SmartSpace
PBWorks is a tool squarely in the Enterprise 2.0 space. SmartSpace attempts to merge the traditional core document management system functionality of legal market leader iManage (Interwoven) with an enterprise wiki, or actually, thousands of wikis. To understand this tool you have to understand a little bit about how iManage's "matter centric collaboration" or MCC system works.
iManage Background
With MCC each legal matter or practice area is automatically assigned a "workspace" that contains iManage folders. These iManage folders function something like a Windows explorer folder, but are located essentially within the application (webparts allow folders or workspaces to be displayed in portals, however). To assign a matter number or other characteristic to a document or email, it is placed in a folder in a workspace. At the "workspace level" proper, however, no information is displayed and no documents can be located. Workspaces, like folders, can be associated with metadata like client / matter numbers, legal service codes, and practice areas.
Baker Robbins has leveraged the curious opportunity created by the "blank" workspace to create and display a workspace-specific wiki. As with any wiki, new pages can be linked and created on the workspace wiki. The home wiki page is currently somewhat "structured," such that documents in iManage can be added as part of a "briefing" at the top of the home wiki page.
Technically I understand that the SmartSpace wiki is hosted on a separate server and is displayed within iManage dynamically based on the workspace information (this suggests that it would not be challenging to show the SmartSpace alone on a portal, say in conjunction with one of the many Matter Pages intranet systems or in an extranet).
Document Management System Collaboration??
I think it is really interesting that a top consultant has figured out a way to add a matter-specific collaborative tool right into the main-line document management system. Providing attorneys and staff the ability to interact with and add context to the key set of documents they work with could very significantly enhance their ability to find and leverage work product, and also could provides an easy way for wiki knowledge-sharing and collaboration to be embedded in the normal attorney / staff workflow.
Suggestions For Improvement
The product was first discussed (released?) in June (2009) so, not surprisingly, I see a few ways that the current SmartSpace approach could be improved to make them more of a collaboration and communications platform.
1) Notifications (Signals)
Notification of changes is core wiki functionality, in my opinion, because it provides a signal of changes and allows the wiki to serve as a communications platform instead of simply an on-line database.
I did not see notifications built into SmartSpace. It should be easy to sign up for notifications of changes to the SmartSpace (and perhaps also the documents in the workspaces?). Notifications work best if the user can select the notification frequency, whether immediately, daily, or weekly digest formats.
In addition, the type of notifications provided can be really important. As noted by my former colleague in "Sharepoint Wiki Disaster," Sharepoint 2007 (a/k/a MOSS) provides the latest version of the page "entire," without a redline or indication of changes. This has limited (though not eliminated) the utility of those wikis.
Notifications are typically provided by email, or, in fully Enterprise-2.0-compatable organizations, through an RSS feed.
2) Ease of Editing
A wiki is supposed to be easy to edit. The edit button should be large, friendly, and inviting. That encourages people to start the editing process. Lowering the barriers to authorship enhances the opportunities for attorneys and staff to add value to the workspace wikis.
3) Structured vs. Unstructured Wiki Pages
Currently SmartSpaces allows users to right click on a document anywhere in iManage and add a document to a "briefing" section on the home page of a workspace wiki. I understand and applaud making it easy to add documents to these wikis.
I am concerned however that limiting where the documents go when they are added will dramatically reduce the opportunity for users to provide context to the documents through organizing and formating the page and set of pages to on which the document is linked. It is the ability of users to control and add to the context and organization of wikis that make them superior, from a knowledge management context, to traditional document databases.
One way to improve the flexibility would be to let users choose from a list which page on the wiki to add in the link. Another would be to have the right-click create the full link, complete with text, for addition into any place on the wiki. A third way would be to have the right-click simply identify and copy a unique URL for the document (this is clunkier).
4) Search
Another concern is search. An organization with enterprise search could readily search both the iManage system and any related wiki. Without federated search, however, the documents themselves and the context for the documents and the text provided by the SmartSpace wiki would need to be searched separately, which is problematic. And search within SmartSpace might be limited to that workspace wiki, or extended to all of the wikis.
