Caselines

Innovation Engine--Belated Post From ILTA 2011

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:59:00 +0000

I was looking back at ILTA Conference 2011 and at Mary Abraham's good post on Chris Trimble's August 22 keynote, and I realized it didn't lay out quite as clearly as my notes the central "performance engine" vs. "innovation engine" dilemma. So, this extremely belated post to correct the issue covers that keynote (and also provides an opportunity to note that Mr. Trimble just published "Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Anywhere" with Vijay Govindarajan, also of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, on April 10 2012.)

The keynote was on the subject “What are the best practices for executing an innovation strategy?” While Mr. Trimble had a great topic, he did not entirely succeed in engaging his audience. He had a very important main topic, however, that ongoing operations and serious innovation inevitably conflict within organizations; the corollary is that you won’t get major change without changing the organizational model.

Through innovation we improve the economy and lives. Information technology has been the most innovative sector over the last 20 years.

He knows how much of our time is spent dealing with everyday battles, “keeping the trains running on time.”

There is a “Mt. Ranier-like” story in every innovation journey. When you finally get the big idea, it can feel like a victory. The breakthrough from big idea to innovative product can be very challenging.

Trimble’s First Law of Innovation: Innovation and ongoing operations are always and inevitably in conflict.

Finding a way to navigate through those conflicts is an art.

He defines innovation as any project that is new to you and has an uncertain outcome. How do we execute high-degree-of-difficulty projects?

Only three models of innovation work. Model 1 addresses easiest innovations; Model 2 slightly more challenging; and Model 3 for hard innovations.

In Model 1 (Innovation=Ideas + Motivation) , every employee can be innovative, and just needs some encouragement to pursue innovation on their own initiative. It is limited by individual slack time.

In Model 2, (Innovation = Ideas + Process), innovation is treated like any other business process. It gets scripted, made efficient and routine. An example is the auto industry. It is limited to situations where every innovation is similar to innovations that have gone before.

In Model 3, innovation breaks or changes ordinary business processes.

Companies struggle with an innovation myth. “Innovation Man” struggles against the bureaucratic octopus, “one person fighting the system.” He is brilliant and clever and determined to get things done. Improve innovation by defeating this myth.

We have to put less emphasis on creativity, more emphasis execution of ideas. We need less on individual achievement and more on organizational excellence.

Organizations were designed to be “performance engines” not on innovation.

Performance Engines focus on:

Today’s customers & competitors
Efficiency
Accountability
Getting things done on spec, on-budget, and on time
Profitability

There is great power in repeatability and predictabilities. Innovation is fundamentally incompatible with that. Breaking the rules doesn’t work, because innovators need the “performance engine”; it sounds too much like “no rules.” Strive for mutual respect between performance engine leaders and innovation leaders.

Innovation leaders have to remember that conflict with the performance engine is normal.

Performance engine leaders should remember that no performance engine lasts forever (e.g., Blockbuster).

Too often innovators and companies skip the planning and strategy requirements for execution.

In Model 3, you need a special type of team and a special kind of plan. Model 3 always needs a dedicated team. There needs to be a partnership between shared staff and the dedicated team.

Special Team

Anything more than adding more people will disrupt shared staff’s responsibility for the performance engines.

Managing the partnership is quite challenging. The project leader of the dedicated innovation team will be in conflict with the general manager. The general manager will win every time. The senior leader needs to intervene and adjudicate those conflicts.

He turns this approach to legal issues.

Under the Law2020 Innovation Challenge, clients want more help with IT. They want efficient legal processes, and they want full and easy access to all of their legal information.

You won’t get major change without changing the organizational model.

The most experienced lawyers typically manage the business, have the most authority, and manage relationships, because that works (in his terms, makes the performance engine run).

With innovation, you need to run experiments while doing no harm.

Are there some clients or projects where the normal organizational approach does not work? Do we need informational professionals comfortable partnering with clients? Do we need to consider client IT when building our own systems?

Trimble sets up the Grey Lady’s attempt to go on-line in the late 90s as a very challenging innovation problem.

The New York Times had smart people with lots of money and plenty of time. They had set up a “little performance engine”, a mirror copy of what they had been doing. They brought in an executive from outside, but early on, everyone who reported to him was an insider.

NYT spun off the web site. Martin Niemeyer (?) set up a new compensation plan, new job descriptions, changed product development process, moved to a new location, and built a new IT infrastructure. They treated it as building a new company from scratch. It was working really well, except for the relationship with the newspaper. There came to be conflicts about client relationships, branding, and use of news. That had to be resolved by a senior executive task force.

There were three phases in the relationship; cautious growth as an integrated organization, rapid growth as a separate organization, and finally profitable growth as a carefully managed partnership.

Every innovation initiative is an experiment. If you run a disciplined experiment, you learn fast. Learning is about turning guesses into estimates into forecasts. This is the learning curve you need to focus on. Better predictions lead to better decisions (which lead to better results).

A quick and inexpensive failure can be a learning experience.

For a special plan, recognize that every experiment deserves a custom plan, don’t use standard templates. A separate forum should discuss innovations and meet frequently. Review plan. Focus on what you don’t know and your assumptions. Spend a little to learn a lot.

Performance evaluations for innovation leaders are challenging.

KM Meeting In Boston, Sponsored By ILTA & Recommind

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:13:00 +0000

As readers of this and the ILTA KM blog know, I have really enjoyed getting to know other knowledge management professionals at conferences and meetings, public or otherwise. As people who lead firm knowledge efforts, we're generally good at sharing, easy to get along with, not to mention (*ahem*) smart and fun.

I'm pleased then that ILTA and Recommind are helping me organize a meetup in Boston next Wednesday, March 28th, here at Goodwin Procter's offices on State Street (a/k/a "Exchange Place.")

Recommind will briefly present on their enterprise search and email filing solutions. We'll then take time to talk about each other's roles, projects, and interests. Details on the ILTA web site.

The Recapitulation Theory and The Lifecycle of Legal Knowledge Management

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:30:00 +0000

I attended a meeting of legal knowledge management professionals earlier this week. By tradition, the speakers (except consultants) are anonymous.

The first topic was "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," a concept from biology also known as "Recapitulation Theory" that refers to the parallel between the embryonic development of organisms (specifically mammals) and evolution.

The speaker has started knowledge management systems four times. He addressed the bumpy "curve" of interest, excitement, and profile that naturally occurs when knowledge management programs progress.

First the law firm recognizes that they have a problem. They see that they'll need to talk to people and develop something. You slay the sacred cows, enlist the aid of people previously concerned with knowledge management, and then conceive of a grand plan. After a lot of hard work, an "immortal" result is achieved, and people are astonished. Most were unaware that the work was going on.

From here the slope of interest and ability to make remarkable changes is downward. People suggest changes that may or may not be useful or easy to accomplish. The amazing achievement becomes "background", expected, and credit or recognition slacks off. It's a hard slog to regain the level of immortality again.

Has the field of legal knowledge management followed the same curve?

For instance, enterprise search in legal was a moment of immortality, "god's gift to legal knowledge management." The next hoped-for trick was the "best practice," which is not a simple add-on but an entirely different approach. Does KM seeking to solve "everything" lead to KM risking becoming nothing? Ideas like social media and document assembly may have a low probability of success and clearly require much more work and structure than the earlier successes. KM staff are helping with project management, financial analysis, task-based process management, and so forth, but legal kmers not necessarily the best people to do that.

So how can legal KM practitioners get back to the moment of immortality? Switch jobs? Repeat the process at organizations that haven't navigated the curve? It's up to us.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Canadian Diplomacy and A Sense of Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:43:00 +0000

Deb Lavoy of OpenText spoke elequently about enteprise purpose.

The ideal company no longer runs like a "well-oiled machine" but is a mesh of minds producing and learning. They can predict failure of enterprise application deployment based solely on whether the group has a strong sense of purpose.
Among people with purpose "Their common cores are aligned to a magnetic north. Personal politics takes a back seat."
The very handsome Tyler Knowlton of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canada told a great story about helping the G20.
One year ago--he was in Toronto working on G20 meeting, his team in charge of electronic / social communications. Working with the G20 is challenging. The subject matter is complex. G20 has a rotating presidency. Each host / president starts from scratch. The lack of a central repository was frustrating.

The central delegate was sick of dealing with long email chains, lists, versions, and so forth. The delegate wanted to apply some of the thinking of Tyler's team to the problem.
He said that if they could come up with it in one month, and it worked, he'd pitch it to the other delegates. They had to switch gears to get tied into the G20 institution.
Email was just the pain point that got the delegate thinking. What they really needed was a system for multilateral negotations, communicating and collaborating.

Three things changed.
First, his team became much more ambitious. They felt that they were feeding into the "big picture." The more work they got, the bigger their contribution.

Second, they became confident and critical.

Third, they became very creative. They had artists, political strategists, web developers. He's learned that parameters foster creativity. Forced thinking about what they had to do, quickly.
They developed something relevant, but also exciting (I wish he had talked more about what they actually rolled out).
They dealt with Korea, and are now talking to France, and are alreading talking to Mexico. The other G20 office was disbanded, but their work is continuing to contribute to the G20 effort.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Bert Sandie of EAI

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:20:00 +0000

Bert Sandie of games maker Electronic Arts, Inc. talked about how to create a culture of collaboration at your enterprise.
What drives people to collaborate?

