Legal Research Center

Imagine…

» Reducing your corporate legal spend by at least 5% within 12 months.
» $1 million in savings for each $4 million spent on legal research.
» Six Sigma levels of accountability and responsiveness from your legal service suppliers.

Increased productivity. Reduced redundancy. Measurable cost-savings. Improved access to to past-purchased workproduct.

Sound too good to be true? Read on to discover how an enterprise-wide program of legal Knowledge Management (KM) can deliver these metrics—and more—to your legal services team.

Existing Legal Knowledge—The Last Buried Treasure

Legal knowledge is the last buried treasure for law firms and corporate law departments wanting to cut costs and increase productivity. Recent studies have revealed that 60% of legal professionals spend at least an hour a day duplicating work that someone else in their law firm or department has already completed. The opportunity for system improvement and cost-savings is significant; however, the challenge of where and how to find the buried knowledge treasure is similarly daunting. Legal KM is the answer.

In response to our customers' needs, LRC has assembled a team of nationally-recognized legal KM specialists and thought-leaders to help you assess, design, and deploy your KM cost improvement plan.

Best-In-Class KM Advice—To Improve Your Bottom-Line

If your law department mandate is to "do more with less" in 2003, then you owe it to your CEO and management team to take full advantage of the KM "dream-team" that we’ve assembled for your strategic benefit.

Ron Friedmann, President of Prism Legal Consulting, has specialized in law and technology consultation since 1989, serving as Director of Computer Applications at Wilmer Cutler, Chief Information Officer at Mintz Levin, and director of strategic development for two legal technology companies. Mr. Friedmann is a lawyer, a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, and the founder of the Law Practice Technology Roundtable.
George Tziahanas, Vice President of KM Services, joined LRC after a successful tenure as director of strategy for Dimension Data, where his work included implementation and design of enterprise portals, content and knowledge management solutions, e-business solutions, and business strategy and planning activities. Prior to joining Dimension Data, Mr. Tziahanas was a vertical markets executive with responsibility for the legal market at Thomson Consulting, a division of The Thomson Corporation. In this role, he served as the subject matter expert in the legal industry’s use of technology. Mr. Tziahanas also led numerous technology evaluations and program audits for Thomson’s portfolio companies. Mr. Tziahanas earned his M.S. in molecular systematics and his law degree from DePaul University.
Jonathan Bellis is the partner in charge of the Law Firm & Law Department Services Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mr. Bellis has twenty years of experience helping corporate and public sector law departments and law firms design and implement management and technology improvement programs. These projects involve overall client satisfaction, effectiveness, quality, efficiency, management of costs, organization, staffing, compensation, performance management, mix of inside and outside legal resources, operations, and systems and technology. Since the early 1990s, Mr. Bellis has led the identification and definition of trends and best practices in global legal function management. LRC and PwC are currently producing the most comprehensive study of KM best-practices ever conducted in the legal industry.
Jon Klemens is a former Principal of Altman Weil, a leading international legal consulting firm, where he headed both the Technology Services and Market Research/Vendor Advisory practices. Mr. Klemens is the former Chair of the National Association of Legal Vendors, a Dallas-based 220 member trade association. Mr. Klemens is an Associate Member of the American Bar and International Bar Associations, and has served as Chair and Planning Committee member of the ABA's annual Technology in Law Practice Program and Chair of the ABA's Law Practice Management Section's Commercial Partners Division. Mr. Klemens is a member of the Law Practice Management and Judicial Administration Division Sections of the ABA.
Kelly Ray is a Senior Manager in the PricewaterhouseCoopers Law Firm; Law Department Services Group. She is a licensed attorney who has practiced for fifteen years. Ms. Ray has cross-functional experience as in-house and outside counsel, and cross-practice experience in a variety of legal practice areas as well as ethics, compliance and business advisory services. Before joining PwC, she was the Director of Client Automation & Solutions for a major Dallas law firm. As an attorney, Ms. Ray participated in team-managed quality improvement initiatives related to organizing law firm and law department knowledge assets and automating legal service delivery through process improvement and technology. Prior to moving into information technology, Ms. Ray served as in-house counsel to Texas Instruments Incorporated, supporting the legal operational needs of a broad range of strategic business units and corporate services.

