What’s the matter?

How a matter-centric approach to DMS implementation has improved business processes and client service at Brodies LLP.

By Andrew Powell, IT director, Brodies LLP

The legal information–technology (IT) industry has some splendid buzzwords and two of the most overused phrases at the moment must surely be ‘matter centricity’ and ‘enterprise content management’.

Although we’ve done a lot in this area at Brodies LLP in the past twelve months, neither of these concepts is entirely new. The legal profession may well have been a relatively late adopter of technology, but one thing it has always been good at is the structured storage of information. Filing cabinets have been ‘matter centric’ for decades if not centuries. But pressure on office space has led to enterprise-content-management strategies that involve offsite storage, shredding, microfiche and various other archiving solutions that enable filing cabinets to contain work in progress, rather than a firm’s entire work product. It is only in the past decade that the balance has started to shift from paper copies to electronic information and with that has come a bit of a nightmare, which has been brought into even sharper focus with post-Enron regulation.

Yet every supplier I have spoken to is keen to point out the process improvements, compliance benefits and efficiencies brought about by technology, so why is there an apparent disconnect?

A filing dilemma

I think it’s fair to say that lawyers are generally not great at filing. Firms rely on the administrative skills of secretaries and filers to maintain paper copies of the file in their matter-centric filing cabinets. And even when the file is left on the floor, it is still matter-centric and its content is easily identifiable.

Compare that to the average partner’s inbox, with maybe a thousand items, sorted in date order, and with no obvious reference to client or matter. The transactional work is mixed with social and personal correspondence. Things that aren’t dealt with immediately fall off the bottom of the screen, replaced by today’s urgent client work and updates from eBay. In short, e-mail was not designed for the purpose in which it is now used, and its ability to act as both messaging system and filing cabinet, while hiding things from others, is its downfall. And we’ve left the lawyers to organise it.

So why bother with matter centricity?

As a progressive commercial law practice, Brodies LLP provides services to many of Scotland’s best-known corporate and financial institutions, as well as to a range of government departments, public authorities and private business clients.

In recent years, double-digit annual growth has placed new demands on our technological capabilities. Prior to implementing document-management technology, rapid expansion had made our content ever harder to manage. We heard tales of a single item taking up to

30 minutes to locate – time that came at the expense of the firm’s productivity and the quality of service we could provide to clients.

DMS implementation

It was with this in mind that we first looked at document management a little under three years ago. A late adopter of the document-management system (DMS), Brodies had managed pretty well with a matter-centric file server that held Word documents and very little besides.

But it was becoming clear that e-mail was increasing exponentially and being used more for transactional work. There was also a growing assumption that this type of work would be dealt with on the same day. While e-mails could be printed to the hard-copy file, they did not go easily into the file server. This resulted in content sat in disparate silos, with no single location containing the complete matter record.

A review of the business and IT strategies at around the same time identified quality of service and access to information as being fundamental factors in the future success of the firm. After a period of consultancy with our users, we implemented what was then iManage technology, with the aim of providing a structured and robust environment in which to house the firm’s content – in a unified environment, which included e-mail and scans as well as the ubiquitous Word documents.

Back then, we were still using Office 97 and had to use an old version of iManage for the integration to be successful. Compared with saving a Word document to a file server, profiling was relatively cumbersome and the concept of putting everything into one large pot and then relying on an accurate search was not always popular. From a management point of view, though, we were finally getting all transactional content in one place. This was good for risk management and document lifecycle routines, and good for firm-wide knowledge sharing. For example, content from inboxes was now being stored with client and matter references.

Fortunately, a network refresh was scheduled within a year and it happened to coincide with the release of Worksite 8. Brodies was one of the first matter-centric Worksite 8 sites in the UK, going live with the system, firm-wide, in November 2004. The decision to upgrade from the previous version was driven by our move to Active Directory and Office 2003 (enabling Interwoven to use component object model integration in Outlook). Our adoption of a matter-centric strategy, in which all of our documents, e-mails and other content relating to a given matter or client are managed together in unified workspaces, was another key influence.

The upgraded system

As before, the entire system is accessible via the standard Outlook interface as well as through Word integration. The technology allowed us to bring e-mails, seamlessly, into the same environment as other types of content, which is particularly important given the rise of transactional content arriving as e-mail attachments. The server side upgrade was completed in advance, while the client software was built into a new PC image and rolled out over a single weekend – at the same time as Exchange 2003 and Active Directory.

