Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Law Firm Wins Award for Intranet that Improves Access to More ProductivityTools
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Legal services
Customer Profile
Established in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1889, Shook, Hardy & Bacon (SHB) is an international law firm with more than 1,500 employees worldwide.
Business Situation
SHB had an aging, inflexible intranet that didn’t support the firm’s strategic goal to provide attorneys and support professionals with a collaborative work environment and integrated resources.
Solution
SHB chose Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and deployed Enterprise Search for employees to find information, people, and expertise across a newly redesigned intranet.
Benefits
Integrates work environment
Enables self-serve access to information
Drives knowledge management
Improves people search
Reduces nonbillable hours
Enhances corporate culture / “With a SharePoint-based intranet, we can provide a work environment with real business relevance for employees. We are reducing nonbillable hours and working more productively to better serve our clients.”
George Rowland, Application Development Manager, Shook, Hardy & Bacon
Shook, Hardy & Bacon (SHB) is an international law firm headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. The firm’s aging intranet functioned more as a vehicle for corporate communications than as a collaboration platform for attorneys and support professionals. SHB wanted a more practical, useful intranet that would provide staff integrated access to all their research tools and resources. SHB migrated its intranet to Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and deployed the Enterprise Search feature. The new intranet provides attorneys with logically organized information and the tools they need for efficient collaboration. Searchable intranet content has increased by 80 percent, increasing self-serve access to data by up to 70 percent. Increased productivity reduces nonbillable hours at the firm and drives a competitive advantage in a global market.
Situation
Shook, Hardy & Bacon (SHB) is an international law firm with a legacy spanning more than a century. Established in Kansas City, Missouri, the firm has grown to more than 1,500 employees worldwide, with 500 attorneys and more than 200 research analysts and paraprofessionals. The firm has offices located in Houston, Texas; Miami and Tampa, Florida; Orange County and San Francisco, California; Washington, D.C.; London, England; and Geneva, Switzerland.
SHB delivers exemplary client service in nearly 40 different areas of practice. The firm's lawyers have extensive experience in complex litigation, keeping SHB at the forefront of emerging global legal trends, such as climate change, nanotechnology, and pressures on global water supplies. SHB is equally recognized for its expertise in tort reform and has a strong presence in corporate compliance, real estate, tax, and corporate transactions.
The IT department at SHB works to provide the best technologies available to help the company make the most out of its extensive information assets. “Our job in IT is to provide our attorneys with easily discoverable, logically organized information, and to give them the tools they need to find colleagues and collaborate efficiently across all nine of our global locations,” says John Anderson, Chief Information Officer at Shook, Hardy & Bacon.
Inflexible Intranet
The first intranet at SHB, LawPort, ran on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 data management software and used the Internet Information Services Web server that is available in the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. LawPort functioned more as an administrative corporate communication tool for the enterprise than as a platform for collaborative legal teamwork or as a portal into consolidated, searchable data stores.
LawPort, Version 2.6 worked well when it was first deployed in 2001, but its inflexible, locked-down configuration was an impediment to change. The old solution did not provide the flexibility to customize information for specific litigation areas, client matters, geographies, communities, or audiences. “If we wanted to alter something significant on the intranet, we had to pay the vendor,” says Lori Weiss, Director of Library/Record Services at Shook, Hardy & Bacon. “The firm has evolved, technology has changed, and we have a talented IT staff capable of great things. We wanted a more user-friendly and adaptive internet solution that we could fine-tune to meet the needs of our attorneys.”
Poor Search Capabilities
SHB attorneys and staff did not have a federated search tool to find information in disparate applications. Essential business information resided in six primary repositories, including a Master Personnel Database, developed in-house; Elite, a financial management suite; Open Text LegalKEY, a conflicts and records management application; Hummingbird DM5, a document management system (now Open Text Connectivity Solutions Group); the SHB Internet portal; and the Internet.
“It was frustrating for users to have to learn the interface for each data source and search through each of them to pull together the information they needed,” says Weiss. “Attorneys often relied on an intermediary to get the information, but then they had to wait. In a global firm operating in many different time zones, this could mean the difference between finding something important today, or having to wait until tomorrow.”
Labor Intensive Security Management
For intranet content, LawPort did not provide a flexible security layer, so the firm could not restrict access to various types of information. “Security at any law firm is critical,” says Weiss. “While we were able to adhere to our security policies, we wanted a more seamless approach to security trimming with regards to our search results. We also wanted to more easily assign access policies to ensure that our documents, data, and client information are only available to those with the right permissions.”
