Notes is here to stay. I enclosed a case study of 1 large law firm who currently uses the JFS software and are realizing savings. By the way this info was located at the Lotus Notes Website.
ROI Collateral\3. Case Studies\Services
Dechert, Price, & Rhoads
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
In a notoriously techno-phobic profession, Notes has provided a legal information system to not only automate the core processes involved in providing legal services, but do it in a way that even senior partners who never uses PCs can learn quickly and use easily.
Vital Statistics
Industry
Legal Services
Competition
Global and Local
Bookings
$100M
Employees
700
Notes Adoption
Discrete
Notes Users
30
Notes Applications
2
Source: International Data Corporation, 1994
Background
Dechert, Price & Rhoads (DPR) is a full service law firm with 350 attorneys organized into four business units - Business, Litigation, Government Affairs, and Tax and Personal. Customers range from individuals to multi-national corporations. Within each department are individual practice groups that specialize by industry and types of law. Each of these practice groups is responsible for maintaining their client relationships through high quality, cost effective service. Increasingly, these relationships are becoming more open, with active monitoring by large clients.
Like most law firms, DPR has had to cope in the last two or three years with some major changes in the way clients perceive legal services. The most pervasive of these is the downsizing and justification of outside services at client companies. For DPR, this has meant meeting increased client demands for:ÿ
tighter litigation budgets increased cost tracking and reporting overall communications with clients in an increasingly competitive environment.ÿ
Business Challenge
The legal profession is notoriously techno-phobic. Indeed, there is more than just a grain of truth to the old joke that it was forty years after the invention of the telephone that the first law firm had one. The skepticism of computers is in some ways warranted, however, because most acquisition decisions are made by senior partners who have yet to see their jobs modeled in a robust, easy to learn and use system. In addition, there is a certain amount of pride in the notion that the legal profession is above automation.
At DPR, for instance, research and library services were on-line, and most employees had PCs. However, these systems were designed and implemented to automate individual tasks such as word processing, and separate support services such as deposition research - not the overall business processes that governed them. The challenge facing the DPR IS manager, Michael Slaughter was how to introduce a system that not only tracked case work and documentation for clients, but also reduced costs for the firm by facilitating communications among case team members, paralegals, librarians, and clients.
Perhaps the most critical element for success, however, was that the system had to be embraced by senior partners, some of whom did not even have PCs in their offices. After searching for some time for an answer, Slaughter said "I saw a Notes application at an ABA trade show and it was love at first sight. For the first time, I saw an application that automated how lawyers work: the process is communications-intensive between teams of attorneys, paralegals, research services and outside parties."
Notes Adoption Strategy
The strategy for Notes at DPR was to get small groups up and running with line of business applications that others in the firm would see and hopefully request for themselves. The goals of this approach were:ÿ
to show lawyers that Notes would greatly improve their ability to work together as a case team, to demonstrate the ease of using Notes to reduce costs and improve the teams ability to provide status reports to clients. to create a pull demand from lawyers to streamline document retrievalÿ
Notes Application: Tax Notes
Tax Notes Today was developed by tax analysts in cooperation with Price Waterhouse. The pilot tax processing application at DPR was chosen because it offered an obvious time savings for keeping up to date on legislation, court rulings, and IRS interpretations pertaining to tax laws.
Litigators Notebook was developed by Jim Feuerstein Systems (JFS), a legal industry integrator that before Notes had been limited to supplying pockets of automation to law firms. Notes has enabled JFS to rapidly move technology beyond library services to litigation process management.
Before Notes....
Before Notes, a librarian would use on on-line service to access the highlights of "Tax Notes Today," a publication of tax related decisions that occurred each day. The librarian would print, copy, and distribute these highlights to a group of about 30 attorneys and paralegals who would scan the report for items of interest. Any additional information needed by the attorneys required a second search which they could perform themselves, reducing their availability for billable tasks, or request from the librarian which required a wait of several hours, or possibly a whole day.
After Notes...
With Notes, it is no longer necessary for the librarian to do on-line searches. Each attorney can now not only access the highlights of Tax Notes Today, but can also scan the full table of contents and instantly access background documents on topics of interest. This has saved on average over an hour a week per attorney for the group, and librarian time. According to Paul Kimball, Tax and Employee Benefits Attorney, "Notes enables us to read more pertinent information in less time, and frees up additional billable hours, the lifeblood of the firm." In addition, on-line service fees have dropped from $30,000/year to $10,000/year.
Notes Application: Litigators Notebook
The Litigators Notebook was implemented with the idea that it could automate many of the line of business activities firm-wide, significantly reducing the cost structure of the firm, and giving DPR a competitive advantage. Still in the pilot stages of implementation, it is this application that holds the greatest potential for the firm.
Before Notes
The Litigators Notebook is an application that addresses all phases of the litigation process:ÿ
Discovery, in which both parties to a case must share documents pertinent to the case;ÿÿ Deposition, which involves statements given under oath from persons on each side of a matter;ÿÿ Trial preparation in which all the research, discovery, and deposition information must be organized into a legal strategy and trial notebook for reference in court.ÿ
A single legal matter can involve tens of thousands of documents that must be available for months or even years. Although DPR had implemented document databases to facilitate the retrieval of legal documents, librarians and paralegals were still required to spend most of their time searching for documents requested by attorneys. This was no small feat as a request for documents with one or two key words could require over a full day to search thousands of documents. Paper handling and management represented both a delay in time as well as a significant expense to the client.
After Notes
Notes, through Litigators Notebook, not only allows the attorneys themselves to access documents as needed by searching from their desktop, but enables them to create a trial support file in which they can plot and support strategies for attacking key points and witness statements from the other side. DPR expects this application to enable attorneys to go to court with laptop computers that will more efficiently perform the function of massive trial notebooks that were prepared by paralegals and required their presence in court to search during trial.
The Bottom Line
ROI
108%
Payback
2.06 years
Total Annual Savings
$49,550
Total Costs
$87,750
Cost per User
$3,635
Source: International Data Corporation, 1994
Lessons Learned
The major lesson to be learned from the experience of DPR with Notes is that an application development environment does not sell itself, it is the applications within the environment that spark interest. This rule holds true for both the relationship between the Notes reseller and the customer, and within the customer organization where Notes is critical.
DPR has also discovered that Notes makes a great marketing tool. Senior partners are already using Notes in meetings with some of their largest prospects to show demonstrable actions that the firms is taking to reduce expenses and increase cost controls for the client.
For furthur cost saving analysis, etc check out the LOTUS website
pertaining to this case study.
regards,
Mark
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