Foreign firms investing in the US will someday bring their firms with them - foreign firms who need US presence and will challenge US firms for talent, clients.

Looking at locations where there is a lot of international trade exposure, but also where that exposure is changing at a more rapid rate!

Iii strategy - Mumbai, dubai, shanghai. “Nothing against it,” but there is a bigger picture

Latin America has as much trade activity as Europe. Most of that is Mexico, followed by Brazil & Argentina.

More trade in Europe than in Asia. Last year American businesses invested more into Europe than SWF and individual foreign investors from middle east invested in US.

Demographics - China is an aging population that will have a declining work population within the next 10-20 years. India is looking to grow working population in the course of next few decades.

Latin America - growing investment in foreign firms, and declining volume in acquiring (though increase dollar values). There is no clear leader in the Latin American space in terms of legal representation, so there may be an open operation there.

Cross border revenue growing faster than domestic revenue. Almost no firms have in-house capacity to handle cross-border issues.

Two dimensions for competitive landscape - value perception vs size

Clementi law in the UK - will allow foreign equity investment in UK firms.

Firms starting to go public in Australia, will be seeing this in the US?

Office based profitability can drive a wedge to prevent acting as a global firm.
 

Trust in Relationships

Best price may come at a high price - the best service and value ratio is not necessarily the low bid. “Explore the concept that price is not the only issue”

“Treat vendors like your business partners”. Can start before you have a formal relationship - story about how a vendor is educating relative to the firm’s needs and industry standards prior to the sale/contract.

Dependability is key. Vendors should call right back.

Confidentiality is key - the vendor will be privy to sensitive information.

Transparency is key - providing more information helps improve trust in the relationship

Story of employees going across the street to starbucks instead of drinking office coffee - so was key to get better coffee in the office to keep them there!

Inherited relationships - what are the “sacred cows”. Entrenched relationships that get taken for granted. Relationships based on relatives, or clients of the firm. Reach out to those firms and to those who are championing that relationship.

They also happen when you are taking a new job. So check the contracts that are outstanding.

Dealing with Cold Calling

Drop-ins: Allow a dropoff of materials, and a follow-up in a delayed basis

Once you get them on the phone:

If you take the meeting, require that the vendor bring industry trend information, marketing information and competitive information. By setting a bar, you reduce the amount of follow-up, because many will not provide what you ask for. And for those who do provide information, you are getting something out of the conversation.

How to deal with calls after the conference: Ask for information that might be helpful if you think you might be interested. If you are not interested, just tell them you’re not interested.. They will move on. This saves everyone’s time, and the vendor will appreciate the “qualified no.”

Salespeople are trained to deal with “no” so go ahead and say it.

Look for support of the ALA chapter/region. They are probably more “in tune” with your needs because of their work with the ALA.

RFPs

“How many have done an RFP?” “Of you, how many would never ever do it again?”

RFPs require a significant time investment - for you and for the vendor.

Why do an RFP? Most often when they are not completely happy with their current vendor, to either put them on alert or to break away altogether. Sometimes it is a standard way of doing business to re-evaluate. (But that’s not always a best practice.)

Don’t use spaghetti method (see what sticks) - only send to those who are best in class and that you would want to work with.

Give vendor the critical information: who is the decision-maker? What is the timeline? If conditions change (e.g. things get delayed) then the law firm should let the vendor know. This will cut down on unnecessary followups that are intruding on your time.

Should the vendor participate? Is the firm looking for a relationship, or are they price shopping? Is the vendor just a stalking horse to get price concessions out of incumbent vendor?

Vendors put in a lot of work across multiple organizations to prepare the RFP. Sales, marketing, purchasing and manufacturing are all involved, but there is one point person for the conversation.

Vendor positives - education about the firm, future relationship is well defined, opportunity to showcase the company and capabilities.  Can lead to long-term relationship.

Administrator positives - future relationships important, don’t burn bridges by treating vendors poorly. (Clear “no” counts and treating a vendor well). This is also an opportunity to network yourself (career enhancement) and the firm.

Vendor Negatives - Expensive, time consuming, lengthy and potentially confusing.

Administrator Negatives - Very time consuming, but very negative consequences if promises are not met, especially not communicating the clear “no.”  Follow up with all the vendors, both yeas and nays.

