Linking and learning

Legal OnRamp, the expanding knowledge-sharing platform for in-house lawyers and their firms, recently launched its first FirmRamp − a practice-specific option for a firm’s own clients. CEO Paul Lippe and Latham & Watkins outsourcing partner, Alex Hamilton, tell Richard Brent how the new venture builds further on the clear potential for professional online collaboration.

The meteoric rise of Facebook in the second half of the past decade is probably the clearest sign we have had of the huge collective appetite that exists at all levels of society for innovative and instantaneous online communication. The many column inches alerting users to the risk of posting private information to such 'social networking' sites may have surged alongside the number of memberships themselves, but more people still happily continue spending more minutes of every day dealing with their various friends, acquaintances and commitments in cyberspace.

As risk-averse professionals, however, where ‘reputation’ in a chosen field is closely guarded, lawyers might well be expected to be the very first to object to such seemingly informal communications in a business context. Corporate communications need to be carefully controlled and intellectual property protected, they will argue – with some justification of course. Spending more time faced with their monitors, however, and requiring instant answers to help solve valued clients’ mounting problems in difficult times, the immediacy of online networking might look like an increasingly attractive client-relationship option.

I linked up with my first Facebook ‘friends’ in 2007 – a little later than the fever pitch perhaps, but the same year that lawyer Paul Lippe launched his Legal OnRamp, allowing in-house and private practice lawyers to connect and engage with one another in various ways and share information about their complex caseloads online. Like Facebook, membership of this professional platform has since grown rapidly, most recently more than doubling its 10,000 regular attendees through a significant alliance with the US-based ‘General Counsel Roundtable’. Furthermore, in 2009 the community also introduced the concept of having an area dedicated to one single practice group of one specific firm (first off, the Latham & Watkins outsourcing group), where clients can ask lawyers more focused case-related questions, but importantly, also access very valuable content from that firm’s knowledge bank – for free!

Free and easy

Outsourcing partner Alex Hamilton admits that this idea of ‘open’ legal advice might initially seem a little strange to some of his peers, but he is not overly concerned at the prospect of offering intellectual property to some clients online at no cost. Indeed, the information available on his FirmRamp is not even reserved exclusively for the firm’s own clients.

“In the language of the dotcom boom there is a clear need for a ‘reintermediation’ of the space that sits between firms and clients, allowing them to come together in new ways,” he says. “It’s becoming ever more clear that content per se is not the differentiator for law firms. It isn’t like Coca Cola – a secret formula. You aren’t a squirrel with a stash of documents. If you can provide valuable things to clients, you have to get out there and show them to people. We’re happy to share our tools with the wider world. You trade content for reputation.”

To date that content consists of two key tools, with several others scheduled for gradual roll-out over the months to come. Dubbed ‘Capture’, the first option sets out to streamline the way in which a client’s specific deal requirements are extracted from that client – “a method for fast-tracking the initial phase of an outsourcing deal”, where clients aren’t necessarily sure of all the details of that deal themselves yet, Hamilton explains. A form is sent to clients as a Pdf document, with key questions on a deal’s scope that prompt further questions. The aim, simply, is to simplify initial conversations.

“It’s the least painful and most efficient way possible to get enough information to produce a document that reflects what clients actually want to buy,” Hamilton says. “However, it can also frame further conversations. You can have better meetings with the client when you are really focused on what to do in the case of that particular deal.” ‘Context’, the second new product, then enables clients to add further commentary about the negotiations and know-how to a signed deal to make the delivery of that solution more manageable.

Hamilton is comfortable offering this information to Legal OnRamp because he happily distinguishes this sort of ‘content’ from the higher-value “counselling” and advocacy aspects of legal advice. “Clients will always be comfortable paying top dollars for that as it has the most value”, he says. “This way it becomes less about the process and more about that high-level advice.”

“Most law firms are very aware there is change in the offing,” Lippe adds. “They are all looking for ways to participate in that change that enhance learning and keep them closer to clients.”

“Ultimately, you can collaborate on Twitter to find out which bar your friends are in, and you can collaborate on Legal OnRamp to agree on a choice of law clause for selling a networking system. Both are collaboration. They just have slightly different people, economics and structures. Everybody is going to move more and more towards collaborating to do their job.

