Digital White Papers

EXPERIENCE MATTERS AT DECHERT needed to incorporate functionality that would enable us to include lateral experience, thus accounting for the entire attorney population at any moment in time. Our IT department built functionality to add lateral external experience that enabled us to capture effectively non-Dechert legal work and matter-experience of new attorneys. WE'VE LEARNED A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT IN THINKING ABOUT AND WORKING TOWARD THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN EXPERIENCE SOLUTION. HERE ARE THE KEY FACTORS WE BELIEVE WILL RESULT IN EXP'S SUCCESS. Start from the top down. From the outset, EXP was a top-down initiative, driven by the chairman of the firm. This improved the likelihood of collaboration across the infrastructure, attorney cooperation and participation, and, ultimately, success. Aside from the obvious technical challenge in adding this capability, we faced the challenge of getting the appropriate information from lateral attorneys and ensuring the information was accurately input into EXP — once again highlighting the importance of thinking beyond the tool itself. To address this challenge, our marketing team developed a process for capturing lateral experience into a template that would be imported into EXP. They then outlined this process in the firm's lateral integration package, which is sent to laterals upon their arrival. In addition to this package, the relevant marketing manager would assist the lateral in completing the template and capturing his or her experience in EXP. Building the Prototype: Once we had a solid understanding of the requirements and objectives, we began working closely with our IT department to build what would become the prototype for DechertEXP. Our focus on experience classification and collection processes continued as we teamed with IT to configure the tool. We relied heavily on IT to translate the needs we identified into a dynamic interface that will pull relevant information from our internal systems — Elite (time and billing) for matter information and ADP (HR system) for individual attorney skills. While these data feeds will provide a great deal of automation to EXP, we also needed to account for the manual entry of supplemental matter-related data not otherwise available or known at the outset of a matter. DechertEXP The Anticipated Result: After all of the significant back-end efforts and related challenges, we have a well-received, branded, homegrown prototype of DechertEXP, which we anticipate rolling out to marketing and practice group administrators — as well as to a few practice groups — for pilot testing this summer. EXP will be an application that allows for the centralized tracking and searching of attorney expertise gained through work on client matters, as well as individual learning and experiences. The tool will be relied upon by lawyers, marketing and practice group personnel to search for relevant experience when staffing matters, assembling pitch teams and populating content in client pitches, proposals and lateral recruiting materials.

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