Please enjoy this helpful takeaway created by the panelists after the March 26th virtual roundtable entitled Matter Profiling Part 2: Moving Forward.
Takeaway - Matter Profiling Part 2: Moving Forward
(3/26/2019)
Moderator: Carrie Remhof
Panelists: Kate Cain, Keli Whitnell, Heather Rivera, Marybeth Corbett
Matter Profiling Part 1 Recap:
- Set initial goals to keep focused and measure your success
- Capture anecdotal examples along the way to communicate the value
- Partner with IT early on to understand where data lives, who owns it now and who maintains it going forward
- Start by setting up your profiles to answer the current questions that stakeholders are asking
- Design fields to tell the matter’s story – don’t make a long unattainable list
- Share common fields across profiles as much as possible – eases future searching and reporting
- Clearly define the role of who will complete the profiles, align profiles to the order of work
- Leverage other internal systems to capture matter details
Processes and Adoption (Adoption – getting them to use the matters and completing the profiles)
- How do you get started?
- Partner and management buy-in and communications
- Collaborate with attorneys and other departments to determine what data to collect and what can be leveraged form existing systems, set attainable goals
- Get in front of responsible parties to explain the process and why it is import – specialized reports, pitches, rankings, precedents
How can you leverage what already exists?
- Start with a credible source, take what you know to get started
- Build critical mass of content in Marketing. Starting with actual content
- Consolidate spreadsheets and offline data to a single place
- Specific practice and subgroup focuses, latch onto existing processes
How do you message the importance of matter profiling?
- Messaging – by audience, Partners vs. Associates
- Defined goal for each
- This is how Matter Profiling will help you
How did you develop your roll-out plan? How did you manage change and encourage user adoption?
- Messaging – by audience, Partners vs. Associates
- Defined goal for each
- This is how Matter Profiling will help you
How do you manage differences across different practices?
- Differences by practice, deals vs. non-deals. Transactions compared to Litigation and Regulatory
What is your goal with matter profiling? How do you measure progress?
- Actively profiling across the firm
- Adoption metrics
How do you keep user adoption strong years after rollout?
- Continuous check-ins continue to find wins and celebrate
Collaboration: Pricing, KM and Marketing:
- Pricing, KM and marketing take different data; how can you work together and why
- A significant amount of matter information will benefit Pricing, KM and Marketing activities – particularly the core matter characteristics.
- Variations in interest often involve the level of detail and precision desired – for example:
- KM wants to find some good sample documents from a couple of recent buy-side asset purchase transactions
- Marketing needs to know exactly how many buy-side assets purchases the firm did in 2018, and their total deal value
- Pricing needs to estimate how much time it takes to do an average buy-side asset purchase, and what “gotcha” issues could derail that estimate
- The Experience System may just serve as a starting point. The KM seeker may identify the buy-side asset purchases he/she wants to explore, but then need to search the DMS or enterprise search tool for the sample documents.
- Pricing may find enough information to estimate an “average” deal time but have to follow-up with lawyers to identify what caused some outliers to go off the track.
- The matter profile will likely be built out over time – hopefully with contributions from all teams.
- Not every matter will warrant a “full profile.” Particularly in the Pricing area, the number of desired data points can be large. It may make sense to target a useful group of representative matters for this treatment.
- Like always, it is important to engage all stakeholders early in the process, and to build a sense of shared responsibility. Try to avert situations where one team blames another when they can’t find the info they want.
- It is important to set realistic expectations. Unless you have an army of matter-profilers (or some very good historic data that can be imported), developing good matter profiles takes time.
How can you benefit from this?
- Starting with a suggested list developed by KM, it was easy to engage other teams to add additional elements to capture for pricing and marketing
- Working with a “we’re all in this together” mentality helped shaped the system to be successful for all
- You’ve gotten started – now how do you leverage other resources/data sources and collaborate across practice groups?
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