No Option for Law Firm

Back in February 2011 I wrote a post titled “Is iManage WorkSite about to be outflanked?” where I looked at two up and coming DMS (Document Management System) technologies that were looking to take iManage WorkSite’s crown as the legal DMS of choice for mid to large law firms. After 18 months I though it would be worth taking a look to see how one of those “manoeuvres” is progressing.

The SharePoint offensive.

Leading the front is Magic Circle giant Clifford Chance, their drive started back in 2010 (at least that’s when I first heard of their plans to replace legacy DM5 systems with SharePoint at ILTA 2010 in Las Vegas). A post on Legal IT Professionals this month nicely brings us up to date on how it’s going and below are some of my comments on the progress.

My first concern for any big law firm thinking of SharePoint is the length of time taken to reach the objective. The project is getting on for two years old and so far only half the firm is live (3000 staff), as an example we have recently put nearly 1000 staff onto WorkSite in a project taking a little over 6 months (the main logistics of the rollout being the last 7 weeks of the 6 months where we also replaced the desktop estate too). Yes you could argue that any new technology brings delays, but you have to weigh those up against the benefits you’re going to get. One of the main benefits touted for SharePoint is the cost savings!

The biggest concern though for me, and I think should be for any firm, is the lack of email management. Managing the volumes of email today is much more critical to firms than just the documents of the firm. Keeping an up to date electronic file with todays mobile lawyers is an essential part of any DMS. Clifford Chance say “We are still deciding how best to present email content in SharePoint”, this is two years in! As Joanna puts it in the article “So basically you don’t have and will not have for the foreseeable future one folder or site-collection with all your matter related data including knowledge, email and related documents”.

Now an interesting point is raised here, “it is not totally clear to me that a single folder for everything is going to be what people actually want” says Clifford Chance. And I agree from a technical perspective, but from a lawyers point of view I think the feel of one place for all the matter material is essential. In fact I’m starting to think that maybe the DMS isn’t the right place for email, but that is for another day/post. Regardless you still want the UI (user interface) to present you a matter folder so from a user perspective you feel all your file is together.

On current progress in legal, SharePoint doesn’t look to me to be a threat to iManage anytime soon with these two issues. However there could be one secret weapon up Microsoft’s sleeve that may turn the tide.

Office 15.

As Clifford Chance point out “firms would gravitate towards SharePoint because it integrates with everything on the desktop” and this is the key point. The user experience is becoming key, the consumer UI that Apple brought us with the iPhone and iPad and now Micorsoft are bringing with Windows 8 mean people are demanding easy to use applications. The integration of Office 15 and SharePoint could be key, as Clifford Chance say “most people like the way SharePoint looks and the way it works. It is very similar to using a Microsoft desktop at home, and it is a lot easier than learning to use a piece of additional software that keeps popping up and getting in your way all the time!”.

On this current attack though I don’t think that iManage needs to worry about being outflanked. If costs are to be believed (“said that they invested over £1 million in consultancy”) then there are few firms that can afford the cost or the luxury of a two year project. But there is the question over iManage now it’s part of HP and how it will adapt in the next few years? The battlefield is about the change considerably with Windows 8, cloud and mobile computing and it’s going to take an entirely different set of equipment to cope!

This blog post is a question to other legal IT teams, especially those that support Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite product. The question came to me after I re-read the post by @jbtrexler on the excellent blog electronic file 2.0.

It’s about storage underneath WorkSite and a realisation that after six years of supporting the product I’ve never really needed to get to grips with the underlying file management of the product.

The question though is simple. For a single WorkSite library or database, can I have the physical documents stored across numerous shares? So for my Matters library could I have the documents stored on a matters1 share on say one array of disks and a matters2 on another?

At some point I’ve been led to believe not, but am I wrong?

This week a couple of things cropped up to remind me of my predictions for the top 5 technologies for Legal in 2010. In particular that I had search at #4 and my thoughts on why I think next year this will be moving up the charts.

First off is my first recent experience on Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5 working with IDOL and using search to retrieve email out of a 30m+ document library. As I tweeted at the time it made me want to take my email out of Outlook and put it in WorkSite! The search experience was so much better than Outlook 2003 Advanced Search (although recently I’ve used Outlook 2010 and the search in that is itself so much better than 2003!).

Then on Friday night, the second thing that got me thinking about search was when my son (aged eight) found a Flipnote on his Nintendo DSi and wanted to know what the music was. I had no idea, but what happened next was an eye opener on the new generation.

I consider myself pretty tech-savvy but in this instance I was well beaten by the eight year old. First off he’d asked if he could use Shazaam, but he couldn’t wait for me to get my mobile and so he had gone to his PC, fired up Google, found the track by searching for keywords and lyrics and then found last.fm and a copy of the track. No guidance, no help from his parents, in fact I was so impressed I went and bought him the track off Amazon (which in hindsight wasn’t that clever, as it is now on a continuous playlist of one!).

