ILTA Day 3: Email Management Using iManage

This was an interesting session devoted to email management success stories with firms using iManage. It highlighted three examples from different size firms.

Small Firm

Maritta Terrell is in a small firm in Austin, TX, about 85 users. [She is very engaging and I bet is a great trainer!] Some partners who had serious pain around Outlook performance and email folders led to implementation of a DMS. They now have 8.5 and set up MCC. Test test and re-test was key.

The Outlook speed problem led to some ideas. They had a contest with 1st and 2nd prizes. Secretarial help really shrunk Inboxes. "Stump the IT team" contest. Both approaches leveraged lawyer's competitive.

Training courses included:

• How to clean up inbox
• Preclass videos on intranet
• Regular classroom classes
• Email management

They also had "Room Service" classes--they put out a training menu like a hotel, they could ask trainers to come to them, even after hours "so no-one else would know."

They also sent around a poster with three points. You must file client email in a client/matter folder, administrative email in an admin folder, and everything else (is deleted or) stored in a personal folder.

Success measurement--email boxes reduced by 19%, may go to another 5% lower.

Mid-Size Firm

Fernando Monteleone ("Monty") works for Robinson & Cole.

Moved from DocsOpen in an April to September timeframe. They have a retention policy, all inbound messages filed or deleted within 60 days.

They chose to disallow flat filing (everything in a workspace). Send / Received dates are preserved in filing. The author in the DMS is that of the email author, not the filer. They created personal workspaces automatically.

Tried to keep folder design simple, about eight categories for litigation and another eight for business matters.

Their customization included a tool to reclassify matters, and run integrity checks. A utility created a project workspace with members listed and documents.

They went live over Labor Day Weekend, got to 8.5 by February. Filing 2500-5000 emails a day, half a million since the beginning of the year. Association of an email folder with a workspace in iManage was the largest method of filing.

Foley & Lardner

Dana Moore is the "Records & Information Compliance Manager."

Email became a risk management issue. Exchange servers were bursting at the seams. Under their RM policy, the electronic version of the email is the official version. They realized email needed to be part of the matter. It allowed document holds, litigation discovery, and file transfers to go smoothly.

They set up an ERM Validation Committee and a pilot group. 10% of the attorneys wanted to participate. They set up a communication plan from the top down. They were moving operations offsite.
They created an "Email Archive Repository." It's a DMS repository that only a few have access to. [Not great from a KM perspective].

F & L had a long implementation period. First communications in June 2007 were around "how much email can you delete?" Did lots of deleting for $50 gift cards.

Email really locked down--old email had to be retrieved through records managers, who kept it out of Outlook.

Filing is now a requirement--all in Inbox or Sent over 180 days deleted. The Delete box is on a seven day aged, with a 2 GB size limit. They do not delete from sub-folders.

There was a lot of bulk filing without classification, into their general personal numbers. It was still refindable even through others couldn't. People didn't follow folder naming conventions. There was some refusal and denial. Training was not required. She thinks mandatory training may not be impossible.

Have filed 27 million emails since 2007. All servers are centralized. Filing is a way of life for most.

Questions:

Some attorneys at Maritta's firm who can barely work with Word file email. Such attorneys had another set up the email filing links.

At Foley, going to the 180 day rule really helped adoption. The most appreciation is coming from the professional responsibility partners and the people looking for email as a result of litigation involving the firm.

They all analyzed how everyone managed their emails and adopted email filing to that behavior. They had to understand how many attorneys worked remotely.

ILTA 2010--Email Management Panel

I am returning to ILTA Conference, this year held in Las Vegas, and appearing on two panels. In both we'll be addressing a subject that I've been working with a lot this year. In this post I'll address email management, a huge KM concern.