People who are really good at collaborating do a lot of things that motivate them. They want to learn AND be social, for instance. Motivators for collaboration includes a desire to problem solve, altruism, learning, competition, recognition, and more. Make sure they get an email back to them and their manager about contribution.

At workshops they get to have a good time, but they have to come back and share what they learned.

Are you hiring enough new people? Are you hiring people who are willing to share?

Create physical environments that enhance collaboration.

White boards
People sitting down
People sit in a "pod"
People move / change offices often
If you're more than 35 feet away, you might as well be in a different building.

Different things work for different people. You have to try a lot of things, and you have to fail.

Bring together special interest groups, run a workshop for 3 days, build a culture of collaboration around it (sounds like an old-fashioned KM Community of Practice!). When you know the people personally you can

The easiest way to collaborate is face-to-face.

Changing behaviors takes "heads, hearts, and hands." Changing the way people think, feel, and behave. Right when they walk in the door you can change their behavior.

We need to lead the change in our organizations. If you aren't the expert (in change), find the people in the company who are. Start with people, your organization, and your environment.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Evolution of Enterprise Collaboration (Ross Mayfield of SocialText)

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:49:00 +0000

Ross Mayfield is a real pioneer among vendors--his SocialText is one of the best applications that integrates appropriately with SharePoint. He looked back at the history of enterprise social application evolution and talked about the differences between enterprise and internet adoption of such tools.

He's talking about evolution, not revolution, in enterprise social applications.

Much of the revolution has already happened. He used to have to explain a wiki. You can now say with some confidence that there is an established category of enterprise software and that it consistently demonstrate business value in specific use cases.

Ross reviews the history of social application development. SocialText tried to fit wiki behavior into an application you could install inside the firewall in 2002.

Microblogging inside the enterprise changed everything. It was a lot easier to deploy and people took to it very quickly.

In 2009 the "activity stream" became a dominant approach.

SocialText has tried to adapt web 2.0 tools. No matter how big your organization is, however, it's smaller than the Web. It's very different. If someone does something bad, you can fire them. Also, the scaling effect is not the same.

On the web, a core set of contributors is 1%, 9% actively use, 90% don't. In the enterprise, you have to bake it into the flow of work. For instance, in company 95% actively use it in the flow of the work.

Knowledge sharing is a by-product of getting these done in social systems. You have to accept that it will be imperfect. It doesn't matter so long as you are getting more of it shared.

You need to keep doing the security, IT Admininstration, reporting / auditing, and so forth.

Inside the enteprise, viral adoption generally won't happen.

SocialText provides a "social layer" where the existing enterprise objects (documents, projects, tasks, enterprise records) become a topic of conversation.

Discovering content through people and people through content is really powerful (agreed!).

In implementing better collaboration, focus less on technology and more on the goal.

Imagine a "Kickstarter" inside your companies that would let you quickly gain budget or backing for internal projects. There is more and more specialization on the web. They commonly add a slight amount of structure, organize people around a goal, but not too much.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Ming Kwan of Nokia

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:55:00 +0000

It was good to actually have a woman presenting a keynote at the general session. There hasn't been good gender balance here (she is one out of six presenters in this first tranche). Her presentation focused mostly on how employees can obtain actionable information through internal collaboration, and share that through external social channels. I wish there had been a few more concrete examples.

Nokia want to get the right information into the right hands at the right time.

They also want to make it actionable. What can employees do with all of that information?

Their principles include transparency across the organization. Their company works in 120 companies.
Another key principle is accountability, by having people take ownership and recognition.
Taking action is another principle. It's not about the volume of interactions, it's the qualtiy.

Return On Investment

Nokia developed a "social marketing KPI" framework. It starts with awareness, then moves to appreciation, with highest level of engagement is engagement (action, purchasing for instance).

Having a set KPI framework gains clarity around the business's performance. Ideally the new information leads to awareness that leads to action.

Third Ecosystem

Nokia wants to create a "third ecosystem" with Microsoft (beyond those of Apple, and Google, although she didn't say their names). In order to do that they will need to collaborate effectively with their partners, including agencies and suppliers.

Nokia's "visualizers" helps managers identify what different teams are talking about (I didn't understand the value of having managers somehow be aware of what are no doubt thousands of conversations going on internally). Nokia's "Socializer" based on Headshift technology include tasking and pinging.

Nokia has had internal idea crowdsourcing for a while. They recently opened up crowdsourcing to the public.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Spontaneous Association and Tom Kelly of Moxie and Tony Martins of Teva Canada

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Tom Kelly from Moxie Software is presenting with Tony Martins of Teva Pharmaceuticals (disclosure: Teva is a client of my law firm's.).

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly first spoke in somewhat repetitive fashion about how he thought businesses should approach implementing social software.

The most exciting companies to work at were the one where people are engaged. The speed at which things are moving has changed in tennis and football just as in our businesses.

Three key elements of any social platform are simple design (simplicity), knowledge, and thought leadership.

Knowledge is the key part of what we are trying to accomplish. Knowledge is about sharing what different people know to accomplish a given goal.

How do you design software for how people work? People work in groups, on projects. It must have an interative process to bring innovative ways for people to work. It should not bankrupt company.

We do need to integrate into existing systems. Like Facebook and Twitter, you can add something simple that will let people connect.

We can change from ""push" model of major enteprise software changes every 18 months to doing something simple (he keeps saying that!).

Tony Martins

Tony Martins runs the supply chain for Teva Canada. He started exploring social business in 2005, with Wikinomics.

The key ingredient is "spontaneous association." Human beings have an amazing ability to combine their skills to resolve problems. We are born that way, and can do it as long as we are allowed to.

Teva has used this in the organization.

There are many changes in regulations, consumer behavior, and the world around the company. The challenges they are confronting are not what they expected would happen. For instance, managers at Teva were spending more than half of their time addressing unexpected events.

A small group of people can come up with solutions much faster than a traditional command-and-control approach where problems are kicked up the organizational chart.

Provide environments where people can bring their skills together quickly. Spontaneous association has to happen somewhere. Over time, Teva found that virtual collaboration spaces (based on Moxie Software) worked well.

What happened in those spaces was becoming aware of those problems, and leaving it up to the people involved to address.

His most recent experience with business value of this approach was that between January and April of this year (2011), manufacturing cycle time was reduced 40% and reduced face-to-face meetings by 50%.

He'll be presenting in a workshop later today (with Sameer Patel).

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Chris Morace of Jive Software

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:12:00 +0000

My continued notes below--errors are below.

Chris is looking awfully corporate for a rep from a company with such hip-looking logos and video promos. This was a very interesting and well-paced presentation, however.

Enterprises are facing waves of disruption from changes in social, cloud, and other new technologies. We're all being asked to be more innovative, be more agine.

IT groups are increasingly feeling like more and more of their time is being spent maintaining antiquated enterprsie systems, and not enough times supporting business needs and innovations.

One conference attendee noted that he could talk to his children by video call from his hotel room, but couldn't get conferencing systems to work at most work meetings.

70% of employees are using unsanctioned cloud applications.

Social is "hot." There's social in Project Management, CRM, etc. etc. None of it integrates together. It creates new silos. IT professionals are going to be asked to address this system.

The app market is an example of the future of enterprise technology. Apps are easy to create, quite frictionless. It's pretty easy. Software is more of an impulse buy instead of a major decision. Each channel comes with millions of potential users and a distribution network. Apps are also integrated with the social graph.

Chris says we're moving to the "consumerprise" model. We used to have to explain why social apps were different from email etc. Now people get it because they are participating in their personal life.

To thrive in this area, you have to add value to the business AND protect it.

New models of consumption are critical. Need to be able to "pay as you go," very simply, so the app just "shows up." Less lockin for enterprise software. Vendors earn the right to have us use their product. We should be able to install an app with the click of a button.

The amount of time it should take to integrate a new system into the HR/ERM/ etc. enterprise system should be no more time than it takes to fill out a Help Desk ticket. It should also integrate with the internal social tools.

We also need easy ways to say that an app is OK or not. Maybe there need to restrict server location, internal or exterrnal storage, etc.

The policies of companies around personal mobile devices has changed. He thinks that companies will change their policies around new applications as well.

The seminal moment in the consumerprise was when Facebook opened up its platform.

There will only be a handful of winners. Christian Finn would call this a "nice dream."

Jive has a platform that can do much of this already. Hundreds of apps can work together. Jive will be the first to have an app market. This is a way we can get around the adoption challenges. We can really change the way people do business.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Lee Bryant on Social Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:54:00 +0000

I was not able to attend Day 1, except remotely via the live stream. Today I'm in person at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, my hometown and base for the Stanley Cup Champion Bruins (sorry, had to slip that in here somewhere).

Below are my notes for the first set of keynotes.

Lee Bryant of Headshift is first up.

"Social Business Intelligence: The Future of Listening"

He's talking about data-driven business improvement, the subject of a recent study by Andrew McAfee.

The term "Humanizing" the enterprise predates the term "Enterprise 2.0." All those using wikis, blogs and so forth are generating lots of data. How can this data be leveraged to help the business?

Some at this conference have already talked about "Big Data" "activity streams" "actionable insight" and mapping social activity to key business KPIs.

Social business is not just about direct collaboration with others. We're also interested in using signals and filters to share "ambient intelligence"

Lee's colleague Dave Gray is a "visual thinking" guru. He calls small teams with a high degree of autonomy "pods." Amazon is an example of pods. No team should be bigger than what you can feed with two pizzas.

