B-LeGal: A BLG case study on its Martini know-how system

Barlow Lyde & Gilbert (BLG) celebrated the start of 2003 with an upgraded know-how system: B-LeGal. BLG’s head of knowledge management Claire Harradine, and IT Director Brian Powell, describe the challenges the IT team and the professional support lawyers faced in the B-LeGal development process. In particular, they look at the business rationale for upgrading the know-how system, the firm’s requirements, the IT architecture options and the benefits of the new system.

At the beginning of 2002, Barlow Lyde & Gilbert’s knowledge-management system consisted of a number of independent practice area know-how databases, accessible only via the firm’s network and with stand-alone internet links to published information. A year on and the firm has launched B-LeGal, its upgraded know-how system. Fee earners can access the integrated firm-wide KM system anytime, any place and anywhere there is an internet connection, leading to our nickname: the Martini know-how system.

The launch of B-LeGal also saw BLG became the first law firm to utilise Syntalex linking technology, enabling the integration of external online sources of information with the firm’s own know-how.

Business rationale and requirements

For three years, since recruiting its first professional support lawyer, BLG has developed know-how1 databases for each of its departments on a demand-for basis. Although everyone across the firm could access these databases, it wasn’t possible to search them all at the same time for firm-wide results. We realised that this made it hard for our lawyers to mine the full depths of our knowledge and expertise, and it was clear that to gain maximum benefit from our know-how collections we had to develop a more advanced know-how system to enable firm-wide searching. We saw this as one of the key ways to increase awareness among our lawyers of the work being done across the firm.

All our existing know-how databases had been developed to a model that was three years old. In the intervening period there had been key developments in information technology, legal publishing and our working practices. We decided that our new know-how development would have to take into account all three. We identified the key requirements of our new system as follows:

To give our lawyers the option to search firm wide for know-how;
To improve the speed and efficiency of access to know-how;
To integrate our know-how with externally published sources of information;
To enable our lawyers to access know-how away from the office – at home, on the move or with a client;
To provide an environment that could grow with the firm by harmonising with the firm’s internet-based systems architecture.

IT architecture

Our existing know-how databases were Lotus Notes. They had been designed by the firm’s IT department to a standard model, working in conjunction with our professional support lawyers. The PSLs were still happy with these as background databases. They contained all the necessary fields required to profile know-how, and from the beginning had been developed with the concept of the paperless office in mind. All know-how documents are attached to an on-screen profile either as Word or PDF files, meaning our lawyers have always been able to download know-how from their desktops rather than ploughing through hard copy files. Such instant access to know-how documents was to prove fortuitous when it came to making B-LeGal available away from the office.

As a result we chose to keep the existing databases as our back-office system, and develop a new Microsoft Internet Explorer front end to improve navigation, information display and speed of service. The new interface, which we have called

B-LeGal, was again developed by our IT department working closely with the firm’s professional support lawyers. We decided to utilise our in-house technical and knowledge expertise to develop an integrated system, which utilised our Lotus Domino software tools such as Domino Extended search software integrated with Notes V5 and IBM’s DB2 database. This provided us with a powerful search engine coupled with high performance from a Dell storage-area network technology using clustered servers for high availability and performance.

While bespoke development may not suit every law firm, we have an IT department that is actively involved in development work, especially the integration of all the firm’s key systems. Our professional-support lawyers also have very high standards for their know-how collections, and held firm views on how the lawyers they represent would want to search, view and access know-how. We achieved the best result by allowing both teams to work together. Through B-LeGal, our lawyers can now search one or a number of departments’ know-how, or they can search across the firm’s know-how collection.

Link Studio

While these developments in themselves are by no means new to know-how systems, they were essential for us, and any firm looking to reap the benefits from knowledge sharing, to complete. By upgrading to a browser-based front end, however, we were also able to look at integrating our know-how with externally published legal information. Our aim in doing this was not only to add value to our collection, but also to help address the age-old problem of how to keep know-how up to date. From analysing recent developments in online legal publishing, we identified two goals we wanted to achieve. These were:

For our lawyers to be able to link out seamlessly from know-how documents to the full text of cases and legislation available from our external subscription services;
To help fee earners assess the relevance and currency of know-how documents by linking out to an external Citator service.

