Biting the bullet: Migrating to a new client extranet platform

 

Key takeaway points:

1. Client-facing collaboration technology is crucial, so if your system is not well received or is unruly to manage, bite the bullet and change it

2. Carefully choose your replacement system. Make sure it is flexible enough for your unique needs and that its underlying structure is sound

3. Don’t underestimate the scale of a data migration project, especially if it requires feedback from clients

4. Consider the initial setup time and cost, but also look at the system’s ongoing maintenance requirements. The more self-sufficient you can become, the better

5. Continue to evolve your approach to collaboration – technology can be your greatest ally

 

In some respects, a law firm is a business like any other - we service clients, collect fees for our work and engage technology to support these processes. However, the 'X' factor for law firms is our brain trust of professionals and how we communicate and collaborate with clients.

How we communicate with clients, and the tools we provide to facilitate that, can strongly influence the depth of our business relationships. Even if our legal services are stellar, if the mechanism of communication is flawed, a client can become annoyed, disgruntled or, even worse, start looking for another law firm.

I lead the e-business team at Eversheds, which puts me in charge of client-facing technology for our 4,500-user firm, with 43 international offices. My perspective is that, if client-facing technology is to work extremely well, it must be well received and easy to use, and it must have a proper return on investment to justify its purchase.

If the applications we offer clients are clunky, unpopular, bug ridden and expensive, we are going to hear about it, and we will constantly be on the defensive trying to cover up and make excuses for a weak product.

Legacy technology

Since I joined Eversheds in 2004, I have witnessed a long history of its use of extranet technology - some have been built internally, while other systems have been purchased from outside suppliers. We have an internal portal for our firm's use only and we also have typically had hundreds of client extranets to manage short-term deals, long-term client relationships, and everything in-between.

Until recent years, we had been using a legacy extranet platform for collaboration extranets. Unfortunately, this was never an ideal solution for the firm. The system had security issues and the support and ongoing development of the technology were weakening it further. The extranets were difficult to use and support and they did not have the flexibility or functionality that our lawyers and clients really wanted. On ?top of everything else, they were very expensive to maintain.

Our clients were not happy using our extranets, and they consistently shared their negative feedback with our IT team. Also, since our system was hard to use and constantly changing, our IT team needed to regularly train our clients on the usage of our extranets. Spending two to three hours of training per client created a huge time drain for us. Hundreds of hours were invested in the product on an ongoing basis and we had displeased clients to boot. Something had to change, and fast.

 

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Choosing a client extranet solution

• Simplicity. Is the system quick and easy to set up and use, or will it require continual training and maintenance? Can a basic site be up and running within a few hours?

• Flexibility. The system needs to be flexible and versatile enough so that your firm can mould it to be what you and your clients need.

• Relationship management. Lawyers should be able to leverage the extranets to maintain online contact with clients and provide a single version of the truth and a central place for communication.

• Workflows. Part of the system should facilitate routine daily processes within complex structures.

• Security. We have a responsibility to have control over levels of access to and usage of client data.

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Switching systems

We decided to look for a better solution ?for our client extranets. Taking a look at ?the key players in the field, we had three finalists that were all well known in the market. All three products seemed to do ?the basics pretty well.

However, there were a few areas in which the provider we chose, HighQ Solutions, had an edge: a legal-specific cloud-based collaboration platform; different levels of user access and security; document storage facilities that facilitated information sharing (iSheets); and a robust audit trail on document access.

Next, we were faced with the real challenge of migrating the firm's data over from the incumbent platform to the new system. We had hundreds of extranet sites established: some were still active, others were obsolete. My group undertook an intense vetting process to determine which was which and what action to take for each category.

We decided to leave some of the existing extranets alone and not import their data over. A few of the sites were not useful, had missing functionality and were rather problematic, so we discontinued them. The last group would be our most challenging - the sites that were high priority and current enough that their content needed to be migrated over.

The migration project was a very large-scale endeavour that took approximately 18 months to complete. In the end, we successfully migrated 150 extranet sites over to the new system, eliminated 50 and left about 20 to expire gradually. The projects ran the gamut from being extremely simple to requiring complex customisations. We had to reengineer many of them due to the capabilities of the new system.

Impact assessment

In retrospect, one of the lessons that my team learned is that migration projects for client-facing technology is a huge undertaking. These projects require a lot of communication with clients, which takes a lot of time because we are at the mercy of their calendars and it's usually not their highest priority. We kept our core team together, but it was very hard to push clients to respond in some cases.

My advice for firms looking to update their client extranet technology would be to allocate plenty of time and resources to these projects, because they are a lot of hard work.

Once we were up and running with the new extranets, we heard next-to-no noise (i.e. negative comments) about the new technology. In fact, we got a lot of positive feedback. What had been a major pain point with clients had now become a popular, well established and stable part of our client-facing technology. We were able to turn a negative into a positive and it was very rewarding to implement a system that made both the firm's lawyers and clients happy.

Each of our extranets serves a unique purpose. We like the flexibility the new system provides us to set up new sites quickly, without needing outside help. Our staff have set up virtual 'deal rooms' to handle a large-scale document transfer. These sites range from tiny ones with about 10MB of stored content to ones with dozens of gigabytes of data.

We have also set up project sites, which support particular project teams rather than specific deals. These are used by both internal and external parties in different locations as a central site to store and access relevant documents.

Our relationship extranets provide our lawyers with an online forum to communicate with longstanding clients in a non-deal-specific, more everyday fashion.

We were always very sensitive to the need to keep costs down. Most IT purchases are seen as a pure expense - part of the overhead and the cost of doing business. However, our client extranet platform carries such large volumes that we are able to get volume pricing that we can pass on to clients, either for a fee or as a value-added benefit to complement our services. At this point, the extranets are primarily cost neutral and some of them are potentially profitable. The good news is that the extranets pay for themselves.

Corporate identity

Eversheds' use of client-focused technology is continually evolving. We started with simple sites that focused on document storage and access and have now developed much more complex extranets, including some with social media features like wikis and blogs. We continue to request customisations to modernise the technology and move it to the next level.

Our new extranet sites are a better representation of our corporate identity and brand. We cannot afford to use cumbersome, outdated technology. ?Most importantly, our clients are well served and consistently reminded that we are there for them. And the extranets are always on, 24/7.

Jonathan Townend is the head of e-business at international law firm Eversheds (www.eversheds.com)