User:Jhodge99/Sandbox

Executive Summary
The business world is in transition and law departments, law firms, and other legal service providers are changing as well in order to keep up. Whether it is social networks, mobile devices or sharing applications across secure networks, users are increasingly relying on next generation technology in order to get things done.

Over the last 20 years, law libraries have continued to down-size and gone are the days when a single in-house attorney, a law firm partner or associate can engage a piece of work iteratively. Gone also are the days when all work is performed inside of an office, or even in a single city. The function of today's law department and law firm require the work of many individuals, in many locations, working with a variety of resources and systems. How individuals engage with technology is evolving even more rapidly. From internet hot spots, to internet on demand, to smart phones, iPads, SMS, email, Twitter, Facebook and a variety of other means and mechanisms, people increasingly rely on one another to accomplish tasks.

Increasingly, work is being performed in real time, placing pressure on systems, devices, and networks as well as increased pressure on one another to meet, discuss, draft, revise, edit and distribute work product. These individuals employ whatever device and network is right for the job in order to increase productivity and meet rising demands for working more efficiently, These trends can no longer be considered evolutionary...they are revolutionary, and they are people-centric and people driven.

Today's work environment requires not only collaboration between people, but sharing information, applications, and responsibilities in order to drive project and organizational success. Collaboration is the unmistakable new normal and it is up to legal technology, law departments, law firms and other legal service providers to keep up with the workers and managers who are driving this new normal. This white paper looks at collaboration for lawyers as one component of "the new normal", a phrase somewhat overused, but apropos in the context of the many changes affecting the legal marketplace in the 21st century. While the end of lawyers may not arrive anytime soon, it is certainly the case that lawyers, paralegals and management have already made the decision to work differently, and collaboration is at the heart of this change.

What is Enterprise Collaboration?
Before we can begin a discussion about legal enterprise collaboration (LEC), we must first understand what enterprise collaboration is, what is driving it, what its dependencies are and how it is affecting the business world. These same factors are placing demands on the law department, law firms and other legal service providers and affecting each in many of the same ways.

Enterprise collaboration is cooperation between agencies or instrumentalities (companies, business units, partners and providers) working together, especially in an intellectual endeavor. Implied is that these entities jointly cooperate in order to get something done. The enterprise begins, of course, with the business, the company for which an individual works. But business is not now, nor has it ever been a self-contained entity. Every business relies on other parts of the economy in order to get things done. We must communicate and collaborate with partners, suppliers, government and regulatory authorities, of course our various business units and geographies, and even competitors. The enterprise then is not simply a company, a law department or law firm. It is rather the collection of individuals at various organizations associated with a body of work. The enterprise defies corporate or organizational boundaries and distinctions, and the work required of the enterprise will proceed, as it always has, as efficiently and effectively as the people, technology, culture and process at each organizational component of the enterprise will allow. To the degree that the enterprise, (the collection), can agree on terms of engagement around work, can agree on means and modes of communication and collaboration, and can develop process, procedure, culture and trust across the collection, the enterprise will succeed in meeting demand drivers. Conversely, the success of the enterprise will suffer to the degree these things are not addressed.

The Speed of Business
In the past, varying modes of communication have been used to collaborate; messengers, telegraph, snail mail, email, etc. At varying points in history, technology, competition, demand and other factors have driven the need to move more quickly. The internet age has without question ushered in an accelerated pace of businesses and demands on today’s companies. With it have come new modes of communication and collaboration beginning with email and now includes mobile devices, remote access and social media i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc. For those that wish to compete and grow, they will increasingly have to communicate and collaborate in new and innovative ways simply because of the pace of business.

