Peer to Peer Magazine

38 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA CASE STUDIES Our journey began in 2009 when the BMO Financial Group became one of the first financial institutions to adopt KM. Our modest beginnings included one librarian and one contract developer supporting our technology. Five years later, we are 16 members strong. We support over 600 LCCG personnel globally and provide a wide range of KM expertise, including professional development, project management, e-discovery and litigation support and, most significant, knowledge-sharing through better matter and document management and good use of intranet and portal sites. Our efforts to foster innovation in the LCCG have not gone unnoticed — BMO has won several awards over the past two years. We've been honored with ILTA's 2013 Innovative Law Department of the Year Award, the 2013 Canadian Society Corporate Secretaries Excellence Award in Best Use of Technology in Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Lexpert's 2014 Innovatio Award for Best Practices in Compliance Systems and Law Department Diversity. We are proud to be recognized for how we've energized innovation. We've addressed our organization's productivity challenges by offering practical and cost-effective solutions, and we've led critical change management processes while supporting individual users and the organization with best practices for better risk management. LET THE INNOVATION BEGIN In 2013, the LCCG launched a transformative initiative to address the challenge of enhancing our oversight of external legal spending while integrating electronic billing with internal matter management. We began this initiative by asking tough questions about our technology and internal processes. We learned that overlapping information was captured in multiple places, and yet we were unable to eliminate redundancies. This prompted us to aim for a one-stop-shop solution for all matter information. As we searched for platforms that could meet our needs, we tested whether the technology could interact effectively with our internal systems. We selected TyMetrix because it is a well-established electronic billing platform used by many other financial institutions, and it had strong similarities with how LCCG opened matters internally. We then built a script that automatically generates workspaces within our document management system (DMS) when new matters are opened, further improving the user experience. From there, we sought user input on the system through questionnaires about the information users needed for reporting, and we integrated their feedback into our customization of the platform. With the new system, we could also apply legal project management practices to budgets and estimates. By coaching our lawyers to look for opportunities for alternative fee About the Author Jolie Lin is the Deputy General Counsel & Chief Knowledge Officer in the Legal Corporate & Compliance Group at BMO Financial Group. Jolie is responsible for the development and management of global knowledge management initiatives and records and information management systems, including centralized litigation support. She is also responsible for project management, internal collaboration systems and the coordination of internal training/ professional development programs. Jolie can be contacted at jolie.lin@bmo.com. Breathing Life into Innovation at BMO Financial Group DISTINGUISHED PEER AWARDS WINNER With an ever-sharper focus on productivity and innovation, knowledge management (KM) is an exciting area for corporate law departments in the 21st century. This is no less true for BMO Financial Group's Legal, Corporate and Compliance Group (LCCG).

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