5) Security
A separate system would need to map and abide by the same security settings found in the iManage workspaces. For instance, it should not be possible to even view the name of a workspace wiki if only certain people in the firm are allowed to access the matter (the names themselves can constitute information that needs to be kept from everyone except those on the matter team).
Conclusion
Despite these concerns, I am very intrigued by the concept of adding matter-specific wikis into the law firm environment. I have been looking for a wiki package that would allow automatic generation of wikis based on matter opening, and this system certainly fits that need. It remains to be seen if this system can meet enough other needs to rise to the level of a truly useful and adoptable tool.
Showing posts with label Interwoven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interwoven. Show all posts
Friday, August 28, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The First Enterprise-Class Social Search For Law Firms: Interwoven Universal Search & Lexis Search Advantage Come To Market
I saw an updated demonstration of the Interwoven Universal Search / Lexis Search Advantage (IUS/LSA?) search product in early December 2008. An excellent lunch by Radius was part of the inducement to visit.
IUS is powered by Vivisimo's enterprise-class search engine. I was pleased to be able to see a more fulsome demonstration of the IUS/LSA product following on the demonstration at ILTA, now with the addition of a potentially powerful social search component for the law firm market.
Background
IUS/LSA is a feature-rich, complicated product. I don't mean to imply that it would be difficult for users to understand, although certainly getting them to use the social search features would be a challenge just like rolling out any new business process is a challenge. I've therefore identified some previous posts in the next paragraph, should you like some background information on enterprise search, social search, and work-product retrieval search.
I first blogged about Vivisimo's social search in October 2007, covering Vivisimo's initial announcement, Lyndo Moulton's framing of social search from a "traditional KM" perspective, and then a live demo of "Velocity 6.0" as that product is called. In August 2008 I also blogged about implementations of IUS (without a social search component) at three law firms; I also noted the rollout announcement for IUS / LSA, again, without a social component, largely by reference to my former colleague Doug Cornelius' highly favorable post on KM Space. For more see my posts with the "enterprise search" tag.
IUS/LSA combines "work product retrieval" and "enterprise" search. As quite nicely explained by Cindy L. Chick in this 2004 post on the subject, these two have been essentially different categories of search products, with the the former sharply focusing on a limited pool of internal (perhaps highly vetted) precedent, and the latter "federating" or broadly combing different pools or silos of enterprise information. Typical content "sources" for enterprise search include a document management system, intranet, and traditional enterprise database such as Expert/Aderant.
The rest of this post discusses particular features of IUS/LSA.
Case Linking and Validation
A key feature of IUS/LSA is its outstanding case validity check (through signals from Shepard's case updating service) and citing references links. The search identifies cases and statutes present in the content and takes that reference information to Lexis' enormous database, containing information how courts have treated each published decision (i.e., citing favorably, overuling, etc.). It returns a signal to the search engine, which is visible as a flag of some sort in an HTML view of the document from within the search (on a click).
Case validity tells attorneys reviewing work product that the cases (or statutes) are or are not valid; citing references provide an extremely efficient way to find or collect all of the work product on a particular topic, by linking all of the work product that cites to a particular case or statute.
The significance of case validation for busy attorneys cannot be overstated. Litigators are constantly weighing the strength of their arguments, based on the facts at their disposal and the extent to which those facts mesh with a legal theory. Legal theories themselves carry varying degrees of authority or persuasiveness—compare for instance the complete invalidation of slavery under the XIII Amendment to the US constitution with the Supreme Court rulings on the validity or invalidity of various race-based affirmative action plans. Case validation allows lawyers to tell at a glance if they might be treading on shaky ground in citing to a particular line of cases.
The "citing references" ability (my term, not theirs) allows researchers to quickly find other work product resources that cite to the same case law or statutory resources. Since lawyers making a legal argument ethically must cite to the leading authority in their jurisdiction on a given point, even if to distinguish its application in the present instance, finding other instances of case citation can quickly lead you to other instances where other lawyers have made the same arguments (or argued the same point from the other side!). Examining work product that cites to less significant authority can also be very productive, since this authority may be one of a line of cases on the your side of a particular issue.
