The International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference was loaded with educational programs. I have lots of posts with my notes.

From the early days of this blog, I have kept my notes from educational conferences in this blog.  But I was not alone doing this at the ILTA conference. There were a few other people live blogging as well.  Here are the summaries of sessions that I have tracked down:

Keynote:

• The War for Talent by Rob Robinson of Complex Discovery

Collaboration Tools:

• Collaboration Tools and Technologies for Lawyers by LawyerKM
• Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools  by LawyerKM
• Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools by David Hobbie of Caselines 
• Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools by me

Email Management

• Interwoven Email Management by David Hobbie of Caselines

Enterprise Content Management:

• Enterprise Content Management by Me
• Enterprise Content Management by LawyerKM

Enterprise Search:

• Interwoven Universal Search by David Hobbie of Caselines 
• Universal (Enterprise) Search from The Law Firm Intranet by Nina Platt
• Enterprise Search by me
• Enterprise Search – The Impact on How We Do Business by LawyerKM
• Lexis Search Advantage and Interwoven’s Universal Search by me 
• Search Strategies and Law Firm “Information Gravitation”

Experience Management:

• ILTA KM 2: Experience Management from The Law Firm Intranet by Nina Platt
• Experience Management – Case Studies in Tackling a Difficult Challenge  by LawyerKM
• Experience Management  by David Hobbie of Caselines
• Experience Management by me

Firm Management:

• Ultimate Legal Technologist by LawyerKM
• CIOs on IT Payoff and Project Management by David Hobbie of Caselines
• Fire the Technology Committee by me
• Law Firm Economics by me
• Building Bridges to Practices by me
• Generation X, Y and Me in Your Law Firm by LawyerKM

How to Start a KM Program:

• How to Start a KM Program by me
• Starting a Knowledge Management Program by LawyerKM

Interaction

• Interaction Portals  by David Hobbie of Caselines

Interwoven:

• Interwoven Matter-Centricity for Non-Conformists by me 
• Making the Move to WorkSite 8.3 and Laying the Groundwork for 8.5 by me

Law Departments:

• Law Department Knowledge Management Roundtable by me

Matter Management

• Beyond Matter-Centricity – Full Matter Life Cycle Management by Lawyer KM

Project Management:

• Project Management Anatomy – Standards, Roles, Responsibilities and Skills by LawyerKM
• Project Management is Not My Day Job from The Law Firm Intranet by Amy Witt

Sharepoint:

• Sharpening Sharepoint; Four Firms Implement SP Intranets by David Hobbie of Caselines 
• Sharpening Sharepoint from The Law Firm Intranet by Amy Witt

Social Networking:

• Social Networking – Marketing Boon, Malpractice Nightmare or Simple Boondoggle by me
• ILTA talk on Social Networking – Boon or Boondoggle by David Hobbie of Caselines

Web 2.0

• Web 2.0 in Law Firms by LawyerKM
• Web 2.0 What It Means to Law Firms from me 
• Web 2.0 Law Firm Adoption by LawyerKM
• Law Firm Adoption of Web 2.0 from me

WestKM:

• Casestudy: WestKM by WestBlog

Wikis in Law Firms:

• ITLA KM4: Wikis in Law Firms  from The Law Firm Intranet by Nina Platt
• Using Wikis in Law Firms by WestBlog 
• Ways to Use Wikis in Law Firms from The Law Firm Intranet by Amy Witt
• Wikis in Law Firms by me

Products:

• Vendor Grand Prix by Mark Reichenbach of On the Mark
• Vendor GrandPrix by WestBlog
• From the Floor of Legal Tech from Law.com’s Legal Technology blog

Let me know if there are any that I missed. Also, feel free to post any others in the comments.

There were also a few other attendees who were Twittering from the Conference. Once place you can see the Twitter stream is using the Search.twitter.com for ilta08.

Speaker: Scott Rosenberg – Huron Consulting Group


My Notes:

Scott thinks that law firms have much better handle on knowledge management than law departments. He laid out a few objectives for knowledge managements:

• Capture legal know-how
• Preserving best of breed work product independent of creator
• More easily find information
• Gather data maintained in multiple repositories
• Better leverage of what’s already been paid for (This is unique to law department.)
• Better sharing and publishing content with others in the company

Law departments can validate knowledge management with cost savings. It can reduce outside counsel costs. Even copy costs can be dramatically reduced. It is hard (if not impossible) do prove value creation in a law firm. At the end of the day, knowledge management leads to a direct, negative ROI. If KM allows an attorney to do a task in 1 hour, instead of 5 hours, that is 4 hours not billed. That is a negative ROI. The value is in the next step of the value chain. If the task could be done in one hour, the client is probably not willing to pay for 5 hours of work. You would argue that KM leads to better realization, better client relations and better attorney satisfaction. But it is hard to prove this.

