Peer to Peer Magazine

WWW.ILTANET.ORG 37 • We host numerous events every year. • We engage lawyers and staff in changes, asking focus groups for their preferences and doing our best to deliver on them. GROWING THE TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIP We have heard time and again that technology has contributed to a lack of engagement with work. Legal assistants cite email as alienating them from the attorneys they support. Because of the speed of communication, attorneys are delivering more legal advice than ever. Practically speaking and in terms of clients' willingness to pay, little time is left for collaboration with others. At Taft, we are trying to shift this paradigm and use technology as a forum for more employee engagement. Partnering our technology and employee relations efforts gives us a platform for meaningful conversation with employees about what they do, how they do it and ways to make their work more fun, inspiring and effective. STORIES OF SUCCESS Two of our projects highlight the potential for increasing engagement via technology. • A desktop project involved rolling out an entirely refreshed desktop to 700 lawyers and staff members in all our locations • A document management system (DMS) project involved rolling out a single piece of software to promote greater and more effective use of our DMS About the Author Beth Silvers is Chief Personnel Officer at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP. She is a former practicing attorney and is responsible for leading the firm's human resources and operations. Beth can be contacted at bsilvers@taftlaw.com. For the desktop project, IT evaluated the applications used within the firm. Flagging redundancies, IT engaged our internal customers about what programs they used and what they liked and did not like about them. We started promoting alternative programs that better met internal customer needs and increased security, speed and efficiency. We then built and tested the new desktop and prepared for implementation. Not resting on our engagement laurels, we beefed up our coaching ranks to foster training and adoption in all offices. We hired external trainers to push out the software to every office, but we also tapped a rich resource — our legal assistants. By identifying teams of talented legal assistants in each office, showing them the new desktop early and making them experts on its use prior to rollout, we generated support for the project from the ground up. The assistants were motivated to ensure worthwhile training and marshaled support among even our most change-resistant attorneys and staff members. Receiving their feedback at each step allowed us to bring the project to a successful conclusion. For the DMS project, we noticed certain attorneys and legal assistants were continuously creating subfolders within our document management system, causing problems from an IT/ templating perspective. When we realized that our customers would create new folders as quickly as we deleted them, we investigated further and learned that the primary subfolder offenders were attorneys. We needed to understand why the current folder structure did not work for them, what value subfolders provided and if they would be willing to create subfolders in a way that maintained our template integrity. We spent several weeks traveling to each office, asking individual lawyers and practice groups what we were missing and relaying our concerns. Through these door- to-door sales conversations, we obtained partner buy-in. We explored software solutions and presented the best choice to the partners in small groups. They agreed, and were ready to move forward. Building off of the success of the desktop project, we went back to engage the legal assistants. We installed the software on selected assistants' computers and asked for their feedback. By the time we did a large-scale rollout, we already had pockets of support and success stories in each office. Early-adopter attorneys would stand up for the software and tell personal stories about its benefits. Early-adopter legal assistants coached their peers on the software's use. And because we had received feedback at every stage, the software was correctly configured from Day One. A CONTRACT FOR CONTINUED GROWTH By approaching our technology projects as employee relations projects, we engage our employees in a way that circumvents many traditional law firm challenges and provides a demonstrable return on investment. We have a theoretical contract to continue to grow these efforts for many years to come in ways as talented, diverse and changing as our people.

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