Information and Communication Remain Disconnected
Couple these changes with the fact that business communications has not kept pace with the culture of collaboration we are experiencing in our personal lives. The revolution that is the “participatory” internet has not yet found its way into our legal business applications, and legal work processes. Email predominates and has become a mechanism for exchange of information without context and backs up in our inboxes becoming a list of to-dos. Reminders and alerts that pop-up in our applications are seldom tied to actions that lead to immediate resolution of an issue. They don't have built-in mechanisms for working with fellow collaborators to resolve the issues being reminded or alerted. Reports and analytics are static. They give us incredible amounts of information and frequently lead to more questions than answers. Competition and Expectations

Today's legal work is more complex, more global, more nuanced than ever before. Management increasingly requires results "at the speed of now". These are business drivers for any company and these drivers have not changed since the evolution of commerce. What has changed are the expectations of economies, markets and the businesses that drive them.

A recent IBM study asked executives at major companies what they believed would have the most business impact in 2010. Among the responses were "global integration, the participatory Internet, changing workforce demographics, the rise of software as a service, the virtualization of data and devices, and the increasing simplicity of technol¬ogy’s design and use." Of course, implicit in such outcomes will be the demand for changes in culture, process, and organization along with increasing demands on technology itself and analytics to measure performance -- and people are leading the way.

Key Dependencies
Increased collaboration has a few key dependencies -- elements that must exist in order for effective collaboration to succeed. First and foremost, there must be a culture which supports collaboration and a degree of trust from management down and between collaborators. Second, collaboration can exist and succeed outside of defined process-oriented framework. However, chances for success are greatly enhanced when there is a well-defined technical and logical framework for collaboration. E.g. what technology will be used, by who, what is the natural flow of work, what are the security and privacy requirements, and is the framework easy to use and integrated into daily routines. Once a culture in support of collaboration is established and trust developed, managers must be empowered to effect and support the collaborative environment. They must be willing to push down responsibility to people on the front lines as it is on these front lines that collaboration will have the greatest impact on the enterprise.

Finally, managers, workers and leaders must be properly equipped. They must have internal applications that are collaboration enabled. Their mobile devices, smart phones, iPads, and telephones must be securely enabled to connect with those systems and with other collaborators, and these technologies have to be easy to use, intuitive and must drive an instinctive desire to collaborate.

Legal Enterprise Collaboration
Companies are made up of multiple groups, business units, organizations within organizations, each requiring people (collaborators), technology and process in order to do the business of the company. One of those collaborators is the law department; the consumer of goods and services by multiple other businesses. While the law department is part of a much larger enterprise, it is an enterprise in its own right; a sub-enterprise if you will. The same demand drivers and dependencies rule the law department that rule the larger enterprise. There is not only a need to collaborate, but a business imperative to collaborate which is perhaps greater for the law department for a few key reasons.

In one form or fashion the law department must be consulted, must advise, must document, negotiate, manage external resources and train or coach other parts of the enterprise. This is done in order to ensure compliance or to mitigate and manage risk. More than any other part of an enterprise, the law department is routinely engaged with collaborators upon which they depend and who depend on them in order to accomplish daily activities.

So, why is legal enterprise collaboration the new normal?

 * 1.	First, the law department does not directly, nor by-and-large, generate revenue for the company; it is a cost center. This means that resources are limited at the law department while demand for services from this group either remains constant or grows. Because it is increasingly difficult to hire more people, leveraging technology and resources to keep up has become routine. Increasingly law departments are relying on law firms, LPOs, legal temps and others to get things done and this shift demands that collaboration increase.


 * 2.	Second, the law department is made up of very specialized, highly trained, certified professionals.
 * Legal departments must optimize the value of these professionals and they must be kept focused and on-task. As demand rises so does the strain on these high-value resources. The more these individuals are pulled off task to do administrative work and problem solve or firefight, the less time they are spending on the high value work for which they were hired. Collaboration allows work to flow to  the person or technology best suited to the task. This means fewer professional cycles spent on administrative tasks and more spent on high value work.


 * 3.	Third, the incredibly important and indispensible task of mitigating and managing risk is laid directly in front of the door to the law department and its partner firms. Highly effective law departments which manage risk, compliance and day-to-day legal operations do so because those functions are highly integrated, perhaps collocated, but ultimately because these individuals collaborate and understand the business of the other. This applies to law firm partners as well. The more law firms understand about the business of their client, collaborate with the client, and the degree to which they are built into law department functions the more effective they are at helping manage the legal affairs of the company.


