Q&A: Jan Durant

With SharePoint 2007 now the hot topic among many law firms, CAROLINE POYNTON asked Jan Durant about Lewis Silkin’s decision to choose SharePoint and what challenges the firm now faces through the implementation period.

Tell me a little more about your background in legal IT and what key projects you have so far undertaken for Lewis Silkin.
This is my third law firm and hopefully my last! I’ve been here for nearly nine years now and working at Lewis Silkin is a true reflection of its image to the outside world – as it says on the website – it really is ‘a rather more human law firm’. But I guess the reason I’ve stuck around for so long is because as far as IT is concerned, the firm’s approach to new ideas is generally ‘if it stacks up go for it’ rather than ‘when ten other law firms have done it come back to us’. Among several other ‘firsts’, we were the first firm to fully roll out digital dictation, the first to put in a taxonomy-free know-how system, the first to put in a managed e-mail service for antivirus/antispam and to make e-mail always available even when servers are down.

I understand you have recently decided to move to Microsoft SharePoint? What was the rationale for this and what benefits do you hope to gain from making the switch?
It was an absolute no brainer. We needed to replace our existing document-management system, which wasn’t meeting our needs: we needed workflow; we needed to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office and Outlook; and we needed to upgrade our intranet and client extranets. It’s very simple – we had to upgrade the Microsoft Office software anyway. Our desktop operating system is seven years old and we needed to upgrade to Vista. But Microsoft software comes with no annual maintenance charge. In common with most other law firms, we had already decided to use SharePoint for our intranet and extranet so we had to buy that anyway. By doing this we have simply done away with the huge cost of buying a new third-party document-management system, a new third-party workflow product, not to mention the huge ongoing annual maintenance costs for both.

What kind of challenges do you face in the implementation period? How do you plan to overcome those potential difficulties?
We’re having to face all the challenges prior to the implementation period, and strangely they’re not technical. It’s all about the design – not what’s sitting underneath. We need to come up with a desktop design that is instinctive for our users. My rather ambitious aim is that if someone can already use a web browser, they won’t need any training – they simply click on an obvious button and our workflows will lead them through what they need to do. However, my colleagues in the IT department treat my zero training ambitions extremely sceptically!

How have your fee-earners so far responded to what will be quite a dramatic shift and how do you plan to keep them onside and involved through the implementation period?
My long-suffering IT user group (which has representatives of partners, associates and secretaries from each department) are briefed regularly. The management board is briefed monthly. Feedback so far is pretty positive – everyone sees the need for workflows. None of them are overly keen on our existing document-management system. But probably the bit they’re looking forward to most is the e-mail management side of it – we’re going to integrate with our client-relationship-management system so users will be prompted with the client/matter number when closing a received e-mail, or sending out an e-mail so everything gets filed matter centrically, on the fly.

How do you intend to use SharePoint to deliver better services to your firm’s clients?
We’re going to give them a wonderful extranet. We’re going to have all e-mails and documents electronically filed and client/matter centrically available from any web browser, so if our clients would like to call our lawyers when they’re not in the office, so long as our lawyers have web access they’ll have access to the electronic file. I’m sure the lawyers will be delighted about this...

Jan Durant is IT director at Lewis Silkin. She can be contacted at jan.durant@lewissilkin.com