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Hiring high performance tech teams

Avatar photo Tony Johnson on November 14, 2024

You might not agree but hiring is hard.

Hiring technical staff such as product managers, analysts, engineers/developers, QA, or devops is extremely hard, but this is even harder still when hiring, building, and scaling entire teams of technical staff.

Now, I’m not talking about simply finding people to do a job – there are plenty of candidates available to fill jobs, but there’s a distinct difference between hiring people and building an effective team.

It’s very easy to hire a team of 50 if you give no consideration to how that team gels or how effective they are, but it’s an entirely different challenge if you want to build, then scale, efficient teams capable of autonomy, executing on a shared vision, with short times to market, at a high degree of quality.

Without wanting to blow our own proverbial trumpet, I can honestly say that the team at sharedo is world class. After 30 years in the industry, working with hundreds of different clients and teams, ours is the best I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and I thought it might be useful to share some insights to why I think that is.

It’s going to be a long one, so if you want the very short version, the key take away is – attitude is the number one thing to consider when hiring. Skills and knowledge are equally important, but it’s the attitudes of the people on the team that births a culture. A culture can enable or inhibit team cohesion, and cohesion is the thing that leads to a high-performance team.

Let’s try and break down the relationship between attitude, culture, cohesion and performance. Why is nurturing a positive culture difficult yet tremendously important, and why this makes hiring a team that can enable the right culture a much more nuanced endeavour than it seems on the surface.

Attitudes define the culture

Every team has a culture that emerges from the people within. That culture can be a positive one, breeding cohesion, or it can be a negative one, killing cohesion and ultimately the performance and smooth operation of the team.

Sadly, culture is not as simple as defining policy. It’s undefinable – an organic, shifting thing that is the outward manifestation of the attitudes of the team, and it’s very easy to down shift from a positive culture towards something less, or even to something toxic.

So, what elements exist within a positive culture and how can we encourage one to emerge?

It sounds simplistic but a positive culture, one allowing cohesion to thrive, will largely be built around safety. To build such a culture of safety requires complimentary attitudes to be present across all members of the team for it to emerge and flourish.

Safety to ask = Eager to educate

Feeling secure enough to be able to ask the seemingly dumb question is of critical importance. There’s a lot of knowledge out there and no-one can be an expert in everything. From processes, procedures, new technology, new business domains and ways of working – the number of things the team needs to understand at any given time is vast and requires a hive mind.

Getting someone up to speed on a technology, a feature, or a business domain requires these dumb questions to be laid out and addressed. Nothing inhibits productivity more than where a team member remains uninformed and guessing because of a fear of asking the question – it drains time and effort and reduces overall morale compared to simply having the question answered.

For there to be safety to ask, there must be an attitude of education within the team members. People who are naturally helpful and willing to answer the questions without judgement or frustration, people who are willing to ask the questions they already know the answer to if they see another team member struggle or be reluctant to ask.

Within the teams at sharedo, we strive to find candidates that possess this quality. We have a collective attitude of “no such thing as a daft question” and everyone is always willing to chip in with the answer.

Safety to suggest = Egoless humility

If you’ve worked in technology for any length of time, you will have encountered the elitists. Huge ego with a white knight syndrome, believing they know all there is to know, and swooping in to save the day. Often, technically gifted, though sometimes Dunning Krueger is in full effect. Regardless the scenario we’ve all seen goes like this.

It’s a design session, we’re talking about ways to optimise an element of the platform and suggestions are starting to flow. The junior developer summons the courage to suggest something, speaks, only for the elitist to shut them down completely and harshly.

There’s nothing wrong with shutting down an idea that won’t work, but it needs to be done with empathy, humility, and again, with an educational attitude. Discuss the option, help the junior understand why their idea won’t work, ideally reaching the conclusion themselves, and they’ll leave the session feeling more knowledgeable than when they went in.

More importantly though, it will reinforce the safety to suggest in future. In the bad scenario, there’s a good chance they won’t ever speak in a design session again, and quite likely will leave the organisation within months.

