Legal Technology Journal

Taylor Vinters’ IT director gives LTJ an update on progress in the past year and where things are going for the year ahead.

I start this article with a question: What have case management, client relationship management (CRM), digital dictation, document management, practice management and SharePoint all got in common with Microsoft’s .NET framework? The answer is… read on and find out. Amazingly, it is almost a year ago that Joanna Goodman, the editor of Legal Technology Journal, talked with me and wrote the article on the four-button practice management system reporting tool that we had introduced to the firm, and what my plans were for IT in the coming years at Taylor Vinters.

Lexcel

The end of 2007 saw us being assessed for the Lexcel practice management standard. I am pleased to report that we attained that accreditation. One of the categories covered by the assessor was the provision we had for maintaining a continuity of service to our clients in the event of an interruption to our normal operations, so it was an opportunity to scrutinise our documentation in preparation for the assessor interview. It was a good exercise to have done. We found some sections that could have been better documented and that some of the technical procedures did not have enough detail in them to be enacted if the proverbial ‘run over by the bus’ had happened to all the IT staff.

Legal Technology Awards

January saw the Legal Technology Awards and my team and I had been short-listed for two awards – Regional IT Team and IT Director. We had all come down for the evening, along with our managing partner, Christine Berry. We waited in anticipation for the results. It is that moment when you hope for the best but have prepared yourself in case it is not to be. Well, it was not to be this year: David Bason from Shoosmiths pipped me for my award. David is a really nice chap and I was ever so pleased to see him take it and his gentle hand on my shoulder on his way back from the podium epitomised the camaraderie and friendship that there is in legal IT. We were proud, nevertheless, to have been there. Rubbing shoulders with your peers is good to do and it was even better to have our managing partner there supporting us and seeing how strong the legal IT world is. For my team, this was a new experience and there was some surprise at seeing so many people all gathered together. I thoroughly recommend to all my fellow IT directors to get your managing partner to join you there and take your team too.

Economic woes

It has been a somewhat turbulent year for us and I suspect for a number of other firms. There has been much uncertainty through the year as to how our fees were going to stand up in the face of the forecasts for the UK and world economy. For us this has meant that we have had to be prudent in our IT plans and be prepared to seriously knuckle down if required. Andy, our financial director, and I have had many meetings through the year to re-align the IT budget with the latest fees and cash flow forecasts; some of that re-alignment has been up and some down.

Four-button financials

What of the four-button financial reports then? We have used them extensively over the past year. It was fabulous and interesting to see how the end-of-year-fees target was approached and exceeded using our wonderful real-time reporting. It gave one a feeling a little like being on the start finish line at Silverstone in 1981 and hearing the resounding cheer following John Watson as he drove the final lap and took the chequered flag – the British driver who had started from fifth place on the grid had won the British Grand Prix!

CRM and the intranet

I wrote last year of how we were presenting a consolidated view of our CRM and financial information through our intranet. That initial representation has evolved somewhat, in line with wish-lists from our partners and, more specifically, with what the three market leaders have wanted to include into the native CRM system. One example, for private client work it is useful to be able to see information regarding what wills and deeds we hold for a client so we were asked if we could put this onto the CRM screens. No problem, create a new entity, include that entity on the screen and job done.

We found that whilst the initial ‘simple’ view of information was excellent, people were asking to see more detail and, whereas we had taken the stance that the native application should be the place to go for that, we asked ourselves whether we could do this by expanding further on the existing intranet design.

We pretended to ourselves that we had a blank canvas, that way we could be objective about what information we wanted to see, how we would categorise it and how we would find it. A great strength of SharePoint is its searching ability and early on we decided that we wanted to keep the simple method of entering what we wanted to search for, a single entry that could either be part of the client name or its client number.

We decided to make some cosmetic changes to the screen that showed the resultant list of matches that had been found, small but effective, such as putting a bordering box around each category of results. We made three categories instead of the previous two: we now had account matches (companies), business contact matches (contacts within companies) and personal contact matches (contacts without a company relationship). With the extra information that people had asked us to include on the screens, we now felt that there was too much to display to keep the simple effectiveness of the original design. We decided to move to a vertical menu rather than the previous horizontal divider look. The vertical menu layout would let us have major and related minor buttons. Each minor button would then have its own screen layout.

