ILTA White Papers

www.iltanet.org process, such as client and matter intake. This indicates to me that SharePoint has fully entrenched itself as a key firmwide application within law firms. ILTA's e-groups are filled with SharePoint questions, solutions and ideas, further supporting this point. Advantages of SharePoint SharePoint offers a free version — SharePoint Foundation. As your needs grow, you can upgrade to various versions, each of which expands your capability. Almost all firms use MS SQL databases, and that translates into nominal startup costs. If your server infrastructure is virtualized, you don't even need to buy any hardware. This means that for a reasonable (if any) startup cost, you can begin to experiment on solutions. This is a distinct advantage over traditional legal industry solutions. SharePoint has an extremely large knowledge community that often shares solutions, code and ideas for free. There are tens of thousands of user communities, blogs and boards for you to review, ask for help and expand your knowledge base. Often there are dozens of SharePoint user groups in your own local community; this is again a distinct advantage over traditional legal industry solutions. A Vertical Problem More than likely, you have seen within your organization the problems that are created when vertical solutions do not play well together. This has been a curse on our profession for many years now. Legal industry technology solutions tend to be designed to meet a specific need and typically do not integrate horizontally. Need an accounting system? Pick one of a very few. Need a document management or CRM system? Again, pick one of a few. Our industry has deep vertical solutions; however, we are often left with a patchwork quilt of verticals that do not integrate. The very few times you manage to actually get applications to work in perfect alignment, patch Tuesday rolls around and something goes awry. We all know 36 ILTA White Paper how frustrating this can be. Some firms have addressed this with broad and deep purchases of data warehouse solutions. Such solutions often promise content and data nirvana, but leave you in project management purgatory with never-ending scope creep. Where To Start With commitment and a bit of sweat, there are many ways to expose your vertical solutions. You can create integration points into your key systems, such as accounting, document management, records and docket, CRM and practice management solutions. You can then leverage SharePoint's workflow and data presentation capabilities to expose and route content in a much more meaningful fashion. Client- and matter-centric views become much more powerful when you can expose more than just email and document content. With SharePoint, one click allows you to expose client- or matter-centric views detailing document and email content plus billing information, accounts receivable, records, critical date information and who-knows-who data. This explodes the typical "content only" model. As powerful an example as this is, creating these integration points is not yet knowledge management. A SharePoint Methodology into KM Last year I was recognized with a 2011 CIO 100 Award for my former firm's SharePoint deployment. They used the following model — it serves as a good example of how SharePoint can be leveraged as the tool to aggregate and represent a wide variety of typically disparate firm content. This model shows how you can connect the dots on a wealth of critical data and present that information to your attorneys in a meaningful context based on the project/matter tasks they are working on. Now you have the platform elements you need, plus the integration into your legal verticals, to develop a robust knowledge management platform and much more.

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