"Sharepoint Development Best Practices” at LegalTech

These are my notes from my first session at LegalTech in New York, a session on the Advanced IT Track. It is a major experiment in terms of connectivity for me—I hope this looks all right as it is being moved around between three devices to get posted.

Overall the session was quite informative and addressed some innovative ways of using SharePoint as a platform for internal and external content sharing and development.

Presenters:

• Guy Wiggins, Director of Practice Management (and KM expert) at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP
• Bob Beach, HubbardLaw
• Steve Fletcher, CIO, Parker Poe

The session description:

"Industry leaders discuss how their firms are leveraging SharePoint technology to serve clients and bring value to the firm."

"Panelists share lessons learned and suggestions for best practices."

The introduction noted both general the hash tag #ltny and a session-specific one #ait1

Sharepoint for Business Development at Parker Poe

Steve Fletcher said that Sharepoint is not just an intranet for HR forms or for office pages. It can be used for client service and business development. Sharepoint is used to generate targeted news and events.

Parker Poe is a 225-attorney firm with offices in the South. They compete with much larger firms.

The Parker Poe intranet "Parkway" is a significant business development tool. Their attorneys show it to clients.

Parkway is used for Client Service teams, for instance, for targeted clients, that have news and information about that target.

They do resort development work in the Caribbean. From the main practice screen for the Resort and & Hospitality page you can browse to different regions ("Caribbean") and then islands/countries (e.g.,"Anguilla"). The site pulls in weather and local news through RSS feeds. There are separate sections for resorts, golf courses, articles, legislation, local contacts, development resources, local contacts (from Interaction). Organizes firm information around "Location." They use it as a client development tool and show it to clients to identify how they work. The sites have won the firm business.

The resort sites are run by one technically savvy person located in the Resort & Hospitality area. It was developed by a team of five people including individuals from Research & Library Services, IT, Business Development, and a Practice area rep.

This firm also has dynamically created "Client Sites."

"Client Sites" provide links to unpaid invoices, invoice history, and relationships from Interaction. You can look at individual matters, documents created for the client. A News tab goes to an RSS based on the top 3-5 articles using client name as a search. He plans to bring in West Monitor information in another tab. West Monitor shows client company information identifying what type of legal work that client has, which law firms they are using, litigation/judges, and a lot more.

They also publish their own news through Business Development. One of the keys to success has been a joint venture of Business Development, Marketing, and IT. BD is responsible for delivering news and vets / targets the news. Can limit news to particular groups of attorneys (e.g., partners). They use the vendor"ShiftCentral" to serve as a source of edited news about practice areas or teams. It comes in as an RSS feed, delivered to a particular practice area.

People will use a portal if the information there is timely and creative and useful.

Steve Fletcher has a business development background and it showed in the skill with which his firm has provided BD-appropriate information to his firm. "Parkway works as a business development tool because Business Development helped develop it."

AMS Legal, a big vendor in the space, is Parker Poe's choice for extranets.

Parke Poe uses XMLaw webparts to display iManage folders.

They are using Yahoo weather and a Caribbean news site's RSS feeds. There is no central repository or control over the feeds and they sometimes break. ShiftCentral providing targeted news is some of the most valuable.

Guy Wiggins on Provisioning Made Easy

Provisioning refers to the process of supplying and maintaining passwords. Make it as easy for the end user as possible. Letting paralegals and site administrators add users without IT is a basic requirement. You need to have separate Active Directory structures.

His firm decided to use "Epok for SharePoint." Site administrators can invite people to the site. They then get a page providing provisioning training and letting them create their own passwords. It's a two-step verification, first of the email address, then another email has the link to get them in.

Epok has password reset ability. Microsoft IAG Gateway provides good access to Microsoft.

A best practice is to require legal terms of use that contain disclaimers and limit liability. Epok has an audit trail for acceptance of terms. Sites can expire automatically.

A big consideration in designing the extranet is site collections. The best practice is to have a Site Collection for each extranet. Automatic site provisioning is possible but only necessary if there are hundreds of sites.

If you'll have a lot of documents, data, you should create a dedicated SQL database to that site. No SQL database should be over 100 gigs.