Depending on the match that had been selected, different major and minor buttons would be used. Account matches would have different buttons compared to personal contact matches. For example, for an account match, the major button of client information would have minor buttons of balances, matters and fees. We had found that the list of matters being shown on the original design was often giving a substantial scrollable list which was detracting from the usability of the whole screen, so it seemed sensible to give it its own and that is what we did. We decided as well to move to the latest SharePoint 2007 and SQL Server 2005 to produce the revised portal, which, as it happened, was quite fortuitous as subsequently we discovered that we would have had to move to SQL 2005 in order to be able to retrieve information from our upgraded Miles33 practice management system. What we now have is an improved CRMintranet portal. It is more functional, displays much more information and has a better presentation – a pleasing result.

Other intranet projects

There were several other projects we had in mind to do that were going to need the facilities that were available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) but not in the existing SharePoint 2003 we had based our intranet on, so it was quite timely that we were making additional enhancements to our intranet-CRM portal.

One of the projects we had delayed due to the economic uncertainty was the adoption of a HR system to replace the many processes and procedures that were in place to perform the various HR tasks that we have to do. We had a discussion as to whether we could perhaps take on some of the key timeconsuming administrative tasks and translate them into a MOSS solution. We knew that Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) was a component of MOSS and that should offer the ability to workflow some of the tasks such as holiday and absence forms, and responding to the query, ‘How many days holiday have I got left?’ that is repeated in the last month of the holiday year. This was an HR task that we felt could be done by us. It would represent a quick win in terms of administrative time and give our staff better access to their information.

Two other projects we had identified that were transferable into a MOSS solution were records management and our manual card indexes. Records management, in this respect, was the recording of where and what movements had happened to our client files, and wills and deeds packs. The manual card indexes recorded the work we had done for clients in the pre-computerisation era – still essential to check whenever there is a new client.

The enhancement to the intranet-CRM portal is now complete as are the HR and records management projects. The next phase of our intranet development is to engage with the team leaders to review what each of them has available on the intranet and discuss how they would like to develop the content on their team pages.

Last year, I wrote that we were looking at how marketing reports might be logged onto the system using Infopath forms that posted content directly into our intranet. That has not quite happened as planned and, for the moment, marketing reports are still being entered as documents on the intranet. A weekly digest is sent to people and the reports themselves can be opened by one click on a link in the digest. We had identified that there were five different marketing reports that we wanted: four were straightforward but the fifth was a much more complicated matter. It had to allow people to record multiple contacts and how they related to each other, a key market intelligence derived from mass attendance events rather than the one-to-one meetings, lunches or dinners. We had to be able to record the details of up to 50 people attending seminars, conferences and business group events. We needed to be able to allow easy retrieval of existing contact records for matching and if unmatched to be able to create new contact records. The relationship mapping began to look a rather complex challenge in programming terms. There was a certain urgency to get something put in place to record this information and not let it be missed from being put into the CRM system, so we took the decision to stay with entering information from paper for the present and to look at it at a later date.

A year ago, the marketing team entered the various activities that people were engaging in – meetings, lunches, seminars, conferences – they then published this on the intranet and by e-mail. This has now been taken on by each of our teams so they enter their own activities, as they do for referrals. This has been enabled by giving people specific training on how and what they should be recording for these activities. This has saved our marketing team a considerable amount of time that was previously spent approving entries. The message from this has been that there is a definite benefit in spending time to train people so that data entry may be de-centralised. It is not an ‘everyone does it’ situation by any means, but each team has two or three people who are competent and that we know understand the value of accurate information.

Another lesson we learnt was that where you are recording in-depth information in your CRM system about firms and people it is important to validate and verify that information, not only once but at a regular interval – it changes.

Document management

What of the document management system investigation that we were doing last year – have we chosen a product or stayed with OpenText? We are still investigating. It has taken a long time for vendors to produce their wares, especially customised for the legal market; like the proverbial bus, you wait a while and several come along at once. The key consideration for us is to be sure that any product we choose will be capable not only of accommodating our present business levels, but those we may have in five to ten years time. That has pointed us away slightly from SharePoint as the all-inone solution and towards separating the actual document storage from the intelligent information about the documents, the client, the matter, the type of document, the indexing of the content – in other words, the metadata. It was our feeling that there were limitations in what SharePoint could offer in performance terms for large collections of documents and how those collections were categorised, so it was perhaps not suitable for us as an all-in-one.

