My iPad and Me: Personal Technology and Live-Blogging

I live-blogged and tweeted at ILTA Conference from the setup shown.  It's a Zagg "Solo" keyboard and the latest iPad.  I thought those gadget-lovers out there might enjoy my thoughts on how these tools worked for me (the bottom line:  quite well, still some room for improvement in my approach). I think this kind of setup would also serve well in occasions when lawyers can't be plugged in, don't have much space to work in, or want to impress the less tech-savvy.

Keyboard

The keyboard came with a handy and effective stand for the iPad, which doubles as a carrying case for the keyboard. The keyboard is very light and easy to use. It works with iOS and Android devices via Bluetooth, so there aren't any cables cluttering things up. I've found it handy on occasion to have the keyboard located in a different place (e.g., lap) than the tablet. Setup was a piece of cake, although I recommend looking at the directions. It's a lot more comfortable working in cramped quarters on a separate keyboard than on a screen attached to a keyboard (i.e., a laptop).

The keyboard has a few shortcut keys that are extremely helpful on an iOS device--Cut, Copy, Paste, Home, and the like. I used the copy and paste for hashtags on tweets and over and over again while working on posts.

I'll have to remember that the keyboard itself has a battery. It it supposed to go a few weeks without needing a charge, so that may be a challenge.  It's recharged through a unique little USB cable, which I am nervous about losing.  You don't have to have the cable to type, of course.

iPad

The iPad (wifi only) worked great as a blogging and note-taking device.  The battery life is four to five times greater than my laptop, and the display looks fabulous.  I was able (barely) to get through an entire day of five sessions on one charge.

It's also great being able to touch a word or point in the document and have the cursor move there.

Connectivity

A word about the wifi.  If my experiences at the E20 conference and at this one is any indication, conference facilities appear to have figured out how to provide sufficiently reliable wifi.  Thanks Gaylord National and ILTA!  This was an essential aspect of working with the iPad so much, as I don't have wireless internet (3G) on it.

Apps

One challenge in live-blogging was figuring out how to write my notes down. I was liveblogging on the Blogger platform. I tried the native Blogger app but, perhaps not surprisingly for a Google tool on iOS it was A) for iPhone only and B) pathetic (did you know that people add "hyperlinks" to blog posts?  The Blogger app doesn't). I also tried working from a Safari browser window, but working with longer posts was not practical because the view would jump around too much.

I then tried using the iPad's built-in Notes app, which is great in that it instantly and permanently saves everything you write and looks good while you are writing. The Notes app, however, gives you almost zero control over fonts or appearance, no bolds or italics even, and it doesn't allow for bullet lists or hyperlinks, common weapons in a blogger's arsenal.

The Notability app on which I'm typing this up solves the font and appearance issues, at least as far as the document on the screen, and also instantly saves whatever you write. It has the ability to embed hyperlinks, but it doesn't copy over into Blogger as HTML, so those get lost in the transfer. Close enough though!

Notability is designed for iPad, which means that you can click an icon and "scribble" on the screen with your finger. I used that feature, for instance, in taking down a draft of the comparison table in the Exemplify review.

The WordPress apps look great, but, for better or worse, Caselines is still on Blogger.  

Poking At The Screen

Editing longer posts once they left Notability still required going to a laptop and opening up a browser.  After working on the iPad for several days, I had gotten used to the touchscreen, and would swipe ineffectually at the laptop screen where I needed to edit next (this left me feeling like Scotty (James Doohan, RIP) on Star Trek IV).

We get used to working with a mouse, and, yes, mousing is more accurate than a finger swipe, but words aren't small targets, and touching something on the screen is simply a lot more intuitive and requires less brain power than maneuvering a cursor. Touch screens are definitely coming to the enterprise--even Microsoft is paying attention to them.

Clause Reference and Creation Tool Exemplify

I met with George May, Bill Bice, Rob Anderson*, and Shannon Brown Janicki of legal technology start-up Exemplify on August 29th at the ILTA 2012 conference (see other coverage of Exemplify's launch here).  Exemplify is a large firm solution that leverages the massive "EDGAR" database of corporate filings in order to improve the speed and effectiveness of attorneys drafting transactional documents.  This post is based on a demonstration of the product. I should note by way of disclaimer that I have not practiced as a transactional lawyer, although I work on systems and precedent collections on negotiated litigation documents such as stipulated protective orders and settlement agreements. 

