P2P

49 I L T A N E T . O R G selected 3E, Baxter points to the two sides' compatible architecture, the ability for Shearman to enter a long-term partnership with Thomson Reuters to help build out the product as a first mover, and the ability to scale 3E up or down to the firm's needs. "If you break down what we do, we have people that bill time. And we don't have perishable stock or supply chain management around the world, so we don't need all of that. We need a solution that's going to fit what we do as a business," he explains. Now, Baxter says, comes the question of implementation. But to get full use of the cloud, implementation will need to take place with the free flow of data at the center. He adds, "3E ingests from other things. And right now, it's kind of like the center of an octopus that we have to break [to change]. And so, what we've got to do is not have one single system just to be at the center of that octopus any longer, but instead have our data lake and our hubs be at the center of that, with all of our other systems kind of in a spoke." Implementation and Architecture To actually get these systems up and running, Williams- Range shared what she calls the "Shearman Analytics mantra" for implementation. It's a six-pronged approach the firm runs through in order with any technology project. First is governance, which she calls the "necessary" first step for a law firm, given the nature of its work. "Do we need in place any new policies? How are we going to regulate this data? How are we understanding the governance aspects of that? Because if you put technology in place with zero governance, it is a crapshoot at that point." Once governance questions are settled, the next step is people and change management. "We have to have an engagement plan—not just a training plan, not just a comms plan, but an engagement plan with every project that we do, especially when it has a huge user impact score," Williams-Range says. "If it's going to take them out of their norm day-to-day, we have to have an engagement plan to do that." Third is the actual act of ripping and replacing the technology—"It is full-blown tech analysis, all that you would imagine with that," Williams-Range says. Baxter adds that this should be done with other systems in mind: "It's an octopus with 42 arms that are the other systems. So you have to look at it holistically, otherwise you're going to lose a leg." Fourth brings an analysis of the firm's processes in place surrounding that technology. As Baxter notes, "If you throw technology at a bad process, you just end up with a really fast bad process, right?" Following that comes the question of the data itself: "What is the data? Should we even keep it?" Williams- Range says. "With 3E right now, we are literally going point-by-point of data. Why is it here? 'Well, because it's always been.' That is not the answer. The answer is, should it be here? Is this the right placement for this?" The final point is the question of architecture, "what's driving it on the back-end." Increasingly, they say, the answer to that is cloud services, with many of the firm's services living on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Baxter views the firm's focus on the cloud as an easy decision, especially when taking the security of the cloud into account. "If you spread your risk by using different vendors and different cloud provision services, then it's very unlikely that everything goes down at the same time. And if it does, we've got much bigger problems, right?" Others agree, noting that cloud security makes sense as a business decision as well. "Microsoft is spending over the next four years an average of five billion dollars a year on security. What's the law firm in aggregate of the Am Law 100 spending? Not even a fraction," Saper points out.

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