This 30-min webinar covers:
- Automate legal service requests to improve responsiveness of the legal department
- Improve the management of electronic content seamlessly while working in Microsoft Teams
- Implement best practices, when using Office365/OneDrive/Microsoft Teams along with your DMS to ensure proper governance of the electronic matter file
Download Webcast Slides
Notable Passages From the Presentation
Make Your Documents as Productive as Your People
“So, we're going to turn to our first topic here, which is how to make your documents as productive as your people?…We are always working on ways to increase transparency to our internal clients. One of the ways we do that is through service levels to our internal teams, which requires us to carefully track and assess the metrics about all of the matters that we handle.
While we do that, a lot of us are conscious that we moved away from firm practice because we didn't want to track our hours anymore. So, it's hard to reach this balance where you're giving the company the transparency it needs, and still maintaining sanity and order in your practice. And we add on top of that we are constantly, all of us, under pressure to do more with less, especially in this age of COVID and re-budgeting.” – Elizabeth Benegas
“People noted that there may not be a huge investment in the document management system. It's a pretty common automation tying together the matter management system with the document management system. So, we spend a lot of time as we come in from an information governance standpoint, we're often brought into the legal department to help with the design, the configuration, the deployment of the document management system. And so, often we spend a lot of time with legal management talking about how they're using their matter management system, if they even have one. From a matter centric standpoint, you see automation that can be done in the NetDocuments document management platform.” – Matthew Hobbs
Automating Legal Service Request
“A legal service request automation is the concept of making it very simple for the business to submit the request of contract review modification approval, show transparency to the business, as far as where the legal department is within that process. And then, hopefully, turning that request around quickly. So, that's just one sample. And, again, that example is really knitting together the power of a lot of the matter management systems that have workflow and process automation built into them, and the tying together of the document management system. And, trust me, it's not perfect and there's always struggles. And you think about just from the very simple thing, contract generation review and approval. Well, you may have outside parties, you may need to capture red lines and edits from someone that's not within the organization. How do you best securely externally collaborate on that contract?” – Matthew Hobbs
Best Practices when using Collaborative Features
“For our corporate clients, I'd say every single one of them have actively pursued our advice on this to say, "What do we do?" I mean we've got IT just throwing this out there. There's zero guidance on how to use it, or very little. And it's starting to feel a little bit like SharePoint, and that gives people pause for concern. Now so, the key benefits I think are obvious. It's super easy to engage with your business partners. So, if you're in legal, and you need to engage with your internal business partners this is the way to go. You can set up a team, set up a channel and generally everybody can participate pretty easily. Content is searchable. The apps on the phones are pretty good. And the UI, I think, makes sense to a lot of people. And especially, now, that they're using it as their defacto meeting location and for chats, it just makes a lot of sense.
The problem is, like we mentioned with SharePoint, the truth of it is the governance and retention has become an issue again. When Teams first really launched last year and it got such huge growth, I just thought to myself, "In five years, I'm going to be doing Teams migrations because people are going to realize that it's just another thing where content lives." So, this last thought is, has anyone thought about design? Because I think we've seen that no one has. And to a large degree with Teams, it's kind of just being used, which is going to be a problem. At some point, we're going to have to look at that and say, "Okay, how do we actually make this work?" Especially if you're a legal team who has a formal DMS, and you like the way it works, now, you're getting forced to use Teams and it's not as great from the governance standpoint. So, we've got some problems there.” – Mike Ferrara
How can Legal Users begin Adopting Technology?
“As you look at approaching implementation of any type of technology for the legal department, it's not an event, it's a process. So, this cannot be managed nor driven for adoption, if it's simply viewed as another technology project…Despite the fact you may have the greatest trainers in the world, the greatest technology deployment doesn’t expect that you're going to see a change in behavior because an attorney spent an hour in a training class. So, the other is we're big proponents of not only change management, but the concept of continuous improvement. And it's a three-legged stool for us. You have to report on a regular cadence, maybe monthly, document usage analysis. How are people utilizing the system? Be thoughtful about getting the feedback from the various groups. And then, promote the concept of monthly continuous improvement sessions that can be easily consumed, whether it's a 30-minute WebEx, whether it's a video that you send out. And that just needs to be a cycle that people get used to.” – Matthew Hobbs
