Time for Firms to Open Up the Doors to Greater Productivity

23
Jan
2013

Chi Eng, Esq.

Social Networking Tools Increase Attorney Productivity, Work Product Quality and Client Relations

Social networking is more than just another communications medium.  It has become the primary means of sharing knowledge and information for increasing numbers of individuals and organizations.  Traditionally,  businesses and law firms, especially, have been  more concerned with the potential risks of adopting social network models into their workflows than with the profit-impacting benefits of social networking tools on their organizations.  Deploying and adopting a social network based work flow system would enable a law firm to increase productivity and enhance the quality of the work product of its attorneys, and at the same time, increase client satisfaction.  

It is a system that complements or otherwise extends the social dynamics of a law firm, encouraging constructive competition among its service professionals and increasing transparency of its workflow to the clients. In the long run, greater client satisfaction will increase law firm revenues, and in our new legal era, that is everything.  

How, then, can these powerful networking tools be leveraged in a large organization such as a law firm with thousands of professionals and clients-securely?  A large law firm, for instance, has all the concomitant characteristics of a social network structure:  groups of social influencers and followers, web of different professional and social associations, and project teams formed for specific client projects.  The sum total of their interactions, i.e., communications and work product, constitute proprietary Big Data of the organization, from which the law firm can leverage and monetize.  

There is an answer:  Closed circuit social networks in which the law firm's staff and clients are invited to and participate in a social network managed and controlled by the law firm.  

This closed circuit social network can be implemented on the law firm's own servers, or preferably, in the cloud.  Cloud based platforms, when properly configured, are preferable for this application because they are readily accessible from around the globe and are scalable depending on data usage and the number of users on the platform.  In regards to security, the cloud has grown increasingly sophisticated.  Law firms IT departments, and their attorneys can now rely in part on cloud infrastructure experts to configure and update the fire walls and security policies of the cloud servers and databases.  Cloud vendors such as Amazon have achieved military-grade compliance with the various security protocols such as SOC 1/SSAE16/ISAW 3402, FISMA Moderate, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001 US International Traffic in Arms Regulations, FIPS, and other compliance initiatives, e.g. HIPAA.  

Best of breed social network tools should allow the users to organize themselves in public or private groups.  Each group will have an area for discussion and a virtual library for storing documents.  Public groups would permit anyone in the closed community to join while private groups can only be joined with the group owner's permission.  Private groups are tantamount to closed-door meetings.  On the other hand, public groups are more free-wheeling, to the extent allowed by the group moderator, and may be used for bond-building purposes or for general interest discussions around topics such as intellectual property law development, cross-border litigation, and securities law.  

These groups will increase the quality of the work product of the lawyers as they will be pressured to demonstrate to their colleagues their breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise of their chosen fields of law.  Healthy competition among the lawyers will benefit the law firm as a whole.  The closed private groups can be used for confidential discussions, information gathering and document collection by client and professional teams for purposes such as possible M&A transactions or litigation materials protected by a court protective order.  Once inside these closed private groups, the invited clients and professionals can freely and confidentially discuss and share documents.  All comments are recorded and ownership of documents is indicated so that everyone is on the same page.  

Once the preliminary discussions are completed, a private group can open a project room where budget and milestones can be negotiated or set up as goals. The client and professional team workflow is then constructed around these agreed or specified milestones.  Project related discussions and documents can then be shared by the project members.  There can no longer be any excuse of lost emails or misfiled documents on a PC or that someone was left out of the loop.  In this project room, every project team member sees the same discussions, documents, and milestones.  There will not be any spam mails, messages from different projects cluttering the project discussions because non-invited members (or spam mailers) cannot access the message or document areas.

Once the social network platform is adopted and used by the law firm staff and clients, data in the form of discussions and documents would be available for mining by the law firm.  The documents and discussions are in fact the Big Data that the firm can leverage, analyze and repurpose.  

The law firm would not incur significant implementation cost if the platform is deployed in the cloud.  For example, the cost of storage at Amazon is less than $0.01 per GB per month and the unit cost goes down further for higher data storage.  Thus, for example, for 40 TB usage per month, the monthly cost at $0.01 per GB per month is $0.01/GB/month x 40,000 GB = $400/month or $4800/year.  This is well above the requirements for, say, a mix of 200 small cases of 25 GB each and 25 large cases of 200 GB each for a total of 10 TB.  It has been reported that an in-house system that can accommodate this amount of data can cost more than $300,000 for upfront purchase cost¹.  

With the Amazon cloud, there would be monthly expenses for renting server and database instances.  Depending upon the desired redundancies, a configuration comprising four Linux-based large reserved instances (medium utilization) costs $4,000 upfront for a 3 year term, and at $0.076 per hour per instance (i.e., about $220 per month for 4 servers per month of continuous running).  For an extra large multi-AZ reserved RDS instance, the upfront cost is $4000 for a 3 year term, and at $0.440 per hour per RDS instance (i.e. about $317 per month of continuous running).   The multi-AZ feature includes a standard redundant database stored in a different location.  These cloud usage costs do not come close to the annual operating cost of an in-house system.  Of course, the above example is for illustrative purpose and is not meant to be an exhaustive price comparison between cloud and in-house implementation.

It's time for law firms to pivot workflow around people and processes-and be fit for success in the new legal era.  Deploying and adopting a social network based work flow system enables firms to increase productivity and quality of the work product of its attorneys, and at the same time, increase client satisfaction.  It is a system that complements and extends the social dynamics of a law firm and the necessary and evolving relationship between firms and the clients they want to retain. 

¹ Cloud vs. Appliance: Comparing the Total Cost for E-Discovery, John Tredennick, Esq., Legal IT Professionals, 15 January 2013.