When asked where his company’s greatest assets were located, advertising legend David Oglivy is said to have replied, “They ride up and down the elevator every day.”  In a similar respect, one of a law firm’s greatest assets resides in its intellectual capital – the work product that’s been accumulated over years of practice.  If a firm can effectively access this work product, they have a much better opportunity to successfully implement a best practices program.  Likewise, the firm will provide a higher level of client service, as fewer billable hours will be incurred “reinventing the wheel” when drafting documents.  This translates to more client value, as document turnaround is significantly expedited.

One of the greatest challenges that my firm, Hancock Rothert & Bunshoft, has faced has been finding an effective tool for helping the firm’s 80 attorneys (in five offices in the western United States and London, England, headquartered in San Francisco) isolate the work product that matters to their practices.  Among our various practice groups, we have more than 730,000 discrete documents in our Document Management System.  While the DMS does a fine job of aggregating all of a firm’s work product into one system, it is not a practical tool for profiling documents, which results in inadequate searching capabilities.  Put another way—if an attorney needs to search by criteria other than author or client matter, the search mechanisms available in the DMS won’t cut it. 

In the fall of 2002 (shortly before I joined the firm), the firm recognized that the DMS was not adequate for the work product retrieval task at hand, and began investigating different technology options that fell under the rubric of Knowledge Management.  The primary option that was being considered was developed by a leading publisher, and provided links between the publisher’s case and statutory citations, and the firm’s documents that contain those citations.

The firm was fairly far along in the evaluation process of this established KM product when another knowledge management tool called RealPractice™ (from Practice Technologies, Inc., www.practicetechnologies.com) was recommended for consideration.  The RealPractice approach to work product retrieval is radically different from the other  approach being considered.  Where the first approach locates documents that relate to the substantive law, RealPractice actually locates specific document types keyed to specific jurisdictions. This is made possible by the program’s profiling engine, which creates meaningful abstracts of documents based upon their contents, according to legal criteria.  This obviates the need for accurate profiling on the part of the attorney when the document is entered into the DMS.  Thanks to this feature, RealPractice provides accurate, category-based searching without necessitating the creation of complicated search strings, and actually enables search and retrieval which can’t be achieved with full text searching alone. 

RealPractice was enthusiastically received by the attorneys who reviewed it, but in December of  2002, Hancock opted for the KM product from the more established company, citing synergies with existing systems and a concern that as a newcomer, Practice Technologies didn’t have a proven track record in the market.  Hancock had recently experienced an unsatisfactory software installation from a small vendor, and in the end, a “no one got fired for buying IBM” mindset was in place. 

The implementation of the first KM system began in June of 2003, a few months after I had joined the firm.  The implementation was “challenging.”  Several different teams from the vendor were dispatched to San Francisco to work on the deployment, and the players changed frequently.  One year into the process we didn’t have a functional KM system.  It was very cumbersome to vet and review documents, and to upload them into the system. 

By June 2004, it was obvious that we needed to revisit our KM issues.  We needed an application that answered the question that our attorneys were asking:  where can we find specific documents dealing with specific issues in specific jurisdictions?   At that time the firm was evaluating and implementing SmartRules, a procedural compliance tool also developed by Practice Technologies.  We extended an invitation for PTI to again present their technology, and agreed to run a pilot program to compare the two products, side by side.

Within two weeks, Practice Technologies had run a very large set of work product through their profiling and categorization engines, and the system was made available for review by our focus group of senior associates and partners.  When compared to the first system, it was no contest.  The RealPractice search results showed on-point work product categorized by document type, jurisdiction, substantive law as well as key words, all of which could be linked back to substantive legal products from Lexis or West.  Since each search result appeared with an abstract, the user could discern the document’s value without having to open it up. 

Consistent with the initial RealPractice demonstration at Hancock a year and a half before, attorneys had an emphatically positive reaction to the technology.  The words of one senior associate on the evaluation team summed up the demonstration.  As he pointed to the screen where RealPractice was running, he said, “That’s what I want.” 

After conducting an expanded pilot with RealPractice, practice group chairs and the firm’s Technology Committee recommended to the Executive Committee that we proceed with the purchase of RealPractice.  Our enterprise license covered approximately 150 seats, and cost less than $125,000 in the first year, including comprehensive support and maintenance.  This decision was made in August, and by October RealPractice was fully implemented. 

Our RealPractice implementation was among the top three technology installations I have experienced in more than 20 years as a senior I.T. manager.  We met with the RealPractice project team to identify, in the broadest sense, where our work product resided in the DMS, and they took care of the rest.  With its document retrieval and vetting tools, the RealPractice system was able to quickly distinguish meaningful work product from all the accumulated “noise” that exists in the DMS.  Then the profiling tools were optimized and deployed against the documents with no intervention required by either firm I.T. staff, practitioners, or support staff.  The same representatives from Practice Technologies worked with us throughout the roll-out.  That they had all practiced law at one point or another gave their recommendations on configuring the system added value. 

The ease of the implementation was only exceeded by the extraordinary reaction of the firm’s attorneys.  The product’s ease of use helped to expedite adoption, which has been remarkably high for a product of its nature.  Attorneys liken it to “Googling.”  During a training session, one of the attorneys described the level of integration between RealPractice and SmartRules as, “This is magic.”

It’s not uncommon to be second-guessed about significant I.T. decisions.  After another training session, I was pleased to hear one of the firm’s most senior partners say, “We’ve been trying to solve this problem as long as I’ve been in practice.  I can’t believe that it’s finally been achieved.”

Norm Weiner was the Director of Technology at San Francisco-based Hancock Rothert & Bunshoft.  Hancock was recently acquired by Duane Morris, which continues to use RealPractice.