• Emails which are increasingly important in the retained content of the firm, such that the issue is no longer about “documents” per se, but rather about tracking communications and knowledge.
• Since emails are numerous and do not have the same kind of “save” controls that documents do, categorizing to get them properly archived is an issue. One CIO mentioned that auto-categorization would be a great product/service to help make this work without requiring a lot of work flow from the attorneys.
• Modular/unified messaging is most commonly manifested as voicemail being delivered over email, and 40% of the room was using that. (There was a mention of archiving the WAV files of the emails causing database bloat and difficulty, not to mention being even able to
• “Taking all the stuff that the attorneys stack and the attorneys create and making sure people can find and access it” was an issue raised from the floor
• In addition to the big players in legal, OpenText
  and InterWoven, a newcomer, Starlaw,
  was mentioned, and the big kahuna from outside legal, Documentum, is in use in at least one G100 firm
• The shift from “document” to “content” management is opening the doors for new types of competitors, both startups and adjacent market players, to enter and offer a different/better value proposition.
• There is a lot of change in this space right now – it was suggested that they should just wait it out, see what settles as the winning mix.
• ECM is not one thing – it is two things (Inventory Management and search/distribution), and figuring out the right mix is not immediately clear. “Lego blocks” dumped out without instructions.
  • Attributes of ECM as Inventory management
    • Single system
    • Supports a variety of retention models
    • Disposal of the data after an appropriate period of time
  • Attributes of ECM as “Marketing”/distribution
    • Intelligent information
    • User role-based view, micro-content
    • Enterprise search
    • Users want “google”
• Because of the two attributes, two systems may turn out to be the right mix – one specializing in the inventory management, and another that retrieves/searches.
• To this point: “If I can build a shell that the users access regardless of what system is underneath, the users will not be affected from a back-end”
• One vision: a “federation” of multiple systems – unified interface, distributed back-end systems
• ECM is a philosophy, not a technology – so preparing businesses processes to incorporate it is key to success.
• 40% of the room has implemented matter-centricity for their content management, the vast majority of whomdescribed it as successful.
• Sharepoint is going to be the platform for anything in this space, so everyone (firms and vendors alike) should be working with it.
• Timeframe for deployment of matter-centric DM/CM: 25% within 24 months, a lot in the range of 3-5 years

It was a small room filled to the brim, which is most conducive to good audience participation. Here’s what I heard:

• China: Concerns about contact data being made available to attorneys working within China becoming vulnerable to snooping or data demands by the government. One solution was firewalling off the data from the Chinese office, so that the Chinese office would have only its own data, so there would be no basis for demand. The question was raised whether the government could demand the data on the basis of the firm doing business in China, a question that remained somewhat open.
• Upgrading to 5.5: The complaints from the room were that is was harder to do reporting, though the additional power over 4.5 was acknowledged. This is a classic trade-off, and there was discussion about where the right balance might be.
• Upgrading data to 5.5: Since 4.5 had laxer data controls, upgrading to 5.5 was causing problems, because importing the corrupted data would not be cleaned. The problem essentially was the need to clean the data before shifting over, but in the meantime more error-ridden data was being created because 4.5 was allowing the entry. The questioner described it as a chicken-and-egg problem.
• There was discussion of the importance of integrating InterAction into systems and workflow. (Shameless plug for Legal55 integration with InterAction)
• Training: Eat-and-learn lunches were described as the best way to get attorneys to stay still long enough to be educated on how to use the software (this sounds like generally good advice)
• Privacy: this is more of an issue in large firms than small firms, because at a small firm everyone knows what everyone else does anyway. So attorney buy-in is a bit easier. Large firms are more fragmented.
• The attorney usage issues are not really about InterAction, or even about CRM – it’s just hard to get attorneys to use a system – even time and billing systems are hard to implement.

• Systems staff want to consolidate and relocate servers/libraries. Complex library models are being abandoned in favor of unitary or binary systems (open cases vs inactive was suggested)
• Upgrades are getting more complicated because of the integrations among systems.
• Attorneys want ubiquitous access to all documents (Google cited as a model)
• Increasing cry to move off of Lotus Notes to MS Exchange
• Scanning in documents is taking up a lot of resource, and PDF storage/retrieval is a significant burden
• Latency for access from offices to datacenters cited as an attorney concern. Cisco, Silverpeak and Riverbed were all mentioned as options for WAN accelerations
• “Use on a plane” is a key consideration for attorneys, and is the reason to stay off of an entirely “thin” client. (Application streaming was also mentioned in re thin clients, but it seemed entirely in the investigative stage, not deployed)
• The more programs that hook into Exchange (BES, Good, InterAction) there is concern that this is slowing down the system. Every new upgrade is slowing down outlook. One firm cited a possible move to DeskSite instead of FileSite for their Interwoven management to keep the management interface outside of Outlook.
• A large fraction of firms in the room have a regular window available for applying maintenance for servers.
• Question from the moderator to the three panelists: what is the #1 issue keeping you awake at night?
  1. Email management
  2. Disaster Recovery / Continuous Availability
  3. E-Discovery and storage issues
• From the floor: Office 2007 “a little scary.”