Session 3 of last day of ILTA: Training for Matter Centricity / Taming The "What's In It For Me" Beast

There were two substantive speakers at this session containing many tips and a fair amount of interesting discussion on training and change management issues relating to matter centricity (MCC) adoption in the Interwoven platform

Gina Buser, President of Traveling Coaches, Inc. (moderator).
Patty Stover, Manager of Technology Training at King & Spalding LLP.
Jeff Ward, Director of Application Support at Fulbright & Jaworski.

Fulbright & Jaworski

Documents from matters were being saved to multiple location. MCC works best when all documents from a matter are in the same workspace.

They structured the database based on the year the matter was started. The year is embedded in the matter numbers.

If they had left out MCC from the introduction of Interwoven "it would have been like ripping off the bandaid all over again."

FJ worked with Baker Robbins & Traveling Coaches to assess and implement change management needs. They had focus groups for 20% of the users over 2 1/2 weeks, video conferenced, and had an e-learning and training program. Attorneys won't go through the difficulty of dealing with a new system and workflow unless they understand the big picture. They did play-acting with lawyers and the staff. Jeff played a corporate attorney with an email problem and his colleague played another one with 4 tasks. They lined up the office administrators and partners in charge of each office behind the road show and had decent lawyer participation and very high admininstrative participation.

Partners were interested because of the email management problem. Other drivers included not having to do redundant printing.

They went with Filesite because they got mixed up between Interwoven and Interaction. "You can't flash-cut over humans." They had target goals for the first week:

Day 1: find documents
Day 2: file documents
Day 3: start with matter list

Lessons Learned

Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users. Rolling out new software can be a difficult test. Prepare users.

Call it "Interwoven in Outlook" or "electronic file wrapper," not MCC.

King & Spalding

Practice support is not office-specific. They have six trainers plus a manager on their training staff. They started in August 2005 and finished rollout in January 2006. They did a staggered rollout, not just one office at a time but started with one as they finished with another.

The strategy was determined by the need to finish the switch before the move to a new office.

They supplemented training with 4 additional trainers--2 in classroom and 2 on floors. They could receive an on-line program customized to the different products (30 went through this way) and the rest got classroom training.

Lessons Learned

They made it too complicated. The words "matter centricity" scares them. Call it foldering or "workspaces." Foldering will help them in a flexible fashion according to how they do their work. People in her firm stored email in Outlook folders already. Foldering is an extension of that idea. Foldering is part of getting them organized and sharing their documents with their peers. It lets them share Outlook folders.

Partner with the records, the library, and practice groups.

They developed an online training capacity that allowed preintroduction and post-testing.

Success was measured by the number of attorneys using the folders. One program was called "the trainer is in." They spent 1/2 a day on the floor and tried to find out what people needed. Sat on the floor with paralegals and secretaries and learned about the "unarchive" problem." Has tips of the week for attorneys, and for two months everything was about workspaces.

In-house people trained the attorneys, others trained by vendors. Staff could receive follow-up classes the next week.

She did not expect people to go back and move documents from their matters. "As you open or reference a document, file it."

Another person mentioned that they used "orphan document" filing problems to identify file needs.

Patty said K & S encouraged "to be filed" folders, especially for attorneys who weren't comfortable with filing themselves. Jeff said FJ did not allow "to be filed" and cautioned that there will be people who dump-file into the wrong matter, and you have to look out for them. A commentator mentioned that her firm forced people to file new documents into a matter workspace and did not allow them to file documents through filling out profiles.

They have workspaces set up for nonbillable administrative work.

I asked Patty what King & Spalding is calling the DMS. She thought that you need to call it "Interwoven" even though some people call it "iManage" (they have not moved to FileSite yet). Another commentator said they started calling it "the DMS."

You have to market the benefits. She creates special introductions to what she is doing. "This will teach you how to..." Give them an introduction to better profiling or organization by doing a webinar as they eat lunch at their desks.

Email

A commentator (with a British accent) from a major international law firm mentioned that they haven't had problems getting documents into matter workspaces and that they have "personal" and "pending" folders. The biggest pushback has been on email.

Patty said that they have a policy that all documents have to be electronically filed. Filing could be in an Outlook folder. They didn't want to advise people to copy emails into workspace folder. They also established that 2 months after the matter is closed, the emails have to be out of Outlook.