Both of these features are found in West KM, although West KM is not currently bundled with an enterprise search tool as powerful, versatile, and social as IUS. In particular, the ability to cluster results on the case and statutory authority is extremely powerful.
Social Search
The newest aspect of IUS/LSA is Vivisimo’s cutting-edge social search features taken from Velocity 6.0. These have been officially released, although I do not personally know of any law firms that have actually implemented these features in production (they have been available in the broader business community for something less than a year, I believe).
Once results are found, users can tag, rate, or comment. The main initial use of tagging is to help individual users refind their documents and create personal precedent collections. The magic of tagging is that each tag in turn enhances findability of documents (they directly effect relevance ranking) and expertise. Users can also tag into "shared folders," say by practice area.
Furthermore, users can identify who applied the tag and see all of a users' tags. Pivoting on known user information is a big advantage of tagging inside the enteprise (as compared to anonymous social tagging such as available on delicious).
One of the truly powerful aspects of integrating tagging into search (tags are applied at the time a search result is displayed) is that it integrates tagging into normal work flow. Users search all the time; they don't have to go a separate system to enter a tag, and the tags are immediately displayed and available for their own use the next time around.
I am a huge fan of social tagging . It is a key aspect of Enterprise 2.0, will greatly enhance findability for individual users, and then will only get better as more and more people add their own targeted markers of significance and relevancy. Ranking and commenting also have great potential for enhancing search inside the enterprise.
Guided Navigation
Like other enterprise-class search tools, IUS displays sets of results clustered by key metadata alongside a directly accessible relevancy-ranked set of search results. Where a collection contains significant metadata, drilling down into a set of search results through clusters of metadata is much more effective than a simple ranked list, because it lets users identify resources with directly relevant attributes or whose attributes are close enough to be useful. It also might let a searcher exclude large sets of returned documents.
For instance, a litigator looking for a Markman brief in patent litigation where guided navigation is available might search across all courts, but then drill down into the particular jurisdiction or into jurisdictions in the same federal circuit.
Semantic or Concept Clustering
In addition to clustering into categories predefined by DMS administrators, the Vivisimo engine has the remarkable ability to group documents into clusters based on concepts extracted from the documents. Vivisimo's "calling card" is its ability to generate clusters of documents based on similarities between groups of documents; at the same time, it identifies the groups by what it determines to be key characteristics of that "cluster." Depending on what the settings are, there can be clusters within clusters, allowing you to drill down into the set of documents most relevant to your search (instead of starting the search over when you get too many hits).
See for instance this clusty.com search for "senators", which lists "members" (of Congress) "Ottowa Senators" (the hockey team), "Legislation, Law" (which includes state senate information), and so forth.
Expertise Identification
The out-of-the-box people search looks at document authorship and official firm website biographies. Expertise can also be identified through looking at who is tagging what, which is exposed both through the lens of individual tags and through a view of a user profile. I suspect it would be also possible to use IUS/LSA to incorporate and analyze billing and matter records to further refine the people search.
Searching Across Silos
A key challenge for KM and information management strategy is the distribution of enterprise content across mutually exclusive “silos” of information. A matters database might have information about the general type of work being done on a particular deal and the partner who opened the matter; a document management system might have documents tagged with those same matter numbers; a separate system might contain final pleadings or vetted content; and a billing system might indicate who has worked on that matter the most. Typically the three sets of data never meet, and certainly cannot be leveraged in any reasonably user-friendly manner.
Enterprise search, of whatever platform, provides the “glue” that can bring all of these pieces together. A search for Delaware patent litigation briefs through such an engine might identify not just the Markman brief that the attorney was looking for, but also patent matters and people who with previous experience from that jurisdiction. In some use cases an enterprise search might even extent to designated or licensed content from the internet or proprietary databases.
IUS/LSA clusters based on source as well as documents' content and metadata.