Attorneys increasingly live in Outlook (sorry Lotus Notesians) and use it not just for tasks and team communications but to transmit key documents to clients and opposing counsel. Where those documents did not originate in client/matter-centric document management systems, vital context about those documents, and the documents themselves, are potentially lost as a searcheable treasure trove in the firm's collective information pool. While I believe that there are better ways of doing many things done by email (such collaboration, knowledge-sharing, broadcasting), the email dragon for client work is here to stay, not slay, and there is no getting around that. Making the email repository--or at least the client file portion of it--matter-centric is therefore a vital KM task. Matter-centric email should also go a long way to addressing the refindability and accessibility of email to the working attorney, an issue that many of them consider a major "pain point."

It's not just KM. IT also struggles with the sheer volume and size of email; and, it drives records and risk management people crazy.

On Tuesday morning at 9 AM, Ironwood 2, I'll be moderating a panel titled "Dreams Can Come True: E-mail Management Success Stories." Slides are already available. The panelists come from varied technological and business backgrounds, but have three intriguing success stories. They have started to accomplish the goal of creating a matter-centric environment in strikingly different ways, with none of them going the "plain vanilla" route of implementing iManage's "WorkSite Email Management."

The presenters are:

• Ana Schuett, Practice Technology Support Manager - Hunton & Williams
• Chris Romano, CIO, Ward and Smith, P.A.
• Derek Schueren, Vice President of Business Development (Co-Founder)- Recommind

Hunton & Williams, a large firm, has leveraged Baker Robbins' FastFiler tool in conjunction with Autonomy's iManage document management system. Ward & Smith, a mid-sized firm, has implemented cloud-based email management through NetDocuments. And Recommind's Decisiv tool, which I believe can be implemented with or without a document management system like iManage, offers predictive filing and improved organization of email threads.

I hope you can join us!

iManage and Information Governance Strategy

I'm republishing this post after some glitches with my blogging account. Apologies for any double hits on RSS feeds etc.

This session (moderated by Keith Lipman) featured Laura Bandrowsky of Duane Morris and Elizabeth Ellis (head of KM at Canadian firm Torys). It was very useful to hear the experiences of firms that have adopted matter-centric email filing (using iManage's document management system) for some time and are moving to the next stage of information governance, beyond "just" the client file.

Duane Morris has a very "locked down" approach to information governance where they prohibit USB drives, CD-ROMs, and export of .pst files. Torys is much more open.
Records management, risk management, and maintaining integrity of documents are concerns for client documents. Duane Morris locks down the folder structure.

For legal or administrative departments there is more flexibility.

Torys' motto is "a place for everything and everything in its place." The place is by default the document management system. Everything should be in the document management system.

Explaining the strategy is not sufficient to obtain adoption. It requires telling stories about successes and failures of strategies.

ESI should be managed outside the document management system.

The initial focus of their matter-centric filing systems was the client file. Then Torys turned its attention to the administrative system. Everyone in the firm can currently create workspaces although this may be changing.

Firm workspaces are organized by practice area or department. People have personal workspaces as well. Liz doesn't believe that personal documents should go on a personal drive because it's a good habit to file everything into the document management system. Look at the documents you have in your firm and have workspaces to go with them.

One practice area had a six-page description of how to manage their workspaces. This was probably not effective.

At one of these firms a document that was practically speaking inaccessible on an "H" drive (and had to be retyped) led to a strong message from a leading partner to his colleagues about putting documents in the document management system.

There was a useful story that encouraged people to put documents in the right place.
Duane Morris created artificial matter numbers for the practice areas and associated a "type of law" with each.

The more unique metadata you have about your workspaces, the easier it is to show them in Sharepoint. It should be easy to find all workspaces for a given practice area.

Keith asked "Where is the future of email archiving and maintaining complete client files?"

Laura wants to have a system that recognizes that a particular email is from a client and flag it for later review to make sure that it is filed in the DMS.

Liz says "managing email gives me a big headache." Think of different scenarios and events that you may have to deal with. Why are you trying to manage the email? No one has really figured this out.

You have to anticipate litigation against the firm. You have to anticipate the client asking for the file. Look at your personal email management. Can you find an email sent 10 years ago?

