Legal Technology Journal

Innovative enhancements to Interwoven's document management system have proved vital in helping Bond Pearce overcome the barriers to matter centric collaboration between all of its offices.

Bond Pearce LLP originally implemented the iManage document management system (DMS) early in 2004 using WorkSite servers and the iManage DeskSite desktop client. With over 700 staff spread over five cities, Bond Pearce needed to consider carefully how to implement the WorkSite servers across its WAN links. For resilience and performance reasons the four main offices each had their own WorkSite Server, Index Server and SQL database server. Each DMS server connected to all other sites databases creating a distributed (fully meshed) environment. The migration from Novell in June 2005 saw the introduction of Active Directory, Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook thus providing a platform to consider the MailSite/FileSite client.

iManage, which had now become Interwoven, had released Interwoven 8 with its matter-centric collaboration (MCC) architecture. Bond Pearce recognised the benefits of MCC and the creation of the electronic file, a fundamental requirement of which is the need to provide better e-mail management. So the news about the concept of e-mail drag and drop, which profiled the e-mail automatically to the client matter file was very exciting. However, Bond Pearce’s distributed, meshed environment made this migration a technically challenging proposition, so it was with some reservations that the firm initiated a project to upgrade to Interwoven 8 and migrate to a matter-centric environment and introduce the FileSite desktop client in August 2006.

The move to MCC

The first stage of this project was to upgrade the middle-tier servers on each site to version 8.2. The process involved significant testing on virtualised test servers ensuring Bond Pearce’s SQL databases upgraded successfully, documenting the upgrade path to ensure detailed ‘back out’/ rollback plans were developed. The upgrade took place over a weekend in October 2006, all systems being taken offline ensuring exclusive access to the servers, configuration and documents. This process also included a reindex of some 6 million documents. Systems were taken offline on Friday evening and all users logged back into iManage Desksite seamlessly the following Monday morning. With the back-end upgraded and ready to support the MCC environment Bond Pearce were then able to start the implementation of FileSite and the introduction of workspaces (part of the MCC architecture). Workspaces effectively allows lawyers to easily see all documents for a particular matter or project irrespective of who created them.

This part of the project started with a mapping of metadata for the workspaces from the practice management system (PMS – Aderant’s CMS.net). This included such data as billing lawyer, department, practice area and, importantly, workspace category. These decisions were key to the MCC design and provide a means to identify different types of workspaces by type for future development (workspace category) and knowledge management profile information.

To initially design and build workspaces for all active client matters the Bond Pearce IT team worked closely with its support partner Phoenix Business Solutions utilising their workspace generator application. SQL stored procedures were developed to query the PMS and insert the data into staging tables. Three types of workspaces were developed taking the form of PMS (client matter files), PSEUDO (support departments) and personal workspaces. The designs were kept simple not only to make the migration easier for the end user but to also ensure a manageable and userfriendly experience. Over complicating designs defeats the point of MCC and the workspaces become difficult to navigate and use, however, the detailed design was to pay dividends later.

Real-time workspace shortcut creation

Out of the box FileSite would require all users to create a list of matter workspaces they are working on or wish to work on. In order to encourage user buy-in, Bond Pearce wanted to remove this manual exercise by automatically generating shortcuts to workspaces for users under their ‘My Matters’ in the Outlook FileSite tree.

Phoenix had developed a tool entitled ‘Shortcut Creator’. Working closely with Phoenix a real time shortcut creation process was introduced, which utilised SQL queries to the PMS returning and thus creating workspace shortcuts to matters that the fee-earners had recently recorded time on. The lawyer’s ‘My Matters’ were then made public allowing the secretaries in their team to subscribe and be able to view and access the shortcuts. The generator also purged all shortcuts if no time had been recorded on a matter within a set time period. From implementation all fee-earners were able to see three months worth of shortcuts beneath their ‘My Matters’. All shortcuts were organised by client.

