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With rapidly evolving end-user needs, Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton realised it would need a much more advanced portal that could deliver integrated business-intelligence, workflow, enterprise-search and knowledge-management solutions. However, was the firm right to choose Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007?

By Tom Baldwin, Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, LLP

Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton is a Los Angeles based, 480-lawyer law firm with nine offices on both coasts. Like most firms, we started our portal efforts with a home-grown system that housed firm news, links to commonly used firm forms, legal research, library resources and the like. We began to see the benefits of having a centralised location for firm information, but saw that the full potential couldn’t be fully realised with our existing system. Around 2000, the firm looked for an off-the-shelf law-firm portal solution to meet its needs and found one that helped jumpstart its efforts. While the product met our needs for many years, we began to see that it too, had its limitations.

In the spring of 2006 we decided that we needed a new system to meet the growing needs of our users and the firm. We didn’t want to go back to building a system from scratch, but didn’t want to have another proprietary application that limited our own development efforts.

Why SharePoint?
Within the legal community, there has been a surge of firms and vendors building SharePoint solutions, which led us down the path of evaluating SharePoint. We were encouraged by the number of vendors building web parts to quickly and easily integrate their products with SharePoint, as well as the rapidly growing community of firms building out their firm intranets using SharePoint. Like many firms, we have in-house development experience with Microsoft technologies and liked the fact that finding skilled Microsoft developers would not be difficult, in comparison to other development languages.

In addition to the price (we are already licensed for SharePoint as part of our Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft) we liked many out-of-the-box features, like e-mail alerts, content targeting (being able to display certain web parts and data based on a lawyer’s role, practice group and office), ease of publishing and how fast the system performs.

SharePoint gave us the best of both worlds: proven products to accelerate our portal initiative, obviating the need to build everything ourselves, but still allowing us the ability to customize the product as we see fit.

To help us convert from our existing intranet and get us up and running quickly on our new SharePoint portal, we selected solution provider XMLAW. Its suite of web parts for Interwoven integration, enterprise search, and its toolkit for back-end database connectors, as well as front-end navigation and templating within SharePoint, was exactly what we were looking for. SharePoint is really a development platform now and out of the box isn’t ‘portal ready’. XMLAW’s suite of products help fill in the gaps and extend functionality, such as their search tools, which augment the native search engine. We still have the ability to customize the web parts and toolkits, as if we wrote them ourselves, but get the benefit of having future product enhancements and support from XMLAW. There are many additional web parts we plan on bringing into the fold as our portal evolves, but we wanted to focus on replicating the functionality our users currently enjoy, and leverage some of the new features SharePoint offers.

Why SharePoint 2007?
For a variety of reasons, our conversion had to be finished by the end of 2006. The timing of our decision to go with SharePoint was a bit inauspicious in the sense that the current version, 2003, had some limitations and 2007 was slated to be released in late 2006/early 2007. I hated the idea of rolling out technology that would essentially be obsolete, but there were obvious concerns of going down the beta path with Microsoft. So, what prompted me to go with 2007, a beta product from Microsoft? I mean I actually like where I work!

Once we informed Microsoft that we were interested in exploring SharePoint 2007, they arranged for us to work with a local partner to gather requirements and scheduled an architecture design session (ADS) which is usually a two to three-day event where Microsoft brings in subject-matter experts on the product in question and pretty much answers everything you want to know. Traditionally, SharePoint has been viewed, and marketed, as a collaborative product. It’s now being positioned as a platform from which an organisation can do any number of things (business intelligence, workflow, enterprise search, knowledge management, etc), not just a place to share documents.

We were intrigued with several new features Microsoft pointed out to us:

SharePoint 2003 does not allow for item-level security, while 2007 has this capability. This by itself would probably have been enough of a motivation for us, as our current portal leveraged item-level security for sensitive executive-management reports and this was something we had to have;
Enterprise search got an extreme make-over. The search tool in 2003 didn’t have the best relevancy engine and was limited to about five million records. Microsoft poured extensive resources into its search product, beefing up the system to handle nearly 50 million records and making it better at retrieving the right information. Microsoft is so vested in search that it is going to offer it as a separate product for companies to buy, if they aren’t already licensed for SharePoint (which comes bundled with enterprise search);
The Business Data Catalog (BDC). The concept behind the BDC is that it can help index all your back-office, line-of-business applications, like accounting, records, docketing, document management etc, and make the data easier to search and present within SharePoint. Our vision is that the BDC coupled with the new search tool would give us an enterprise search system with many of the same features at a fraction of what stand-alone search vendors, such as Recommind, are charging;
SharePoint 2007 is much more tightly integrated into the .Net framework. One of the big draws to SharePoint for us was that we could leverage our existing team of developers to build web parts. In 2003, the process to build web parts was cumbersome and in certain respects handcuffed developers fluent in .Net and Visual Studio. In 2007, skilled developers can more quickly build web parts for SharePoint;
SharePoint knows your data better than you do. Business intelligence and key performance indicators (KPIs) are buzzwords right now and Microsoft didn’t let them slip by. Out of the box, you can build KPIs with neat gauges and graphical representations of data to make it easy to understand performance in predefined areas. Even your most technically challenged partner understands what it means when the gas gauge is on empty! Ideally, you could have KPIs to show budget versus actual on a matter – for instance, if a lawyer is on pace to meet their billable requirements for the year, practice-group goals – you get the idea;
Workflow. Like many firms, we’ve wanted to automate new matter intake, expense reporting, lateral hire, vacation requests and the like for years, but found most products off the shelf either too expensive or too cumbersome to use. SharePoint has tight integration with Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), the new workflow product bundled with your Microsoft Server license. .Net developers will need little help understanding how to build workflows and present them within SharePoint.