*I thought I had met Geoff Petrie but I was mistaken. 

Overview

Exemplify is, I believe,  a new entry in the set of legal technologies intended to assist transactional document generation.  It is a browser-based clause reference and creation tool that compares clauses you provide with clustered iterations of standard clauses created by dynamic reference to the agreements contained in EDGAR.  Its admirable stated goals are to allow a more junior associate to develop a better draft of a transactional document faster, and to allow quick comparison and evaluation of clause language against market and against language from particular firms, financial institutions, or industries. It works at the clause level, a design that matches the way I understand corporate attorneys approach most drafting tasks.

How It Works

Exemplify starts with an empty box in a browser.  You paste in a clause or multiple clauses from your proposed agreement.  It then compares each clause you provided against the model from EDGAR most similar to the one you provide, and provides a redline against your agreement for each clause.

To get to the next closest iteration of that clause you click an arrow, the application constantly showing a redline against your original clause.

It works against a huge database developed by reference to EDGAR documents that aligns thousands of similar clauses from a huge variety of documents.  It has an initially clean and simple interface, that gets only a little more complex as the attorney digs into clause development.

As you work through clauses you can save them and so by the end of clause development work have a complete document ready to be pulled into a document management system and developed into a very good first draft.

Once you are working on a clause you can filter on metadata about the hundreds or even thousands of agreements from which the clause iteration appears. The law firm filter may be most significant for negotiators, but drafters can also filter on financial institution, date, parties, and industry.

Implications For Traditional Drafting Process

An associate creating an initial draft of a transactional document might typically do the work by finding four or five samples; tracking down the particular clause at issue in each; comparing the langage between each; and then copying and modifying the language that best suits the particular deal context.

In my view, Exemplify ought to eliminate time associates normally take to find matching agreements and the matching clauses within them, and ought to also greatly reduce the time spent in reviewing and comparing clauses.

It also should greatly reduce the time taken to find a version of a clause that meets your circumstance (for instance, does the agreement address a Letter of Credit). 

Comparison with Existing Approaches

Substantive KM Resources 

Firms with knowledge management programs have developed libraries of transactional documents and related resources.  Laboriously created annotated forms show associates what the "firm standard" clause is for specific circumstances such as buyer-favorable, seller-favorable, and neutral; memos and articles may provide more information about the context of language changes; and meetings and trainings provide additional opportunities for associates to learn directly from skilled practitioners.  In addition to information about clause language, KM resources often provide practical and strategic advice in context, as on negotiation or proper redline provision.   

These KM resources provide more context and depth than Exemplify can. They have two limitations that Exemplify does not:  they do not necessarily reflect what is "market," and they are not updated without additional input of senior attorney time.   Because of the necessary investment, they are typically  targeted at a particular categories of common documents, where Exemplify will pull in whatever documents are publicly filed regardless of their frequency. I can imagine that Exemplify might help a transactional KM attorney work faster, by putting common clause variants at the attorney's fingertips, with the attorney supplying experience-based understanding of the reasons for the different variations.  

Document Assembly 

Traditional document assembly products help attorneys quickly draft one or more legal documents (typically transactional documents) through automated questionnaires that "fill in the blanks" or provide options leading to the program incorporating or excluding specific clauses from the finished document (for a publicly available example, visit my firm's Founder's Workbench site, which will assemble papers for incorporating a Delaware corporation).  As with Exemplify, what results is a much more advanced draft than what is possible with "mere" reference to a single sample.

Development of the document assembly "template" that contains the language options and the like, however, is very challenging and time-intensive, requiring high-level legal knowledge about a document's logical structure and some ability to handle the complex software involved.  Templates are developed through laborious reference to existing firm and individual lawyer standards,  and may also refer to clause language from outside the firm.  Document assembly templates do not dynamically refer to the set of documents out in the market.

kiiac

Kingsley Martin's kiiac application reportedly greatly improves the speed of developing document templates, but kiiac must be "fed" a large corpus of documents and itself is a complex piece of software not as easily accessed and leveraged by practicing attorneys (I have seen several demos but have no hands-on experience with this tool). Generating a comparison against a given clause requires many more steps. kiiac is complementary with document assembly in that it can show template compilers the standard variations within a subset of a firm's documents.

kiiac is also not tied into EDGAR, which means that it must be fed a document set or corpus and that it can cover all transactional document types, not just those addressed through publicly filed EDGAR documents

kiiac does, however, provide statistical analysis of all variations at once and a "checklist" of all possible clauses, two features Exemplify largely lacks.  It clusters clause options by the degree of frequency rather than by their similarity to presented language.