Matter-centric design – making it fit

The concept of matter centricity and making it ‘fit’ into Bond Pearce’s complex environment identified some design issues and constraints. The most significant was that each database had the same clients and matters (replicated around each database from inception). The iManage DeskSite client works differently from a MCC client by profiling documents based on the author’s default database. This concept changes with workspaces, in terms of its database location, with the workspace defining where the document is profiled. Based on this rule Bond Pearce created one workspace for each matter. Having a workspace for each matter per database would have created significant overheads and is incorrect. Metadata from the PMS was used to make this decision with the ‘matter lawyer’s’ home office defining the location of the workspace.

A document sweeper utility was then used to insert all project items (documents) into each workspace’s subfolders (based on document class). A project item is effectively a link in the workspace subfolder back to the underlying document in the database.

However, documents that were the wrong database could not be inserted into the workspace; if these documents were swept in then the edit date field would not be available as it is not stored for these ‘link’ documents. This presents a training issue and becomes confusing for the end user; if users are trained to work matter-centrically they expect to view their documents in the workspace subfolders no matter from which database they originate. This is a significant hurdle to overcome when upgrading from a distributed iManage DeskSite environment to a mattercentric environment.

To make the view in the workspace consistent, ensuring the workspace displayed all documents irrelevant of database, the Bond Pearce team developed an innovative solution to this problem, which we called the ‘Super NRL’.

‘Super NRL links’ – the solution

Each database can contain different documents for one matter and following the introduction of a workspace to just one of the databases the ‘Super NRL’ concept was designed and introduced. A SQL script was used to identify those documents existing in other databases relating to a matter.

Using a Visual Studio application the results formed the source to build a document moniker for the document (a type of hyperlink to the document, an NRL). The application then generated a new document containing the moniker; these documents were imported into the system using Interwoven’s SDK and are thus displayed in the workspace subfolders.

Therefore, from go live, the workspaces contained all documents for a matter. Visibly the workspaces subfolders look the same; however, it now contained both documents and ‘Super NRLs’. If a Super NRL was opened from a subfolder the FileSite client was able to read the moniker of the document and open it. This concept extends the standard NRL link functionality in FileSite, exploiting existing features while also customising and enhancing them to provide a solution to Bond Pearce’s problem.

Beyond matter centricity – enhancing usability with iCommands

Now that Bond Pearce was live with MCC and drag and drop e-mails, our thoughts turned to how we could extend the functionality of the environment to make it even easier for lawyers to use. Making something as simple, easy and intuitive as possible would be key to ensure firmwide usage. The first area was to automate the filing of e-mails and this was achieved by a simple Outlook add-in, which automatically files a reply into the workspace the original email came from – without the lawyer needing to do anything. As a result in excess of 70,000 e-mails per month are now filed directly to the electronic file (workspace) and this will grow further.

But to go beyond this and provide even more functionality direct from Filesite, Bond Pearce had to add something extra and that came in the form of ‘iCommands’. The FileSite SDK is a powerful tool set enabling firms to customise and add functionality to the desktop client. Bond Pearce has developed a number of applications to assist the end user, which solve some of the multi-site environment problems and streamline processes. All of these applications are accessed from a right click of the workspace or its subfolders, and the application is then contextually aware of the workspace from which it has been initiated, allowing us to short cut a lot of the effort previously required from the user. Bond Pearce has used Visual Studio 2005 in conjunction with the Interwoven SDK to develop these solutions as follows.

iCommand – move to matter

New clients and new matters sometimes require documents to be created before the matter can be incepted into the PMS and DMS. This can lead to these documents being orphaned once the workspace is created. Bond Pearce’s MCC environment can now take advantage of drag and drop to re-profile documents between workspaces. Drag and drop is core functionality and is fundamental to the way the system works. Dragging and dropping documents between workspaces that exist in the same database will re-profile the document, the document inheriting metadata from the destination workspace, for example client matter code and security.

