Special foscus: Enhancing the e-environment

SJ Berwin decided to take matters online for paperless efficiency and email management.

By Dave Packer, director of professional services marketing, Interwoven

SJ Berwin LLP

SJ Berwin LLP is a pan-European law firm whose 150 partners and 500 lawyers advise clients on a comprehensive range of legal services through offices in Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris, and Turin.

Challenges

Inability to effectively maintain complete matter files, including both emails and other documents;
High cost of storing, copying, shipping, and filing paper documents;
Difficulty of complying with regulatory and client requirements regarding auditability, security, and disaster recovery.

Benefits

Increased firm productivity through the creation of electronic matter folders that capture emails and related content within a single unified environment;
Reduced paper storage requirements by 50 per cent to save more than $700,000 million annually;
Gained the ability to enforce new policies around security, e-mail retention, compliance, and disaster recovery.

Like most law firms today, London-based SJ Berwin faced document management challenges on both sides of the paper-electronic divide. Paper-based files posed obstacles to collaboration, as any given folder could be used by only one lawyer in one location at a time. Meanwhile, the rising volume of electronic content in the firm’s work, especially emails, was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and audit.

“We were seeing a significant shift away from paper to electronic transmission,” says Simon Kosminsky, SJ Berwin’s IT director. “Certain cases were becoming wholly electronic. Secretaries were often printing hundreds of emails every day, often only a few lines in length but repeating the entire conversation thread, which became a substantial chore and created enormous waste.” With real estate costs at a premium, storage for these redundant printouts came at a high price.

With paper, emails, and electronic documents each handled differently, the firm’s matter folders were rarely complete, undermining client service and making policies for security, retention, compliance, and disaster recovery nearly impossible to enforce.

To help its lawyers better manage all forms of content and improve its client service, SJ Berwin needed a major upgrade of its document management capabilities. The firm sought to provide its lawyers with instant access to all their information from any location while capturing audit trails for all information generated both internally and externally. The high costs associated with paper had to be reduced—not just storage and retrieval, but also photocopying and printing, messengers, and filing time. Client concerns about security, disaster recovery, and compliance also needed to be addressed.

Finding the right solution

SJ Berwin’s first attempt was based on a system of public Outlook folders, an approach that proved to have significant drawbacks. The lack of consistent email profiling limited the ability to automatically index and cross-reference the extensive matter information they contained. Scanned material was difficult to incorporate alongside related content. And despite extensive training, only a small percentage of the firm was using the system. “Lots of files were still incomplete, creating a significant risk,” says Kosminsky.

A full-featured document management (DM) system was clearly needed. After extensive research, the firm determined that Interwoven WorkSite met all of its criteria, while allowing it to retain the look and feel of the Outlook system through tight desktop integration. All the documents relating to a matter could be held securely in one place, and information moved around by simple drag-and-drop procedures. Automated profiling ensured that data and associated metadata could be correctly captured, identified, and filed for rapid retrieval.

“Not only would Worksite hold all of the emails, electronic and scanned documents, and faxes related to a matter, but it worked in a way that appealed to the lawyers used to living in Outlook,” says Kosminsky.

Moving the matter file online

In March 2006 SJ Berwin implemented WorkSite for 800 people in its London and Brussels locations, with offices soon following in Italy, Germany, France and Spain. Professionals in any location can now access and share repositories of matter-centric information containing more than six million electronic documents, scanned images, and emails – a number expected to rise to more than 12 million by the end of the year.

“Most importantly,” says Kosminsky, “it allows us to provide significantly better and more flexible service to clients. Any lawyer receiving an urgent call at 2am can deal with problems instantly, without the need to return to the office or carry cumbersome folders home with them.”

That facility will be extended in the near future with a portal system that will provide access for clients who need to view their own matter data, billing information, contact information and more.

Cutting paper – and its costs

SJ Berwin’s new paper policy has two principal components: every new matter must be created and managed wholly electronically, and no new paper content can be filed anywhere. Advanced scanning technology not only creates image-based and OCR versions of documents, but also automatically recognises employees, files documents according to their specific matters or interests, and even generates appropriate client billing documents for each activity.

While employees can create, print and read documents within the building, they must destroy them afterwards. “Paper is still a very convenient medium,” says Kosminsky, but the firm now ensures it doesn’t create or store any more documents than are absolutely necessary.

The reduction of paper storage has already had a dramatic bottom-line impact. In planning its move to a new building in London, the firm calculated it could reduce storage requirements by half, from about 70 linear feet to about 35 – and cut its annual storage costs from £1.4 million to only £700,000.

Unrestricted by filing cabinets, the firm has also been granted the freedom to create a much more open environment to facilitate movement and communication. “It has helped us create a place that looks and feels like a single, well-integrated organisation rather than a maze of cramped and untidy offices – a key element of our commitment to the best people and the best service,” Kosminsky says. Wireless technology encourages people to work in any of the many open spaces and informal meeting areas in the building on laptops, BlackBerries or other mobile devices – and the firm can now fit more fee-earners into a given space.

Reducing risk

New policies around security, email retention, compliance and disaster recovery have been much easier to design and enforce. Now SJ Berwin can be sure that people who need access to particular information – and only those people – can have it, regardless of where they happen to be working. At the same time, the firm has been able to make guarantees about retention and storage policies that have affected everything from the relationship with clients to the size of insurance and indemnity premiums.

By taking its matter folders online with WorkSite, SJ Berwin has accomplished a broad spectrum of key organisational goals – while positioning itself at the forefront of legal IT with capabilities that few of its competitors can match.