Peer to Peer Magazine

10 R opers Majeski Kohn Bentley is a Silicon Valley law firm with 100+ lawyers; when I arrived as the firm's CIO over 4 years ago, I noticed there was a high reliance on manual processes for almost everything and underlying all of this, an aging document management system. As a first step to solving this, we implemented NetDocuments—but once this transition was completed, it became evident that this was not an all-encompassing solution. As we audited the transition to NetDocuments, I noticed an underlying and glaring problem: a lot of the firm's e-mails were being filed to the wrong document type and some were not even making it into the system. This was such a problem that for some attorneys, only 40% of the emails were making it into NetDocuments. The sheer volume of email was making it impossible for the attorneys to file e-mails to achieve 95% compliance. The attorneys were drowning. We were foisting more and more compliance regulations on them and they just didn't have the technolo to help streamline the process. E-mails that do not make it into a firm's DMS significantly increase the firm's and the client's exposure to risk. Another process that was bogging down our attorneys' productivity B Y M A K S A G A M I R was a variety of manual methods to track billable work performed on their mobile devices. In certain cases, attorneys would take a screenshot of the e-mail and send that to themselves; some would star e-mails they worked on using a mobile device and un-star when they created a relevant billing entry; finally some would add a note using mobile device Notes application. The only "quick" option was to drag emails into specialized Net Docs folders, but many users would not file the email until it was no longer needed which reduced the likelihood of the email being filed. It was incredibly inefficient. This was clearly a serious issue negatively affecting the firm's compliance and resource utilization—and anecdotally, this seems to be an entrenched issue that a lot of law firms are challenged by, but it's difficult for many CIOs to come forward and discuss the issues openly. In 2017, nothing was available on the market that had the full capabilities or the flexibility Ropers Majeski required. We spent almost a year and half looking for a solution and tried Decisiv from Recommind, TimeFinder from Tikit, and a number of others. Unfortunately, each piloted solution ended-up having at least one show-stopper: some stored confidential information without appropriate security; some required extensive infrastructure modifications; others needed external access to firm's secure systems, etc. That is when I became familiar with Zero as a suite of technologies powered by artificial intelligence that ran only on the user's device – mobile or desktop. Zero automates both filing e-mails into document management systems and tracking billable time on mobile devices. It's installed as a plugin to Microsoft Outlook and as an app for the iPhone, first we decided to test it out in our IT department. Zero for mobile was quickly piloted to a group of 14 attorneys who were actively queried about their experience. There are no server setups, no complicated integrations, and no changes to our security measures. We simply installed it via MDM, logged in and Artificial Intelligence for Email Management

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