Massive Attack - Aderant Wins Crucial First Battle

Official news in today from Aderant (press release here) that they have won the first major battle for control over the next generation of ERP software within the Australian firm market.

Analysts have long suggested that the first one to make the move away from the legacy Keystone software would set the trend for the remaining major sites in the region - time will tell. There are over 10,000 potential users just across the major firms only in the Australian market, making it the next most critical segment outside of the UK and the US for these vendors.

The news will no doubt be a significant blow to the competition and a sign both that the market may no longer be prepared to take risks in uncharted waters, and that continued delays to securing a live flagship site of significant size and international presence is equally damaging. It is also a telling signal of confidence in Aderant's recent ownership changes by the market.

Allen & Overy Knowledge Management

The Lawyer magazine in the UK finally has run with the news regarding Allen & Overy's David Jabbari (Global Head of Knowledge Management) moving to the COO role at Barlow Lyde & Gilbert. Read the news article here and the press release here.

Allen & Overy's explorations in the field of law firm knowledge management have been well documented, and many firms have learnt lessons from observing the firm's activities during David's time at the firm. Best wishes to all parties.

...and so it begins...

As Thomson Elite's CEO Steve Buege flies in to Australia today to meet with clients and prospects in Sydney, and to beat the drum at the local user group meeting in Brisbane next week, news is breaking that the traditional Elite competitor Aderant is about to announce what could be a significant blow to the original business case which originally brought Elite to the APAC market some four years ago.

No Time For Innovation? Well, it is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time...

Here is a cute posting on Innovation which uses themes from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club to make you think about how you are approaching your daily work and your own personal approach to Innovation.

After reviewing it, we certainly think that "Tyler Durden's 8 Rules of Innovation" are worthy of a read and your consideration.

With rules including "No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide", "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken" and "This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time" there is just enough content in the post to make you think and possibly challenge the way in which you approach your projects and your prioritisations.

The last two are our personal favourites - especially the "buying a MacBook Pro and an iPhone doesn't make you creative" comment and the thoughts on urgency (are you really living the life you imagined?). The link to Foolish Productivity is also worth a read, as is the introduction of Lou.

Enjoy, and thanks to the Pony for the link.

Friday's Cocktail Leadership

Friday has come early this week, and as soon as we woke up (well actually every night and every day)...we knew that it is you we need, to take the blues away...good morning to all the Janders Dean sparkling clients and friends. Does it feel like Santa is coming?

Anyway...what an exhausting week at Janders Dean! Combined project and presentation work at four of our top clients has kept our heads busy and our feet sore. We're actually almost too exhausted for our regular Friday Cocktail Leadership posting.....yeah right.... so here we go (with a glass of the good stuff, and the resulting green fairy on our shoulder):

We've been busy with our friends up at King & Wood this week, and send a great thank you to Kim for her assistance with our trip. We've also spent time with the team at Freehills - who are making phenomenal progress on their development, design, testing and content streams. Big rewards are coming from Janders Dean in the form of a dedicated milestone cocktail event just for you!

You'll have noticed some rapid postings this week including an exclusive guest posting from David Fitch, news from G+T's practice floors on their blog, mention of an article on the evolution of managing knowledge and the knowledge department itself from Allen & Overy, and the promise of more guest postings.

We're also excited by the rapid increase in membership to the two new LinkedIn groups created last week with the assistance of Janders Dean - the APAC Law Firm Technology Group, and the APAC Law Firm Knowledge Management Group. Peter Campbell (CIO at Sparke Helmore) has kicked off the first discussion in the technology group with a topic on "Green IT" and his actions for the firm in this area. The thread has comments from Philip Scorgie at Deacons, Dylan James at DLA Phillips Fox and Richard Figar of Moray & Agnew, who all provide feedback on their actions.

The Janders Dean green innovation tip for this week is to get your hands on these groovy little batteries. They rock! Thanks to our friends at Innocent for putting us on to these. Now go grab some. Although Bevan doesn't know it yet (whoops) Janders Dean has just agreed to off-set all our international and domestic flights for the 2008/09 year which (for those of you who know our travel schedules) is not a small number of bad meals and plastic cutlery. Don't worry...Bevan will say yes to this if Justin finally gets that spreadsheet to him that he's been promising for many weeks.

The sun is about to set on the latest two day LawTech Awards & Legal Technology Conference event at Byron Bay today, with winners of the awards about to be released. We wish the team at Chilli all the best for this event, and thank them for their continued interest and energy in the APAC market. Oh....speaking of fun events....after our successful event at Zeta, the next exclusive Janders Dean client event is the ElBulli evening with Ferran Adrià in Sydney. Don't say we don't love you!

Finally on the work related front, we wish Adam, Jennifer, Bernadette and the gang at TressCox all the very best as they go into their pre-migration 'black-out' period, and send a bravo out to Peter, Helen, Linda and the Sparke Helmore gang for their awesome focus group and persona work. Bravo! We also say 'buy some new clothes' to the big NYC birthday man from LNG.

So, what have you been up to? Did you enjoy last Friday's international "talk like a pirate day"? True. It was. This Friday is "walk to work" day. True. It is. So did you? Speaking of good causes, Pink Ribbon Day is coming up very soon. We send a massive hello to Cat and the original '07 Kokoda Chicks, and urge everyone to visit this link to learn more about the National Breast Cancer Foundation and Pink Ribbon Day (October 27th).

Did anyone notice that this Friday morning there seemed to be a bright, golden haze on the meadow? More like a Spark than a haze...we're off next week to live the life we imagined for a while. You should try it. Enjoy the weekend. Enjoy life. Enjoy dreams. Enjoy imagination.

Janders Dean Exclusive: Guest Post by David Fitch, Director of KM at Simmons & Simmons

Janders Dean is pleased to bring you an exclusive guest posting from David Fitch (Director of Knowledge Management at Simmons & Simmons).

We're pleased to be the online forum where David speaks for the first time about this project to the wider community in what is a very open, honest and detailed account of the firm's recent Enterprise Search project. We thank David for his excellent summary and advice.

We look forward to bringing you similar case studies and additional guest postings in the areas of law firm Knowledge Management and Technology in the near future.

Justin & Bevan

******************

ENTERPRISE SEARCH @ SIMMONS & SIMMONS

What did we learn when implementing enterprise search?