Time Wasted on Administrative Tasks
The firm wanted a more robust intranet that would have direct impact on the attorneys’ productivity. “The goal was to provide our attorneys with all the research tools they needed on the desktop and a central access point to the data sources they use,” says Weiss. “This way, we would cut down on time spent on nonbillable work.”
This goal resonated for Shook, Hardy & Bacon Partner, Mischa Buford Epps. As the relationship partner for one of the firm’s large clients, she spends a lot of time performing important administrative and client management work.
“I like to keep track of what is happening with other clients that may be of interest to this particular client, but it was difficult to stay on top of what my colleagues were doing in other offices,” she says. “The corporate bios on the Internet site didn’t give me the level of detail I needed, such as where people are admitted to practice. And without making a lot of phone calls, it was also difficult to gain visibility into ‘ethical wall’ information when I needed to pull together a team for a new matter. I’m always fielding client requests for information, so I spent a lot of time talking to people in the accounting department or in our records center to find out which attorneys are involved in different matters.”
Buford Epps is also active on the firm’s diversity committee, but the prior intranet was not a good vehicle to broadcast the committee’s goals and activities to the rest of the firm. “Diversity is an important part of our culture, and I wished we had a platform where we could more readily post our diversity training and events,” she says. “When I chaired the committee, we wanted to roll out our initial diversity checklist for all attorneys to complete. But there was no way to distribute this electronically, so we ended up sending it to just the partners.”
Like any other international law firm, SHB faces increasing pressure to provide timely service, so boosting attorney productivity is key to staying competitive. The firm’s Knowledge Management Committee saw the advantage of redesigning and deploying a more practical, useful intranet where attorneys could access all their research tools and resources. “We also saw the importance of deploying an effective, relevant enterprise search tool that we could configure to filter results in a way that matches our security model,” says Anderson.
Solution
The Knowledge Management Committee at Shook, Hardy & Bacon had already completed a successful initiative to migrate its extranet to Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “The extranet gave us the springboard to move on to the intranet,” says Anderson. “That project was very successful and allowed us to gain internal expertise and a better understanding of the capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007. It was easy for executive management to see the benefits of migrating the intranet to the same platform.”
For SHB, a major incentive for the choice lay in the extra value of a combined intranet development solution that also offered Enterprise Search, a sophisticated search tool built into Office SharePoint Server 2007. The firm had replaced its Google search appliance with Enterprise Search, successfully using it on the SHB Web portal, which contains up to 10,000 indexed items.
SHB also saw the value of standardizing on a single product for its different Web environments. “We were very confident that Office SharePoint Server 2007 would answer our needs for the intranet,” says Anderson. “We used the SharePoint infrastructure to pull together corporate information into a more intuitive organization for a law firm, and then to configure an integrated search tool with metadata and tagging so that attorneys could optimize search results.”
The IT team built a customized version of People Search, using the Business Data Catalog feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to index the Master Personnel Database, a SQL Server 2005 database that houses information about every attorney and employee in the firm. The company used Active Directory® Domain Services to enable role-based personalization on the intranet so that attorneys can access different content based on their user profiles.
Now SHB is able to make major strides toward global federated search capabilities across firm and legal information. The new FAST indexing and Federated Search Connectors will provide even greater capability. The firm now takes advantage of a network of Microsoft partners and vendors who are developing third-party Web parts for Office SharePoint Server 2007.
One of the goals for the intranet, dubbed CityLink, was to bring together information from federated sources and then correlate that information for employees to easily access. “The openness of the Microsoft environment was a significant factor in why we chose it for our intranet,” says Weiss. “Now we have the ability to integrate and take advantage of other tools, applications, and external resources through third-party Web parts.”
SHB partnered with third-party vendors to create custom Web parts to integrate external data sources into the intranet environment in a way that conformed to the firm’s security requirements. To date, SHB has incorporated Web parts from Handshake, eTech Global, and Quilogy. “The role of the integrator, Handshake, was to provide access to line-of-business application data with security screening for access control,” says George Rowland, Application Development Manager at Shook, Hardy & Bacon.
The IT team is considering roles-based My Sites. Within Office SharePoint Server 2007, My Sites are personal sites that give employees a central location to manage and store their documents, content, links, and contacts. SHB is creating slightly different My Site templates for partners, attorneys, paralegals, and other employee communities within the firm. “As we design the My Site templates, we are using the same design principle that we used for CityLink overall: identifying and consolidating the tools and applications that are the most critical to our employees’ day-to-day work,” says Weiss. “For example, with the My Site, we are using Elite’s WebView to provide attorneys with important financial information regarding their clients and their practice. Elite’s WebView has very strict security protocols that Office SharePoint Server 2007 honors.”