Data is not just about aggregate measures, it's about specific insights into how teams behave.

We can leverage the analysis strategies that companies are using to look at consumer web behavior. The practice of social media monitoring in the past has been too narcissistic--"Do you love me" "Do you like my brand in this place" etc. We'll see a move to a more intelligence-driven approach. We should be looking at things the business can change.

People have been hiring "quants" primarily so far to "get people to click ads." This is not ideal.

Google person says that they have the data to predict divorce two years in advance based solely on spending (searching). It's not about showing off the size of your data (insert NY U.S. Congressional Representative joke here).

We can learn lessons for approaching data from sports. Two Red Sox championships were driven by "Moneyball." People are also starting to map soccer data. They track kilometers run "at top speed" versus "total amount run" because the former correlates with goals scored.

We need to immerse ourselves in the data. Insights too often stop at the marketing department, although they might not be in a position to make the changes required.

We need to move to machines that generate signals of key events, and pipe them around the organization, making sense of them with social analaysis.

Social analysis is applying "many eyes" to the data. How can we stimulate people to take action based on information derived from socially derived information.

Nothing motivates people more than feedback given in the course of the workflow.

He talked at a very abstract level. I wish there had been more concrete examples of social business intelligence and analysis in action.

ILTA KM Blog Launched!

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:56:00 +0000

I have not been particularly rigorous about posting on Caselines of late. Part of that is some effort that I and others have been spending on gearing up for a new venture, the ILTA KM Blog. I'll be continuing to spend much of my blogging energies over there.

The ILTA KM blog will include posts by me and Patrick DiDomenico; we'll be managing it together. It will also include periodic posts from the ILTA KM Steering Committee, and from the ILTA PG membership, a diverse and smart group of people. I hope you will check it out and follow what's happening.

Defense Attorney In Court With iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:07:00 +0000

Fastcase has been promoting a recent, dramatic story from the Pittsburgh Gazette in which defense attorney Marc Daffner, in the middle of a hearing, calls for a recess, whips out his iPhone, and views notes on the sentencing guidelines that by report led to a reduction of 5-10 years of sentencing.

I have a few comments.

I may of course not have the whole story, but if this made such a difference, shouldn't Mr. Daffner have done his research well in advance? That was a nice save, however, I wonder what else he might have missed.

I also couldn't help noticing that the newspaper misspelled the name of the vendor as "FactCase" in the story. And the vendor's link to the original story is broken. Technology doesn't always work as smoothly as the story implies.

I do agree that greater access to caselaw, statutes and regulations is a great thing, for lawyers and the public, and I appreciate Fastcase's efforts on that front.

I also appreciate that mobile device access is not only cool, it can also help peripatetic lawyers provide better service to their clients. Certainly law firm IT departments are receiving pressure to make the services they provide available to lawyers with such devices, because they are so easy to use and convenient.

Taming Twitter: Paper.li and Legal KM-ers

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 20:30:00 +0000

Twitter is a great way to see what people in my and related fields are talking about today. But above a certain point (which may be as low as 50 or 75 followers), it is simply not possible, nor likely worthwhile, to try to view every tweet from every tweep. And I'm following over 700 people! I could simply stay clear and "dip my toe" in the twitter stream every once in a while, but then I get the feeling I'm missing out on my tweeps' collective wisdom.

Twitter has two "native" ways of coping with this situation, search and lists.

Search allows you to look for mentions of a specific hashtag (I look at #km periodically, for instance) or a specific person. It works very well, but of course you have to have a topic in mind before you begin.

Twitter lists allow you to group sets of followers and then watch the stream only from that subgroup. Among my lists is "legal-kmers", a group of tweeps I especially value because they are legal information professional like myself* and because they periodically post or link to valuable content.

Even at that level of specificity to my work, it's not easy to review the valuable posts that go by. That's where paper.li comes in. It allows you to point to a Twitter list and generate a newspaper-like view of all the links posted the previous day. The URL is simply paper.li plus your Twitter account name plus the name of the list, hence:

http://paper.li/kmhobbie/legal-kmers

If you don't want to leave this page, here's what it looks like on a specific day.

What makes it newspaper-like is that it includes the headline and a small amount of content from the article or other site to which my legal kmer has linked. That's hugely valuable for helping me identify something that speaks to me. Paper.li also sorts the articles "below the fold" into somewhat vague categories like Education, Technology, Crime, and Business. It also shows a scrolling version of today's legal-kmers posts. If you log in with a paper.li or Twitter account, the posts are interactive (i.e., you can easily re-tweet). Finally, Paper.li includes daily archives, in case you want to go back and look at a previous date's posts.

All in all, paper.li is a great addition to my collection of tools to "tame the information firehose." Who are your favorite tweeps? Who consistently finds the good stuff? Put them in a list and share them with me!

*not all are formally legal knowledge managers, however.

Document Assembly; Standard Approach and The Future

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:23:00 +0000

This is another presentation report, my notes from a KM peer group meeting.

Document Assembly is a "hard nut to crack." It is one of the ways however that lawyers can greatly increase their productivity.

Enterprise search, document assembly, contract analysis, and proofreading are all key ways to increase productivity.

At one firm financial industry registration changes and a large amount of anticipated work led them to develop a document assembly package for the new registration forms their clients needed. A few attorneys were able to set up a tool that did a lot of work. One lesson learned was the necessity to set up at times complex processes to maintain document assembly packages. There may be either too high expectations or "blaming the application" for errors introduced after the documents had been generated.

It was a successful effort in that the efficiency gain made it possible to do a lot more work. It was easy to change the model, and quality control was improved. It's not "last deal done" sample use any more. The KM lawyer is very happy to have document assembly in her tool kit.

Joshua Fireman of ii3 looked at the KIIAC application (discussed by Peter Krakauer at the ILTA conference). It assesses the variations and extent of variation of agreements. The firm he was working with delivered over 100 share purchase agreements. The tool deduplicated and determined that there were "only" 55 unique documents. One document was identified as the "most conforming." The fourth on the list was a bar association standard form. The firm KM lawyer went through clause-by-clause and assessed which version would work better. It took him 4-5 hours to figure out KIAAC and another 4 hours to develop the purchase agreement model. Almost every clause included links to most-commonly used variant clauses.

Joshua thinks that KIIAC has some document assembly features but also has a strong quality component. You can compare documents against the "KIIAC standard." The tool can not just develop a model or document assembly package, but can also greatly reduce the time to turn around effective comments on a document received from other counsel. (I had not thought of this use, which further demonstrates that I am a litigator by nature not a transactional attorney).

KIIAC is a tool designed to be powerful rather than user-friendly. PSLs or KM attorneys might use it to set up document assembly but practicing attorneys would not use it that way. Perhaps PSLs could use the tool in the analytical "other counsel" scenario. This can position KM as a real competitive advantage. KIAAC may not be able to deliver a final model, but it can save tremendous amounts of time in the development of such models. It can generate a decent quality model or document assembly package in a very reasonable period of time.

KM and Legal Project Management

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:08:00 +0000

These are my notes from a presentation on knowledge management and legal project management (LPM). The first half contrasted the purposes, tools, challenges of LPM and KM. The second half of the presentation covered an impressive, albeit soon-to-be released, legal service platform for delivery of commoditized administrative complaint legal services. It combines an effective workflow with KM and information-sharing of a very high order.

(As with the previous post, the specific presenters and firms are not identified under the rules of this meeting.)

KM Contrasted with LPM

While KM seeks to provide actionable information, LPM tries to provide more structure to what lawyers already do. Both seek to deliver more efficiency, and use software or business process changes. KM seeks to develop content (I note that some content is a by-product of LPM). It is not clear who can or should do legal project management at law firms. The PM role should be embedded within practice areas. Where LPM requires lawyers to create a plan and follow that plan, KM offerings are typically more voluntary. LPM requires a change in organizational methods, it is not simply "more structure."

A commentator noted that some KM practitioners are concerned with quality and consistency as well as efficiency. A project manager will typically balance quality as one component against time and cost.

Some KM practitioners are already concerned with process improvement. It may be time to "grasp the nettle" and get involved with these efforts. LPM is an opportunity

Clients will pay for planning if it is positioned properly.

Process Improvement

The CFO at one firm has been asking the KM department to identify or provide tools and mechanisms for process improvement and LPM. KM feeds into LPM very well. LPM helps you map the process. KM's job is to build the tools that support the processes.

This firm has set up a workflow for firm administrators to track intake on a certain type of administrative complaints that are filed against some clients across the U.S. KM provides forms, wikis, and information specific to the matter at the time that the attorney is drafting the response to the complaint or interviewing witnesses.

The firm has "flex-time" attorneys that can handle these matters. Other attorneys are supervising the matters and conduct or review risk assessments. (It strikes me that this model is flexibly expandable).

The recommendations of both as to how to proceed need to match (or, I assume, the file is escalated to the supervisor's supervisor). They are tracking metrics for frequency and cost of settlement that can be assessed at the flex-time attorney or supervisor level. All the status and monitoring information is available to the client. The client can also track metrics such as claims by location or by client's manager.

This approach is very effective for commodity-level work. You can control for the variables. It combines case management and document assembly. Multiple levels of supervision are critical for the quality control. The tool is not in active use yet but was started in January 2010. It took them two months to conceptualize the project and present to the client. They used an interim database to capture information before the full tool is rolled out.

