This past week members discussed the cost of transferring data for lateral moves and more. Want to learn more about the upcoming SharePoint || Office 365 Symposium? Read the guest post from the Symposium keynote speaker, Richard Harbridge. Also hear from Sean Coleman of BA Insight and Ted Theodoropoulos of Acrowire about their session SharePoint 2016. Explore curated sources on these topics including some from ILTA’s treasure chest.
Data Transfer Considerations
We often focus on the upfront costs of lateral hires and moves including signing bonuses, compensation agreements and legal recruiter fees for those laterals joining a firm and the potential loss of a client for those leaving a firm. However, the effort to transfer client files and all related materials exacts another cost, personnel time. As an industry we know lateral movement continues at a rapid pace. ILTA has tools to help manage your data transfer best practices. David Malkinson and Ben Weinberger provide guidance and a checklist in ILTA white paper, “Offboarding: Managing the Challenge of Attorney Exits.” Alexander Campbell reminds us to apply security best practices with laterals in the ILTA webinar, “Protect Your Information (Laterals and Internal Threats) – It’s Not Just Hackers!” Much of the work around successful, efficient and safe transfers of data revolves around a strong information governance program. Get started with tips from the ILTACON 2015 session, “Successfully Selling and Information Governance Program.”
Guest Post by Richard Harbridge, “Considerations Before Implementing Matter Center for Office 365”
Microsoft’s Office 365 Matter Center is a document management and collaboration solution created specifically with law firms and legal departments in mind. Many customers are already experiencing how Matter Center helps people work anywhere, anytime and from any device, and some have begun to see greater possibilities with a little well-planned development effort on Office 365 or within Office 2013/2016 using add-ins and Azure (the code and solution are updated regularly on GitHub).
Matter Center for Office 365 is a great development, but before you get too excited, there are five critical questions derived from real-world experience that your organization needs to ask before jumping in.
- Is your organization ready to embrace and invest in Office 365?
- Is your organization technically prepared for Office 365 and Matter Center?
- Does your organization have a plan to migrate content and processes?
- Does your organization have the talent available?
- How will your organization integrate, customize or update Matter Center?
The rest of Richard’s article will appear in ILTA’s summer Peer to Peer magazine. Before then, find out the answers to these questions and more at the SharePoint || Office 365 Symposium in Baltimore June 8-9. http://sharepoint.iltanet.org
SharePoint || Office 365 Symposium – Sean Coleman of BA Insight and Ted Theodoropoulos of Acrowire Discuss Their Upcoming Session, “SharePoint 2016: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”
I spoke with Sean Coleman and Ted Theodoropoulos about SharePoint 2016, security in the cloud and their upcoming session at the SharePoint||Office 365 Symposium, “SharePoint 2016: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Sean and Ted present together regularly and have spoken at the Symposium in past years. They believe the addition this year of the Office 365 track will provide attendees with insight into migration to a hybrid or cloud solution. Ted said fiscal challenges in the legal market have delayed migration from on premise to the cloud for some firms. “Spending money for IT, especially for things that already work, doesn’t make a lot of sense to them (legal IT).” However, if firms run on unsupported version of Windows, the greater security risk may accelerate a migration. Sean believes some in the legal market resist moving to the cloud citing security. “Security is typically what people say but I think what they mean is loss of control... before I could go put my hands on where it (data) is and now I can’t.” Sean believes firms can succeed in the cloud or a hybrid solution if they adapt to a new mindset on data location, determine how they will operate in the cloud and develop appropriate security measures.
The Good: Sean hopes to encourage the application of the new user interface capabilities in SharePoint 2016. With people accustomed to mobile, touch friendly and responsive design in personal online tools, law firms should leverage the improved user interface tools in SharePoint 2016 for their internal applications. Users expect it. Both Sean and Ted spoke about the unique hybrid approach in legal. Working with customers of BA Insight, Sean believes hybrid solutions will remain in the market for the next three to five years. Sean explained some benefits to a hybrid solution. For instance, Microsoft can manage the search index freeing the law firm IT department to focus on business solutions. Ted sees more legal technology vendors with product development underway or putting Office 365 and hybrid solutions on their roadmap for development. This progress should improve firms’ migrations to a hybrid or the cloud. Ted will focus on highlights relevant to the legal market from the recent Future of SharePoint announcement from Microsoft. For a full preview, see Ted’s Acrowire blog post from last week, “You Thought SharePoint Was Dead.” He writes about his views on the future of SharePoint and the improvements in security, file sharing, mobility and an open and connected platform.
The Bad and Ugly: Luckily “The Bad and Ugly” portion of the session will focus on global data privacy restrictions and futureproofing, not doom and gloom. Sean will address lessons learned from clients with heavily used legacy platforms. He says, “Make sure that you have agility and flexibility in what you build because the technology is always going to change… if Microsoft does pivot, then you’re not stuck with a large problem.” Perhaps “the ugly” comes into play with global law firms needing to comply with privacy laws outside the United States and certain client requirements regarding data. Sean explained, “Office 365 is then a very tough thing to bring into the mix because a lot of the data is transient.” Having worked with some large SharePoint customers migrating from on premise to the cloud, Ted says “we’ve (Acrowire) seen the good, the bad and the ugly.” He and Sean hope attendees’ bring questions to this session and the entire Symposium.
In closing my conversations with Sean and Ted, I asked them to describe a favorite unique SharePoint application. Ted spoke of a practice management solution built in SharePoint using Matter Center and Sean liked examples of “virtual company yard sales” for selling theatre and sports ticket and more. Sean said “I’m not an advocate of spending a lot of hours of your day on it” but this space can create community in your organization, drive SharePoint usage, increase interaction with peers, and generate new ideas for innovative applications using SharePoint.
SOMETHING EXTRA – Highlights from the Legal Marketing Association P3 Conference in Chicago
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the LMA P3 Conference in Chicago. The Legal Marketing Association holds this practice innovation conference each year to focus on the three “p’s” of pricing, project management and process improvement. The session opened with a keynote by Jeff Carr, the leader of ValoremNext and former Senior Vice President and General Counsel of FMC Technologies. He discussed an issue he has championed for decades, efficient billing focused on value rather than the billable hour. I attended sessions on leveraging data to create efficiencies in current matters and better budget planning for future matters. Presenters also addressed the realities and pain points around capturing data based on attorney work. “Understand Your Story: Leveraging Data Analytics to Uncover Your Hidden Strengths,” presented by ILTA with Andy Peterson of Davis Wright Tremaine and Christian Zust of Bryan Cave speaking, discussed the two projects behind the ILTA Peer Awards winners for Innovative Law Firm of the Year awarded in 2014 and 2015. Andy and Chris shared how their innovative projects continue to generate new work and new business solutions for their firms. Another session, “The Evolving Role of Legal Operations” moderated by the LMA P3 co-chair, Keith Maziarek, brought a panel of three in-house legal operations professionals from Motorola, Archers Daniels Midland and Corning Incorporated to discuss their roles and responsibilities in their organizations. The audience had many questions about what they, outside counsel, can do differently to get better outcomes for all. In return, the panel had questions for the audience about showing value. This year, the LMA P3 celebrated its 4th conference on pricing, project management and process improvement strongly focusing on applying data to help determine value and drive efficiency.
As ILTA’s content curator, I’m always monitoring the discussion forums to discover what topics are top-of-mind among the members. Each week, I focus on a few areas that spark your interest, and I provide some curated resources to assist your own information-gathering on the topics. If there are specific topics you would like assistance exploring, please contact me at joanne@iltanet.org