West KM Transactional

This Thompson Reuters product automates the breakdown of internal transactional documents into clauses and provides some level of profiling of transactional document type as well.  It allows quick location of sample language, but does not conduct the type of comparison of clauses that is found in KIIAC or Exemplify.  West KM Transactional relies on a firm's own documents. 

My firm has West KM for litigation.  This tool is in a way parallel to Exemplify in that it shows the validity of cases and statutes referenced in a firm's internal briefs by drawing on the massive and frequently updated Westlaw KeyCite system, (showing, for instance, red, yellow or "citing reference" flags) where Exemplify assesses a given clause by comparing it to  the massive and frequently updated EDGAR database of transactional documents.

Summary Chart

If you compare the transactional document source with the primary function of these tools, you might get a summary chart that looks like this.  

External Agreements	EDGAR	Exemplify
Internal Agreements	West KM	Document Assembly	KIIAC
	Shows Clauses / Documents	Creates Documents	Show & Compare Clauses

ILTA Interactive Session: "Forget The Wild Goose Chase"

In another excellent interactive session developed by Mary Abraham, ILTA members learned about methods for analysis and self-reflection and time management aimed at increasing the impact of our work on our organizations through presentation and through an interactive card-sorting exercise.  (I promised my excellent table, which included JAG CKO Scott Reid, Mallesons KM head Felicity Badcock, Cheryl Disch, and others, and from which I learned a lot, that I would provide my notes of the results of the exercise.  Here they are.)

Formal Description:  

"Discover a framework for differentiating between busy work, beneficial work and work that truly has a high impact on your firm. Each attendee will learn how to move their focus to high-impact projects." Hashtag #AFT5.

Unfortunately I missed the earliest part of the presentation.  I understand that Jordan Furlong covered the "Force Multiplier" concept previously addressed in Mary Abraham's post on the ILTA KM Blog  and that understanding effectiveness requires looking at who one's activities are impacting and how.

Mary Abraham suggests that the exercise of investigating your and your group's impact should be at least an annual investigation, perhaps even quarterly.

The first part of the card-sorting exercise saw everyone in the room write down the "three activities you spend the most time on" on 3x5 cards. At our table we then formed these into rough groups covering strategic, operational, and tactical types. Strategic activities generally address choices about what work to do, working with organizational leadership, and comparable items; operational activities directly address a process or organizational issues such as personnel; and tactical activities directly get work done.  Strategic activities are most often high-value and force-multiplying, with some operational activities also being high value, and tactical activities may be necessary but are rarely high-value.

The next part of the exercise was to sort the activities into high, medium, and low value buckets.

Finally we discussed strategies and approaches for spending more of our time on high value activities.  Mary Abraham challenged us to try to spend 80% of time on high value activities.

I have grouped the resulting tips and approaches, most of which came from the people at my table, into a few categories. I feel I was lucky to have such a great collection of talent at my table; others at the session may have had very different experiences, for better or worse.

1)  Timekeeper Discipline

Lawyers already have to track their time in excruciating detail. While non-legal staff may not need to record their time in that level of detail, they may find it very useful to keep  track of what they spend time on each day.  Reporting on time-spent metrics is a good basis for lobbying management to change the balance of work.

One HBR professor sets a chime to go off every hour.  He then asks himself two questions:  "Am I doing the best work I could be doing?" and "Am I being the best person I could be?"  Often he finds that one or both of the answers is "No."

Looking ahead, write down what you're going to do each day, on paper.  If you've forgotten until task completion, you can still write down the task and give yourself the reward of crossing it off the list.  If you don't write down what you're going to do you'll end up "chasing the shiniest object in the room" or browsing the internet.

Balance time spent talking and listening to others and "alone" time for reflection.

Also balance brainstorming, seeking leadership or peer approval, and making sure your staff is doing the work is it should be done.

Set aside time for strategic thinking.

