Searchable spectrum: Simplifying access to internal and external knowledge

 

Key takeaway points

1. Keep abreast of innovation across as wide a spectrum as possible, not just in knowledge or information management.

2. Strive for the best when you decide to implement a KM system. Go for the highest level of capabilities and work with solution providers who have a track record of innovation.

3. Take a five-year view of the business to ensure a robust future-proofed solution. A two to three-year timescale is too short.

4. Maintenance is crucial – keep pruning, ensure relevance and focus on business requirements in all information decisions.

5. Train all incoming staff in depth and update them regularly to avoid underuse or misuse of systems.

6. Consider, with everything you do, what the client will achieve from it.

 

At Stibbe, we have been on a progressive journey of discovery across the knowledge and information management landscape for almost 15 years. We have constantly ?held the discipline close to the heart of the business and certainly high on our strategic business agenda. As a result of our focus in this area, we have created a number of innovative techniques and approaches internally. We have also kept on top of ?any developments in any area of the marketplace that could possibly trigger new ideas, or more efficient processes, for ?our KM strategy.

It's a constantly rewarding journey; building more efficiencies on a regular basis and feeding into a process of smarter, faster and better informed fee-earner decision making. The key area of enablement that informs decisions - leveraging information as a valuable legal practice and business tool - is search: knowing where to look and, of equal importance, knowing how to look.

It is self-evident that the value of information to a lawyer (or any other business user) is greatest when it is delivered in a robust, comprehensive and timely manner. Its value diminishes when access to it is held up by the laborious time-consuming process of tracking it down, ensuring that it correlates with all available sources and then verifying such correlation so that one may act with confidence upon the information.

Back in 2000, there were two dominant legal publishers in the Netherlands. Rather than making the quest for legal knowledge and information simpler, this situation led to complications, primarily because the ?two publishers had a strong tendency ?not to cooperate or provide inter-company access to material.

We had to 'reinvent the wheel' at Stibbe, so I created a legal portal for all legal knowledge that we obtained from external sources, integrated with our own internal sources. We made the process simpler ourselves and, in doing so, made it possible to support faster client service, better decision making and greater productivity.

In creating our legal portal, we discovered many insights that have helped to guide our actions since then:

• specification - designing realistic expectations for search technologies ?and software when specifying requirements to vendors;

• customisation - deriving and demanding enormous business value from flexibility in any selected solution; and

• utilisation - focusing on the needs and behaviours of users, as technology is little more than cabinets, cables and codes if users do not wholeheartedly adopt it.

The next evolution

When our existing KM solution approached the end of its life and it came time to choose our next system, I had greater perspective on what we needed. One of our primary goals was to gain the ability to search all legal materials from all publishers. It's a big requirement, as there are a variety of formats and file types across different publishers: no two titles are organised the same.

There are now more than 15 publishers in the legal market in the Netherlands and we have had to negotiate to be able to store every document locally. When there were only two publishers, Stibbe could dictate the format in which we required information but, as the market has grown, we can no longer call the shots. We needed the ability to incorporate the imported files into a new system and for them to be as easily searchable as information that we generate ourselves.

One particular area was the requirement to address a new breed of user - new lawyers and PSLs, along with other support staff coming in with an innate and intuitive relationship with technology and devices. Many of them exhibited behavioural traits that were markedly different to how lawyers with more years' experience of the law, if not of technology, behaved.

We met with several vendors over ?a period of six months in an endeavour to track down the optimum search software ?in the market. We were deliberately specific in every requirement we had ?of the new system.

Successful KM is a combination of a reliable and innovative technology and proactive staff within departments such as HR, KM, finance and legal practice areas. Gaining input from these departments can be a powerful tool - giving competitive advantages and delivering better value to the client.

The following five considerations were at the top of our list.

1. Involve all potential stakeholders

We decided from the outset that any re-evaluation of how we treated our vast, diverse and growing information repositories should involve stakeholders from all departments. Content stored across disparate locations can be hard to find. This could result in lawyers spending a significant amount of time searching for relevant information; time that they could focus on exercising their core skills and servicing client requirements more productively and profitably.

The same observation applies to all staff and specialists across the business: finance, IT, marketing and BD, to name a few. For that reason, we involved representatives from every area of the firm to identify their requirements for the next-generation internal search capability.

2. Design a user-centric system

We had observed that lawyers who have been with a firm for many years have a different approach to search than younger lawyers joining the practice. Lawyers of longer-standing experience tend to combine browse and search; they take the weight of some of the initial stages of a search process upon their own shoulders. New starters tend to go straight into search, trusting the systems and the machine to provide end-to-end processes.

