No option for Law Firm

Last week I attended a Workshare user group event down at Herbert Smith’s offices in London. If you’re a Workshare customer I can say that (apart from Herbies meeting rooms being far too hot even with the aircon on) the user group is worth attending. It was a good mix of user feedback, product direction and case study and definitely not too heavy on the sales.

The point of this post though is to look at a couple of interesting products on the horizon. Both in my opinion take Workshare up against vendors that traditionally haven’t occupied the same space in Legal IT.

First up is ”Document Doctor” (I’m not sure these are actual product names as yet).

This is a product they are working on to look at restyling and repairing documents. The idea being that it would work as part of the flow of what you are doing e.g. a comparison fails due to corrupt document and then it would prompt to try a repair. It’ll be available as standalone and also integrated into Workshare Professional (WSP). I wasn’t sure if it was an additional cost bolt on to WSP or part of WSP 5.5.

To me it’s clearly looking at an area currently held by another well known legal IT vendor, maybe not in direct competition but if they get the licensing right it could be a viable alternative for a lot of firms.
Next up is the integration with Sharepoint 2010. And there are two parts to this:

First off document collaboration, workshare becoming the glue between your DMS (Document Management System), Word 2010, traditional Workshare functions and Sharepoint 2010. Allowing you to leverage the collaboration features of Sharepoint 2010 and Word 2010, yet maintain the control your DMS gives you. The thoughts I had were of collaboration portals for clients. So you could use an extranet version of Sharepoint for collaborating on documents with clients, yet keep full control of versions etc within your DMS. This could be very exciting.

Second for me was the biggest surprise. This is where Workshare enter into another new legal IT arena, one I wasn’t expecting. It’s their product that adds matter centric working to Sharepoint. Allowing you to work on and store your documents in a matter centric content management system.

Some of this functionality was announced in conjunction with the Office and Sharepoint 2010 launch.

A very interesting development indeed!

For a while I’ve been meaning to do a post on document collaboration, especially as working on documents with the client is such a key part of a lawyers work. In a typical law firm this collaboration is through backwards and forwards emailing of the document to the client.

I’ve had some more thoughts on this recently whilst doing a number of workshops on email management, a large portion of email traffic for a lawyer being this transmission of documents back and forth! To be fair this process works reasonably well, especially when you’ve got version controlled documents in your DMS (Document Management System) and tools like Workshare are thrown into the mix, either for use in comparison (e.g. using the Compare functionality or Deltaview as it was once called) or for power users using tools like the collaboration in Workshare Professional to track the multiple amends from various parties.

However I had a nagging feeling return that underlying all this was the email system and really this wasn’t what email was designed for. Surely there is a better way to do this?

So first off when I originally thought about this post it was Google Docs that had prompted the feeling above, with its ability to share the document in the cloud. This basically cuts down on the multiple copies of the document. Instead of attaching the document to an email and sending out to multiple people (= multiple copies) you create your document on the internet and invite people in to collaborate in real time. One click and they can edit and save the document online. One copy, always up to date!

For a brilliant explanation of Google Docs watch this video : Google Docs in Plain English.

Then this week I came across an article in my RSS feed for a product called DocVerse, a document collaboration plug in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For me this brings the benefits of Google Docs, with its online collaboration and real time document editing with a number of parties, together with the power of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint which I’m guessing is the standard for most law firms. This for me is the ideal solution.

Again take a look at this video explanation from the DocVerse suppliers.

This real time collaboration has to be the way forward. There is a but though and thus I think full adoption of this technology may be a few years off yet. The but is that there are a few hurdles IT depts and risk management functions need to get over first. The major one being “the cloud” itself. I read an article online yesterday that posed a question :

“Would you use a cloud-based service to store critical infrastructure documentation?”

45% said they’d consider it

36% said no way!

only 20% said definitely

That’s only 1 in 5 that would definitely be happy storing their documents in the cloud! Maybe someone good in math would be able to work out the odds therefore of you and your client being happy? And for this reason I think for large adoption this may take time, however for small firms who can move quicker than the large firms maybe the take up will be faster.

There is one thing that has been on our teams “future” or “background” task list for quite some time, “Bible” creation. The ability to pull together documents, emails, PDFs, maybe even pages of documents into one final “Bible”.

Today I find the genesis to a solution on the Workshare blog.

Workshare PDF Enhancements

This looks excellent, ability to add different types of documents, entire folders of documents and even individual pages of a document. Clear the meta data and add PDF security. Access to the DMS. All this needs now is the ability to generate a hyper linked index page (maybe that could be template based for branding) and that’d be a perfect solution!

Now pity we can’t get our custom 5.2 SR1 package to install and uninstall properly, but that’s another story…..

If anyone wants an example of why you should blog or use twitter, read on!

Since starting this blog back in January I have built up better relationships with legal IT suppliers than I have ever managed with any “account manager”. Through blogging and through twitter I’ve managed to discuss their products directly with the people inside those companies who are involved with developing them.

An example today relates to comments I’ve made over the past month in regard to Workshares products, first about their recent 5.2 SR2 release and then about a possible protect workflow problem here.I’ve been contacted a couple of times by Workshare through this blog and through twitter (@jesbreslaw), but today I got some good news relating to two specific points I raised in the posts indicated above.

1. My comment on 5.2 SR2 – “The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!!”
2. My comment on how Protect and Autonomy iManage Send & File together could annoy lawyers.

Here’s what Kevin Docherty, Product Manager had to say:

I just wanted to clarify a quick point that you mention… re “The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!!”- I suspect that you are using the first Beta as the second Beta fully supports DMS interaction.

This is great news as I see this peice of functionality being really useful for things like Bible creation etc. Then on the second point Kevin continues:

yes, we know that this may provide a challenge to the basic Protect workflow. We are obtaining a pre-release version of Autonomy very soon and will be looking to get it set up ASAP. We’re specifically targeting Protect Workflow in the SR 3 version of Professional (Oct/Nov) so I will hopefully have some feedback for you around this area soon – and how we will be looking to cope with the multiple Autonomy pop-ups.

I’ve no idea how Workshare found the blog, but regardless I’m impressed that they took time to read and respond to their customers. More companies should follow suit and get their product development and sales staff on twitter and other “web 2.0″ technologies to get dialogue going with people who use their applications.

If you want dates for the Workshare releases I got told the following:

• SR2 Beta refresh– April 17th

• SR2 General Availability -  May/June

• SR3 estimated release – Oct/Nov

Workshare Protect v Autonomy iManage Send & File

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on an upgrade from Workshare Professional 4.5 to 5.2 SR1 and during this time we’ve been getting a lot more information on Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5. The combination of these two got me thinking that either Workshare or Autonomy iManage need to work together on user experience around email sending.

In Workshare we have the Protect module configured so that as you send an external email you will get prompted with a pop-up box like that below. This allows you to utilise the Workshare functionality to removed meta-data, turn the document into a PDF etc

In WorkSite 8.5 you can utilise the Send & File functionality to ease email management, in particular filing of Sent emails into the matter workspace (see my previous article on Send & File functionality). Again as you send an email you will get prompted with a pop-up box like the one below.

What happens if you have both installed? I can see our lawyers getting really annoyed with multiple pop-ups when all they want is to get the email fired off to the client!

So a call to Workshare and Autonomy iManage, what we need is a Send, Protect & File integrated dialogue!