The new CityLink went live in November 2007. The solution supports an integrated, collaborative work environment and consolidates access to a variety of corporate data repositories, including case management applications, best practices document collections, client records, and litigation support databases. Enterprise Search is enabled on 250,000 indexed documents on CityLink, an 80 percent increase over the searchable content on LawPort.
Benefits
The intranet infrastructure at Shook, Hardy & Bacon acts as a foundation for productivity across the firm. Instead of offering top-down corporate administrative information, CityLink provides a single source for all the tools and information attorneys need on a daily basis. It has been so successful that SHB was recognized by CIO Magazine with an award as one of the top 100 companies in 2008 that is creating new business value by innovating with technology.
“We used the SharePoint solution to consolidate and present an integrated view of corporate data that’s available to everyone through a powerful search engine that filters results based on user permissions,” says Rowland. “With a SharePoint-based intranet, we can provide a work environment with real business relevance for employees. We are reducing nonbillable hours and working more productively to better serve our clients.”
Integrates Work Environment
The new intranet at SHB supports a strategic corporate goal to effect a more collaborative, cohesive work environment. CityLink brings together, in a single interface, client, legal, and administrative information that attorneys previously accessed from disparate systems. Today, the intranet offers an integrated collaborative work environment shared by all employees across the globe.
“Our attorneys told us they wanted more tools, integrated resources, and a common interface so that they wouldn’t have to learn multiple search techniques or have to go to different locations to find what they needed. CityLink delivers on all counts,” says Ann Schlomann, Senior IT Project Manager at Shook, Hardy & Bacon.
Attorneys can find a host of tools, including a time reporting system, Office SharePoint Server 2007 team sites, and reference materials, such as online dictionaries and phone books. “The significant benefit that we receive from these integrations is that data can be pulled out of many of the native sources and repurposed for dynamic displays of business information,” says Weiss.
Enables Self-Serve Access to Information
Attorneys use Enterprise Search to access and search the six disparate data sources. According to Buford Epps, CityLink provides a great search tool that enables her to find people and information. “Now that all the information in CityLink is fully searchable, I can find information, news articles, and archived data myself, often after business hours. Before, if I needed help finding something from a person in the accounting department, I was restricted by the timeframe,” she says. “With integrated search and self-serve access to information, what used to take a day for another person to find, I’m finding in minutes.”
Enterprise Search not only empowers employees to find information themselves, but it also helps reduce productivity blocks due to time zones. “With the search capabilities built into CityLink, I can find what I need myself about 80 percent of the time, compared to only about 10 percent of the time with the old intranet,” says Buford Epps.
Drives Knowledge Management
For the SHB Applications Development Department, which Rowland manages, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provided a flexible Web-based knowledge management environment that it could tailor to meet the needs of SHB employees. With the flexibility to aggregate and present information in a way that is intuitive for attorneys, the team was able to configure the intranet to offer maximum value. For example, the intranet provides client-centric information. Today, attorneys can dynamically aggregate up-to-the-minute information regarding their clients or team members. They can easily identify individuals who have a relationship with a client or which attorneys have experience with a specific industry group.
“We are now able to pull together all the information specific to a client or a matter all the way down to billing guidelines,” says Schlomann. “We also display the ethical wall information for every matter.”
Buford Epps continues, “My favorite feature of CityLink is the ability to go online and look at the database of open matters. It used to take a couple of hours to get information from our records department, but with CityLink, I can do a search on the client, find out the attorneys involved in the matter, and read the initial engagement letter, all while I’m on the call with the client.”
Improves People Search
Enterprise Search within CityLink offers streamlined access to employee biographies. For a firm with more than 500 attorneys dispersed around the globe this is a significant advantage. “We have an improved directory function right within CityLink,” says Weiss. “There’s a lot of good information, in addition to the attorney biography that you get on the Web portal. If you are getting ready to work with a colleague in another city, you can determine who their key clients are, find out what they’re working on right now, see their current case load, and look at the interest groups they’ve represented, all with the click of a button.”
Reduces Nonbillable Hours
A better organized intranet with integrated, consolidated tools on the desktop coupled with improved search reduces the time attorneys spend on administrative functions.