Session 2 of last day of ILTA, August 23, 2007; Interwoven Corporate Update

[This post is from a session devoted solely to a presentation by a vendor. The session was jammed. This session included a discussion of Interwoven's new search features, which I addressed in a previous post along with a disclaimer about the benefits I've received from Interwoven. This is a good place for Interwoven's press release about its ILTA appearances and related news.]

Neil Araujo provided an overview of Interwoven's business.

Their core focus is in three business areas: professional services; capital markets (e.g., derivatives handling), and web content management.

Numbers

Legal services is the biggest business of Interwoven (professional services is 40% of their business). They crossed $200 million mark in revenue in 2006, with 14% revenue growth (their growth is double that rate in the legal market). They have 3900 customers (including 1200 law firms) and 780 employees in 6 countries. The ECM industry grew at 6%. Worksite is 50% of their total business.

68 of the "Global 100" are Worksite customers.
66 of Amlaw 100 (subscription required).
50 of top UK 100 firms.

They want to move beyond document management to email and records management, including compliance.

User Support

Kevin Hicks is doing a "Field Update" for 2007. He leads the field services organization (maintenance and support).

They are sharing a lot of information with ILTA; there are monthly review meetings and a two-way feedback loop (ILTA staff go to Interwoven on issues that bubble up on the listserves and they will develop FAQs or solutions ). They are also doing technical webinars. They want to establish best practices for DMS implementation, a step beyond just addressing technical issues.

The field organization is in three groups, Technical Support, Customer Care (which could help users with MCC), and Field Enablement Services.

The Enablement group will review a client firm's proposed design (as with MCC setups) to validate or to check for yellow or red flags.

Interwoven has a Matter Centric Best Practice Guide, as well as a similar best practice guide around IRM, and are planning to develop Universal Search and Offsite best practice guides. They have a toolkit to aid help desks in helping figure out "check-in document" problems. They'll also have an enhanced performance checklist and a "Worksite Health Check Methodology."

They are investing in better on-line support, including a web support interface list of defects, listing when they have been released, forthcoming, or in planning, an integrated enhancement database, and customer-specific notifications. They will be sending out their short term and long term goals weekly or biweekly.

They will be implementing Universal Search internally on their support website.

Interwoven is considering adding blogging and issues-based content. (If they want to create an interactive atmosphere they might consider setting up a wiki or something more like Cisco's contract system rather than a blog.)

They are investigating online access to support cases. This turns out to be trickier than they expected. They are also developing personalized web support experience, tracked with login.

[Collaborative Software Break---It looks like there are a lot of places that customers have to go to find out what's new coming out of Interwoven. Are there existing message boards on Interwoven? I am glad they are investing wikis and blogs; perhaps Interwoven should also set up an inside-the-firewall locked-down feed reader that brings in RSS feeds from the different Interwoven support web sites and resources that customers have access to. They should work with the customers to customize the feeds based on the products and versions that customer has. ]

The focus in user support used to be on new content and making it perfect. But they now say that people are more interested in troubleshooting simple issues.

Business Drivers At Law Firms

Neil said that three issues have repeatedly come up in his discussions with firm management and CIOs.

Battle for talent

The number one reason associates leave is work flexibility. How can an associate be effective working in part from home or on the train? How do you meet users expectations that are now shaped by their experience on the Web?

Client expectations

Clients want global service teams.

Risk management

How can you implement a legal hold? How can you enforce a commitment to a client to retain records for a certain period of time? Ediscovery is expensive because our information is all over the place.

New Search

Interwoven partnered with Freshfields to select a new search engine. They tested engines side-by-side with Freshfields documents. Freshfields used to take 7 weeks to index 7 million documents. It took a little more than 2 days, using "good beefy hardware."

The new search will not hit the DMS' SQL database for search; it will go after the full-text index instead. It will have a mirroring capacity. They enabled quick access to Worksite search through a double press of the "Control" key.

There are many different ways people save and store email. The utopian goal is as close to one-click filing as possible. Should it know where to file it? The new method has a "send and file" email button as well as a simple "send" button. Sent emails have a new piece of metadata in the subject line that suggests without requiring where an email needs to be filed. Return emails are flagged but it does not alert the user that an email with that MCC folder has come in.

Interwoven also has a new blackberry mobility client.

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.