Overcoming the Barriers to Organizational Change

Last month, we explained that in order to stay ahead of the competition in today's economic environment, a law firm needs to be flexible and agile in adapting to change, whether through a corporate restructuring, adopting new technologies or processes, or introducing new products or services. We discussed a number of important ways of doing so, and we conclude this month with a final major area: IT.

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.

Steven Burchell, PsyD., is the Director of Client Management at Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold LLP in San Francisco.

Last month, we explained that in order to stay ahead of the competition in today's economic environment, a law firm needs to be flexible and agile in adapting to change, whether through a corporate restructuring, adopting new technologies or processes, or introducing new products or services. We discussed a number of important ways of doing so, and we conclude this month with a final major area: IT.

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.

Steven Burchell, PsyD., is the Director of Client Management at Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold LLP in San Francisco.