Essentially the client is outsourcing much of the internal work that used to be associated with these matters to the law firm. The tool and processes (and the staffing model) enable mass-scale commodity work to be done by a large firm, with quality control.

Legal Process Management In Action

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:27:00 +0000

Another presentation at a KM peer group saw real-life examples of project management in action at large law firms. Under the rules of this meeting, firm identities are not publicly acknowledged. As with the previous notes, these are my near-live notes of the presentation.

The two firms discussed are at different phases of development and adoption of project management. It was interesting to hear real-life examples of the processes and changes necessary in a more PM-oriented law firm.

One firm saw greater client interest in knowing costs in advance of project commencement. They felt that greater certainty and predictability of legal cost would be a market differentiator for them. Clients are also seeking more nonstandard fees. They want to move away from the "cost-plus" model. Capturing historical information about staffing and pricing can be used to provide good estimates for fixed fee or other types of AFAs.

They drew on an IT staff member with significant project management skills. The KM professional worked with this person to try to identify what additions lawyers might be able to handle in terms of additional structure to their work.

They first developed a training program and some proprietary software. A small pilot led to robust feedback about what was and wasn't useful in different ways in different practice areas. Many of the partners who participated became champions of LPM going forward. The pilot has also led to some real stories about improving efficiency that help with training.

They didn't have a KM lawyer on the initial working group. In the second phase they have more KM lawyers, who have made a significant contribution in the areas of information collection and linking existing firm resources into the templates. They have also helped with naming conventions and the technical aspects of information gathering that typical lawyers are not so aware of. The KM lawyer can be a bridge or "de-mystifier" to LPM processes. KM lawyers have also helped managed the breakdown of work.

Legal PM can borrow techniques that have been very successful in other industries for decades. Putting a structure in place for planning, and increasing accountability for keeping to the plan has led to higher standards for matter organization. The communication points are crucial and are reflected in the name of their program. They believe that will greatly reduce their firm's writedowns (writeoffs).

LPM can greatly increase profitability in a few different ways. If the right people are doing the work, you will have the best leverage model for that work.

AFAs can be intimidating for law firms. A historical database of matter information can let you see how you staffed it and priced it, and what you learned from previous matters.

A second law firm is involved in the ACC "Value Challenge." They created a project management office outside of IT. They all got certified in PMI and put formal processes in place. They hired a few PMs from outside. The firm has identified PM skills as a core competency. KM professionals are supporting the PM team but aren't driving the effort.

Their goals were to institutionalize the process of having "value conversations" with clients and to work collaboratively to acheive that goal.

They are doing both process improvement and LPM. They take out ineffeciencies and take out what the client doesn't want. They've reduced the cost of legal services. They have a structure of DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control), or "improve & control." For instance, they examined the matter intake process and found a five-day delay that could be eliminated by combining some forms and rearranging the conflict check process.

They have done process maps for 70 different types of legal work. It's like static. If you know what's going to happen it will happen faster. The maps identify proper resources and task codes. The PM team sits down in "Kaizen Sessions" with a whole team and identifies what happens when (initially using sticky notes). Task codes are a very important piece to let them track how we are providing legal services.

KM "artifacts" are connected with particular steps. What do need at each step? A checklist? Template? Form? Get "brain dumps" for checklists. People from the team can see what they need for what step. Process maps are on their intranet. They are treated as "road maps." There is a time estimate in each step. They also have staffing suggestions (staffing is still under development). They have tools that identify where people are on the map.

They have a monitoring tool they developed in-house. They have created task codes for different areas of law and require all attorneys to use them. Time and expense against the budget is shown on their tool. Attorneys have to assess and add to the tool the actual "percent complete" at the specific phase level.

At the end of an engagement, this firm uses a scorecard and lets clients rate the firm on understanding objectives of the matter, legal expertise, efficiency, responsiveness, budgeting skills, and results, and asks "would you hire us again."

This firm has a "fixed fee" offering for single plaintiff (employment?) litigation. They have reduced the average cost of such matters almost by half by managing such matters more efficiently.

The PM team now consults with in-house counsel on effective process improvement.

They did not require the whole firm to adopt this approach. Attorneys are impressed with the mapping sessions. Clients like knowing that the firm is doing effective project management.

Firm culture has changed. It is a big change. People are understanding that they will have to change with the market.

Outside of formal PM processes, some people might be able to develop a time frame, staffing, and budgeting for a particular deal. But if it is not documented, these plans are not transferable, and can't be as easily reused. If the 189 steps of a deal can be documented it would make it easier to do the high-value work. If the tasking and scope is not confirmed with client, then changes to the scope (as with the discovery of another 400 boxes of due diligence documents) aren't so easily discussed with the client.

Legal Project Management

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:11:00 +0000

Susan Raridon Lambreth of Hildebrandt Baker Robbins presented on legal project management (LPM) at a meeting of KM peers this morning. She is an effective (albeit extremely quick-talking) speaker, and seems to have found an effective approach to communicating LPM themes and approaches to lawyers.

What is Legal Project Management

LPM is a "disciplined approach to the management of legal matters." We have to acknowledge that lawyers have been successful in managing legal projects before the formal application of LPM. In training LPM don't suggest that they have been doing everything wrong. Emphasize that LPM will enhance communications with clients and managing client expectations.

Process Improvement and LPM

Process improvement might be better tackled before LPM improvements. Many law firms have gotten on the LPM bandwagon, perhaps because it is less threatening. You can "back into" process improvement after doing some LPM. Process improvement may lead to greater efficiencies faster.

Drivers

One of the trends driving LPM is client demands for "better, faster, and cheaper." Clients saw more serious economic effects of the recession than the legal industry as a whole did (referred to increased profits at AMLaw 100 firms). Clients expect costs to be lower every year. Clients are looking more for alternative fee arrangements (AFAs).

The profit equation is also changing. Billable hour productivity had been going down. Billing rates were driving increased profitability. This is now flat or down in many firms. Law firms have to get more profits by changing the way that they work. There is also more competition for legal work in terms of outsourcing and aggressive pricing (large firms competing with and sometimes beating medium-sized firms on price).

The procurement offices are also getting more involved in legal work sourcing. Procurement officers may be in a position to put more pressure on outside firms.

Increased client power is driving faster segmentation and devaluing. Work even within a high-priority matter might get broken out or segmented, so that "trusted advisor" work would be compensated or sourced differently than the due diligence or filings work. The more strategic, high-value work is not getting bigger and may be shrinking. Operational or routine work might be expanding. Lower-tier work can be more highly leveraged. Some litigation practices can be very profitable, with the right work / staffing structure.

She considers project management to be not a business-world "fad" (like TQM?), but a natural evolution of application of certain tools and disciplines, already in place at the practice or department level, to the matter level. Eventually it may be internalized and not broken out as a different aspect of work.

Two hidden benefits of project management are a greater emphases on professional development and knowledge management. It leads to a greater emphasis on training and development for younger attorneys. Associates like being part of a formal project team because of the higher level of communication and awareness of the bigger picture. We can enhance the professional development of lawyers as part of an LPM approach.

She referred several times to the ILTA White Paper on alternative financial arrangement.

You can train LPM as "delegation and communication" skills. HBR's approach to project management breaks down a project life cycle into five phases of Initiation, Planning, Executing, Closing, and Lessons Learned. It's best to teach LPM without using PM jargon. They had left in the term "stakeholder," and despite some objections at a NY meeting in June it turned out that lawyers didn't mind that term.

She outline four approaches to early adoption of LPM.

Training and Education

Early adopters of LPM are starting with training and basic education. A 2-3 hour session is not really training, it's more education about "what" than "how to." It's more effective to get people to volunteer for LPM training. It can also be effective to build LPM skills into competency models for lawyer development.

Pilots

Other early adopters are trying LPM in pilot practices, such as with commercial litigation or other specific practice group. Groups with more client pressure (as described above) are more interested.

Technology / Software

Only a small number of firms have effective budgeting or project management software. Some have done historic data / analysis and others have done several years of tracking with ABA task codes or e-billing vendor codes. Litigators seem to be more on board with this in many firms, because they've had to do a tremendous amount of budgeting. In many cases they have not had to stick to those budgets, until the last two years. Budgets are now treated by clients as fee caps.

Staffing

Full-time project managers are in place at a few firms.

Lessons Learned

Don't make LPM seem mysterious. Attorneys may need support like staffing, software, and other "handholding" before LPM can be broadly adopted. Training associates where partners are not on board can be really challenging.

Adjusting compensation structures may be necessary to reward efficient practices. Client and matter profitability is increasingly the focus of compensation committees. Having partners more accountable for the profitability of their matters is an increasing trend. Some have started by making the information available but not tied it directly to compensation.

For some partners LPM might seem like fundamental change.

Initiating

The challenge for law firms in initiating projects is to slow down and more thoroughly explore the in-scope / out-of-scope parameters of the engagement. An engagement agreement is equivalent to a project charter, although typically in law firms they are much less detailed than a good project charter would be. Exploring detailed client expectations such as "what does success look like to you" (or the in-house counsel's boss) is really important and often neglected.

Planning

Law firms have done a better job at budgeting than at planning. Developing a schedule is often not done well. They don't or can't look back at previous matters and figure out what went well and was completely in a timely fashion and what wasn't. Communications planning needs to be set up for contacts with the client and internally with the matter team.

