Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Global Law Firm Uses Search Solution to Improve Access to Information
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Legal
Customer Profile
Representing clients around the world, Covington & Burling LLP has 650 lawyers practicing in offices in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Brussels, andLondon.
Business Situation
Covington & Burling’s previous search tool worked poorly. Because the majority of the firm’s intranet content was unsearchable, employees wasted time looking for information in other ways.
Solution
Covington & Burling chose Enterprise Search from Microsoft, a component of Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Employees use Enterprise Search to find information, people, and expertise across a newly redesigned intranet.
Benefits
Exposed intranet content for search
Increased the use of intranet search 400 percent
Reduced IT administration of thesearch solution
Increased productivity
Enabled better customer service / “We saw the value proposition of Office SharePoint Server 2007: Combining our intranet development tool with an enterprise-ready search tool saved us time and money.”
Stephen Roberts, Chief Information Officer, Covington & Burling LLP
Tired of getting irrelevant search results, many employees at Covington & Burling LLP did not use the firm’s legacy search solution to find information on the firm’s intranet. As a result, the global law firm’s 650 lawyers and their support staff couldn’t take advantage of information resources, which could have increased their productivity. Covington & Burling deployed Enterprise Search from Microsoft, an integrated part of Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The search solution has unlocked the value of Covington’s rich information resources so that employees around the world can quickly find structured and unstructured information. Employees now use Enterprise Search within a redesigned intranet to quickly locate the internal services and information resources that they need to work efficiently.
Situation
Judge J. Harry Covington and Edward B. Burling opened the doors of Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C., on January 1, 1919. The firm grew quickly, establishing early its enduring principles of excellence, tolerance, and integrity, and its commitment to public service and professionalism. Today, those principles are imbued throughout the firm’s diverse practice areas—cutting-edge technology, litigation, white-collar defense, transactional, governmental affairs, international, and life sciences. The firm’s commitment to pro bono work was sealed during the late1960s, when the firm launched its lawyer rotation program at a Neighborhood Legal Services office.
Covington’s lawyers work together across their offices in Brussels, London, New York, San Francisco, and Washington as an integrated team. This team must often act quickly to provide effective representation forits roster of Fortune 100 clients. As withany other international law firm, providing creative, high-quality, and timely service iskey to Covington’s ability to stay competitive.
In 2006, Covington & Burling’s executives decided to migrate the firm’s seven-year-old intranet to a more effective operating environment. At that time, the intranetwas running on Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0, a Web server that comes with the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. They defined the project’s goals in terms of improving access to services and information for all employees. To that end, they wanted to provide a streamlined, more intuitive gateway to the firm’s large repository of digital information, which had evolved over the years. Built to house Covington’s libraries, the original intranet had grown to contain approximately 4,000 hyperlinks organized by areas of law, and many thousands of pages of reference materials. The firm’s phone book, policies, procedures, and services germane to different offices’ locations were also available on the intranet. However, the majority of the time, the searching and indexing tool available with IIS did not deliver relevant results.
“We had a wealth of information, but people simply couldn’t find what they wanted,” recalls Stephen Roberts, Chief Information Officer at Covington & Burling LLP. “Only a small percentage of our staff used the search function of the intranet, and that was usually just for the phone book. This left most of the intranet content unsearched. We were flooded with complaints about not being able to find information about practice groups, our areas of expertise, lawyers’ publications, or even forms that an employee might need from the Human Resources department.”
Covington Partner Kenneth Ebanks recalls how he had given up searching for information and frequently asked his secretary tofind it for him. “It all comes down to being efficient,” he says. “Clients expect us to be efficient, and wasting time looking for information is not a productive use of my time. However, even if I wasn’t looking for it, Istill had to wait for my secretary to find what I wanted.”
Searching for people and expertise was a particular pain for Ebanks, especially in relation to business development for the firm. “During a pitch to a prospective client, I need to know what expertise and experience Covington & Burling can offer. Because we are an international law firm, I don’t always know where to find those experts and resources that would best serve the client. Often, I had to hang up and research what we could provide for the client. This wasn’t the best way to promote our firm and secure new business.”