Spotlights
IUS also has "Spotlights", very much like “Best Bets” or canned prepared sets of responses to particular queries. Knowledge management or other firm groups can promote particular sets of precedents or practice guide. In the demo, a search for "motion philadelphia" gets "How to file a motion in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas."
This kind of spotlighting ties in well with efforts to provide procedural guidance for litigators, or deal checklist assistance to junior business lawyers. I am engaged on a wiki-based project to gather just this kind of information (on the litigation side).
Metadata
The search previewed here will also add metadata about court and judge to that about cases and statutory references. This is through a trick known as “entity extraction”, where key parties or case numbers from the documents are matched up with party, case, and judge information from Lexis’ massive databases. I am not sure if this feature has been publicly released.
Profiling
They also demonstrated automatic document profiling, through which documents can get assigned document types such as memo, pleading, correspondence, and so forth, based on their content and similarity to comparison sets of documents. I do not believe this feature has been publicly released either.
Information Gravitation
Some clients are using search to populate client pages that combine information from internal sources and saved searches of the web, in Sharepoint web parts. They have a federated search connector for Google, or, can search particular sites.
Such pages highlight enterprise search's ability to expose and make useful content previously buried in unconnected databases.
IUS is powered by Vivisimo's enterprise-class search engine. I was pleased to be able to see a more fulsome demonstration of the IUS/LSA product following on the demonstration at ILTA, now with the addition of a potentially powerful social search component for the law firm market.
Background
IUS/LSA is a feature-rich, complicated product. I don't mean to imply that it would be difficult for users to understand, although certainly getting them to use the social search features would be a challenge just like rolling out any new business process is a challenge. I've therefore identified some previous posts in the next paragraph, should you like some background information on enterprise search, social search, and work-product retrieval search.
I first blogged about Vivisimo's social search in October 2007, covering Vivisimo's initial announcement, Lyndo Moulton's framing of social search from a "traditional KM" perspective, and then a live demo of "Velocity 6.0" as that product is called. In August 2008 I also blogged about implementations of IUS (without a social search component) at three law firms; I also noted the rollout announcement for IUS / LSA, again, without a social component, largely by reference to my former colleague Doug Cornelius' highly favorable post on KM Space. For more see my posts with the "enterprise search" tag.
IUS/LSA combines "work product retrieval" and "enterprise" search. As quite nicely explained by Cindy L. Chick in this 2004 post on the subject, these two have been essentially different categories of search products, with the the former sharply focusing on a limited pool of internal (perhaps highly vetted) precedent, and the latter "federating" or broadly combing different pools or silos of enterprise information. Typical content "sources" for enterprise search include a document management system, intranet, and traditional enterprise database such as Expert/Aderant.
The rest of this post discusses particular features of IUS/LSA.
Case Linking and Validation
A key feature of IUS/LSA is its outstanding case validity check (through signals from Shepard's case updating service) and citing references links. The search identifies cases and statutes present in the content and takes that reference information to Lexis' enormous database, containing information how courts have treated each published decision (i.e., citing favorably, overuling, etc.). It returns a signal to the search engine, which is visible as a flag of some sort in an HTML view of the document from within the search (on a click).
Case validity tells attorneys reviewing work product that the cases (or statutes) are or are not valid; citing references provide an extremely efficient way to find or collect all of the work product on a particular topic, by linking all of the work product that cites to a particular case or statute.
The significance of case validation for busy attorneys cannot be overstated. Litigators are constantly weighing the strength of their arguments, based on the facts at their disposal and the extent to which those facts mesh with a legal theory. Legal theories themselves carry varying degrees of authority or persuasiveness—compare for instance the complete invalidation of slavery under the XIII Amendment to the US constitution with the Supreme Court rulings on the validity or invalidity of various race-based affirmative action plans. Case validation allows lawyers to tell at a glance if they might be treading on shaky ground in citing to a particular line of cases.
The "citing references" ability (my term, not theirs) allows researchers to quickly find other work product resources that cite to the same case law or statutory resources. Since lawyers making a legal argument ethically must cite to the leading authority in their jurisdiction on a given point, even if to distinguish its application in the present instance, finding other instances of case citation can quickly lead you to other instances where other lawyers have made the same arguments (or argued the same point from the other side!). Examining work product that cites to less significant authority can also be very productive, since this authority may be one of a line of cases on the your side of a particular issue.
