Feature

posted 2 Dec 2002 in Volume 5 Issue 7

Managing content-heavy client relationships

A content management case study from Hammonds

Helena Twist, director of legal development and Claire Wheat, director of quality at Hammonds Suddards Edge examine a number of content management issues in the professional services environment. In particular, they assess how the introduction of their content management system enabled them to offer improved access to quality knowledge and expertise. They explore the challenge of meeting the requirements of internal clients (or co-workers) and external, or business clients.

Some of our thoughts have been informed by the writings of Richard Susskind. Susskind’s thinking on how technology has changed, and will continue to change, the legal profession and the way it delivers legal services is inspiring and challenging. We encourage anyone working in this area to read, at the very least, his latest book, Transforming the Law.

Business context

The last 20 years have been a time of significant change for the legal community. Mergers and acquisitions have transformed the legal landscape. Clients have become much more sophisticated in their choice of firm and purchase of legal services: they are less loyal and they demand greater value from their law firms in exchange for their business. Lawyers have also become more mobile, defecting to other firms when it suits them.

Businesses know that to maximise return from an asset, they must maintain, leverage and invest in it. In a law firm, the primary assets are in its people: what they know and who they know. Investment in maintaining expertise is taken as a given. Indeed, lawyers have a professional duty to keep learning and firms invest significantly in legal education and training, and in libraries, information resources and online legal research tools.

From the early 1980s, the large or forward- thinking law firms recognised that they needed knowledge banks or know-how systems, as well as law libraries. Into these paper knowledge collections went documents that other members of the firm had found useful: guidance notes, precedents and special information about clients.

Gradually it was recognised that dedicated knowledge workers were needed to work with library and information staff, not just to manage those collections but, more importantly, to encourage the experts to share their knowledge with colleagues, and to document it. A new career avenue emerged in the law in the form of a knowledge worker or professional support lawyer, for experienced lawyers who have a real interest in knowledge sharing and information management.

The human context

The environment, an organisation’s culture, is a significant influencing factor in the success of any knowledge project. We needed to understand not only our people’s knowledge requirements but also their characteristics as professionals, and particularly, as lawyers.

Lawyers share, with other professionals, a strong sense of their market value or worth. They have specialised knowledge, have been trained as an elite and therefore regard their judgement as sacrosanct. They have also been trained to find flaws in arguments and documents, so they have a low threshold and tolerance for inaccuracies. This educational conditioning can mean that they are reluctant to share information. They have historically preferred to work in partnerships, rather than in the corporate environment, since in the former they believe they can have more autonomy.

While good lawyers undoubtedly develop creative solutions to clients’ problems, much activity is directed towards producing well-crafted legal documents to support clients’ business goals. If lawyers are asked to collaborate, progress can be slow because they are all trying to refine particular problems to perfection – and then produce perfect solutions.

Our users’ information and knowledge requirements

We need to be able to harvest our internal learning, recycle and store it for the firm’s and our clients’ benefit. Our internal clients, our lawyer colleagues, want fast, just-in-time, easy access to quality information, because time is money. Lawyers charge on a time, as well as project basis, and if they cannot find what they are looking for, when they need it, they are likely to get turned off the system. We want them to have access to up-to-date, quality-assured documents and client intelligence, so they can offer clients innovative and cost-effective solutions.

Our clients have similar interests and requirements but not for information in the same format or depth. They want access to legal updates and bulletins in a language they can understand. They would like to monitor progress on their assignments and have access to our accounting systems, so they can track their spend on legal fees. They ask for access to our work products and knowledge, since they expect us to share these. Some would also like training, so they can reduce their legal costs and work more effectively in partnership with us.

The challenge is to meet the knowledge and information requirements of these two very different constituencies, and bring together proprietary systems and internal corporate databases and systems – but without incurring major cost or disruption.

Technological support

The options for investment in knowledge and expertise management have broadened in the last 12 years.

Online research tools, document management and practice- management systems, all represent modern investment vehicles that empower firms to increase the returns on their expertise assets. These vehicles also bring with them their own set of challenges since lawyers have to learn to use them – and integrate their use into their working practices.

Firm management used to focus primarily on the delivery of legal services. There was some business development but most lawyers were slow to appreciate that contact and relationship information were firm assets, so this information was not widely shared among firm members. This is surprising since relationships form the core of any legal practice, binding the client to the firm and generating much new business.