The session was very much a dialogue. Scott said much less than the audience. I was part of the dialogue so my notes are a bit sparse.

Speaker: Sally Gonzalez – Senior Director, Knowledge Management at EXENET LLC

My Notes:

Sally started off with some examples of being “connected” to the organization and being “disconnected.” It is important to focus on what the technology “does,” not what the technology “is.”  You need to characterize IT as an investment, not as a cost center.  Don’t be an order taker. Be innovative, find what the attorneys needs and anticipate what a lawyer needs.

You need to understand the business. You need to understand the economics, trends, services, competitors and clients of the firm.

IT can look for ways to bind the clients to the law firm. You can create extranets and external applications for the client.

Look for ways that IT can help in the war in talent. You need to deliver the best tools to the lawyers to help them do their job.  

To create a connected strategy, you need to understand the current state. You should focus on the “information,” not the “technology.”  Then you need to form the vision and figure out what you want to be and where you want to go.  Then develop the plant to go from you are today to where you want to be. Communication is key.

 

Focus on the “field of gains” first. Those projects that are easy to implement and deliver a lot of value.  Create programs with links to business and a program description.  Outline the benefits, risks and costs of the program. Sally recommends that you also create a program for ongoing operations.

Sally thinks setting up practice service team are a great way to connect the lawyers to the technical people. You designate specific contacts for practice groups, identify liaisons and foster tight working relationships.  Think about embedding IT in client teams.

Don’t hide your light under a barrel. Show your success. Communicate like a business leader.

This was a great presentation from Sally.  The audience seemed to rally catch onto these ideas and looked ready to go back and change (or at least give some thought to making a change) with the way they operate their groups at their firms.

Resources to help learn about the legal market:

• David Maister’s books on managing professional service firms
• Business Press (WSJ, Managing Partner Magazine, The Lawyer, Law Firm Inc, American Lawyer Publications)
• Your firm’s website and intranet
• Hildebrandt Headlines and Publications
• Adam Smith Esquire www.adamsmithesq.com
• Roll on Friday www.rollonfriday.com
• Internet search alert for your firm’s name
• In person: seminars and conferences

Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule

This was a sparsely attended session (it was during lunch time) from Chris RuBert, Director Customer Care of Interwoven giving a Worksite 8.3 Field Update and Shawn on preparing for Worksite 8.5.

Technote 62008-2619 provides planning guidelines. For every 5 million documents in Worksite, you need a 4 CPU/Core server with 8-16 GB RAM. Within the guidelines, you want to be able to process 1 search per CPU/Core per second with an average search response times of 3 to 5 seconds. Investing in hardware will yield a return. More processors get you faster indexing and more searches per second. More RAM gets you faster searches. 64 bit is the recommended platform, with better performance and greater stability.  The Indexer should not be on a virtual machine. The concern is the IO bottleneck on VM platforms when under load. It is a resource intensive application.

The 8.3 upgrade is a little easier than past upgrades.  Get your hardware and point it at the production data.  You can identify potential content issues in the test and test real user searches against a live index since you are setting up a parallel system. You hit the switch to move from verity to velocity.

Indexing performance tuning guide is available on the Interwoven Support Site (72008-2659). You do need to get the virus and backup software out of the way of the Indexer.

Wildcard searching has changed. A custom dictionary is recommended. Wildcard searching requires 3 characters. Searches with dashes is a problem, but can be configured in syntax. Leading wildcards should only be used when needed. (We have noticed this to a be a problem. This is a big change in functionality.) The old setting automatically inserted leading and ending wildcards. With the velocity search engine, you want to disable the leading wildcard. The trailing wildcard is addressed with stemming. This is why you need to build the dictionary.

The current problem is that the indexer either indexes all versions or just the latest version. If you index all versions, then all versions come back in the search results (This is terrible see: Interwoven Express Search and Worksite 8.3 Update – Back to Wow!! ) The service pack will just show the lateste version that meets the search criteria.

Version 8.5 is trying to enhance the offline experience, email management, searching, MCC and multi-language support.

They are looking to have seamless online/offline switching. They want to handle a network failure allowing wired to wireless switch. They also want to have better synchronization and have it in the background. You can pause, see the progress and manually stop it (if you have a bad connection). Of course they want better performance. They are using a new SQL express client database and event driven architecture.

When you deploy Offsite, there may be a big initial synchronization which will put a big load on the server. You want to phase the rollout.