At sharedo, we again specifically look for this attitude – one of knowledge sharing and education. Those types of people enrich and build up the team rather than tear it down. We could have the most technically brilliant mind on the planet apply to join our team but, if they don’t have this quality, they don’t join the team.

Safety to learn = Willing to learn

Complimentary to the safety to ask, it’s important for the team to be willing and eager to learn new things. No-one likes change, but things move so fast that opinions on best practices from 3 years ago might have better alternatives now. There’s never a “one true way” and the team needs to keep an open mind and be willing to absorb new information.

It’s ok of course to have opinions, it’s ok to debate and defend those opinions when challenged, but they should be opinions, weakly held, always willing to hear and learn from new information.

It’s for this reason that at sharedo, we don’t put huge weight on years of experience. It might be a bitter pill, but 30 years of experience doing the same things is of significantly less value than someone with 5 years of varied experience.

At sharedo, there is a constant exchange of ideas, with regular debates and challenges to the status quo, from all levels in the teams. We strive to hire those with an attitude of humility to accept new learning, and I know for a fact that any time a seasoned/battle hardened member sits down with a comparative newbie, they will walk away having learned something new.

Safety to fail = Empathetic

We’ve not yet made a perfect human unfortunately, we’re not infallible and we get things wrong. The way in which the team, managers, and leadership react to mistakes is critical in keeping an open, honest, high performing team.

Where the reaction to mistakes is one of anger, shouting or repercussions, this does nothing but instil fear, paralyses the response to the issue at hand, and ensures that when someone realises a mistake they’ve made in future, they’ll likely try to hide it, cover it up, or resolve it in secret. That’s not to mention the impact on morale with the team itself.

A team that reacts with support, an attitude of all hands to help, is one where future mistakes aren’t covered up, aren’t hidden away, are volunteered and dealt with quickly without fear of ridicule or repercussions and leads to much greater efficiency when dealing with inevitable problems.

Failure can come in many different guises of course, across all disciplines, but as an example, the reaction from our teams during a critical outage of a service would be to focus on resolving the problem, then working out how we, collectively, can learn from it and improve our processes to gate against it in future.

This requires an attitude of empathy in candidates – a willingness to help, to work together as a team to solve the problem.

This openness results in better handling of future issues, we’ve implemented processes, guards and checks based on learnings from past issues, such as ensuring our code review and QA is as robust as possible, our devops processes are automated to reduce or eliminate human error. The focus on continual improvement rather than blame creates safety to fail. This is not detrimental to performance, it bolsters it by growing the capabilities and efficiencies of the team.

Safety from (office) politics = Respect and candour

Office politics – gossip, finger pointing, blame, withholding information, inter-departmental rivalry, quid pro quo and generally “playing the game” are nothing but toxicity. They provide no value and do nothing but inhibit efficient working and should be avoided at all costs.

To avoid falling into the traps of office politics as the team (and organisation) grows, it’s critical that the team are well practiced in candour and honesty. Through frank, open conversations, the entire team can be clear on accountability, responsibilities, and expectations with no ambiguity.

At sharedo everyone is encouraged to have their say – openly. Disagree with something? Speak up – discuss it, debate it, with empathy and respect for each other. Hopefully everyone ends up on the same page, but if not, having the conversation, understanding each other’s points of view takes the sting out of the disagreement without devolving the team into the murky waters of politics.

From Culture to Cohesion to Performance

The attitudes of individuals within your team are the seeds of its culture. Culture is the thing that builds, or burdens, cohesion within the team and cohesion delivers performance. A cohesive team is a team that simply works. It’s able to effectively manage itself with almost complete autonomy, minimal steering required, working towards a shared vision. It’s a well-informed team that communicates well, understands it’s direction, ambition and objectives. To put it even more simply, it’s a team consisting of grown-ups, capable of talking to each other, who come to work each day to build cool stuff and have fun doing it. With cohesion comes performance – it’s one of the key reasons we’re able to design, build and maintain a platform like sharedo with a team of ~65, not 650.

So, why is hiring and building a team so hard?

