Baker & McKenzie is banking on peer-to-peer to promote
knowledge sharing and to create new revenue streams.
The law firm Baker & McKenzie has adopted P2P as the optimum
model for sharing information across its global enterprise. Like
most large, international law practices, it has a highly
decentralised structure with its 62 offices enjoying a great deal
of autonomy.
This works very well in terms of building local business, but is
less satisfactory when it comes to sharing best practice and data
on cases. "The document management system that we used gives a
limited view of knowledge resources. We didn't know what the
entirety of the content across or organisation was," says Brian
Gillam, global practice management systems, Baker &
McKenzie.
Over the past year, Baker & McKenzie examined the way documents
flowed around the company, and found ways to improve this. It found
an abundance of documentation that detailed the final versions of
negotiated contracts but a dearth of competency and transactional
information.
This information "black hole" confirmed that Baker & McKenzie
was being inefficient and missing out on significant commercial
opportunities. If one practice had worked through an issue in a
particular set of circumstances but had not captured the process
formally, another law practice on the other side of the world would
be likely to reinvent it. "This inefficiency is particularly costly
to the firm when it does time-based and value billing," says
Gillam.
Of greater concern to the law firm was the realisation that poor
information sharing meant missed revenue-earning opportunities,
especially in the field of merger and acquisition work. When a
company acquires another, it needs a whole raft of services
including marketing and tax advice, for example. A company sitting
in the middle of the process, such as Baker & McKenzie, would
be in a very good position to cross-sell. "In all our M&A work
we could add extra value to the client by offering other corporate
services," says Gillam.
Identifying the problem was just the easy bit. Identifying an IT
infrastructure and product set that would deliver was much tougher;
nurturing a culture which embraces information sharing between
colleagues and offices will be harder still.
"When we started this documentation process, there were some
concerns from individuals and offices about giving up ownership of
their content," says Gillam. "We needed to be able to distribute,
rather than centralise information to allay these fears." In
addition, it was important to ensure that whoever contributed a
piece of content retained absolute authority to determine who could
access that data.
"Although we were satisfied with our existing tool (PCDox from
Hummingbird), it did not have the right functionality for the new
distribution model," says Gillam. The firm found that other,
content management systems, such as Vignette, did not have the
necessary attributes either. The company eventually stumbled across
NXT3, a P2P content management system from NextPage, which mirrored
the political structure of the company.
"Technically, NXT3 is a 'permissioning' model," says Gillam, who
notes "content owners can determine access rights" and that the
system scales well to the technical sophistication of different
users. The platform supports the distributed nature of today's
business by enabling access to information in its native format,
allowing owners of content to manage, maintain and update that
information. The system is currently in beta and goes live in two
months' time.
For the moment, Baker & McKenzie is relying on a SWAT term to
identify and upload relevant content, but long term is aiming for
users to add pertinent data incrementally every day. The firm has
found a system that means relevant information can be shared that
otherwise might escape an organisation, but is very aware that
individuals may have to be incentivised in some way to
participate.
"We didn't begin this exercise thinking, 'let's find a P2P tool'.
But in P2P we have found a method of sharing data that suits the
political structure of our organisation."
www.nextpage.com/gartner whitepaper final.pdf