Members recently discussed department responsibility for opening new matters, soft skills training, the return on investment for aligning with security standard ISO 27001 and more. Explore curated sources on these topics including some from ILTA’s treasure chest.
Matter Intake
When reading the discussion threads in any Community on ILTA, you quickly realize law firms similar in size, location, and practice areas often have different departmental structures. Yet, best practices and smart work-flow processes can be applied anywhere. For ethical reasons, the opening of new matters must be completed with care. For business, new matters must be opened quickly. To improve the matter intake process, see “Better Business Results Through Better Business Intake Parts I and II” from ILTACON 2015. For workflow tool recommendations, consider “Innovative Workflows and Business Process Automation” from the ILTA SharePoint Symposium in June. This session highlights when and how to use SharePoint and when to transition to a different tool.
Soft Skills
Soft skills include communication, problem solving, conflict resolution, collaboration and more. We must teach our team and ourselves soft skills. For guidance, Fast Company provides “6 Steps to Improving Your Current Employees’ Soft Skills.” Emotional Intelligence guru, Daniel Goleman, addresses issues with communication in “How to Overcome Communication Breakdowns” and professionalism in “Help Young Talent Develop a Professional Mindset.” I would argue, soft skills in a legal setting additionally include understanding the climate and hierarchy within a law firm or law department. Because few if any of us were born into a legal setting, we should help newcomers understand this specific environment. We can also use the soft skill of communication to listen to newcomers. Perhaps “the way we’ve always done it” no longer applies.
Security and ISO 27001
We cannot escape security threats but we can work to prevent attacks. Determining the right level of security for your organization presents challenges. The LegalSEC Connected Community provides helpful resources to assess your current security and find security solutions. If you need to convince management to align with the ISO 27001, consider using the PowerPoint template, “Benefits of ISO27001.” To determine where your peer organizations lie in the ISO 27001 certification spectrum, review “ISO Certification – Momentum in the Legal Industry.” For statistics and more detail, read the latest survey by ILTA’s LegalSEC Steering Committee and Digital Defense, Inc., “2015 Study of the Legal Industry’s Information Security Assessment Practices.”
Something Extra – ILTA TV videos, Taxonomy and the ILTA Connected Community App
On ILTA TV at ILTACON 2015 ILTA thought leaders shared visions for the future, their plans to increase diversity and what they see as the greatest threats to the legal industry with Randi Mayes, Executive Director of ILTA, and Monica Bay, freelance journalist and Fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
As a librarian, the latest ILTA KM Blog appealed to me. Be sure to read Andrea Alliston’s contribution in “Does Anyone Do Taxonomy Anymore?”
During the Mimecast outage, many of us could not send or receive emails. This meant finding alternative ways to communicate in the discussion groups on the Connected Community. With new functionality, the ILTA – Connected Community app can notify you of all new discussion posts in your subscribed communities. Many members kept abreast of the Mimecast outage and helped peers develop workarounds even though they could not receive or send emails. To configure this yourself for your communities follow these steps:
1. Download the mobile app and login.
2. Click on the menu in the top right hand corner and scroll down to one of your communities and touch it to be brought to the community home page.
3. Click the cog wheel to be brought to your discussion settings for that community and you will see your options. Select your preference and press Save.
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.