News Archive for October, 2007

This was a fantastic session, in which CIOs from a range of firms could hear about what’s on the minds of the largest firms in the world. The G100 summit was a great experience for us at last year’s ILTA (I presented Legal55 to the august panel), and it sounds like the subject this time, ECM, was equally stimulating.

• 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

I attended this session because I knew Stephanie Larson (who I worked with at Gesmer Updegrove and is now at Goodwin Procter) was running the show. The session was mostly a freewheeling Q&A with the experts in the front of the room (including a couple of LN people as well as the client-side speakers from previous sessions in the track).

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.

Major notes from the session:

• 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.”