Digital White Papers

50 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Law Firms Harnessing the Power of Data PROCESS DATA TECHNOLOGY we are working with global providers to help streamline all internal systems, passively track data as we work and integrate external data sets so we can move from seeing what happened in maer files and trying to understand why it happened to predicting what will happen and ultimately, knowing what we should counsel clients to do. Business Challenges and a Modern Approach Clients want faster delivery of information and counsel. Needing to visit multiple places to get information slows lawyers down in the process of providing good counsel. We must also use more than just what we have learned anecdotally from prior files. Instead, we need to look at actual risk and contextual data gathered both internally and externally. The goal is to provide holistic counsel around legal spend and risk analysis, which are top of mind items for all of our clients. Historically there have been three major considerations in providing data to lawyers within law firms: the law firm's needs, the technology provider's abilities and the information provider's access options. This creates multiple competing issues: the law firm needs a single platform to access data from multiple sources, the technology provider typically has limitations connecting internal and multiple external data into one consumable system, and the data providers only want to provide what the law firm has paid for via their own access points. This system has created a walled garden situation. In today's legal venue we must create a new approach to working together. With the help of the right providers, we must deliver the data the way lawyers want to consume it. We can do this through the concepts of the digital library and the data store. Digital Library Traditional law firm libraries have been under great pressure over the past two decades with the elimination of space, reduced budgets and the move from most information providers to the ebook platform. Additionally, the cost recovery process for electronic research has been consistently decreasing as clients see this as law firm overhead. The digital library concept takes the idea of the physical law library with physical books or multiple print providers and converts that into an online space available via an internal portal and enterprise search. No ebook platform or multiple logins for different providers are needed. This is done with the help of two key partners: PROFITABILITY

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