It’s been a long journey for Simmons & Simmons in delivering enterprise search technology to the firm. Finally, on 15 August, we rolled out the Recommind MindServer platform across 20 offices, to 1000 fee-earners, integrating five key knowhow and information collections across the firm.

The journey commenced over two years ago, through a recognition that lawyers faced real difficulty in finding information across the many disparate knowhow and information resources across the firm. We had great collections, but lawyer feedback confirmed that there was confusion around where to go for different types of material, that findability of information in a number of systems wasn’t optimal, and importantly, that lawyers spent too much time looking!

Identifying the business case for enterprise search

The business case for enterprise search was straight forward and focussed on four key areas:

* Reducing the amount of time that lawyers spend finding information
* Providing a single entry point to key information and knowhow resources
* Encouraging lawyer self-sufficiency
* Supporting our global business by integrating systems across borders and introducing search capability that supported all languages in which we do business

Most enterprise search business cases invariably propose calculations around reducing search time for lawyers, calculating out estimates of weekly time saved, multiplied by average charge-out rates. These types of calculations, although useful, only take you part of the way to assembling a compelling case for enterprise search.

Every firm is different. Each of us will have different types of information collections, in different systems, in different languages and with varying structures behind them. Every firm will have different business drivers and high level objectives documented in a longer term strategic plan.

In developing your business case for enterprise search it is essential that you outline how the introduction of enterprise search technology will help you, as a business, to more readily achieve your firm’s strategic vision. For Simmons & Simmons, it was around the provision of a knowhow and technology infrastructure to better support our growing, global organisation.

Vendor selection

Once the business case for enterprise search had been approved, a detailed list of requirements was assembled. These requirements were used to identify prospective vendors. When on the market back in 2006, we shortlisted six vendors based upon our requirements analysis and a short RFI process. We selected two providers for a competitive proof of concept exercise.

Running a proof of concept

The best way to make a decision about any technology is to take it for a test drive!

Technology vendors will invariably make claims around how their system operates, what connectors are available, the overall performance of the system, various functions and features. The only sure way to form a view as to whether the given solution meets your requirements is to put it to the test. The proof of concept exercise that we ran at Simmons & Simmons, pitched two leading search platforms against each other. We asked each vendor to connect to the same information sources and to deliver a basic user-interface for testing.

We learned a lot about how search systems operate during the proof of concept. What was apparent was how different the underlying technologies were – using the same underlying data – how different the results were for the user. We also learned some of the search jargon, precision and recall as examples. We found real differences between the two systems and were able to form a good view around which system would work best with our collections and which provider would deliver the most usable system for our lawyers.

Aside from testing the technology platforms, a key reason for running a proof of concept was to asses how well we could work with the technology providers. A successful partnering relationship is absolutely key when delivering any technology system to your business. We worked incredibly well with both providers, but ultimately, we felt a stronger relationship with Recommind and an impression that they were committed to and better understood the market in which we operate.

Getting to grips with metadata and taxonomies

The proof of concept exercise highlighted that in order for us to deliver a successful production system, we would have to get to grip with our underlying metadata and taxonomies. Recommind MindServer delivers faceted search capability – that is, it delivers the ability to “slice and dice” search results based upon the underlying metadata facets.

To give you an example of faceted search in action, take a look at the Amazon UK online shoe store. When searching for shoes, you can filter results by style, brand, colour and price.

In the law firm world, faceted search allows us to run a generic search that delivers many results. You can then filter (or narrow your results) by metadata facets that include jurisdiction, document type, author and date. This allows lawyers to drill-down through their results quickly and enables much greater precision in the final results delivered.

To get faceted search working properly, you need to do some work on your metadata and taxonomies. How many documents do you have classified as “General”, “Default” or “No Office Specified”. Improving the quality of your metadata will make a significant impact in terms of usability of your chosen system.


Negotiating the agreement

Once we selected our provider, we set our procurement manager the task of negotiating the agreement. I would recommend this strategy to anyone. Having a procurement manager in place keeps you at arms length from the vendor and allows commercials to be negotiated in the best possible terms.

Buying any type of firmwide solution will be a significant investment. It is your obligation to negotiate the best possible terms that you can with the vendor. Despite what they say, there is always room to move!

Building a production system

Once the deal was struck, we moved in to planning and building our production system. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of planning and taking time up front to agree the scope of the project and responsibilities for work. The team at Recommind were a pleasure to deal with and were committed to helping us deliver a fantastic solution. Some of you will be aware that Recommind undertook all the development work remotely from San Francisco. I have to say that I was sceptical around this at first, but in hind-sight, I feel this worked to our advantage (particularly because of the time zone differences which in effect gave us much faster development turnaround).

The system rolled out on 15 August is our Phase 1, Knowhow release. It integrates the following content collections:

* Interwoven WorkSite (our collection of standards and precedents)
* Knowhow database (home grown system sitting on Oracle)
* elexica (our award winning online service)
* Heritage (our London based library catalogue)
* PLC (knowhow and online service now used across the majority of our UK practice groups)

Our next phase will be to switch on the remaining FileSite indexes across our four data centres. We’ve built and tested this already and are waiting a short time for our lawyers to get comfortable with the system before we throw another 30 million documents at them! Our final phase will be to enable the Matters & Expertise module, integrating time narratives from Elite and contact information from InterAction – allowing us to use Recommind MindServer as a sophisticated expertise location tool.

Rolling out to 1000 lawyers

Rolling out the system across the firm was straight forward. We relied on email communications and recorded online demonstrations, garnering the support of our professional support lawyers (PSLs) to deliver targeted messages within the practice groups. Recommind MindServer is accessed by an icon on the desktop (something which lawyers seem to like), in addition to having links from the intranet and our business management system (BMS).

Most days, we have over 1000 searches going through, and around 100 unique users accessing the system. A great result and one I know that will only get better over time.

What’s the feedback so far?

Lawyers love it, even partners are using it! We still have another two phases to deliver, and I’m confident that the positive feedback will continue.

What makes the system a success for us is its ease of use and simplicity. Lawyers like going to one place, they appreciate being able to search in any language, they report precision in search results and like a number of the features such as saved searches and preferences.

What next?

Our journey is not yet complete, but we are well on the way to deliver what we set out to achieve. We have a trusted technology partner in Recommind and feel confident continuing our next round of development. Over time, we would like to integrate more sources, bringing in a number of systems that are located outside of London. Longer term, we’d like to explore integrating content from the large legal publishers, although this will require careful planning and testing to ensure that integrating such large content collections does not dilute the quality of what we already have.

