Monday 3 December 2007

In-house counsel at National Grid get techno savvy

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In house counsel sit in a prime position instructing panels of lawyers/attorneyss and dropping them if they don’t perform. In technology terms though they have often just existed. As their private practice law firm counterparts have scaled new heights in technology, in-house counsel have usually got by using Word. However the worm is turning. National Grid has bought enterprise SharePoint ®, they have Workshare ® Professional and now they want a world where lawyers/attorneys click into their intranets not the other way round.

Adam Davidson works in the 45 strong in-house legal department at National Grid. A company sporting some ten thousand employees and with a merger (Transco) under their belt in the last three years they have→ →just finished a roll out with Microsoft Office SharePoint ® and Workshare ® Professional to bring their disparate systems into line. Following the high profile merger the two in-house legal departments realized they needed better working practices to join the two departments together more. In addition the whole business was reviewing the document management system to see if it could be improved. (Other departments within National Grid have the same sort of requirements as the legal team.

Wisely their first action was to put in calls to their panel lawyers to get advice on who they should call in for a beauty parade. The usual suspects were named. It seemed certain one of the big vendors would get the deal – as Adam says “why reinvent the wheel?”. But the head of information services at National Grid challenged their thinking. The company was already using SharePoint ® portal server and he thought it made sense to pilot the DM system through the legal department first, just to see if that might suffice. It made sense because it meant they wouldn’t have to support different systems across the business. The in-house legal team agreed and the pilot started. As Adam says “we were reasonably impressed.”

Customisation was required but interestingly not too much. The main things they needed were the automatic date stamps and individual access for lawyers to see their own files. Although Adam does add that since doing this they’ve realized that other parts of the business can use this customization which has enabled them to re-use some of the work.

Training is always an issue with vendors who usually lose their rag with clients who don’t invest but Adam Davidson has a down to earth view.

“I volunteered to run this project or some might say I was volunteered! But it has proven very rewarding. I have been able to shape the system how we wanted it. We had someone from IT come and sit with us in the legal department for three months to improve functionality. This really shaped what the system was like so when it came to training I knew we could keep it fairly simple. I organized an hour and a half for each user then whilst they were training switched their files into the new system. This meant when they came back their learning was fresh and they just continued from that point. “

Adam continues “there was a mix of learning capability and some needed more help than others but most have come on in leaps and bounds.”

Of the improvement in their working practices Adam says “We now have a seamless audit trail and more importantly people aren’t hoarding information in their own spaces. We also have a practice of manually uploading user Outlook email files to relevant matters in SharePoint ®. This is so that everyone in the department can see up-to-date information on each file and can work on them if someone is away or on holiday. Its making for better collaboration and culture for us.” he finishes.

As to Workshare ® Professional which they use to remove hidden meta data on documents, he gives this a 10 out of 10 rating and is undeniably impressed, “For us its about ensuring that other parties don’t get any upper hand in any dealings with us - we don’t want any internal notes read or any clue as to the changes we’ve made on documents.” He continues “Since using the Workshare ® Professional software which flags up high risk documents lawyers have got nervous about what they must have sent out in the past. It highlights the usefulness of this tool. “I did wonder if it would make people too reliant on the software but if anything its made everyone super aware of simple mistakes that could be made. The added ease of sending out pdf documents through it has also saved us having to have Adobe licenses.”

As to the future of their ongoing IT he makes an interesting point. “At the moment we click onto our lawyers intranet sites for information. We would like to see a time when they all click into our SharePoint ® portal and update or review our files from here. It saves us that whole deal of clicking onto six or more different web portals.” Although he adds “it may take us a bit of time fiddling with peoples firewalls and may need some training but I see these as basic teething problems and nothing more.”

National Grid is getting larger with a major presence through a merger in the USA. He says in future they will want to have more interaction with their USA counterparts and work out how to share data which they don’t really do now.

He also says that they plan to open up their legal pool of documents and knowledge to the rest of the company to help team heads keep up to speed on deals. Interestingly he adds it’s a strange cultural change not having complete ‘control’ of their documents.

Of the law firms who helped them navigate the maze of IT. He praises Martineau Johnson and Wragge & Co for giving them thoughtful direction and time to sit down and review their systems. □

Editors note: For all of you investing in intranets Adam Davidson’s comments mean an interesting shift in tech-working with clients in future. Speaking to clients to work out what their forward momentum is, would now seem vital (to align it with yours in future). Otherwise you may be doubling up offerings and wasting precious IT dollars.□

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