ECM Briefs

Few industries can rival the legal market when it comes to volume of electronic documents and email. Law firms, which are relatively small compared to the average Fortune 500 corporation, have adopted ECM technologies to help them manage the daily flood of information. Like most organizations, however, the needs of law firms continue to evolve.

What are some of the biggest ECM challenges facing law firms today? To find out, we spoke to Mohit “Mo” Thawani, a co-founder of LegalKEY® Technologies and now head of Open Text’s Legal Solutions Group, who has more than 12 years of experience helping law firms overcome their most pressing information challenges. Over the past several weeks, Mo has had numerous consultations with law firm customers at events such as LegalTech® New York and Open Text’s Summit 2007, as well as conversations with members of Open Text’s Legal CIO Advisory Board.

What do you see as some of the key information management challenges facing the legal market today?

Mo Thawani (MT): Following recent discussions with customers, I have to say there are three that stand out: managing email overload to meet ediscovery requirements and mitigate risk; finding the most effective means of identifying conflicts of interest and addressing other risk-management issues when undergoing a merger with another law firm; and understanding how Microsoft plays into the law firm environment with SharePoint.

Let’s start with email management. What are the issues and what do law firms need to do?

MT: If a law firm doesn’t have proper records management technologies in place for all content, including email, firms are exposed to risk, lost opportunities, and higher storage costs.

The majority of client communication occurs via email and some of this communication is considered a record that should be tracked as part of the client file and stored for the necessary retention periods. However, archiving alone may not be the best answer. Many of our customers are telling us that they are concerned about the risks involved in just blindly archiving email. Many want to move away from this practice, in favor of a program that applies a clear records lifecycle to email. The goal is to have a retention strategy that archives important emails associated with a particular matter, improving discovery capabilities. This allows firms to manage the risks of email, and get the performance benefits of archiving while reducing the burden on email servers. We offer email management solutions that let users organize and search for email in a client/matter environment, declare and file email as appropriate records, and then apply the retention schedule as the matter ends, all the way to the destruction of the email.

What are the risk management issues for merging law firms?

MT: With the increasingly competitive legal marketplace, mergers are the answer for many law firms. However, when considering a merger, law firms must determine potential client conflicts that could arise between the two firms. Ineffective conflicts checking processes can lead to serious consequences such as malpractice claims, lost business opportunities, and a jeopardized reputation.

A conflicts-checking system such as LegalKEY Conflicts Management, make it easier to catch potential problems. The system can analyze client lists from each firm, perform a conflicts check against both systems and determine if there are any conflicts that could negate the deal.

Why do customers want better integration with Microsoft technologies?

MT: At the end of the day, law firms are looking for solutions that will help lawyers do their work more effectively and productively. When talking to our customers and members of our Legal CIO Advisory Board, we’ve found that they want to be able to get all data for a particular matter from one place. So, instead of having to go into their DM system to get documents, and then to LegalKEY to check records in and out, and then another application to get financial or time and billing information, they want to be able to access all information related to matter from where they live, and where they live is in Microsoft Outlook.

By giving attorneys and legal staff access to all related information on a specific client matter from within the familiar Outlook environment this will increase productivity since end users do not need to spend their day opening and closing different applications to get to their work. With the combination of Open Text and Hummingbird technologies and know-how, Open Text is now uniquely positioned to offer this capability to the legal market.

And with our recently announced DM X offering, the new Rich Client will feature fully customizable dynamic business views available through Microsoft Explorer, Microsoft Outlook 2007 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system authoring applications. It will give clients a front end that will work with their choice of DM repository, and below that will be the Open Text Enterprise Library Services which will offer tightly integrated content archiving, metadata management, search and enterprise records management to help our clients address governance and regulatory compliance requirements.

Should Open Text customers expect further integration with Microsoft technologies down the road?

MT: We’re working closely with Microsoft, and specifically with the SharePoint platform, to develop additional functionality designed specifically for law firms. We hope to have more details by the end of May about how our law firm customers will be able to better leverage their investment in Microsoft technologies.

In the months ahead, Open Text legal customers will be introduced to many complementary products, features, and comprehensive solutions that the combined Hummingbird and Open Text technologies bring to the table.

An important upcoming event is Convergence V, the annual user conference for LegalKEY customers where they can preview new and expanded offerings for professional services firms. The event is being held May 6 – 9, 2007 at the Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa. For more information, go to Convergence V for more details and early registration discounts.