Overcoming The Barriers to Organizational Change

Sedgwick is an international trial and litigation law firm, made up of almost 400 attorneys with offices in the United States and Europe. Previously, the firm's practice support processes were manual, quite labor-intensive and time consuming. Since the new business intake and conflicts processes were largely manual, it could take days to open a new matter. Consequently, it was necessary to upgrade the processes to help the lawyers get the information they needed more rapidly to decrease risks and fulfill the firm's growth requirements.

What the firm required was a sophisticated and systematic approach that would meld disparate processes, people and technology and create an automated, unified solution that would benefit the firm as a whole. After much research and evaluation, we decided that the LegalKEY' suite from Open Text would help us achieve our goal of an unified offering that would better support our business practices and risk management.

Taking a Unified Approach

In order to meet my objective of process optimization, there were several areas that needed to be addressed. From a records management standpoint, my key goal was to adopt an enterprise-wide perspective, as opposed to an office-by-office, or department-by-department perspective, of records management. The unification of traditionally disparate departments is not an unusual goal for small to mid-sized firms as they expand into large firms and find that there are many, many layers of redundant data entry by these disparate departments. This inefficient records entry process led to departmental overlap and duplicated efforts that posed a significant impact on the firm's bottom line in terms of the utilization of resources and an increased probability of error. These are not trivial issues.

So, my goal was to provide a single environment where data would be entered once, and as close to the source ' the attorneys and secretaries ' as possible. Once the data is entered, it could then be made available to be repurposed across the enterprise by the various departments that need the information.

In order to satisfy the goal of taking in new business quickly, we required an automated new business intake system that would easily adapt to our existing business procedures and manage the complete matter intake process ' from conflicts checking, to calendaring of critical dates, to the management of both physical and electronic work products and records.

Finally, we required a conflicts checking system that had native integration with the records utility and NBI application and provided features for seamless research against both custom and third-party databases to help the conflicts analysts do their jobs better. We sought more inclusive and thorough conflict searching capabilities to be able to produce more comprehensible and detailed conflicts reports and increase the quality of our risk management ' not only the reporting, but also the review process.

Changing the Way We Work

When introducing new systems and processes into an organization, the three greatest hurdles are: failure to achieve employee acceptance, cultural barriers and lack of leadership commitment. Each of these hurdles needs to be addressed, with involvement from as many levels within the organization as possible, in order to identify what resources and training will be necessary to overcome them.

Before the planning began, we brought together the principal resources throughout the firm and achieved consensus on the direction that had to be taken. This first step is vital if you want to be successful in adopting the new systems and processes.

We also paid special attention to the cultural change issues that were going to impact the firm. A transformation in workplace practices of this magnitude requires an open exchange of views and ideas. If you can, develop a committee within the firm to facilitate that process. The committee should include the attorneys and partners and other end users, including the records staff, the conflicts staff, and at least one representative from each core group should be a part of the change movement.

Involving IT Is Critical

Some firms experience a disconnect or a breakdown of communication between the records and conflicts groups and the IT group. Project managers or change agents, responsible for deploying new information management applications, need to convey the importance of these tools to the IT department. Quite rightfully, an evolving firm's focus has traditionally been more on the LAN or the WAN and applications such as the document management system (DMS), e-mail and accounting applications. However, clearly, adding risk management tools to a law firm environment gives the administration an opportunity to achieve statutory compliance and greatly minimize risk.

But, technological challenges will arise. Will you be able to integrate the practice support systems with the firm's other systems? This can be a challenge that, to some extent, also falls under the culture category because the IT department has its own culture. They're busy. They're usually understaffed and pressed to keep the communications and core functionality of the firm up and running. These new applications add another level of technology that they're going to own and be ultimately responsible for.

National and world events over the last 10 years have brought records management to higher levels of visibility and statutory concern in the legal community. There are a plethora of issues to consider in crafting and implementing these programs. In order to make it work, these issues need the full support of not only sophisticated, well-developed applications such as LegalKEY, but the IT department needs to recognize them as core necessities for doing business. From my perspective, I've been really fortunate at the firms that I've worked in because the IT departments have embraced the applications and enthusiastically worked with the LegalKEY developers.

