In this Roundup, a report on an excellent article by John Alber on Enterprise Search, a blog post by Sun GC Mike Dillon on managing outside counsel, and a McKinsey report on web collaboration.
Search as a Law Firm Enterprise Foundation
John Alber has an excellent article, Search at the Foundation of the Enterprise (LLRX, 8/27/07). John has previously written about business intelligence (quite a few of my BI posts cite him.) He now applies his considerable knowledge and experience to a topic every large law firm should understand.
Sun General Counsel on Aligning Law Firms with Clients
Sun GC Mike Dillon recently blogged about ways that Sun is managing legal spend, including:
- A preferred partner program (aka convergence)
- “Dyanmic bidding” for commodity aspects of legal work. Sun invited bids from around the world to review and summarize agreements. I wonder if they invited offshore legal outsourcing companies to bid
- A Global Legal Services team “focused on efficiently handling the less complex, but higher volume agreements and services we provide”
Blogs and Wikis
Mckinsey articles How companies can make the most of user-generated content (namely blogs and wikis) and How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey help explain and further validate (as if that is really necessary) the use of these important collaborative technologies.