The thought hit me though, that if my son was to go into law (not on his list of potential employment at all at the moment, currently being a Chef is #1) then he just won’t accept the reams of paper file or the clunky e-filing systems that require either browsing or complex search forms. No search is something he takes for granted. It’s not technology to him it’s just something, like reading and writing, that he just does.

We in Legal IT have about 10 years before these kids start arriving in law firms, think we’ll have enterprise search working by then? And for the lawyers get yourselves comfortable with search technology, as these kids won’t accept the “I don’t understand computers” argument. They’ll just look at you like you’ve just announced “I can’t read”!

If you’re an Autonomy iManage customer and you have access to the WorkSite Support portal, then there is some new content on there that will be of interest. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a direct link to it from the portal home and I’m not sure I should link from here direct to the resource due to it’s customer only nature, but have a word with your Autonomy contact for a link (also if Autonomy are reading this and don’t mind pointing out the location please feel free to add it into the comments).

The new content is a number of video webinars on the IDOL worksite indexer deployment that are worth a look if you’re on or about to go to version 8.5. There is about 60+ minutes worth of flash video taking you through such topics as:

• Indexer Deployment
• WorkSite Indexer Components & Key Settings
• Initial Crawl vs. Maintenance Crawl
• How Indexing and Searching Works with Active Content
• Plus a number of other related topics

I think it’s a great way to spread the knowledge of this new indexer and as IDOL becomes a key part of WorkSite it is a much better than the traditional training methods Interwoven (and other vendors) have previously implemented for new products.

I’ve not had time yet to watch all the videos but colleagues have and have said they’re excellent. Once I’ve had chance to watch them I’ll post what I think in the comments.

You work with a product for years and every so often you find something new, something so obvious you probably should have known but it had escaped your notice. And that’s exactly what happened to me with iManage WorkSite last week. Finding a small feature in v8.2 to do with searching.

Basically if you use FileSite then you have the ability to use the Advanced Search in Microsoft Outlook to search your folders/workspaces.

Just simply select Advanced Search:

Outlook Advanced Search

And then you can use the Browse to select folders etc from within the FileSite. The limitations of Outlook are the same as if you have a PST (archive file) attached, in that you can only search something in the Inbox OR FileSite but not both at once.

This feature is pretty useful for searching for emails as you can use the From: lookup to select email addresses to search for.

As far as I know this is available in v8.5 as well. That is it’s on page 28 of the User’s Guide (it probably is in the 8.2 Guide but being a techie I’ve never picked up the manual for the current version! I just dived straight in), I just haven’t used the feature in our v8.5 test environment yet.

Workspaces. They’ve been around for quite a while and I’ve thought about doing a post on what they are since starting the blog. The aim being to try and easily explain the concept of workspaces and libraries within the Autonomy iManage WorkSite document management system (DMS). So basically removing the tech speak and explaining what they are in “real life” terms. I was going to title this post “The Dummies guide to Workspaces”, but apart from possibly getting sued for copyright infringement I figured the concept of Workspaces and libraries are terms that to be fair aren’t that easy to grasp. So, here it is. Let me know in the comments if it hits the mark.

Let’s start at the top. That green blob in Outlook under FileSite or the application called DeskSite on your desktop. The document management system (DMS) itself, think of this as your firm. In a paper world this is where everything is stored. DMS = Your firm

The Office = The DMS

Now inside your office or firm you can have many of Filing cabinets. This is the place where your documents are stored. In the DMS these are pretty much what are known as the libraries. Library = Filing cabinets

You can group these in logical ways just like filing cabinets, a row for Litigation, a row for Real Estate or maybe you just have a bank of cabinets for all the firms clients. It’s exactly the same for your libraries in the DMS. You might have one way of grouping them, you may have many. e.g. Litigation Library = Litigation filing cabinets

Filing Cabinets = Libraries in the DMS

Right what’s in the cabinets? Yes, files and typically lots of them! In the DMS this is known as a Workspace. Workspace = File

Workspace = Matter File

Your firm will probably have hundreds or thousands of these files. Some of which you’re working on, some of which are just stuck in the filing cabinets (let’s not touch on those in archive today!). How do you organise those you’re working on? This is where your desk comes in! Your desk, the place where you put your files. In the DMS this is like the list of files under “My Files” (you may have it labelled My Matters or My Woirkspaces). My Files/My Matters/My Workspaces = Your desk

My Desk = My Files/My Matters/My Workspaces

This list can be changed by removing files or adding new ones. Remember though you’re just using these files, they aren’t just yours. Update them and all the office can see the updates. To add these in the DMS you would use a search to find the workspace (file) and add it to your My Files, in the real world you would go and get it from the filing cabinet and put it on your desk. Same concept.