We also replaced all of our laser printers with multi-functional devices that print, photocopy and scan. The new machines are linked to keypads that require a PIN code to be entered before a user’s job is printed. The initial drivers for this were resilience, quality improvement and cost savings, but we’ve seen a change in working practices that we hadn’t expected. Individuals can use the devices to scan documents in PDF format and have them e-mailed directly to their inbox, at which point they can be dragged into a DMS Workspace. This facility is used extensively on major deals that run out-of-hours.

We see DMS content – for example, a Word document – being printed, amended by hand, scanned in colour and saved back into the DMS, before being sent to the other party by e-mail. Although it sounds crazy from a network administrator’s point of view, it allows our lawyers to turn work around very quickly, particularly out of hours. And it goes down very well with clients.

Matter-centric e-mail management

The matter-centric environment has also allowed us to take a harder line on e-mail inboxes. Because it is so easy to move e-mails into the DMS environment, we have introduced mailbox limits to ensure that it actually happens. We have chosen to archive within the DMS rather than Outlook, as we would rather archive a structured repository of transactional information where content is easily retrievable. By introducing mailbox limits in Outlook we are hoping to push valuable content into the DMS – either into a legal workspace or a non-transactional one – and whatever remains in Outlook is left to the lawyer to manage and delete. It does appear to be working, too. Prior to the introduction of Worksite 8, our Exchange repository was growing at a rate of almost 50 per cent every six months. But in the six months following its introduction, it remained static.

Logical workspaces

The workspaces can be navigated easily by ‘client’, ‘matter’, ‘industry’, ‘employee’ and other criteria .The matter list is logical and timely, making it easier for people to find documents. Having experienced significant growth in turnover over the last four years, the document repository now holds around two million documents and, in the rare event that a user is unable to find one right away, robust search capabilities can be relied on to locate it in a matter of seconds. Although most discussion on matter centricity focuses on transactional work, the same applies for non-transactional documents such as HR, marketing or finance documents.

These are stored in workspaces of their own within the same intuitive structure. We have given our support departments the ability to construct their own filing structures within the workspace environment, giving them the flexibility of the old file server from pre-DMS days, with the security and control that can only be achieved by document management.

The same is true for know-how, where we have an entire knowledge database within the DMS, which is accessible through an intuitive workspace structure. Back at the transactional side of things, users also spend less time saving documents into the repository. As each new client or matter is opened, an automatic feed from the practice-management system generates a new workspace that is available for lawyers and staff when they begin their work.

Each workspace is pre-configured and pre-populated with profile information that is then automatically assigned to each content item placed inside the workspace. This spares users the need to fill out lengthy forms and eliminates the categorisation errors that can result from manual entry. As a result, the time and effort saved in every aspect of content storage and retrieval has driven significant efficiencies that improve the responsiveness and quality of work provided to clients.

Practice management

In March 2005, we further developed integration with the practice-management system, adding ‘timekeeper’, ‘date opened’ and ‘date closed’ details to each workspace.

When Worksite 8.1 with matter-centric archiving arrives later this year, we will be well placed to automate the archiving of closed matters from the live-document repository to the archive repository.

This should streamline the main repository and further enhance system performance, risk management and disaster recovery. In addition, the hardcopy client file is scanned to text-indexed PDF on closure, and will be added to the archive workspace once the creation of it is automated in 8.1.

Remote access

We also use the DMS to publish information to a secure extranet for use by remote workers, as well as to generate self-service extranet sites that permit clients to directly access their own workspaces in real time, rather than having to request updates by e-mail or phone. A high level of granularity provides the access control and security needed to maintain effective control over our content without impeding its productive use.

Furthermore, our lawyers with laptop virtual-private-network access are able to work remotely, using the DMS as though they were in the office. Because all content is in a single matter-centric environment, they are able to look at the current state of play on any given matter, regardless of whether they have the paperwork with them or not.

A unified content environment

With complete matter information at their fingertips, our lawyers have achieved greater responsiveness for their clients. The unified, matter-centric content environment supported by WorkSite has delivered benefits beyond the daily work of our lawyers. With documents of all types managed together, the document lifecycle is simplified enormously. The firm can clearly identify everything related to a given matter and ensure the consistent application of archiving, retention and destruction policies. Back-up and disaster recovery are greatly simplified, and we have the foundations in place for a master file that is electronic rather than paper-based.

In summary, our matter-centric implementation has reduced hassle, improved business processes and strengthened client service. Despite being one of the very first adopters, our system was implemented successfully over just one weekend and has probably made the single largest contribution to process improvement in the firm.

Andrew Powell is IT director at Brodies LLP. He can be contacted at andrew.powell@brodies.co.uk