Boosting Your Institutional Memory

By Tom McNichol

There's one challenge that's common to all law firms these days, regardless of where the company is located or who's in charge: work-product retrieval. Basically, the problem is: How can attorneys get their hands on work that they, or someone else in the firm, have done in the past. In other words, how can a lawyer avoid reinventing the wheel when tackling a new case? And when a client wants to know how much a case is likely to cost, how can the lawyer locate past matters similar in scope and issues, to provide the client with an accurate cost estimate? In short, how does an attorney tap into the firm's collective wisdom?

"Having a robust system to help locate work product is a problem that every law firm struggles with," says Thomas Baldwin, chief knowledge officer at Reed Smith in Los Angeles and former CKO at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton. "An attorney will say, 'I've drafted a document like this before, and I don't remember the document number, but I remember it was this type of deal, and I think it was for this type of client. But I'm not sure.' The question comes down to, 'What do we know as a law firm, and how do we harness our intellectual capital?' What processes and technology do we put in place to make it easier to leverage and mine the intellectual capital that's floating around the brains of the firm's lawyers?"

A generation ago, the way most lawyers researched the "who knows what?" question was to walk down the hall and knock on the doors of a few likely suspects. But that wasn't always a reliable method of inquiry, and it didn't work well at big firms with hundreds of lawyers and multiple locations.

Computers promised to change all of that by collecting information in an internal network. But somewhere along the line that payoff never quite materialized at many law firms. Today, the way most firms try to answer the "who knows what?" question is to send out a mass email to all attorneys on staff and hope that someone responds. But more often than not, the response is a roaring silence.

That's because email - particularly a mass email - turns out to be an exceptionally poor way of getting answers to time-sensitive questions. Emails are simply too easy for busy attorneys to ignore, and once ignored, they vanish into an information black hole.

"Lawyers get emails all day, and most of the time it's just static," says Patrick DiDomenico, a lawyer and CKO at Gibbons P.C. in New York City. "That's because the email is probably not timely information. It's not immediately actionable. But I might need it in the future. So what do I do with it until I might need it? Well, I'll probably put it in an email folder, and then I'll try to find it some day when I need it. And I'll usually be unsuccessful."

The recession is making the work-product-retrieval problem even more critical. For one thing, attorneys who can't access the best information the firm already has on hand are not going to be as effective as they could be, which doesn't bode well for repeat business. And even more to the point, the economic downturn is forcing many firms to move away from the billable hour to a fixed-fee model, making speedy access to past work crucial.

"More than ever, firms are trying to get a grip on finding matters that meet a certain criteria, because clients are asking us to be more precise in estimating a budget," says Baldwin. "You want to be able to say that the matter we're bidding on is similar to these other ten matters, and these ten we billed between $75,000 and $125,000. That gives you a good basis to arrive at a fixed fee."

So how do firms capture all of the knowledge that's floating around the office and store it in a way that's easily retrievable? The basic principle of law-firm knowledge management is: Don't expect the lawyers to do it. Attorneys are too busy with their own work. Any information-retrieval system that relies on the good will of lawyers to assist others is doomed from the start.

"The first rule is don't ask a lawyer, but automate," says Oz Benamram, CKO at White & Case in New York. "Instead of asking a lawyer the name of a judge in a case, it's better to find the place in the system where the information already exists. If you ask a lawyer something that has nothing to do with his concerns, your system isn't designed right. The lawyer has to have some skin in the game."

As a result, law firms are turning to specialized software to help them automate their content management, archiving, and collaboration efforts. The most popular collaboration platform these days is SharePoint from Microsoft, which is attached to the Office suite of tools. SharePoint uses the Microsoft interface that's familiar to millions of workers using Office, and it can be configured to access data from other programs, databases, and websites. SharePoint has become popular among large law firms in particular, as they struggle to manage the blizzard of data their attorneys generate and to make the collected information of the firm searchable. (Subscriptions start at $7.50 per user per month.)

But the market is too lucrative for Microsoft to be the lone player, and SharePoint now has several large competitors. Among them are IBM and Oracle (which sell collaboration and content-management software separately) and also EMC Corp., which updated its Documentum Enterprise Content Management suite of tools last year.

With SharePoint and similar content-management platforms, it's no longer necessary for attorneys to track down the right person in the firm to gain important information. Nor is it necessary to send out blanket emails begging for help. The SharePoint portal, when implemented correctly, contains most of the institutional knowledge of the firm - information the software is constantly capturing and updating in the background while attorneys go about their work.

The main SharePoint portal page consists of modules that can launch a specified function, such as a task list, discussion board, calendar, or shared document area. The sites can be customized, letting users add elements they need for each specific project. And the platform's search function allows users to search across all the firm's databases - not only legal documents but also accounting, marketing, and HR data if necessary. The platform also has a "colleague tracker" feature that lets users follow what specified attorneys in the firm are doing, including information from less obvious sources, such as blog posts and wikis.

The information managed by SharePoint can be used within a firm on its internal network, and relevant parts of it can be made available to clients. Some firms are using this ability to share ongoing work with clients as a marketing tool.

"Every client in every matter we have has a site on our intranet," says Meredith Williams, director of knowledge management in the Memphis office of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz. "We can turn on external access to that, which has helped us retain clients. We have a big health care client that we gained last year, and at the time there were about five other law firms doing their work. We built an internal section on our intranet that allowed us to manage all of the different files we were working on for that client. Then we debuted it to the client so they could see how we were managing their work and keeping their costs down. They eventually moved all their other [outside] work over to us."

Larger firms are using software such as SharePoint as the air-traffic controller of their internal networks, making sure information arrives on time and without incident. And perhaps just as important, the system can keep attorneys from being deluged with irrelevant information that has nothing to do with their practice area. Some firms are also tailoring their intranets so that the information appearing on each lawyer's desktop is different, depending on the lawyer's particular area of expertise.

"We try to present data in a targeted way throughout our firm, so that what shows up on the home page of our company portal is different for a partner than it is for an associate," says Baldwin. "Which office you're in dictates the type of news you get, and which practice group you're in dictates the library links you get. It personalizes the portal without the lawyer having to do any work. That's all native SharePoint technology. It's a very effective way to make sure that the experience each person gets is tailored to his or her individual needs, but they don't have to take the time to customize it themselves."

In all of these cases, law firms are finding new ways to take advantage of what's often been an elusive asset: their own institutional knowledge. The collective experience of a firm is often the most valuable and marketable asset it has, but it's only valuable if it can be accessed and readily put to use. In the past, attorneys needed to know the right people to approach. But now, new software tools are making the collective brain of a firm much more easily accessible to everyone.

"Our firm has been around nearly 75 years, so chances are good someone's done [a similar case] before," DiDomenico of Gibbons says. "If you can find that work product and use it, you don't have to start from square one anymore. That makes you more efficient. And the client will be happy because now you don't have to charge him for the hours you would have spent looking for the right information."

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