1Syd 4/492945

Case Study: Minter Ellison Lawyers

Martin Telfer

CIO

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Agenda -1

•who is Minter Ellison ?

•lawyers - the ultimate knowledge workers?

•tools of the trade

•lawyers & KM

•intranets - a logical first step for lawyers

•the intranet pilots and why we needed a web CMS

•choosing a solution

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Agenda - 2

•the ME public web site project

•where are we today?

•the benefits

•lawyers and portals

•who needs application centric paradigms?

•the Context Portal - a concept

•Q&A

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Who is Minter Ellison?

•Minter Ellison is a top-tier regional law firm and the 15th largest law firm in the world. The firm has more than doubled in size since 1995 and now has over 2000 people working in seven countries.

•Offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Adelaide, Auckland, Wellington, Hong Kong, London, Bangkok, Shanghai and San Francisco.

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Lawyers - the ultimate Knowledge Workers?

•law firms aren’t corporations

•cross office and cross practice working is surprisingly limited

•there is more routine work than you might think

•cultural issues

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Tools of the trade

•Office - though mostly for WP

•Document Management - peculiar to lawyers?

•Email

•on-line information

•administration - HR, time & billing, CPD...

•Knowledge Management

•Collaboration

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Lawyers and KM

•limited success

•tied to technology

•culture kills it

•has lost some credibility

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Lawyers and Collaboration

•the law is not a real time business…

•… even though responsiveness is a key client complaint

•lawyers are conservative, risk-averse people

•little or no take up of IM, Sametime, Netmeeting

•have used third party web based repositories for multi party multi national deals

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Intranets - a logical first step for lawyers

•bring together diverse information sources

•build team/practice group bonds through communal ownership

•relatively easy and low cost - “quick win”…

•… but, quickly developed the bottleneck problem

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Why a WCMS?

•pilots used Dreamweaver and folder structure

•pilots very successful - demand building rapidly

•needed to decentralise content creation and management to practice groups

•pilots tied in with a growing commitment to become “Knowledge Driven”

•needed workflow for drafting & approval

•needed a security model

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Choosing a solution

•Spread of offerings from toolkits to polished systems

•Wide range of implementation times and prices

•Our key criteria

•ease of use

•minimal training /HTML knowledge

•time to deploy

•scalable

•platform for future expansion

•cost

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The ME Public Web Site Project

•hosted by CSC through acquisition of eDime

•Spectra on Cold Fusion

•CSC wanted out

•use of Aptrix made sense

•building skills already

•existing investment

•IBM managed transition under tight time constraints

•now deployed (no change to appearance)

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Where are we today?

•most Divisional intranets deployed

•web site deployed

•tidying up old, geographical “admin” intranets

•adding functionality (eg booking systems)

•starting to think about portals

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Benefits

•decentralised content creation

•workflow for submission/approval

•standards imposed on appearance

•no technical knowledge needed for most-used content

•public web site on same system - content easily shared

•rapid deployment of new intranets based on templates

•Websphere as a portal platform

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Lawyers and Portals

•“traditional” portal model will deliver some benefits….but

•there is a more pressing problem - context

•current application centric paradigms not helpful

•need client & matter portal

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The context portal - a concept

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