Live from GearUp 2008

So far this is been pretty informative. Guy Kawasaki kicked off the morning in the Keynote, if you've not heard Guy speak before, he's fantastic. Later in the morning there was a panel comprised of CIO/IT Directors from a range of firms, including Ashurt from the UK. No surprises, everyone was still very much challenged with how to manage e-mail. In a room with well over 100 people, only 3 hands went up when the moderator asked who had 75% or higher of adoption for e-mail filing. After lunch there were several breakout streams, I sat in the on the Business Strategy track where Neil Araujo and Rafiq Mohmmadi outlined the product roadmap for the next 12-18 months, including their discussions around version 9, code named 'Meritage'. Much like the fine wine that blends the best from many grapes, Interwoven's version 9 purports to be a totally new platform, leveraging a SAAS model, which they hope will allow them to extend their product line to smaller firms that have traditionally found the implementation a barrier to entry. The last session was conducted by Jerome Pesenti, Chief Scientist at Vivisimo, the makers of Interwoven's new enterprise class search product. In true scientific form, Jerome quickly went through a myriad of slides, it would have been nice to see a live demo, but I think the audience certainly is interested in seeing more.

Introducing the new Director of Knowledge Management at Reed Smith

Thanks to all of you who either referred someone you knew, or applied for the position directly. We had a TON of interest in the position and there were many fine applicants.

I'm pleased to announce that Lisa Kellar has accepted our offer and will join Reed Smith in May. We are extremely lucky to be able to bring in someone of Lisa's caliber and experience.

Director of Knowledge Management opportunity

For those interested, I am looking to bring in a right hand person to do "km stuff" :) Major initiatives this year include a MOSS rollout, Recommind installation, Interwoven/MCC deployment and a few other things I could tell you, but then I'd have to.. well you know how that goes. [UPDATE] A couple of points to address now, based on some of the questions I've gotten:

• Although I'm based in LA, the preference is to have someone based in either Chicago, NY, DC, PHL, or PIT.
• If you don't live in one of the cities where we have an office and are interested in the position, working from home or telecomuting aren't options. You'd need to be prepared to relocate.
• If you're interested in the job, please e-mail your resume using the info below, don't email me directly as our HR folks have asked that everything go through them for tracking/reporting, etc. If you want me to know that you've applied, just cc me on the email.
• The rollout of IWOV has already begun and both Recommind and MOSS are approved and FUNDED projects.
• The is a Director level position and the compensation will be as such.
  

Here's a link to the job description, if you're interested e-mail your resume to jobs@reedsmith.com.

Cheers!

Tom

The Generational Divide..

An interesting string started today on the ILTA listserves regarding the generational rift within IT Departments as reported in a recent CIO.com article. This falls in line with what we're seeing in all corporations, especially in law firms.


This also has an important impact on how technology is designed and how we go about training lawyers on technology. A great post by Doug Cornelius which discusses/defines the types of searches a lawyer conducts when looking for documents got me (abstractly) thinking more about this issue.


As we get more focused on the needs of lawyers in our design of systems, the knee jerk reaction is often to build to the needs of the Partners and rightfully so. They are the ones that ultimately employ us and bring money in the door. On the flip side, there's the possibility that you are building systems based on the wrong user group, if for nothing else, because many partners won't bother using the technology - regardless of how great and user friendly it is. You often hear the term "building to the lowest common denominator", which is a nice way of saying that we'll build something so even our least tech-savvy lawyer can use it. But, is that the right approach? Will your least tech-savvy lawyer even bother trying out what ever system you have built and if so, what percentage of your lawyer population actually falls in that category? Furthermore, how much longer will that crop of lawyers be at the firm? Conversely, tailoring your systems to the needs of young, tech-savvy, Associates might also be a CLM (Career Limiting Move).

Going back to Doug's post and thinking about some of the comments by my good friend Beau Mersereau, perhaps you do both and build systems around "where they live". When you build document retrieval systems, you focus on the needs of the Associates, as they are the ones most likely to use a system like that. Partner's aren't usually taking a first cut at a MSJ (motion for summary judgment), or being asked to dig up a buyer-friendly asset purchase agreement, it's the Associates. On the flip side, when looking at implementing a portal, or Outlook integration, Partners have a greater need to aggregate information from various locations than Associates do.