Offsite is going to be tied into email management.  You can continue filing email when you are not on the network.

Version 8.5 will allow multi-byte languages (like the Asian languages) in description, comments, to, from, cc and bcc.  Version 9 will be fully unicode.

Version 8.5 will also index workspaces, including the metadata and descriptions. It will enforce filing locations so that documents must be in a folder in a workspace. It will introduce a search for workspace in the save document window, giving the workspace in the window. It also will not show the contents of the folder anymore. Showing the documents takes time to render. There is a button to show the documents. Seeing the documents helps you to see if you are saving the document in the correct place. Since version 8.5 will be indexing workspace, you need to make sure you have the recommended hardware.

Version 8.5 will allow server-side email filing. This will result in a big time saving. Currently any email filing takes at least a second per email. This is because the filing is happening on the machine. (It is fast on outlook/exchange because it is happening on the server.) Now the email movement will be a server-based transaction. The heavy lifting happens on the Interwoven Communication Server. They will using the email icon in Outlook to indicate that the email has been sent for filing and then again when it is actually filed.

There is also a new filing toolbar. When you highlight the email, it will offer a list of suggested workspaces. (Just like the Blackberry file email suggestion.) There is also an option to (i) file, (ii) file and delete from Outlook and (iii) file, print and delete from Outlook. The toolbar has an button to save the attachment into Worksite.

There is also an Outlook folder sync function. You can set up a link from your email folder to a Worksite folder. The user can focus on the organization and not have to focus on finding and filing. It will also work from any email access: Outlook Web access or Blackberry. A benefit of using a convenience copy in Outlook/Exchange is you can still use flags and follow up indicators.

You can also do delegate filing. If the secretary is filing the email, author will be the attorney not the secretary.

One issue is the physical location of the Exchange servers and DM servers. Since you do have server filing, you can put a load on the WAN.

The upgrade from 8.3 to 8.5 will require a re-indexing of the document collection.

Speakers:

• John Alber – Bryan Cave, LLP
• Bruce MacEwen – Adam Smith, Esq.

My Notes:

The market conditions today:

• clients are unhappy with the level of service
• clients are reducing the number of firms that service them
• purchasing agents are key players in law firm selection
• clients are driving change like Legal OnRamp
• extraordinary price and budget pressure
• clients are banding together to band together on issues like associate compensation, diversity, etc.

What are law firms doing in response:

• A lot of business as usual
• Some growth in fixed fee engagements, risk sharing proposals
• Some creative technology responses
• Some increased use of business analytic tools to refine pricing, staffing models (see Redwood Dashboard)

Interview with Jeremy Hand
Chairman of British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association
Quoted in LegalWeek June 19, 2008 on the failings of law firm management

“Very often the managing or the senior partner does not actually control, run and manage the firm in a way that other professionally run organizations would expect to see. In fact, making quick, effective, efficient, and in some cases bold commercial decisions to take advantage of opportunities like the Legal Services Act is simply beyond the capabilities of the partnership group as a whole to make. I do not necessarily think that the best outcomes are going to be delivered by lawyers who happen to have been promoted into senior management roles.”

Someone has to propagate knowledge of business fundamentals into the decision-making process on pricing, staffing and growth decisions. A starting point on the decision-making process is to understand law firm economics.

The income statement of the “P and L” has three variables:

• Rates
• Hours
• Realization

All three of these variables have a ceiling. They are not unlimited. You can only at so high a rate, work so many hours and only reach 100% realization.

The expense side consists of:

• people (65%)
• rent (26%)
• everything else (9%), including IT which ranges from 1% to 7%

The percentages are rough averages.

Law firms cannot compromise on talent (people) or being in Class A downtown space in financial capitals. Law firms should be able to budget their expenses very accurately.

Profit Margins. The AmLaw 100 averaged a profit margin of 36%. The downside is that a 10% discount on rates leads to a 28% drop in profits. The expense side is very fixed.

What does an equity partner cost? They have the cost as a worker. You have to pay them what an equally talented non-equity partner would be paid. They are managers. You have to pay them what you would have to pay a professional manager to do the job. They are owners and have a residual claim on profits after everyone else gets paid. The “Profits Per Partner” figure combines all three costs into one.

Where does IT fit in? Every penny spent on IT comes out of the partners pocket. If you are going to make an investment decision, you need a compelling case that it will pay for itself in full or better this year. There is not concept of “retained earnings.” Law firms strip cash out and distribute to the partners.

Every professional services firm (including law firms) has a mix of revenue creating groups and expense creating groups. The working lawyers create expense and rainmakers create cash. That is comparing hours billed to fees billed.  This is a touchy issue inside law firms. Lots of lawyers do not like to talk about profitability.