Adapting to Change

Based on my experience over the past 15 years spearheading similar projects at other law firms, I am quite familiar with the advantages of LegalKEY. The developers have a proven focus on the legal industry and hold frequent joint application development sessions with their clients to understand how the product can best fit the needs of the law firm environment.

At Sedgwick, we began with a simultaneous rollout of the conflicts and records management systems firm wide. The conflicts database is integrated with our time and billing system that is the definitive place for all client matter information for the entire firm. The records database integrates with the conflicts system and allows us to easily repurpose our data multiple times as it's used and accessed across the enterprise. I am currently closing in on my goal of achieving unification between what had traditionally been disparate departments.

Going hand-in-hand with this whole process was the design and implementation of our new business intake system. Previously, the NBI structure was somewhat fragmented and I wanted a more consistent review process for matters ' not only from a conflicts standpoint, but also from a business standpoint.

The LegalKEY developers certainly have experience in the NBI arena, and the prospects of having our conflicts utility and our records application integrated with our NBI system was very attractive for the firm. LegalKEY NBI provides an automated, rules-based workflow for opening new business and streamlines the steps in the approval process so that attorneys can begin billable work faster.

Recent enhancements to the NBI product enable the entire review and approval process to be tracked and managed to provide a complete audit trail of every step. For example, every action is date and time stamped from when the attorney submits the form, to when the conflict check is done, to when the approvals are completed. The system also allows the firm to run a statistical report that will, for example, identify if there are bottlenecks in the approval process. This helps the firm identify how it can improve the processes and cut down the time it takes to open new business.

The NBI system also integrates with our accounting database, time and billing, and tracking client credit worthiness. In the future, we plan to integrate the NBI system with the docketing system.

Unification of our systems was the overriding issue and that unification is really one of the things that knowledge management is trying to achieve. But it is important to keep in mind that there is a synergistic relationship between knowledge management and a firm's culture.

Lessons Learned:
Managing The Culture Shift

The process of bringing in the NBI utility, from selecting the automated system (after a fairly exhaustive review of our options), to introducing it and rolling it out, was perhaps the most interesting project that I've undertaken in a law firm in about 20 years. The cultural shift at the firm had many layers and traveled across several departments.

When designing the NBI workflow strategy, we found that no matter how much up front work we did in designing and mapping out the workflow, there were going to be subsequent changes. It is a very iterative process so it is best not to over develop the first design because right out of the gate the end users are going to pose lots of suggestions ' and good ideas ' that should be integrated into the NBI utility. You'll find establishing a user group as soon as possible, and not only from the business logic development standpoint, but also from the user interface review and added feature standpoint, is critical.

Top-management buy-in is essential to a successful implementation. At Sedgwick, the partnership has been very enthusiastic about these changes. We have a conflicts committee that reviews all new matters and new clients coming in. The committee evolved as part of the introduction of the conflicts, records and new business applications. The new business workflow utility opened up the door for experimenting with new workflow strategies and new approval strategies. In most evolving firms, these processes are fragmented and usually located in the individual offices. Now, with better tracking and a higher level of centralization, there is an opportunity for improving upon the various review strategies and strata for the new business intake process.

Conclusion

An automated and unified approach for process optimization equals improved risk management for a law firm. If this is a new approach for your firm, organizational flexibility and adaptability to change is essential. Bottom line benefits to the firm include overall operational improvements and creating outstanding service for your clients.

To optimize organizational learning and be successful with these types of change initiatives, knowledge management processes need to be integrated into the culture of a law firm right from the beginning. If knowledge management is the 'brains' of a firm, culture is its personality.

When introducing new technologies or processes, managing the challenge of change requires a clear vision, ongoing two-way communication with the affected stakeholders and an understanding of people's levels of influence and commitment to the change. A law firm's culture can impede the adoption of new processes. When employees are accustomed to performing tasks in a certain way, you are bound to come up against some resistance if the new processes translate into a loss of their routines and comfort levels. Therefore, it is imperative that you get the appropriate people involved early in the planning to make sure they understand the new systems and processes ' and how the changes will affect them and the firm.