While we found that several legal publishers offered manual tagging of data and creation of hypertext links to their products, we decided to work with electronic legal publishers Context. Context was in the process of developing Link Studio, a product that enables large-scale linking projects to be performed in a matter of minutes. Link Studio can identify multiple citations, or other references, within the text of documents, and automatically convert them to hypertext links. These bypass any password and search-screen requirements, meaning that fee earners can move seamlessly from know-how documents to the full text of cases, articles and available legislation from external subscription services.

One of the main advantages for us in choosing Link Studio is that it allows the freedom and flexibility to choose which published sources of information we create hypertext links to. Currently from B-LeGal, our lawyers can link to cases on Justis.com (which is a Context product) and legislation on Butterworths Legislation Direct, a service from LexisNexis Butterworths Tolley that has co-operated with us and with Context to provide access to their information. In addition, our lawyers also have the option to link from citations or other references in know-how documents to bibliographical information on Context’s new legal citator, JustCite. This fulfils our second requirement of helping fee earners assess the current status of any given know-how document.

We are the first law firm to use Link Studio, and we worked closely with Context to help develop the functionality of their product. Our IT team were key in the development and integration of software, and the feedback from our PSLs, who tested Link Studio extensively, has helped us and Context develop an integrated information feed that adds significant value to our know-how collection.

Anytime, anyplace, anywhere

In 2002, the firm also piloted its new remote-access service, BLG-Online. Using Citrix, this provides secure internet access for staff to the firm’s office applications and systems, from outside the office. The pilot of BLG-Online has been a success,2 and it is now in the process of being rolled out to authorised users around the firm. B-LeGal, as part of our integrated online systems strategy, is accessible via BLG-Online.

The results and benefits

We now have a firm-wide integrated know-how system based on browser technology that links to externally published information and is available to our lawyers both in the office and, via BLG, online wherever they may be in the world. In effect we have created a virtual research centre for our lawyers, an essential development as we move towards both more flexible and mobile working practices.

B-Legal only went live in December 2002, so it is too soon to comment on the full scope of its impact. Initial feedback, however, is very positive. Because it looks and works like numerous web-based search engines, our lawyers are finding it easy and quicker to use. They have more confidence in the search results now that they can search across departments for know-how and check for themselves whether there have been any more recent developments they should be aware of. Early statistics for January 2003 have shown a marked increase in the number of lawyers searching for know-how.

We still have many plans for B-LeGal. In the future we aim to integrate B-LeGal with further external information feeds and our case-management system – Pro-Law. By linking to Pro-Law our lawyers will be able to see where know-how documents have been used in practice, by who, and in what context. Currently our IT team, working closely with the PSLs, are developing sophisticated audit systems to track how our know-how is being used by individual lawyers. This development will help shape our know-how policy as we move forward, as we will know how it is being used, what type of know-how is being searched for most frequently and who we should target for future donations. From these audit systems we also hope to develop personalised know-how alerts for our lawyers that will inform them of when something new and relevant to their areas of interest, has been added to B-LeGal.

We hope over time that the concrete benefit of this development will be a continuous growth in knowledge sharing throughout the firm as our lawyers realise there is a wealth of know-how on B-LeGal they can learn from, and specialists they can contact.

Knowledge, as they say, is power, and we fully expect our know-how developments to increase the efficiency, speed and quality of the service we deliver to our clients.

References:

Our know-how collection is maintained by the firm’s Professional Support Lawyers, and currently consists of practice guides, advice and research, precedents, pleadings, articles, conference and training papers and some counsel opinions
The great advantages of this service are security, speed as processing is undertaken at the server end and not on individual PCs, and automatic upgrades centrally

Claire Harradine is head of knowledge management and Brian Powell is IT director at Barlow Lyde and Gilbert. For further information, please contact Rachel Jones at: rjones@blg.co.uk.