KM for legal apps: Time is money

Several years ago, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal was using a manual system to check for conflicts. The firm, founded in 1906, has a staff of about 700 lawyers and other professionals. "In order to check for conflicts, our attorneys had to fill out a 14-page form," says Andy Jurczyk, CIO of Sonnenschein, "which would set off a series of e-mails and phone calls to follow up on potential conflicts." Opening a matter would take up to two weeks. "We were desperately in need of automation," he adds.

Already a user of the eDOCS document management system from Hummingbird, which is now owned by Open Text, Sonnenschein purchased the LegalKEY Suite. LegalKEY includes Conflicts Management and New Business Intake components.

"Now our attorneys fill in an online intelligent form that is much faster to complete, because it eliminates questions that do not apply based on their answers to initial questions," Jurczyk says. The time to determine whether a conflict exists has been cut to a day or two.

To set up the conflicts management system, a team of business analysts identified the workflow for the review process, recommended changes that would streamline the process, and then handed the project off to LegalKEY developers, who customized the LegalKEY Conflicts Management software accordingly. Once the system was deployed, two further modifications were made to streamline the workflow.

"Making the transition from paper to electronic mode is not completely straightforward," Jurczyk says. "Using an automated workflow gives you a new perspective, and then you see more that could be changed."

The new system does not provide an answer about whether a conflict exists; rather, it flags potential conflicts. "These red flags are worked by the attorneys as part of their business analysis workflow for new matters," Jurczyk explains. "We are now much more confident that we are identifying any potential conflicts and addressing them appropriately."

Automating conflict management along with other components of new business intake helps clients gain services more quickly and accelerates the firm toward billable time.

"LegalKEY helps firms collect all the information they need about a client upfront," says Mohit Thawani, business development manager at Open Text. "When a new matter is approved, the conflict information is sent to LegalKEY, billing information is sent to accounting and marketing information goes into the CRM system."

With attorneys’ hourly rates rising and corporate clients pushing for cost containment, law firms will be under increasing pressure to work efficiently.

"Adoption of technology by law firms is still slower than many expected," says Dennis Kennedy, a technology lawyer with a popular blog on legal technology topics. "However, the current generation of lawyers was raised with computers and the Internet, so the level of acceptance should increase steadily in coming years."

Kennedy also expects the various products used in law firms to work better together, more as an integrated whole than a series of functionally unrelated products. In particular, he notes significant interest in using Microsoft’s SharePoint with other programs.

SharePoint helps too

In addition to adding Open Text’s LegalKEY Conflict Management to its technology arsenal, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal has been doing a significant amount of work with Microsoft’s SharePoint07.

"We have over 6 million documents full-text indexed within the SharePoint system," says Andy Jurczyk, CIO of Sonnenschein, "and we will be porting all new business intake conflicts and records into it as well."

The firm wrote code to enhance the SharePoint search tool, which crawls Sonnenschein’s CRM, financial and document management systems to index information from that repository. "What we like is the consistent user interface," says Jurczyk, "which provides an access point into many systems, and aggregating the data is easy. It’s beginning to achieve what we hoped to do when we first started talking about KM years ago."

On the back end, Open Text enforces document and records management rules, security and stores profile information. "Virtually all my peers are thinking about using SharePoint in a similar fashion," Jurczyk says, "and the strong partnership between Microsoft and Open Text will help support this type of integration."