So far, I’ve whiffled on about culture, how it emerges from attitude, and why it’s important in terms of building team cohesion to create a high-performance team.

But why is it hard?

Not only is there high competition for top calibre candidates, hiring well into these disciplines is extremely nuanced. It’s a complex mix of skills evaluation alongside how a candidate will fit in with the culture you want to encourage – remember you don’t have control over culture – it emerges, and that is all driven by the attitudes of your team.

Hiring a QA analyst, we need to consider the candidates skills (of course), but also how will their defining attitudes fit into the above elements of the culture. Hiring an engineer, we need to consider the depth and breadth of their skills and how that overlays with the existing engineers, but equally, will their personality enhance or detract from the culture that creates cohesion.

Similarly, it’s not just about whether an engineer will fit with other engineers or a QA with other QAs – it’s all one product team, working in very close collaboration with each other – it needs to be a skills match and a cultural fit across the entire team.

Too often, to their detriment, a lot of companies focus on hiring a team whilst focussed purely on technical skills.

How we do it.

The goal when recruiting into the sharedo team, which we believe is extremely successful, is to weight team cohesion fit at the same rank as job and skills fit. This approach has served us well over the years to build the team we have today (which we continue to build! we’re always hiring!).

We do this through a typical 3 stage process, but we invest time and energy into hiring to make sure we fully understand a candidate’s technical capabilities and their team cohesion fit.

The honest job ad

Our process starts with an honest job specification / advert. We intentionally write these a little differently – we don’t just list a bunch of skills in bullet points, we specify the critical skills that are required and how we use them, we talk a lot about what the team is like, the people, what we’re building, what we want to build and how the candidate will be involved. We lay down everything about the role, the recruitment process and what to expect with complete openness – recruitment is bidirectional – the candidate should be evaluating us as much as we are them, and so, the job specification should reveal as much about the role as a CV should reveal about the candidate.

Screening the CVs

The CV screening process is pretty much focussed purely on the skills match, but some elements of team fit can also be gained if you know what to look for.

We’re looking of course for keywork matches – taking an engineer role, do they have critical skills of C#, JavaScript, SQL and such, and what have they done with them. This is where we can start to understand the candidate a little bit more before we even speak to them.

Firstly, is there anything on the CV that piques our interest? A good CV will contain things that make us want to start a conversation with them. Statements like “[x] years of [some technology]” and “I built [some system] with [some technology]”, tell the screener that you’ve used [some technology] for a period, but nothing more – there’s nothing there to make us want to ask them more questions.

On the other hand (and without wanting to reveal the cheat code for getting an interview!), a CV that has some permutation of “We had [some problem] that I resolved by building [solution to problem] using [some technology] because [why], which resulted in [outcome]” will usually get to the next stage – it prompts questions and discussions and shows a level of detail that fits with the learning/educating attitudes we’re looking for.

The 30-minute screening call

Once the CV review stage is done, candidates are put through for screening. This is usually a 30-minute teams call and is always with someone holding the equivalent role. An engineer for an engineering role, QA for QA etc.

This is important. Unlike some companies where HR will handle the screening call, hiring into technical focussed roles requires someone in the same role to perform the screening. Someone from HR might be able to establish team fit, but, with all the best will in the world, they simply aren’t qualified to screen candidates’ technical abilities beyond pre-canned questions and check lists.

For this reason, screening is done by someone in the equivalent role.

Whilst we’re looking for indications of team fit and skills proficiency during this call, it’s also an opportunity for a candidate to ask lots of questions about us. Interviews shouldn’t be one sided – it’s a 50/50 decision – it should be the case that the candidate is interviewing us – they should be trying to establish how we fit for them, not just the other way around. When candidates ask us questions, our responses are frank, open and honest – we don’t want to mislead candidates at any stage as the fit, from both sides, must be genuine.

The 2-hour interview

At around 2 hours long, it might seem like quite a grilling, but it’s done in a conversational and friendly way. The goal is to deeply understand and assess the candidates’ relevant skills whilst trying to further reveal and understand attitudes contributing to that all important team

cohesion – both are weighted equally, so, counter intuitively, an absolute genius with a low team fit is unlikely to move forward compared to someone with solid skills and great fit.