Think about your time as a glass jar you're trying to fill with big rocks, smaller rocks, and sand, where the big rocks are the bigger, more urgent projects and the smaller rocks and sand more numerous and less high priority activities.  You have to deal with the big rocks every day, and you should also pay attention to the smaller rocks, and if you have any time left over you can let the sand fill up the jar.

2) "Urgent" Requests

How much of your work must be done in "crisis" mode?  We all have some projects that have to get done right away; working too long in crisis mode can get away us from high-value projects.

Urgency is in the eye of the beholder / requestor, and can be tracked and assessed for validity.  Urgent requests may not improve anything other than the requestor's situation, and often waste time.  Some techniques for addressing that situation include:

• Delegate as much as you can
• Figure out who are the "screamers that matter" and the "screamers that don't"
• Identify in advance who the appropriate people are to do specific types of requests and who can be ready to handle urgent requests that anyone on your team can do
• Identify appropriate level of service for the request.  You don't have to bring your "A" game to every request.
• Establish technical workflow systems (e.g., ticket systems), being mindful however that the most urgent and high priority requests may not be appropriate for such a system (my firm has at least three such systems in the areas of User Support, eDiscovery, and Court Procedures)
• Get comfortable saying "No"
• Conduct reviews of tasks completed, identifying urgency requested and "actual" urgency as perceived later (sufficient to break down by A, B, or C requests)
• Track your team's request turnaround time

3) Managing Up

Repeated unduly urgent requests should be addressed as a personnel and organizational issue

Talk about your activity metrics and analysis with your superiors or key stakeholders and convince them they should support delegation or other systems to better manage time-wasting requests, and that they should protect you, if necessary, from attempts to avoid those systems.

Conduct internal marketing around moving yourself to higher benefit work.  It might help if you explain the force multiplier effect.

4) Email

Periodically step away from email.

At an organizational level, try to break out some types of communications into systems that don't demand our attention in the way that email does.  Enterprise social networks for RFIs is one such system.  Email remains a good way to privately ask someone to do something.

4) Meetings

Ron Friedmann suggested having meetings go no more than an hour;  have them standing up; and try to make sure no one is having more than five meetings a week.

ILTA Session: Missing The Point, And Finding It Again

The following are my notes on an excellent, and, as promised, provocative session with John Alber, drawing lessons from outside the legal industry and attempting to apply them to legal KM and IT.

John started in law business in 1979, he became a partner at Bryan Cave.  He left to run a transportation business and sold it right before the dot.com crash.

His session is intentionally provocative, intended as a "sharp stick in the eye."  He wants to challenge how we do our work and what we call it.

He took a law school class on phenomenology. The idea was to investigate a term and deconstruct it.  (They spent two weeks on the word "charm.") He's deconstructing knowledge management.

Phenomenological approach asks what the terms says about our choices. With the phrase "knowledge management," people will leave us alone, but that's OK, because we don't like to be bothered by other people about what we do.  We're very good at what we do even though it's very hard to explain.

We can manage any kind of knowledge, except maybe if it has to do with numbers, because we don't like numbers, and that might be financial management.

KM's name declares its intention.  KM and other technology functions are usually:

• Internally focused (introverted)
• Insulated from everyday business of the firm
• Attenuated connection to revenue
• Expensive in terms of capital and operations
• No clear path to return cost of capital
• Few if any metrics connected to the business of the firm 

What does search engine usage mean to the business of the firm?

Firms don't usually talk about IT or KM at the top level.  They do articulate its value.

What Does This Matter?

KM headcount is revenue sensitive, even more sensitive than revenue.

KM is a "felt" need rather than a profit-driven need.  Lawyers say they need to have it.

If KM drove profitability the same way R&D does.  When revenue drops, people often increase investment in R&D, as they are looking for new ways to make money.

We're not doing something right if KM headcount goes down with revenue.

Jeff Rovner referred to Jim Johnson's statement that business development investment drops off first in a downturn.  In most law firms business development does not develop business (he's not referring to his own firm's BD).

It's hard to think outside of our group, to look at what others are doing.

What We Could Call Ourselves

MYLB "Making You Look Brilliant"
MLLB "Making Lawyers Look Brilliant""

Imagine that KM doesn't just manage knowledge. Imagine KM is a business unit that increases knowledge. It helps us understand what we do best and how we can best help our clients.  It helps us make better decisions.  KM can be profoundly connected to profitability.

