Legal Technology Journal

Andrew Powell, new director of IT at Nabarro, discusses his team approach to developing an information architecture that supports the firm’s brand.

It’s all change for Andrew Powell – not only has he been in his new role for just seven weeks, but Brodies’ former IT director is also in the process of moving from Scotland to London. It was time for a new challenge, as he’d been at Brodies for six years, during which time the firm – and his IT team – had almost doubled in size. 

Powell’s achievements were recognised at the 2007 Legal Technology Awards, where Brodies was voted IT Team of the Year. According to Powell, this was even better than being awarded IT Director of the Year a few years back, because the award acknowledged the efforts and achievements of his whole team. ‘IT in a law firm is definitely a team sport,’ he says. Although Nabarro is about twice the size of Brodies, the two firms have a lot in common when it comes to information management, most notably a quality-driven agenda. ‘They also run similar systems and face near-identical challenges in terms of uptime, 24/7 operations and developing the systems that support the lawyers,’ observes Powell.

The scale of Nabarro’s operations makes little difference to Powell’s strategic approach. ‘Whether you’ve got 500 desktops or 1,000 desktops, if you mess something up you’re going to know about it,’ he says. The main issues relate to deployment. ‘You can’t change 1,000 desktops over a weekend without some very smart resourcing. It’s also a matter of communicating change and training more users, but I also have a bigger IT team of course.’ Like Brodies, Nabarro is expanding, and Powell is accustomed to working in a growing firm. However, he emphasises the importance of consolidation. ‘A growing firm has a relatively high proportion of new people, so there’s a greater requirement for integrated systems that are easy to use in order to get people up to speed quickly, so that they become fully productive as soon as possible,’ he says.

In his first few weeks, Powell is concentrating on consolidating the firm’s existing IT infrastructure and tweaking it where appropriate. ‘I’ve been doing some benchmarking, some expectation setting and a lot of internal communication,’ he says. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time speaking to the partnership about their expectations and aspirations. I’ve also been spending time with my own team, finding out about their perceptions of IT within the firm and the marketplace. I am using that information as a starting point for developing the firm’s IT strategy going forward.’

As the strategy is still in draft form, Powell is unable to go into detail, but he can reveal that for the time being at least he is concentrating on consolidating and developing the firm’s existing IT infrastructure. ‘The back-end systems we have in place at the moment are sound, so it’s a matter of developing what we’ve got rather than starting from scratch with something new,’ he says. ‘I will be introducing some new products, of course, but fundamentally it’s all about bringing all the different elements together into a cohesive strategy.’ Having said that, he adds that major projects on the horizon include introducing a new practice management system – Elite 3E.

Electronic matter files

First, though, Powell and his team are concentrating on developing the firm’s document management system (DMS), which is provided by Interwoven. Powell suggests that applications that deal with compliance issues surrounding the matter lifecycle will continue to dominate the legal technology marketplace. A DMS, for example, enables e-mails and other document content to be filed together in a single matter file. Although this type of document management may seem straightforward, as Powell explains, it has implications for a firm’s IT strategy. ‘Increasingly, firms send e-mail attachments instead of letters,’ he says. ‘In the past, the correspondence would have remained in the e-mail system and a hard copy would have been printed and filed.’ The move to electronic filing requires a matter-centric IT framework, which needs to include retention and destruction policies and the capability to carry them out. ‘If you decide to archive an item after a certain number of years, then destroy it a certain number of years later, you need to know where it is.

While you could probably achieve that with enterprise search technology looking across multiple document sources, people tend to grasp the concept of matter-centric filing much more easily – they’ve been doing it for years with hard copy.’ Powell underlines the advantages of moving to electronic matter files, whereby the primary copy is held in the document management system. The most obvious benefits are the significant cost savings in terms of printing, storage and reclaiming expensive City office space by dispensing with all those filing cabinets, not to mention the time spent printing and filing emails and attachments.

