Feature

posted 19 Feb 2003 in Volume 5 Issue 9

Looking through the corporate portal: A case study of e-strategy at Eversheds

In January 2001, Eversheds decided to develop a range of online services for clients that would move the firm away from the piecemeal services it had previously offered. Kevin Doolan, partner and head of e-strategy, and Nick Williams, associate and e-business manager, describe the client-led project, which also catered for the knowledge-management needs of the firm.

Three years ago was a bewildering time for many companies. Not only was everything better, faster and cheaper on the internet, but also whole rafts of services were available for free including e-mail, information and advice. There was even a scheme that gave people free computers, paid for by advertisements that would be continually delivered to an area of the screen.

This heady enthusiasm extended not just to the benefits that would be brought to the consumer, but also to a wholly new method of valuing businesses. Now it was irrelevant whether a business was making a profit or not; what mattered was the number of “hits” and the creation of “income streams”, irrespective of the huge monthly losses needed to create those relatively modest amounts of income.

In one now notorious example of this practice, two dotcoms started advertising on each other’s sites, agreeing to pay each other very substantial amounts of money for this privilege. As a result both were able to book huge extra income (notwithstanding the fact that it was never actually paid), resulting in both companies enjoying much greater valuations.

The dotcom bubble may have burst, but in its wake there is still a healthy demand for online business services that add real value to a company’s operations. The only difference is that these services have to work within a sensible business model rather than just relying on the perpetual motion machine that was the internet.

For the legal profession, a coherent business model has always been a vital first step. When Eversheds launched its internet services project in January 2001, it was an attempt to move away from the piecemeal services it had offered to clients before then, often in reaction to a specific client demand. For example, for one American client the firm had built an extranet that included (at considerable effort) direct access into all of the firm’s billing and accounting systems. It was, however, a one-off project.

Starting in 2001, the project team began analysing the marketplace and examining what other law firms were providing. The whole course of the project, however, changed when the firm’s head of business development was addressing a conference on online legal services. The speaker immediately before him, who was from another international law firm, described a project that they had “launched on an unsuspecting public”.

At that point, Eversheds realised that its conversations with clients had been sporadic and disorganised at best. It was at risk of doing the same thing as this other law firm – designing the services that it thought its clients wanted.

The client advisory board

The firm decided to formally involve clients in this major project. Eversheds invited eight of its largest clients to form an advisory board and explained to them that it would take up serious amounts of time over the coming 15 months.

These were major publicly quoted and public-sector organisations and they provided a range of representatives and points of view. The internet services team then decided that it would be better to put together some working models for those clients to examine, even though this meant an amount of web-development work taking place on an entirely speculative basis.

Clients were given a variety of different approaches and asked to report back at the next meeting on their experiences – good or bad. Thankfully, the clients were extremely open and forthcoming in criticising what had been put together for them and were comprehensive in their lists of demands. What emerged was that the clients’ needs could be stated very simply, but to deliver on them would take a lot of work. It also became clear that Eversheds could not deliver all the demanded services itself but would need to form joint ventures.

Clients’ needs were split down into three entirely separate areas. First, there was the need for the firm to have clear and usable brochureware on its main site. This would enable both clients and non-clients to get a feel for the breadth and depth of the firm’s services, where it was based and the details of individual partners’ experience and specialities.

Eversheds worked on this with IT consultancy experts Gigaweb. The latter had developed a “usability scorecard” that would compare the planned site with its best-practice sites worldwide, and give the site an appropriate ranking. Eversheds developed its site in line with those comments, succeeding to such an extent that Gigaweb even used the firm’s homepage as one of the best-practice sites against which others were scored.

The second part of the project involved delivering business information and in-depth legal resources to clients through an online subscription service. Clients had confirmed that they were prepared to pay for information services online, but they needed to be extremely targeted and offer real value. This included what was happening in the client’s chosen business sector through breaking news stories, together with details of all relevant legislation and cases affecting its business, and an in-depth analysis from Eversheds’s lawyers as to what these developments meant in practice. This was where joint venturing was to prove so important.