Do you need detailed reporting on visitors and activities? The best practice is to be aware of auditing processes and turn it on if needed. What you can audit is limited in WSS; there are good examples of code if you have a good programmer who knows Sharepoint.

Sharing information from internal to external

Guy claims (without strong certainty in his voice) that XMLaw is the only vendor known to have synced up a legal intranet and an extranet. Extranets should reflect the client's look and feel. Another "best practice" is to set up alerts on key lists so that the client knows when new content is being added (this is the aspect of Sharepoint most like a wiki or other Web 2.0 platform).

Where you can, create a custom solution that solves a particular client problem. Even legal departments in big publicly traded companies may lack IT resources to do such things themselves. A good extranet site can lead to more work for your firm.

Resources include Codeplex External Collaboration Toolkit; XMLaw/Hubbard One Oneview Extranet; and EPOK Edition for SharePoint. Guy does not recommend that small firms undertake this, or that anyone undertake it lightly. It's best if you can leverage existing SharePoint skills and knowledge.

Bob Beach

Bob is often surprised at how little thought goes into providing meaningful content through the portal.

Bob has a six-point bulleted list titled "5 Rules for Great Content." (He made fun of himself for this so I don't have to). Great content is:

• Fresh and Relevant

• Vetted (manually or through workflow)

• Categorized (by practice, department, office)

• Targeted (by user, internal or external)

• Prioritized / highlighted (by importance, timeliness)

• Readily Available (no manual effort)

An extranet is a real opportunity to interact with your firm. Having a place to grab a document is not achieving the "enhance client relations" goal. Vetted content is much more effective. News stories should provide distinct value for that user. You have to deal with information overload. Personalization helps address that. iGoogle or myYahoo are really good for users. Attorneys would rather have someone else think about what information they need. Must be able to tag or attach metadata to the content.

Capturing blogs, wikis, discussion threads is happening. Categorizing and tagging it will help make it great. (I agree but in SharePoint 2007 there is no effective way to have cross-site or even cross-list tagging. You certainly can't look at who made what tags or use the categories on any but the site you are on).

Content Management in MOSS

Site columns provide consistent possible source of categorization, tagging, and metadata.
Content Types lets you define "classes" of communications with common attributes and policies. Can define the metadata and workflow/retention policies. He considers these an important part of configuring a robust content management capability.

User Profile data can drive targeting and what news shows on a portal page.
Presentation can be as important as the data itself. Browsing for content is still really important for people.

Sharepoint 2010 will have some improved content management capabilities. Metadata and taxonomies can be defined for the whole enterprise. You can navigate through categories. There will be better blogs and wikis for capturing information. Social feedback will allow rating of documents, discussions, posts, and so forth.

User profiles are more scalable, as are lists and libraries.

The panel feels that Extranet & Intranet usage analysis is a significant weakness of SharePoint.

LegalTech KM Session--"How Integration Drives KM"

KM1: How Integration Drives KM

• Early approaches to KM
• Individual, highly customized systems
• Commercial applications
• Benefits of powerful combined approaches

Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer, Reed Smith

Preston McKenzie, Vice President and General Manager, Business of Law @ West (Thomson Reuters).

******************************

It's a full room here the first KM session at New York Legal Tech (for Twitter followers, #LTNY not #NYLT as I earlier thought, plus #KM).

Oz Benamram, of White & Case, introduced the session. He is on the conference committee; his goal was to make presentations here more interesting and less vendor-focused. Tomorrow's Web 2.0 session is also relevant to KM.

Preston's Talk

Preston runs Thomson Reuters/West's "business of law" functions, in the client development / client-facing KM space. Products he deals with include Hubbard One, Contact Networks, West Monitor.

Productivity is a key interest because smart firms must "do more with less." He analogized driver behavior with gas at $4/gallon to what law firms have to do in operations, litigation, and lawyer support.

Law firms face three different levels of complexity; information is more complex and spread across systems, law firm organizations are more complicated geography and structure, and the markets are more complicated (diverse).

