Breaking Barriers With the Buddy List

Seven years ago, the Washington, DC, office of Shaw Pittman had an entire room dedicated to an army of fax machines cranking out the bulk of our documents and client correspondences. Clients and co-workers faxed important documents and relied on this method of communication to do business. While it may seem antiquated now, at that time it was unusual for businesses to send any documents over e-mail, for fear of security breaches. Now, that same fax room has one machine left in it, as almost all of our 750-employee law firm's document sharing and collaboration is done through e-mail and instant messaging (IM).

What was once seen as a chatting tool for teenagers, IM is becoming a required tool for more and more businesses. According to Gartner Research, enterprise instant messaging is growing at approximately 20% annually and is expected to be in use by 70% of all companies by the end of this year. By 2005, it's expected to surpass e-mail as the primary online communication tool.

With IM, you can look at your list of common users or buddy list and “see” who is online via presence awareness (the ability to view who is online and available to chat). When you're working on a time sensitive contract negotiation or just need an answer ASAP, IM is invaluable for lawyers.

As the legal industry itself continues to mature, lawyers will need to evolve and become more like consultants and advisors and less like legal technicians. A key tool in this transformation has been, and will continue to be, collaboration technologies. The days of showing up to a client pitch with a rented laptop are over.

Technology as a Competitive Advantage

The benefits of newer collaboration technologies such as instant messaging are clear. Employees say that IM has changed the way they communicate, shortening the time they must spend with e-mail and voice mail, on the phone, and in face-to-face communications ' making them more productive and efficient. With offices in Washington, DC, London, Los Angeles and New York, and soon to be expanding into Taipei and Silicon Valley, at Shaw Pittman we've found that the real-time collaboration and ease of use of IM has improved the way we do business, and is continuing to shape the way our offices function, both internally and externally with our clients.

Shaw Pittman and our employees have found that as our client work has become more complex and more focused on intellectual capital, collaboration technologies that foster greater collaboration and easier communication represent a significant competitive advantage over others in the industry. The firm prides itself in its commitment to keeping up with the latest technological innovations, especially within its technology practice. Any prospective client or colleague talking to us knows that if there is a technology that will make us more efficient, we are probably already using it.

Implementing IM Solutions

Shaw Pittman chose to deploy IM as early as we did because we saw it as an opportunity to extend upon the collaboration our lawyers were already experiencing through our messaging platforms ' IBM Lotus Notes and Domino ' which we had been using for years. Offered through the same brand we had come to know and trust, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing made perfect sense for us to take our collaboration tool set to the next level. It naturally integrates with our existing IT infrastructure because it works with a wide variety of software and hardware.

Security was also an important feature when choosing IM systems. The IT staff needed to ensure that the way we were communicating was secure with verified user identities and realized that the various free IM programs did not offer such security features. When instant messaging with someone on a public system, there is no way to verify whom you are speaking with and thus it presents security concerns. The IT department liked that enterprise instant messaging was secure, but that employees could link their Lotus Instant Messaging screen name to another name and chat with clients and others who are using a public instant messaging system.

The implementation of Lotus Instant Messaging to the workplace was quite easy from an IT perspective. The staff rolled out the program office-by-office in order to provide more efficient assistance to those employees learning how to use it for the first time. They also found it helpful to provide employees with quick reference cards and basic how-to information. As not to overwhelm the users by showing them the many functionalities of Lotus Instant Messaging at once, the IT staff initially focused the implementation on just the chat functionality. As time went on, many employees, and especially those in the technology practice, came to be power users by using many of the other features.

By integrating instant messaging to our offices in 2001, we were far ahead of most other law offices. Overall, our users adapted very quickly and are comfortable with the program, using it to enhance their jobs in a variety of ways. Today, most of our employees consistently use IM to share documents, hold impromptu global meetings, pitch global clients and collaborate with other employees in real-time.

Matching Resources Without Regard to Geography

Much like that room full of fax machines, another trend at Shaw Pittman that has gone the way of floppy disks and dot matrix printers is staffing accounts based on location. Before incorporating instant messaging and Web conferencing into our offices, we would have staffed DC-based lawyers on DC-based accounts. Thanks to enterprise instant messaging, the lawyers with the most expertise to handle a particular client are assigned to work on that account, regardless of location.

