ILTA White Papers

Productivity and Priorities: An In-House Perspective on Knowledge Management border issues and not speak only to the law of the local jurisdiction. Law firms should be especially circumspect about approaching business units directly to provide legal updates without first speaking to the corporation's legal group. Corporate counsel can provide direction on how the legal advice should be presented because they are familiar with the company's particular challenges, risk tolerance and strategy. Even if a business unit has approached the law firm for support on learning, firms should circle back with corporate counsel and present the opportunity to work together. Finally, if law firms have training or CLE tracking systems, consider offering them to clients. We take the position that each attorney is responsible for managing his/her hours, and we do not chase lawyers down to confirm they're on track. However, we would like to have the information in a reportable format to provide to our executive level, to demonstrate the ongoing productivity investment we have created. Productive E-Discovery The BMO Legal Group has brought e-discovery in-house under the KM team to provide centralized litigation support across the enterprise. BMO aims to create a more systematic, defensible e-discovery process that will help protect BMO from the risk of potential sanctions and reduce overall litigation and regulatory investigation costs. Hold notices are centralized and issued through our automated e-discovery tool. Centralization allows for better tracking of who is under a legal hold, which helps safeguard against the inadvertent loss of records during other BMO standard processes, such as systematic records destruction in accordance with the enterprise record retention policy, computer hardware refreshes or server cleanups. We continue to raise our internal expertise in this field and work to reduce the amount of e-discovery work that would otherwise have to be outsourced to external law firms or to e-discovery service providers. How Law Firms Can Help: Law firms might see BMO's strategic decision to bring e-discovery in-house as a loss of revenue, yet opportunities remain. E-discovery is a tricky and still-burgeoning area. Clients could use law firm help to evaluate vendors and new technology. As best practices develop, law firms should impart these to clients at no charge. If a firm can demonstrate broad expertise in e-discovery practice and management, clients will rely on that expertise to get programs implemented and supported. Consider seconding your e-discovery technologists, associates and paralegals to help evaluate a client's e-discovery program, even outside the context of an actual case. Productive Matter Management Before the KM office was established in the LCCG, legal professionals were using four disparate systems for file and matter management, largely due to corporate mergers between entities, or to track litigation separately for reporting purposes. The systems were outdated (including legacy software no longer supported by vendors), cumbersome or simply duplicative. The KM team created one matter management system (MAX for Matter Administration eXchange) and migrated the data from these legacy systems. The new system is Web-based and customized to the needs of the legal group. Further refinements are always under development to increase functionality based on user requests. We are currently looking for ways to enhance reporting to executive levels to be more efficient. MAX allows the line of business's lawyers to keep track of their own matters, and we leverage this data for reporting purposes. Centralizing matter management in MAX increases efficiency by enhancing reporting, reducing duplicative and/or inconsistent efforts to track matter information, and providing a clearer view into the work the legal professionals do with their lines of business. Finally, MAX was designed specifically pursuant to enterprise file retention and destruction policy. Each matter "type" is mapped to a record retention series. ILTA White Paper 43

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