Portal technologies, now a common resource, gather and display information and documents from the many constituencies of corporations, organizations and professional practices. They promise to distribute responsibility for gathering, editing and refreshing the content.

Portal leadership requires a combination of a thorough understanding of the work and roles, documents and information of each part of an organization, together with fluency in the tools, methods and technologies that support the system.

At the law firm, Drinker Biddle and Reath, beginning in 2001 as Program Director and later Director, Practice and Project Services, directed the acquisition and deployment of a firm-wide portal using Plumtree’s portal product. Starting in 2006, directed deployment of the portal in Microsoft SharePoint, first in SharePoint 2003 and later in SharePoint 2007.

Both the initial portal deployment in Plumtree and migration to SharePoint involved work throughout the Firm’s practice groups and administrative departments, as well as close coordination with the information systems engineering staff responsible for installing, configuring, customizing and maintaining the the portals.

As the technology matured and the firm grew, especially with the 2007 merger of Gardner Carton and Douglas into Drinker Biddle & Reath, the portal became the opening page for each user’s desktop. Worked with the communications and marketing leadership to develop a front page organization and presentation, assisted by consultants from XMLaw (now part of Thomas Reuters’ HubbardOne group). The communications and marketing group took responsibility for daily updates of the front page content.

Designed, implemented and trained users for custom document collections, such as court filings for complex cases. These applications connected a constituency of lawyers and support staff with a highly focused interest in the content of the collection and the time, effort and skill required to support it.

Bob Blacksberg delivers Technology Training, including CLE qualified courses, on a variety of topics.

These build on courses first delivered at the law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath. In 2009, the firm dramatically expanded its training program for arriving first year associates. In the face of the economic struggles in law firms, the firm opted for a rigorous and comprehensive program of training instead of postponing the arrival of the new class of associates.

The training program included a significant expansion of topics devoted to the role and use of technology in the practice of law. Developed, documented and delivered a program of 10 thirty minute to one hour classes devoted to the power, concepts, skills, methods and concerns associated with the technologies of contemporary law practice. Topics included:

• Practice Safe Computing – observing the cautions required for secure computing that protects the confidentiality of client information and communication. A student exercise challenged the class to find information hidden as metadata in Microsoft Word documents.
• Mastering messages – a focus on the limits of e-mail communication, and strategies for managing the flood of messages that arrive daily.
• Power in Presentations – with and without PowerPoint, demonstrating clarity in presentation, and the critical role that illustration and graphics play in narrating facts and data.
• Comprehending Excel – from its heart of automating the arithmetic of rows and columns to a tour of the complex and often hidden world of information in large Excel files.

At TechLaw, led significant consulting engagements relating to document assembly for the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and The Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent quasi-judicial agency in the Executive Branch of the United States Government.

For these clients, extensive form sets were built using the HotDocs document assembly, with the assistance consultants now at Docugility, LLC.

Responsibilities included detailed review of the requirements for forms and their use, connections to external data systems and integration with document management systems. Responsibilities also included project management and communication with the lawyers and staff at each of the clients.

The work drew on detailed knowledge of practice and drafting from earlier work as a practicing lawyer, skill and experience in HotDocs (including earning the status of HotDocs Certified Consultant), and knowledge of a broad range of technology systems.

Document management systems have been embraced especially by law practices and other professional services firms to gather, share and secure their work product and precedential documents.

Since the mid 1990’s, led major projects devoted to the selection, design, configuration, implementation, training, maintenance and troubleshooting of document management systems. At TechLaw, led projects devoted to the implementation or transformation of document management systems at law firms, corporate law departments and government agencies, using the then leading programs, Soft Solutions (no longer in use) and DOCS Open (now OpenText). While working at TechLaw, led the project to convert Drinker Biddle’s document management system from SoftSolutions to DOCS Open.

At Drinker Biddle, responsible for program leadership and project management for the conversion of the heritage DOCS Open and DM5 systems to Autonomy iManage’s FileSite program. The effort began in 2006, with a detailed comparison and demonstration of the competing systems, including NetDocuments and iManage. The project expanded significantly in 2007 with the merger of Gardner Carton & Douglas and Drinker Biddle.

The project unified the document management systems in a firm-wide iManage system. It featured a matter centered filing system. The project took on the challenge of filing of e-mail messages with documents, with the use of the document management system incorporated into the Microsoft Outlook e-mail interface. The task of filing shifted from completing a profile to selecting folders from a set planned to imitate the organization of physical files. This design sought to promote a high level of precision in filing, improving on the frequent use of miscellaneous or other uninformative categories assigned to documents in the earlier systems, and to associate every document to its matter.

Project leadership responsibilities included project management, coordination with outside consultants, the design and configuration of the iManage system, the organization and deployment of the training program, quality control testing, ongoing troubleshooting, and analysis of usage.

In a large law firm such as Drinker Biddle, the perceptions of success of a project of this magnitude and extent can vary significantly. Comfort with the procedures and use depend significantly on personal work habits. “Filers”, whose offices tend to be clean and highly organized, often embrace the tools that mirror their habits. “Pilers” whose offices can be recognized by the seemingly chaotic growths of paper arising from desk and floor, may resist the new organization and methods.

E-mail message filing presents challenges that were not yet solved at Drinker Biddle. The sheer number of e-mail messages, fragmenting communication that in earlier times could be found in a few letters or memoranda, and high volumes of material of no lasting import, makes the e-mail filing task daunting for many users. These issues will continue to be a key factor in the success of document management systems.