Both of these features are found in West KM, although West KM is not currently bundled with an enterprise search tool as powerful, versatile, and social as IUS. In particular, the ability to cluster results on the case and statutory authority is extremely powerful.
Social Search
The newest aspect of IUS/LSA is Vivisimo’s cutting-edge social search features taken from Velocity 6.0. These have been officially released, although I do not personally know of any law firms that have actually implemented these features in production (they have been available in the broader business community for something less than a year, I believe).
Once results are found, users can tag, rate, or comment. The main initial use of tagging is to help individual users refind their documents and create personal precedent collections. The magic of tagging is that each tag in turn enhances findability of documents (they directly effect relevance ranking) and expertise. Users can also tag into "shared folders," say by practice area.
Furthermore, users can identify who applied the tag and see all of a users' tags. Pivoting on known user information is a big advantage of tagging inside the enteprise (as compared to anonymous social tagging such as available on delicious).
One of the truly powerful aspects of integrating tagging into search (tags are applied at the time a search result is displayed) is that it integrates tagging into normal work flow. Users search all the time; they don't have to go a separate system to enter a tag, and the tags are immediately displayed and available for their own use the next time around.
I am a huge fan of social tagging . It is a key aspect of Enterprise 2.0, will greatly enhance findability for individual users, and then will only get better as more and more people add their own targeted markers of significance and relevancy. Ranking and commenting also have great potential for enhancing search inside the enterprise.
Guided Navigation
Like other enterprise-class search tools, IUS displays sets of results clustered by key metadata alongside a directly accessible relevancy-ranked set of search results. Where a collection contains significant metadata, drilling down into a set of search results through clusters of metadata is much more effective than a simple ranked list, because it lets users identify resources with directly relevant attributes or whose attributes are close enough to be useful. It also might let a searcher exclude large sets of returned documents.
For instance, a litigator looking for a Markman brief in patent litigation where guided navigation is available might search across all courts, but then drill down into the particular jurisdiction or into jurisdictions in the same federal circuit.
Semantic or Concept Clustering
In addition to clustering into categories predefined by DMS administrators, the Vivisimo engine has the remarkable ability to group documents into clusters based on concepts extracted from the documents. Vivisimo's "calling card" is its ability to generate clusters of documents based on similarities between groups of documents; at the same time, it identifies the groups by what it determines to be key characteristics of that "cluster." Depending on what the settings are, there can be clusters within clusters, allowing you to drill down into the set of documents most relevant to your search (instead of starting the search over when you get too many hits).
See for instance this clusty.com search for "senators", which lists "members" (of Congress) "Ottowa Senators" (the hockey team), "Legislation, Law" (which includes state senate information), and so forth.
Expertise Identification
The out-of-the-box people search looks at document authorship and official firm website biographies. Expertise can also be identified through looking at who is tagging what, which is exposed both through the lens of individual tags and through a view of a user profile. I suspect it would be also possible to use IUS/LSA to incorporate and analyze billing and matter records to further refine the people search.
Searching Across Silos
A key challenge for KM and information management strategy is the distribution of enterprise content across mutually exclusive “silos” of information. A matters database might have information about the general type of work being done on a particular deal and the partner who opened the matter; a document management system might have documents tagged with those same matter numbers; a separate system might contain final pleadings or vetted content; and a billing system might indicate who has worked on that matter the most. Typically the three sets of data never meet, and certainly cannot be leveraged in any reasonably user-friendly manner.
Enterprise search, of whatever platform, provides the “glue” that can bring all of these pieces together. A search for Delaware patent litigation briefs through such an engine might identify not just the Markman brief that the attorney was looking for, but also patent matters and people who with previous experience from that jurisdiction. In some use cases an enterprise search might even extent to designated or licensed content from the internet or proprietary databases.
IUS/LSA clusters based on source as well as documents' content and metadata.