Your journey

I hope your journey with enterprise search also delivers a happy ending. Take your time to plan, be confident about your business case, partner with your IT teams, communicate and collaborate with your technology vendor, spend time on your metadata and taxonomies. For me, these are all essential features of a successful journey in to enterprise search.


David Fitch
Director of Knowledge Management
Simmons & Simmons
24 September 2008

Allen & Overy KM Thoughts: "The End of 'Command Control' Approaches to Knowledge Management?"

A "food for thought" article from David Jabbari, Global Head of Knowledge Management, Allen & Overy LLP recently which was featured in Law Practice Today. It is worth reading and sharing.

Entitled the "The End of 'Command Control' Approaches to Knowledge Management?", it makes for good "water-cooler" content to discuss with your peers (more in relation to the structure and process pieces rather than the technology related pieces). The article can be sourced here.

We have invited Simon Gilchrist from Gilbert+Tobin and his practice group partners to provide a guest posting on this blog which is in some ways related to this where he discusses his innovative role change, and the firm's evolving approach to direct fee earner professional support. Stay tuned.

G+T Continue Innovation

Gilbert+Tobin have continued their leadership in legal service provision innovation, with what else but a client focused blog on Innovation! The subject matter is prepared by some of the leading thinkers in this space, and includes interesting summaries and comments on the recent Cutler Report on Innovation in Australia.

Check it out and sign up here. Bravo to the G+T partners and staff.

**** UPDATE ****

Following on from our posting earlier in the week on the G+T Innovation Blog, the ALB Magazine has also mentioned the firm's new approach in an online article here.

Interwoven in Asia-Pac

Interwoven have continued to penetrate the Asia-Pac market with their document management system with wins at Indian firm J Sagar Associates, and a major sweep across Singaporean firms including Allen & Gledhill, Colin Ng & Partners , KhattarWong, Rajah & Tann, Rodyk & Davidson. Malaysian firms Shearn Delamore and Zaid Ibrahim & Co have also announced their move to Interwoven. Thanks to Charles for the original posting.

Simmons & Simmons Goes Live With Recommind

International firm Simmons & Simmons has successfully deployed the Recommind MindServer Enterprise Search application this month across 20 offices worldwide.

Those of you who were at the Janders Dean Law Firm Knowledge Management conference in Sydney earlier in the year will recall our keynote speaker David Fitch (Director of Knowledge Management for Simmons & Simmons) discussing this as an upcoming initiative.

In the official Recommind press release, David states "In a law firm of our size, it's critical that we can take control of the huge volume of information stored across our systems. It's the knowledge these systems contain that sets us apart from our competition."

"The Recommind solution is proving to be as user-friendly and effective as we'd hoped and it's been simple to roll this out across our global offices without having to make huge investments in training and with no major upheaval to our staff. Through the implementation of Recommind MindServer, we're expecting to significantly reduce the amount of time lawyers spend searching for information and thereby gain a quick return on our investment."

Janders Dean send our best wishes to the team at Simmons & Simmons as they move forward with this - we're looking forward to hearing more from David exclusively on this. You rock!

APAC Law Firm LinkedIn Groups Started

An increasing number of our LinkedIn contacts have started to utilise the application more after a short break - primarily given the advanced feature set associated with 'Groups' and the 'Discussion Forum' functionality has been released.

The wonderful Peter Campbell (CIO) has established an APAC specific Legal Technology Group this week, and we strongly recommend membership to it. Click this link to join.

The group consists of IT Directors, CIO's and technology department personnel from law firms that operate in Australia/Asia Pacific. It is a forum for sharing ideas on common issues facing people in Legal Technology. A similar group was established around the same time this week and for the same purpose; however after close collaboration with Miles, Peter, and Simon this has now been removed so that we can consolidate/combine these and avoid confusion.

Membership is open primarily to people who are in these roles (or have been in them) in law firms. Both Peter and Miles Ashcroft of Freehills will manage this group moving forward, and members are encouraged to utilise the discussion forums and networking features.

In addition to this group, an APAC Law Firm Knowledge Management Group has been created here. Simon Gilchrist of Gilbert+Tobin will be taking responsibility for this - particularly relevant for Simon to do so given the new and innovative knowledge intensive leadership role that the firm have entrusted to him. This group is to focus on the more traditional Knowledge Management fields; however cross over into technologies topics will no doubt occur. Charles carried a recent posting on the international versions here.

We encourage you to join both of these local APAC groups - we also suggest you join the international versions of these here (for Knowledge Management) and here (for IT). Each group takes about twenty seconds to join and requires no additional information from you. Peter, Simon, Miles and all those involved in the groups understand the value of these, and you can be sure that membership will be a positive experience for all.

So that is four groups we recommend you sign up to as soon as possible - the power of these groups comes from the size of the membership and utilisation of the discussion features - the APAC market is known for its positive collaboration and sharing across firms and peers, so get out there and enjoy.

Friday's Cocktail Leadership

Well good morning (or afternoon) everyone, and welcome to Friday! Yet another busy week for the team at Janders Dean, but we still have all our teeth.

This week we say a special Romper Room Magic Mirror hello to the Freehills team who have been busy rolling out their matter centric Interwoven design with the help of the team from Alphawest, while also being busy little beavers planning out their next fun event. The teams in KM and IS are doing excellent work together under pressure, and we're awe struck. Rock on.

Hello to our new client team in Beijing who are exceptionally busy planning out the next few weeks and collating materials!

What a massive first birthday party we had - thanks to every one of our lovely clients and pals for an excellent evening of celebrations. Sorry that Sparky couldn't be there...we're all looking forward to our next fun client event when we have an evening with Ferran Adria from elBulli. Yum!

We also say hi to the ReedSmith crew, and thank Guru Tom for his mention on the blog, and his ILTA List recommendation of the Janders Dean team. Speaking of ILTA, welcome home to the APAC law firm representatives.

This year's events witnessed a massive concentration on the Knowledge Management space, and some great sessions on SharePoint, Office 2007, Enterprise Search, and Web2.0 technologies. It is interesting to see (in our opinion) that the Web2.0 presentation content and discussion forums indicated that the US may still be slightly behind the UK and the APAC region on their analysis of this area.