Recommends "Does IT Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr.  IT can only productivity when it's combined with broader changes in business practice, competition, and regulatory control.  In isolation, it is inert.

Accenture 

Accenture arose out the accounting practice of Arthur Andersen.  AA tried to develop computer competence in 1951.  It was asked to study GE's manual payroll process and help automate it at Appliance Park in Kentucky.  AA Consulting, the IT function of Anderson, grew to be larger than the underlying business. It split from AA in 2000.  Some of the risky behavior that the auditing partners began to do (that led to AA's downfall) was driven by the differences between profits for partners.  The original AA was liquidated in 2002 as a consequence of the Enron scandal, and AA Consulting became Accenture.  They now employ 250,000 consultants.

Accenture does what we do.  They work with very busy professionals who bill by the hour.  They deliver technology, although their first delivery of technology was directed outwards.  They train.  Accenture manages knowledge in lots of areas.

Accenture was very innovative at the core.  Legal IT/KM by contrast is risk-averse. Accenture has taken risks in order to innovate.

There's a book on training at Accenture called "Return on Learning."

Accenture claimed a 353% annual return on investment in learning.

At the time of its IPO, Accenture was spending $700 million/year on training.  They were asked to cut the budget in half, still deliver great training, and measure profitability (e.g., "run it like a business.")

They had to measure "employee value" and were asked to measure and maximize it.

They had to create a governance and sponsorship structure to let learning organization respond to the business.  They also developed relationships with key decision makers, making sure learning was on their agenda.

"Getting management buy-in"' is a shallow level of connection to the business.  The Accenture "V-Model for Learning and Knowledge Management" is a much deeper connection.  Hundreds of people throughout the organization are involved in each training.

Another recommended paper is "Six Decisions IT Should Never Make."  Ross & Weill from HBR.

Applying Accenture Lessons

Training on running on Word is different than training on running a deal.  The latter includes skills like:

--Effective collaboration on drafting
--How to organize and share your work
--How to memorialze lessons and work product

Getting the Accenture Level of Engagement

KM can be directed squarely at profitability and its results can be measured.  They had a set of best practices set up for doing matter work and could compare matters that used those with ones that didn't.  Traditionally managed AFAs did not, on average, break even, those using the best practices were quite profitable.

How can law firms help clients attack the total client legal spend.  Total spend includes risk management, fees to main firms, eDiscovery costs, transaction costs, settlement costs, etc.

Ask each quarter "what are we trying to do this quarter?" Ask if they will help KM figure out how KM can help with that, in other words, "Help us figure out how best to drive you to that goal.".  What matters is the questions you ask and of whom you ask.

ILTA Session: Aligning KM With External Client Expectations

Formal Title:  Why IT Doesn't Matter and KM Matters Even Less To Clients:  How To Align Services With Expectations
 
Speakers:

• Felicity Badcock, King & Wood Mallesons
• Risa Schwartz
• Sally Gonzalez, CIO, SNR Denton

This session by an all-star set of knowledge management leaders addressed client perspectives on internal initiatives and highlighted some successful KM initiaves in law firms and law departments.  What follows are my notes from their session at ILTA conference today.

Sally Gonzalez

Ms. Gonzalez has seen three stages of KM.

The first stage involved capturing knowledge and professional development & training.  They did it in the U.K. because they were trying to manage risk.  U.S. lawyers were trying to be more efficient, an uphill battle under billable hour regimes.

Around 2000 law firms started to focus on business development and marketing. Information about people and matters became more important.  Sharing knowledge about the work and about firm relationships became important.  CRM systems were implemented, often not by KM.

Marketing started to understand the intersection of KM and business development.  Freshfields looked at what the client wanted.  They didn't want generic broadsides, they wanted content tailored to my company and my jurisdictions [Ed.--how does firm get to know what specific clients want to know about?]

Around 2008 a seller's market for legal service turned into a buyer's market.  Law firms used to control basic structure and processes of legal work, which was done under a billable hour model.  With the buyer's market, client demands for efficiency and effectiveness have increased.  Corporate legal is under price and cost pressure.  That's turned into across-the-board demands for efficiency and effectiveness.  Firms are beginning to be more efficient and new legal service providers have emerged.

Commercial risk, not legal risk, now drives law firm KM.  The client cares that you are providing the right level of legal service at a good price.

