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 | W I N T E R 2 0 2 2 Then the data must be ingested into the onboarding firm's systems – which has its own complications. One consideration is each document will have a unique number and (it's a number of authors?) author – but these aren't part of the new firm's systems so often it becomes about managing how the new data is pushed in the onboarding firm's DMS. The firm may have to understand who to allocate as new authors of each piece of content and how to assign new matter numbers so that the new data is ingested successfully. And all the while fee-earners are screaming to get access to their clients' data. Merry-go-round It's a pity that matter mobility is becoming more common, because, all told, it's a costly business for law firms. The cost in senior lawyer time alone is considerable. In addition, firms are exposed to business, compliance, and reputational risks (and fines) if something goes wrong, for example, the wrong information falls into the wrong hands or data privacy laws are breached. It's also a merry-go-round. As off boarding firms lose lawyers to their competitors, they're backfilling those roles by recruiting their own lateral hires who in turn are hopefully bringing across their existing clients. The net result becomes an understanding that "what goes around, comes around". Everyone is learning that no one wins by making life hard for their counterparts in rival firms. It's at the point where relationships are being built between people in competing large firms that are continually trading partners back and forth. Since these individuals are constantly working together on facilitating lateral moves, they've become friends. The way forward must surely be to make the processes of managing these cross-cutting risk and professional responsibilities easier for everyone. The ideal might be to agree a standardized approach covering the business decisions, technical requirements, and risk aspects of exporting and ingesting data, taking into consideration the technical and organizational challenges and conflicts. This would streamline the process and result in a better client experience. For now, firms should seek out solutions that automate as much of the work as possible and streamline the rest with workflow wrappers that manage processes and authorizations and make it relatively easy for senior lawyers to review content. Matter mobility is a growing challenge for firms. The time has come to take it seriously and get some help. ILTA Q 4 W H I T E P A P E R S Chris Giles is CEO and Director of Information Governance at LegalRM, which creates market-leading software, services and solutions for records, risk and compliance management and serves some of the world largest law firms as well as blue chip organizations from other industry sectors. Kandace Donovan is LegalRM's Vice President Operations, North America. To find out more visit the L E G A L R M W E B S I T E , where you can down- load our white paper or view our ILTA Product Briefing, 'How to make client transfers a key competence'. We discuss the technology that can support firms to efficiently manage the challenge (and opportunity!) of matter mobility and show how iCompli, from LegalRM can streamline the process of data transfer accurately, whilst reducing risk and improving client service.

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