For copies of any of the ILTA 2008 presentations, simply go to this link and check them out. A massive range of resources to review - and if you are not a member yet, you should be. Janders Dean was proud this year to bring you the first Knowledge Management for Law Firms conference in Sydney, and we were happy to have ILTA there to spread the good word.

What are you up to this weekend?

If you are playing ball games, have you ever thought about what happened when the ball you were playing with in the back yard went over the neighbour's fence (or roof if it was a big hit) and was subsequently lost? No? Haven't thought about that for a while huh...OK....well imagine you were from another planet or universe (oh come on...play along) and then think about the fact that you might be really really big....now what would happen if you smashed it hard and your ball went flying then? Answer here.

Anyway...we're off at the end of an exhausting week now to grab some well deserved cocktails...and we'll see you later on with some news. Be good. Oh by the way...why don't you treat yourself to a spa day this weekend? Go on, you know you deserve it. Wrap it up!

A last thought....Christmas is 15 weeks away. A special delivery from Korea is only 2 weeks away. Bleasdale's 30th is 3 weeks away....and Golden Week is just around the corner!

P.S. We've noticed that our "posting hosting" for the blog is a little out of whack recently, so a few of you may have received some strange old versions this morning at a weird time - apologies for that, but hey, you were just happy to hear from us right?

Janders Dean Celebrates!

Break out the fairy bread and party hats....we're turning 1!

Hard to believe that we've only been going for such a short period of time we know...but this month marks our first birthday and what a fantastic year it has been.

After establishing a presence in the Asia Pacific market last year, we have quickly built a great client base which includes global leaders such as Freehills, Blake Dawson, Gilbert+Tobin, Deacons, Sparke Helmore, ReedSmith and others - including a recent client addition of one of the largest and most successful law firms in China.

Over the twelve months, we were also fortunate enough to gain Bevan Read as a leader at Janders Dean, with his skills and expertise bringing even more mojo to our offering.

In addition to our consulting services, during this first year we also worked to introduce the Janders Dean Law Firm Knowledge Management conference to the world, with the first event being held in Sydney during May 2008. Speakers included international representatives from Recommind, Headshift, and global firm Simmons & Simmons - in addition to KM leaders from the local market from firms such as Freehills and Blake Dawson, and partners from Gilbert+Tobin. The feedback from this event was fantastic, as was the level of attendance, and yep - we'll look at potentially replicating it again.

The year has also seen us lend support to a number of charities on behalf of our clients, including CanTeen, The CP Foundation, Medecins Sans Frontieres, The Australian Royal Flying Doctor’s Service, Committee Assist and many others.

...and yes...we travelled the globe, with multiple stints in the UK and the US to work with our international client base and to participate in various leadership conferences. The London trips were always the most valuable, simply because of the invaluable time spent with Sparky.

Although we feel that we've had a great first year, we certainly didn't do it alone. Massive thanks must go to Justin and Bevan's respective partners (Sparky and Bugs) and our children for their ongoing support and patience with our hectic schedules and travel absences. Thanks also to irreplaceable close friends such as Tony & Jen, our wonderfully supportive, trusting and honest clients (who we adore and consider part of the Janders Dean Family), and of course the makers of Bombay Sapphire gin.

The plans for the next year are always bigger and (most importantly) better. At the heart of Janders Dean though is the fact that we'll continue to provide honest and trusted independent consulting services in our fields of expertise to wonderful clients who "get it".

*** Join the party and help us celebrate - this week's Friday Cocktail Leadership drinks are special as they are to celebrate our birthday, and for us to say thank you to all of you. We'll all be at Zeta in Sydney with our friends and clients from 5pm onwards into the evening. Please join us if you're able! No pin the tail on the donkey though...but that does remind us of a funny story we heard about almost getting trampled by these creatures...oh if only we were there! ***

ReedSmith Rocks

We are pleased to offer our best wishes to the team at Janders Dean client site ReedSmith for their win at this year's ILTA conference Interwoven and Baker Robbins Matter Centric Design Awards.

Lisa Gianakos, Tom Baldwin, and the entire gang there deserve this gong (and indeed probably more given the scale, complexity and challenges). Well done and bravo...in the words of Janders Dean...you rock.

Gilbert+Tobin Reach ILTA MCC Awards Finals

Congratulations have to be passed across to the Gilbert+Tobin e-File project team who last night made the short list of finalists for the 2008 Interwoven & Baker Robbins Matter Centric Design Awards held at the ILTA conference in Texas.

Congratulations also to entire ReedSmith team (including Janders Dean's best pals Tom Baldwin and Lisa Gianakos) for winning overall.

Open to all Interwoven MCC projects across the globe each year, a short list of less than ten finalists are selected. These firms are then allowed a five minute presentation to explain their designs, which is followed by a live judging session at the ILTA conference before the winners are announced.

After being invited to provide MCC subject matter experience and lawyer behaviour expertise to Gilbert+Tobin on this project, Janders Dean developed an original folder design for discussion and presented this to the project team where we then facilitated the design component of the project.

Janders Dean established the basis for the Gilbert+Tobin matter centric folder structure using a philosophy of absolute simplicity for go-live. Having worked on one of the largest MCC projects in history at Freshfields while with BRCo, we had seen the potential for project delays and change management issues which could be caused when a firm tried to perfect a folder design prior to go-live.

Our approach was to encourage Gilbert+Tobin to start with a simple and intuitive design, observe the behaviours and requirements of lawyers who utilised the matter centric environment and MS Outlook integration post go-live, and use this proven and factual behaviour as the basis to deliver enhancements post go-live which would be acceptable and fit with the behaviours - to continually "enhance" the user experience based on user behaviours, rather than trying to force a design onto users based on "predictions" on how lawyers worked or (far worse a scenario) how the project team may "want" them to work or think that they should be working within the new environment.

In addition to this, we encouraged the firm to learn from all other MCC projects that had gone before them (which clearly demonstrates a reduction in the number of folders pushed out at go-live over time), and to start their project by collecting and collating useful pre-MCC metrics around usability and behaviours which could be referred back to post-MCC to prove points (rather than getting drowned in anecdotal feedback).

The temptation was always there to use the advanced features of Interwoven to "wow" the lawyers with a day one design which looked sexy or forced them to behave in a certain fashion; however the project team was always steered back to the starting point of simplicity by Janders Dean.