Quite often, the team of lawyers will fly out for an initial meeting in order to get to know the client and get invaluable face time, but will conduct all future meetings and conversations via instant messaging and Web conferencing. The ability to share screens via Web conferencing is especially useful for this purpose, allowing the lawyers to review documents with their clients and make any necessary changes in real-time, without having to spend money on a flight and hotel to do so.

In addition to staffing these long-distance accounts once they are landed, screen sharing is useful in the very beginning of an account's life, when it is being pitched. The Shaw Pittman team across multiple offices is able to bring up a presentation and walk the prospective client through it via conference call, conducting the meeting as though everyone were in the same room. One advantage to conducting meetings in this way is using the chat functionality of instant messaging to gather information during the meeting as issues arise unexpectedly. The lawyers are able to use instant messaging to ask each other questions and pull up answers and facts for clients in real-time before the pitch ends and the client makes their decision.

IM also pays off internally. As our offices are scattered around the world, it is not possible for employees in different offices to have every meeting in person. One such meeting is our partners meeting during which all of Shaw Pittman's partners gather regularly to discuss important business. Using the screen-sharing functionality of Lotus Instant Messaging, the partners are all able to view the same screens and conduct business as usual, despite the fact that they are all in different offices.

In addition, employees often find themselves in global impromptu meetings, aided by presence awareness. Recently, a Shaw Pittman employee in the Washington, DC, office was having a conversation with another in Maryland over instant messaging, who was instant messaging with another in London about the same issue. The three turned the chat into a meeting and instantly were able to discuss the issue at hand without skipping a beat. Without the presence awareness feature of instant messaging, they would have lost significant time in calling or e-mailing to determine a time that all three were available to meet.

Such examples offer just a glimpse into the benefits in travel and time cost savings and facilitation of real time collaboration that IM and Web conferencing present. So much of our work ' especially high-end services such as contract negotiation, international trade and government regulation ' is dependent on the quality of intellectual capital that a firm can put to work for clients. Collaboration technologies that maximize the use of people resources are as important to the growth of our industry as any new regulation or legal standard that may come along.

The legal profession has traditionally been conservative when it comes to the adoption of newer technologies. Firms wanting to stay ahead of the curve will need to change that way of thinking.

Seven years ago, the Washington, DC, office of Shaw Pittman had an entire room dedicated to an army of fax machines cranking out the bulk of our documents and client correspondences. Clients and co-workers faxed important documents and relied on this method of communication to do business. While it may seem antiquated now, at that time it was unusual for businesses to send any documents over e-mail, for fear of security breaches. Now, that same fax room has one machine left in it, as almost all of our 750-employee law firm's document sharing and collaboration is done through e-mail and instant messaging (IM).

What was once seen as a chatting tool for teenagers, IM is becoming a required tool for more and more businesses. According to Gartner Research, enterprise instant messaging is growing at approximately 20% annually and is expected to be in use by 70% of all companies by the end of this year. By 2005, it's expected to surpass e-mail as the primary online communication tool.

With IM, you can look at your list of common users or buddy list and “see” who is online via presence awareness (the ability to view who is online and available to chat). When you're working on a time sensitive contract negotiation or just need an answer ASAP, IM is invaluable for lawyers.

As the legal industry itself continues to mature, lawyers will need to evolve and become more like consultants and advisors and less like legal technicians. A key tool in this transformation has been, and will continue to be, collaboration technologies. The days of showing up to a client pitch with a rented laptop are over.

Technology as a Competitive Advantage

The benefits of newer collaboration technologies such as instant messaging are clear. Employees say that IM has changed the way they communicate, shortening the time they must spend with e-mail and voice mail, on the phone, and in face-to-face communications ' making them more productive and efficient. With offices in Washington, DC, London, Los Angeles and New York, and soon to be expanding into Taipei and Silicon Valley, at Shaw Pittman we've found that the real-time collaboration and ease of use of IM has improved the way we do business, and is continuing to shape the way our offices function, both internally and externally with our clients.

Shaw Pittman and our employees have found that as our client work has become more complex and more focused on intellectual capital, collaboration technologies that foster greater collaboration and easier communication represent a significant competitive advantage over others in the industry. The firm prides itself in its commitment to keeping up with the latest technological innovations, especially within its technology practice. Any prospective client or colleague talking to us knows that if there is a technology that will make us more efficient, we are probably already using it.