We are still not in a position to enforce a policy of filing email in the document management system. Don't just focus on client-matter email as there is a lot of other email that is really important.

The send-and-file utility and hammering home the lawyer's fiduciary obligation to preserve the client file are both important to adoption.

Duane Morris has become very collaborative with many cross-office matters. They are filing 18-24,000 emails a day. They have a trigger on a certain email archive size over which the partner gets a called in which the message about preparing for litigation is delivered.

It's better to make email management implementation prospective only rather than asking attorneys to file everything going back. The message was "if you want to go back and file you can."

Have they advocated for human support for email filing?

At Duane Morris the biggest need for that is in the lateral partner / attorney context. Duane Morris assigned people to help with the transition. They ran a provisioning program with preexisting matter/client workspaces, or in "to be filed" workspaces so that they could identify important email from their old firm.

At Torys there is no objection to administrative staff having access to email inbox. But then how are you managing confidential communications? The translation to electronic has meant a loss of some context and the assistants has less idea what is happening with the file.

How do we train lawyers to file correspondence? Laura says we need a shortcut key for inserting client / matter tag into subject line.

Keith believes that all lawyers are risk-averse.

Does the rate of subpoenas and litigation hold implementations effect governance? Yes, if information is not well organized and you have to look in multiple locations (file share, custodian's .pst files, DMS). One firm estimated that they were spending 30 hours of IT cost *per hold* at roughly $100/ hour. There is a similar cost when lawyer or client leaves the firm. A well-organized collection will take 80% less time. Some firms are up to 2 subpoenas a week.

File Shares

Inventory shared drives to see what doesn't go away. The inventory is partly for a business continuity perspective (it is not backed up the same way as the DMS). Is the initial reason for including that information in the DMS still valid?

Privacy

How do you manage information that could be useful for KM purposes or KM collections? Enhanced privacy concerns may require people to remove names from KM collections.

Massachusetts law is driving privacy compliance at Torys as it appears to be the strictest available. You have to assess where all of your information is stored (which is a good exercise in any event).

Paper

Paper files are much smaller but still should be stored offsite at the end of a matter. There is increasing digitization.

Exposing Email in a Portal

I asked if in the panelists' experience exposing matter email in portals or some other way had helpd increase adoption of email filing. Liz said that it's all about "how many clicks."

People like being in Outlook and the ability to batch-move email is very important. The email folder synching with the workspace is really important because lawyers are really comfortable in Outlook. Keith said that in implementations he has seen portal exposure has not significantly increased filing.

Ark Conference, Is KM converging with Litigation Support, Risk Management, and Client Services?

Moderator:
Craig Carpenter, VP Legal Solutions and GC, Recommind

Panel:

Brent E. Kidwell, Chief Knowledge Counsel, Jenner & Block LLP
Stacie Capshaw, Firmwide Records Manager, Kirkland & Ellis LLP
Joshua Fireman, Vice-President Development and General Counsel, ii3

Here are a few key points from this panel of experienced KM and Records folks.

KM As Mediators and Glue

One type of “convergence” is the role KM can play in mediating or “glueing” together different administrative and legal groups. In many firms KM has had a role as the “lawyers who talk to IT,” or at least as people whose job it is to facilitate communications between lawyers and IT managers at law firms. By virtue of their expertise with improving knowledge and information handling, KM often has projects with many different administrative groups, and can lead the discussions between the different functional areas. I have certainly found that KM has a broad range of contacts and activities compared to other administrative departments at my firm, particularly as we start to leverage Enterprise 2.0 technologies like wikis and blogs.

KM can serve this role better once it has obtained the trust of other groups through successful programs.

Brent gave the example of office moves. KM can play a role because it can assist in the transition away from paper files.

KM and E-Mail

Email is the most pressing issue in records management, because of the immense volume and significance of the content. Stacie believes that email is a “necessary evil”, like dial tone, but that it also saps lawyers’ productivity. KM should address better email behavior. Joshua said that we need to break down all forms of communication, including email, into streams, and then figure out how can you syndicate the information. How would I like to use this information? How would I like to know about the relationships? The value and utility of email should drive how we are looking at it.