Firms have recognised that their knowledge and relationship intelligence can be aggregated and managed as a centralised resource. Client relationship management software exists that can deliver relationship intelligence to lawyers. It can be managed in a similar way to expertise knowledge, empowering fee earners to leverage who and what they know to increase revenues.

For more than 20 years, information processing has made it possible for us to produce documents efficiently and to manipulate data. Now we are on a continuum of using technology to manage work processes and knowledge. Future use of IT, information and knowledge systems is now more about sharing these systems, or extending them to organisations and people outside the firm.

To illustrate our approach to achieving effective content management, we will be referring to diagrams developed by Richard Susskind.

The purpose of our systems in the bottom-left quadrant is to maintain the firm’s operations, and improve our efficiency and productivity. The systems should provide a robust infrastructure and a platform for the systems found in the other three quadrants – and they should work together seamlessly. In real life, we have found incompatibilities because the systems have been developed over time and comprise a number of smaller component parts. Like many organisations we have spent much internal effort trying to make these systems compatible and work effectively.

The purpose of the client relationship system, in the top left quadrant, is to provide new ways of delivering traditional legal services. Our clients now want access to the data or information held by us in our systems, preferably online. They want access to financial reports, basic precedents and update bulletins on the law. In the same way that we are now able to track parcels along their delivery paths, our clients expect to be able to track the progress of their work.

As clients come to expect access to this type of information as a matter of course, in time there will be little competitive advantage to be derived from these systems. Then we are back to where we were before the introduction of these technologies: lawyers deriving competitive advantage, not from the technology, but from their ability to creatively apply their most valuable resource, their knowledge and experience.

The bottom-right quadrant, in Figure two, represents our internal knowledge systems: press cuttings, precedents, standard forms, guidance notes. These are delivered via our intranet and our document and knowledge-management system.

The top-right quadrant illustrates innovative service opportunities, like new ways of selling legal knowledge and expertise – what KPMG used to call turning knowledge into value for clients’ benefit. This is where our next challenge comes. Moving through the dynamic content website and bespoke client extranets to enable our clients to access the law without the need to meet a lawyer. The extent to which we will follow this approach, though, may be limited by the cost effectiveness of both delivering and receiving up-to-date and specific legal services and advice in this way.

Our approach

We invested in a document and knowledge management system (DKMS) developed by Documentum, which we have configured extensively. The most important concept was that all documents should be in a single, central repository, with the client at its heart. All too often, electronic systems replicate historic internal structures and we were determined to put the client at the centre, since clients are the focus of our work.

Our document- management system would be the key to our internal knowledge system. We had client facing systems and back-office processes in place to manage information, to assure the quality of our products and services, and to manage risk. A customised document-management system, linked to a quality-management process, would bind together our client services and turn knowledge into intelligence.

Characteristics of Hammonds’s systems

Looking specifically at our DKMS, there were a number of features and configurations that were of immediate importance to us. A legal document goes through many drafts and changes and so version control, and tracking and monitoring changes is crucial. With this product version control is automatically managed. Every version of a document is stored with a description of the reasons for the changes. We have integrated the DKMS with Microsoft Outlook, so that all e-mail traffic is automatically regarded as part of the information store. We have configured the properties component to ensure that documents are easily retrieved for what and when we need them. Each document also has it own Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, a unique pointer to the document.

Deploying intelligence

The re-use of intelligence is about having information to hand that can be applied with a reasonable level of confidence. That way you can improve an organisation’s and an individual’s efficiency, avoid duplication of effort and exploit experience. Since this knowledge, or what we now call intelligence, is the foundation for what we do, we have a designated storage area for intelligence documents. These are documents that have been quality assured as useful knowledge. People are encouraged to submit documents to be considered as intelligence through an easy process. They simply click on the button labelled ‘i’ on the screen. We have called our system Quality Intelligence or Qi to reflect the two aspects that are of most importance to us.

Managing the content

The expression, “content is king” was apparently introduced by vendors to get away from the notion of technology being scary. Content is tangible and users know good content when they see it. A content- management strategy needs to have defined what information the organisation needs and regards as relevant – and in what form. Content management can be achieved by having a set of rules and processes to manage the content life cycle through its origination, publication, delivery and expiry. You need a system where content owners can add and edit content easily.

You need to have single, not multiple, repositories. It is bad enough looking for a needle in a haystack, but looking for a needle in a number of haystacks really discourages users. You need to match the information to the user’s needs. This can be done by drilling down, searching or enabling the system to profile the user and proactively delivering content.