Then you start looking at how we traditionally train lawyers. I'm still mystified at all the rollouts that rely on classroom training for lawyers. I guess we're all still stuck in the late 90's, when we could get lawyers to show up for classroom training for the WP to Word/DOS to Windows training. Ah, the days of watching people play Solitaire for hours on end while they "learned" to use a mouse.. That went out around the same time Pearl Jam stopped being popular, but we (much like Eddie Vedder) are holding hope that there are glory days still ahead of us.

Partners don't have the time (or desire) to spend an hour learning the latest and greatest tool being rolled out and the misnomer that food will bring them in is also a joke. These guys make plenty of money, they can afford to pay for their own Quiznos sandwich. Associates are equally pressed for time and many of them feel that they can usually pick up whatever new software you put in front of them within minutes. Unlike their senior counterparts, they were practically born with a keyboard in their hand and dismiss the notion that they need training on most anything.

This requires a shift in the way you deliver training to lawyers. This isn't to say that you stop all forms of classroom training, it's still a valuable tool - especially for staff. But, you can't rely on it as your only means of training the lawyers. Take the 1hr session and boil it down to what you can deliver in 10-15 minutes, usually the most relevant 5-10 features/functions that are critical for the lawyers to know. Walk the floors and make personal visits to every attorney armed with "Do you have 10 minutes for me to show you a new tool that might make your day a little easier?" Now, you're doing on their terms, in the comfort of their office and doing it in a timeframe that they'll accept. While this approach requires more people, time and effort, it's a sure fire way to optimize the acceptance and adoption of new tools.

Anyone know people that would be interested in our new Firmwide Director of Records position?

While this is in poor form, it's my blog and I can do what I please.. I guess :)

In any event, this is a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor and be able to implement a new records system (Interwoven) along with new policies and procedures. We're also looking to go paperless, it's a very exciting opportunity for the right person. The person can be based in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh or DC. For more information look at the link below:

http://www.reedsmith.com/careers/job_search.cfm?cit_id=18688&faArea1=customWidgets.content_view_1&usecache=false

Meet the new CKO at Reed Smith...

First and foremost I hope that everyone had a safe and fun Holiday season. For those of you that hadn't heard yet, I accepted the Chief Knowledge Officer position at Reed Smith effective January 7th. I've been in Pittsburgh this week to meet everyone here, it's been fantastic so far - everything I expected and more. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Sheppard Mullin and have fond memories, but I am really excited to begin working on all the various projects here at Reed Smith.

I'll still be 'based' in Los Angeles, which is where I'll be getting mail and having dust collect in my office, I'll likely spend more time in the Friendly Skies on United for the next few months, so I'm not sure how much I'll be writing here. For those that will be attending LegalTech NY this year, I look forward to seeing you.

Law.com article from Mark Gerow on implementing large-scale extranets with SharePoint

Fenwick & West have long been on the SharePoint bandwagon and Fenwick's Mark Gerow has litterally written the book on SharePoint on extranets for a law firm. In this article, he covers the technical issues and the human element of building and rolling out an extranet with SharePoint:

"In this article I'll discuss how Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (SharePoint) has been used at Fenwick & West to meet the challenge of making extranets available for each and every matter opened. I'll also cover the key issues that must be addressed in order to scale to thousands of extranets and terabytes of data. At the conclusion of this article you'll have a better idea of what can be accomplished with SharePoint at your firm, as well as a road map to get you started. "

This is a great article for anyone interested in SharePoint, especially those thinking of using it as an extranet.

Sheppard Mullin case study gets a 'top 17' nod from Microsoft

What do BMW, MTV, Enterprise Rent A Car, Mary Kay Cosmectics and Sheppard Mullin all have in common? We're all listed on the official blog for Microsoft's SharePoint Product Group as having top case studies for MOSS. While it's nice that our case study is part of this group, it's actually really interesting to take a quick peek at the other case studies. We can learn a lot from folks outside of legal.

Those of you looking to automate new hire intake will find MTVs case study of particular interest. They focused heavily on addressing many of the shortcomings for new hire intake and have found significant time and cost savings.

New site on the KM scene

Every now and then, something comes along that is compelling to spend time with. Today I received an e-mail from Matthew Parsons with a link to his new site(co-authored by Neil Richards), Knowledge Thoughts. I'm hard pressed to classify it as a blog or a wiki, I suppose it really a bliki - combining elements of both. Here's Matthew's description of the site:

"Today Neil Richards and I are delighted to launch Knowledgethoughts.com, an open source resource for the KM and legal KM communities. This is a personal, collaborative learning effort, and is not associated with any organisation." more..