She showed a couple of examples of "work breakdown structures" that tie into a detailed scheduling processes (like phases and tasks of a matter).

Executing

Avoiding conversations where attorneys talk about increased work with clients is really common. There often weren't conversations about monitoring schedule and expenses.

Closing

They have separated out closing from lessons learned because they deserve extra emphasis in law firms due to their culture.

Lessons Learned

An after-action meeting could be 10 minutes or an hour. Talk about what went well, what they could have done differently. It's hard because lawyers don't like critical feedback. Lawyers are afraid of what might be discoverable in a malpractice claim. Get them to look at how it helps their team or other teams in the future.

Challenges

Who will pay for time spent on LPM tasks? Will clients pay for it? (There is an ABA code, some clients are willing to pay if it LPM is actually being done). There is a sense that LPM will make the work more "cookie-cutter." The greatest motivator for lawyers is their relationships with clients and their sense of accomplishment and professionalism (though they are also driven by relative compensation).

Making "best practices" and sample forms available without much effort can free up lawyers to do more interesting and significant strategic thinking about their matters.

Getting lawyers to work teams can be hard because of typical lawyer personalities and law school training. They teach "anti-teaming" in law school. Lawyers are contrasted with "non-lawyers. She was asked "do you mean that I'll have some project management geek telling me what to do?"

The biggest change will be moving to profitability analysis for compensation, as old metrics of production and revenue will not be as effective.

Keys to Success

Train volunteers. Get firm management buy-in. Give tools and templates matched to their needs (basic versus sophisticated / challenging).

Social Media At ILTA: Sharing and Collaboration Explodes at Conference

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:09:00 +0000

Four years ago, Kevin O’Keefe contrasted the social media activity that had already become prevalent at most technology conferences with the relative lack of such activity at the International Legal Technology Association conference. He noted some improvement in 2008, and in past years only a few sessions mentioned either social media or secure collaborative software.

This year ILTA conference saw an outpouring of social media activity in many different channels. Social media tools were embraced by the association itself, by conference co-chairs, by vendors, and by peer attendees.

There is still room for increased adoption and smart use of these channels (such as a more friendly and effective pre-conference wiki platform), but I believe that the benefits of social media to people who attended or who followed from afar were great, and that the refindability and reusability of all this content will continue to benefit ILTA members and the legal technology industry.

An earlier version of this post made invisible all but the Twitter section of this post, due to formatting errors.

Tweeting In The Halls

Perhaps the most visible change from previous years was the formalization and much broader extent of Twitter use. It was professional, not personal I’m-eating-a-sandwich tweeting. In addition to the #ilta10 conference hashtag, each session had a formally identified short and useful hash tag such as #km2; in some sessions as many as four or five people were highlighting and sharing key thoughts through twitter.

Legalerswelcom used What the Hashtag to graphically show the tweeting by day; each day with educational sessions had over 700 tweets, and there were over 3,000 for the week. I reproduce a picture of it here, because the WTH service shows the previous five-day’s tweets and the week's view will not be available soon.

And this was despite the regrettable absence of Jenn Steele, one of the twitter champions of previous conferences.

While it is essentially impossible—despite Mary Abraham’s impressive wireless keyboard-and-iPad combination—to capture as much content through tweeting as one can while live-blogging, tweets were nevertheless adequate to get a sense of the session, and to identify many of the key takeaways. Session tweeting also allowed people running late to find out which ongoing sessions had good content matching their interests. It also in many instances led to interaction between tweeters, or amplification by “retweet” by conference attendees or even those overseas of especially interesting comments or developments such as Peter Krakauer’s description of the KIIAC semi-automated agreement assessment tool.

Vendors did tweet about events and offerings, and there were some fun twitter-based giveaways / contests, but as you can tell from the “top 10 tweeters” list from WTH, above, there was not vendor abuse of the conference hashtag in any serious way.* Certainly the two on the vendor/consultant front on the "top 10 list," Legalerswelcome and InsideLegal, were adding rather than taking away value from the online conversation. I hope that such an approach will continue.

Twitter generated face-to-face social interactions as well as on-line activity. There was an initial, formal tweetup on Sunday, and a less formal but also fun “#tweetup2” on Tuesday organized by conference attendees rather than the conference itself.

Sessions About Social Media Or Enterprise 2.0

On the educational side, a dozen sessions covered social media and collaboration topics including:

Day 1, August 23

Social Media Policy Development by Julia Montgomery and Karen Sheehan.

Day 2, August 24

The Cloud and Law2020: Where Megatrends and Vision Collide, Super Session, Tom Kolopopulous
SharePoint 2010 for LegalServices, Julie Kremer, Microsoft
Transparency: Beyond the Extranet, featuring Deborah McMurray of Content Pilot LLC, Jon Parish of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, Julie Kremer of Microsoft, and Steve McHargue of Project Leadership
Smarsh Social Networking Compliance Solution, Stephen Marsh and Sam Kolbert-Hyle of Smarsh (vendor session)

Day 3, August 25

Improve Information Flow With Enterprise 2.0, Paul Domnick of Freshfields Bruckhaus and Mary Abraham
Managing Information Overload Through Personal Knowledge Management, Mike McBride and Sean Brady
Failure Leads to Success in Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
Meaningful Metrics to Quantify ROI for KM and Enterprise 2.0 Deployments, LTC Charlotte Herring and Clark Cording, Orrick

Day 4, August 26

How KM Supports Alternative Fee Arrangements
Open Text Social Workplace (vendor session)
Uniting Project Teams with Collaboration Sites

Blogging

Live blogging was made feasible, after Monday, by the generally high-quality wi-fi at the Aria resort. The conference organizers were refreshingly up front about the problems before Monday evening. Conference setup included “Click Zones” that were really designed to limit typers to a certain part of the room (understandable due to the tapping), rather than provide power. I eventually learned to simply open up a side panel in the session rooms, but it would have been better (and safer) to have power strips with taped-down extension cords available in “Click Zone.”

In addition to these other Caselines posts, the following are some of the blog posts covering the conference:

LegalCurrent blogged about Universal Search Implementations and the Metrics for Enterprise 2.0 session that I also addressed.
Ron Friedmann blogged about outsourcing and the keynote.
Jason Plant a/k/a NoOption blogged about Day 1, August 23 (keynote and Office 2010), Day 2, August 24 (iManage and search), Day 3 (August 25).
Legal IT Professionals provided a Vendor Response to ILTA Conference
Inside Legal provided a lot of online content including this Technology Purchasing Survey

Mike McBride has collected a number of conference posts at his Delicious account. I haven't tried to be comprehensive here--comments and additions welcome, of course. And the fact that it wouldn't be easy to be comprehensive is telling.

Videos and Podcasts

Vendors and consultants are leading the way in integrating video and audio content into conference.

Legal consultants ii3 professionally produced and made available hours and hours of high-quality video known as "ILTA TV," with chats hosted by Shy Alter. Day 2 for instance featured an interview with a visiting general, along with a discussion on KM supporting legal administrative departments with knowledge management attorneys Mara Nickerson, Rachelle Renegal, and a certain bass-voiced litigation knowledge manager (at about 120 minutes in).

Over at Legal IT Professionals, Christy Burke had a number of podcast interviews with a variety of vendors and peers broken down into Days 1, 2, and 3.

Kevin Hunt of Thomson Reuters also made a number of other podcasts, including a video interview of conference co-chair Meredith Williams; the post includes a link to interviews with Patrick DiDominico, Craig Ball, and yours truly.

I also made my first podcasts, releasing by Cinch (http://www.cinchcast.com/) a podcast about the initial tweetup and another short one about showing pictures of faces in Outlook and elsewhere based on a conversation with Mr. Alter. Cinch is a really easy way to record and share short audio recordings on the iPhone or over the internet.

*occasional exception aside.

ILTA Day 4--Using Business Process Management to Increase Matter Efficiency

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:26:00 +0000

Session Materials

Formal Description:

"Managing individual matters is where firms can realize the biggest efficiency and cost gains. For firms that are serious about efficiency and alternative fee arrangements, this session will discuss the strategic application of principles from the fields of business process management and project management and highlight firms that have put these principles to work. While law schools may not have project management or business process classes, lawyers can still learn from experts in these fields."

For tweets see #info15.

Monroe M. Horn ("Monty")- CIO, Sunstein Kann Murphy & Timbers LLP, Boston IP boutique
Angel Garcia-Manso - Goodwin Procter LLP
Bill Decker - Hubbard One, a Thomson Reuters Business
Toby Brown - Fulbright & Jaworski

Disclosure; Angel is my colleague at Goodwin Procter. I know Monty personally, he's an outstanding tenor! Also, these are my unedited notes (live-blogged).

BPM in an IP Boutique

Monty started. Why BPM? Technology benefits come from integration and automation rather than new "killer apps." They determined it would be best to have apps that exactly met their needs. Most users are suffering from information (email) overload. Very often business processes involve sending and acting on email. Yet users often don't have the information they need to act on when they need it (this sounds like a KM problem to me!).

They chose to automate a client-facing business process, IP docketing. They rolled out in Beta using live data (in parallel). They've applied for a patent and are working with a vendor to commercialize it.

Key elements of successful automation are:

1. Filling in "white space" between application without changing the way people are working.

2. Provide rich user interfaces, especially to attorneys and paralegals. They are not tolerant of things acting clunky and not following Windows protocols. Usually BPM applications don't have to have that level of user interface.