Strategic & Stealth KM

“Stealth KM” was another topic of discussion. Some panel members approached projects without needing to brand or label them as KM projects. One audience member chimed in and bluntly addressed the need to “have a strong partner in your corner when the chips are down” and argued instead for highly visible KM. Such a partner is not likely to be a user of KM tools; they will base their opinions on those of the mid-level and senior associates.

Another excellent strategic point made by another audience member is that KM should be strategically focused on those practice areas that are growing, rather than those where adoption may be easy.

Interwoven E-Mail Management; Monday at 2:30

Title and Session Link: Interwoven E-Mail Management — Tailoring Processes and Technology to Fit Your Firm


Description:

When it comes to e-mail management, one size does not fit all. A firm’s size, number of offices and practice area concentration all need to be considered when email management processes and systems are being developed. Our panel of member firms of varying sizes and demographics discuss how they approached development of an effective e-mail management strategy suited to the unique aspects of their firm. Whether your firm is large and spread around the globe or small and in one location, you will learn how different firms have tackled this important issue.

Speaker(s):


Brie Stampe — Traveling Coaches, Inc.

Nancy Lio — Torkin Manes Cohen Arbus LLP;
Karen Tausher — Davis Wright Tremaine LLP
Fritz Sassine (fill-in)-- Hunton & Williams


My Take:

I'm interested in this one because, once my firm establishes solid Interwoven search, we will be moving to "matter-centricity" or email foldering. MCC entails incorporating email into the Interwoven document management system in matter-specific workspaces.

This was an informal panel discussion; the smallish room was jammed. The speakers were up on high stools on a dias, but connected well with the audience. The sessions was quite informative. Hearing from people at law firms who have been actually implemented email management is really invaluable.

Nancy

Her firm has 1 location, 175 lawyers. Their biggest challenge was storage capacity, with file stores all over the place. Ended up "visualized."

Policy: Set Outlook mailbox limit of 150 MB, removed "Save As" option, filing is pretty much mandatory. Lawyers don't want to file emails, so assistants have to have rights to file email. The problem is that having the assistants file changes the "author" metadata. Some lawyers bcc their assistant on every email. Have enabled duplicate email notification, but duplicates still go in. They should have done an email retention policy earlier (3 months for Inbox.)

They don't support .pst files.

The entire document store is 1.7 million documents, 1.2 million of which are email. Lawyers don't want to file because they can't get to their stuff as quickly. We need to get them to search more and learn how to search well. (The only loss of functionality on filing is that reminders on emails are lost).

Attorneys have difficult navigating hundreds of shortcuts in matters list. They stored a large volume of stuff in the personal email workspaces (their needs to be an automatic way to drop off matters as they age).

Buy-in was not difficult, because they could point to advantages of centralization. Outlook integration was critical; they needed drag-and-drop capability for email filing. Full-text searching in emails and attachments was also important.

Roll-out entailed a firm-wide party with food and a demo, and an open training session. Had some lunch-and-learns. Administrative staff got hands-on sessions. The small insurance group piloted the DMS, and then they rolled out MCC to the rest of the firm.

Karen Tausher

Her firm has 505 attorneys, 9 offices, 1 in Shanghai. They rolled out MCC in April-May 2008.
Their biggest challenge was attorneys wanted to have email both searcheable, filed, and easy to use.

In advance of the rollout, they fostered a"best practice" of filing email in Outlook folders.

They've had success in filing emails. After the rollout, they had 3.2 emails per document, now they have 4.7 emails per document. Baker Robbins "Fast Filer" tool addresses assistant-filer-as-author problem.

Attorneys are willing to listen to tools that will help them manage their email. After a setback involving records management and an outdated area-of-law taxonomy, they developed a road map.

Attorneys are searching in DeskSite for emails but want Outlook functionality (they should be using FileSite).

What they would do the same: User preparation was really key; roadmap and getting attorneys to file emails in Outlook folders paid off. Trainers emphasized the benefits of searching attachments, finding things when people leave the firm, etc. Their first pilot group was chosen for political reasons, the second group was technical and provided much more useful feedback.

She wished they had had more time with the Baker Robbins tool before rollout.

They should have focused on "Email Management" (search) training time. The "email only" search is very valuable.

Attorneys wanted "undocked" foldering through Blackberrys. They haven't solved that problem yet.

They haven't been able to get attorneys to file the "right" email.

She would have mandated 1-hour hands-on training for attorneys. She wishes they had increased floor support, not 2 people/floor but at least 4/floor.

She would consolidate their three "sets" of workspaces because people put client information in user or precedent workspaces. "My Matters" list grow to 200-300, way too many. Opening up Outlook takes 7-10 minutes.

Karen is piloting Express Search / Data Miner (based on Vivisimo's Velocity engine).

Fritz

H & W finished MCC rollout in April 2008, except in Asia where 8.5 will provide language support.

Biggest email challenge: Attorneys want to file email. There's no way to mass import emails in older system without Outlook locking up. Dealing with large email boxes is a big issue. Email policy needs to be addressed as part of email management.

They are moving to 30-day email deletion. They will assign email coaches to individuals with giant email files.

Three practices (labor, trademark, transactional) are filing most of their email.

The general counsel of firm wanted to have everything related to a matter in one place. They videotaped them talking about the benefits of matter management. If they needed to remove something, they needed to be able to get it all at once.

Attorneys designed their own workspaces. If they had told attorneys what folders to store them in, they might not have gotten the buy-in.

For their roll-out, they posted FAQs, Camtasias, did "WOW" sessions, and kick-the-tire sessions. Set up on-line game. If there is a prize at the end, attorneys will challenge each other. Tracked all activities, to catch up to people who didn't attend. Attorneys did not turn out for "mandatory" sessions, so they had a lot of 1:1 sessions. The day of the rollout had a "survival guide" showing 5 basic things they needed to know. Also had people walking the floor. They are doing more team sessions because teams work in different ways.

He wishes they had gotten top-down support for mandatory email training sessions. They didn't understand how email storage works with Interwoven. E.g., one pain point was transactional attorneys who had to open up each of 50 workspaces on a "drag-and-drop."

Fritz and Karen both said that the Blackberry client is used principally for opening documents from workspaces, not for filing or searching.

Thanks to the panelist for their presentation and to the audience for some good questions, reflected in the information above.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action and RSS Learning

Tomorrow is the Enterprise RSS Day of Action. Because I can't link to it enough, by way of background, I'll post again to Common Craft's basic but brilliant explanation of RSS in Plain English.

I've been up to my elbows in Enterprise RSS as my firm has been evaluating various vendors and I've been making presentations to groups and individuals about RSS over the last two weeks in particular.

I view RSS as a key technology for taking advantage of the tremendous wealth of fresh information available on the Web. Because RSS is based on the flexible .xml standards, RSS within the firewall has tremendous potential to solve some existing problems and enhance knowledge sharing.

One of the existing problems is corporate "spam" or irrelevant, bothersome email. Email comes in a glut into my Inbox and I have to do something with it--mark it as read, or delete it, at a minimum, which means to pay some attention to it because I don't know what it's about until it's in there. By contrast, an RSS feed comes into an Outlook reader already categorized by the type of information it belongs to, whether a litigation victory announcement, lost mail, conflict check, or whatever else. I choose when to pay attention to that category of information instead my having to pay some attention to whatever's there, lest I lose something that is actually directed to me in the flood of emails.

Enterprise RSS can enhance knowledge sharing. It will inform you if a change is made to an internal wiki or blog--critical for quality assurance on these internal knowledge sharing platforms. As the KM team I am on has learned through use of pbwiki.com, such a notification also greatly enhances the project management use of a wiki.

This week I have been learning more about the power and flexibility of RSS. See this excellent post on how to mash up and otherwise play with RSS feeds. Not all of the services described here are 100% reliable or necessarily useful for enterprises, but I don't think it would take a genius to figure out how some of these "tricks" could apply within the firewall.

Today to my delight I learned from LifeHacker how to convert an email subscription to an RSS feed, using mailbucket.org (tip of the hat to Damon Jablons*). Getting email subscriptions out of my Outlook Inbox makes me really happy. It may let me help others overwhelmed by email.

If you want to learn more about RSS, I recommend you check out the popular Delicious tags on RSS.

*name previously misspelled.

Why are wikis better collaboration tools than email?

It is hard to capture the "flow" of a business process with words, just like it is difficult to grasp the aural universe(s) present in the score of a late Beethoven quartet.

Jim McGee of JVM Associates* provides a striking visual explanation of the reason for the superiority of wikis as a collaboration tool. Just like the "Yays" and "Boos" of the Common Craft video, this diagram (once you get past the smiley faces) says it all. Users have to do roughly more work more often with email. It's time to wikify the law firm!

*Thanks to Dennis Kennedy for the tip, from his weekly links.

Session 1 of last day of ILTA---Thursday morning August 23, 2007: Where are the Matter-Centric Pioneers Now?

By way of background, "matter centricity" is the concept of storing all or some portion of a firm's documents, notably including email, in matter-specific folders within a DMS or other comparable environment. The folders are tagged with matter profile information, and there are various ways of storing and retrieving documents and the associated folders (also known as "workspaces"). This session focused on firms who have attempted to implement matter centricity in the context of the Interwoven document management system.

According to an ILTA 2006 survey, over half of firms surveyed are going to a matter-centric collaborative (MCC) environment. There was a refreshing degree of honesty from this panel of senior IT folks who have (apparently succesfully) implemented MCC about the challenges they faced and how they might have done things differently.

Speakers:

Thomas Gaines, CIO, King & Spalding, based in Atlanta.
Peter Lamb, Director of IS at Torys LLP, Toronto & NY.
Andy Rudall, IT Operations & Programme Manager, Wragge & Co. LLP, Birmingham, England.
Bob Dolinsky, Director, eSentio Technologies, moderator.

King & Spalding

Thomas Gaines is known for saying that Matter centricity is easy to grasp intellectually, but hard to make operational. King and Spalding has 2000+ users, with eight offices in places as far-flung as Atlanta, London, and Dubai. Their DMS "libraries" (which in the Interwoven DMS is a particular designation for a set of documents that can be easily searched and linked to a set of specific folders) are defined geographically (so presumably they have 8).

The King & Spalding MCC project took place at the same time as an upgrade to the whole desksite and the "back end" as well. They used Interwoven Worksite 8.0, email management, Office 2003. Thomas advised ignorinig the other stuff and focusing on MCC.

Business drivers included risk management, and the firm management's focus on the necessity to manage, organize, and dispose of matter email.

The project was organized by a risk management committee consisting of partners, other lawyers, and staff. The RMC was both a pilot group and a broad base of people who could disseminate the benefits of MCC. Outside consultant eSentio also helped provide a broader perspective.

The biggest challenge was getting the lawyers to understand how MCC worked and to understand that it works the way that they think already. His biggest key to success was getting lawyers involved early on. He said that you want lawyers involved in the design process, especially the template structure for workspaces. People are all over the waterfront in terms of how they organize their own stuff.

He had thought that they would let users create workspaces. In the pilot, however, lawyers created workspaces that meant something to them but nothing to anyone else. Their workspace creation is manually driven by matter creation process. K & S allowed a "to be filed" folder.

They pulled in preexisting iManage/Interwoven folders into a public space. They did not try to convert them.

The project took 2 1/2 years from discussion to implementation. They had large demonstrations and put the product online well before rollout, as well as 1 1/2 hour classroom training. In retrospect, Thomas would have preferred to have 3 hours of training, to let lawyers adjust to how MCC might work within their existing processes. The challenge is that their "save" screen is different.