Aside from fit, it’s equally important to fully understand the skills of the candidate. Taking an engineering hire for example, on the skills side, we’re trying to establish the candidates T-shape – the breadth of knowledge and which areas have depth and how deep does it go.

The way we approach that, is by going through various areas of tech and discussing it, probing deeper and deeper into the depths of it until either the candidate can’t contribute further to the conversation (saying “I don’t know” here is something we’re actively looking for), or where we (the interviewers) have exhausted our own knowledge.

It involves a lot of conversation around not just the specifics of the technology, but the why – why does it do what it does, why would you use it, what purpose does it serve, which problem does it solve. It’s not so much about memorising syntax or SDKs, as it is about knowing how things work, to have an analytical mind, can think critically, or, where things go really deep, be able to hazard a guess or at least know what to google!

As we cut across these various skills to establish their T-shape, we’re thinking about how their skills profile overlays the existing team – what holes does it fill, what depth does it add, what breadth does it introduce.

This final interview sounds gruelling, but it’s really not – the team culture flows into this too! it’s kept very conversational, we’ve even had candidates tell us it was fun, but importantly, it’s critical to get a deep understanding and a true picture of a candidate’s proficiencies and fit within the team.

For that to happen, the interviewing team need to be sufficiently proficient to be able to drill into the breadth and depth of the T-shape themselves and be willing to spend the time to truly understand the candidate, whilst executing this with empathy for an already nervous candidate.

Conclusions

For us, attitude is of equal importance to skills and knowledge. Attitude is what births culture, culture breeds cohesion and cohesion creates a high performing team.

The subtle differences in process and the extra time we invest in recruitment, from the job ad through to the final detailed interview, are the critical elements for hiring to build a team rather than hiring to fill a role.

ShareDo and AI: Six compelling use cases for a legal case management platform

sharedo on October 19, 2023

I recently found myself deep in conversation with a CIO whose passion for technology and knowledge of artificial intelligence was clearly evident (and in abundance!). Over the course of our discussion around AI’s potential, a recurring theme emerged – the absolute necessity for robust systems of record, and the need for platforms like ShareDo in this new era of AI.

AI may still feel like some distant future consideration for many of us. But with a steady release of new AI tools, such as Microsoft’s upcoming ‘AI companion’ Copilot, the need to embrace AI, while safeguarding integrity, is upon us right now.

Here’s six high-impact use cases where the power of ShareDo’s modern and adaptive architecture can be combined with AI tools to achieve better results for your law firm.

01: Predictive case analysis

By applying AI Machine Learning techniques to historical case data in ShareDo, patterns and insights emerge to enable you to forecast data points such as risk profiles, reserves or awards or even potentially case outcomes. The importance of having clean and usable data makes a huge difference between being able to use these tools effectively, or not being able to use them at all! ShareDo’s dynamic data model and data quality rules is designed to maximise the timely input of quality data. You can then leverage models such as Azure ML within your workflows or shortly in ShareDo budgets.

02: Data-driven pricing

Using ShareDo as your core business system enables you to understand and interrogate all activities on any given case, alongside the ability to track the cost of every transaction. Being able to mine both case data and billing records enables AI to propose pricing models to your users to effectively balance competitiveness and profitability. This helps remove inconsistent pricing that can impede many firms.

03: Intelligent case connections

Many enterprise law firms only identify a business case for ShareDo in some of their high-volume areas of their business. However, the creation of a central and single point of truth for all of your case and matter data is essential for the AI age. ShareDo’s extensive databases, paired with AI, can unearths crucial connections between cases. We are all guilty, in every industry, to a greater or lesser degree of “reinventing the wheel” – intelligent case connections in our opinion might at least prompt you not to.

04. Intelligent client services

How many people have to phone your firm and sift through large amount of information to know what is happening on a case or a transaction? AI assistants will become a staple of internal user portals and external client portals, for both B2B and B2C companies. By integrating ShareDo’s case histories with AI assistants these can be used to instantly address client inquiries, boosting satisfaction while reducing administrative burdens and unnecessary internal or external interactions.