Step One—Assess the Need

Our KM Needs Assessment will help your law department:

» Reduce Costs by defining ways legal KM can enhance productivity, diminish
redundancy, and deliver measurable value to your legal services team.
» Enhance Service Quality by recommending ways to improve information access and
targeting the highest and best use of human and technological resources.
» Build Consensus & Collaboration by helping your management team understand the
value proposition of legal KM and how you can maximize its unique value on an
enterprise-wide basis.

How Does the KM Need Assessment Work?

The Assessment is a two-day onsite discovery process conducted by two of our KM specialists working in conjunction with your management team. The first day is spent interviewing department management, lawyers, staff, and selected internal clients. The interviews elicit a range of information concerning desired improvements, current practices, and processes (e.g., how your department interacts with outside counsel); existing technologies; and your use of those technologies. Our KM specialists will produce a responsive report, which they deliver to law department management the afternoon of the second day.

What are the KM Need Assessment Deliverables?

Assessment specialists create two deliverables: 1) a presentation of findings and recommendations to law department management; and 2) a report outlining the department’s KM potential and path-forward framework. Here is what you can expect:

1) KM Goal-Setting
1. a) Management goals—including knowledge reuse, expertise finders, collaborative tools, practice guidelines, and integration with outside counsel.
2. b) Client-service goals—including preventive law, knowledge resources, collaborative systems, and competitive advantage and immunity.
2) KM Landscaping
1. a) Existing work processes.
2. b) Incentives to share and reuse your knowledge assets.
3. c) Review of existing systems and processes—
  1. i) For producing and delivering documents and advice; and
  2. ii) For managing matters and outside counsel.
3) KM Budgeting
1. a) Value proposition.
2. b) Resource selection and allocation.
3. c) Metrics and measurement tools.
4. d) Cultural integration and deployment.
4) KM Solution Mapping

Grid comparing KM best-practices and product solutions with your law department’s needs.

KM Need Assessment—Price & Process

Step One’s Assessment is a fixed-price, fixed-duration study. It is a two-day engagement, staffed by two of our KM specialists. The price is $10,000, plus pre-approved travel expenses. Your selected department managers, lawyers, and staff will be interviewed on the first day, and then gathered on the second afternoon for a two-hour meeting. To facilitate overnight report preparation, LRC will arrange for access to high-speed Internet connections, printers, and a copier.

Step Two—Design Your KM Plan

LRC’s team of KM specialists can also help you specify the design requirements for a customized KM solution for your law department. Our KM Design Plan engagement is also staffed by two of our world-class KM specialists, working collaboratively with selected members of your team over three to six days. Our deliverable is a written Design Plan and formal presentation, with technological, financial, and deployment requirements and recommendations. Our Design Plan process will help you build internal consensus as you move forward with the targeted procedural changes, organizational incentives, measurement metrics, and technology tool-set decisions that will form the basis of your customized KM solution.

KM Design Plan—Process & Price

Objectives for the onsite visit and the correlating planning sessions include the following:

1) Document Management—Process Analysis. Review of your workproduct retrieval and document management procedures; outside counsel collaborative processes and procedures; and supportive administrative operations.
2) Legal Research—Process Analysis. Evaluation of the nature, scope, and volume of legal research produced by your inside and outside counsel; review of current research assignment processes and measurement standards.
3) Business and Information Systems Integration. Review and evaluation of departmental IS plans and associated management functions with regard to KM Design Plan recommendations. Consideration of the potential value and implementation requirements of expertise databases, portals or Intranets, document assembly, online compliance training, and client-facing interactive advisory systems. Review of departmental incentives for improved knowledge retrieval, reuse, and sharing.
4) KM Solution Deployment. Finalization of specifications for the KM solution deployment to be memorialized in our KM Design Plan.

Step Two's Design Plan is also a fixed-price, fixed-duration study. It is a three- to six-day engagement, priced from $15,000 to $30,000, plus pre-approved disbursements. Our KM Need Assessment findings will help us further define Step Two’s engagement duration and your resultant fixed-price.

For More Information

To learn more about LRC's KM Advisory Services, please contact Mazen Haddad at mhaddad@lrci.com or (800) 776-9377.

Then rest assured that the country’s most experienced legal KM specialists will be at your service, helping you discover the last buried treasure in your law department—your company’s legal knowledge assets.