Third, clients needed to be able to collaborate online with their lawyers. At the time, there had been a tremendous amount of hype around the idea that all major transactions would soon be carried out through online “deal rooms” and there were a number of different suppliers with very comprehensive services. Eversheds had to understand exactly what its clients needed and then make sure that it used the right suppliers.

Developing joint ventures

Given the wide range of demands from Eversheds’s clientele, the project team had to source joint venture partners that would be able to offer exactly the right blend of valuable information. The first port of call was FT.com, which had established a reputation as the leading supplier of online business information in the UK. It was well placed to provide breaking news of real relevance to Eversheds’s business-focused client base.

The deal with FT.com meant that all of its information sources were available to the Eversheds’s site. The firm was then able to cut and slice each story and piece of information based on its meta-tagging so that it could be placed in the most relevant position for the client. For example, the top breaking news stories of the day are always displayed on the front page of Eversheds’s main site at www.eversheds.com.

Once a client moves into a subscription-only knowledge bank, the stories displayed are only those relevant to the area in question – such as employment law or real estate law. At a further level, inside the clients’ own extranets, they can choose stories relating to their own business, their competitors and any other relevant criteria. At the extranet level, the client has effectively chosen the news that it sees.

The next stop was Butterworths Tolley Lexis Nexis (part of the Reed Elsevier Group), who provided Eversheds with the full text of all relevant cases, legislation, statutory instruments, leading text books, journals and so on. Again, this information was disseminated into the different knowledge banks so clients would receive only what they really needed.

Butterworths Tolley Lexis Nexis also had considerable (and as it turned out, crucial) expertise in integrating its information streams into clients’ own systems. Once the information sources noted above had been built into the system, the advisory board added a requirement for very specific information providers – for example, in the area of employment and HR law, Incomes Data Services was seen as a key information provider. Similarly in real estate, Estates Gazette Interactive had established a leading position. By building in information from these sources the clients would be receiving exactly what they had demanded.

Almost as a by-product of the project, Eversheds had catered for its own knowledge-management needs. Individual lawyers within the firm needed this information as much as their clients, and they now had it all presented together on a single page.

Project rooms

The advisory board had identified the need for two specific products. First, clients needed their own extranet with Eversheds, where they could store details of all of the information being provided by the firm. This would include details of the teams of lawyers acting on various matters, regular update reports, financial summaries and the like. This information had to be secure because most of the work carried out between a law firm and its clients is not just confidential but may have extremely unfortunate consequences if disclosed. Eversheds went to IBM and Lotus for the hosting and software in order to provide a secure online service for its clients.

Second, the advisory board had identified the need for deal rooms where complex and often multinational corporate transactions could be conducted online and with the highest level of available security.

At this time there was a huge amount of activity in this marketplace. Many of the world’s leading law firms had been pushing their ability to provide these types of deal rooms and Eversheds certainly needed something similar. Although some firms had provided these services in-house, the majority had gone to external IT suppliers to provide online collaboration tools. The Eversheds team was consequently tasked with seeing demonstrations by all of the leading providers.

It soon emerged, however, that many of the products were very much “first generation” (that is, some didn’t work at all) and that they were very ambitious by trying to automate aspects of the corporate transaction. This was fine in theory, but with a client based in Canada, the company being sold in Italy and the purchasers based in England, there was no way to organise training courses for everyone so that they could understand how to use the deal room. In addition, the advisory board didn’t want to get involved in any online collaboration tool that meant having to spend time on training sessions.

As an intermediate solution, one of Eversheds’s corporate lawyers put together the structure for a simple deal room. It would act as a multi-party online file store, subject to security, with version control and the ability to tell exactly what documents were the current drafts. This was being used by Eversheds as a training model to introduce the concepts and to help judge the external suppliers.

However, both the lawyers within Eversheds and the clients really appreciated the simple model. It worked, was extremely easy to use and took approximately five minutes to develop a thorough understanding of how it operated. In essence, it was about as difficult to use as a standard e-mail system. Once again, IBM hosted the service to offer clients a high level of security and resilience.

