Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: JUNE 2014 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 26 • Schedule regular discussions with your provider's development team and with fellow firms that have the application to discuss issues, recommend product enhancements and share best practices and workflows. • Follow up with attorneys. Walk the halls of your firm to check on the overall experience and to identify trends and concerns. • Incorporate feedback into your documentation. Consider consolidating and recording this feedback on a frequently asked questions page, and distill it into your standard documentation (including a refresh of internal forms and reports). Third, don't underestimate the value of metrics. At a minimum, keep accurate tabs on your budget and review rates per hour to compare how long it takes to do a task now versus the time it used to take. These and other important metrics (e.g., documents reviewed, gigabytes processed or pages produced per hour) will help you measure efficiency. Track attorney adoption as well, including the number of users and the number of cases involved. When designing your metrics, ask yourself what is most important for the attorneys to understand regarding the status of litigation support work on their cases from both timeline and completeness perspectives. Finally, celebrate success. You and your team will deserve it. FITTING A SOLUTION TO MEET THE NEEDS OF A WORKFLOW: IN-HOUSE BE THE CHANGE! ENSURE LONG-TERM USER ADOPTION You've rolled out your review platform with robust workflows, training materials and support. Now how do you get users to adopt it and move away from the old way of doing things? Years ago, when discovery was paper-based, the solution was to throw more bodies at the review. The more people you used, the more documents you could get through in a day to meet your production deadline. This model resulted in more billable hours and revenue for the firm. While this model shouldn't be in practice in the world of electronic information, it still plays out this way in many firms. What can you do to help create a shift in this paradigm? One way is to prepare examples of quantifiable success. Keep them in your back pocket for when you need them. Another method is to develop a time and cost estimate up front. Showing attorneys how you can meet deadlines and how much money you can save the client in review costs by leveraging technology will encourage adoption. Also consider your users' cultural differences and views on technology. Getting lawyers comfortable with technology can measurably help with adoption. Finally, show your attorneys what other firms are doing. In general, law firms prefer to follow precedents while remaining competitive with their peers.

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