Although Janders Dean contributed to the design and dictated the team stick to plan, all credit for the successful implementation and hence serious kudos goes to the whole eFile team of Simon Gilchrist, Judy Meek, Tracey Vitnell, Mandy Caldow, Jane Hogan and many others too numerous to name.

Search Gets Serious: LexisNexis and Interwoven Combine

ILTA never fails to impress with the "BIG" announcements from various vendors each year - and the first one out of the gate this week from ILTA '08 in Texas could be more interesting than we've seen in a while. We've only just digested this, so no real comments just yet until we ponder....hmmmm....(that is the sound of us pondering).

***** Industry Leaders Combine Strengths in Enterprise Search, Document Management, and Legal Content and Analysis for Streamlined Workflow Approach To Knowledge Management *****

DALLAS, Aug. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILTA 2008 CONFERENCE

Interwoven, Inc. (Nasdaq: IWOV), a global leader in content management solutions, today announced it has entered into an agreement with globalbusiness information solutions provider LexisNexis to integrate and launchLexis(R) Search Advantage, a new search enrichment offering, with Interwoven Universal Search.

The integration of Lexis Search Advantage with Interwoven Universal Search will combine the market leading enterprise search solution for professional service firms with content and services from LexisNexis(R) to provide law firm attorneys a single destination to efficiently find and leverage internal workproduct and trusted content from LexisNexis. Lexis Search Advantage is available immediately in the U.S. market by LexisNexis.

The agreement supports a growing demand in the legal industry fortechnology providers to combine expertise to offer more integrated and powerful solutions to help attorneys streamline workflow and productivity. Lawyers today must use a multitude of technology solutions to perform daily functions with little-to-no integration or context between the technologies.This results in a productivity drain that negatively impacts firm profits andcan harm client satisfaction due to the inconsistent application of firm best practices.

"To compete and win on a global scale, today's law firms requirestreamlined technology solutions," said Mike Walsh, CEO U.S. Legal Markets,LexisNexis.

"The integrated product offering by LexisNexis and Interwoven is aperfect example of two respected market leaders delivering enhanced workflow capabilities to improve productivity, increase profitability, and stimulate growth."The combination of the market leading Interwoven Universal Search solution with the new Lexis(R) Search Advantage solution provides law firms with a powerful asset that unifies and integrates access to content across multiple internal and LexisNexis sources, to provide a unique and comprehensive search environment. The benefits to law firms include:

* Significant streamlined workflow in a more intuitive and efficient manner, driving higher levels of client service and improved profitability

* Richer contextual search capability with simultaneous searching of allinternal documents and LexisNexis services at http://www.lexis.com. LexisNexis research solutions are used daily by lawyers and relied on as the most authoritative, comprehensive collection of legal, news and business, and riskand analytics content available anywhere

* Integration of real-time Shepard's Signal(TM) indicators in internal documents instantly allow attorneys to confirm if a case law citation is strong, accurate, and on point. This eliminates several manual steps that lawyers must take to examine current legal validity of a citation

* Powerful enterprise search technology and Web 2.0-based user experienceand navigation to drive a tailored and comprehensive search experience

* Documents within a firm's content repositories are enriched with additional metadata to enable enhanced identification and improved access to relevant external documents

"This alliance exemplifies the thought leadership Interwoven and LexisNexis have in the legal industry and demonstrates Interwoven's commitment to help solve the complex information management challenges of law firms," said Joe Cowan, CEO at Interwoven. "Customers want their top technology providers to work closely together to drive increased efficiencies, reduce risk, and provide better leverage of their investments. By working together with LexisNexis, we can make a big difference to a fundamental aspect of a lawfirm's operation."

Third Annual Lawtech Summit and Awards

The team at Chilli Marketing in Sydney have announced their latest event for the APAC region which is the third annual Lawtech Summit and Awards - to be held this year in Byron Bay during the 25th and 26th September. We recommend this event to all our clients, and (based on our experiences at the past two annual events) give it (and the Chilli team) a massive stamp of approval for their speakers and content.

Each year they manage to snare great international speakers and chairs, and the peer-to-peer networking is one of a kind in the APAC market place.

Last year they had both Tom Baldwin (now global Chief Knowledge Office at ReedSmith) and Sally Gonzalez (Baker Robbins & Company alumni) come in from the US to address delegates, with Richard Susskinds also appearing via live video hook-up.

From what we hear, this year's independent speakers from the domestic and international regions are just as impressive as last year's. The conference has gained a wide following, with it being raised in discussions at the Janders Dean event in London last month by some of the LegalWeek Lisbon delegates. Chilli must be doing something right - our advice is register and nominate for the awards. One of the JD team will see you there!

LexisNexis & LinkedIn

An interesting news item surfaced today here discussing the fact that LexisNexis have taken a step into the brave new social networking world, and shown that they can move away (however briefly) from their obsession with product acquisition by announcing a tie up with LinkedIn.

Interesting reading from LexisNexis on the background to this arrangement can be found here.

Friends at theorangerag.com also picked this up tonight, and charles gives a good round up here.

Take a Break!

A five second break for you today early in the week to warn you that here comes the vendor press releases....so, before they arrive on your desks...

As it looks like we're all in for a raft of these, here is a prediction re what they will include. A large Australian practice management system win for Aderant (over 1,000 users), to which the response from Elite will be another New Zealand win to add to their recent win there in Hesketh Henry (75 users). Expect quite a number from Elite as three to four firms in Australia eventually go live, and again in November as Allen & Overy go live in London. Also expect more "people changes"...

Also expect news (formally or informally via "sales team drinks talking") from Alphawest and Recommind in the coming weeks about local APAC wins etc. The big piece to wait on is what will happen re one of the world's largest firms and SAP.

So now that you know the news (well, kind of) before it happens, you can look forward to the more important stuff from Janders Dean - including our upcoming Cocktail Leadership celebration event in Sydney to mark our birthday and say thank you to our clients and friends. Now that is something which will be worth reading! Recycle the rest....

Enough gossip people....tut tut...now back to work please!

Friday's Cocktail Leadership

Well hello strangers...you're looking wonderful today for a Friday...yep, it is Friday finally, and you're the best thing on the bus. We had another busy week this week...but we won't complain, as none of you care.