 * 4.	Finally, in one form or another, nearly everything undertaken by any enterprise must run through the law department at some point which will seek counsel outside. Regardless of where business activity at the enterprise originates, the law department must be involved. While the law department frequently pushes low risk legal activities to business units, it must remain responsible and accountable for the implied risk. How then can the law department safely distribute responsibility to business units, law firms, and corollary departments while maintaining accountability? -- collaboration!

What's Happening Today?
The reality is that e-mail, reminders, to-dos, alerts and static reports still dominate most of the collaboration that takes place in the legal enterprise. Don't blame e-mail or the users. The blame should be on the shoulders of legal software vendors that have not come up with something that provides the user with a better alternative. And we should be realistic, users are already collaborating across the legal enterprise, but without the context of the legal matter, case, project, associated spend, risk, status', etc.

During a typical day, users in the legal enterprise interact with multiple enterprise systems. E.g. legal spend management, matter management, HR, ERP, CRM, Portals, Dashboards, and Reports. These systems provide little to no collaboration mechanisms. So, when it is time to collaborate, users go to e-mail or to a centralized collaboration application. And as they move to collaborate somewhere else, they lose the context of the systems that they are interacting with provide. The result: collaboration without context, which equals slower and less effective collaboration, if it can be called collaboration at all.

A collaboration-ready legal enterprise system empowers the user to communicate at-will, anywhere. Allowing them to collaborate from within the multiple systems they interact with daily, putting communication in context.

How it Should Work
One way to answer the question of how LEC should work is to look at what legal enterprise collaboration is not.


 * LEC is not only email notifications from a single system or multiple systems
 * LEC is not only alerts generated by those systems which arrive in email or otherwise
 * LEC is not only automated reporting and analytics
 * LEC is not merely a shared workspace where members of the legal enterprise can interact, and
 * LEC is not only about a set of policies describing or mandating when and how members of the legal enterprise should or must interact.

Unfortunately, this is how collaboration has been loosely defined until now; piecemeal. LEC is not simply technology, a set of policies or procedures. LEC is a holistic, systemic approach to executing the business of law with people at the center. LEC relies on technology, tools, defined security and workflow, and a supportive, trusting culture in order to "share in the responsibility for managing the legal affairs of the company with the legal department always in control".

A Centralized, Secure, Entry Point for all Collaborators
The LEC model contemplates a few key design concepts.


 * 1) The Law Department owns and controls information and functionality, deciding which users (or user groups) see what information and who is given which shared functionality
 * 2) Access to information and functionality are distributed on a "need to know" basis
 * 3) Trusted access can be granted to both information and functionality based on a very granular security model. Those "trusted" collaborators can see, interact with and help manage law department information, pushing and pulling information
 * 4) Non-trusted access can be granted to information by pushing information only. Non-trusted users can still communicate with the law department, but collaboration is limited

Additionally, as one would expect, some users/collaborators should not be given access to functionality i.e. opposing counsel, competitors, and the like. However, a true collaborative platform should allow the law department to give these collaborators information and these non-trusted users should be able to respond to these deliveries. A good example would be in a document production scenario. The law department and law firms may want to produce documents electronically, allow opposing counsel to work with the produced data without giving them access to the collection system. But even in these "push only" scenarios, non-trusted collaborators will need communications tools and protocols that accompany the information. E.g. Email links to the producers, IM capabilities with the producing parties.

This entry point, how it looks, what information and functionality are available, all lists, drop-downs and links are defined by the law department and distributed through this common collaborative interface. Each type of collaborator (law firm, insurer, etc.) will see different information presented based on the work they are doing with the client. Each individual collaborator will see only the information and functionality particular to their needs and their need-to-know. And while this common entry point (a "portal") is available in different forms to collaborators, individual tasks, requests, to-dos, alerts, reminders and communication via selected devices is made available as well.