When I joined Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold two and a half years ago, one of the first projects I was charged with was evaluating the firm's records management and conflicts systems. I concluded that a more efficient IT solution to automate and unify the records, conflicts, docketing and new business intake (NBI) systems would be required for process optimization. Inevitably, this initiative would lead to a change in how the firm did things, which would mean a substantial cultural shift for the firm as it evolved into greater sophistication in these key areas.

Sedgwick is an international trial and litigation law firm, made up of almost 400 attorneys with offices in the United States and Europe. Previously, the firm's practice support processes were manual, quite labor-intensive and time consuming. Since the new business intake and conflicts processes were largely manual, it could take days to open a new matter. Consequently, it was necessary to upgrade the processes to help the lawyers get the information they needed more rapidly to decrease risks and fulfill the firm's growth requirements.

What the firm required was a sophisticated and systematic approach that would meld disparate processes, people and technology and create an automated, unified solution that would benefit the firm as a whole. After much research and evaluation, we decided that the LegalKEY' suite from Open Text would help us achieve our goal of an unified offering that would better support our business practices and risk management.

Taking a Unified Approach

In order to meet my objective of process optimization, there were several areas that needed to be addressed. From a records management standpoint, my key goal was to adopt an enterprise-wide perspective, as opposed to an office-by-office, or department-by-department perspective, of records management. The unification of traditionally disparate departments is not an unusual goal for small to mid-sized firms as they expand into large firms and find that there are many, many layers of redundant data entry by these disparate departments. This inefficient records entry process led to departmental overlap and duplicated efforts that posed a significant impact on the firm's bottom line in terms of the utilization of resources and an increased probability of error. These are not trivial issues.

So, my goal was to provide a single environment where data would be entered once, and as close to the source ' the attorneys and secretaries ' as possible. Once the data is entered, it could then be made available to be repurposed across the enterprise by the various departments that need the information.

In order to satisfy the goal of taking in new business quickly, we required an automated new business intake system that would easily adapt to our existing business procedures and manage the complete matter intake process ' from conflicts checking, to calendaring of critical dates, to the management of both physical and electronic work products and records.

Finally, we required a conflicts checking system that had native integration with the records utility and NBI application and provided features for seamless research against both custom and third-party databases to help the conflicts analysts do their jobs better. We sought more inclusive and thorough conflict searching capabilities to be able to produce more comprehensible and detailed conflicts reports and increase the quality of our risk management ' not only the reporting, but also the review process.

Changing the Way We Work

When introducing new systems and processes into an organization, the three greatest hurdles are: failure to achieve employee acceptance, cultural barriers and lack of leadership commitment. Each of these hurdles needs to be addressed, with involvement from as many levels within the organization as possible, in order to identify what resources and training will be necessary to overcome them.

Before the planning began, we brought together the principal resources throughout the firm and achieved consensus on the direction that had to be taken. This first step is vital if you want to be successful in adopting the new systems and processes.

We also paid special attention to the cultural change issues that were going to impact the firm. A transformation in workplace practices of this magnitude requires an open exchange of views and ideas. If you can, develop a committee within the firm to facilitate that process. The committee should include the attorneys and partners and other end users, including the records staff, the conflicts staff, and at least one representative from each core group should be a part of the change movement.

Involving IT Is Critical

Some firms experience a disconnect or a breakdown of communication between the records and conflicts groups and the IT group. Project managers or change agents, responsible for deploying new information management applications, need to convey the importance of these tools to the IT department. Quite rightfully, an evolving firm's focus has traditionally been more on the LAN or the WAN and applications such as the document management system (DMS), e-mail and accounting applications. However, clearly, adding risk management tools to a law firm environment gives the administration an opportunity to achieve statutory compliance and greatly minimize risk.

