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Is SharePoint the One?

I’ve heard this question a lot of times lately and for some reason I always wondered: “will it ever be?” If you are looking further down the road you’ll hear a lot different opinions about SharePoint and if it will be necessary or useful in a law firm.

Many firms are busy to renew their intranet to professionalize the look & feel and to implement new features. Often, such intranet redesign projects face quite some scope-creep resulting eventually in the launch of new and related projects. This is always the biggest challenge of a project manager: scoping the project to a manageable piece.

But who will be the owner of the project: Marketing? IT? Or perhaps Knowledge Management? This will be different in every law firm. I see these projects start from the Marketing department because they in general strongly believe that the first page on an intranet is filled with marketing- and business development related information. On the other side IT departments often feels that it is an IT project (Yes, there is a server involved!) and the Knowledge Management department wants to give access to the know-how database amongst other tools and consequently see this project as a big opportunity.

Anyway: everybody thinks his/her business is of great importance.

Back to the basics. Why are we using SharePoint as intranet solution. I think there are better solutions around. Perhaps we choose SharePoint because it’s Microsoft and therefore its “great”. Nobody could tell me, but what I was told, is that SharePoint will be used because you can do document management with it and you have wiki’s and you can start a blog and the personalization is great. The workflow solution is also very handy.

Hmmmmm... Yeah, right!

Maybe there are firms who actually go that far, but using SharePoint as a document management system in a law firm is (for now) asking for a complex and extensive project. In my opinion you could, and maybe should use SharePoint as Intranet solution but it should be more than only a static view of links, company news, and related items. It could be a first step to a “lawyers dashboard” solution. The use of words like Legal Information Management pops up. Give the lawyer the information he or she needs. Information about a client, a prospect, a matter or a contact which outlines the financial status (Total billed, WIP etc) , the matter data (documents/e-mails) and the contact details (which contacts do we know). As you can see , I get carried away myself now and start misusing the Intranet project to do more!

If you think how many IT systems a firm is using today, you could imagine that there is big loss of productivity in terms of the poor reuse of information. This will eventually result in loss of opportunities, loss of billable hours and a decrease in client service. One of the problems today is to get the lawyers up to speed with (new) IT systems to increase efficiency. IT training is becoming more and more a mandatory subject on the agenda of a lawyer (see also the column of Chris). Without the good knowledge of the different systems in use, lawyers cannot do their work properly.

The IT departments are facing a challenge to take control of all the information. Lawyers want to work with more efficiency and all the different systems can “be a pain in the ass” (actual quote of a lawyer I interviewed on this subject). So how to give lawyers what they want, what is the best way to implement these requirements and how are we doing this? The best way to do this is using a top layer above applications like DMS, CRM, PMS etc.

SharePoint could be a good solution. So if you think of a firm using SharePoint as intranet solution, the next project could be the “ legal dashboard” challenge. There are vendors who are offering thess kind of solutions. US based company XMLAW is one of these vendors and they are offering a really great solution with OneView Connect. Lawyers will love this. The IT department will love this, Knowledge management will love this, the finance and marketing department and Business Development will get a tool to give lawyers useful information. Last but not least, firm management will love it. Can you imagine? Software with connectors to Interwoven, Interaction, Elite, OpenText/Hummingbird, Aderant, and more. Personalized views of data which you can see instantly with one click and with a single interface to search across all repositories.

All information accessible from one place. The business case is created easily but who will be the “owner” and initiator of these projects? That’s the question to be answered first. This will make or break the success of SharePoint in the Legal world. The Legal IT world is a small world and if projects are failing because of bad management, bad functional design, or wrong decision-making, SharePoint will get a bad name. As you know, it’s not the people that are failing, it’s the software......!

Any comments are welcome.

Marcel Lang

September 2008

 

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