Covington’s decision to redesign and deploy a more intuitive intranet also mandated a more effective enterprise search tool. “Competition in the global legal business dictates that we conduct our business in close to real time,” says Roberts. “An improved search tool for our intranet would facilitate that. If we are going to make available all our electronic and digital resources through a redesigned intranet, search becomes a critical success factor in making those resources accessible. For me, the top goal for a new search tool was to provide people with an efficient, easy-to-use tool they could use to access the resources—for example, information, people, and expertise—they need for their daily work.”
Solution
Recognizing that technology can provide a law firm with significant competitive advantage, Covington IT staffers and managers decided to build the new intranet using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. In fact, the firmtouts itself as being among the first to roll out this advanced solution within the legal industry. For Roberts and his team, a major incentive for the choice lay in the extra value of an intranet development solution that also offers Enterprise Search, a sophisticated search tool built into Office SharePoint Server 2007.
“We saw the value proposition of SharePoint Server 2007: Combining our intranet development tool with an enterprise-ready search tool saved us time and money,” says Roberts. “While we were redesigning the intranet and reorganizing the available information into a more intuitive arrangement, we saw it would be much easier to optimize search results byconfiguring a search tool integrated into the intranet.”
Another reason why Roberts and his team chose Office SharePoint Server 2007 was the product’s stability. “We kept hearing from our peers how stable and reliable SharePoint Server 2007 is,” confirms Roberts. “Reliability is a key factor for us in running a fast-paced, highly accurate business.”
Quick Deployment
It took Covington only four and a half months to design, build, and deploy the new intranet based on Office SharePoint Server 2007, including configuring and deploying the integrated Enterprise Search solution. Roberts pulled together a small team of three IT professionals, including one IIS/Active Server Pages (ASP) developer. After conducting a series of focus groups with representative attorneys, including Ebanks, the team met every day for two months to develop the look and functionality of the new intranet site.
Roberts credits the quick migration to the team’s methodology. “We didn’t attempt to move all the content over from our IIS servers in one step,” he explains. “Today, we have one server in our Washington, D.C., office that’s running SharePoint Server 2007, and it delivers about 100,000 pages a day to all five of our offices. We have migrated about 1,000 pages to the new intranet. For the content that remains on the IIS servers, we created another design that complements the look of the new intranet but just links back to the old site. We are gradually moving the remaining content over in regular increments every day.”
Logical Intranet Content
From the beginning, Roberts and his team designed Covington’s new intranet, called CovNet, with fast, effective searching in mind. For example, they designed CovNet’s navigation to mirrorthe firm’s business structure andincluded shortcuts within the site itself to give employees a jump-start on accessing information. The site is geographically sensitive, so if a lawyer logs on in Washington, D.C., and then clicks one of the “My Office Shortcuts,” the results delivered will be germane to that person’s home office location. (See Figure 1.) Above My Office Shortcuts is a list of the shortcuts used most frequently throughout the firm to get to the services, systems, and information that are most often requested by all employees.
“We removed several steps to access frequently used information and took pains to deliver information useful to specific locations,” says Roberts. “We also integrated office floor plans into the phone book, so users can find people in every department of every office, as well as every office’s hours of service. The intranet is easy to use, and the content can easily be found—that’s key.”
“As far as intranet search is concerned, we focused on features that would be of strategic benefit for us, like keyword searches, synonyms, and best bets,” adds Philip Schroeder, Director of Information Resource Services at Covington & Burling LLP. “In a global law firm, people describe the same service in different ways—for example, some people will call a copy center a ‘Xerox center,’ and others will call it a ‘duplicating center.’ So we had to take that into account when configuring our search solution.”
The team invested some time in configuring the intranet search solution with customized queries, search scopes, and meta tags on documents such as Human Resources department forms. In this way, they could make sure that the solution delivers relevant results from both structured and unstructured content. Then they created several search scopes tailored to the firm’s organizational structure and the intranet’s information architecture. These scopes include Practice and Industries, Committees, Marketing, Library Research, Offices, Policies and Procedures, and Phonebook. A separate client matter search enables lawyers and other staffers to look up a client using a client ID number and name. “Enterprise Search covers all content on the intranet, and we have also featured the MSN® Search Internet search engine right in the center of CovNet’s home page,” explains Roberts. “That way, our employees can save time finding online resources because they get quick, easy access to Internet search from an application they use all day, every day.”