What works, what doesn’t
No article featuring a Microsoft product would be complete without talking about its shortcomings, but first let’s look at what has worked for us so far in our beta testing.

Searching iManage/Worksite
One of the ‘quick wins’ we’ll enjoy is that the enterprise search tool, coupled with XMLAW’s integration with iManage, now allows us to full-text search all our iManage documents and honours security set-up in iManage. The Holy Grail for many of our lawyers is work-product retrieval and XMLAW web parts allow us to deliver a viable solution. While still in final testing, we’re seeing search results that come back in usually under one second and actually show the documents lawyers are looking for. This feature alone should ensure me job security for at least another year!

Workflow works…
While new matter intake is at the top of our list, we wanted to try and start with something, we thought, would be a little easier – lateral-hire intake. This proved to be almost as complicated as matter intake, but in less than a month we had a proof of concept up and running that handled task creation, routing and reporting. In future, we will be able to handle all of our workflow needs with WWF and SharePoint.

Taking a knowledge-management view of workflow for a second – automating matter intake and lawyer intake is probably the best way to capture as much information about that matter or lawyer as possible. You have the lawyer captive, having to fill out certain information about a matter to get it moving along the process and when new lawyers come aboard they want to make sure everyone knows what skills they have.

The following are a few things Microsoft missed the mark with.

RSS Reader
So, the point of an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader is to allow a user to point the reader at any number of RSS-enabled sites and allow the reader to roll up feeds from all the sites under one application. Enterprise licenses for RSS readers can get expensive and the idea of having this shipped with SharePoint 2007 was really appealing.

Microsoft fell asleep behind the wheel with this feature. For some reason, it built the reader to only accept one RSS feed, which is a glaring problem as the whole point of an RSS reader is be able to look at multiple feeds at once. Perhaps this will get cleaned up, however.

Blogs, wikis and online surveys
These are all new features in 2007, and while the blog and wiki features might be passable for internal use, I’d never use them for a public-facing site. They are much more cumbersome to use then stand-alone blog and wiki applications. That being said, we’ll likely implement wiki pages for practice groups that want to collect and store discussion threads. With the ability to send targeted e-mails anytime, new content is posted, we’re hoping to use this and eliminate the use of e-mail for Q&A sessions. That way the Q&A strings are saved and searchable for future use.

The online survey software is not anything near usable. For now, keep your surveymonkey.com or zoomerang.com accounts active and let’s hope Microsoft takes another crack at this feature in their coming releases.

The Knowledge Network (KN)
This was touted by Bill Gates himself, shame on Bill. Hopefully, this too, will get an extreme makeover because the concept is great. KN was supposed to deliver on the idea of providing companies the ability to capture experience and expertise of its people, mostly through e-mail exchanges.

The product is lacking significantly in its ability to collect knowledge without having a context around what areas of practice an organisation, or law firm for that matter, engage in. Perhaps a vendor within legal will take this product and build in the elements necessary to make this a winner. For now, let someone else do the heavy lifting and focus your energy elsewhere.

Conclusion
Attempting to go live on a beta product is not for the faint of heart. You need the right people behind you and a little luck. So far, we’ve got both. Through 2007, we will assess if there is any bugginess from a stability perspective, but while certain features aren’t there yet, we have no reason to believe that the system will be unstable. Working with Microsoft has been great; our internal team is dedicated to making this happen and having XMLAW leading the way has helped us tremendously.

For law firms that have been waiting for SharePoint to really be ready for prime time, it’s finally here. The product has added many of the features needed to make it a viable solution for firms and with the amount of vendor support behind it, there’s little doubt that investing in SharePoint will reap your firm many rewards.

Tom Baldwin is chief knowledge officer at 480-lawyer, Los Angeles based firm, Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, LLP. Before joining Sheppard Mullin, he held a senior level position at Foley and Lardner. Prior to that, he consulted for seven years with law firms and corporate legal departments. He can be contacted at tbaldwin@sheppardmullin.com