ILTA KM

Post by Chris Boyd and Amy Halverson, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Part 1 of this series  examined the typically siloed, department-based structure of many law firm intranets and proposed an alternative:  an interface based on the lifecycle of a matter that suggests relevant KM resources and other practice support tools based on the stage of the deal or case.  In this post we explore the concept further by examining how such an interface might work for a case team that is in the “Work” phase and “Manage” process of a large litigation matter.

Let’s imagine that the firm is defending a company in a significant dispute involving the alleged misappropriation of trade secrets.  The litigation team is facing a discovery deadline and is preparing its motion for summary judgment.

Barbara, the senior partner on the case, logs into the firm’s intranet from home before leaving for a breakfast meeting with the client’s Chief Legal Officer, who will want an update on the case team’s progress and next steps, along with current and forecasted fees and costs.  Barbara opens the matter dashboard and reviews the previous day’s updates to the case status page, including research summaries and deposition schedules.  Next, Barbara looks at the matter management tool to see how closely the fees billed to date are tracking the original fee estimate and the latest forecast of fees and costs through summary judgment.  To get an update on the client’s business, Barbara then opens the client portal page, which contains recent news stories about the client and related industry news.  She sees a story relating to proposed changes in consumer data security laws that may affect the client, so she prints a recent client alert written by the firm’s privacy practice group that describes the proposal and recommends next steps.

Gary, the junior partner running the day-to-day work on the case, arrives at the office to learn that one of the associates on the case team will be taking an unexpected leave of absence.  He opens the matter dashboard and checks the shared team task list, which shows the responsibilities he will need to reassign to other associates.  He also looks at the litigation calendar to see who is scheduled for deposition over the next two weeks and track other significant upcoming deadlines.  He sees that he will soon be taking the deposition of plaintiff’s expert, which causes him to add to the list a task to compile a backgrounder on the expert by Friday.  He assigns the task to a junior associate, Alex, who automatically receives an email informing him of it.

Shortly thereafter Susan, a mid-level associate, receives a call from Gary telling her that she will be joining the litigation team.  She needs to come up to speed on the case quickly and begin work on her first assignment, which is to prepare a deposition outline for Gary to use with a witness later that week.  She goes to the matter dashboard and first looks at the shared team task list, to see who else is working on the case and what they are doing.  She next reviews the case’s pleading index, from which she can see a chronological list of the court filings and discovery served in the matter to date, to learn the case history and read key briefs.  When browsing through the links listed on the matter Discovery Phase section, she opens a recent firm training course on preparing for depositions, which gives her a refresher on how to prepare and use exhibits in a deposition.  She then uses the firm’s enterprise search tool to find an example of a deposition outline that Gary had prepared in another matter to see his preferred format.

Susan tells her secretary, Julie, that she’ll be working on the case.  Julie checks the case pleading index and notices from the case profile that the action is pending in a federal district court to which Susan is not yet admitted to practice.  Julie goes to the checklist for new court admissions and begins filling out the paperwork for Susan.

Around the same time the junior associate on the case, Alex, starts the task of compiling a backgrounder on the plaintiff’s expert by checking the firm’s expert witness database and pulling a list of firm attorneys who’d worked with or against that witness previously, along with work product created by the witness.

That evening, senior associate Peter reviews his unopened emails and sees that a motion to quash had been filed by an internet service provider to which he had issued a subpoena.  He turns to the pleading index database to search for examples of oppositions to motions to quash involving ISPs.  In finding samples he also learns who in the firm worked on prior matters involving the same legal issues, so he can speak to those attorneys to learn more about their experiences.  He then checks the matter Discovery Phase section and re-reads the guide to third-party discovery.

Each of these role-based examples illustrates a type of information resource that can be aggregated and presented together through a matter-based interface as part of a “Work” phase or “Manage” process for a litigation matter.  Some resources are persistent across phases, such as the client portal, while others are specific to the case type and phase, such as materials relating to discovery and depositions.  Regardless of the type of resource, the end user does not need to hunt through various administrative pages to find the tool.  Rather, the client and matter phase-based presentation promotes more effective use of KM and other practice support resources by leading the user to his or her next task and introducing the resource needed to complete it.   Moreover, the transparent nature of the shared resources (task lists, calendars and pleading indices) enable team members to better collaborate on tasks.

