With the mountains of paper generated by law firms, the need for efficient electronic document management cannot be ignored. But, rather than rush out to upgrade to the latest system, firms need to get the right one for their business needs, And, says Liam White, in the fast-moving world of IT, they had better be quick
Electronic document management (EDM) systems are a must for any modern law firm, and the majority now have a system of some kind. But, after a year in which so many firms got there first, considerable changes still lie ahead.
Linklaters’ head of information systems and strategy, Simon Thompson, completed a big EDM project in 1999, and sees his firm’s EDM strategy as part of something far larger. “Our corporate EDM system is Documentum. We still use our old bespoke system for storing old documents, but all the old ones we consider likely to be needed are in the new system, serving our 2,800 users,” he says.
Linklaters implemented Documentum between January and June 1999. The goal was to allow access to any document anywhere in the world within one window.
“The major challenge was scaling the underlying infrastructure to cope with that – to work from Bangkok on a document that was created in London. We rolled it out as part of a project that put Windows NT and Office 97 on every desktop in the corporation as well.”
Ultimately, a law firm’s EDM strategy is part of its
knowledge management and IT infrastructure strategies. How legal staff gain access to information is crucial to the service that is delivered to customers. But not every firm is alike; and neither are its needs and its customers.
Paul O’Connor is technology director at Tikit, a systems integration firm that has worked for 30 of the top-100 law firms in the UK, and implemented EDM in more than 20 of them. “Some firms will do a five-day fast-track job,
others will have practical reasons worked out for making the project larger, making 30 days more normal.
“Eighty percent of needs are common in law firms, but all firms are different by the time you look at their practice management, messaging, client and bespoke systems to tie in,” O’Connor says.
Ed Dean runs IT at Lovells with an in-house IT staff of 60 to service the firm’s 1,600 legal staff. They have been
running Hummingbird’s Docs Open (previously known as PC Docs) for the last 18 months. Why did the firm move? “Mainly because our previous SoftSolutions system was obsolete, and had Y2K worries. We looked at four or five products, and felt it was the most appropriate,” Dean says.
When it came down to it, the functionality differences between the products were a bit esoteric in terms of the firm’s overall needs. Dean says: “The decision was more about how we felt it would fit with our current infrastructure and future strategy in knowledge management (KM) – and our intranet, which was already up and running.”
Besides concern about SoftSolutions’ Y2K status,
another imperative was settling a global standard with the Boesebeck Droste merger coming up on 1 January, 2000.
“We needed a strategy for the firm based on global
benefits, which was where the KM initiative came from, too. Training was a big issue, but we did it in-house, with a
comprehensive training scheme,” he explains.
Training, interoperability, and – where a firm cannot implement a large-scale project itself – the quality of the help that is available are key factors.
Alan Weintraub works for the world’s largest IT consultancy, Gartner Group. He spends his life watching the EDM market. “A lot of market consolidation and changing of messages happened last year,” he says.
“Products are moving pretty quickly, too, and the EDM vendors are moving into new value-added capabilities – a lot of them to do with publishing, particularly web publishing, collaboration, portal-building tools, KM tools…”
The main driver for this, according to Weintraub, is that Lotus and Microsoft are incorporating many EDM functions free with standard desktop software. Suddenly, all the EDM products look like the web, have similar pricing and training schemes, and aim to provide global collaboration tools. As a result, all the leading EDM companies are providing increasingly specific add-ons to differentiate themselves.
“Look for a product that is supplied by someone with business expertise in your industry, who understands your business problems and the kind of approach you want to take to solving that, be it content or KM – and then choose,” Weintraub says.
“All my EDM legal experts are global and they continue to have common problems that are evolving. Not long ago, the main problem was the amount of information to manage now it is more problems of collaboration.”
What about non-global users? Head of KM at McGrigor Donald, Christine McLintock, recently finished implementing iManage’s EDM product, ditching WordPerfect for Word, and all the attendant training.
“The decision came from looking at why we produce and use documents… I am pleased to hear there has been a big take-up of this product recently, and we are looking at setting up a user group. We looked at Livelink at Simmons & Simmons and I was impressed, but they are using that more as a global knowledge management system. It includes intranet development tools, and global software engineering stuff,” McLintock says.
McLintock’s KM strategy is integrated with iManage, but managed separately. Speed of implementation also made iManage a better option for McGrigor Donald under their circumstances.
Like McLintock and Linklaters’ Thompson, Chris Roberts at Simmons & Simmons wanted something web-based and chose to roll out new desktop applications at the same time. Like Lovells’ Dean, he had had to move away from SoftSolutions. Unlike the others, he chose Livelink, which he believes fitted best with the firm’s web strategy (see www.elexica.com).
All the leading products in the market are safe for law firms, although some can be better than others depending on individual needs. They all also have increasingly different plans for their future direction. If you are a small firm, and cannot implement EDM by yourself, the key factor will be the quality of help that you can get.
But the future might not be so simple. Weintraub believes that as EDM vendors continue to diverge in systems capabilities, its leading users will gain an edge by
incorporating the abilities of more than one EDM system.
As McLintock put it: “Oh no! Don’t say that!”