“What does collaborating mean? How do I leverage other people to help me to do my job? There’s nothing fundamentally new in any of these things, like there’s nothing fundamentally new in law. You just put them together in slightly different ways.”

Model behaviour

Latham & Watkins management can now get behind Hamilton’s project to drive a greater chain of change in the wider business, which is the gradual way change builds up momentum in any case, Lippe argues.

“Change doesn’t happen by everyone agreeing on things. That’s why law firms are a little slow to change. A lot of their decision making is done through pseudo consensus models, but real change occurs by people who want to do stuff doing that stuff. That’s where change is happening in large part in the law firm world – with individual innovators.”

In this way FirmRamp also “maps well” with the practice group structure of most firms, Lippe says, allowing different pockets of deep expertise to grow quite independently. Another law firm, the US-based Littler Mendelson, which specialises predominantly in employment law, is also looking at FirmRamp, and while Lippe admits that UK law firms might be rather less practice-focused than their US counterparts, he thinks most firms will at least explore his model in the months ahead.

A layered approach

For Hamilton, however, the initiative is really quite a natural extension of work that his firm has already been doing for some time in terms of leveraging technology.

“We’re very interested in how you can bring technology to bear, tightly coupled with legal advice. We want to become more institutionalised, not just completing transaction after transaction,” he says.

The outsourcing group at Latham has been using wikis since 2003, and like Lippe, Hamilton views the possibilities of Legal OnRamp as the culmination of a collaborative trend that begins with such internal activity. The team is also rolling out a document-automation programme, which he says is designed more to drive up the standard of output than to generate efficiency gains, as might perhaps be expected.

“All these tools are very natural for everybody in the team and it’s an ongoing process. Each layer builds on the previous piece. You capture better learning and then build up the next layer. However, from conversations with clients we definitely see a perceived need for places where they can build such a network for themselves and get exactly the information they need when they need it,” he says.

Legal OnRamp’s information sharing can take many different forms, Lippe says. Just as clients of Latham & Watkins can download Hamilton’s outsourcing forms, other firms can upload their own documents to share. There are alerts, blogs and more open-ended day-to-day conversations. People can ask for referrals or resources, run searches and there is also a wiki of “thousands” of frequently asked questions that can be browsed, he explains. Moreover, all of this is framed within the ‘profile’ structure familiar to users of Linkedin and Facebook, including what Lippe terms the “Facebook paradigm of connect and follow”. However, Legal OnRamp has also moved beyond this to offer more privileged access to specific areas such as communications between a legal department and its panel of law firms. One such ‘Secure OnRamp’ - a private and paid for space - was taken by international electronics corporation Cisco Systems, for example, whose general counsel, Mark Chandler, also helped to establish Legal OnRamp itself in the first place.

“Information can be structured or unstructured, but the thing people don’t intuitively realise is that you can also differentiate between segregated access spaces and more open-access spaces,” Lippe says.

“Like the social networks, we start with the profile as a point of navigation as it’s a very effective way to access both information and people, but from here we can shift to the notion of a Secure OnRamp for communication between legal departments and their firms. That naturally supports a business model where privileged communications will usually all be paid for and non-privileged communications won’t.”

Naturally, Lippe hopes that Hamilton will eventually move to adopt a paid-for SecureRamp for his outsourcing communications, which is where the real focus of the venture lies. FirmRamp − “as much Alex’s ideas as anyone’s”, Lippe says − is really designed to be a “nice intermediate space” for this eventual transition. “We’re still paddling out to the waves,” he explains.

Nevertheless, even with a further 15,000 members newly networking for knowledge gains since signing up the General Counsel Roundtable, the concept could well still be believed to be in its relative infancy.

“Process, technology, communication, interaction and information: as you look at how things have played out in law in recent years, those concepts all kind of look like the same thing,” Lippe concludes.

“Historically that has been a challenge for law firms because they have viewed technology as a discrete and ‘scary’ thing that didn’t have much to do with lawyers.

“This is about pulling all of those together. What Alex has done at Latham is probably the most sophisticated effort yet to do that in any big law firm.”