Back to the file. Within the paper file you can arrange the documents with tabs and/or folders. Within the workspace (file) in the DMS  you can do the same. Tabs = Tabs, Folders = Folders

Tabs and Folders

Within tabs you can store folders, within folder documents and emails.

Finally that thing called “Subscribe” what on earth is that? This is basically the ability to look at your colleagues desk and see their files!

For those that struggle with the concept of workspaces, hopefully that will make some sense. From here you can read on and learn about how you can apply security to these workspaces (files) (worksite security pt1 and worksite security pt2).

Last week I had a webex with Paul O’Connor from GrantSelect, Paul’s an ex Autonomy iManage employee and was demoing a new product GrantSelect have developed for WorkSite.

There are three main areas to the product:

Sending WorkSite Documents/Links

This I think is the neatest area and is a very simple (from a user perspective, not for one minute suggesting technically it’s simple!) solution to a classic WorkSite problem.

For those that use WorkSite, do you default your “Attach worksite document” as an NRL link or as a Copy of the document? If it’s set to the former you risk sending your clients useless NRLs, but if the later you could clog up your inboxes internally with large attachments (and lose all your version control as people use the copy in the Inbox rather than the latest copy in the document management system).

The GrantSelect solution is a service that sorts this out. You can set WorkSite to always send an NRL link, if it’s internal then great! People get the small link and all the version control, security etc WorkSite brings. If it’s external then the GrantSelect product swaps out the link for an actual copy! Thus your client gets a useful document.

It’s a simple yet effective solution to a simple but annoying problem. My only question is will it be cheap enough? It’s one of those problems that probably can’t justify a high priced solution.

Receiving documents in emails as attachments

Next part of the product is for incoming emails, specifically those with attachments. The email is processed before the inbox and the documents are replaced with NRL links, the documents are then filed in a secure workspace (I think Paul said they are secured to the email recipients, but can’t be 100%).

If you subsequently file the email from your inbox into WorkSite, the documents are also refiled to the same workspace (for example, alongside the email in the client matter workspace).

This one I wasn’t too sure about and after a few chats I got similar feedback. Which is although the storage saving and single version controlled instance of the attachment is very nice, you’re ultimately messing with the email. We couldn’t help thinking that fee earners won’t appreciate their email not being as it was sent from the client.

I would love to hear other people’s comments on this one:

What do you think about the whole "email as a record" question?

Do you think people in general will get it?

Working remotely (without WorkSite for BlackBerry!)

This one’s another nice simple idea, especially for those Blackberry or Outlook Web Access (OWA) users without access to the document management system.

Basically it allows you send an email to a "Doc Request" email address, be it either an NRL or just a document number. The product will then email you back a copy of the document for you to access either through your BlackBerry or OWA.

Again like “Sending WorkSite Documents/Links” it’s  a simple solution to a common problem (especially if you started defaulting all your internal links as NRLs!).

Paul also mentioned that they were considering this for InterAction, so you could email in a contact and receive details of that contact in return.

Overall I think these are very nice simple solutions to common problems (they’re not major WorkSite issues, but niggles that crop up time and time again). The key to these products will be cost and scalability. I can’t see people wanting to spend huge amounts on these problems (especially at the moment), but at a reasonable cost they could form part of a usability and email management solution. The scalability due to the volumes of emails medium/large law firms will receive.

There is also the benefit of reduced storage space (which for email could be considered a major issue due to the exponential growth of the stuff!) and keeping the multiple copies of emails with links to single instances of the documents will facilitate this, but as I’ve mentioned I’m not sure about the ramifications of this email “alteration”? Also this area will need some hard case study evidence as to the cost benefit.

The full name of the product is GS Link Warden for Worksite and there’s more information over on the Grant Select website (http://www.grantselect.co.uk/products/products.htm)

One final thing that I thought was in relation to my recent posts on email management. That is with WorkSite 8.5 on the horizon, Zantaz EAS (or other email archiving) and Exchange already in use, it’s a lot to think about tying all these technologies together into something that in the end makes file management (especially of emails) easier for the fee earner. I mean the fee earner doesn’t care about IT storage issues, they want their electronic file to be as easy to browse, read and manipulate as the paper one was/is!

This week we got a suggestion from a fee earner in one of our offices for improving WorkSite. It was a simple request and once I’d thought about it fairly obvious omission from the functionality.

It was a comment that came from a document search and from there you can see where the document is located. The query was once you knew where the document was located from the Where Filed/Where Used dialogue, whether there could be an enhancement to allow you to access the workspace from here?

