Introduction
Although SharePoint has been around for a decade, it now seems to be on everyone's lips. This article, based on a collaborative parallel session held at the Conference, aims to explore both SharePoint itself and in particular look at how legal information professionals can use their skills to add value when working in a SharePoint environment.
As I said at the Conference I don't claim to be an expert on SharePoint but I am independent, one of your peers and I'm not trying to sell you anything! (- imagine a faint ripple of laughter!).
Jackie Fishleigh
Payne Hicks Beach
Payne Hicks Beach is a top 100 firm in London. It has been in Lincoln's Inn since 1730, housed in various buildings around the Georgian beauty of New Square. For some photos of what I mean please visit our site at www.phb.co.uk. We have departments dealing with the Family, Tax/Trusts, Dispute Resolution, Property, Company/Commercial and Employment. The Family department is one of the largest in London and known for the work of Fiona Shackleton (now Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia). She had the misfortune to have a jug of water thrown over her in court by Heather Mills during our client, Paul McCartney's divorce. The images were beamed around the world and the incident seems to have gone down in legal history! Our Dispute Resolution department has a number of sailing clients because the Head, Richard Butcher is a former world dinghy sailing champion. We are sponsoring some of the sailors competing for the UK at Weymouth in 2012 including the wind surfers, Bryony Shaw and Nick Dempsey as well as sailors Iain Percy and Andrew “Bart” Simpson (Star class) and Paul Goodison (Laser class).
Knowledge Sharing at Payne Hicks Beach
After attending Harriet Creamer's session on “Knowledge Management Refocused” at the BIALL conference in 2010 I decided I should attempt to align myself more closely with the business. Just at the time when I was hoping to invite myself along to the Company/Commercial monthly departmental meeting, I received an e-mail from one of the Corporate Partners asking me to set up what he called an InfoBank of documents. Well they say timing is everything…it looked like the perfect opportunity! Fortunately I had recently written a paper on Knowledge Management and I circulated a shortened version of this to those attending. Planning and preparation are key. I had already shown the report to the Managing Partner who was complimentary. He was supportive of my aims and objectives. At the meeting I presented my paper on KM and provided a brief introduction to SharePoint as a potentially suitable way of managing the material electronically. The mood of the meeting was very positive and interested so in the end I found I was pushing at an open door and did not need to sell the idea very hard. It was agreed that a sub-committee would be set up to undertake a pilot project. This comprised two partners, a former partner now working as a consultant, an assistant and myself. Later our IT Director became involved.
At the first meeting of the sub-committee we hit a major hurdle. The stakeholders in the project wanted to use the PLC (Practical Law Company) taxonomy. Unfortunately the version of SharePoint we were using did not index to this degree of depth. We tried loading on some sample documents and even Bibles (large collections of documents related to the same deal/transaction). We have decided to keep things simple and use Microsoft Access – this is a tried and tested application used by Bailey Solutions for the Penlib Library Management System. We are hoping to install a SharePoint interface at a later date. Info Banks are now established in three departments – Company/Commercial, Employment and Property Litigation. In future we may look at rolling it out to other departments, namely Family and Tax/Trusts.
“Connectedness and openness” have taken over from “secrecy and empire-building” as keys to personal and collective success…
“Learning to Fly. Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organisations” by Chris Collison and Geoff ParcellFootnote 1
On a light note I find it mildly amusing that Learning to Fly is also the title for Victoria Beckham's autobiography! I wouldn't bother to look up KM in that index though! I am delighted Chris Collision was the Keynote speaker in Gateshead. He also invented the Naked Law Librarian tag. This came about when I attended one of his KM Masterclasses. Chris praised the way a team of librarians had tackled a group activity and put it down to naked librarian skills.
I like the above quotation and used it at that first Company/Commercial meeting. These days group working, networking, collaboration, crowd-sourcing and interaction between individuals are becoming the norm. The “Eat What You Kill” philosophy which used to be common, particularly amongst City lawyers now has less traction. A related subject to this which seems to be discussed increasingly in North America is the phenomenon of the Four generation workplace. I would recommend the article by Lewis (2011).Footnote 2
For the first time in modern history workplace demographics now span four generations:
Traditionalists: born 1922–1945. Their approach is a chain of command – may still occupy senior positions – delaying retirement due to pension concerns and poor state of economy. Loyal.
“tempered by the war, [and] disciplined by a hard and bitter peace”
Baby boomer: 1946–66. Change of command (largest generation currently in workforce). Products of post war baby boom. Optimists!
Generation X: 1967–1980. Self command. Sceptical. Sandwich generation stuck between two of the largest generations in recent history. Independent. Individualistic.
“breathes there a cohort group with a soul more dark or with such an edgy scepticism about them?” Douglas Copeland Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture”
Millenials (also known as Nexters, Generation Y, Echo Boomers and the Net Generation): 1981–2000. Command? Better to collaborate! Have grown up with computers, etc. Accustomed to getting what they want when they want it! Optimistic. Confident.
“the fawned-on spawn, the coddled and confident offspring of the most age-diverse groups of parents ever”.
The willingnessness or otherwise of different groups of lawyers to embrace or shrink from KM may well be linked to a greater or lesser extent to the above.
Law librarians stripped bare …what are our particular skills?
Law librarians have many skills but the core ones as revealed at a brain storming during a meeting of the London Information and Knowledge Exchange in 2010 are as follows:
Communication skills
In the words of Lord Alan Sugar… “never, ever underestimate” the power of good communication. It is incredibly important – it always has been and always will be. I managed to persuade our Property Litigation team to set up an Info Bank for their documents. They had tried to set this up before with our IT department but nothing had happened. Only through clear and effective communication was I able to persuade the key players to attend a meeting to gets things set up and moving forward.
Specialist knowledge
Our in depth knowledge of legal research gives us “the edge”. We are persistent, determined and thorough.
Influencing and negotiation skills
Not only useful for dealing with publishers and suppliers, our powers of persuasion can help us keep SharePoint projects on track and parties working successful together. Librarians are also professional, independent minded and even handed in their dealings with others which is a great advantage in getting things done. Or in the lyrics of Elvis “a little less conversation, a little more action”!
ICT – “ the use of information in order to meet human need or purpose including the use of contemporary devices such as the Internet.”
While legal information pros are not gurus or gadget victims they do tend to be more advanced technically than the majority of lawyers.
Organisation of information
Turning paper or electronic information chaos into order is second nature to a law librarian.
Lawyers, however talented, do not seem to be very good at indexing and organising their own documents in comparison. We agreed with our Company/Commercial department to set up a database called Info Bank. Within a few weeks a Partner had started to call it “DocSave”! Later a document which screamed Corporate Governance did not have this keyword included in the indexing terms. Other documents were loaded on which had no dates or parties added!
One might say, leave it to the IT department but they have no capacity to deal with the nitty gritty. They run a lot of applications and are looking at the bigger picture.
Which areas are we experts on?
Our cores areas are:
Usability
Because we spend a lot of time searching for documents we have a unique insight into the importance of findability!
Content
We are obsessed with the quality, accuracy and currency of content.
N.B. If you ever need to get yourself invited along to a meeting to discuss the Intranet or KM say that your passion is usability and content. It is very difficult for anyone, however senior, to deny that these are crucial areas. This is exactly how I got myself involved with our Intranet and I feel it is all the better for it.
What is SharePoint?
In a nutshell, SharePoint is a content management platform and Microsoft's solution for collaboration and document management. It is not just another application but a new way of working. This is why people say they are working in a “SharePoint environment”.
It is possible that you are using SharePoint in one form or another without even realising it! I used the e-mail discussion forum for CILIP Update Editorial Panel for over a year without realising it was run on SharePoint. If your organisation is one of the many using Microsoft's Office package then you will have some access to SharePoint (or your IT department will at any rate).
Why SharePoint?
SharePoint is Microsoft's fastest growing product and key to Microsoft's software vision of the future. It integrates with Windows Server software and Microsoft Office. The advantage of this is that uploading documents is easy. You can just copy documents from Word.
SharePoint is here to stay and it is ubiquitous. Bill Gates says SharePoint will be to the noughties what Microsoft Office was to the 90s e.g. Outlook, Word, Excel etc.
It is relatively cheap and user-friendly or so they say. If you wish to find out more about its user friendliness or otherwise please see my 2011 LIM article.Footnote 3
One law librarian asked her IT department to explain to her what SharePoint was – the answer was short and dramatic: “It's a revolution – it can do anything you want!”. An information worker at a NetIKX/CLSIG seminar commented “We're using SharePoint because someone heard it was free”.
“Research on collaboration and SharePoint in the UK – All is Not Well”, a report dated May 2011 commissioned by Fujitsu, referred to by Michael Sampson, collaboration strategist:
shows that of all collaboration technologies, SharePoint is by far the most common. 92% of enterprise organisations using collaboration software use SharePoint and for over three-quarters of organisations (78%) SharePoint is the only collaborative technology that they use. But on average only 60% of SharePoint sites are active; many organisations are clearly failing to maximise their SharePoint investment.
Furthermore when looking more broadly at collaboration technology, IT managers are not confident about the benefits it brings. 59% believe that collaborative and content sharing applications will drive efficiency improvement within their enterprise but only 40% believe it will drive cost savings within their enterprise.
A few other findings of interest from the research:
“The success of collaboration technology is a ‘leap of faith for IT managers’.
Less than a third of IT managers feel their organizations have the skills required to make collaboration happen to users' satisfaction”.
“SharePoint is the answer”
To the e-mail plus attachment nightmare. What is meant by this is the confusion, time wasting and risk of mistakes produced when colleagues working on a document generate different amendments and versions of that document. The beauty of SharePoint is that different individuals can access the same document via a team site and contribute to the evolution of the same document. E-mail does not work particularly well as a means of communicating with large numbers of people in these situations. It is still ok for one to one communication though!
James Akrigg, Microsoft SharePoint developer says their approach is “SharePoint is the answer, what is the question?”
Who uses SharePoint?
SharePoint is used widely by a huge range of organisations – e.g. BT, BAE, many government organisations, charities, universities, property companies – including Jones Lang LaSalle (one of the largest users of all) and law firms, notably Clifford Chance and Lewis Silkin.
In a recent Law Society library future trends survey 3 out of 4 UK law firm respondents said they worked with SharePoint.
What are people doing with SharePoint?
According a Michael Sampson Legal Services Survey conducted in August 2010 the key areas are:
1. Supporting team collaboration;
2. Publishing intranet content;
3. Providing document management services – some law firms are “betting the business” on SharePoint.
Lewis Silkin, Clifford Chance and Winckworth Sherwood are all making SharePoint their main document management system. This means that client files and all other documents are being moved from existing systems onto SharePoint. This is a substantial “leap of faith” and represents a major investment, especially if consultants become involved.
Christel Aguila, Head of IT at Winckworth Sherwood gave an interview for theknowlist. She explained how they chose SharePoint as a document management platform because the firm “already had the operating licenses for SharePoint and we felt going down this route would enable us to invest in other resources that would make it a DMS that works for us.” She described how “our goal was to provide a system that would cater for those who work mostly in Outlook, as well as for those who spend most of their time in Word. Access to both client and matter or admin files form these interfaces are crucial and works well for us”.
What (seems to) work!
At a recent NetIKX/CLSIG seminar which included speakers from the Department of Education, the British Red Cross and Jones Lang LaSalle, the take home messages appeared to be as follows:
• Find senior level champion(s)
• Avoid foisting SharePoint on users – do not use the S-word or language of SharePoint. Use project branding e.g. Co X 2.0
• SharePoint is a new way of working requiring a gently, gently, approach. Increase functionality gradually…
• “Intimate user engagement” to obtain very frank and real feedback.
Michael Sampson congratulated Lewis Silkin on their new SharePoint DMS, launched in November 2010. Although it took three years rather than the one year originally intended he was full of praise on his blog:
At a technology level, I was impressed. At a business engagement level, I was incredibly impressed. What Jan (Durant) and Carol (Skinner) have created, in conjunction with in-house developers is impressive, but what really stood out was their deep knowledge of how lawyers work, and an almost obsessive focus on getting it right – through discussions, experimentation, trying things out, seeking feedback and input from lawyers, working with people through the change process, and so on.
Christel Aguila explained in her interview how:
We ended up with a solution that we are proud of and it is constantly evolving to meet end users' needs. A secretary just commented that she has now forgotten what the previous system looked like. That is good. They now generate documents and correspondence without caring whether files are sitting in SharePoint or some other storage area. What matters is that whether it is document or client matter centric, the approach is completely holistic and meets our business needs.
Peer Assist
The session ended with a peer assist which is a KM technique with the following characteristics:
• Face to face meeting for sharing experience
• Opportunity to pool knowledge and reflect on a given topic
• Different perspectives and approaches may provide insights to help shape a project.
People tend to attend these kinds of sessions to find out what other are up to! So it was a valuable opportunity to do just that. The sort of things that were of interest to most people were:
• Ease of use, user adoption, user friendliness
• Consultants – how widely are they being used?
• A fruitful road to go down?
• Potential to save money – has anyone cut costs by using SharePoint?
Conclusion
The original material for this article started life as an audio-seminar for the BIALL solos and small teams group presented in November 2010. I then pitched it as a possible session at the Gateshead conference by responding to the call for New Blood speakers. It's hard to believe I've now transformed it into a 3,000 word article…I am really only scratching the surface of SharePoint. Whatever next – a stand up comedy version at the Edinburgh festival? Perhaps not…
I am very happy to continue the conversation though. Feel free to get in touch with me via LinkedIn.