3. Allowing users to organize and prioritize the work and tasks is really important. For instance, break out attorney's work by stage, by whether they are directly responsible or supervising, and so forth. Add "flagging" that people can leverage as they see fit [I'd advocate for tagging by keyword!]

4. Supervisory capacities need to be baked in.

5. Try to give them the information they need when they need it.

Bill Decker

He spent the last five years doing project management at a large law firm and is now at Hubbard One / Thomson Reuters. How can PM techniques assist attorneys with fixed fee arrangements?

Project has four (or five) phases. Project Initiation is for understanding what your goals are. Project planning is the most important piece. Identify (and document) the processes needed to establish the scope and the objectives. Project Execution (lumped in with Project Monitoring), then Project Closure, where you show that you did what you set out to do.

Communication is the key success factor. Poor communication is the primary reason why projects fail.

Traditional projects are similar to a legal matter in that they have definite ends and goals.

Attorneys do not accept that a legal engagement is unsuccessful if not completed within a reasonable time and under budget. Their goal is to win.

Project management and continual planning will prevent clients from being surprised by the last bill.

With AFAs you need to build models based on previous experience. Bill mentions that ABA codes as a possible source for matter planning. He notes that "CodeSense" has loaded the ABA codes into SharePoint to track status against different parts of the tasks.

AFAs at Fullbright & Jaworski

Toby Brown of Three Geeks and a Law is the alternative fee person at Fullbright & Jaworski.

He described the approval process for AFAs at his firm.

The first step is a "pre-approval" processes where partners seek information and have a dialog. Partners want to know what form of fee to use and how much to charge. Every RFP crosses his desk, needing AFA content.

The second step is the lawyer's preparation of an actual AFA proposal. They seek information about the client (e.g., financial information), the type of arrangements (looking at type, amount, metrics, and probabilities), and value (allowing lawyers to provide more context).

The third step is AFA analysis. Evaluating the margin of a particular billing partner is key. Partners will run the same type of margins. He will compare similar proposals. Toby is using Redwood analytics. Small changes in the leverage can have large variations in margin.

Fourth, a small group of partners approve the AFA. They talk with Toby about the matter.

Fifth, it gets set up as an AFA matter.

Sixth, the budget gets entered into a tracking system. There still needs to be a system for tracking progress against budget (?).

Seventh, monitor budget against performance. Send monthly and quarterly variance reports.

Eighth, report back on closed matters to the AFA system.

Budgeting and other Projects at Goodwin Procter

Angel counted nine sessions at ILTA addressing Alternative Financial Arrangements (AFAs.) Goodwin decided that doing budgeting would be an important step in addressing AFAs. They asked practice managers to talk to partners and break work they do in phases and tasks. They continue reviewing phases and tasks and improving the 70 matter templates.

The Goodwin budgeting system integrates with Aderant and the time-entry system. Goodwin will also be integrating with SharePoint and Goodwin's Matter Pages system.

(Disclosure: I have been a part of the AFA work at Goodwin).

The iStaff project is another example. Goodwin staffing managers help find partners the best associate for a given project. Each staffing manager was dealing with 40-60 associates and had to learn their experience and professional development needs, and wanted to match that with the jobs. They automated the collection of information from associates about their needs and busyness. It pulls in information from Expert, the HR systems, partners' input about what they need, and associate workload reports. The new system increased compliance (associate reports) 70%.

Another example is the IP Practice System. They interviewed attorneys over 10 months to identify process mapping. They identified inconsistent operations across offices. They built a couple of tools that helped people delegate work. They integrated all the different sources of information. It pulled in matter-centric iManage folders where they had scanned and filed the paper records. The case information can be forwarded to other attorneys. It also links to the PTO file and the Matter Pages system.

Partners reported that what used to take them 10 minutes now takes 10 seconds.

Questions

How did they get buy-in? Monty said they have a small shop; the firm decided to change the way it worked; and the paralegals liked it because they could prove they had provided the file(s).

Angel said that adoption depends on the sponsors. Demand for iStaff came from the directors in the firm and was heavily promoted by the staffing managers.

ILTA Day 3: Email Management Using iManage

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:36:00 +0000

This was an interesting session devoted to email management success stories with firms using iManage. It highlighted three examples from different size firms.

Small Firm

Maritta Terrell is in a small firm in Austin, TX, about 85 users. [She is very engaging and I bet is a great trainer!] Some partners who had serious pain around Outlook performance and email folders led to implementation of a DMS. They now have 8.5 and set up MCC. Test test and re-test was key.

The Outlook speed problem led to some ideas. They had a contest with 1st and 2nd prizes. Secretarial help really shrunk Inboxes. "Stump the IT team" contest. Both approaches leveraged lawyer's competitive.

Training courses included:

How to clean up inbox
Preclass videos on intranet
Regular classroom classes
Email management

They also had "Room Service" classes--they put out a training menu like a hotel, they could ask trainers to come to them, even after hours "so no-one else would know."

They also sent around a poster with three points. You must file client email in a client/matter folder, administrative email in an admin folder, and everything else (is deleted or) stored in a personal folder.

Success measurement--email boxes reduced by 19%, may go to another 5% lower.

Mid-Size Firm

Fernando Monteleone ("Monty") works for Robinson & Cole.

Moved from DocsOpen in an April to September timeframe. They have a retention policy, all inbound messages filed or deleted within 60 days.

They chose to disallow flat filing (everything in a workspace). Send / Received dates are preserved in filing. The author in the DMS is that of the email author, not the filer. They created personal workspaces automatically.

Tried to keep folder design simple, about eight categories for litigation and another eight for business matters.

Their customization included a tool to reclassify matters, and run integrity checks. A utility created a project workspace with members listed and documents.

They went live over Labor Day Weekend, got to 8.5 by February. Filing 2500-5000 emails a day, half a million since the beginning of the year. Association of an email folder with a workspace in iManage was the largest method of filing.

Foley & Lardner

Dana Moore is the "Records & Information Compliance Manager."

Email became a risk management issue. Exchange servers were bursting at the seams. Under their RM policy, the electronic version of the email is the official version. They realized email needed to be part of the matter. It allowed document holds, litigation discovery, and file transfers to go smoothly.

They set up an ERM Validation Committee and a pilot group. 10% of the attorneys wanted to participate. They set up a communication plan from the top down. They were moving operations offsite.
They created an "Email Archive Repository." It's a DMS repository that only a few have access to. [Not great from a KM perspective].

F & L had a long implementation period. First communications in June 2007 were around "how much email can you delete?" Did lots of deleting for $50 gift cards.

Email really locked down--old email had to be retrieved through records managers, who kept it out of Outlook.

Filing is now a requirement--all in Inbox or Sent over 180 days deleted. The Delete box is on a seven day aged, with a 2 GB size limit. They do not delete from sub-folders.

There was a lot of bulk filing without classification, into their general personal numbers. It was still refindable even through others couldn't. People didn't follow folder naming conventions. There was some refusal and denial. Training was not required. She thinks mandatory training may not be impossible.

Have filed 27 million emails since 2007. All servers are centralized. Filing is a way of life for most.

Questions:

Some attorneys at Maritta's firm who can barely work with Word file email. Such attorneys had another set up the email filing links.

At Foley, going to the 180 day rule really helped adoption. The most appreciation is coming from the professional responsibility partners and the people looking for email as a result of litigation involving the firm.

They all analyzed how everyone managed their emails and adopted email filing to that behavior. They had to understand how many attorneys worked remotely.

ILTA Day 3: Metrics and ROI for Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:33:00 +0000

This was an interesting session that addressed metrics not just for Enterprise 2.0 but for knowledge management and technology projects.

Formal Description:

"Proving return on investment is every bit as difficult for Enterprise 2.0 projects as it is for KM projects generally. Since we tend to get what we measure, what should we measure and how can we report the results in a fair and meaningful way? In this session, we’ll examine the basics of metrics, how to measure productivity rather than busy-ness, how to measure engagement, velocity and impact of information flows, and other ways to meaningfully mine data."

Session Materials

Presenters:

Clark R. Cordner - Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Charlotte Herring - Chief, Information Technology Division and Deputy Chief Information Officer, The US Judge Advocate General's ("JAG") Corps

Moderated by V. Mary Abraham

Lisa Denissen and Steven Levy both helped out with the presentation.

What Are Metrics

Clark introduced metrics as a way to "measure progress and demonstrate how your project advances firm strategy."

In terms of formal project management language, Steven Levy appeared by video, with permission. He used the example of the Soviet screw factory that makes giant screws no one wants because it is assessed by how much material it spends. It's an input metric not an output metric.

Substitute metrics don't measure exactly what you want. What you want and such metrics often diverge significantly.

A good client metric is the likelihood of reuse of your firm. Repurchase intent is not a substitute metric; client satisfaction is.

The question is what the correlation between the output and the objective.

Some things are very hard to quantify, and you may need to quantify using satisfaction surveys.

Mary said that too often KM practitioners consider metrics too squishy and fail to push the analysis and identify all the things that we could actually track.

Clark recommends the blog Adam Smith, Esq. who talks a lot about metrics. You have to be thoughtful about what you spend your time measuring and communicating. A metric is like a lens. It's like the optician who asks if a given lens is better or worse (*flick*), better or worse (*flick*).

Have clear objectives and ensure your effort advances those objectives. Measure the factor most likely to strongly correlate with "success." If your success is shorter cycle time on a document, then you measure that.

