BACKGROUND

This year I went on a tour of every department at our firm to give a presentation on the intranet and also to increase awareness of the firm's KM activities. Payne Hicks Beach (PHB) is best known for its Family and Private Client departments but also has practices in Employment, Company/Commercial, Property and Dispute Resolution.

PROMOTION

This road show was not my own idea but arose during my performance appraisal and came from the Library Partner who is a fee-earner in Dispute Resolution. The appraisal was overwhelmingly positive. He felt though that I should raise awareness of both the intranet and KM.

At that time I was already attending the monthly meetings of both our Dispute Resolution and Company/Commercial departments. I started participating in these after the 2010 BIALL conference in Brighton. Harriet Creamer of consultants, Outer Circle gave a compelling presentation on aligning one's self with the business. I took to heart what she said and have not looked back. The idea of the “embedded librarian” is not new but is thoroughly endorsed in the recent AALL/ILTA Digital White Paper. In this paper David Shumaker of the Catholic University of America's School of Library and Information Science identifies four keys:

1. 1. Build strong relationships with members of a specific information user group

2. 2. Focus on understanding their work and information needs

3. 3. Share their goals and actively contribute to the achievement of these goals

4. 4. Become an integral and indispensable member of the group.

It marks a shift in emphasis from being library-centric to customer-centric, from the idea of the library as a space and towards the idea of the library as a service or better as a trusted partner. In the process the librarian's focus evolves from a general, reactive approach to a specialist role which is integrated and engaged with the projects undertaken by the lawyers.

I must say the idea of giving a formal presentation to each department seemed quite daunting at that time. Most information professionals are not trained educators. I am no exception and apart from giving a parallel session at the Gateshead conference 2011 I am not really accustomed to public speaking.

I decided that rather than go straight into giving the presentations, that I would do what turned out to be a lot of preparation. I simply felt that I didn't know enough about intranets to address groups of lawyers, and trawled through any articles I could find on law firm intranets. That didn't take long! There was next to nothing I could use. Then suddenly things changed when I went up to the University of Hertfordshire in July. I was attending the Umbrella Conference at which I received my CILIP Fellowship. While browsing at the Facet bookstand at the exhibition I came upon “The Intranet Management Handbook” by Martin White. I could have jumped for joy. Apparently it took Helen Carley at Facet Publishing more than 5 years to persuade him to write it. For me the timing was perfect and I buried myself in it. I repackaged some of the pearls of wisdom in it (fully attributed to the source) and blended these with the fruits from several visits to law firms’ intranets with a group called ILLi, together with some of the points made in an Interact Intranet paper on Planning and Deploying A Successful Intranet. I turned this into an article for LIM entitled “Blue Print for a Brilliant Intranet”. This title would probably horrify Martin White as in the preface to his Handbook he says that, “there is still no such thing as best practice in intranet management.” That said, my list of 17 Top Tips I hope gives the expectant reader an oasis in a desert which has got to be better than my own previous experience when I was searching for such material.

Martin White is keen on doing surveys to measure the value and impact of an intranet. So when our new trainees joined in autumn Reference White2011 I decided I would ask them to give feedback on the intranet. After all they could hardly refuse! Nevertheless I made this a low key survey on content and usability. The results proved really positive and I ended up with some great quotes. My favourite was:

And this was from a trainee who had worked in a Swiss Bank where the intranet was massive and the “launch pad for everything”. It is amazing how much of a boost something like this is. It really encouraged me that we were on the right path.

PRESENTATIONS

At this point I felt ready to work on the structure and content of the presentation itself. The key factors in my mind were making it relevant to busy lawyers and making sure it was the optimum length to get my points over in a compelling way.

After a brief outline of the scope (basically 10 minutes on the intranet, followed by 5 minutes on KM) I decided to start with the following quotation.

I am grateful to former BIALL President Daniella King for using this quotation in a previous article. I recall spotting it and thinking I'll (re) use that one day. Mr Disraeli produced many interesting quotations during his lifetime, a number of which were drafted in by Ed Miliband in his much praised speech to the Party at the Labour Conference in October. Kicking off with a quotation lends gravitas and immediately concentrates the attention of the audience.