With this shift there is arising a third phase of of KM.  Traditional KM skills are being applied to the budgeting/pricing context.

So what do clients want now from in-house KM and from outside counsel's KM & IT departments?

Risa Schwartz

Clients want in-house staff and law firms that know their business. 

Clients other than HP hire people from law firms. They are typically hiring people who understand sales contracts and the life. What they don't know is how Cisco vs. Apple vs. Google negotiate sales contracts, in other words, they don't understand the business. 

Law firms and clients should define "how can everyone on the team get up to speed on the industry?"  Lawyers need an *intimate* understanding of the client's business.  

Knowledge management and technology staff need to get closer to the business people.  Some KM staff were hired without legal or business experience (technologists).  Partners would not talk to them and share their expertise and knowledge of the business.

KM initially reported to the IT staff.  That was understood as only occasionally successful.  The landscape is littered with KM and IT project failures.

KM is now more often reporting to the managing partner.  Sometimes they also report to the marketing group.

Felicity Badcock

Ms. Badcock is Head of Knowledge Management at King & Wood Mallesons, an Australian / Asian-Pacific firm well-known for its cutting-edge knowledge management program.

A survey of the Australian Legal market indicated that the 2008 recession drove a change in what buyers were looking for from reliability as the first criteria to understanding the business and industry of the client.  Price also became a factor where it had not been before.

King & Wood Mallesons has a Knowledge Management, a "Business Development and Marketing," and "Legal Logistics" groups all reporting to the Managing Partner for Clients and Matters.

KWM has reorganized around key sectors and industries.  With clients as the focus rather than the practice it increases the ability to anticipate client needs and know the industry.
Partners are affiliated with a primary sector and a minor sector as well as a practice group.  Sectors get a lead partner, business development assistance, learning & PD, and KM support.  Revenue is reported on a sector basis.

KWM has developed an enterprise-social-network-style sector community pages that let you see clients, people, and updates about that sector.  The ESN encouraged the sharing of information around the sectors.   They also rolled out ESNs around practice areas.  This is a new way of communicating. Updating information is seen in the context of the sector or practice. They've seen some good knowledge sharing on these sites that has led to additional work or better client service.

They've developed guides to help junior attorneys conduct industry research. 

Another tool is after action reviews.  There are four types:

• Client-facilitated
• Internal facilitated
• Internal-team reviews
• Internal self-assessments (partner)

The theory is that the more a firm understands about the work that it's done the more it can use the information to improve service on the next matter.

A full debrief pulls together lessons learned, financial profiles, client insights, matter profile, market profile, and knowledge sharing.  The market profile looks at matters that might be innovative and/or have a good story. 

They are trying to embed the process of internal review into the way they do work.  

They share reviews through improvement opportunities, lessons learnt stories, media opportunities, and the like.  They look across lessons to identify common trends and issues, and try to fit the appropriate lesson learned to the level of the organization (sector, practice area, firm).

Risa Schwartz

Risa addressed some examples of successful legal  km projects that involved clients.  Unfortunately she was not able to provide the identity of the clients or firms involved.  I have previously blogged about some of her work at Cisco.

Most law departments have a static deal room.  A successful program at a legal department asked M&A attorneys.  They said they were waiting for an email from outside counsel.  Sometimes outside counsel don't know when the general counsel need what. 

A simple SharePoint site let law firm attorneys update information about hot documents and key deal issues on a site that automatically notified in-house counsel.  It was built jointly by law firm and in-house counsel.  The technology saved a few weeks of time and a lot in legal bills as well.

In litigation people are desperate for information about related cases.  In-house counsel may not be able to find information about comparable cases.  Sometimes clients need law firms to build sites or themselves host sites with information about the matter. 

Outside counsel can work with in-house counsel, asking what is useful for the business, starting with the general counsel and getting down to the individual counsel. 

It's very difficult for in-house counsel to manage subsidiaries.  Orrick's system identifies approved lawyers in different countries, for the subsidiaries.

Training needs to identify the business of the client.  Some training programs have been built on client intranets.  Some have dealbooks.  Better dealbooks are on updated platforms such as wikis.  Standard clauses, fallbacks, and negotiated points are all on these wikis.  Outside counsel can be given access to the wiki, both to supply answers and to learn about the business.  Discussion forums also might address specific topics such as clauses within sales contracts.