Westlaw is trying to make available the strength of relationship assessment of, say, people at your firm with a particular judge. This leverages your firm's unique information. West is (appropriately) trying to have an open architecture, allowing integration for instance with Sharepoint. They recognize that we will have more uses of integrative information than they can imagine.

They are putting together all of the desktop software applications such as LiveNote, West KM, and so forth into one package. Large software implementation are rarer if they happen at all.

Preston discussed West KM. Smart firms are thinking about capabilities rather than products. This allows you to integrate best-of-breed aspects of a product's capabilities. For instance, Westlaw can be leveraged in the online research service Westlaw.com, through an intranet portal, and through an application like Microsoft Word. The real value of West KM is its combination of converting documents into HTML, full-text search ability, keysearch classification, and citation extraction (linking) and validation. They are breaking out pieces of functionality, for instance, for use with another search or a document management system.

An example is leveraging West KM in Microsoft's Sharepoint search. This turns the West KM classification scheme into metadata that Sharepoint can display. The categories are not just a one-way feed. Another example showed integration of West KM with Recommind's MindServer Legal; for instance, a document preview in a search result shows the West KM validation and hyperlinking of a case citation.

Tom Baldwin

Tom is one of the KM leaders, having joined Reed Smith from Sheppard Mullin in 2008. Tom is a self-avowed "slogger" rather than a blogger since he hasn't posted since September.

What does 2009 hold for KM programs?

We need to do more with less. Drive your "ATV" through more "Awareness" "Training" and "Visibility." Driving awareness of your firm's capabilities would make life better. Yet lawyers won't go to a classroom any more.

We need to demonstrate value and show how we're helping "the cause."

How can we make KM systems be viewed as "vital" to the firm's processes?

Find your "Al Gore"--a project sponsor, someone who embraces the new ideas/application.

When you get positive feedback, get the attorney to send it to your boss. Try to gain trust of lawyers to get into a client-facing role and leverage any positive feedback you get (one example was use of surveymonkey.com to help a client address their HR surveys).

We need to hide the fact that there is more technology and less time for training.

Tom has previously been out front in his leveraging Sharepoint as a law firm portal and information access point, and it looks like he has done it again at Reed Smith. This intranet is called "ouRSpace" (RS="Reed Smith"). It requires XMLaw, Recommind, and Sharepoint to work together. It rolled out recently.

There is one navigation bar, with pictures for applications.

Sharepoint and ouRSpace lets you dynamically drive content to lawyers and staff depending on office, role, and title.

One fancy trick is an interactive time zone "slider" that lights up the slice of a world map and highlights the Reed Smith office(s) in that time zone.

The ouRSpace "digital file" search scope includes documents from the document management system, intranet content, and West KM, with the docs from West KM always coming up higher. The search directly leverages the metadata in West KM such as case and statutory citations, and exposes the case validation and linking features of West KM in an HTML view of the results.

Person profile exposes education, direct reports, roles, and billing rates. The search for "German" worked to find people who speak German.

Home news pulls in headlines from U.S. and international versions of the Wall Street Journal.

They are trying to pull in video. Professional quality videography is not cheap or easy to coordinate. They are doing it cheaply using conference equipment and Silverlight. They are doing videos for office managing partners and other leaders.

They lock down the "all users" email address. Instead they have a set of blogs, which use the content-targeting feature to limit the audience to those in a particular office or practice. Blogs are a great way to engage people with a steady stream of communications.

The users' home pages has a "library" tab that knows your practice area and provides links or resources specific to that area. Its "stats" tab shows timekeeper information such as billable hours worked, hours billed, and utilization percentage, again, with the amount of information varying by role.

The Office ouRSpace pages have a chat feature through a "Collaborate" tab. Each practice area has a template, with little custom content (primarily news). Each practice area page displays financial information for that practice, top clients, know-how, library, and collaboration. They started from persona development, through requirements gathering (interviewed 120 people at all levels and every geographical area).

I don't know if I would do everything as Tom has done at Reed Smith, but pulling this amount of information and displaying it in a fairly user-friendly way is an impressive achievement. Adding value indeed.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action and RSS Learning

Tomorrow is the Enterprise RSS Day of Action. Because I can't link to it enough, by way of background, I'll post again to Common Craft's basic but brilliant explanation of RSS in Plain English.

