Get it together or lose out

Law firms that want to stay on top of their game must harness their intellectual capital, centralise disparate repositories to form a single know-how system, and streamline the way fee earners and support staff work across the matter lifecycle process.

This is the word from Daniel Hall, MD of IA Systems, sole local distributor of Hummingbird collaboration solutions.

"Law firms operate in a progressively competitive environment. Globalisation, mergers, consolidations and increasing pressure to improve client service levels and firm profitability all contribute to the mounting list of success factors," he says.

To succeed, Hall says, legal firms and corporate legal departments need an integrated system to support the end-to-end matter lifecycle -- from intake and conflicts checking, to docketing, calendaring and information search and retrieval, through to work product and records management and, ultimately, final disposition. Take, for instance, e-mail. According to a recent research report from Gartner: "Companies that rely on employees to tag and push appropriate e-mails into the record management system or an e-mail record archive must implement a compliance monitoring system and audit to ensure that the corporate policy is being followed. Alternatively, there is the option to deploy a records management system that offers the option to automate some parts of the declaration process while capturing all non-declared records into a large "other e-mail" folder. This adds intelligence to some of the e-mail records while eliminating the need to oversee that all users are in compliance."

"Although some classes of documents will interest all or most people in a firm, they amount only to a fraction of the firm`s total corpus of knowledge. Compliance and other legal business processes require close management of content firm-wide, which can only be done by a suite that integrates the various content-related functions. This use of the technology is what defines enterprise collaboration management (ECM)," says Toby Bell, Research Director at Gartner.

"Remember, though, that compliance is first and foremost a business and policy problem and technology is only one part of a strategic corporate performance management initiative. But suite technology helps reward better practice management behaviour by individual associates. ECM makes their contributions more accessible, their expertise more available, and uses better approaches for collaboration than e-mail has traditionally provided," added Bell.

Gartner`s research report entitled: "ECM Suites Emerge From Industry Consolidation", states that the right approach for most organisations is an ECM product suite, advising companies to turn to ECM to reduce the number of point products and content repositories they support; improve compliance and automate vertical processes; and achieve a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing integration and customisation requirements.

This research is consistent with internal findings at IA Systems about the information management requirements of professional services firms, says Hall.

"Customers desire a comprehensive, integrated solution that works `out of the box`; requires little or no customisation; offers seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook for discovery, knowledge sharing and e-mail management; is user-friendly; and can be implemented quickly.

"Our customers also recognise the growing focus on law firms to be able to meet compliance and corporate governance requirements, not only for the firm, but also on behalf of their clients, and recognise the importance of having a full information retention policy in place," he says.