When an extranet is well-built, clients are willing to overlook their usual preference for sites that they host themselves.

Volunteering to conduct an information management or KM needs assessment at a client is a good way for a law firm km person to start the conversation with the in-house KM person.

ILTA Session: Dashboards and Warehouses

These are my notes from the fifth session in the KM track, "Data Warehouses, Dashboards and Data Integration:  Delivering Actionable Business Intelligence."  It was pretty tech-heavy, as dashboards rely on clean data and data warehouses were also addressed.  Hashtag was #kmpg5.

Session link: 

Formal Description:

The ability to deliver actionable data to decision makers in anticipation of upcoming business cycles is the key to success in a highly competitive marketplace. Case studies will be presented with a focus on data warehousing and data integration to deliver business intelligence using easy-to-consume dashboards. We will hear from CIOs, KM practitioners and application developers who are leading the charge in delivering and using real-time data to facilitate strategic decision-making.

Speakers:

Steve Lewis - Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson LLP Douglas Horton - Handshake Software Tracy Elmblad - Bingham McCutchen Gina Lynch - Bingham McCutchen

Gina Lynch

Gina Lynch is the Global Director of Knowledge Services at Bingham, my former firm (1997-2002).  She is a wry and effective presenter.

Bingham has had rapid growth from 2000 to the present and has merged with many firms.

The new intranet was intended to create a new powerful communications platform, harmonize the Bingham community, and increase productivity and efficiency.  They had to promise that the new intranet would save the firm time and money.  

KM and KS were good facilitators for the project.  They are good at listening and distill customer needs from a conversation.  "They tell us what they want, we know what they need."'  

Finance is really important for dashboards.  You need to take them to lunch and buy them big expensive presents.  

The project needed to come out as a firm project, not a KM or IT project.  Key stakeholders needed to be in the loop about providing their information.

Their home page comes up with "news of the day," human interest or updates, followed by firm news.  The front screen emphasizes search.

Partners want long and short-term financial data.  What was it like 3, 6, 12 months ago? They want WIP, AR, hours, revenue, realization, and receipts.  They also wanted easy access to Elite data.  

Accounting wants to provide partners easy access to Elite data, billing reminders, and self-service FAQs. 

The dashboard has stoplights and bar charts.  Clicking on an image pulls up details.  Green-yellow-red for good-danger-bad.  It has billable hours, WIP and A/R, and Receipts, Billing & Realization.

What does a new partner need?

New partners need a detailed view of information about client.  

The client "entry" view shows amount of receipts and realization with big bars for different departments for multiple clients.  They can adjust the time period.  A client lookup searches by name and number, or you can filter by group, practice area, and industry.

Client detail view shows general information, time value, engagement, and the rate agreements.  

Department Pages  

Focus groups said they wanted easy access to applications, password management, and engagement letter on department pages.  

People don't really tell the truth in focus groups.  

According to the searches, they want to know "what I am going to eat, when do I get paid, when can I retire." 

Their individual view shows personal information such as hire date, timekeeper number, insurance, payroll schedule, holiday amount, retirement balance.

Partners really wanted cash flow schedule and payroll stubs.  

They learned that intranets need to be skinny.  Their approach is to identify the small bits of information that people really use (provide functionality instead of information?).  

Steve Lewis

Fried Frank's intranet focus started with addressing findability and uniformity, then switched to focus on associates, then partners, matter, and practice management.

Associates cared about where they were in relation to their peers, and also about finding sample work product.  Fried Frank chose Lexis Search Advantage.  

Their new intranet focused at the highest level on Recruitment, Revenue, and Recognition.  

The quality of the work is assumed.  You don't get in front of big clients unless you can do the quality of the work.  We won't survive unless we can do our work much, much more efficiently.  The chairman of Fried Frank feels that the new intranet is a very serious part of that effort.  

The chairman or the managing partner presented the intranet to everyone in the firm.  It was a very significant lawyer-facing project.

The home page had three sections, top stories, firm news, and calendar, designed by Right Hat.  Four columns for today and the next three days, with scrolling forward and back available.  

Tabs show "My View", "My Practice," "Clients" and "Firm."

My view shows subscriptions, watches, editorially provided content, alerts, and the like.

