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Law Technology Now put up podcast on how client relationship management and social networking tools will change the way we practice law: Almost Live from LegalTech West Coast: Tom Baldwin — Social Networking. (registration required).  The podcast was a recording of Tom Baldwin‘s presentation at Legal Tech West Coast. The podcast is about 12 minutes long.

One of the pillars of knowledge management is that who you know is as important as what you know. Tom surveyed broadcast emails and found that a huge portion of those email were asking for information about people.  Attorneys were looking for outside experts, internal experts, service providers, matchmaking clients, pitching clients and clearing conflicts.

Tom has found Client Relationship Management systems to be lacking.  CRM systems have grand ambitions of pulling the firm’s contacts into one place.  Tom has found that most CRM systems get relegated to managing external marketing lists.

Tom has become more of a fan of Enterprise Relationship Management systems like Contact Networks and Branch IT.   ERM systems mine external email traffic to identify relationships. [My post on Contact Networks: Contact Networks - Enterprise Relationship Management.]

Tom also sees some tools coming from entity extraction. In court filings, you should be able to extract the party names, the judge and the jurisdiction. That information is in fairly standard locations in a document.  Then when looking to see what experience the firm has with a particular judge or in a particular jurisdiction, the entity extraction system can help answer that question.

One warning about the podcast. I understand that Law Technology Now needs effective advertising to make money. But this is the first podcast that inserts an advertisement into the middle of the podcast. I found it very jarring to cut off in the middle of Tom Baldwin’s presentation to an ad for Blue Arc.

On June 20,  I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster.

A replay of that webinar is now available on the ILTA website: Connections in Context – Who Mentioned CRM?

Enterprise search has become the standard for helping to make organizations’ information retrieval processes more efficient. Improving user access to data across the enterprise is key.  But effective search can do so much more than just improve existing business processes, it can transform your business network by exposing otherwise hidden expertise, customer relationships and cross-selling opportunities. In this session, Oz Benamram demonstrates how to transform your business development process with enterprise search by automatically sharing relationship connections and context throughout the enterprise and provide the benefits of a contextual, searchable network to your stakeholders to achieve maximum adoption and effectiveness.

I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster. The presentation was a retake of the presentation he gave at the Enterprise Search Summit.

Oz has done some great work on finding documents. So I was enthusiastic to see his take on finding people.

My Notes:

The goal of CRM has been to help you find someone and to deliver information about that someone to help you decide if that someone is the “one.” We need to make it easy to find people, whether internal or external, and see our shared experience with this person.

Oz set forth Amazon.com, with all of the related content related to the product. With Facebook, he pointed out the flow of information from Facebook.

There are three keys around people: who, why and what. Who are the People and Contacts. The Why is the client, matter or project. The What are emails and documents. It also important to coordinate those with when and where.

The goal is to make the information findable in a Google-like manner. That is one simple search box that integrates all systems. It also important to filter the results like you do in Amazon or Clusty (powered by Vivisimo).

Oz moved onto a presentation of the contacts module of his AnswerBase system. AnswerBase is powered by Recommind. The tool uses a relationship analysis tool from Contact Networks (in a proof of concept). This tool looks at the email traffic between internal and external people to show the strength of relationship. They also add info from the CRM system, HR databases, document management system, billing system, matter management system and marketing systems.

They had a privacy issue related to harvesting email. They limited it to emails that were put into their email filing system. This allows you to expose the email and alleviated privacy concerns.

Oz moved onto finding contacts in context. This involved some entity extraction. They use West KM to find courts, judges and parties mentioned in the document. (This is very litigation focused.)

Oz moved on to finding internal expertise. They mash together information from the HR system, the documents the attorney has drafted, the information on the attorney’s matters and the attorney’s time entries.

We had Rich Rifkin and some of his colleagues in from Contact Networks to see what their product can do. I was left very impressed.

They call their product Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) and distinguish it from Client Relationship Management (CRM) products. I have posted about my dissatisfaction with CRM systems: CRM in Law Firms, Is CRM Worth It? The Pros and Cons of Client Relationship Management. The problem is that they do not add much value to the lawyer so there is little incentive for them to add and maintain the information in the CRM system.

Contact Networks mines information from email traffic, address books, calendar, the CRM system and other available data sources. In particular, it matches an email domain to database of companies. So it knows that an email to someone@gs.com, is an email to someone at Goldman Sachs. Using that email address they match the contact information to the CRM system or the contacts to flush out the name, title and other information.

They crunch all of the contact information, the frequency of email communication, and some other information to determine the strength of the relationship between someone inside the firm and an external contact.

Contact Networks provides a simple, “Google-ish” interface to search for who inside the firm knows a particular person outside the firm or who inside the firm has contacts at a particular company. That is a question that passes through my email system dozens of times a day. InterAction was set up to try to answer the question. But InterAction relies on attorneys adding contact information and dealing with its kludgey interface. Contact Networks also goes farther than showing Who Knows Who to showing How Well Who Knows Who.

When seeing the relationship, it displays what data is part of the relationship: emails, contact card, InterAction entry, etc. This exposes some interesting information. A large amount of email traffic goes out to people that are not in your address book. Looking back at my recent traffic, I agree that the proposition is completely true. I am just as lazy and time-pressured as anyone else. I often will just hit reply all and not bother adding the contacts into my address book. Rich threw out a number of 70% of email traffic recipients not being a person’s address book. A benefit of Contact Networks is that it can match the email address and email traffic from one person to someone else’s contact card or InterAction information for that person. I may just be hitting reply all. But if my junior associate has entered that person’s contact information, Contact Networks will match the contact information to the email address.

Contact Networks also has a compilation of Standard Industry Codes for the companies so you can associate the contact with an industry. The you can search for contacts in a particular industry and see who in the firm knows the person and how well they know the person.

Contact Networks is not trying to position itself as an alternative to InterAction or CRM, but as a complement. Contact Networks is able to pull in lots more information than InterAction can get on its own. Bu Contact Networks does not have the management and control features of InterAction to track information and catalog it.

Obviously, Contact Networks focused on alleviating concerns of privacy. First, they do not look at the contents of the email. They just grab the address, date and frequency of email contact. You can also allow users to opt-out, you can allow users to apply a private label to exclude the contact information and you can limit who has access to the ERM information.

The great thing about Contact Networks is that it requires no user input. It harvest everything from existing inputs in other processes and systems. It has a simple user interface, so training is a few minutes or a simple email instruction.

Tom Baldwin has been telling me to bring in Contact Networks for months. I am glad I finally did.