For this week's cocktail leadership, we're not going to bore you with work - who worries about all that at this stage of the week anyway? Why don't we share with you some of our favourite things (just like Julie Andrews did so many years before us)...unlike her we don't like kittens (unless they're tied up with brown paper packages and string..or if they're Tinks).

But we do like the fact that downstairs at The Regent on Liverpool Street there is PacMan....and hours of fun for all cheeky summer drinkers (every hour on the hour). We don't like Freddy Eynsford-Hill but we do love slippers.

We also like The Royal Berkshire Shooting School (bang bang), Liz and Phil, and pig heads. We like having the Tube map on our iPod (http://www.isubwaymaps.com/). We like laughing at the lone guy who lined up for 11 hours to be the first person in Australia to own an iPhone (OK, so a few people joined the queue after him, but we think they were just stray British tourist who saw the line and joined it because that is what they do). We like horse number 4 in the 3rd (you pick the location). We also like laughing at people who don't deserve cameras and/or Internet access - where do these people come from?

Oh...and we just love the difference between 105 and 107.

Finally today we'll let you in on three facts (ones that you'll forget by tomorrow - regardless of it you go drinking this evening or not) about recently discovered new species. Yep, new species are being found every day all over the place...

• Xerocomus silwoodensis is a new species of mushroom that was discovered on Silwood Campus of Imperial College, London. This guy didn't have to go far for his field work did he?!
• Malo kingi got its name from an American tourist, Robert King, who was stung to death off Queeensland, Australia, by the second known species of the box jellyfish genus Malo. High price to pay.
• Tecticornia bibenda is called the "Michelin Man" plant and is one of many new species noted during environmental impact studies for mining companies. Mining companies are good for the environment...obviously.

Have great weekends people - remember that Balsamic is for grown ups, and butter is for toast. We'll see you all bright and sparky again on Monday morning.

Cheese (and wine).

The Inmates Are Out Again

One of the developers over at Knowledge Thoughts has a recent blog posting on "getting lawyers to use wikis"...it even has a graph describing "adoption and trust" which not a single partner on your steering committees will understand.

Now we're not going to get involved in the value proposition argument of Web2.0 technologies in law firms, successes, failures, different approaches, etc - and indeed the posting is an interesting little read between coffees.

However we are a little concerned and surprised that there remains an element of "finding a problem to match the solution" within the technical development communities. One can best liken it to Coyote from the Roadrunner series running around in mad circles with a cartoon bomb (with the word "WIKI" on it rather than "ACME") trying to find somewhere to put it before it goes out...

Our advice?

There are probably many many many more areas within your Knowledge Management function which require and deserve your attention. They are probably higher priority and provide greater value to your fee earners....shock, horror...some may actually not even involve technologies...

Our advice on identifying these areas?

Don't have developers identify them for you....oh, and read Alan Cooper's text again.

Independence = Integrity

News is coming through from Sydney that a local APAC "integration/third party provider/reseller" is about to announce their partnership with the latest law firm software package on the market. Not really worth a posting here, however there is already some annoyance bubbling from the market in relation to this news - terms such as "jumping horses midstream", "selling your grandmother", and "so how long will they keep this one for" are circulating.

Although the sales teams and marketing engines will be going into overtime with press releases, breakfast briefings, client case studies from firms that few have heard of, our advice to firms within the top tier of the APAC region remains as it has been for many years - go direct to the international senior sales team/corporate management of the software company themselves, and subsequently negotiate and make your purchase via them, and without a reseller...

You're brands are big enough to take this approach, the size of the firm's investment in the application certainly warrants it, the risks of not doing so are many (as are the potential benefits which are opened up)...and typically, the reseller adds little value with the exception of being able to provide a local salesman to take you to lunch before the deal, drinks when you sign the deal, and vanish after the implementation (possibly to look for the next product out there that will replace the one you've just bought).

Summer in London

As many have noted, we've been quiet on the site since just before the successful Knowledge Management in Law Firms conference event in Sydney during May. The event was a great success thanks to the speakers, the content, and the attendees (and the tarts). Many thanks to all those involved, and to all those who have provided such wonderful feedback to us over the past few weeks.

Our silence has been down to our increasingly expanding international client base and our travel schedule meaning that we get no sleep, but fear not, we have been slapped for being away from the blog and will continue to post regularly from now on in....so there...

In fact, we're jumping on a flight from London tonight, so perhaps that will allow us a chance to get some more interesting things together for you all (only serious important stuff remember!).

See you Friday for the less serious stuff.


Be good to your gran - without them we would have no good recipes for jam left.

Janders Dean's Knowledge Management in Law Firms Conference

The final faculty places and venue have now been confirmed for this unique event. Chrissy Burns (Blake Dawson - Director of Knowledge Management and IT) and leading Knowledge Management author and commentator Gretta Rusanow (Curve Consulting) will join the speakers list to make this the most comprehensive and informative Knowledge Management conference in the region. The event will be held at L'Aqua Gold Room and roof top terrace.

Places are already filling for this event from firms around the country, and limited spaces remain. For more information, a copy of the agenda or registration details, please email info@jandersdean.com or justin.north@jandersdean.com.

Special Announcement: ILTA and Recommind To Present At Janders Dean Knowledge Management Conference

*** Click here for pre-registration reservation requests ***

(Prior to the official circulation of registration instructions)

After confirming the attendance of Headshift last week, Janders Dean are proud to announce that both ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) and Enterprise Search market leaders Recommind have confirmed their involvement in the upcoming Janders Dean Law Firm Knowledge Management conference to be held in Sydney on May 7th 2008.

Simon Price of Recommind (London) will be traveling to join the faculty in Sydney, and will be on hand to discuss the recent trends in Knowledge Management technologies and enterprise search across Europe. Brent Snow (Baker & McKenzie and APAC Regional Director for ILTA) will be available to discuss the role and growth of ILTA in this region, and the benefits of involvement in the peer-to-peer network from both a technology department and knowledge management department's perspective.

These additions continue to strengthen the faculty and agenda for this event, adding to the existing conference speakers including David Fitch of Simmons & Simmons (London), Bernadette Jew of Gilbert+Tobin (Sydney), Livio Hughes and Anne Bartlett-Bragg of Headshift (London), and Nicole Bamforth of Freehills (Sydney).

We are also pleased to announce the official media partner The Legal Technology Insider, and confirm the official benefiting charity for the event Committee Assist. Additional information for the event will be circulated in the coming days, with allocation of final delegate and attendee spaces occurring in early April.