Keeping it organic and current

Content management is not just about filing information but also enabling people to profit from information and relationships. Yet, in the end, what is important is how the content lives on the network, so understanding users’ mindsets and preferences is essential. You can have a coherent framework but if that framework does not address the user’s relationship with the content, it will not be used.

A system must therefore allow users to engage with the content rather than merely access it. Content is not a fixed entity but evolutionary or organic. Users take the words you put online and make them their own, often cutting, pasting and recycling the text into new documents. Users forward e-mails, pass on URLs, annotate documents, ask questions and search for other material. This means that the piece of content created and published is simply one piece in a broader content world and part of a set of relationships that cannot be controlled.

You also need to have procedures to ensure that new content contributions are reviewed and approved prior to publication. Keeping content up to date is critical. Workflow systems can be used to manage content: to archive items; to warn users when a piece of intelligence is no longer correct or is approaching its expiry date; and to alert users to new and important intelligence.

Taxonomies and structure – should you or shouldn’t you?

The aim of a classification system is to organise information in a way that makes sense to the user. Taxonomies have astonishingly become a hot topic in KM circles. Originally used to classify species, taxonomies are now in popular use in the electronic environment as a means of organising knowledge. Corporate taxonomy is a term used to describe the collection and management of a KM system. A taxonomy can assist in content management by ensuring that the content of a site is categorised and indexed uniformly.

There are sound arguments in favour of a classification approach to content management. It provides structure and order for material – and it supports access. It theoretically provides a degree of control over information. Finally, it improves the relevance of searches. The hierarchy of a classification scheme acts as a navigational tool providing an overview of resources and their relationships. It is easier to find what you need if you are navigating within an understandable, consistent, structured environment.

There are disadvantages to classification and structures, the most obvious being that you are trying to impose order on materials that are not necessarily orderly. The people doing the classifying may have to make compromises and put material in the ‘next best’ area, and this can irritate users. New areas of interest have to be accommodated into existing classifications and hierarchies and if there is not sufficient space, parts of the scheme may have to be re-written. Finally, a classification scheme that suits and is intuitive for our lawyer users will not necessarily suit our non-lawyer clients.

Our goal was to create an intelligence bank that would only be two clicks away. Hence, we have spent time on taxonomies and subject hierarchies, classification and thesauri. We knew that if we did not manage the content effectively our users would not find what they were looking for quickly, would stop trying and the system would be distrusted and devalued.

We decided that we needed to categorise documents. This would help users find what they want easily. Since our document-management system gave us the opportunity to add metadata or tag documents, we seized that opportunity. Now every document, when initiated, must be profiled. We bought a legal thesaurus, which we could customise because every organisation has its own language. It included certain pre-defined key words because we also wanted to discourage people from inventing lots of new terms. We gave someone responsibility for managing any requested changes in terminology.

Work with the professionals – and the users

Information professionals and librarians have been classifying knowledge and managing the information- retrieval process, by cataloguing and indexing, for many years. So it made sense to involve our librarians, with their relevant skills in content management. We also involved our knowledge workers, our professional support lawyers, in reviewing and customising the thesaurus terms.

This was quite difficult and new work for them, but we felt it was important that they understood taxonomies and classification since they would also be involved in content management.

Our professional support lawyers act as quality assurance managers, checking that documents meet the requirements of the users and ensuring that documents have not passed their ‘best before’ date. They also act as gatekeepers, ensuring that there are proper summaries of documents, or appropriate key words have been selected, when documents are included in the intelligence bank.

Each document has a brief summary to help the user decide whether to look at the document and any attachments. Omitting a summary and forcing the user to spend time opening and reading attachments will turn people off.

A single, searchable, document and knowledge- management system with clients at the heart, is the cornerstone of our intelligence system. Involving our business users, and specifically, our professional support lawyers to help design the system and manage the content, has enabled us to put a system in place. An approach from which both colleagues and clients will profit.

References

Quinn, J., Anderson, P. & Finkelstein, S., ‘Managing professional intellect: making the most of the best’ in Harvard Business Review (March/April 1996)
Smith, G., ‘Plight of the navigator’ in Knowledge Management (Ark Group, October 2000)
Sturdy, D., ‘Systems for managing knowledge management’ in Computers & Law (August/September 1999)
Susskind, R., Transforming the Law (OUP, 2001)
Locke, C., Levine, R., Searls, D. & Weinberger, D., The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Publishing, February 2000)

Helena Twist is director of legal development and Claire Wheat is director of quality at Hammonds Suddards Edge. For more information contact Helena Twist at: helena.twist@hammondse.com