Business Pain Points

LTC Charlotte Herring says that the only way to have a successful KM program is to talk to lots of people in your organization. What are the pains? It's going to vary between the senior partner, the junior associate, the secretary, or the finance administrator. Come up with tools to focus on those pains. Then implement them.

The JAG Corps has had 650 attorneys deployed as a result of the Iraq / Afghanistan wars. They sometimes don't have internet access and can't always rely on technology. KM is not just technology. Some metrics have nothing to do with numbers. KM can consist of two people talking.

What denotes health and sickness? In a firm, it might be profit margin. The JAG does not track time and doesn't care about money.

Verifying Metrics

Consult with friendly people who can tell you if your metrics might make sense to your stakeholders.

Dangers with Metrics

You are only as credible as your metrics are reliable. Unconscious biases may lead you to emphasize the wrong thing. Be willing to acknowledge alternative interpretations. Numbers can be quite dangerous.

Practical Examples

1. JAG's Automated Trial Process

For the JAG Corps, criminal work is a statutory obligation. The JAGC Military Justice Online was a web-based enterprise application for military justice from investigation to post-trial.

She started developing this new application in 2007. Everyone moves every 2 or 3 years. Each move led to a a different set of rules since practices varied. The system was designed to establish one system across the JAG Corps.

Stakeholders were very broad. The client is the institution of the US Army. A particular commander is not the client.

The commander needs information sufficient to deal with the soldier. Congress wants to know numbers of offenses and convictions. The JAG Corps wants to track how the system is working.

They succeeded in lessening time it took to process a charge. Efficient JAG procedures are more just ("justice delayed is justice denied"). Quicker processing reduces error.

[It was really great to hear the JAG Corp perspective, so different from a firm litigator perspective yet still with the same client service and zealous advocacy orientation. I wonder if big firm pro bono work could benefit from analysis of comparable metrics].

2. Portal / Intranet Rollout Metrics

Most of the audience had some sense of how to analyze success of a portal. Typical metrics on the slide and/or raised by the audience included page visits, clicks on content, reduction in certain types of RFI emails, frequency of visits, number of unique visitors, and so forth.

Measurement of an Activity Stream (such as internal twitter, Yammer, Google Reader, or RSS feed system) is more exotic. One can measure Activity Streams by the number of users. You can also measure penetration to managers and other members of the firm heirarchy. You could also look at whether it is "flattening" the heirarchy. Could track virality, or usage over time. Demographics of adoption also matter. One could also measure the pace of conversations and the type of communication (social or professional). How does it stack up to email?

I suggested that you might measure success by the number of links sent. One can also track time of usage. Often people will send links during commuting time as part of the transition to home life. (I've found that I often tweet during commutes).

Clark also spoke briefly about metrics for Orrick's Public Finance's "Online Closing System." I did not catch the substance of it. If someone would comment...

3. Rice Metrics

Finally Mary raised a "bowl of rice" metaphor for thinking about metrics. It's easy to quantify a bowl or sack of rice in terms of the number of grains or the weight. It's more useful perhaps to think about the value of someone getting a meal, or the value that person fed can add as a result of being fed for however long.

Enterprise 2.0 Session--Improve Information Flow

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Formal Description:

"Enterprise 2.0 can help solve inefficiencies caused by the inability to locate accurate information. This session will discuss why a great search engine is not enough, and which data repositories need to be available to the enterprise search engine to ensure transparency, how to reduce information silos and redundant, contradictory, or inaccurate data, and how activity streams can enhance retrieval and access to more unstructured knowledge."

Paul Domnick, CIO, Freshfields Bruckhuase Deringer LLP
Jessica Shawl, Operations & Program Manager, Intel

Moderated by V. Mary Abraham (twitter) of Debevoise & Plimpton. Session Materials.

Missing was Sandy Owen, Operations Director, due to a work conflict. These are my unedited notes of a discussion of significant advances in Enterprise 2.0 activity and capability, particularly at Freshfields.

Mary introduced the session. "Time wasted searching for information"--50% of time devoted to information work. Working with greater transparency makes it easier to find information about others' work.

Three ways of getting to "Las Vegas."

1. "Straight Route" of enterprise solutions:

Social Stack (Headshift) includes personal km tools, group collaboration, blogs & networks, bookmarks & tags, and public feeds & flows.

2. Intel Route

Focused on personal content & solutions. They started developing a lot of point solutions to meet individual content management needs. Some pockets of collaboration & sharing started. Initially a "KnowledgeBase" linked to documents on shared drives. They eventually had developed 60-70 applications. Finally they brought in a document management system and

Intel has a corporate-wide wiki as well as a legal department wiki. They use IM a *lot*. Systems needed to "talk" to each other. They developed matter management, ebilling, DMS, and MOSS (Sharepoint 2007).

DMS was first, but was very slow. Litigation group didn't like the DMS, so they got another one [It makes sense that a company like Intel has all that amazing IT resources to do all this wheel-spinning!].

They set up a wiki to allow easier authoring. Finally they are creating a portal with information feeds.

Laying the foundation (slides)
Rethink offerings
Integrate solutions

Federated searching, portal,

One problem was a failure to update content on the static web sites. They made it easier for people to self-serve and update content. They added wikis and DMS. Because everyone is an author,

Intel used a "web jam," a place where people could go in and post an answer to a question, to determine directions to go with transparency. "How can we be more efficient"? It's like a message board, people can post additional ideas or comment on others thoughts. There was a time limit for contributions (two weeks). It was a great way to gather lots of ideas.

There is strong use of IM. It's especially helpful in negotiations where you want to share with a colleague.

Internal networking tools are used for blogs and internal profile pages in a Facebook style. There are forums on project management, legal topics, work-life balance, and so forth.

They are piloting a federated enterprise search. They have taken a more organized approach to wikis, for instance, with "playbooks" on the wiki outlining negotiation strategies for different situations. They have some automated contract-management systems.

They use "Flip" videos to record a "day in the life" of an attorney. They used them to evaluate work processes and to figure out how to make them more efficient.

They have corporate-wide blogging (from legal department?)

Lessons Learned

If you go too far out of people's normal business processes, they won't use it. If you have to train people on it, they won't use it.

Understand how people work at home and try to provide similar capabilities. Can you search from one place in the same fashion as Google)

People are using Facebook, Twitter, IM, texting externally. Why not use them inside?

Focus on finding content rather than enforcing rules of content creation.

They are also finding enterprise (federated) search extremely important.

Sometimes having technology available is not enough. You may have to talk to people 3 times to get what you want.

Leverage early adopters. When 16% of the population accepts your idea, it becomes unstoppable. Pulling people along instead of pushing people to use is much easier.

This worked great for wikis. One gung-ho attorney loved it and brought other people along with them [this has been my experience also]. Became unstoppable.

People finally saw the value of enterprise search.

3. Freshfields Route

They had some great successes with pressing needs, as met by two initial Enterprise 2.0 projects. Later projects have had more patchy success.

First, nobody liked their intranet but nobody knew what it should be. They no longer have a portal. They completely replaced it with a wiki (Atlassian's Confluence). All 6000 employees can post content.

Second, they created an alumni network for their 27,000 alumni. They created a social collaboration site with SelectMinds [I believe SelectMinds is also a vendor for my firm].

In three weeks they had 400 users of micro-blogging tool Yammer. People agreed to use it for three months every day. It now has a complete life of its own and the constant input is not necessary.

People found the wiki fairly hard to navigate. They created a Google-like search that links to wikis. Widgets related to specific clients, industries, or Freshfields attorneys can be dropped into the wiki. Their site map is now created dynamically.

People want push as well as browse. Information will be pushed to people's profile pages. People won't tell you how they actually use the social tools. People are on average very precise about where they go to get information.

A million page impressions a day on the wiki. Get from the needs to the wants by analyzing what people actually do.

They are now working on an external collaboration site with high design level based on Jive. Involve people in firms' "CSR Agenda" (?).

Structured information--opening a matter leads to creation of a wiki pages, feed of news from client web site, fee deal description, and documents.

Enterprise search is critical because the machine can't handle all of the matter related tool, but it can pull in information in federated way from inside and outside the firm.

The 20/80 rule instead of 80/20. Listening to what people want and knowing

If we can get something up & running and 20% of people adopt it, the risk is that it will get out of control rather than that it won't be adopted.

Match available tools to needs rather than waiting for the perfect solution.

You feel like a bit of a fraud talking about this because there is so much more that could be done. But don't go down the "exactly what we need" rabbit-hole. It works if you can explain to people the vision.

None of these tools completely replace earlier ways of doing things.

Three pillars of transparency are collaboration, mobility

They made their wikis work on Blackberries and iPads. Instead of Twitter this week has has been updating his wiki and then posting to Yammer on his iPad.

Cautions (from Intel and Freshfields)

You may have to fight bureaucracy. Everyone wants to have a say in how things are implemented. In can bog things down.

People may not want to wait for a strategy because of immediate needs. That's OK.

Giant strategy that will take three years might get side-stepped by home-grown solutions.

Expediting adoption might require close support.

It can be hard to get the business case right; that can be an iterative process.

Paul--beware of users who want new toys. People want Skype, but there are some complicated reasons why that's not a good idea.

A lot of Enterprise 2.0 tools aren't quite as friendly as consumer tools. They have more functionality and control. You might have to compromise and steamroller out some things you don't need.