Fried Frank concentrated less on dashboards and more on a lot of information on the screen at one time, e.g., My Hours, My Clients, etc.  They have a "backlog summary" showing A/R for partners.

The client pages showed the partners what the firm wanted them to pursue.

Practice group pages show recent matters, media mentions, new hires, bylined articles, and the like.

Tracy Emblad

She's addressing development of the HR dashboard and the data warehouse.

They worked closely with Handshake, SharePoint could not have done what they wanted out of the box.  

They used Silverlight as well, which worked fine until iPads came along.  

She feels that every firm should have a data warehouse.  It's really important to get it into a place where it's easy to consume.  It's designed to make extraction and analysis simple.  A good warehouse turns data into a reliable firm asset.  It can also track data changes, which may not be possible in other systems.

It's one point of access and entry.  It can also be clean and trusted, and provides application-neutral data.  Some systems can only feed information in at night.  A warehouse can be queried at any time.  It's designed for high access speed. You don't have to be a database administrative to create query tools.  

Their warehouse has employee data like pictures, spouses, client/matter data, ethical wall information, etc., etc.

Getting data into a warehouse typically involves a business question or problem.  Data gets out by reports, dashboards, excel exports, etc.  

They've had measurable gains in productivity, efficiency, customer service, and compliance from their dashboards.

They watch metrics on who uses what.  Dashboards are overtaking news in popularity.

Douglas Horton

He's from Handshake.  Data integration entails pulling information from a variety of firm systems.  

We've come a long way with technology.   He talks about being called into a PI firm that had burned up an "Altos" computer by storing it in a broom closet.  

You address many of the same issues with mobile devices.  Usability is key.  Nobody is delivering dashboards by mobile (ed.--except Mallesons).  Touching is less precise than mouse clicks.  Small target areas can be a real problem.  

ILTA Demo: Potential Advances In Document Version Control and Editing

At first glance the Litera IDS product appears to be a significant improvement over now-standard legal industry methods of collaborating around drafting Word documents.  Essentially it differentiates between document owners and revisers in how documents are revised, and also does a better job at tracking who wants to add what. It has the potential to extend advanced Google-Docs style editing and track changes into a law firm DMS environment, with an extra layer of legal-style control and security.  I attended a demo today at the International Legal Technology Association and what follows is my notes on that demo.

Norm Thomas introduced the product.
 
Collaboration in their view is working on a document at the same time while keeping track of who contributed what.  Drafting documents through exchanging copies of documents through email doesn't work (I agree).
Document drafting through an extranet is limiting because everyone downloads a copy, and then loads it back up.   Editing a document in Litera IDS creates a database of changes, it doesn't actually change the document directly.  The edits are being collected.  People can be made aware of changes by others.  People can also hide other's revisions or limit editing on particular sections of documents.
You can attach workflow to editing, including deadlines. 

It allows everyone to work on the same document without modifying until the document owner goes through and accepts/reject in one fell swoop, creating a new version.  You can view all of the changes in a given paragraph, showing who made changes and when.  You can also view all the changes by a particular person.  The approach reduces revision clutter by "several orders of magnitude."

Donovan Alexander then did a demo of the product. 

The document owner can control who can review documents, and whether reviewers can further delegate editing. Red dots show locations of editing; when that section is opened, side-panels show who edited what when and the changes. Owners can review multiple people's proposed changes and accept or reject each.   It allows major and minor versions (1.0 , 2.0 or 1.1., 1.2.)

Outside counsel or client receives an email that requires local installation of IDS (I wonder if some law department systems are locked down to not allow application download).  Litera can host it, but most law firms will likely prefer to have their own servers. 

You'll be able to bring a document from a DMS into Litera.  When you're finished you can save it into a DMS either as a .ids file with full history or as a .docx file. 

Typically people invited to a particular document don't check it out, but finish their work and then check it back in. 

IDS provides a "Word-like editor" that is fully .rtf-compatible.  Some numbering styles may not work. Lawyers have found that the time savings are worth the reformatting sometimes required. 
Freshfields is doing a beta test. They see it as a potential competitive advantage. They are drafting an IT Strategy and the IT managers are using it to work on the strategy. They have not opened it up to attorneys.

[Ed.--lawyers work in very particular ways with documents, document formatting, and versioning, they should be exposed to it to see how it may benefit their work and what the pitfalls might be.]