I am attending Successfully Implementing Law Firm Experience Management with Keith Lipman (Prosperoware), Barry Solomon (Foundation Software), Keith Wewe (Content Pilot), Stacy Pangilinan (DLA Piper), Steve Warmerdam (IntApp). This is a session at the International Legal Technology Association annual conference, ILTACON 2018. This is live – I post as soon as the session ends – so please forgive any typos or misunderstanding of meanings. Session description is appended at end.
[The structure of this session is a rotation among panelists to describe key success factors, which I show in bold and all caps.]
Keith Wewe on PURPOSE: In thinking about an experience management system, it’s key to answer the following questions:
- What is the purpose?
- How will success be defined (metrics) at various future points in time?
- What are the most common requests received from lawyers?
- What is the firm’s strategy and what does that suggest emphasizing?
- What do practice group leaders want to achieve?
Barry on OWNERSHIP: You can have great tech but it will fail without clear ownership of your experience management system. Addressing this has five key elements
- Set proper expectations (eg, timeline and functionality)
- In putting team together, go deep and wide.
- Be clear on accountability – who owns what
- Don’t go to practice leaders upfront (they don’t own functionality, just a use case)
- Find experience with experience (team needs to include people with prior experience management hands-on work experience)
Keith Lipman on TAXONOMY. My sound boring but it’s really important. Many firms have poorly defined matter type lists, which is a core data type. More generally, define your core data elements and then create good list of those. Lawyers litigate, do deals, appear in front of regulators, and give advice. That’s what they do. So in reporting, even though litigation has many flavors, make sure you can find all litigation matters. Core data will describe service data, area of law, and industry. From this, you can create extended data. For example, in litigation: jurisdiction, docketing info, and parties. Legal, in contrast to other industries, have poor product definition. (Indirectly cites ICD-10 in medicine.) . Keith and many others involve in SALI, to develop standard to describe matters. Help buyers and sellers align on what’s being sold and bought. Call for participation
Steve on CAPTURE: There is passive and active capture of information to feed an experience management system. (From end user perspective, all the data are there. The issue is how it gets there.) Passive capture: comes from other systems of record. You need to bring data in from those systems, eg, CRM, NBI, HRIS, and time and billing. Active capture means getting information that lawyers hold in their head. you need a notification, triggers, and human process to gather this data. This requires curation and approval process.
Barry on BUILDING a system:
- Phasing – don’t start by boiling the ocean. Start with a project plan with multiple phases.
- Communicate plan to all stakeholders, esp. the non-tech leads
- Stage the use case. Don’t do all use cases all at once. Do one at a time to develop successes and champions.
Steve on DATA INTEGRATION: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You need to manage and harmonize:
- Simplify and harmonize various taxonomies. Do it iteratively.
- Integrate with existing systems
- Rely on external data that exists, eg, LinkedIn
- Utilities to capture and integrate information from other systems.
- Make sure you bring in good information.
Keith Lipman on SECURITY AND ETHICAL WALLS:
- Clients are pressing for least privilege access > that means that experience data will be mission critical for knowledge management. This changes life for KM professionals – a coming freight train
- Ethical walls: do they actually apply to experience data? Most litigation is publicly so arguably, you don’t have to exclude users from the matter metadata. But much data MUST be secured. So you have to think through the security model. You need discussions with risk and security teams.
Keith Wewe on POST-LAUNCH STRATEGY:
- Make sure you track success
- Talk to those with experience to find out how to define success, before, during, and after roll-out
- Use analytics, typically in-built to systems – use those reports
- Track subjective lawyer reaction to system as well
- Do some formal surveys
- Maintenance
- Keep tech up to date
- Know the product roadmap
- Training to ensure adoption
Steve on the FUTURE.
- Lately, AI is always the future. But the future is now. It has applicability today to experience management systems.
Q&A omitted
SESSION DESCRIPTION
This product-agnostic session will address how to create a successful experience management database, whether you are preparing to start from scratch, moving to a new platform, or just want to improve the system you currently use. From data cleansing basics to trend analysis, learn how to get value beyond generic pitch responses.
Takeaways:
- Understand best practices for cleaning and maintaining the data
- Hear fresh ideas on maximizing how the information is utilized
- Learn tips for getting the lawyers and firm management engaged