The system soon began to develop. For example, one team of lawyers was in the middle of a major staff reorganisation for a client. The project ended up being one of the biggest users of a deal room (which was then developed into a full-blown “Project Room”). This had more than 100 users accessing the site on a daily basis over a nine-month period.

Shortly afterwards, a property company asked if it could use the project room to scan and store all of the deeds for its portfolio of UK properties. This would give the company, its surveyors and its managing agents online access to all of the key information about its business at the same time as Eversheds’s lawyers. As a result we made a further development: creating an online “deeds store”.

Next, another client wanted to set up an intranet for its in-house legal team but it found that this idea was very low down the line on its company’s list of IT projects. The client therefore asked to use one of the project rooms to set up an external intranet where it could store all the key information that would typically have gone on an intranet. As an added benefit the system was simply and securely accessible both from home and when staff were travelling.

Yet another client, a telecom provider, started running paperless meetings through a project room. It installed staff diaries, accompanying papers and minutes of all the meetings. Even at the meeting itself, no paper was used. Instead, the staff simply accessed the project room through a laptop and then projected the agenda onto the wall.

Defining the offering

Eversheds then set aside a separate meeting of the advisory board to look at what the service really entailed and how it could be defined and categorised. This meant that the firm could now produce brochures and user guides that better explained exactly what clients could do online. Of course, it helped considerably to have a client explain what it had done and how the service had met its needs.

The firm soon realised that it had started to branch out into many different areas. It had a main site with its brochureware, it had developed knowledge banks that clients could access through a log-on on the front page of the site and it had then developed several different types of online collaboration to enable clients to carry out a specific project online.

Each of these, however, was accessed through a separate site. There was a risk that clients would end up with multiple entry points, multiple passwords and a confusing time for all. Therefore, influenced by developments seen in the US, Eversheds became aware that it needed a single client point of contact. This client portal would give each company a single address that was only available for its own use, and its staff could use that portal to access all the services that Eversheds was providing.

A client portal

Finally, Eversheds realised that what clients really needed was their own homepage – a single address that, in a fully secure environment, would bring together all of the services they needed from their law firm. It would include every single service in one place, not just the particular aspects clients were currently using. It was an advertisement of what services were being offered, making it a good way of marketing additional services to existing clients.

For example, a client might set up an extranet because it wanted to track progress on a number of litigation cases that it was defending. These could be found under the cases tab in the client’s own portal.

Alongside it there is a tab marked deeds. The firm had originally considered that only property companies – whose whole business revolved around the ownership and management of property – would need the online storage of property deeds. However, this proved not to be the case. In fact, almost every Eversheds’s client has to manage a large number of properties in the general course of its business. So, once that client sees the demonstration of how useful online deeds storage would be, it is much more likely to want that service as well.

The single portal also makes a real difference to security by giving clients a single log-in and password. It makes it much more likely they will remember them and not be tempted to write them down.

Next steps

Currently, clients are looking for the next stage of integration. This involves Eversheds being able to integrate all of its services into the client’s own intranet, or at least giving the client a single point of access to a whole range of suppliers.

In addition, online training is finally starting to find its niche. There are an increasing number of areas where businesses need to show that they have complied with the training requirements of very specific European and international legislation. Failing to properly train its staff will leave the client and its directors exposed to civil and criminal sanctions.

In such an area, e-learning has a real edge because it can deliver training across a whole organisation without much disruption. It can also test each person’s understanding and maintain detailed and accurate records. In fact, when an organisation is faced with the need to train its entire staff, and to keep repeating that training as new personnel join, e-learning may be the only practical method. Eversheds is working on this at present, bearing in mind that any e-learning system has to integrate with all the client’s other systems and with the Eversheds client portal.

The essence of the platform, now called eversheds.complete, is to provide clients with the online services that they have themselves requested. Going forward, the intention is to continue working with clients to ensure that future developments are in line with their needs and expectations. Enhancing the platform this way avoids unnecessary risks.

Kevin Doolan is Head of e-strategy and Nick Williams is e-business manager at Eversheds. For further information, contact Kevin Doolan at: kevindoolan@eversheds.com.