Spotlights
IUS also has "Spotlights", very much like “Best Bets” or canned prepared sets of responses to particular queries. Knowledge management or other firm groups can promote particular sets of precedents or practice guide. In the demo, a search for "motion philadelphia" gets "How to file a motion in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas."
This kind of spotlighting ties in well with efforts to provide procedural guidance for litigators, or deal checklist assistance to junior business lawyers. I am engaged on a wiki-based project to gather just this kind of information (on the litigation side).
Metadata
The search previewed here will also add metadata about court and judge to that about cases and statutory references. This is through a trick known as “entity extraction”, where key parties or case numbers from the documents are matched up with party, case, and judge information from Lexis’ massive databases. I am not sure if this feature has been publicly released.
Profiling
They also demonstrated automatic document profiling, through which documents can get assigned document types such as memo, pleading, correspondence, and so forth, based on their content and similarity to comparison sets of documents. I do not believe this feature has been publicly released either.
Information Gravitation
Some clients are using search to populate client pages that combine information from internal sources and saved searches of the web, in Sharepoint web parts. They have a federated search connector for Google, or, can search particular sites.
Such pages highlight enterprise search's ability to expose and make useful content previously buried in unconnected databases.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Update on Lexis & Interwoven Universal Search
I was very impressed early this morning by a demonstration of many of the capabilities of Lexis' new search, created in partnership with Interwoven and its Universal Search product. See my colleague Doug Cornelius' post on the breakfast and announcement (I had to present shortly after the breakfast and couldn't liveblog it).
Litigators think in terms of case citations and common citations to statutes, so it is good to see Lexis and Interwoven "getting it."
Litigators think in terms of case citations and common citations to statutes, so it is good to see Lexis and Interwoven "getting it."
Monday, August 25, 2008
Interwoven Universal Search
Title and Session Link: Interwoven Universal Search - Business Drivers and Case Studies
Description:
Is your firm taking a look at Interwoven's enterprise search product? Listen to member firms discuss the business drivers that led to their purchase decisions and what they're learning during implementation.
Speakers:
Peter Lamb - CIO, Torys, moderating
John Kuttler - Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP
Robert Guilbert - Knowledge Management Architect, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
Chris Bull - COO of Osborne Clarke in the UK.
John
Finnegan is an IP firm with many offices. "Geek lawyers" tend to appreciate a service like enterprise search.
He saw a demo of IUS at ILTA 07, and thought that it would benefit his attorneys. They've had "Google mini." Unlike Universal Search, it doesn't respect security.
On their intranet, they have drill-down into matter and client systems that pull in information from many different systems including IP Docketing, Records, DMS (Interwoven), Financial Systems, and InterAction.
They've done a pilot test with attorneys, and hope to launch mid-September. First collections included DMS, Intranet, public internet, Exchange public folders, client-matter database (numbers and names only); file shares, and their CPI IP Docketing System.
Attorneys need and like both stemming and highlighting hits in context. It shows number of hits per author.
They customized IUS by only displaying client / matter number, and then a mouse-over shows full name.
They haven't turned it loose on people.
He would like to tune the results based on who is doing the searching (esp. with technical searches).
Robert
Wachtell is 275 lawyer firm in New York only. Search was driven by poor email search, it was frustrating to waste time looking for information. "I can search Google and find information across the entire internet in seconds...why can't I search within our own domain like that?"
Can sort by each repository. Can customize each data source, to show doc type from DMS and From and To for email.
They chose IUS for its scalability, open results within native applications, ease of setup, and so forth.
They spent three months on a Proof of Concept. The POC expanded from 20 to 100+ attorneys, and they had little choice but to purchase it.
Some rollout delay occasioned by the use of search to find information that was previously and appropriately obscure.
Content searched includes WorkSite documents, email, Client memo databases, firm presentations database, and through federated search, some legal websites.
They went from ~300 searches a day in the first week to ~500 searches a day in the fourth week. Number of users per day also increased dramatically.
Search has "changed the way our attorneys work." Robert feels it gives them a competitive advantage.
The next steps for them are adding in Interaction, web 2.0 technologies like tagging and voting, and role-based searching.