I've been up to my elbows in Enterprise RSS as my firm has been evaluating various vendors and I've been making presentations to groups and individuals about RSS over the last two weeks in particular.

I view RSS as a key technology for taking advantage of the tremendous wealth of fresh information available on the Web. Because RSS is based on the flexible .xml standards, RSS within the firewall has tremendous potential to solve some existing problems and enhance knowledge sharing.

One of the existing problems is corporate "spam" or irrelevant, bothersome email. Email comes in a glut into my Inbox and I have to do something with it--mark it as read, or delete it, at a minimum, which means to pay some attention to it because I don't know what it's about until it's in there. By contrast, an RSS feed comes into an Outlook reader already categorized by the type of information it belongs to, whether a litigation victory announcement, lost mail, conflict check, or whatever else. I choose when to pay attention to that category of information instead my having to pay some attention to whatever's there, lest I lose something that is actually directed to me in the flood of emails.

Enterprise RSS can enhance knowledge sharing. It will inform you if a change is made to an internal wiki or blog--critical for quality assurance on these internal knowledge sharing platforms. As the KM team I am on has learned through use of pbwiki.com, such a notification also greatly enhances the project management use of a wiki.

This week I have been learning more about the power and flexibility of RSS. See this excellent post on how to mash up and otherwise play with RSS feeds. Not all of the services described here are 100% reliable or necessarily useful for enterprises, but I don't think it would take a genius to figure out how some of these "tricks" could apply within the firewall.

Today to my delight I learned from LifeHacker how to convert an email subscription to an RSS feed, using mailbucket.org (tip of the hat to Damon Jablons*). Getting email subscriptions out of my Outlook Inbox makes me really happy. It may let me help others overwhelmed by email.

If you want to learn more about RSS, I recommend you check out the popular Delicious tags on RSS.

*name previously misspelled.

What a feed reader can do for you

A Google engineer has posted on the many sources of news and information that can be tracked using Google Reader (or any other RSS feed reader, for that matter.) The list ranges from classified ads of a particular type (say, apartments in Brookline under $1500 /month) to weather to finance and news reports, to saved searches.

The list is far from exhaustive, and I think more and more information, litigation-related and otherwise, is going to be "subscribable" like this list. For instance, in two minutes I just set up this search for Patent Litigation in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts through Justia.com. The results page had this RSS feed result. This is close to a direct feed from PACER, the federal courts electronic filing information system.

For enterprises, it will be increasingly the case that RSS will be the method of sharing and keeping track of content. Because it is inherently flexible and allows for the addition of faceted information like tags and practice areas, it can be particularized to the internal needs of the firm. Sharepoint 2007 has taken advantage of this power by having RSS feeds available from any page, list, wiki, blog, or other content repository. Too bad the Sharepoint 2007 is completely inadequate.

I noticed today that the Google Reader in particular has a useful "Discover" feeds tool, located right next to the "Add subscription" button.

It apparently compares the types of content that I regularly follow and finds other feeds (mostly blogs) that match that same type of content. The number of Google Reader subscribers is listed so hopefully I can tell if a feed is completely bogus. I found KM leader Tom Davenport's blog that way, and I re-found contrarian and search consultant Stephen Arnold's blog, Beyond Search, which started in January 2008 without an RSS feed.

I recall hearing Stephen's entertaining and informative closing remarks at the 2007 Enterprise Search Summit in New York (just before I began to live-blog), and also posted on the Enterprise 2.0 discussion that Anrew McAfee and Tom Davenport had this past fall. I'm glad to find out another source of information on them. Thanks Google.

As a side note, like many people, I have saved searches for my own name feeding into a reader and also an email alert. It turns out there's another David Hobbie who works for the Army Corps of Engineers in Florida, and who I suspect has more control over the water levels in Florida's swamps than any other single individual in the country. There also is another one, a business student who works for Thomson Financial. Watch out world--me and my doppelgangers are taking over!