Mobility experience is challenging. The vendor might not have thought through how something might work via mobile. E.g., Blackberry requires sign-on every 24 hours.

An audience member was using SharePoint and Confluence for communities. Also developed "Grapevine" for micro-blogging. He suggested that people are put off by techie aspect of Confluence.

Paul said that it is a blank slate. But they have a lot of macros that let you do things like tagging, news article creation, follow page, and so forth.

Yammer is used firm-wide for "do we do X" and "have you seen this article" posts. The KM community uses it for workflow.

AFAs and the New Billing Models--First Regular Session at ILTA

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:25:00 +0000

I attended Dan O'Day's session on alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) on Monday morning. Dan is a Thomson Reuters employee, but his session was devoid of product-pitching and served as a useful overview of AFAs, including a useful analysis of the key characteristics of all of the major varieties.

Almost half of the audience was in IT, the other half was in finance (I was in the small minority not in either camp).

Twenty Years of AFAs

Dan turned back to the DuPont Legal Model (c. 1992) for background on the development of modern AFAs. DuPont wanted to have fewer firms working for it, with closer partnerships with the fewer firms, all tracked by metrics around spend, diversity, and IT. The goal was to cut costs, increase the productivity of the outside legal work, and provide easier access (from DuPont's perspective) to legal work.

As has been noted elsewhere, different AFAs address different client concerns, and have different risks for firms in terms of cost overruns, shared outcome risk, predictability of fee amount, and so forth. Dan pointed to a 2002 presentation developed for the Legal Marketing Association (.pdf, see p. 7) and its chart ranking AFAs by frequency and noting the various key characteristics of the different types.

The rarest AFA, which I was less familiar with, is "Value-Based" or "Retrospective Based On Value" billing. In this model the firm is compensated based on the value of the services to the client. Dan's first example was a firm that raises funding in Europe based on a law firm's relationships with capital sources. A firm might negotiate that it should obtain 1% of the that funding so raised. Or, a firm might provide a 25% bonus to a litigation matter's billings if the law firm is able to prevent the firm CFO's deposition. It truly aligns the firm's needs with the client's needs, but it remains the rarest in part because they are hard to negotiate.

Moving to AFAs

Dan, a lawyer himself, noted that one challenge to moving to and budgeting for AFAs is lawyer's characteristics. A study (?) indicated that unhappy people make good lawyers, and he suggested that lawyers as a whole are more critical and negative than the population as a whole. They are paid to figure out (and try to prevent) what might go wrong in a given business situation or litigation.

Dan suggested that expanding the extent of AFAs at a firm requires a great deal of analysis and preparation.

As to existing AFAs,

How many are there?
What percent of business do they represent?
How profitable are they?
Are there any patterns as to the frequency by practice area, jurisdiction, billing partner of particular types of AFAs?

Preparing to work in a manner focused on efficiency is challenging, and is a task made more challenging by lawyer's critical managing style noted earlier.

The business process structures and strategy required to handle AFAs are quite different from those needed to support only billable hour work. To use a casino analogy, what are the table limits?

Should the firm say that no fixed fee agreements will be allowed for 7-figure of 1,000 hour potential matters?
Should the firm exercise tight process and setup control over even the smallest matters?
How will matters be monitored?
How will attorneys be held responsible for cost overruns?
When in the course of a year is the profitability of unusual AFAs assessed?
More generally, what is the governance of AFAs? Dan recommended that the model of "permission not forgiveness" be adopted.

Marketing and AFAs

One audience member was a marketing professional who is jointly responsible with finance for addressing AFAs at her firm. She suggested that that is because in her role, she is highly aware of client requirements and needs, and because pricing can be a key part of marketing strategy.

Dan's session was at a fairly introductory level, but it was still quite useful because he was able to raise, if not answer, so many key considerations for AFA implementation.

ILTA Keynote--Jason Jennings on Values of the Best Companies

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:36:00 +0000

The keynote session opened with a slick montage, a palindromic flow of phrases that was pessimistic going forward but optimistic (for legal technologists) going backwards.

Randy Mayes and then Meredith Williams and Maureen Babcock kicked off the formal sessions at ILTA.

The theme is "Strategic Unity"--aligning legal practice and technology, and bringing together lawyers and IT to meet the new challenges of this economy. Connectivity is the most valuable return from conference. We should return with "ideas, answers, and connections."

Jason Jennings was the keynote speaker. He described the "five traits shared by the world’s most successful people and businesses to embrace change, get everyone on the same page and make things happen." While his presentation had some consultant-speak, he also touched on aligning personal ethics and the business work we do in a way that ultimately was quite effective.

He asks three questions of most people he interviews:

1. Story of Your Firm
2. Your story (home town, family, etc.)
3. What is keeping you awake at night? What could keep your organization from succeeding?

Key problems consistently uncovered by his interviews with ILTA people are:

Getting people on the same page
Changing practices
Downward Pricing pressure
Getting faster
Coping with sheer volume of data

His first book addressed, what makes a company fast? His second, what makes a company productive? His third, what makes companies grow year after year after year. They've also looked at CEOs and screened in total more than 120,000 companies.

World's best organizations include:

Ikea
Smucker's
Office Depot
Koch Industries
Newcorp Steel

He said that these "best" (by the metrics) companies shared five key attributes.

Everyone Shares a Common Noble Purpose
Letting Go
Everyone Knows Strategy
Think & Act Like an Owner
Led by Stewards

Noble Purpose

What it is

It is not a "mission statement" or "vision statement." It is big and bold like Microsoft's "put a computer with Microsoft operating system on every desk in the world."
It is inclusive. It is a *non-financial* reason for doing what you do. Steve Knight of Nike got mad at him for asking what it was like to be worth $5 billion when it was all about "competing, winning and being better than anybody else."

It fixes what's wrong, like Walmart's credo of "getting average people to buy the same things as rich people."

It gives meaning to people's lives.

Effects

Provides direction, fuels passion, drives momentum

2. Letting Go

Most organizations Cannot Let Go Of:

Yesterday’s breadwinners
Ego
Same-old, same-old
Conventional Wisdom

The best example he gave was Jack Welch and GE Capital’s decisions to continue to pour $2 billion into Montgomery Ward seeking to protect their initial investment of $100 million.

Effects:

Organizations that can let go are better able to deal with change. They are more focused than their rivals and find it easier to innovate.

3. Everyone Knows Strategy

At Smuckers, all vendors and new employees spend a few weeks learning strategy of the organization. There's a book outlining what it is every year that they willingly share with all of these stakeholders and (apparently) with their competitors.

Effects

If people don’t know the strategy, they don’t know why they are coming to work and won’t get emotionally attached. There is no accountability under a regime of secret strategies.

4. Think & Act Like an Owner

Jennings spent four days talking to people at Koch Industries, then a last day with Charles Koch. Koch claimed that his company was superior because everyone there (99.9%) felt and acted like an owner of the business.

People want to improve, get better, and get "scores." People will act more like owners if they know how what they do create economic value, and are rewarded based on the economic value they create. (There was an unfortunate lack of concrete examples of how one can get a company to act like a Koch Industries--an evidently extremely rare alignment of the perceived needs of the people who work there and the needs of the business).

5. Led by Stewards

The best leaders in business see their role as being good stewards.

Stewardship values service over short-term self-interest. Does not embrace power over others. It preserves natural and human resources. It is nurturing and supportive.

Stewards share information. Knowledge is not power—it’s execution. All information is shared with the employees.

Stewards are accessible. They keep their hands dirty and get out their with their customers or clients. Stewards don’t simply keep things the same, they make things better.

Jennings closed by asking, "Why do you *really* do what you do?"

He said that the reason in most of these organizations is to make sure that the same opportunities for personal and financial growth and fulfillment will exist for others later on in the same organization.

Reaction

I really appreciated Jennings' discussion of stewardship. It really touched a chord in me, and also reflects some of the values of the knowledge management movement. Saying and affirming that sharing information and knowledge is a good and valuable thing, part of leadership and stewardship, is powerful, and an important lesson for organizational leaders of all kinds.

It clearly also hit the right notes with the audience of members at ILTA, I suspect because his description of the necessity for service, stewardship, and support of others is completely in line with the values of that organization.

ILTA 2010--Upcoming Panel--KM Supporting Alternative Financial Arrangements

noreply@blogger.com (David Hobbie) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:44:00 +0000

There is quite a bit of talk this year at ILTA about alternative financial arrangements. On Thursday August 26th at 10:30, Starvine 10, I'm presenting on how "traditional" KM supports the work on such matters (particularly that on fixed fee work) and the different risks and rewards in focused contrasted with broad-based knowledge management work.

With me on the panel are Peter Krakauer of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and Michael Mills of Kraft & Kennedy. Peter will be discussing how knowledge management skills and resources can be applied to the process of developing, understanding, and implementing alternative financial arrangements; Michael will be looking at some tools available in the marketplace that can assist firms with handling alternative financial arrangements. It should be an interesting session.

Formal Description:

"With all the buzz about alternative fee arrangements, you may be wondering how knowledge management can support them. This session will review how KM provides critical support for firms as they design, manage and offer AFAs. In addition to more traditional methods, such as model and sample forms, matter databases, and expertise location, KM supports AFA strategies through project management, financial analysis, business intelligence, and standardized information capture."

"How KM Supports Alternative Fee Arrangements." Session Description: