ECM Briefs

It’s clear from what we saw and heard last week at the 2007 International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference in Orlando, Florida, that although law firms face many of the same IT challenges – whether it be managing email overload, finding the most effective means of identifying conflicts of interest, or addressing other risk-management issues – more than one solution is required to meet these challenges. Attendees said they need some flexibility and different options so they can find the best approach for their environment, whether it is a law firm with 100 staff or a global firm with offices located around the world.

Open Text made several key announcements at the conference as we put our stake in the ground as the ECM vendor with the most innovative strategy and product direction in the legal industry. Bill Forquer summarizes our news at ILTA in his ECM Brief posted on Monday.

During our Peer-to-Peer day, we presented our product road map. Our clients gave favorable reviews on our direction and the amount of innovation we are currently investing in. These sentiments from our clients reinforced what we heard coming out of our LegalKEY conference held last May. Whereas most vendors will try to sell upgrades, we are enhancing all generations of our products and not forcing our clients into an upgrade cycle.

Our Peer-to-Peer day also offered an opportunity for customers to share experiences with their peers and learn how others have handled similar challenges or situations. These peer group discussions play a pivotal role in helping to innovate and improve the industry as a whole.

Amy Freese from Cozen O’Connor, Rhonda Lewis of Sirote & Permutt, P.C., and Lani Jacobs of Open Text presented a joint session on email management issues faced by all firms. Managing email overload is arguably one of the biggest issues in any industry, but especially in the legal profession. Lani’s presentation highlighted the variety of solutions provided by Open Text using LegalKEY, eDOCS DM with Dynamic Views, and Automated Email Management. Amy and Rhonda each discussed the differing strategies their individual firms have implemented for handling email.

This session helped answer a lot of questions for attendees and raised a few more. Clients realize that there are various tools available, but establishing policies that cover usage, content, access, when and what to archive, and records retention is more important. An email is a business record and must therefore be retained for the same time period as any other record in the same classification. The Open Text email products provide an integrated solution for managing, tracking and securely storing and retrieving e-mail content to enable compliance with corporate governance and other legal requirements.

As in past years, ILTA ’07 proved to be a valuable conference for the attendees. The four-day event featured educational content across 25 tracks. Open Text customers are invited to visit our new online community for law firm customers: OTO go/legal (registration is required), called the Legal Business Solutions Special Interest Place (SIP), where they will find information and details on products and strategy. Visitors will also find links to various online forums including a special forum dedicated to topics of interest specific to the legal industry where customers can exchange ideas, pose questions, and provide feedback on how to improve the community.

When it comes to law firms, one size does not fit all – flexibility is the key. That was the message from customers at last week’s International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference. ECM requirements continue to mount for law firms. The productivity of fee-earning attorneys is critical to success, yet that productivity is hampered by the volume of email and documents they work with, and a complex web of compliance and business requirements.

Open Text is happy to hear the flexibility message – more flexibility is precisely what we’re working on for law firms and we are prepared to change the ECM game to do it. How? It starts with the recognition that Microsoft SharePoint is offering the legal world a powerful option: A single document management and collaboration system in a familiar Microsoft desktop interface -- everything in one place, easily extendable across a global firm at a low cost. That in itself is game changing and for ECM vendors, one would think it spells disaster. But for Open Text, it presents opportunities. At ILTA, we announced with Microsoft our plans to integrate our specialized law firm solutions with SharePoint. What changes the game (and where competitors are loath to follow) is that SharePoint becomes the firm’s document repository while our solutions ride on top. Customers get the productivity benefits of SharePoint, combined with all the specialized capabilities we offer to manage firm processes, client matters and compliance.

How can we do it? For starters, we’re a major Microsoft ECM partner globally and a leader in developing ECM solutions that extend SharePoint (you can read more about our track record here). We have the expertise and technology to embrace and extend SharePoint, while our competitors are still stuck in “whistle-past-the-graveyard” mode.

The news of our SharePoint plans shouldn’t concern customers who choose our document management solutions. We’re continuing to advance our Livelink ECM – eDOCS DM product line with new capabilities, also announced at ILTA (more are on the way in the months ahead). And we’re continuing to add new features to our LegalKEY Practice Support Solutions, our suite of specialized law firm applications and the core of the solutions we’re integrating with SharePoint. LegalKEY has proven to be a powerful solution for law firms as customer Steven Burchell, of Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold, discusses in a recent podcast.

In a nutshell, we’re giving customers multiple options so that they can define an ECM strategy that best suits their firms. We’re continuing to deliver on the promises we made following our acquisition of Hummingbird. At ILTA, customer reaction was good. We held our Legal CIO Advisory Board meeting at the conference, where we had a wide-ranging discussion about product direction and strategy. Our ILTA booth was crowded with customers, partners and prospects, and we had to overflow some conversations into partner booths -- two of our best legal industry partners, EIM and Onward, which were both exhibiting at ILTA, obliged.

One thing is certain, the law firm market offers interesting opportunities and CIOs who have a clear understanding of their growing information management challenges. ILTA proved to be a powerful forum, more than living up to its tagline “peer powered” by creating an environment where attendees could easily share best practices. Kudos to Peggy Weschler, the ILTA Program Director, and her team, who facilitated the conference.

There’s no getting around it – baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, are beginning the inevitable process of hanging up their BlackBerrys and heading for warmer climates in a well-earned retirement. In fact, retirements are expected to pick up sharply in 2011 when the first wave of boomers reaches age 65. By 2029, 44 percent of today’s workforce, or 62 million working baby boomers, will have reached retirement age.

What’s a great move for retirees however, will soon turn into quite the nightmare for those companies losing them – a limited number qualified people will be available in the workforce to replace retirees and once they are replaced, few people will have the knowledge to train the new hires. According to a recent Federal Computer Times article, Government agencies in the U.S., are already lobbying for a legislative fix to be able to hire back retirees to curb the impending workforce shortage.

So what can organizations do to avoid this ‘brain drain’? Here are just a few key things to think about:

• Don’t Avoid the Situation: Hiding your head in the sand will only make the situation worse – organizations need to get the proper tools and processes in place to minimize workforce and knowledge gaps, and sustain a proper working environment for years to come.

• Involve All Departments: It’s imperative that all departments be involved in these plans, especially human resources, along with key lines of business most at risk, supported by the records or knowledge management specialists within the organization. Establish mentorship programs, collaborative work environments and a structured approach to capture, protect and disseminate valuable legacy work before the peak staff turnover wave hits.

• Developing structured interview and knowledge gathering sessions in the months or weeks before the scheduled departure of a transitioning employee is critical. Involving more junior staff as part of corporate memory transfer is important for seamless continuity of ongoing projects and best practices.

• Establish an ECM Strategy: Creating an ECM strategy to support an overall program of information governance helps to identify content loss risks and knowledge leaks before the business is affected. Managed repositories of corporate content that is accessible across business units or geographies serve as channels of information distribution even after the originating author leaves the organization.

You can find out more by reading the press release we issued today on the baby boom retirement issue and how ECM can help. We also recently posted a podcast on creating and maintaining a community within your company, so that all knowledge assets are used and shared in one repository. For more information on records management, communities and collaboration software that can help, visit our website.