Goodwin Procter Makes Strong Case for Knowledge Management
Integrates data using Microsoft's Sharepoint
CIO — If anyone knows that time is money, it's an attorney. The 850 attorneys and their staffs at Goodwin Procter were spending too much time assembling documents and looking up information, which meant cases took more time than they should to proceed.
The $611 million law firm's eight offices used seven different applications to manage over 2 terabytes of data for Goodwin Procter's more than 60,000 cases—close to 10 million documents. CIO Peter Lane wanted to integrate the data. Using Microsoft SharePoint, his team created the Matter Page System as a hub through which attorneys could access business data and client information.
What's more, the firm has been able tlo use the platform to share their notes and work in progress. It's now possible for an attorney to easily find a colleague who can help them with a similar case.
Matter Pages took a year to implement, but once it was deployed, it immediately changed how Goodwin Procter's attorneys work. The transformation of the firm's work processes earned it a 2008 CIO 100 Award.
Photo By Steven Vote
A Better Way to Find Data
When Goodwin Procter attorneys assemble documents for a client's case, the data comes from, among other systems, an Interwoven document management system and an Interaction CRM system and Lexis-Nexis.
When a client called with a question, finding the answer used to mean launching more than one application and looking up the data in different systems. Attorneys needed contact information, documents, billing information, and more. The process sometimes took hours.
But all the information had two things in common says Andrew Kawa, Goodwin Procter's development manager, who leads its system development efforts:
"Everything is based on the client number and the matter number." ("Matter" is a term that describes all the facets of a case). The numbers provided the key to integrating the data through SharePoint. SharePoint is used to build a set of web pages within the Goodwin Procter intranet based on the selected matter number. Once a user selects a matter, the pages with the relevant documents are dynamically generated and accessed via a tabbed menu. Each tab represents integration with one of Goodwin Procter's corporate applications.
Now, "Instead of having to launch the different systems from the desktop, or the web interface, or [open] the document management system, we were able to pull all of this information into a one-stop-shop view for the users in our company," Kawa says.
