P2P

50 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 Leadership and Project Team • Ensure you have support and buy-in from the very top. We were fortunate to have the support of our Firm Chair, COO, and a steering committee made up of Chiefs from each of the various firm departments as well as partners. • Have a project manager who is not a business owner and use a robust tool to track task assignments and statuses. Hire an external consultant if you don't have an internal Project Management Office. • Assemble a knowledgeable team with the right skills and a variety of perspectives. Our team included a non-practicing lawyer who represented a practice-based power user, an invaluable addition. Add a team member to document processes as decisions are made and a trainer who can develop materials as you go. • Involve the team ultimately responsible for populating data so they can understand why decisions are made and how to best leverage the system. In our case it's our legal data analysts (LDAs). We included an LDA in the project team at the onset and then brought in the rest of the team months before launch. • Any department who owns a system you are integrating with should have a representative on the core team, even if they just listen to the calls. This includes finance, new business intake, and human resources if you collect people data. • Be flexible with your core team, willing to add new members as you identify new roles and needs. • Build a team bench. Large projects can be delayed when a key member has an urgent priority or goes out on PTO. A backup trainer or business analyst can help keep the flow going. • Select a vendor with an experienced team. Lean on them early and often to provide best practices for designing profiles, building reports, configuring fields, and much more. Requirements and Data • Conduct focus groups and incorporate their feedback. If everything on the wish list can't be accomplished in phase one, document for later phases as necessary. • Take the time to really understand the system data you plan to integrate into your new solution, both to decide what to include and the best way to bring it in. • Create a spreadsheet of every field you want, where the data will come from, the field type (free text, curated list, etc.), then keep reviewing it in detail with all the necessary parties to ensure your profiles are complete and manageable. • Involve the full marketing and business development teams in the data clean-up. The work will be done faster, and the team will become familiar with the system. When we rolled out our new solution, anyone in business development could answer a lawyer's question about how to use Foundation. F E A T U R E S "I was recently charged with finding a litigation counsel or associate that had billed at least 25 hours for a certain type of client. I had an answer in under an hour. It would have taken me over a day with the old system." — Director of Business Development, Akin Gump

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