05: Optimising business processes

Continuous process improvement varies significantly across the industry, and many firms implementing core operational systems such as ShareDo struggle to find the time to go back and keep their systems fed and watered. Combining ShareDo’s process data with AI spotlights process or underperforming cases that are ripe for automation or intervention. This accelerates operational improvements and enables firms to increase profitability across work-types.

06: Client and employee

Imagine if you had an early warning system where you could understand if the overall frustration or satisfaction level was changing with your employees or clients. Being able to understand the changes in communication sentiment acts as a significant early warning indicator; enabling you to take appropriate interventions and ultimately prevent churn.

Conclusion

These six use cases represent only a fraction of the system-wide and everyday benefits of combining a legal case management platform like ShareDo with AI. Having a modern and adaptive system of record at the heart of your business will enable you to harness the power of AI. Without this, you’re extracting siloed data or modelling your AI over data that is fragmented and, therefore, ultimately flawed.

To find more on how you can make AI work for your firm, book a demo with one of our experts today to see how we can help accelerate your firm’s AI journey.

Six small but powerful ways to help your lawyers do more each day

sharedo on April 19, 2022

Introduction

Competitive pressures, juggling client expectations and the age-old challenge to “do more for less” affects the legal services sector like any other industry.

But with the scarcity of legal talent driving law firms to do even more each day within existing headcount, the problem is exacerbated and unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon.

Tech “done right” can play a huge role in enabling lawyers to streamline and super-charge performance and, ultimately, be more profitable.

Here’s six ways in which we are helping thousands of lawyers be more efficient and achieve super-human results to out-perform their competitors.

1. Go with the flow and avoid ‘context switching’

“Fear is not the mind-killer, context switching is the mind-killer.”
Elon Musk

Many have called this now legendary Clubhouse livestream comment by one of the great entrepreneurial innovators of our time as a deeply profound statement.

What Musk means is that when we are constantly switching from one task to another, our productivity, and indeed our mind, is destroyed. Put simply, we are constantly breaking our natural flow and jeopardising the successful completion of each task.

While we agree that Musk’s observation goes to the very heart of one of modern life’s biggest impediments, it’s not a new phenomenon. We’re positively fixated on addressing this very issue and have spent the last five years and more on developing technology solutions to improve and enhance flow time for legal firms.

So how does ShareDo help with context switching?

ShareDo prioritises your workload, enabling you to quickly see the most pressing task that requires your focus at any single point in time. It constantly adapts and re-prioritises tasks as matters evolve, giving you the right focus at the right time.

ShareDo also monitors your work against critical success factors. If something changes, such as a task is soon to be overdue or how now been flagged as more urgent, it alerts you. And, importantly, it provides you with any supporting tools and contextual help to reduce the likelihood of switching to a different task.

Just like we would recommend you do with other technology apps like e-mail, Slack and Teams, ShareDo also lets you “mute” notifications to avoid that ever-present curse of context switching. This can be set at a granular level, so you can again minimise any breaks in flow.

However much we may think that we’ve reached legendary status in multi-tasking, our brains cannot focus on two sources of input at one time.

2. Delegate tasks and optimise your resource levels

Outside of the “lawyering” to be done on a matter, there are many activities which can be delegated to support staff, shared service centres or processing teams. Activities such as compliance activities, litigation and post completion support require a lot of resource to complete.

Given the scarcity of legal talent, it’s imperative for your lawyers to be able to delegate these tasks quickly and reliably. Added to this, you need to be confident that tasks are delegated safe in the knowledge that your key people will be kept informed of their outcome.

ShareDo provides an ‘instant delegate’ function for all activity, alongside resourcing dashboards and notifications so you can keep track of progress and overall performance.

But managing traffic of work is only half the picture.

Implementing a shared service centre using ShareDo is an excellent way to centralise common processes and provide relief for fee-earners from repetitive non-legal tasks. Again, they’ll always remain up-to-date on progress and vital information.

