Digital White Papers

37 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Expertise Location and Social Collaboration: Three Case Studies on a Winning Formula DORA TYNES Transforming the Portal with Expertise Location As the first law firm in the world to adopt SharePoint 2007 for its intranet portal, Sheppard Mullin aorneys and staff had become accustomed to quick, easy access to data. Several years later, though, the technology was showing its age and could no longer handle the exponential growth of data generated by associates and administrative personnel. Recognizing that the time to upgrade had come, we understood that a fresh user experience was also needed. Metrics revealed that finding information regarding aorneys, especially around expertise and skills, accounted for a substantial percentage of the portal's use. In the light of this insight, preserving and enhancing this high usage with a more optimized KM tool was deemed imperative. Increasing the proficiency and capacity of the portal's people and expertise search was integral to the upgrade. The portal's ability to take full advantage of information the firm had about its people and their experience was paramount but also challenging since the data were stored in disparate locations: aorney bios and experience summaries were published on the firm's main external website while Former chief knowledge officer at Sheppard Mullin, a full-service global 100 law firm handling corporate and technology maers and complex financial transactions marketing materials and aorney writings, papers and blogs were stored in other systems. The goal was to integrate all data related to experience, expertise and skills and ensure that everything was indexed, segmented and tagged with metadata fields enabling niche searches for a beer user experience. This integration allows us to take expertise location to the next level by presenting new functionality such as comprehensive skills taxonomy and field parameters. In addition, the tool's role-based security allows us to present only relevant data to the person executing the search, eliminating the need to display data fields and reducing cluer. For instance, a team member can search the firm directory for a German-speaking aorney who is familiar with German law, an expert in data privacy and versed in ediscovery. The data fields –– in this case, language, aorney status and data privacy expertise –– are critical to finding the ideal contact. If the team member executing the search belongs to the same practice group as those in the results set, the role-based data fields will also display the matched aorneys' current workload and availability. To provide crucial information uniformly and without duplication, Sheppard Mullin uses an integrated solution that extracts data from a central repository of various internal databases. Presenting the enormous amount of information in the repository in an actionable format provides a tremendous competitive advantage to practitioners. This feature was critical as our firm culture demands streamlined, targeted, value-added information based on individual aorneys' needs. With the upgraded portal and integrated expertise solution, our professionals can more effectively marshal resources, coordinate DORA TYNES Dora is the Director of Knowledge and Research Services at Stoel Rives LLP. While at Sheppard Mullin, she oversaw the firm's knowledge management initiatives to drive efficiency, speed, reuseable content and client service through the use of best practices. Dora was also responsible for the management and oversight of the litigation/trial support group and the legal research services group. Contact her at dora.tynes@stoel.com. DT

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