Managing the environment

One of the headaches that every systems administrator has is managing the environment. That headache becomes worse when you have a combined desktop and remote working environment. Many firms have complex group policies and scripts that manipulate the system to produce what people want to see on their screens. We have been looking for some time now at a product from a Dutch company, RES Software, which allows both these environments to be controlled from one management screen. Not only does it do that but it also offers functionality that is really rather difficult to do, such as only loading policies when needed and optimising the use of memory and processor resource. We have carried out a full trial, translating our existing group policies and logon scripts into its structure and seeing what happened. The results were very encouraging so we have now bought it and will use it to manage our Windows and Citrix environments.

BlackBerrys

We, like many firms, have a number of lawyers who have BlackBerrys. The vast majority use them to manage their e-mail. They have a separate mobile for voice calls, partly because this is historic and partly because we have not encouraged them to use the BlackBerry as a mobile phone. That is now changing, as increasingly people do not want to have two devices – they want one. They are using the BlackBerry more and more for voice calls and many have their BlackBerry number printed on business cards so they become the contact number for clients.

With this increasing use of the BlackBerry to make voice calls has come a corresponding increase in call charges per month. It is now time to rationalise this situation and adopt a combined e-mail and voice tariff. Our particular tariff allows for free-of-charge calls between BlackBerrys and into their main office number. We are setting out a project for this year to deploy digital dictation and time-recording facilities to our BlackBerrys. This is all part of our productivity and business continuity measures.

Recently, I have purchased some BlackBerry software that allows you to remotely manage your servers. Previously you needed to use a PDA or laptop to do this. Admittedly, it only does some basic functions but, for instance, being able to see what is happening with your Exchange e-mail queues is really rather useful. Please feel free to contact me if you would like more details.

.NET enters

A good number of the software products I have looked at this year have been produced upon the Microsoft .NET platform and I suddenly started wondering why that was and what it could offer me as an end-user of software and developer ourselves. Coincidentally, at about this time as well, I had been having discussions with two different companies who offered quite disparate software products for the legal market. I thought that it would be good to bring the two of them together to explore the theoretical question of if I wanted to use the two products together, how would we integrate the two products, how would they talk to each other, how long would it take and how much would it cost?

We arranged to meet over breakfast at Covent Garden. Tea and toast at the ready, it was with some trepidation that I started the conversation with the two of them. As in previous similar conversations, the phrase, ‘It is complicated and expensive to do’ featured strongly. I told them that I liked both their products and then came the crucial issue: ‘I will need to be able to integrate your two products together; they will need to talk to each other. How are we going to do that?’ I expected a stroke of the eyebrow, an intake of breath and a request for my cheque book, but instead the answer was short and sweet: ‘We will need an XML string with the client number and matter number in it.’ The other agreed: ‘That is good for us.’ I realised that they were both looking for a response from me. ‘Oh, is that it? It is that simple,’ I asked, with what must have been an astonished look. They continued: ‘We use .NET form and web services to carry out our tasks that can take as input and output XML strings. It is a common method, and is a standard way of .NET integration. It is what .NET is all about: standardised means of information flow.

The services are independent of each other but coded to the same standards, therefore one can communicate easily with the other. If we want to do things like pass security then it is more complicated because the source model of each has to be related to each but for a simple case of a client and matter number, it is no problem.’ This was fantastic! What would be the possibilities if all our software was .NET produced? That’s where and when my .NET strategy was born. So, what of case management, CRM, digital dictation, document management, practice management and SharePoint – what is the link with .NET? The answer is that there are vendors for each of these application areas who have or are working to produce .NET standardised products. Potentially, they will all be able to integrate with each other in a far easier way than has ever been possible, so that is where we are going to concentrate our efforts.

Once we have these core products in place, then we will have a very versatile environment and that will mean that we can make life easier for the lawyer and secretary, and if they can work more efficiently, they will work better and be happier. The promise is that integration has now come of age and the vendors had better pay attention. In my opinion, those who do not are missing a trick.

I want to say a last word whilst on the topic of .NET. Mobility. The possibility of making all this happen on any device – be it BlackBerry, PDA, mobile phone, laptop or home PC – is a reality. .NET is device independent so the future may mean that we really will be able to do at home what we do in the office, from an application perspective as opposed to the technical delivery systems that exist. What am I going to be doing this year? .NETTING, I think.

Steve Sumner is IT director at Taylor Vinters.