In my initial scan of the site, it's already rich with a variety of content for those seasoned vets in the KM space, or those just starting out and wanting to learn more. There's a wiki section with some terms classified such as CKO and PSL, along with selling points for those looking to add these roles to their firms. There's a section with a ton of rich media content, aimed at helping explain KM. Much of this comes from outside legal, which is a great thing. A section bound to be on everyone's "to be seen" list is their leading people and thinkers page. If you're looking for ideas to kick-start your knowledge management initiatives, there's even a thought starters section.

I'm going to need to sit down and dedicate some serious time to this site, there's too much to just quickly glance through.

Recap from the Legal Technology Exchange

This was a great event, as it blended leading C-level folks from law firms as well as leaders from many major in-house legal departments. The speakers represented a great cross-section of in-house counsel and law firms. For me, it's always helpful to be reminded of the pain points our clients are feeling and try to identify ways we can help.

One of the main themes was the continuing pressure in-house counsel face to reduce legal costs. This is squarely in opposition to the constant rate increases many firms are pushing on their clients. You know corporations are serious about cost-cutting when companies like Citigroup have someone with the title of "Director Legal Expense Control". The salary of first year associates was brought up routinely. If we think it's an issue within law firms, it's even more of a problem for our clients. They view the rate increases solely as a mechanism to help absorb these associate salary increases, while maintaining what I like to call a law firm's "stock price"- profits per partner. Think your firm is different and really listens to its clients' needs? Check out this article from Bruce MacEwen's blog - there's a huge disconnect between how our clients perceive us and how law firms view themselves as it relates to outside counsel satisfaction. One more piece of evidence to demonstrate the disconnect is found in the InsideCounsel Magazine's 18th annual survey. Clearly there is room for firms to proactively go to their clients with ideas on how to reduce legal expenses:




Offshoring and outsourcing of low-level legal work (like first-cut document review) has been the fashionable thing to talk about lately, but when talking to folks at legal departments, they didn't seem all that interesting in their law firms doing it - at least some of them. Much of a company's comfort level with off-shoring legal work seems to be directly linked to the company's own use of off-shoring for other functions. So, before you go down this path with a client, find out if the company currently does any off-shoring, you might save yourself some grief as there were several companies in the room that would take serious offense to it.

However, I think there are opportunities to help clients reduce litigation costs in the document review area. McDermott fired the first salvo recently, by creating a new tier of associates. Think of them as permanent contract associates -- to handle lower-end tasks at lower billing rates. I was also told during the week that there is a surplus of lawyers in cities like Detroit and Charlotte, as a result you can get contract lawyers in those cities at rates not much higher than that of Indian off-shoring companies. I heard of one firm that setup an office in Charlotte simply to conduct document review, taking advantage of this talent surplus.

The takeaway for me was, and has been for a while, that we need to truly listen to our clients needs and pain points and take real actions to help them.

New Sedona Conference comments lend credence to new search tools

Thank goodness there are lawyers out there willing and able to cull down commentary from the Sedona Conference into bite-sized morsels we can all consume. In this case, Ralph Losey has done a great job on his blog in summarizing the most recent commentary from the Sedona Conference, published in August of 2007.

What's interesting is direct verbiage from the Sedona Search Team almost admonishing the reliance on simple keyword search technology for the review of ESI:

. . . the experience of many litigators is that simple keyword searching alone is inadequate in at least some discovery contexts. This is because simple keyword searches end up being both over- and under-inclusive in light of the inherent malleability and ambiguity of spoken and written English (as well as all other languages). . . .

The problem of the relative percentage of “false positive” hits or noise in the data is potentially huge, amounting in some cases to huge numbers of files which must be searched to find responsive documents. On the other hand, keyword searches have the potential to miss documents that contain a word that has the same meaning as the term used in the query, but is not specified. . . .

Finally, using keywords alone results in a return set of potentially responsive documents that are not weighted and ranked based upon their potential importance or relevance. In other words, each document is considered to have an equal probability of being responsive upon further manual review.

But the Sedona Search Commentary does not end on a negative note; instead it discusses new search technologies that will significantly improve upon the dismal recall and precision ratios of keyword searches:

Alternative search tools are available to supplement simple keyword searching and Boolean search techniques. These include using fuzzy logic to capture variations on words; using conceptual searching, which makes use of taxonomies and ontologies assembled by linguists; and using other machine learning and text mining tools that employ mathematical probabilities..

The last tidbit Ralph brings to our attention is a call to action from the Team:

The legal community should support collaborative research with the scientific and academic sectors aimed at establishing the efficacy of a range of automated search and information retrieval methods.