I toyed with doing a PowerPoint presentation or having the intranet live on the screen but rejected both these ideas. This was largely because I didn't want to get our IT department involved for such short sessions. Instead I made copies for each attendee of our intranet homepage and of our Site Map. The first was in colour to increase its visual impact. Basically I talked through the most important areas of both of these with particular emphasis on anything that had been recently updated, such as the areas covering regulation e.g. the Bribery Act. When I went through the components of our Research Resources section this was a good opportunity to refresh memories of which databases we have, and to remind our busy lawyers about sources such as BAILLI, together with its strengthens and weaknesses. This approach went down very well and there was a high level of focus from all levels of lawyer because everyone had their own copy to look at and retain for future reference marked with their own annotations. Very few were left behind on the tables so I took that as a good sign.

I ended the intranet section of the presentation with the results of my survey of the trainees, a mention of the visit I had made to other firms' intranets (lawyers love hearing about what other lawyers are doing!) and finally of my article in LIM which I said was accessible on the intranet via the Westlaw link in the Research Resources section. LIM is published by Cambridge University Press, the oldest publishers in the world which gives a high level of credibility. I ended by describing the intranet as a work in progress and said feedback was always welcome.

I then gave a 5 minute session on Knowledge Management focusing on some definitions but also what it meant in practical terms. Most importantly I highlighted what the different departments at PHB were doing to promote KM activity and options for the future.

I very much doubt that this would have worked as well using Power Point which is often over and unnecessarily used, as speaker Nick Davies pointed out so entertainingly in his popular session at the BIALL Gateshead Conference in 2011.

One of the most crucial areas when presenting at a departmental meeting is timing. You really do need to adopt a lawyer's mind set and make what little time you have with them count and stick to the amount allocated. Our Marketing Manager had given me some excellent advice the previous year when she recommended that I booked out a meeting room and ran through my presentation on SharePoint on my own several times. I was reluctant to do this initially – it seemed a very solitary thing to do. Having tried it though I would always do it now and would say it is essential in the final preparations of any speaker. By the end of it you know how to carry on without any feedback or encouragement from the audience. This is really important because often there is little of either, most likely because the participants are in listening mode. Alternatively you may have to cope with questions, interruptions and all manner of distractions so it is vital that you can keep the show on the road and running to time. We have all been to presentations that overrun, often by a significant margin. The result is often inconvenience, frustration and irritation on the part of delegates and other speakers.

PROFILE-RAISING

In these difficult times, visibility has become a key issue whether you work in legal information management, marketing or as an actuary. It is not enough to do your job, you also need to get out there and connect with your customers! It is really important to show your expertise and be accessible so that your colleagues can make the best use of it. What you want to avoid is the “Who is Fred Bloggs anyway?” syndrome. It may sound harsh but the day could come when a senior manager looks at a list of staff and asks around as to their or even your (!) value to the organisation. It is at this point that visibility will kick in. If people know you, like you, are aware of your strengths, abilities and how you add value this will be of great advantage. The same is true of members of your team. Do senior managers know them as individuals? Are their contributions known and recognised?

Showing off one's expertise is part of the job these days and focusing on our key strengths of usability and content makes sense. This is the part I always emphasise. Lawyers know and understand its value so it is worth majoring on. The appreciative feedback I received from my road show was very satisfying. I have now made some additions to the intranet following feedback from our Family department. They have also asked for some refresher training on sources. I have devised an hour's worth of legal research training using the new BIALL Legal Information Literacy Statement aka “the toolkit” for which they can receive unaccredited CPD.

Personal branding is another area we can usefully work on. I recently received a letter from the Prime Minister thanking me for being a Games Maker volunteer at the Paralympics. He spoke of the “warmth, friendliness and can-do spirit” of the purple army we had created. The same qualities are the ones I try and display in my day job as I strive to demonstrate my personal value to the organisation and effectively market my services.