I can see how this could be a requirement. A colleague passes you a document and asks you for advice and mentions there are comments from the client in the emails folder of the workspace.

Yes, you could look at the document properties, then note the client and matter number, then search for the workspace, check it is the same workspace as you saw on the Where Filed/Where Used and then add the workspace to your your My Workspaces/My Files. But that’s quite a few clicks!

Or an option could be added onto the Where Filed/Where Used dialogue to allow you to add the workspace to My Workspaces/My Files. I can’t see how you could access the workspace direct from there, but a shortcut to the workspace seems feasible.

So I thought I’d put it out there in the hope Autonomy see this, if you use WorkSite and think this would be a good addition could you mention it in the comments of this post?

Here’s a problem for you all, let’s see if this blog post can generate some comments on possible solutions.

Lawyers travel a lot, whether they’re in a regional firm or a global firm they will travel and they will want to use IT whilst they travel (especially email). Now although we are in a WiFi world the hotspots aren’t always accessible or cheap and so offline or limited connection is still the norm away from the office.

The problem I’m building up to is caused when you want to file email in a matter centric way within a document management system (DMS). I’m sure the ideal for most lawyers is to maintain a full electronic file using the DMS just as they’d maintain a full and proper paper file. But the electronic file is usually the current file too and thus they want to have access to these emails when away from the office (the same as historically they would have carried a pile of papers in a briefcase).

As a lawyer in the office, from an Autonomy iManage point of view using WorkSite, I can maintain the electronic file for all my documents. But the answer for out of office access is either by using their OffSite product or by using the WorkSite for BlackBerry product. Both an expense, did I say I also didn’t want to spent a lot of money solving this problem?

Now with WorkSite 8.5 the new synchronised folders within the Outlook Inbox is fantastic, I can keep all my emails in Outlook/Exchange (which is running in cache mode so all my emails are on my laptop offline or available in the Blackberry) and I know that they are being filed/synchronised into WorkSite. Thus at the end of the matter I can remove the folder in Outlook with confidence that the emails are on the electronic file.

Perfect!

Now here’s the problem. Sent items! What do I do with them?

Filing them has always been difficult, products like Send and File help with this by suggesting filing locations as I send the email. However if I move the email on Send and File then I can’t refer to the emails out of the office? But I can’t copy as I want the ability to keep my Sent Items clean like my Inbox, removing emails I’ve finished with!

An ideal would be for Send and File to move the email into the synchronised sub folder in my Inbox, that way it’s filed, available offline and out of my Sent Items. But I’ve checked with Autonomy, it doesn’t do this!

So there it is. How do I keep my Sent Items clean and tidy, have access to my emails through Outlook cached mode and ensure filing in the electronic matter?

Comments very much appreciated!

WorkSite 8.3 Express Search/WorkSite Miner.

This tool has been out a while, but unless you jumped to WorkSite 8.3 with the Velocity search engine or are lucky enough to be one of the WorkSite 8.4 with IDOL implementations you probably haven’t used it.

We’ve just completed an 8.4 upgrade and so we’ve had chance to use this tool. It basically works like a desktop search. It sits in your system tray until required and can be activated with a simple key press (default is Ctrl+Ctrl). Then simply type in a term and hit return. The term will then be searched across your default library (this can be altered using the drop down).

You can use usual boolean operators (AND, OR) and also you can use key fields to be more specific e.g. in this example above To: to denote where an email is to me (you can also search doc numbers, document or workspace names etc). Right click on the documents returned and you get the usual WorkSite DMS menu options.

Apart from a quick way to launch your documents I see the real power of this application being for finding emails. Something that is difficult in the standard FileSite or DeskSite applications given the volumes of email in a typical document management system (DMS) library.

As mentioned you can search quickly using the Express Search and its key fields for email (To: etc), plus adding say a word or two you expect to be in the body. If the number of emails is large you can click the “Show All Results” and launch the WorkSite Miner application.

Again this is a simple application that basically searches, but on the fly you can “slice” up the results in a very easy way. Either by ordering using the columns, dragging the columns into groupings, adding further search terms etc. Nothing earth shatteringly new, but very effective.

This gives a much more flexible way to order your results to try and identify the item you are looking for. This is particularly useful for emails, especially now that on a typical legal case you could see thousands of emails.

Also from within the Miner application you can preview the documents and emails (like Quickview in FileSite) and right click on them to get the standard WorkSite DMS actions.

I really hope that the Miner capabilities of “slicing” up your results are integrated into FileSite in the future. But in the meantime this really simple product that takes advantage of the newer search engines in WorkSite 8.3 and 8.4 (and 8.5!) will be a great addition to WorkSite on the desktop.