Benefits
Using Covington’s new intranet search solution, everyone at the firm now has improved access to services and information, which improves client service, increases efficiency, and helps to maintain the firm’s competitive edge in the global legal industry. Query and results reporting available through Office SharePoint Server 2007 show that usage is up by 400 percent—evidence that the IT department delivered what the firm’s employees wanted and needed.
“Our new search solution has opened up intranet content to fast, relevant searches, whereas relevant searching simply didn’t exist before,” says Roberts. “Today, we’re running several hundred thousand hits on the intranet each week.”
According to Roberts, an additional benefit of CovNet’s newly streamlined content and search is that it has decreased the IT department’s administrative burden, so staffers can tackle the array of other IT requirements of the 650-attorney firm with offices in fivelocations in the United Statesand Europe.
Enabling IT to Deliver What the FirmNeeds
Covington IT staffers deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Enterprise Search to provide significant business value to the firm, and realized a surprisingly quick time to benefit. They delivered a redesigned intranet with a more intuitive structure and better organized content that maps to the firm’s geographically dispersed offices and diverse practice areas. At the same time, they configured an integrated Enterprise Search solution that dovetails with the site’s structure and saves time for employees searching for needed information. “Because the intranet is more streamlined and user friendly, I’m already halfway to finding what I want just by logging on,” says Ebanks. “My peers and I are all very happy with the work that Steve and his team did in putting this together.”
“What I’ve seen is that people are opening Enterprise Search in the morning, minimizing it, and then using it constantly during the day,” confirms Schroeder. “It’s gratifying to see the results of our efforts so quickly translating into practical business benefits.”
“We were extremely happy with our ability to deploy our Office SharePoint Server 2007 intranet and Enterprise Search in record time,” adds Roberts. “In fairly short order, our IIS/ASP programmer became an expert in SharePoint sites. The migration from IIS 6.0 to SharePoint Server 2007 simply isn’t that difficult. With less time and effort than we expected to spend, we jumped to an infinitely better search solution.”
Improving Productivity
Today, more employees are using the new Enterprise Search capability than the previous search solution. “They are finding it easier to locate the information they need,” says Roberts. “Our people are happier and are working more effectively across the entire firm.”
Ebanks is grateful that he can find everything using the search function on the intranet, especially when he is talking to prospective clients. “We are a professional services firm, so marketing is important,” he says. “When I’m making a pitch to a client, the standard information I need to promote the firm—like practice groups, areas of expertise, and information about lawyers—is all there at my fingertips. I never have to say, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ Using Enterprise Search during a phone call to look up and promote a colleague on the other side of the world proves that we are a fully integrated firm and that we can work together as a team. It’s a great tool that helps me leave a great impression.”
Ebanks also uses the new search solution tosave time when he is helping young associates learn about new areas of law. Covington & Burling has always hosted training programs in all of its offices, but previously, these programs’ resources were hard to find on the intranet. “Now that we have all our training materials on CovNet, I can quickly do a search, click a link, print the documents, and hand them to my associate,” says Ebanks. “This saves me a couple of hours because I don’t have to sit down and explain a new process to a less-experienced associate.”
Enterprise Search is also improving productivity for the staff in the IT department. Tools like the management console make this a much easier solution for the IT staff to administer. “The time we save can be used to focus on more strategic endeavors,” says Schroeder. “Also, with Office SharePoint Server 2007, people are finding it easier to do their own content development, which will save us time in the long run.”
Maintaining a Competitive Edge to Increase Business
Enterprise Search is making a difference to Covington’s efficiency because employees are using it to minimize unproductive time. “It comes down to the cliché, ‘time is money,’” says Ebanks. “Using Enterprise Search, I can find what I need myself, which is more cost-effective than asking my secretary to find the information. Now I can spend more time on the substantive work for my client. This translates into better service, and that’s how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”
“The speed of our business today is real time, and that’s truly extraordinary,” concludes Roberts. “My top priority in supplying technology to support the firm is really quite simple. I’m only interested in solutions that help us provide more efficient, high-quality legal services to any client, anywhere in the world. That’s why Covington & Burling LLP chose Office SharePoint Server 2007and Enterprise Search for the intranet.”
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