Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/37773
“Data integration without data integrity leads to bad results!” INTEGRATE WITH INTEGRITY While firms like Parker Poe and Reed Smith have found ways to leverage SharePoint to build stronger client relationships and to improve service delivery to their clients, some challenges still remain. One of the greatest challenges firms encounter when delivering such capabilities is around data quality and integrity — that is, the accuracy, consistency and completeness of data across all systems. As firms utilize SharePoint to pull together information from multiple systems and content sources (including sources of information that live outside the firm in the form of online legal research, company data, market and competitive intelligence data, and other sources of news and current awareness) they quickly realize that it’s not always practical, or possible, to determine how all of this 28 Portal Platforms ILTA White Paper information can be aligned properly to display within a SharePoint page or site. And as data volume grows by the day, these issues are exacerbated. “Big data” is a big problem for the legal industry, just as it is within other industries, and oftentimes SharePoint provides a better view into bad data. Firms are now seeking a solution that provides “a single version of the truth” across the data that matters the most to the firm, focusing on client, matter and attorney information as well as classification, tagging and taxonomy across this data. For example, client records in the CRM system must be matched to client records in the time and billing system, and to sources of news, social media, competitive intelligence, legal activity and more. To create a complete client profile, to know all you should know about your clients, a problem needs to be solved at the data level first.