There is strictly limited availability for this event, so please send any expressions of interest to info@jandersdean.com prior to the official circulation of the agenda and registration instructions.

*** Click here for pre-registration reservation requests ***
Please mark your diaries and circulate this SAVE THE DATE to your team

Special Announcement: Headshift To Present At Janders Dean Knowledge Management Conference

*** Please mark your diaries and circulate this SAVE THE DATE to your team***

Janders Dean are pleased and excited to confirm that international Knowledge Management technology thought leaders Headshift will be travelling from London to present at the upcoming Janders Dean Law Firm Knowledge Management conference in Sydney on May 7th. This is one of the first times the team from Headshift has presented in Australia, and we are pleased to introduce them to the Australian law firm Knowledge Management community.

Headshift are well known within the Knowledge Management and IT teams of the world's leading law firms for their social media innovations - with their early adoption and expertise of Web2.0 technologies at firms such as Allen & Overy (see case study) and Freshfields Bruckhaus Derringer being regularly recognised as the benchmark for next generation Knowledge Management technology.

David Fitch (Global Director of Knowledge Management at Simmons & Simmons) will also be on-site from London and has been confirmed as keynote speaker. The full conference agenda, list of speakers, and registration instructions will be circulated this week.

Additional speakers confirmed for the event include Nicole Bamforth (Director of Knowledge Management at Freehills) and Bernadete Jew (Parter at Gilbert+Tobin)

With a blend of leading international and domestic speakers and thought leaders, this is set to be one of the most exciting and informative legal KM conferences in the region for both KM and IT management, and also PSL and support personnel. Limited places remain for this unique event.

Additional information for the event will be circulated in the coming days, with allocation of final delegate and attendee spaces occuring in early April.

*** Please mark your diaries and circulate this SAVE THE DATE to your team***

Sydney Law Firm Knowledge Management Conference Announced - SAVE THE DATE

Janders Dean are set to host a leading law firm Knowledge Management conference in Sydney on May 7th 2008, with some of the most innovative and experienced global speakers and content on offer.

We are pleased to announce that David Fitch (Global CKO of Simmons & Simmons) will be on-site from London and has been confirmed as keynote speaker. The full conference agenda, list of speakers, and registration instructions will be circulated in the coming weeks.

This is set to be one of the most exciting and informative legal KM conferences in the region for both KM and IT management, and also PSL and support personnel, with thought leadership and experience from across the globe being on offer.

*** Please mark your diaries and circulate this SAVE THE DATE to your team***

Bevan Read Joins Janders Dean

Janders Dean are pleased to announce that Bevan Read has recently joined the firm as a Director. In his previous role Bevan was an Associate Director for LexisNexis within the Total Solutions Group, having joined LexisNexis following the acquisition of Visualfiles.

With 5 years experience as a practicing lawyer, and a further 10 years in many different capcities within Visualfiles, Bevan will continue providing leading consulting and thought leadership services to the legal sector in the areas of process engineering, automation, workflow, and matter management.

In commenting on his move to Janders Dean, Bevan says, "Over the past 15 years I have been exposed to, and involved with, the various tools a lawyer is exposed to, and have gained great insight into the day-to-day working practices across all legal practice areas. I am passionate about making the lawyer's working environment as functional and seemless as possible, whether it be functionality and process improvements in areas related to document management, financial management, information searching and retrieval, reporting, or within areas of matter and case management and tracking."

Justin North of Janders Dean commented that "In addition to the work currently being undertaken for international law firms, Janders Dean has recently launched into the APAC market with amazing success, working with a majority of the top firms in Australia and New Zealand."

"Bevan's move to Janders Dean will ensure that we continue to be positioned as the leading team in this region. Bevan's market leading expertise in process and matter management, and his ability to translate his own hands on experiences as a practicing lawyer into the consulting services he provides to our clients is unmatched in the Australian market."

Legal OnRamp

An interesting link from Mr.Fitch this week in London - an invitation to join the new Law Firm specific online community site - Legal OnRamp. Simmons & Simmons, Allen & Overy and Eversheds here are significant members of this heavily used US site. A combined approach with this functionality on top of ILTA style content is a potential future direction for our global community.

Floodgate Warning?

For those who are keeping an eye on the 3-5 year law firm systems retirement cycles and re-investment horizon (especially in the APAC region), our friend Charles Christian reports something interesting this week. This could be nothing more than a fortunate win for the often confused SAP legal offering's positioning, or an interesting early warning sign.

International firm Cuatrecasas (with 22 offices, 193 partners and 1368 fee earners) has just placed an order for SAP "to handle finance, practice management, analytics, HR, workflow and elements of CRM.

Giant Spanish law firm Garrigues followed the Linklaters approach by investing in SAP as their new practice management/ERP application last year. Rather than adopt the traditional model of using the software vendors' direct implementation services teams (who can sometimes be left wanting in terms of capacity and experience on firm implementations of such size), the Garringues' implementation (like others of such size and significance) was undertaken by Accenture. Linklaters used Deloitte and their own expert resources heavily during their SAP project.

Charles notes that "SAP say the contract was won ‘in a competitive engagement’ against the Thomson Elite 3E product." The best possible response from Thomson now needs to be a firm of similar or greater size going live with (not simply purchasing) the 3E product - which was released to the market back in 2006 and is yet to be road-tested by a firm of such size.

Friday (Mourning) Cocktail Leadership

No, it is not a typo...

Hello all. Friday's Cocktail Leadership is making a special guest return since our recent break. This is of course due to your constant emails asking questions about where we are and where the Friday Cocktail Leadership postings have gone. We told you before that we were taking a break after a busy six months, and (having reluctantly returned), we feel like another is in order.

Since our return from London we have been busy working with our friends at Gilbert+Tobin as they successfully complete their major document management and matter centric upgrade. Well done to the team and the entire firm on such a great project. We were proud and privileged to work with you in the past few months. You should be more chuffed with how well you all worked on this massive initiative.

We could regale you with tales of our trip, the places we went, the people we met with, the topics we covered, the applications we saw, the cheese we never baked, the stylish jackets we bought, the chicken that never cooked, Jimmy's gold tassles, and the odd smack in the nose...just not today if that is OK with you all.