In looking at profitability, you need to analyze the relationship between revenue and expense. It is not always linear. If they are linear, the opportunities for profits to increase are limited. If they are non-linear, with revenue increases not tied to expenses, then profits can rapidly increase.

You can break the linear relationship by not being tied to hourly billing. That has a built-in cap on profitability.

There are also three time-tested ways to influence the relationship between revenue and expense:

• Brand – For example, wall street firms. Can you be the go to firm and charge a premium
• Lifetime client value – Not thinking matter by matter, but as a flow of revenue and experience
• Transactional costs

IT, Finance and other law firm business functions can strongly influence the relationship between revenue and expense by creating a kind of “information gravitation” that makes decision-making information transparent and accessible.

Transparency questions that can help be answered with technology:

• Am I making money now? 
• Where is the break-even point?
• How can I disassociate income from expense?
• How can I increase lifetime client value?
• Are my service levels appropriate to my price model?
• What supply/demand conditions are we operating in?

Make this information is the key to getting better decision-making inside the firm.

Law firm matters/transactions/cases are essentially projects with resources, tasks to be accomplished and a critical path to the desired end.

One way to show transparency is to show the margin per partner per hour. 

Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule

Congratulations to Lisa Gianakos of Reed Smith LLP for getting First Place!

Continuing my live-blogging from International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference. . .  As Web2.0 tools mature, there is an increased number of adoptions by Fortune 500 companies. We explore and learn if Web 2.0 solutions already being adapted by Fortune 500 companies would be accepted by the lawyers in your firm.

Speaker: Bruce MacEwen of AdamSmithEsq.com

Bruce is cautious optimist about the adoption of the these tools. He sees the most important change from Web 1.,0 when you surfed, to Web 1.5, when you searched, and to Web 2.0 when you share.

He thinks they have a real place as a management tools in professional services firm. They have so many advantages over email [See Luis Suarez's approach on Elsua.net]. Of course there are rules of the road.  He pointed to IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines. He recognizes that HR and PR will be concerned about the loss of control and approval.

An audience member focused on the comment function.  Bruce has seen it. But he thinks it is a defensive position. On his own site, Bruce gets 10 personal emails for every comment. I pointed out that legal blogs are not that interesting and do not get that many comments.

Bruce went through DOs and DON’Ts for blogging. (You can see them in the session materials.) Bruce views blogs as a way to prove expertise. You can say you are an expert. But you need to prove it. He also sees blogs as a great tool for knowledge management.

Bruce also sees a strength for a blog to be in project management. The reverse chronological nature of blog lends itself nicely to project management. You are typically interested in the latest piece of information. A blog displays the most recent post at the top.

Bruce moved on to wikis. A wiki is just a blog with lots of authors.  Wikipedia does not work in theory, it only works in practice. Vandalism fears are unfounded. Are your people going to vandalize your reception area? No, so why would they vandalize a firm wiki.

He cited the case of Dresdner where the introduction of wikis reduced email traffic by 75%.

He cited another case study (You can see them in the session materials.) The company rolled out six internal group blogs with 150 contributors. It worked because it is very intuitive. They are much like the way people think. People do not think in structured information like databases. They think unstructured like wikis and blogs.  You also have the update features, the categorization and easy searches.

Bruce moved on to mashups. He focused first on companies use of Google Maps.He showed an example of locating key clients on a Google Map. So if you are out of the office with some free time, the attorney could quickly see if there are any key clients nearby.

He calls Web 2.0 not “Hi-Tech,” but “Appropriate Tech.” The tools are easy to use tools that allow you to easily share information.

Bruce is more cautious than optimistic on social networks. He thinks they have intriguing opportunities. He thinks MySpace is appalling.  He sees LinkedIn as still being scattered.

He thinks if anything is going to work in the legal field it is Legal OnRamp. He has a concerns that it is getting too big. He cited the natural connection limit of 150 people. It is hard to know more than 150 people. He also did not like the presence feature on  Legal OnRamp. He found it creepy.  

Bruce is still striving to find success stories. He sees much more proven success inside law firms than the deployment outside firms. The McKinsey report on Web 2.0 showed much success in the corporate world.

The power of the tools is to form and strengthen networks.  But it does require the business side to engage with IT on development and for IT to look over the horizon. 

To end, he played this video, Information R/evolution by Michael Wesch:

A great presentation and insight from Bruce.

Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule

Let’s see, what qualifies someone for membership on a firm’s technology committee? Desire for an Apple iPhone? Having assembled an Altair computer in 1975? Having a son-in-law in the computer business? Technology committees are notorious for their ineffectiveness. We’ll do our best to find out the proper way to govern technology investment and strategy inside law firms; the goals of governance and who should set them; the attributes of a good technology committee; and other governance structures that work (and ones that never work) in this lively and entertaining panel discussion.