They had a specific project map / timetables and the RMC received regular reports of progress.

They measured project success by email. They have 5-digit number of workspaces. More than 50% of documents in workspaces are email. That's the case even though their attorneys don't have portable access to Interwoven documents (portable access is one of the currently unsolved challenges of MCC, and one of the few advantages Outlook folders currently have over MCC for email storage).

Wragge & Co. LLP

By way of introduction to his firm's home town, Andy Rudall amusingly described famous discoveries (like "oxygen") and people (J.R.R. Tolkein, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ozzie Osbourne) from Birmingham, England.

Wragge & Co. is on Worksite 8.2, use 2003 Office products, and SQL 2000. One Interwoven "library" serves all offices.

Business drivers included delays in a Hummingbird MCC solution; they therefore switched to Interwoven after a proof of concept test in their lab. Other drivers were that lawyers wanted to be work in a matter centric fashion and wanted access to the DMS through Outlook.

They also used a consultant and engaged with the business units to spread the word.

A big challenge for him was the switch to MCC over a single holiday weekend. They didn't want to have separate conversations with practice areas over how they wanted to workspaces configured, and so established a single template for the whole firm. They have allowed some separate styles of workspaces since the rollout.

The key to success of the rollout was communications and selling into the business. They had a "Star-Wars" theme with wallpapers and posters--"DocWars"--"A long time ago we had..." In retrospect, they should have tried more ways to encourage lawyers to attend trainings.

They have a tool, called E-filing Wizard, that allows automatic filing into a workspace on sending [I have seen a demonstration of a comparable tool developed by Baker Robbins, and also believe that the most recent version of Interwoven's MCC implementation also has this functionality]. The same tool allows filing of return email with the insertion of some code. This wizard was really important for adoption of MCC at Wragge & Co.

Torys LLP

Torys has 280 lawyers across 2 offices (Toronto and NY). They also have a centralized computing environment with only one library [my firm currently has six].

Torys is using 8.2 Interaction, Office 2003, one SQL server in Toronto, with caching in NY. For DMS security, they have "IndApp WallBase" after trying Baker Robbins' security tool.

Business drivers included risk management and the development of a "document retention policy" where email and documents were in the same system and there could be an electronic copy of the entire file. They also wanted a standard DM platform across offices (they had had DocsOpen in NY and no DMS at all in Toronto).

In a 2007 survey, a vendor [anyone out there know who?] claimed that between 75 and 80% of all matter information resided in email.

The inside champion was the KM Partner "Bob" who worked closely with the lawyers to develop the workspace schema. Torys also had a full-time project manager for MCC.

The biggest challenge was getting participation from the attorneys. They are interested so long as it doesn't take any time. His advice was to start with the perspective that Interwoven did not invent matter centricity; lawyers are already working in a matter centric fashion; this is not a change in how they think, it's a change in how the technology works. Training lawyers was difficult because they actually had to be changed. It was critical to get lawyers to understand how MCC works.

The key to success in implementing MCC is understanding that this is not a technology project, it is a process change. It has to be run through focus groups of lawyers in advance. Assume that most lawyers are working in organized ways. Reflect those systems instead of telling them what to do.

One effective "trick" was to populate the attorney's worklists on changeover, even without a previous document management system.

In retrospect, they should have spent more time involving the assistants. KM Lawyers don't have the same input as practicing lawyers in terms of organization. Start off with defined processes. No one told them when email is supposed to get into the workspace. They should also have done more on the why and where of email saving. There has been very little practice support information about how and when to do that. Best practices and processes should be developed at the same time as rollout.

The most succesful training for partners by far is 1:1 in their offices. Although they did face-to-face training almost exclusively, they should have offered some group sessions for lawyers.

Now they have more email in the system than documents. Torys saw declining growth what their Exchange email servers had to handle. They did not communicate to lawyers that a goal was to reduce the burden on the Exchange server, but that did happen.