Looking at these comments, albeit in a vacuum, it's astonishing to see such a clear line in the sand drawn by the Team. Clearly, reliance on simple keyword such isn't going to cut it for much longer. Vendors like Recommind, Engenium, Sygence, Content Analyst and the like will be drooling once word of this gets to them.

There's a lot more on Ralph's blog about this and he writes much better than I do, so I encourage you to read the post in it's entirety.

Australian Law Tech Summit - Recap

On my recent visit to Australia, I spoke at the 2nd Annual Law Tech Summit in Noosa, Australia. Put on by the fine team at Chilli Marketing Solutions, it was a very well organized event, with a lot of great content. The highlights for me, were the keynote given by Richard Susskind who's concepts and theories have heavily influenced how I view IT within legal, and Peter Williams, a Partner at Deliotte and CEO of their web and software development business, Ecplise. I found Peter's views on how to rapidly experiment and implement technology very refreshing, as we often get too bogged down in the minutia of a project to actually get it off the ground.

I learned a lot about the legal market, the economic climate and the 'proper' way to pronounce such words as aluminum and tomato, as well as certain acceptable words in the States that are off limits in Australia :)

"Brain drain" was a phrase used often at the conference. The country is experiencing a flight of talent, mostly to the UK. While wages appear to be decent for most tech-related jobs, the cost of living is very high (a Volkswagen Passat costs around $40k and a Snickers bar at a convenience store was $2.00 - food was particularly expensive) and as a result many of Australia's brightest young minds are taking their talent overseas.

More and more legal work is coming from all the growth from China. With construction comes a lot of legal work, especially litigation. One consultant, Justin North, suggests that the next large merger will not be "vertical" (NY-London), but "horizontal" (China-Australia), because of the synergies between these two countries and their respective economies.

Over the years, I found that there are a handful of highly innovative firms in Australia, such as Mallesons who have taken the Recommind product to new levels with their Decisiv e-mail management tool. While there are firms in Australia that are arguably more advanced in their use of technology than any firm here in the States, it seemed that firms are generally a bit behind what we are doing here as an industry. Many of the conversations were on topics we were dealing with 3-5 years ago.

There are also many thought leaders from Australia, both within law firms and on the vendor side. Justin North, who recently left Baker Robbins/Thomson to start his own consulting company (Janders Dean), is among those leading the charge on the innovation front - not only in Australia, but across the globe. Most recently, he's been working with a few of the largest firms on the planet on the selection and implementation of enterprise search.

All in all, it was a very interesting conference, well run, with a good mix of content and opportunities for networking. Anyone in Australia should consider their next event in 2008.

Blogging at ILTA's conference

While I had a few posts from the ILTA conference, some seemed to be surgically attached to their PC while in sessions. It's amazing to see the amount of information spewing out from bloggers like David Hobbie, Doug Cornelius, and Monica Bay. I think folks providing near real-time posts are great for the industry. Daily headlines from Sean Doherty also let those not able to attend get some of the major highlights of the conference. Keep up the good work!

Enterprise Search, uncovered and revealed

John Alber's recent article titled, "Search at the Foundation of the Enterprise", does a really nice job of explaining the business issues solved by enterprise search and goes on to discuss, in depth, the various types of underlying search technology used today. It's in plain English, so even I can understand it. John was nice enough to include pictures and charts to help explain set-theoretic models, algebraic models, and probabilistic models. Understanding these principles helps provide the basis for which John explores the pros and cons of search products like Autonomy, SharePoint and Recommind (which is what his firm uses). He finishes the article talking about how enterprise search technology can be best utilized within a law firm and a few plugs for Recommind :) A great primer for those embarking on enterprise search technology.

Live from ILTA

So far, things are pretty interesting. KM tracks yesterday were well attended, so perhaps there is hope for KM, despite my earlier post ;)

Today the buzz is about OpenText's announcement around their SharePoint strategy. I was not in the session, as my firm is an Interwoven shop, but here is what I heard from others that attended:

• There will be the option to have SharePoint become the main store for documents
• OpenText is looking to extent beyond DM to more full blown matter/document lifecycle management, using Sharepoint to accomplish this.

The feedback around the show is mixed. Some are very excited by the news, while others wonder what this means in terms of their investment in OpenText's current product architecture.

Both DM vendors seem to be scrambling to respond to the product offering from StarLaw, which purports to have a more comprehensive solution for document lifecycle management (DM, RM, etc.), or as they put it an "intelligent Enterprise Information Management system".