Break Down the Silos and Lead Your Firm's Information Services From the Data

Prevent Duplicative Work

One reason it has been difficult to apply technology to library services is the historically siloed approach to research services across a firm's various offices, reference requests and workflow that is generally “tracked” by Outlook as a main technology platform. This is a perfect storm for duplicative work, radically reduced efficiency and productivity, and a general vaccination to prevent knowledge sharing. Many research professionals still utilize Excel spreadsheets to track research requests which, as we know, are not only phenomenally inefficient but entirely opaque in terms of knowledge sharing capabilities.

For my organization's (Visionary Information Solutions) outsourced information services, I needed a foundation that would break down these silos, deliver key metrics both internally to our organization, but also deliver that valuable information and insight to our law firm clients as well. This meant identifying an infrastructure that could receive research requests from my client base, something that was highly secure, where the flow of information would be seamless and the metrics would be captured in the background with as few touches as possible from the research professionals themselves.

In addition to the metrics, I also wanted to provide a secure, knowledge-sharing environment that would prevent duplicative work, increase our productivity in handling requests, and add value through the knowledge-sharing environment. And at the end of the day, I wanted to be able to wrap all of it in a bow, providing detailed and eloquent reporting for my clients. Obviously, this was not going to be achieved in Outlook or Excel. I was aware of technologies in use by some leading firms such as SydneyPlus, Eos or Gimlet. Other firms have also created Sharepoint portals, but many of these were built as add-on products or without integrated time and billing features or knowledge sharing benefits.

Quatrove

Our decision went to Quatrove, a Web-based technology platform that was conceived from the ground up for law firm research services, taking aim in one fell swoop at key metrics: KPIs to drive decisions on team utilization, capacity, content platforms as well as improving billable to non-billable ratios and knowledge sharing benefits ' all in a highly secure environment. Specifically, Quatrove allows: automatic capture of employee billable time; exporting to billing systems; managing online and hard copy resources by client/matter, project, work group, cost or metric; gathering of data to assist the understanding of consumption habits; eliminating wasted time with screen prompts; and increasing collaboration/mentoring through an integrated, shared environment.

The Quatrove platform is a tool Greg Lambert, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog'contributor and Chief Knowledge Services Officer at Jackson Walker, a 350 attorney firm based in Dallas, also adopted this year. At his former, AmLaw 100 firm, he used the reference tracking system, SydneyPlus, which, at the time, was a system where everything was entered manually. When Lambert arrived at Jackson Walker three years ago, Outlook was the only technology utilized to organize and track reference requests ' “that and the technology of 'hope' that we didn't miss anything,” he adds. Jackson Walker has a centralized reference system servicing seven different offices, four of which are staffed with research attorneys and/or research librarians. The firm really needed something that ensured sure work was not being duplicated and nothing was falling through the cracks.

Lambert led Jackson Walker to an early adoption of Quatrove this year as a Web-based platform that could bring efficiencies to its centralized library services.

“The Quatrove dashboard allows me to get a snap shot of current projects, incoming requests per matter, prevents duplicative work all the while tracking time per user,” Lambert comments. “This has helped with a number of things. It allows us to fairly easily gain helpful insights into matter-related requests such as to quickly correct mis-assigned non-billable numbers to billable matters. We can track if we're getting a lot of requests from certain attorneys that aren't billing these services, and this gives us information about how or with whom to follow up and discuss those types of trends.”

“We can also scale back the focus to the practice group level and investigate certain practice areas that may be underutilizing research services,”Lambert continues. “This indicates a potential need to create awareness of the services to that practice group. We're what I would call in the early stages of utilizing Quatrove, but we've found it tremendously helpful in improving our efficiencies.”

Improved Collaboration

For VIS, the story for our outsourced clients is not one simply of holding down costs through leveraging technology. Quatrove improves our collaboration and knowledge sharing environments. It is common, for instance, for a New York-based attorney to be working on a similar case as a California-attorney. Previously, there was no way for library directors to capture this knowledge sharing opportunity which improves efficiency, and also improves the legal work product as a result of better collaboration. Consequently, the tasked researchers worked more quickly, smarter and more informed, and were able to more fully support the business efforts of the firm in substantial ways.

Instead of searching through Outlook, e-mails are forwarded into Quatrove and it becomes a request where all communications are recorded in that request history, saved in a secure database with a potent search engine ' and a team dashboard displays in real time what everyone is doing. This allows Quatrove to provide the workflow data that enables library directors to both accurately allocate their research resources and prove the value to managing partners.

Conclusion

Meeting the need for metrics-driven analysis in research services is not something to fear but to fully embrace. First, there is no stopping the tide of client demands for measurement. Second, measuring the work of information professionals and learning from those measurements to optimize the results is pivotal to improving the quality of legal services. Simply put, data is both the friend and the future for success of 21st Century law firm libraries and information centers.

Donna Terjsen is President and CEO of Visionary Information Solutions (www.vislegal.com), an information services consulting and outsourced solution for law firms. She can be contacted at [email protected].