Peer to Peer Magazine

P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 17 designed for rapid, in-house, do-it-yourself application development. They come complete with app templates and other pre-built components and utilities that dramatically simplify the development of business apps. For example, they may allow users with a non-IT background to quickly add content, images, lists, documents and other elements using familiar drag-and-drop functionality and WYSIWYG editors. A cross-functional, holistic approach to IT architecture allows organizations to easily extend and manage workflows based on their unique, rapidly evolving business requirements. Having a comprehensive, integrated platform that extends across multiple workflows can help them reduce overall costs by eliminating the need to constantly invest in new, expensive and difficult-to-maintain applications that quickly outlive their usefulness and are difficult to integrate with other systems. In addition to being flexible and scalable, a platform optimized for the creation of functional workspaces and rapid app development across the legal workflow must be accessible by multiple device types, including mobile devices. It should accommodate not only the rapid creation of custom applications, but also make it easy to re-use them for new projects and deploy them on the fly. The platform should also have built-in, easy-to-use and comprehensive tools for managing users, managing access via user roles and permissions, and tracking and reporting on key performance indicators. A bird's-eye view of activities, performance and projections The consolidation of reporting functions in a comprehensive, configurable platform enables another important feature of new legal technolo stacks: a universal dashboard with access to data from multiple workflows. With a universal dashboard, users with the appropriate permissions can monitor and manage activities and projects across the organization in real time from a single, central location. For many firms or legal departments, this level of control is currently impossible. Their legal hold system reports only on legal holds, systems that support internal investigations can report only on internal investigations, systems for document review and production can provide insight on those functions alone. A universal dashboard allows for granular reporting across tasks and functions because the platform is part of the common fabric of all tasks and functions. This creates opportunities for better management, insight into the precise sources of cost overruns and inefficiencies, more accurate planning of budgets and resource allocations, and – ultimately – better strategic business planning. New ways of organizing work and teams As the pace of business quickens and the legal marketplace evolves, law firms and legal departments must be more agile and flexible in the way they organize the work they do. The concept of functional workspaces is a direct response to these requirements. Easily configurable, cross-functional platforms give organizations the ability to quickly group and organize applications and data by department or project or legal matter. A functional workspace provides access to a specified body of data in a central location from which designated users can read, analyze, search for, report on, update, create or delete records that are directly relevant to a specific set of tasks. Certain users may also be given permission to use and/or create applications within the workspace to better manage and manipulate the data. Applying user permissions and managing access rights in this context can be very complex, and with legacy platforms may require the intervention of a vendor or internal IT staff. New platforms have greatly simplified the configuration of workspaces, making it much easier and faster for non-technical staff to manage users, roles and security protocols so that teams can get right to work on the task at hand. Custom applications that streamline work and provide actionable insight Custom applications typically emerge from the need to improve the way we organize specific tasks, to create centralized workspaces so that people in different job roles or from different departments can share information and collaborate more efficiently, and to aggregate and segment data from diverse sources to get a better understanding of processes, outcomes, costs and performance. Potential use cases are virtually unlimited, but the examples below should give you an idea of what's possible. Examine trends across multiple matters. Think about what happens every time a corporation faces litigation. Legal holds must be disseminated. Custodians must be interviewed. Data is collected, culled and reduced to a manageable body of potentially relevant information. Eventually, there will be documents to review, and in large, complex cases this might involve dozens of participants across multiple organizations, including in-house lawyers, outside counsel, subject matter experts and more. As the process moves forward, pre-trial motion practice will come into play. Meanwhile, invoices from outside counsel will be generated, received, processed and tracked. With the body of data generated from these activities, custom applications could be created to track specific trends, measure performance, reveal efficiencies and inefficiencies, and identify correlations across multiple matters over time. For example, we might want to have a better understanding of which reviewers are more cost-effective in certain kinds of cases. We might wish to track the performance of outside firms and vendors in terms of their efficiency and cost-effectiveness on specific, technolo- related tasks. We might wish to identify "hot" documents that are likely to be seminal across multiple matters. We might want to analyze the time it takes to litigate matters by practice area. A flexible platform designed to

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