Making the most of mergers

A compelling KM initiative, by James Carr and Guy Wiggins

Kelley Drye & Warren LLP recently merged with Washington DC-based firm Collier Shannon Scott, PLLC, giving Kelley Drye a considerable presence in DC, through Collier Shannon’s existing deep roots and relationships in that market. Likewise, the merger has enhanced Kelley Drye’s capabilities in several key areas, including international trade and customs, advertising, government relations, environmental and anti-trust. For Collier Shannon, the merger bolstered its litigation, intellectual property and corporate-law resources.

It should go without saying that, when two firms merge, the lawyers must be able to quickly and easily locate the work product, knowledge and expertise that each firm has developed independently over the years. For example, one of our colleagues in the newly-merged Washington DC office, who is active in the firm’s advertising practice, may have an advertising-agency client that is facing a possible lawsuit and may wish to learn if any Kelley Drye litigators have experience dealing with such a case. Conversely, a long-time Kelley Drye litigation client may call the partner who manages the relationship, wondering if she can assist with some export license issues as the company expands sales to Europe.

Ideally, the Washington advertising lawyer should be able to determine quickly if anyone in the firm has handled an advertising-fraud case, while the litigator in New York should be able to quickly locate opinions that the international trade and customs group has written, then adapt them for her client. Being in a position to achieve these initiatives would enable the combined firm to more quickly realise one of the primary objectives of the merger – to achieve growth through increased billings and more cost-efficient operations.

Before the merger was announced, Kelley Drye had been in the process of evaluating the leading knowledge-management (KM) applications in the marketplace. After examining several options, we decided to use RealPractice (from Practice Technologies, Inc). We realised that a major business problem we had as a firm was a lack of a true enterprise-search tool, which could find documents as easily as Google can locate information on the internet.

As many firms now understand, traditional document-management systems (DMS), such as PC Docs (our current DMS), have significant flaws. For starters, in the age of Google, we were not able to do basic full-text searching on our documents. It simply did not work fast enough nor was the search reliable. DMS-profile searching was also a flawed way of finding documents because fields like ‘document type’ were used inconsistently across our numerous offices, or because file names were often only intelligible to the originator of the document. These problems were compounded by having five different libraries in different offices and by a user interface that was unintuitive. After extensive review of the leading KM applications, we selected RealPractice because of its power and ease of use. Importantly, it did not rely on the DMS profile to categorise documents. Instead, it used its own engine to ‘read’ the documents we have in our system and automatically categorise them based on their actual legal content. This was critical for us because we knew from experience that systems that rely on input from lawyers to identify and categorise documents fail. This had to be done automatically. Another critical requirement was that it respected the ethical walls and rights defined in our DMS.

What we quickly realised during the merger discussions was that an enterprise-search tool could significantly accelerate the benefits of the merger. Without this, the Collier Shannon documents risked becoming yet another silo of information, which most of our lawyers would not be able to easily locate and re-use.

We decided to speed up the implementation of RealPractice, which is scheduled to go live this month. Early demos before different practice groups – both transactional and litigation – have met with enthusiastic receptions. But many lawyers are understandably sceptical as well. The ability to effortlessly conduct a full-text search across all documents in all offices, and to be able to filter and drill down by accurate legal categories to find the relevant documents quickly, has been a tool that lawyers have dreamt about for years.

The challenges of merging two law firms are multi-faceted, touching upon cultural as well as operational differences. While it’s a bit early to tell conclusively, we believe that uniting our combined work product in a manner that will make all information easily accessible to all parties will help us come together quickly as one firm.

James Carr is a partner at US Kelley Drye & Warren LLP. He can be contacted at jcarr@kelleydrye.com. Guy Wiggins is director of practice management and can be contacted at gwiggins@kelleydrye.com