But, technological challenges will arise. Will you be able to integrate the practice support systems with the firm's other systems? This can be a challenge that, to some extent, also falls under the culture category because the IT department has its own culture. They're busy. They're usually understaffed and pressed to keep the communications and core functionality of the firm up and running. These new applications add another level of technology that they're going to own and be ultimately responsible for.

National and world events over the last 10 years have brought records management to higher levels of visibility and statutory concern in the legal community. There are a plethora of issues to consider in crafting and implementing these programs. In order to make it work, these issues need the full support of not only sophisticated, well-developed applications such as LegalKEY, but the IT department needs to recognize them as core necessities for doing business. From my perspective, I've been really fortunate at the firms that I've worked in because the IT departments have embraced the applications and enthusiastically worked with the LegalKEY developers.

Adapting to Change

Based on my experience over the past 15 years spearheading similar projects at other law firms, I am quite familiar with the advantages of LegalKEY. The developers have a proven focus on the legal industry and hold frequent joint application development sessions with their clients to understand how the product can best fit the needs of the law firm environment.

At Sedgwick, we began with a simultaneous rollout of the conflicts and records management systems firm wide. The conflicts database is integrated with our time and billing system that is the definitive place for all client matter information for the entire firm. The records database integrates with the conflicts system and allows us to easily repurpose our data multiple times as it's used and accessed across the enterprise. I am currently closing in on my goal of achieving unification between what had traditionally been disparate departments.

Going hand-in-hand with this whole process was the design and implementation of our new business intake system. Previously, the NBI structure was somewhat fragmented and I wanted a more consistent review process for matters ' not only from a conflicts standpoint, but also from a business standpoint.

The LegalKEY developers certainly have experience in the NBI arena, and the prospects of having our conflicts utility and our records application integrated with our NBI system was very attractive for the firm. LegalKEY NBI provides an automated, rules-based workflow for opening new business and streamlines the steps in the approval process so that attorneys can begin billable work faster.

Recent enhancements to the NBI product enable the entire review and approval process to be tracked and managed to provide a complete audit trail of every step. For example, every action is date and time stamped from when the attorney submits the form, to when the conflict check is done, to when the approvals are completed. The system also allows the firm to run a statistical report that will, for example, identify if there are bottlenecks in the approval process. This helps the firm identify how it can improve the processes and cut down the time it takes to open new business.

The NBI system also integrates with our accounting database, time and billing, and tracking client credit worthiness. In the future, we plan to integrate the NBI system with the docketing system.

Unification of our systems was the overriding issue and that unification is really one of the things that knowledge management is trying to achieve. But it is important to keep in mind that there is a synergistic relationship between knowledge management and a firm's culture.

Lessons Learned:
Managing The Culture Shift

The process of bringing in the NBI utility, from selecting the automated system (after a fairly exhaustive review of our options), to introducing it and rolling it out, was perhaps the most interesting project that I've undertaken in a law firm in about 20 years. The cultural shift at the firm had many layers and traveled across several departments.

When designing the NBI workflow strategy, we found that no matter how much up front work we did in designing and mapping out the workflow, there were going to be subsequent changes. It is a very iterative process so it is best not to over develop the first design because right out of the gate the end users are going to pose lots of suggestions ' and good ideas ' that should be integrated into the NBI utility. You'll find establishing a user group as soon as possible, and not only from the business logic development standpoint, but also from the user interface review and added feature standpoint, is critical.

Top-management buy-in is essential to a successful implementation. At Sedgwick, the partnership has been very enthusiastic about these changes. We have a conflicts committee that reviews all new matters and new clients coming in. The committee evolved as part of the introduction of the conflicts, records and new business applications. The new business workflow utility opened up the door for experimenting with new workflow strategies and new approval strategies. In most evolving firms, these processes are fragmented and usually located in the individual offices. Now, with better tracking and a higher level of centralization, there is an opportunity for improving upon the various review strategies and strata for the new business intake process.

Conclusion

An automated and unified approach for process optimization equals improved risk management for a law firm. If this is a new approach for your firm, organizational flexibility and adaptability to change is essential. Bottom line benefits to the firm include overall operational improvements and creating outstanding service for your clients.