Improving the Efficiency of Legal Services

What if every lawyer had an assistant sitting by their side, participating in all their business-related actions throughout the day? Furthermore, what if that assistant had "perfect" knowledge of all subject matter, clients and industries relevant to that lawyer? Finally, what if that assistant was unobtrusive, learned more over time and never took a day off? Such an assistant may one day take the form of a "digital avatar," providing a boundless knowledge management tool to the legal profession.

Professionals who bill for their services, and collect revenue based on billable hours, want to spend as little time as possible on non-billable work. Business realities require them to spend their working hours on numerous non-billable tasks, including management, administration, client development, continuing education and knowledge management.

Law firms are a good example of organizations with these characteristics. The best law firms try to deliver support and services to their timekeepers to minimize non-billable time. To accomplish this, they:

• Deliver workflow systems to reduce administrative tasks to simple mouse clicks;
• Develop business intelligence systems which reduce the time spent looking for information, while increasing the accuracy of the data;
• Automate routine document preparation, giving lawyers time to think through more complicated and unique matters; and
• Provide document management systems that simplify the storage and retrieval of the firm’s work product.

Many of these products and services are routine in law firms. Most firms continue to struggle with delivering the best means of sharing knowledge among their experts. A minority of firms are willing to dedicate non-billable time and personnel to the effort. The majority, however, are still searching for the "killer app" that will solve the KM riddle.

Hunt for the KM Killer App
This hunt has taken many forms. For years much attention was focused on portals. Millions of dollars were spent on portal projects. Some were successful, but many were not. Search engines were seen as a panacea for some time, but this cure has proved elusive. Current conventional wisdom seems to be that search plays a key role in KM for law firms, but it can not address all requirements. Client relationship management (CRM) plays another role in KM for lawyers, but is sometimes hindered by firm culture and governance issues.

LexisNexis has been delivering electronic information to lawyers for more than 30 years. Neither Google nor Microsoft existed when the first LexisNexis online database was being used by the top lawyers in the profession. Decades of experience have proven that there is no one tool that will deliver the information necessary for lawyers to complete their tasks. Our customers have taught us that their needs are constantly shifting, reflective of the changing requirements placed on them by their clients. Thus lawyers must use a wide variety of tools to deliver outstanding legal services.

Most lawyers did not enter the profession to use great technology. They are not motivated by the latest gadgets. They just want everything to work. They want software that anticipates their needs. They want a solution—not a tool. The delivery of those solutions is critical to the future of the profession.

Lawyers want tighter integration between tools to save them time on non-billable tasks. For example, if a case is filed against one of the firm’s clients, the firm’s court-monitoring system should know this before the client does, pass the data to the CRM system automatically, which then notifies the person in the firm with the closest relationship to that client in order to initiate a representation discussion.

From the lawyer’s perspective, a limited set of tools should be able to anticipate their daily needs. Foremost among these are the telephone, email, word processing and the browser. Some also make extensive use of calendars, contacts and timekeeping tools. Most know a limited set of commands for these tools, and learn little after an initial start-up period.

Therefore, their tools should think for them. That’s the difference between "active" KM and "passive" KM. Active KM requires the participation of a person to make the determination that a piece of information should be categorized and stored for future retrieval. Passive KM provides tools that perform these tasks programmatically, and present the appropriate information to the lawyer as needed, without the lawyer requesting it.

This dream is starting to take shape. Imagine a digital avatar sitting on the shoulder of a lawyer. It looks at their incoming and outgoing email messages. Within those messages it looks for domain names, noting both the individuals and the companies involved in the correspondence. The avatar also looks at the content of the messages, identifying pertinent business and legal subject matter. The same content review occurs within documents created within word processing software, as well as spreadsheets and presentations. Integration with document management identifies the client and matter information, along with document type.

The act of viewing individual contact information can be noted both within the lawyer’s email contact list, and within the CRM system. Contact information can be drawn from phone calls that the lawyer places and receives, when caller ID information is available. Both voice mail messages and the narrative provided within time entries can also be analyzed for content and relationship information. Calendars can be scanned for the names of meeting attendees, noting the presence of others in those meetings. This helps the avatar categorize relationships.