Post by Chris Boyd, Senior Director of Professional Resources, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Oz Benamram, Chief Knowledge Officer, White & Case

Note: this post is based on a presentation that we delivered recently at the Ark Group conference on “Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession.”  For information about this and other Ark Group conferences, please go to http://usa.ark-group.com/.

Law firm practice resources created by KM and other support teams tend to be presented to users on the firm’s intranet as stand-alone tools in departmental silos.  Marketing’s site provides template pitches and pre-approved deal and case lists; Finance’s site provides fee data, pricing estimators, and hours and billing status reports; KM’s site provides form and sample documents, expertise locators, and precedent matters; and so forth.  An attorney must typically remember to visit each silo at the right time and find the right resource in order to effectively market, sell, deliver, and bill her services.  Because of this inefficient setup, the attorney may take more time than necessary to navigate the offerings, or may overlook a useful tool that’s available but unintentionally hidden.  As a result, neither the attorney, nor the firm, nor the client gets full value from the practice support resources.

This setup is also suboptimal from a KM perspective.  Not only are KM’s resources likely under-used, but a large amount of knowledge generated during the course of the matter about the project, the client, the attorneys, and the work product is either never collected or, at best, only partially collected after the matter is done.  As a result, attorneys and clients on future matters aren’t able to tap the full past experience of the firm, and thereby lose out on some degree of efficiency and effectiveness.

What if you could instead provide resources through a department-neutral interface organized around the lifecycle of a matter?  The attorney could open a “dashboard” of her clients and matters, and for each matter have access to useful resources in each of the five steps of the matter lifecycle, as illustrated in the diagram below:

1. Pitch.  In this phase, the firm offers its services to the client.  The pitch can occur in a one-on-one conversation between a general counsel and a partner who’s worked for the company many times before, or in a large beauty contest where delegations from multiple firms meet with a client team to better understand the client’s needs and pitch their services as the best solution for those needs.  During this phase, each pitching firm will also check for potential conflicts.  To prepare and deliver an effective pitch, the firm’s pitch team may need to use multiple support tools, including matter databases, pitch templates and samples, the enterprise search engine, a proposal generator, the document management system, the client relationship management system, the conflicts system, and others.
2. Opening.  The client and firm sign an engagement letter, the firm obtains any necessary waiver letters, the firm opens the matter in its administrative system, the lead attorney staffs the matter fully, and the team starts working.  During this phase, the firm’s matter team may need to use tools such as the legal forms manual, the new business system, the conflicts system, the client relationship management system, the financial system, and others.
3. Work.  The firm’s matter team and client work together to close the deal, win the case, or otherwise achieve the matter’s goal.  During this phase, the matter team should be using resources such as core form documents and vetted sample documents, the enterprise search engine, expertise locators, matter databases, the document management system, the docketing system, the who-knows-who tool, the client extranet, and others.
4. Closing.  The firm’s matter team closes the matter in the firm’s systems, sends the client a bill, and ideally debriefs the matter both with the client and internally.  The conversation with the client should also ideally turn into a discussion about future possible work, perhaps in the very short term; hence the arrow between Close and Pitch in the matter lifecycle diagram above.  During this phase, the firm’s matter team may need to use tools such as matter databases, the client relationship management system, the financial system, the extranet, and others.
5. Manage.  “Manage” isn’t a separate phase, because project management occurs throughout the matter lifecycle, from organizing the pitch, to budgeting and pricing the matter, to monitoring and reporting work progress, to debriefing with the client and firm teams when the matter is finished.  While managing the matter, the team can use tools such as project templates and checklists, the financial system, the project planning tool, the extranet, and others.

During each phase, then, the firm’s team may need to use multiple practice support tools.  In most firms’ typically segregated approach to providing the tools, if the attorneys and other team members don’t already know where to find the resources and how best to use them at each point, the team will certainly be less efficient and potentially less effective.  A firm that instead united the tools behind a lifecycle-centric view of each matter would enable each attorney to take more advantage of the firm’s collective expertise and experience and as a result, the attorneys, the firm, and its clients will derive more value from the investment in KM.

In our next post, we’ll outline some examples of how this approach might work in practice.