hear what is happening with them. Fiona opined (based on her own experience as a PSL lawyer) that part of why KM has become KBD may be that the PSL lawyers, unlike the centralized business development staff, were very close to the practice areas and in some cases the clients, and so were in a position to intimately know exactly what the practice areas in particular offices needed.
Client facing KM is in three strains, current awareness, client training & seminars, and KM consulting,
Freshfields produced about 150 Client bulletins. They also put out newsletters, extranets, and online services. Clients really care about format, and try to tailor information to show how it affects a client's particular needs. Some sites like "FSnet" provide financial services information. Some clients have encouraged Freshfields to work collaboratively with other firms (example: banks) in a "BLT."
Freshfields will do tailored training for business and legal teams. First, the relationship partner needs to ask the client what they want.
Clients with large KM teams or legal departments are also looking for help with their own KM.
- Secondments,
- Strategic consultancy,
- Tools & processes (as by having a KM attorney audit), and
- Technology and systems.
Freshfields has tried to bring in KMLs into U.S. offices but client expectations have dampened that effort.
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