RSS feedsAnyone who still imagines that law firms are dinosaurs when it comes to adopting new technology should lay that belief to rest. In the past year, the global law firm Allen & Overy has embraced Web 2.0 technologies at a time when many corporates are still trying to work out what they’re for.
The firm’s innovative use of the social software that makes up Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, has attracted a good deal of attention. That it has been so successful is in large part down to the efforts of Ruth Ward, Allen & Overy’s head of knowledge management. With offices in 25 countries, 4,900 staff and expertise in multiple areas, including tax, employment law and intellectual property, the firm has a strong interest in making sure knowledge is shared and disseminated as effectively as possible among staff.
Ward had been a banking lawyer since 1992, but was attracted to the knowledge management role at Allen & Overy because it meant working with the firm’s then global head of know-how, Philip Wood, an internationally renowned banking expert. After joining the firm as Wood’s deputy in 2000, Ward’s first task was to help Wood launch a series of online practice manuals for the firm’s main areas of business, and to help make them available globally.
The manuals themselves, known as Fountain Guides, were the result of Wood’s decision to bring together groups of Allen & Overy experts who would discuss, review and amend drafts that someone else then put into shape. It was an ambitious project, which involved publishing 70 online books in one day. “There was no chance to sit down,” says Ward. “It was all action from day one, and that was great. It was really nice to see something through to publication, and launched very quickly, within the three months in the job.”
Since then, Wood has retired and the knowledge management team has been re-organised twice. Ward now reports to associate director and global head of know-how and training David Jabbari, and her role is more focused, concentrating specifically on systems, new products and client projects.
Caught in the web
The idea for using Web 2.0 technology arose from a conversation Ward had with
Jabbari about 15 months ago, after both had attended a conference where Web 2.0
technology had been discussed. They could instantly see the benefits of using
blogs and wikis as a method of communicating and sharing information within the
firm. Although the business potential offered by blogs and wikis has been widely
noted, the number of businesses using them remains relatively small.
Ward took on the project, helped closely by a member of her team, the IT department and some external consultants, notably Lee Bryant at Headshift, a business specialising in the development of social software tools. When Ward and her colleagues spoke with Bryant, they were very open-minded about what they wanted and were happy to go with Bryant’s suggestion of using websites that combined both blog and wiki functionality in a single site.
It was instantly successful. “We had no idea that this type of site would become an Allen & Overy standard,” says Ward. “Actually, the design they came up with, and the integration of the two, seems to work really well and has become a standard Allen & Overy template.”
Ward and her team began by launching three experimental sites. One was for the professional support lawyers’ (PSL) team, the aim being to explore the use of the technology for communities such as cross-border teams who need to collaborate. The PSL team spanned all the firm’s offices and staff, all of whom had a common purpose in their role, and so was ideal for this purpose.
The second pilot site was built for a team of environment lawyers needing to build their knowledge on a new EU directive in the environmental area. The idea was to explore the usefulness of the technology for knowledge projects, in particular for improving processes for creating knowledge about new legislation. The third site was used to publish online newsletters at the office level in one of the firm’s jurisdictions.
The success of the initial three were soon followed by the launch of another six or seven sites, and a further 20 will follow this autumn. Most of the sites serve quite small communities – the biggest, according to Ward, serves about 150 people.
By popular demand
Ward was surprised at how quickly the sites took off. “One of the reasons it has
been so extraordinary is that people immediately got it,” she explains. “Just
show somebody three screen shots or two minutes of an online demo and they sit
there and go, ‘This is fantastic. It’s just what I want.’ It seems to speak
powerfully to anybody who’s not sufficiently techy to build their own intranet.”
Much of the success, she suggests, is down to the simplicity of the template. “Everything you would want a collaboration or communication site to do, ours does easily. And the ease-of-use for people who are going to champion and administer sites, and for the general user, is absolutely critical.”
One of Ward’s concerns is that users should not be put off using the sites by worries about security. Before launching the pilot sites, she visited Euan Semple, head of knowledge management solutions at the BBC, to find out how the broadcasting company deals with security and house rules. “His guidance was very much, ‘Keep it to the minimum. Keep the spirit of the wiki.’ That was quite an important message for us.”