This brings a real step-change to our client’s overall performance. But there is more that can be achieved by automating the allocation of these tasks through ‘allocation rules’ that makes the whole process even more streamlined.

ShareDo brings extra power to your people and operations through an accumulation of incremental improvements to how you collaborate

3. Great UX saves many minutes, many times each day

When you think about user experience (UX) in digital platforms, you may mistakenly think about a slickly designed user interface (UI) or quick loading app.

UX is about much more than this.

It’s about applying a deep understanding of how people can best interact with your platform to complete tasks and collaborate with others to be more successful. It’s about focusing on people’s needs and making every task they complete as streamlined and as intuitive as possible.

Optimising case interactions can shave minutes off every single process, each and every time it is undertaken. These frequently saved minutes quickly add up to huge savings. Minutes that enable your fee-earners to achieve the super-human results they thrive on.

Most case management systems are designed to be the key operational system for your internal staff and the platform they will be using for a good proportion of each day. Poorly designed case management systems often do more harm than good. They not only frustrate your people but can lead to above average employee attrition. Needless to say, it is imperative that user experience is “front of mind” for a case management system.

ShareDo’s UX is designed explicitly for legal teams and individuals. Designed and built from the ground up, it is not a by-product of a software platform designed for a different purpose. Instead, every ‘line of code’ has been written and continually optimised to streamline for legal processes. This is why we confidently describe ShareDo as being “designed for you”.

Truly great UX, however, recognises that not all ‘users’ are the same. In addition to varying job roles, they will have different needs, skills and preferred styles of working to name but a few.

ShareDo is powered by a unique ‘persona engine’ that enables the personalisation of every single interaction by role and user type.

4. Unprecedented levels of ‘Automated Precedents’

Why reinvent the wheel when you can press a button and have a document generated for you in seconds.

ShareDo contains advanced automated document assembly functionality to enable every member of your team to “do more for less”.

Most routine operation – whether simple or multi-faceted – is automated, transferring further minutes of time to fee-earning activities.

5. Seamless sharing and clever collaboration

You’ve created a brilliant piece of legal advice and need to share it. But, as is often the case, time is limited, and it’s put aside for when you have more time to do this. Time that will never come.

Just like any other form of interaction, ShareDo makes it easy to save time and seamlessly share this with relevant groups, saving you that all important time and avoidance of dreaded context switching.

As the name suggests, ShareDo makes sharing easy. Within a couple of clicks or drag-and-drop of your mouse, you can send files via DocuSign, email, outsourced post, or share materials via a Virtual Dataroom, safe in the knowledge that external access is secure and strictly controlled.

6. Automate to save time

Probably the most effective way to save time is to simply to get the “machine” to do the work for you.

By automating key steps in your processes – or indeed the whole process – you can significantly boost your “lawyering” capacity.

The key is to automate appropriately for you “work style”, as different user groups and different practice groups will need varying degrees of automation. That’s why ShareDo advance workflow capabilities enable you to support different work management styles across your business.

+1. Save an hour a day

At ShareDo, we’re all about the +1s, and this list-based article is no different!

Imagine what you could do if you had an additional working hour each day?

Bill more.
Contribute to practice-wide initiatives.
Update your knowledge management.
Focus on client service improvements.
Support a colleague.
Something else?

……..Or (whisper it) simply feel less pressure.

Many of our clients set themselves the challenge of ‘saving an hour a day’ – a bold statement, perhaps, but one that is achievable when you look holistically at the savings that could be achieved.

Challenge our claims

If you would like to join the ‘Hour a Day Challenge’ then please contact us for a consultation via one of the routes below.

Top 7 Critical Success Factors for Implementing Case and Matter Management Successfully

sharedo on April 19, 2022

When ‘done right’, your case or matter management system (CMS) quickly becomes a critical part of your business. As a fundamental cornerstone, it can deliver process improvement to all practice areas and provide outstanding operational insight across your business.

