Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/68817
www.iltanet.org If law firms are willing to provide subscriptions, their clients will jump at the chance to sign up. How Law Firms Can Help: This is an excellent area in which to make some KM headway. Matter management is KM 101, and most law firms have years of experience and learning to share. Yet matter management and reporting has not had as much attention in the KM literature, nor have we heard much from our partner firms. Corporate counsel are under pressure to simply get their arms around all their files and quantify them to management and the board. What are the files worth? How many are closed each month and year? How much are they costing? Which files are of strategic value and which are nuisances? Consider offering tactical and technical help in managing the nonlegal details of their mandates. Firms will learn more about their clients, their strategies, their inefficiencies (where you can then offer support for improvement) by supporting such an exercise. And if you provide ways to actually manage all that information, your clients will be eternally grateful for being able to report in a simple and productive fashion to their boards. Productive Collaboration The KM team develops and maintains LCCG's intranet sites (which are visible bank-wide) and the group's internal team sites. Work on the intranet sites over the past few years was more in the nature of a "refresh," including updating the general design to enterprise 44 ILTA White Paper standards and managing the content for our "client groups" within BMO. The team sites (portals) are designed to enhance communication and collaboration. We continue to develop more central repositories for shared information, such as standardized templates, policies and personnel information. The group and team sites are highly consistent in look and feel and in navigability, and we have accumulated excellent content. We are now fielding multiple requests each month to develop new pages for subgroups and smaller teams. These sites allow group members (who are scattered across various offices and time zones) to locate shared information easily. (Substantive legal content is housed in our DMS, iManage.) We also maintain group calendars to note key events and meetings. Here are some examples of how we're leveraging SharePoint to increase awareness: • We developed a "Flights" page for updated information about new hires, transfers and departures. Once a week, we aggregate this information into an email to more publicly announce and welcome new hires, as well as list open job opportunities • We maintain a "Current Awareness" page for all units across the LCCG, updated daily with news items and cases. This is also aggregated into an email once a week to share key developments across the group.