However, drag and drop between workspaces that are in different locations/databases always creates a link document, the underlying document profile not being updated. A new worksite database was introduced and the workspaces for new.new and any ‘client’.new were located here. Because it was a separate database, for these types of document the documents would always need to be moved cross database following inception of the new matter.

For new clients documents can be profiled under new.new. Following inception of the client they are then dragged to the ‘client’.new workspace. With the document now being associated with a client code and following the inception of its matter and creation of subsequent workspace a process was required to move the document cross database. ‘Move to matter’ was introduced as a right click iCommand. The application is contextually aware of the client code you are working on and following a selection of the document(s) a dialogue is displayed with a drop down list box displaying a list of matters for the ‘passed’ in client code. Once a matter is selected the application would then re-file the document to the correct workspace (as a new document) marking the original as redundant. This process replicates a manual re-file introducing a dialogue to assist the user and complete all actions automatically and can be seen in Figure 1 – Move to Matter.

Subfolder creation – controlling users’ ability to add folders

Bond Pearce decided to limit the potential for users to create subfolders in workspaces when FileSite was introduced. The primary reason for this was to stop users creating their own subfolders with a view to avoiding the creation of a ‘miscellaneous’ subfolder. This keeps the workspace structures consistent for all users and therefore Bond Pearce could control the creation of subfolders centrally when there was a requirement to develop the system further. The create s u b folders commands were removed from the default right -menus.

However, it was recognised that subfolders would be very useful for certain departments and their workspaces. A second iCommand was developed to enable this functionality.

iCommand – create folder

To control the availability of the command the workspace category is queried by the application. Three categories were coded as candidates to enable visibility, these categories being automatically applied to the workspace at creation. The right-click option now allows the creation of root or sublevel folders, however, the command is only available to workspaces and their subfolders where the category is of a certain type. For example ‘PUBFOLDER’. Bond Pearce can therefore limit the creation of subfolders by category type.

iCommand – time recording

A third right-click option was developed to assist lawyers in entering their time recording profile information. When a user right clicks a workspace and selects ‘time recording’ the client and matter reference is then passed into a new Internet Explorer process, which calls the PMS Time Entry web client, automatically populating the client and matter references. The application is again contextually aware and completing the client and matter code for the fee-earner saves time and streamlines the process. This is shown in Figure 2 – Time Recording.

iCommand – publish to extranet

This iCommand was developed to assist with the publication of documents to a SharePoint portal. Bond Pearce provides a number of clients with the ability to securely view their documents externally. SharePoint is the chosen platform to deliver thesedata and deal rooms.

Users themselves control the content of the external SharePoint repository directly from Filesite as there is a direct association between the two systems. This drastically reduces any lead times to produce a data room and removes all but the initial security involvement from IT to not only create but to also maintain the extranets. Ownership of the sites is now passed to the end user and their team.

iCommand – create new matter

The final iCommand (see figures 4 and 5) is again accessed via a right click and passes the client and matter code to Bond Pearce’s matter creation process (a workflow process built using the FloSuite tool). This workflow integrates all actions into one common interface for lawyers to create new matters and replaces a lot of manual procedures significantly reducing lead times for inception. It is fully integrated with the PMS and performs full conflict checking. Once the matter inception process is completed the workspace is instantly created and the fee-earner/secretary can start profiling documents straight away.

Conclusion

Bond Pearce’s journey towards MCC has now come full circle. A lawyer working from within Filesite can now right click on a workspace, create a new matter for that client with the relevant workspaces being instantly created. The lawyer’s team can then collaborate and create new documents in that workspace wherever they are based, creating folders and recording time without needing to know the client and matter numbers and to then publish a set of those document folders to the client via an extranet if required. None of this requires IT involvement and is all achieved by right clicking on the workspace. These iCommands were presented to the Interwoven UK User Group/Gear Up event in October 2007 and were voted an innovation award by other Interwoven users.

David Coates is the IT director at Bond Pearce LLP. Bond Pearce was shortlisted in the 2008 Legal Technology Awards.