P2P

48 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 | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1 had a voice. Focus groups that included lawyers and other legal team professionals helped gather requirements, define project phases, and socialize the new platform. The result was a comprehensive list of key use cases that required data from a range of systems. The firm directory functionality necessitated HR data, so HR needed to own that piece of it. New business intake, also an integration source, needed to own their data, finance the time & billing data, and so on. The goal for IT was to get all our data sources syncing to the new platform and to delegate the responsibility of creation of fields, field groups, and profiles from software developers to business systems analysts. Foundation's UI-driven administrative interface is extremely flexible for a business administrator to assume that role. Power users, data stewards, business development people, and other key users were trained to create reports and dynamic searches. COVID Reset We defined our rollout plan in January, driving to a launch in April of 2020. When COVID struck in March, the decision was made to pause the project rollout and check in two months later. We set our sights on a fall launch, when we assumed that we'd be back in the office and could conduct live training for launch, believing this was an important element of a successful rollout. We invested the additional time into continued efforts to enhance the quality of our data, assisted by the robust functionality in Foundation. We engaged the entire business development team to greatly expand the number of fully profiled matters, with the side benefit of teaching the team how to use Foundation as they entered and cleaned firm data. The extra time also gave our IT team the opportunity to integrate a data feed from Dun & Bradstreet to add rich industry and other company data to client and matter profiles. By July, we concluded that we would launch while we were still working remotely. We retooled our rollout plan expecting that change might be more difficult for people during COVID. A Remote Launch Plan Renewing our focus, we increased the number of early adopter groups, launching the training early with key teams. Starting in spring, we added participants every few weeks, ending up with 300 people in the system before the official rollout—more than if we launched under different circumstances. With all of marketing now piloting the tool, we started hosting Friday 15's — 15-minute training sessions to cover one Foundation topic each week with an opportunity to ask questions. Survey feedback enabled us to optimize the experience for future sessions and ensure successful adoption. Phasing in early adopters allowed us to receive feedback from different perspectives and make changes in response to user insights before launch. We also gathered requirements from multiple teams to create reports tailored to their needs, ensuring that on launch day, legal teams would have one-click access to critical firm knowledge. Next came introducing the new solution to the rest of the firm. Since we couldn't offer in- person trainings or demo sessions over meals, we crafted a series of teaser emails to pique user interest in the system. One example in the month- long series posed the question "Finding it hard to locate lawyers with the right experience?" Each teaser included a short video showing how easy Foundation made it to accomplish the task, in this case execute a search. We offered a robust training calendar with classes designed for lawyers and business services team members. Classes ranged from simple getting started trainings to instruction on advanced searches and creating reports. The Friday 15 training sessions we had offered marketing were expanded to the full firm. These short sessions allow any system user to drop into a call to ask a question or learn a new feature. To keep the system top of mind, we still send a monthly Foundation Fast Fact email to promote a system feature that benefits a broad group of users. Finally, we made sure that help was always available. We included our internal support email address everywhere — the teaser emails, the homepage, and quick reference cards. We staffed an email distribution list with marketing and IT professionals who could provide help within 15 minutes, whether to run a search and send the results or to hop on a screen share to demonstrate how the user could accomplish the task independently. This was in addition to the assistance that the firm's Helpdesk could offer. The fact that our training was so effective also has a lot to do with how intuitive Foundation is to learn and use. Our success criteria for the firmwide launch was to have minimal questions from our new users. In fact, even with the entire F E A T U R E S

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