The information itself is more flexible and accessible for remote and mobile working. In terms of business continuity, electronic files can be replicated off-site and are less likely to be destroyed accidentally or mislaid. They reduce the risk of a document being lost altogether simply because it was never printed out and filed. In theory, they also facilitate inter-office collaboration.

Although the drivers are compelling, moving to electronic matter files also means changing the way law firms work, and this will surely take time. ‘Lawyers have amassed big piles of paper for hundreds of years and moving from a paper-centric environment to an IT-led environment – certainly not a paperfree environment – will probably mean that, at least in the short term, we’ll use more paper,’ observes Powell. ‘Because we will no longer have a primary paper copy, every time we need to refer to a document, I suspect that we’ll print it, look at it and then destroy it, because there’s nowhere to file it. So we’ll need to keep our recycling policies under constant review – given the volume of paper we use, draft copies should all be printed on fully recycled paper. So electronic filing will also affect our print strategy, requiring multi-function devices that handle scanning and copying as well as printing. Basically, doing away with a hard-copy file also means providing the capacity to print hard copy quickly and reliably when it’s needed.’

Powell is currently looking at automating e-mail filing using new ‘send and file’ functionality from Interwoven, though he points out that the process cannot be fully automated because there sometimes needs to be a judgement call on where to file each e-mail. ‘If an e-mail is generated from a matter workspace, we add a reference to that e-mail so that the reply is automatically filed in the right place,’ he explains. ‘At the moment if we want that to happen, we cc the matter workspace. The problem is that, if, as invariably happens, recipients don’t ‘reply to all’, the reply isn’t filed in the matter workspace. The new functionality removes that difficulty by generating references within the e-mail that enable the reply to be filed automatically without the need to cc to a matter workspace. The e-mail still appears in the Outlook inbox, marked with a green flag to show the lawyer that the message has been filed. There is then a purge feature to remove the filed e-mails from the inbox at a time that suits the lawyer.’

There are still some operational challenges to overcome, however. ‘If you send an e-mail about one transaction and the recipient replies referring to a different matter, it’s automatically filed in the wrong place,’ says Powell. ‘That’s why we allow it to remain in the inbox: the recipient still gets to see it and can take a judgement call on where it should be filed.’ The process is further complicated by correspondence that refers to multiple matters and potentially needs to be copied to several different matter files.

Retention, storage and archiving

Powell is also turning his attention to retention, storage and archiving. ‘We’re putting all our content into a document management system that is growing exponentially. Not only are more e-mails sent, but attachments are larger as bandwidth considerations become irrelevant and technology makes it easy for people to scan and send large documents. This makes the document management system fill up very quickly, both in terms of terabytes of documents and the size of the underlying database, so we’re now reviewing how we deal with older closed matters,’ he explains. One solution is to integrate document management with the practice management system, and apply ‘date opened’ and ‘date closed’ metadata to all matter workspaces. This allows the removal of matters that have been closed for, say, more than three months from the live system to an archive, and makes closed matters read only. Although the closed matters can’t be amended, they remain visible for reference, search and compliance purposes. Powell explains that lawyers record their time against individual matters on the practice management system. Elite also stores information such as time spent on matters, billing and collections. ‘We don’t take all that data across to the DMS,’ he says. ‘We select certain information like department, date opened, date closed and matter numbers and use that metadata to decide what to do with each matter on an ongoing basis.’

Knowledge management

This strategy includes reviewing the firm’s knowledge management (KM) technology. Nabarro has a well-developed knowledge environment. Its knowledge lawyers are supported by a Knowledge Centre comprising library and online resources. Although the firm already has a KM system within its SharePoint intranet, this doesn’t actively capture knowledge – it provides access to resources that have been determined as knowledge. However, harnessing the full potential of the firm’s knowledge resources will require a change to how knowledge is held within the document management system. ‘We will be creating a slightly different taxonomy for the metadata that goes with authorised knowledge material. This raises questions about how we change people’s attitudes to submitting knowledge, which is a perennial question in any firm,’ says Powell.

Powell believes that developing a collaborative, knowledgesharing culture is a critical success factor for any KM system. ‘From a technology perspective, it’s easy to flag something you’ve created as suitable for knowledge capture, and it’s then quite straightforward for the knowledge team to identify, through searches, those items that have been flagged. So long as people submit knowledge, the collection of it is self-fulfilling. When people see that a system works, they’re more inclined to contribute to it,’ he says. ‘Of course a certain amount can be achieved through effective document management – by creating an environment where it’s easy to submit and access knowledge – but technology will not overcome the cultural challenge of encouraging busy people to spend time submitting knowledge. It’s then a matter of checking all submissions through a central process whereby the knowledge team authorise content and turn transactionspecific information into generic knowledge. That isn’t necessarily a specific knowledge management system; it’s simply using the document management platform to its best ability.’

Powell intends to enhance KM at Nabarro by introducing knowledge-focused search applications that include relevance ranking and look across multiple sources of internal and external data. This will enable the simultaneous harvesting of knowledge from multiple systems, such as DMS, customer relationship management (CRM) and online information sources. These comprehensive enterprise search tools are not confined to KM. They can also be applied to other functions within the firm – such as conflict checking and compliance-related issues.

As Powell explains, as well as trawling e-mail and document archives, live matters and knowledge repositories, they can also incorporate expertise locators. ‘The idea is to select a remit based on your particular requirements,’ says Powell. ‘If you’re using the application to locate knowledge, you might only want it to search your authorised knowledge repository, but if you’re using it for compliance purposes, you might well want it to look across a much wider range of internal sources. Of course, it’s critical to make the system user friendly, so that people appreciate the significance of the different options.’

User groups and pilots

How does Powell plan to gain firm-wide buy-in to the new applications that will be introduced in the coming months? ‘You can only get buy-in to IT that delivers against a particular requirement and reflects business priorities,’ he explains. ‘If we introduce applications simply because they look nice, we’re not likely to get very far, but if we’re making specific changes to support business growth while improving uptime and the general end-user experience, then the buy-in will be easier.’ A new IT strategy necessarily involves an element of change management, however.

As people tend to buy into new products and systems much more readily once they see them working, all new applications are tested extensively, demonstrated and piloted before being rolled out. Powell admits that it is sometimes difficult to engage users in testing new applications before going live and still harder to take busy people away from their work to review technology and strategy. He is therefore establishing an IT executive to ensure that the IT strategy is implemented effectively. This group consists of senior IT managers and the heads of practice groups and business support departments.

He is also introducing a specific user forum that will gather input from people throughout the firm. Powell explains the rationale behind this strategy: ‘Without an offline forum for discussing user requirements, problems, ideas and so on, the helpdesk becomes the user’s only feedback mechanism. So when people ring the helpdesk for a technical fault, they might also spend five minutes – completely understandably, because there’s no other opportunity – explaining why the system is not as good as it could be. Not only does that tie up helpdesk operators who need to resolve the immediate problems, it potentially loses a number of good enhancement ideas as they never make it to the development team.’ As well as identifying trends and helping the IT department deal with issues as they arise, effective user groups also represent ready-made pilot groups and peer champions, communicating the benefits of new applications to their colleagues and teams and encouraging them to use them.

Technology that supports the business

Powell reiterates the importance of ensuring that IT projects reflect the firm’s strategic vision and business priorities. ‘We don’t have IT projects – we have business projects that happen to be delivered by IT. If an IT-led project does not deliver specific business value, it’s questionable as to why you’ve done it in the first place. More often than not we’re looking at reducing hassle, improving client service, improving user experience, improving the top line, making our systems more accessible and supporting other business strategies. For example, providing remote access supports the firm’s strategy both in terms of improved client service and providing a work-life balance.’

He adds that the purpose of an internal IT department is to ensure that the firm’s information architecture is focused on the business aims of the firm and its strategy going forward. He is currently working on an IT strategy that reflects Nabarro’s brand promise and delivers its core strategic message. ‘Clarity matters’ is not just a strap line for the firm’s rebranding – it is also an apt description of Powell’s IT strategy, which is equally focused on delivering clarity and quality.