Speakers:

• Michael Mills – Davis Polk & Wardwell
• John Tredennick – Law Practice Today
• Chris Bull – Osborne Clarke

I missed most of the session, but slipped in for the final few minutes.

Government structure is important and you need to think about the relationship with the technology committee. It is important to give the committee tasks and to keep them busy. View the committee as working for you. For example, if you are thinking about moving to Office 2007, ask the technology committee to ask their clients what they are doing.

You also need to address the difference between responsibility and authority.

Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule

MicroStrategies and Todd from Lownestein Sandler presented their view on how Lownestein Sandler use Matter Centricity.

Specialized practice groups operate differently. Managing partners and other heavy hitters who operate on their own. Administrative departments also have a different way of dealing with documents. They do not work on matters.

You need to dealt with complaints that matter workspaces are organized by matter numbers. Attorney do not remember attorney numbers. They remember client and matter names. Lownestein had half of the firm wanted it organized by client name and the other half wanted client number.

They used shortcuts to see matters in a different way. Lowenstein organized matter workspaces named Client#, Matter#, Client name and matter name (in that order). They used a shortcut with a new name Client name, matter name, client#, matter#. They use a tool from Microstrategies that automatically creates the shortcuts.

The firm had a client with hundreds of matters with several opening per day. They really needed a way to organize the matter workspaces. It also caused a huge screen real estate problem. The solution was to build out a tree structure of the matter workspaces for that client using shortcuts for a fictional user account. The tool automatically adds newly opened workspaces into the client’s shortcut tree.

One user wanted to just fill out the document profile and not have to find the matter workspace and folder. They created a script that finds the documents and moves them into document folders. It also required a setting on the computer to keep the classic view and not the matter workspace view when saving documents and finding documents.

Then next problem is cross-disciplinary matters, where you multiple practices involved. For example, when you have tax, labor or another group working on a securities matter. They created an email address that will create a new folder, with the name of the folder in the subject line. You use the “file and send” function and file the email in the matter workspace. This allows the user to create a new folder without the elevated rights that would allow them to edit the workspace.

My ILTA Schedule

Speakers:

• Tom Mighell – Fios
• Dennis Kennedy – MasterCard Worldwide

My Notes:

The internet changes everything.  Collaboration is no longer optional. What are you doing?

Mapping the Current Collaboration Landscape:

• News and Communication
• Working Together
• Social Networking and Web 2.0
• Key: How Are We Moving Beyond Email as a Platform? [See Luis Suarez - Elsua.net]

Collaboration is about working together. Lawyers need to share documents inside the firm.

A fair amount of the session was on the basics of collaboration tools and social networking tools. (Tom claimed that LinkedIn is more robust than Facebook as a social networking tool. I do not agree. LinkedIn may be more widely used by lawyers, but is has much less functionality.)

They moved on to active versus passive collaboration tools and enhanced workflow. Tom thinks we are moving toward more project management.

Loss of Control, Security and Ethics are the three big legal issues with collaboration tools.  Attorneys are taught to control the document drafting. Wikis and Google Docs take a away drafting control. (Personally, I do not think anyone should be thinking about collaboratively drafting documents with adverse parties.)

Tom shared some horror stories about cloud computing. I countered that firms have just as much downtime and network problems. (If not more!) You do need to focus and have policy for dealing with document retention and discovery issues.

Collaboration tools do pose security issues. Dennis ran through a few issues.

Tom turned to ethical issues and the lack of opinions and law on the ethical implications of collaboration tools and web 2.0. There was an ABA many years ruling that email can be confidential client communication.  The other rulings are on document metadata. At least one state has ruled that lawyers need to be aware that documents have metadata and that the accidental release of information in document metadata will have ethical implications.

They moved on to striking the balance between risks and benefits. Dennis opined that if telephones came out today, most firms would ban them. (People would waste their time on the phone, they would talk to friends and family. . . )

IT departments need to allow innovation. The ways we work and communication have evolved and will continue to evolve.

You do need to define and implement appropriate policies. Doing nothing is a bad option. You need to channel appropriate behaviors. Attorneys will find work-arounds to avoid the technology policies. Attorneys want to get their work done. 

Looking into the future, Tom sees two things impacting these tools. One is the high price of gas.  Maybe there will be more video conferencing and collaboration because it is too expensive to travel. The second is using the internet as a platform.  Dennis thinks clients may start driving the use of these collaboration tools.

Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule