ILTA Staffing Survey Results Now Available

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

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

Blogs to replace newsletters?

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

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

Aderant (formerly CMS) enters the CRM space

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

Desktop search gains momentum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extranets help separate firms, for now

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of mergers...

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

What do mergers really mean to the industry?

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

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

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

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

Southern California Regional Event

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

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

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

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

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

More on knowledge repositories

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

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

Hummingbird loses three clients while others progress to rollout

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

Full text searching of iManage or Hummingbird

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

Does anyone out there have any success stories to share?

Guiding Principles of Knowledge

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

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

After Action Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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