Law Times

Law times • OctOber 5/12, 2009 BRIEF: LEGAL TECHNOLOGY PAGE 19 ments, yet difficulties accessing information and legal solutions across multinational corporations can lead to repetitive work. Finding a way to create sys- Lawyers seek one-stop document management shopping R BY KELLY HARRIS Law Times einventing the wheel has never been a viable option for legal depart- that is not conducive to extra-territorial collabora- tion," Fireman says. "Gen- erally, where they end up is in either dabbling in portals, which has its advantages and disadvantages, depending tems across a wide area to access a company's best legal solutions can run into several difficulties, not the least of which is a disconnect between information technology personnel and legal departments. IT professionals are usually trained and dedicated to provide support for the primary function of a company. This means legal department needs can slide down the priority list, says Joshua Fire- man, vice president of market development and general coun- sel with knowledge management firm ii3 Inc. "Let's take a document man- agement system in a corpora- tion, for example," he says. "A [document management] sys- tem in a corporation isn't neces- sarily set up for the same reasons as a [document management] system in a law firm. A law firm will say, 'It is critical for us to have firm-wide access irrespec- tive of the office our lawyers find themselves in because that is critical to our ability to lever- age work product and be as effi- cient and current as possible.'" The same cannot be said for corporations where the document management system is developed to support the primary function of bringing money into a busi- ness, not cost centres such as legal departments, says Fireman. "[Corporations'] needs are not necessarily very, very diffi- cult to solve. It's just that they have to look at creative ways of solving them." Other issues that come into play are information silos in legal departments, says Fire- man. Still more questions can be raised in the information- sharing world of multinational corporations if there are privacy laws or legislation preventing the transfer of customer infor- mation across borders. "So the law department has to find a way to work extra- territorially in an environment on what the corporation has . . . . Enterprise search tools are emerging as a solution to problems of accessing and creating these kinds of in- ternational virtual supposi- tories." By developing different types of search tools, legal departments can design the parameters that best serve their particular function. Search tools that look at documents in their entirety rather than keywords are im- portant, Fireman says. He says that a legal depart- ment can identify specific docu- ments that best serve the com- panies' needs and then use those to recommend other files that would be complementary. Still, the issue of IT departments' pri- mary function being that of the business and not the legal depart- ment could mean a great deal of work for lawyers. Identifying the best docu- ments on which to base search- es and arranging a document management system to support the legal department is labour intensive and can fall into the trap of miscommunication be- tween lawyers and IT profes- sionals, Fireman says. One place legal departments could turn is to their outside counsel. Law firms are already running document management systems that focus on the law as the primary function of their business. Fireman says he foresees a day where an enterprising firm offers its clients its expertise on document management systems as an added bonus. "In the coming years, we may be able to see some firms actu- ally taking the step of offering information management ser- vices to their own clients in or- der to leverage the law firm's in- frastructure investment and also provide a type of service to their clients that goes beyond the core provision of legal services by the hour," Fireman says. "That's a future looking prospect." This, of course, could provide Ted Tjaden firms with a competitive ad- vantage. "They are trying to run a sub- stantial practice with covering off enormous issues with real mate- rial implications to the corpora- tion without access to the same resources that the firms have," Fireman says. "So if someone were to offer them that help, I think they'd be taken up on it." Law firms have already begun taking advantage of Internet- based tools to allow for virtual client file folders. Ted Tjaden, national manager of knowl- edge management at McMillan LLP, says one of the services his firm offers clients is an extra- net where all of the work that is being done for them can be posted in a secured forum that the client has access to. "I was just setting up one today for a client to look at his corporate minute books," Tjaden says. "I guess the old- fashioned way would be for them to call up and say, 'I can't find a copy of this. Can you fax it to me or e-mail it to me?' "To me, it is almost a no- brainer that we make this available to our clients." The system is also being offered at other law firms. As a result, Tjaden says legal de- partments have already begun bucking the trend of accessing law firm extranets. "The tide has turned, so to speak, to the extent that the corporate in-house legal depart- ments have the power to answer back saying, 'I have 10 differ- ent outside law firms. I have 10 different sites I have to go to. I have to remember 10 different names to log into.'" highlight the Instead, the trend now has been for in-house counsel to have outside law firms posting to a corporate site so that all the information is in one place. At the end of the day, both Tjaden, who was a law librar- ian and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto before joining McMillan, and Fireman have knowledge in the informa- tion management and the legal sides of the issue. A key for them is creating ef- fective document management systems to best possible files and search func- tions that will allow in-house lawyers to easily find the docu- ments they are looking for. Of course, who does that for a legal department whose work crosses different jurisdictions? Lawyers seem to have a few choices: either existing corpo- rate IT professionals who may not understand the needs of a legal department; spending tight budget dollars on dedi- cated IT management firms; or the possible eventuality of law firms offering their present document management exper- tise to their clients. The issue, then, remains a challenge for lawyers. LT your OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY source In support of / Pour soutenir la CANADIAN BREAST CANCER FOUNDATION™ FONDATION CANADIENNE DU CANCER DU SEIN MD October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Dye & Durham BASICS supports and promotes awareness by offering a line of pink products. A percentage of the sales go directly towards the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. 55947-06 00887-00 61114-00 61114 00 61114 00 49957-00 00129-06 12100-06 C View our October flyer at dyedurhambasics.ca for our full collection of pink products. 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