Safe and sound
Ward decided not to create any sites where security would be a concern, so she
stayed clear of content relating to clients. She also kept house rules to a
minimum, so that people would be encouraged to post. “I was conscious that
lawyers are very different from people who work at the BBC, and I felt that
people might be reluctant to post, particularly if there were large warnings on
the site telling them they would be immediately expelled from the Law Society if
they posted anything defamatory.”
In the early stages, says Ward, her approach to the pilot sites was experimental. She didn’t have a clearly defined success criteria. Informal feedback was highly encouraging, however, and people have been very enthusiastic at the prospect of creating new sites.
Now there is a formal workflow process in place through which people can apply to have a site created, and the success of each site is monitored and reviewed. “Your success criteria have to relate to the business objectives of the site,” she says.
“In order to be a success, some sites depend on everybody’s contribution. But a site such as my Know-How Group site [as pictured with her], where I post more than anybody else, is an enhancement of my previous way of telling everybody what is going on. So, it has got rid of about four or five email groups, is much more immediate and much more chatty. If you had a set of criteria that said unless 90% of the population of any wiki site post once a week it is not a success, that might be appropriate for one site, but it might not be a true success factor for other sites.”
Ward acknowledges that as more and more information is added over time, ensuring that users can still easily find what they are looking for will be crucial to the wiki’s continuing success. She and her team have made sure that information within the wiki is labelled clearly to enable users to search for it later. “There’s the tiered structure of the wiki pages to help you get back to information, but even within the blog we have the concept of administrator-set categories and member-set themes, so every time you post a discussion, as well as choosing a category for it, you have the option to set your own theme. Both of those can be used to see the archive. It’s not just top-down classification; it’s bottom-up classification, because people can pick tags with themes that suit them when they make an individual post.”
When a site has reached the end of its useful life, it gets archived. “It may well be that the site is extremely useful in the six months of the project and then you shut it, and that’s fine, because you just archive the site. Similarly for our sites relating to knowledge projects, where you’re seeking to build your knowledge, it may be that once the legislation that everybody’s been preparing for is enacted, and Allen & Overy has rolled out its website for clients, maybe the site is archived because its purpose was at the beginning.”
The introduction of Web 2.0 technologies has also improved efficiency within the firm, says Ward. Traditionally, for example, queries were often dealt with through email lists: a group of people would receive an enquiry and respond to it. “Very often, the people who receive it don’t know if anybody else has picked up that query. And if they don’t reply to all, then somebody could end up responding twice or three times.
“But if they do reply to all, that means lots of people will receive two emails they didn’t want to see, maybe even three,” she says. “Whereas here, if you could imagine a user community using a blog or wiki for that purpose, everybody gets an alert that the question has been posted, they can see if anybody else has responded, and it’s immediately archived there.”
The more the merrier?
Because the sites have been so popular internally, Ward has considered whether
it would be useful to make new sites available on demand so that people could
just click a button and create a site. At the moment, the technology doesn’t
make that possible, but she also thinks there are benefits in having to go
through a formal application process. “The key to a successful site is very much
around the personality and the culture and the business usage. I think there is
a lot of value in having the more managed approach we have, where, from the
knowledge management team, we manage the application process and try to add as
much value as we can to ensure the sites we build are likely to be successful.”
Not surprisingly, the project has generated a lot of interest from both clients and competitors. Ward has been happy to carry out demonstrations for other law firms. “Like so many technologies or products in the knowledge management sector, seeing a few screen shots is one thing; getting it to work in your organisation – both in systems and culturally – is another.”
Allen & Overy, says Ward, has the reputation of being a particularly collegiate firm, where partners are willing to give their time to help the development of junior lawyers. Culturally, this meant that collaborative technologies were more likely to be successful than in other organisations.
Ward is now excited about the next phase of the project, which will involve rolling out a site to the knowledge management teams of key clients. She sees this as an extension of work that Allen & Overy already does. “We spend a lot of time with key clients. We bring them together and have lots of areas of common interest to discuss. It’s not just Allen & Overy telling our clients what we think works and doesn’t work; it’s about clients sharing their ideas with each other.”
This model of working, Ward believes, is becoming increasingly common, with businesses tending to enter into collaboration with each other. As an example, she cites the Banking Legal Technology Group, a consortium of major banks that has created a portal to share legal information from law firms such as Allen & Overy and Linklaters.
In future, it seems likely that this kind of collaboration will become the norm – and Ward will be able to say that she played a part in making it happen.
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