There is scope in any firm for both methodologies to exist alongside each other, but it is important that the functionality of the system responds to ?any user approach, primarily to encourage use of the system. The user interface ?had to reflect and respond to different styles of users.

3. Demand a future-proofed system

Our process of internal planning and collaboration was designed to channel our potential vendors' proposals into presenting solutions, which would not only serve the needs of a wide range of users but also be future-proofed to the extent that we could confidently rely on them for at least five years to come.

Half a decade is a realistic expectation for the life and relevance of a system such as this; any less would be insufficient and counterproductive (after the initial bedding in of the system, we would have a very short honeymoon period before the update process would need to start all over again).

4. Be innovation aware

Knowledge and information management is critical in law firms. There is simply too much material, from too many sources, in many locations and formats, to expect fee-earners to even to know of the existence of all pertinent information, let alone its location and its inter-relationship with other material on the same subject.

Our mission in this regard was to make sure we always understood the relationship between the many technologies, systems, devices, approaches and strategies that might have a favourable impact on knowledge and information management. This mission involves constant awareness of the latest hardware, from personal computing devices, storage, data centre capabilities and services to the software that enables it, from business process cloud applications to content-related software.

It also involves the ability to integrate online sources with all other sources and being constantly aware of what's new and of value to the firm, not only in the legal domain - in areas such as knowledge and precedent libraries - but also in business development, finance and client services. It further extends to the evolution of format types, such as e-books and knowing how to manage digital rights for legal publications and documents.

5. Keep it simple

One of the prime goals in realising the value of an internal search function is to accelerate the acquisition of information. The process of searching should, therefore, present no barriers to users from every function at every level of experience.

Deploying the system

With the foregoing areas exhaustively addressed at the business planning stage and after six months of meetings with vendors, we found a vendor that understood our requirements.

The company we chose was Recommind and the solution we selected is Decisiv Search, which indexes data from across our numerous IT systems without the need to move data from any existing location. This enables fast access to the right information, delivering the most relevant knowledge for any given source.

The product ticked all the right boxes and offered us the necessary flexibility for customisation, most notably of the user interface. The provider's team was also prepared to work with us while the adaptations were made.

Our custom-designed user interface is based on one governing principle: keeping it simple. It comprises two horizontal bars: one relates to 'field of law', or practice group, and the other relates to 'source'. A user can select 'all' in both fields to access all available material. In this regard, the system responds to the different relationships our users might have with ?the search function.

As well as all internal sources, we now have a system that covers precedent libraries. This enables our PSLs to search through all the documents in existence in the practice group and add to the precedent libraries as and when they unearth precedent gems.

Having designed our own user interface for the platform, we encouraged new starters and junior lawyers to start searching for information themselves. Monthly mandatory training is provided for newcomers to the firm, giving them a complete overview of the information accessible to them. This encourages an efficient culture and generates high-quality results for clients.

We also wanted a robust system for importing files in a variety of formats from legal publishers. This was a big issue, since a user cannot link out of a publisher's format to undertake cross referencing. With our new system we can now do this; we can make the connections across all of our stored information and more sources drive more intelligent search.

Weight of responsibility

The modern law firm has a responsibility and an obligation to know everything that pertains to every field it deals in. Throughout history, law firms have had the same weight on their collective shoulders - to repay the trust and financial investment that their clients give them by delivering robust and completely reliable legal representation, based on an exhaustive and definitive understanding and interpretation of all information relevant to each client's particular areas of interest.

The growth of knowledge, data and information stored in a diversity of formats, devices, systems, countries and repositories has simply amplified this challenge. Sources have expanded; globalisation has added to the complexity; the size, speed and constantly multiplying varieties of information have enriched the capabilities of the profession.

We are now in an age where managing big data can be a full-time occupation. Contrary to the time-honoured adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a cyber-universe ?packed full of it - and growing further - can bring its own challenges if not properly managed.

My advice is to never focus on KM in isolation. It's not simply a case of creating better and faster ways of accessing information, although these are certainly among the many benefits that will accrue. Nor is it uniquely about focusing on smarter search technologies to increase the productivity of fee earners and enhance their services to clients. These too are among the many benefits of a successful KM strategy. But, to put this strategy within an overall and visionary context of innovation management is to leverage every capability available to drive across-the-board efficiencies in the modern law firm.

Dr Marnix Weusten LLM is head of knowledge management at Benelux ?law firm Stibbe (www.stibbe.com)