Implementing IM Solutions

Shaw Pittman chose to deploy IM as early as we did because we saw it as an opportunity to extend upon the collaboration our lawyers were already experiencing through our messaging platforms ' IBM Lotus Notes and Domino ' which we had been using for years. Offered through the same brand we had come to know and trust, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing made perfect sense for us to take our collaboration tool set to the next level. It naturally integrates with our existing IT infrastructure because it works with a wide variety of software and hardware.

Security was also an important feature when choosing IM systems. The IT staff needed to ensure that the way we were communicating was secure with verified user identities and realized that the various free IM programs did not offer such security features. When instant messaging with someone on a public system, there is no way to verify whom you are speaking with and thus it presents security concerns. The IT department liked that enterprise instant messaging was secure, but that employees could link their Lotus Instant Messaging screen name to another name and chat with clients and others who are using a public instant messaging system.

The implementation of Lotus Instant Messaging to the workplace was quite easy from an IT perspective. The staff rolled out the program office-by-office in order to provide more efficient assistance to those employees learning how to use it for the first time. They also found it helpful to provide employees with quick reference cards and basic how-to information. As not to overwhelm the users by showing them the many functionalities of Lotus Instant Messaging at once, the IT staff initially focused the implementation on just the chat functionality. As time went on, many employees, and especially those in the technology practice, came to be power users by using many of the other features.

By integrating instant messaging to our offices in 2001, we were far ahead of most other law offices. Overall, our users adapted very quickly and are comfortable with the program, using it to enhance their jobs in a variety of ways. Today, most of our employees consistently use IM to share documents, hold impromptu global meetings, pitch global clients and collaborate with other employees in real-time.

Matching Resources Without Regard to Geography

Much like that room full of fax machines, another trend at Shaw Pittman that has gone the way of floppy disks and dot matrix printers is staffing accounts based on location. Before incorporating instant messaging and Web conferencing into our offices, we would have staffed DC-based lawyers on DC-based accounts. Thanks to enterprise instant messaging, the lawyers with the most expertise to handle a particular client are assigned to work on that account, regardless of location.

Quite often, the team of lawyers will fly out for an initial meeting in order to get to know the client and get invaluable face time, but will conduct all future meetings and conversations via instant messaging and Web conferencing. The ability to share screens via Web conferencing is especially useful for this purpose, allowing the lawyers to review documents with their clients and make any necessary changes in real-time, without having to spend money on a flight and hotel to do so.

In addition to staffing these long-distance accounts once they are landed, screen sharing is useful in the very beginning of an account's life, when it is being pitched. The Shaw Pittman team across multiple offices is able to bring up a presentation and walk the prospective client through it via conference call, conducting the meeting as though everyone were in the same room. One advantage to conducting meetings in this way is using the chat functionality of instant messaging to gather information during the meeting as issues arise unexpectedly. The lawyers are able to use instant messaging to ask each other questions and pull up answers and facts for clients in real-time before the pitch ends and the client makes their decision.

IM also pays off internally. As our offices are scattered around the world, it is not possible for employees in different offices to have every meeting in person. One such meeting is our partners meeting during which all of Shaw Pittman's partners gather regularly to discuss important business. Using the screen-sharing functionality of Lotus Instant Messaging, the partners are all able to view the same screens and conduct business as usual, despite the fact that they are all in different offices.

In addition, employees often find themselves in global impromptu meetings, aided by presence awareness. Recently, a Shaw Pittman employee in the Washington, DC, office was having a conversation with another in Maryland over instant messaging, who was instant messaging with another in London about the same issue. The three turned the chat into a meeting and instantly were able to discuss the issue at hand without skipping a beat. Without the presence awareness feature of instant messaging, they would have lost significant time in calling or e-mailing to determine a time that all three were available to meet.

Such examples offer just a glimpse into the benefits in travel and time cost savings and facilitation of real time collaboration that IM and Web conferencing present. So much of our work ' especially high-end services such as contract negotiation, international trade and government regulation ' is dependent on the quality of intellectual capital that a firm can put to work for clients. Collaboration technologies that maximize the use of people resources are as important to the growth of our industry as any new regulation or legal standard that may come along.

The legal profession has traditionally been conservative when it comes to the adoption of newer technologies. Firms wanting to stay ahead of the curve will need to change that way of thinking.