We've collated some interesting law firm management, technology, and knowledge management links and articles which we will share in the coming weeks, and we'll also news about our upcoming Knowledge Management University (KMU) conference series...just not today.

We could also share some cute links with you as we normally do each Friday so as to lighten your mood...but again, just not today.

The sun is setting on the week and we have a date with a KitKat, an avocado, and the lyrics to one of the best B-sides we've discovered this last week (which of course will no doubt result in "a fall that breaks this very smug mug of mine"...).

So really it is just a quick 'hello' to you all as we close our eyes on another week and concentrate on the clip clop which plays constantly in our heads. Enjoy the sunshine you tiny sparkle people, and live the life you imagined this weekend.

Douse the houselights...

Janders Dean Update

Hello all - how is your 2008 going?

After finishing some wonderful projects with our (even more wonderful) clients, Janders Dean is going to take some of our own advice and finally take a well deserved break. Don't panic, we'll catch up again soon.

Enjoy your February friends!

Blake Dawson Shortlisted for Legal Technology Awards (UK)

Congratulations are due to the team at Australian client Blake Dawson after it was announced that they have been shortlisted in two categories ("Commoditised legal service of the year" and "Training initiative of the year") at the annual Legal Technology Awards to be held later this month in London.

Janders Dean are privileged to currently be working with some of the senior management at Blake Dawson, and can confidently note from our experience with them, that the firm is indeed deserving of this recognition - especially in the areas of legal technology and knowledge management innovation and thought leadership. We wish them all the best in the coming weeks as the event draws closer.

A full list of the award categories and shortlist can be found here.

Friday's Cocktail Leadership

It's time to play the music. It's time to light the lights. Its time to fly the fly spray...on floor 37 tonight. What a cracking year 2007 was...and we've had an equally cracking start to 2008!!

First up as always - how are you? Happy to be back at work? Tired from shopping? Did you get a sparkly new frock and a pair of Jimmy's? Glad it is Friday and you have some time to escape and read some cheeky gibberish from Janders Dean? Well....here are some useless facts from us for you to share at cocktails tonight:

1. For those of you who are nervous flyers, we've discovered that there are over six million parts in a Boeing 747-700. How many of these (or maybe just one?) do you think would need to be faulty in order for the plane to cr.....whoops....

2. The largest diamond ever found was 3,106 carots. The first were found over 4,000 years ago in the Golconda region of India. What else...ummmm....oh, we know...

3. After much debate here we've discovered that the first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com

By the way...seriously everyone...you need to let some things go...people are laughing at you. Here is why (and here). Need more?

Well, the song we are currently listening to would be known to those younger kids as the soundtrack to this ad. The latest article we have (re)read is The Kingmaker. We've also been following Chad's story and eating too much sugar (but no peppermint frogs this year - no food parcels at all - none - zip). We also dig Tonka.

For those boring ones out there who like to talk about work on a Friday, here is something for you.

While we were all in the festive mood over December and January, the software vendors were busy finding things to do. LexisNexis moved to purchase Redwood Analytics (the business intelligence specialists), and as we all are aware, "the other bunch" have been after Redwood for numerous years as a way to strengthen their "stretched" practice management BI offering. This may turn into a nice little move for LexisNexis if the next generation of Redwood Analytics turns out to be as good as the plans we've seen. As posted previously, LexisNexis also placed chips on the table for the Asia Pacific small firm practice management organisation Locus. The war chest has obviously not had the surface scratched yet, as two more acquisitions (not in the practice management space) are expected in the coming months.

Other consolidation moves included Microsoft making a pitch for the enterprise search vendor FAST (reported earlier this month), Solcara (another enterprise search vendor with less of a footprint) being taken by ArgentVive, and Seagate snapping up e-Discovery leader Metalincs.

On the enterprise search front, Recommind have had a cracking year end in the UK with a number of major law firm signings (most of which are expected in the press soon). Our pals at Simmons & Simmons (Hi Fitchy!) are one of these. This further strengthens Recommind's standing in the market.

Traditional names such as Aderant, Axxia, BigHand and Interwoven all had wins across the globe at the end of 2007, whereas some of the more traditional "big name" vendors apparently had a less than joyous year. We've sent them all a copy of the Big Issue just to make ourselves smile.

The continued innovation of Gilbert+Tobin was demonstrated in the BigHand story. Speaking of our friends at Gilbert+Tobin - five weeks to go people!!

Outside of vendor land, other individuals have had busy festive breaks including our friends Tommy "I didn't start the LA fires" Baldwin who leaves Sheppard Mullen to join Reed Smith as their new global head of knowledge management, the wiki wizard Matthew Parsons who starts a new adventure in 2008, and also Sally "Guru" Gonzalez who does the same. We'll see a majority of you in New York later this year and toast your success. Speaking of New York....we like comfortable T-shirts.

Enough of the work related spam, and back to the other stuff.

Because we love our clients, this Friday we say happy birthday to the merry Mrs Meek and to Cathy (my surf life saving club is better than your surf life saving club) from G+T. We also say hello to Tiger Frketic because he always feels left out.

A 6:50am g'day to Tony "I have a new toy" B (Janders Dean's local ice, tonic and lime supplier).

Best wishes to Wildfire O'Reily from LDM in London who joined us for drinks while in Sydney this week, hello to Jeremy H and Jason H in London, and "thanks" to Chris at Ashurst. Congrats to Kate on the birth of mini-wiki and welcome back to work! Have we missed anyone?

We must run away now - the early Eurostar to Paris is warming up. Have wonderful weekends everyone. Take off your shoes and socks for the rest of the afternoon and find some grass to walk across. Seriously. Why not? We plan to....you don't know what you're missing. We promise to (help) lead your cocktails in 2008 if you do.

Now wasn't that the ...[dramatic pause]... most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, muppetational...back to work please!

Enterprise Search - Microsoft Bids $1.2 Billion US for FAST

A few little birds were quick on the draw to highlight this piece of news in the enterprise search market. It is less likely to impact those few law firms around the globe who have (or are currently piloting) the FAST product as an Enterprise Search engine, and is of more interest to those who are interested in Microsoft's Sharepoint solution strategy.

More analysis to come as further news comes out.

A New Year at Janders Dean

Welcome to a wonderful 2008 - what were your resolutions? Our resolution is to wear more fancy pants. We will see you all very soon as the festive season comes to a close and you all start back at work (excited by that prospect?).....