Legal Technology Journal

Lewis Silkin’s head of IT explains why the firm is moving to its ‘Rolling Stone’ Microsoft Office/SharePoint DMS.

Shortly before Christmas 2006, I looked at my three-year aims and objectives for the IT function here at Lewis Silkin and it was fairly daunting. We needed to facilitate easier matter-centric working. Our intranet was only publishable to by the IT department, and people only seemed to want to look at the café menu on it anyway. We needed to provide easier, more instinctive collaboration with our clients (lawyer clicks on document, decides whether client can see it via client’s web browser or not). We needed several workflows, the top of the list being client/matter inception. And more than that, we needed to find a way for all our systems to be instinctively visible to our users without vast amounts of training – ‘You click on this to do this, and you click on that to do that.’ On top of this, decisions had to be taken about our document management system.

As far as document management is concerned, I’ll need to explain where we came from so the reader will understand why we got to where we are now. My brief on joining Lewis Silkin back in 1999 was to implement a document management system (DMS) as soon as possible. Within a year we had rolled out Hummingbird’s DocsOpen and everybody was very happy with it. Unfortunately, this happy status quo was not to continue, as the e-mails were arriving in their thousands and the only way to get them into that DMS was to file them one at a time. I was adamantly opposed to an archiving system because – and some IT directors will heartily disagree – I believe in the one repository route. If it all goes in one place, then simply put, it can all only come out of one place, and the software only has to talk to one place rather than several places. But technology’s a fine thing, because in early 2003 I saw a demo (as did many other law firms) of the same software house’s new, all-singing, all-dancing DMS, DM5. It wasn’t difficult to make a case for its purchase.

And now we have to skip forward two years, because we didn’t actually roll that out until January 2005. This, of course, gives an indication that we had some difficulties with the initial version of the product.

Events take an unexpected turn

So, in theory, since January 2005 Lewis Silkin staff have had the ability to move a folder of e-mails in Outlook to the firm’s DMS by dragging and dropping. That is, as long as they enjoy sitting and watching them all moving there, because they certainly won’t do it in the background. This is obviously something of a problem.

On top of this, the maintenance payable to the software house alone is a hefty annual charge – and if we need to change anything, then of course we need specialised consultants from the same software house, and unsurprisingly they don’t come cheap either.

Way back, I wondered – as I’m sure many other IT directors did – why Microsoft could not just come up with a solution that integrated with everything else.

And now it has. Bill Gates and co have given us SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007, a combination that ticks almost allour boxes.

The best way of describing how SharePoint works is as an organisation’s own internal website. It simplifies the way people in the same organisation work together. It also allows easy and instinctive processing of information as it manages content comprehensively. It provides one place for users to interact with each other – a kind of one-stop shop for everything enterprise-related. It’s a way of providing easy access to the people, documents and information they need. It enables people to share documents, track tasks, use e-mail efficiently and effectively, and share ideas and information. It also provides a single workspace for people to co-ordinate calendars and participate in discussions both within their own firm and over the extranet with clients and other law firms. It helps people and teams stay in touch with a variety of communication features that let users know when actions are required or important changes are made to existing information or documentation, including announcements, sophisticated alerts, surveys, and discussion boards. And it provides forums for brainstorming ideas, building knowledge bases, or simply gathering information in an easy-to-edit format with new templates for implementing blogs and wikis without any specialist technical knowledge.

But the most exciting thing is the document management part of it.

The case for Microsoft

At present, the out-of-the-box product is unlikely to be sufficient for law firms’ purposes, as most of us already have sophisticated DMSs in place. There are areas we are going to have to engineer ourselves, hopefully with the full co-operation of Microsoft. But we know we have ticked every box as far as keeping existing functionality is concerned – and this software gives us more. When I put my business case to the partners, I had to assure them that despite there being no known roll-out in a law firm, my recommendation would give them something that would cost less and be more robust than our existing DMS, and with the added bonus of not having to buy in a third-party workflow system as we could get a lot of workflow functionality out of the SharePoint/Vista/Office 2007 offering. I undertook an analysis of our needs, and as well as replacing our existing DMS, we needed to upgrade our intranet and extranet capabilities – and all these systems needed to talk to each other. They all also had to be easily manageable by IT staff and users of the system alike. At this stage I had identified the person to make it happen. Anna Lawton – who had been employed in the past by the two leading DMS vendors – was looking to move into a law firm. She also knew document management inside-out, and was confident the system would work. We agreed Microsoft was the way forward for document management at Lewis Silkin, and that it was probably the way many law firms would go in the future.

Looking forward

In about a year we will be delivering our new DMS and intranet/extranet plus some workflows to the firm. This will cost far less year-on-year than the current system – and indeed the maintenance on a new workflow system – because support for a SharePoint and MS Office system is both far more comprehensively accessible for in-house use and there are far more third-party vendors that can supply support than for any other DMS provider – both these elements provide much more costeffective maintenance and support.

The new system will be instinctive to use, requiring far less time lost in training new entrants to the firm. We will achieve Lewis Silkin’s aim to significantly increase the firm’s profitability using workflow without detriment to the firm’s culture and ethos. And we will also achieve a consistently high standard of service delivery from the firm’s people – partners, associates and business services staff – as well as implementing good risk management and quality control processes. People who are currently employed to replicate procedures (eg re-input information currently provided already on forms) could be redeployed to other roles. There will be little effort needed to prove compliance with and maintain regulatory requirements on document security, retention and disposal. And with the appropriate agreements on processes and procedures, the easy-to-use integrated workflow components could be used to reduce overheads, streamline processes and make users’ working practices conform to the firm procedures with minimal effort, while at the same time making the monitoring and administration of procedures easily manageable.

Incidentally, I make no apology for the name of our Microsoft Office/Sharepoint (MOSS) project. I asked our head of marketing for a project name and we really like it. Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to my ‘19th nervous breakdown’, that none of our lawyers shout ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ and that nobody will be calling me a ‘crazy mama’ in the future!

Jan Durant is the head of Lewis Silkin’s IT department.