CIO Jon Kenton outlines how Corrs Chambers Wesgarth, one of the major players in the $20 billion + Australian legal industry, is moving to place SharePoint at the heart of its information management strategy, where it will become the firm’s central window on all its business applications.

The SharePoint rollout forms part of a revolution in Corrs’ internal processes, a factor identified as essential to the success of law firms over the next 3-4 years by industry analysts IBISWorld.

Kenton has in place an IT Strategy that will enhance the way the 1000-strong law firm addresses the issues of content accessibility, business intelligence (BI), collaboration and enterprise search.

Kenton was headhunted in 2007 from a role at NAB Capital to take over the reins as CIO, and given a brief to drive an IT Strategy that will ensure Corrs has a technology platform that is able to support its demanding business strategy.

Over its 150 year history in Australia, the firm had developed separate infrastructure in state-based offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. As part of Kenton’s IT Strategy, these separate infrastructures were virtualised and then centralised in Melbourne.

“We have invested in core infrastructure, building a solid foundation by investing in the wide area network links and the infrastructure around virtualisation and disaster recovery.

“Once we did that we could refresh the business continuity plan, along with backup and archiving, so that all those core fundamentals have been established at the base level. Next we then moved into the enterprise applications, with the migration from Notes to Outlook and Exchange, and the upgrade to the document management system, practice management system, and upgrade to Office.

Corrs has now completed a national upgrade to the latest version of Open Text eDOCS 5.2 as well as a migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007 and an upgrade to Office 2007. In addition an ERM system called ContactNet has been implemented that identifies staff and clients relationships based on an analysis of email traffic in Exchange.

“Now we’re moving into the bit which I think is probably the most exciting, the more business facing applications and client facing applications, which is where SharePoint comes in.

“Our central vision is really around centralising information so our lawyers and staff are able to see all information relating to a matter or client in one place. They can see the linked document management system, where documents are, they can see invoices or information from the financial system.

“That way they do not have to think about what application to use, we just present everything through SharePoint and that way if we want to replace a system or change a system at the back end, it provides less of a change management issue for the end user. It’s less disruptive as they will still go to the same place and perform the same functions and it just happens to execute by different systems.

“We are looking drive greater collaboration across the firm in the next 12 months using SharePoint and the follow that by extending collaboration externally.”

On the early adopter program with Microsoft, Corrs began rolling out SharePoint 2010 last year.

Kenton lists some of SharePoint’s major attractions as the speedy development cycle, familiar Microsoft interface, and the off-line capability, an attractive feature for a large legal form with a very mobile workforce.

“We think there’s some really great improvements from the previous version of SharePoint, not least of which is the mobility of offline/online working through the incorporation of Groove into workspaces,” said Kenton.

“To get the full capabilities that the SharePoint 2010 environment can provide, we need to get to an Office 2010 platform at some point. We’re quite fortunate being on 2007, the move from 2007 to 2010 is relatively small. Obviously getting to 2007 was the major jump.”

SharePoint’s first role was to provide a Business Intelligence tool that uses the familiar Excel application as the analytical front end. A repository of data about the firm’s clients can be “sliced and diced” in Excel to provide detailed behaviour analysis.

“What we like about SharePoint, and the Microsoft platform in general, is that it’s a front end that everyone’s familiar with,” said Kenton.

“Basically, if you can use Excel pivot tables, you can obtain a whole slew of information around clients, from profitability and revenue to analysing whether the strength of the relationship is increasing or decreasing.

“We use our reporting platform currently for analysing operational data, as well as for more high level behavioural analysis around client relationships and to identify hot spots for resources across the firm. It tells us all kinds of interesting things.”

In the next 12 months, the focus will move to business process management and workflow, and the capacity to integrate the firm’s Aderant Expert practice management system with SharePoint.

“There are some opportunities for us to move from our current workflow practices to a Microsoft-based one that will allow workflow across email and through SharePoint, integrating with our practice management system,” said Kenton.

“We haven’t built that single pane. Our SharePoint achievements to date are around BI; but as we look forward, we are making sure that everything we do or purchase, or engage in, integrates into SharePoint.”

Corrs has been using Open Text eDOCS (formerly Hummingbird) as its central document repository for many years.

“Like a lot of other firms, we set the environment up so that it strongly encourages you to use document management systems. You can store documents outside of it, but it’s easier to store it in it,” said Kenton.

By default, users are prompted to save into eDOCS, and a project is underway to enhance the classification of documents and records to improve search and retrieval.

“Everything goes into the document management system, so the greater level of classification we can put in on the way, the easier it is to find, store and search things.”

“We do see SharePoint as providing that single pane of glass, integrating a document management system. Like all law firms, and many other industries, we have a huge central repository full of documents.”

Virtual practice

A major project to centralise and virtualise the firm’s IT infrastructure in Melbourne has been underway since 2008 at Corrs Chambers Wesgarth.

“There’s a whole bunch of benefits we have from virtualisation, let alone just you know, getting better use out of your hardware. It’s easy to manage, cheaper to deploy, but also we’ve piggy-backed on that for a disaster recovery solution, which replicates the data down to an offsite disaster recovery site,” said Kenton.

“We focused a lot on the infrastructure, getting the underlying concepts right before moving on to what we can the enterprise applications, upgrading them, centralising them, really and rescuing the whole way in making sure things were resilient and robust, a real focus on ... on security and robustness and resilience.

Corrs has also implemented Symantec’s Enterprise Vault for email archiving within a centralised VMware virtual environment in Melbourne, running on EMC SAN storage. The upgrade has also included an improved disaster recovery capability with Symantec NetBackup and PureDisk disk-based backup and deduplication solutions.

A LEGAL ENTERPRISE

Aderant Expert practice management
Open Text eDOCS 5.2
Symantec Enterprise Vault
SharePoint 2010
Windows XP
Exchange 2007 & Office 2007