Peer to Peer Magazine

52 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2016 FEATURES Beyond the Interruption: Leveraging Expertise Location To Capitalize on Talent Adapting Secure Social Collaboration to Firm Culture The art form of expertise location reduces disruptive PTI emails, but combining expertise initiatives with secure social collaboration can also add further granularity in creating a searchable, indexed thread of information. One of the values of secure social collaboration is enabling maer, practice, alumni and client communities. Nuanced queries that were not well-suited for email become a secure threaded conversation among your legal professionals, admied based on your firm's established privacy and access rights. This creates a familiar social forum for KM and practice leaders to confidentially share best practices, solve problems faster and create repositories of historical information that remain accessible by future team members. Conversations can be searched and integrated with your expertise location platform (e.g., added to collaborative tools such as SharePoint and used to solve problems or develop new ideas and strategic plans). With granular permissions and privacy controls, firms have the tools to maintain ethical walls while solving PTI email overload and capitalizing on extensive tacit knowledge within the firm. Perhaps most important, the social platform should be highly trusted and adaptable — branded as an internal solution that can be deployed on-premises to foster greater adoption and to integrate seamlessly with profiles, processes and workflows. What Makes a Good Firm Directory Great? People, expertise and location are the keys to maximizing your firm directory. By also capitalizing on tacit knowledge through social collaboration applications, firms gain the ability to profile and pivot on other aspects of the business. The directory itself should handle both simple and complex queries and include several channels for suggesting or validating skills; delegates can be appointed to approve profiles based on a skills taxonomy that goes through a workflow in a secure, controlled manner. With a high level of integration with systems of record, directory content should be autopopulated wherever possible, for instance by connecting with your data warehouse, master data management or human resource systems. User experience makes all the difference. Lawyers inherently resist learning and utilizing new systems; information should be as accessible and intuitive as using a Web browser or LinkedIn. This includes mobile access, as expertise location on the go becomes even more essential. Building a Future on Expertise, Social Collaboration and Profiling What should your strategy be today? There is big value in effective profiling—creating a robust and flexible solution that tracks, links and shares data such as maers, alumni and practices as the next level of expertise location. If it is of strategic value to the firm's business, then it should be profiled. Going well beyond email reduction, an integrated profiling and social collaboration platform offers a unique ability to capitalize on this information firmwide, using a consistent taxonomy to define skills and experience. These systems harness your firm's structured knowledge and tacit knowledge, keeping your practice beer poised for the future. As KM initiatives continue to expand, capturing and sharing information effectively must become a priority. Information is a real-time commodity that adds unique competitive value to an organization, today and in the future. P2P The social platform should be highly trusted and adaptable — branded as an internal solution.

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