In addition to accessing distributed content and functionality through a team room, users should be able to access those team rooms and their distributed functionality and data through the device of their choice; iPad, desktop at the office, laptop at home, iPhone, Blackberry, etc. Finally, collaboration should be enabled within the context of a particular matter communication. This means that when collaboration is initiated (E.g. a request to add a timekeeper to a matter by the law firm) the message, alert, IM, text message etc. should contain enough information to allow the recipient to respond without having to connect to the system. Instead, the communication should allow the recipient to approve, deny or modify the request from within the message. The examples below shows how such a message is constructed in both email and as a text message.

A request from law firm A to approve the addition of Bill Furnace as a time keeper: Received via email: Fig. 1 The same request from law firm A to approve the addition of Bill Furnace as a time keeper: Received vai SMS texting: Fig. 2

The examples show the message being delivered via the preferred means of the recipient (which is modifiable as with an in/out of office setting) with available actions embedded. Collaboration is thus facilitated without the sender or receiver being tied to a specific application, device or location.

These few examples are representative of a growing demand by all sectors of the legal enterprise to join content, functionality and communications in order to facilitate a collaborative work effort. The demands presented by competition as well as user demands to help them collaborate in new and innovative ways are driving vendors to innovate. The legal marketplace will most certainly get what it wants. The only question is how long it will take for technology, culture. processes and all of the rest to catch up with the rising demand to collaborate.

The Benefits
By now, the benefits inherent in an increasingly sophisticated legal enterprise collaboration model should have made themselves evident. The drivers and key dependencies cited early on must be addressed, and it is in seeing the result of these challenges that we will understand the true benefit of collaborative technologies. These examples are beginning to deploy and the benefits will increasingly reveal themselves over time. For now, we can, fairly easily, predict the advantages and benefits for the legal enterprise.

Legal Enterprise Collaboration: Advantages, Platforms and Metrics Fig. 3

Conclusion
The pace of economies and the businesses that sustain them is accelerating. The legal department and its business partners are being driven to keep up. As demand increases, law departments can either hope and expect that they can hire new employees or can outsource more work at higher cost in order to keep up. A third option does, however, present itself in the form of collaboration and the technologies that support it. The degree to which those individuals engaged in a matter or case, project or process can collaborate the more efficient and effective they become. This in turn eases the demand for more resources or more outsourcing.

Make no mistake, individuals under pressure will engage the technologies they are already using in their personal lives in order to keep up with their personal demands at the office. Today, however, these collaborative communications will be non-contextual because they will not be integrated with internal law department systems, they will be unsecured and they will not be governed by a policy or process. Law departments are seeing these "workarounds" already and are beginning to demand collaborative features in their law department technologies, but these are coming slowly and without an overarching design or vision - piecemeal. A change is in the wind.

It is a market fundamental that the consumer always, eventually gets what they want and need. Law departments will get collaborative, contextual features and functions. The question remains whether this will happen in a formative way, with one or two vendors and the legal community itself taking the lead, or whether vendors and the community will stand by and let collaborative capability "grow wild". The implications are large as collaboration is set to become the backbone for how things get done in business going forward. The degree to which the legal community and its suppliers and vendors apply a "collaborate first" mentality, and think about how to design and integrate new and existing systems to rely on collaborative models, will mark either a smooth or rough transition to the collaborative framework which is sure to be the dominate model for law departments moving forward.

Closely related terms

 * Collaborative learning-work
 * Collaborative work systems
 * Computer-supported collaboration
 * Computer supported cooperative work
 * Integrated collaboration environment

Groupware type of applications

 * Content management system
 * Document management system
 * Electronic meeting system
 * Enterprise content management
 * Extranet
 * Human-based genetic algorithm
 * Intranet
 * Web conferencing
 * Whiteboarding

Other related type of applications

 * Massively distributed collaboration
 * Online consultation
 * Online deliberation
 * Online project

Other related terms

 * Collaborative innovation network
 * Electronic business
 * Information technology management
 * Knowledge management
 * Management information systems
 * Management
 * Office of the future
 * Operational transformation
 * Organizational Memory System
 * Project management
 * Worknet