extranets – Compliance Building

Corresponding with Cornelius – a new series of blog posts

Not all of my online conversations take place here at Compliance Building. I try to make as many comments in other places as I do here. Twitter is a sporadic stream of thoughts, comments, and replies. I also try to leave as many comments on other blogs as I do posts here. I think you should join some of those other conversations. Here are some other blog posts that caught my eye and made me leave some commentary.

Corresponding with Cornelius on Collaboration with Clients by David Hobbie at Caselines

A follow up to my earlier post on Extranets for law Firm and Client Collaboration

Why Corporate Ethics is Usually an Oxymoron by Charles Green of Trust Matters

Charlie does not like the idea of ethics being treated as separate process and an individual course. I agreed.

Live Events in the Age of Social Media by Bill Pollak of Incisive Media

Bill points out the ways Twitter and the social internet are changing the ways conferences are run and what happens after. I point out that they are also changing what happens before the conference.

How Are Lawyers using Twitter by Simon Chester on Slaw.ca

I share the ways I use Twitter.

Training: What Works? By Alexandra Wrage on the wrageblog

A great grouping of four types of workers in anti-bribery training. I note that the same paradigm can be applied to most compliance and ethics training.

Social Networks and Employer Branding by Brand for Talent

Mark and I are writing some guidelines on the use of social media for our readers. We invite you to join the conversation.Let us know how you think we can embrace these tools versus police them. I offered up my draft blogging / social internet policy.

The Three Types of Collaboration by Jordan Furlong of Law 21

Jordan sets out a paradigm of three types of collaboration: Lawyer-to-lawyer, lawyer-to-client, and client-to-client. It is one of the few times I have disagreed with Jordan.

I have to credit David Hobbie with coming up with the phrase “Corresponding with Cornelius” which led to this blog post title and this new series of blog posts. (At least new for me.)

Martindale-Hubbell’s Counsel to Counsel Forum

The folks over at Martindale-Hubbell were nice enough to invite me to their latest Counsel to Counsel Forum in Washington D.C. The forum operates under the rule that “what is said in the room stays in the room” so I will not share any details, but there were a few themes that I think I can share.

The intent of Martindale-Hubbell Counsel to Counsel Forums is to bring together senior corporate counsel and a few law firm partners to share best practices in the management of corporate legal departments, provide an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue about key issues, and to network in a relaxed atmosphere. I think it accomplished those goals.

The two day forum kicked off with panel discussing challenges to building legal teams and ways to better manage in-house/law firm teams. That lead to a break out session that continued some of the discussions. It became clear that big law firms may not understand the pressures that many in-house legal departments are experiencing. Several attendees noted that their budgets had been dramatically slashed. Any law firm sending out a rate increase notice is going to risk getting fired on the spot.

The second day kicked off on a (high?) note with my panel on Technology, Tools & Knowledge Management for High-Performance Legal Teams 2.0. I was joined by Jeff Brandt and Eugene Weitz. I implored the audience to think beyond email. I think one of the ways to build a better legal team is to build better ways to communicate. My earlier post on Extranets for Law Firm and Client Collaboration – Moving Beyond Email embodied most of my points. As Jessica Lipnack taught me, I tried to get around the room and have everyone introduce themselves and bring up an example. We didn’t get very far in the introductions because the discussion really kicked off. One attendee shared a success story with SharePoint. I shared my love/hate relationship with SharePoint.

We moved on to another session about teams, the characteristics of good teams, the characteristics of bad teams, and some ways to covert your team from bad to good.

Of course there were many interjections about Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Thankfully, they were more like product placements than sales pitches. Of course the Forum was on their dime so Martindale had every right to pitch their product. I skipped one session to speak with some of the folks behind Connected. They seem committed to developing the community and continuing to improve it. My take is that they are struggling with how to deal with Web 2.0 and online communities, just like most companies are struggling with it. But they do see the challenges and the opportunities. They are listening to the criticism, learning, and incorporating suggestions into the development of the platform.

I ended the day by chairing the breakout session on compliance, risk, and governance. The attendees in the session were very diverse with very different needs and different concerns. There were several common themes and concerns. Susan Slisz of LexisNexis did a great job helping the organize the discussion. I think everyone in the session had something they could bring back to their company.

If you have the opportunity to attend a Martindale-Hubbell Counsel to Counsel Forum you should go. It will be well worth your time.

Extranets for Law Firm and Client Collaboration – Moving Beyond Email

project_extranet

One of the problems with collaboration between law firms and their clients is that too much of it happens through email. Email is fast, allows you to send the same message to lots of people, and is inexpensive.

But it is still a set of messages sent back and forth, much like the Pony Express. To figure out what is going on you need to comb through the messages and hope that you end up looking at the latest message. Since email is so fast and so inexpensive, you often end up with a barrage of short ineffective messages.

With email, the message ends up in a different place for the sender and recipient. If I send the email, it is in my sent items and it ends up in the inbox for the recipient. Each recipient may do something different with that email once it’s in their email in-box. Some may pile it on top of the thousands of other emails in their inbox, some may file it in another email folder, some may print and delete, and some may just delete.

There has been talk for years of using extranets to change the way law firms and their clients communicate. Unfortunately, it seems there has been more talking than there have been successful extranets.

The trouble with deploying a successful extranet is finding both an attorney team and a client team that want to share information by using an extranet.

The most common extranet for a legal team is the document war room seen in larger acquisition transactions. There is a great benefit to having the documents in one place, typically with some great security. But they lack the communications tools needed to move it beyond being merely an online fileroom.

An extranet can be poorly organized and messy, making the relevant information hard to find. But organizing the information in a meaningful way can save lots of time and money for both the law firm and the client.

One of challenges for using an extranet platform is deciding which one to use. Should it be sponsored by the law firm or the client? If it is sponsored by the law firm, a few issues arise. One, the law firm will have to allow access to the client’s other law firms working on similar matters or the client will have to work with a different extranet for each of its different law firms. If the client sponsors the extranet, then the client bears the expense and maintenance burden of the extranet platform. There also will be the expense and resources spent on showing the law firm how to use the extranet platform.

One barrier to overcome is that there are a broad variety of possible extranet platforms that operate very differently and provide information in very different ways. Some of the newer 2.0 tools show how the web can be better used as a collaboration space. They also break down some of the barriers to using an extranet. Perhaps the next generation of extranets will be more effective. The answer may be SharePoint. Microsoft is pushing its SharePoint platform causing it to become more pervasive and bringing some of the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 into many business environments. By having a common platform, you could break down some of the barriers to extranet adoption.