Chris
He was involved as a program director, not a technologist. As COO he is responsible for KM as well as IT, HR, and so forth.
Osborne Clarke has 430 attorneys, 3 offices in the UK, 2 in Germany, 1 (small) office in Palo Alto.
They just launched MOSS in July 2008, and had a major KM systems overhaul. Their KM systems were scattered, and search was slow. They wanted to reduce email overload. Search was a critical part of intranet upgrade. They decided not to go with Sharepoint native search, because of the lack of federated search and the lack of integration with WorkSite.
They didn't do a Proof of Concept, although it probably would have sped up the selection process.
They wanted a single, simple search tool. It makes it look like you have a single database. They have 10 Practice Support Lawyers. Part of what they wanted was to get external knowledge from Lexis or PLC. The People and basic intranet search are powered by IUS.
They stripped out the library system. They added the library catalog in to IUS. People hadn't used the native application.
Ranking is really important. The right search results had to be on the first page.
- WorkSite--includes emails, KM library, and matter workspaces.
- PLC--external know-how database
- Intranet
- Library catalogue
They've had some issues with the amount of older content. They were able to get its rank reduced. Some people had bulk-profiled email, which wasn't coming back well. It really exposes improper profiling of documents.
"When you can filter as well as you can in IUS, you just have to educate people."
Their intranet has nice clean look, branded as "The OC Intranet." The professional KM practitioners don't like the clusters, everyone else likes them.
Each practice area has its own knowledge page. OC exposes a folder on WorkSite, to cater to people who like to browse.
Recap
These three had a very positive view of IUS. It sounds like you can tune and weigh different data sources' ranking to get what you need on the first page. These implementations are especially impressive in the IUS had little to no penetration in the legal market last year, and so the IUS team must have had very little experience on which to draw.
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.
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.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
ILTA Vendor Announcement--Interwoven and Velocity / Vivisimo
Interwoven, which has come in recent years to be the leading if not quite the dominant leader in the provision of document management systems for legal services, announced yesterday and at another ILTA session today that they are partnering with enterprise search company Vivisimo.
My colleague Doug Cornelius has already described in detail the proposed set of search tools that will be released. One capability he didn't mention is the Interwoven Universal Search's identification of attorney expertise using a combination of biographical, matters, and billing underlying data, as I suggested here.
Vivisimo is known to be a leader in enterprise search in the corporate world, highlighted this April by KM World magazine. Vivisimo clearly understands the specific security concerns that law firms have (registration required for download).
I believe that this is an excellent move by Interwoven and has the potential to improve search dramatically within firms that have not already adopted an enterprise search engine.
The pricing model for Interwoven Universal Search is based on two pieces, a client access license price (per user) and on the volume of documents indexed, in 3 million, 5 million or 50 million "packs." Documents in WorkSite are not counted towards this pack limit.
[Disclaimer--Goodwin Procter uses Interwoven Worksite products, and, like Mr. Cornelius, I attended a very pleasant event sponsored by Interwoven at the Epcot Center last night, and may attend another event they will have sponsored.]
My colleague Doug Cornelius has already described in detail the proposed set of search tools that will be released. One capability he didn't mention is the Interwoven Universal Search's identification of attorney expertise using a combination of biographical, matters, and billing underlying data, as I suggested here.
Vivisimo is known to be a leader in enterprise search in the corporate world, highlighted this April by KM World magazine. Vivisimo clearly understands the specific security concerns that law firms have (registration required for download).
I believe that this is an excellent move by Interwoven and has the potential to improve search dramatically within firms that have not already adopted an enterprise search engine.
The pricing model for Interwoven Universal Search is based on two pieces, a client access license price (per user) and on the volume of documents indexed, in 3 million, 5 million or 50 million "packs." Documents in WorkSite are not counted towards this pack limit.
[Disclaimer--Goodwin Procter uses Interwoven Worksite products, and, like Mr. Cornelius, I attended a very pleasant event sponsored by Interwoven at the Epcot Center last night, and may attend another event they will have sponsored.]
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