However, despite your very best of intentions, if your CMS is poorly designed or badly implemented for you, it can do more harm than good. It could either be improperly used, resulting in costly and time-consuming errors that frustrate your clients and employees, or it won’t be used sufficiently to deliver a strong return on investment.

We’ve spent the last five years building a reputation for personalising and implementing first rate case management systems for legal organisations across the UK and beyond. While we’re always learning, here’s the top critical success factors to get right to ensure you experience a successful CMS implementation.

1. Manage change effectively

True and lasting change has historically been very difficult to achieve in the legal Industry. Natural resistance tends to be high and adoption rates being very low. And that’s before we factor in change management as a discipline being at its infancy within many firms. With Change Management being cited as the single most important factor for a project’s success, its importance cannot be under-estimated.

Effective change management requires more than just effective communications or an analytical focus on detailed requirements gathering. Instead, change management should be considered as its own specialist discipline. Its lens should be firmly focused on understanding the motivations and behaviours of those that you are attempting to impact and addressing them appropriately. It is a discipline that is constantly evolving and borrows much from psychology and behavioural science.

2. Engage your stakeholders

Your subject matter experts (SMEs) and key stakeholders are lawyers who are by their very nature extremely time poor. To engage them effectively you need to:

1. Understand their process

For busy SMEs there is nothing more frustrating than engaging an implementation team who need to be “educated” in their legal processes. How we approach this at ShareDo is to have legal technology experts who specialise in different practice areas, together with out-of-the-box process maps, to support them every step of the way. We work closely with teams to ensure we apply the right solution for their exacting needs and objectives.

2. Incremental updates

Where possible, make the first implementation a ‘true’ Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and then prove that you can deliver incremental change at pace. By executing smaller incremental updates, you are less likely to lose traction with your project schedule and undermine any promises your stakeholders have made to external parties.

3. Ownership

Ensure you appoint a single empowered Product Owner who can manage disparate stakeholders and take a strategic view, as well as a “Project” view. By doing this, you ensure that the work type can scale effectively across all client groups.

3. Choose the right work style for your practice

Case management systems by specialists like ShareDo are ultimately designed to deliver process improvements through differing levels of automation. This ranges from something as as simple as automating precedents or as sophisticated as ‘straight through processing’ that requires no manual intervention whatsoever.

One of the key factors for a successful implementation is getting the level of automation just right for an individual practice group. Too much automation or workflow, when it’s not required by a practice area, will only frustrate and alienate users. Too little automation for more volume-driven practice groups and you’ll get the same outcome!

At ShareDo, we’ve guided our clients to success by automating appropriately for their preferred ‘work style’. We recognise that different user and practice groups require different levels of automation, so adapting the systems to these specific needs can super-charge the overall results you gain.

4. Accelerate adoption by incorporating best practice

Ultimately, this is about incorporating what’s worked well in the past and avoiding reinventing the wheel. All too often, transformation projects assume that everything must go through the transformation mill.

The majority of processes adopted across most law firms for a given Practice Group are very similar. Firms all follow similar processes for Litigation, Real Estate, Commercial and the like. This presents the opportunity to accelerate the delivery of these ‘core workflow’ spines by reusing common process, enabling you to focus on the truly value-added processes and differentiate your service with your clients.

At ShareDo, we deliver this common experience in the form of Solution Accelerators.

Each accelerator contains both a business analysis toolkit (including processing models and supporting documents) together with out of the box solution configuration (work types, workflows and personas). Solution Accelerators enable you to engage more quickly in workshops together with configuration artifacts that enable you to implement quicker. By doing this, your implementations are not ‘reinventing the wheel’, but instead are iterating quickly against a best practice baseline.

5. Create a structured implementation process

The adoption of the Agile project management methodology by the entire software industry has led, in our opinion, to important established best practice often being left behind. Agile doesn’t mean no documentation or no upfront design. Instead, it advocates an appropriate level of these vital tools.

In addition, ‘low code’ platforms often encourage a constant state of ‘tinkering’ with system configuration. These can prove harmful, with implementations lacking strategic direction and taking too long to stabilise.

As part of any CMS implementation, we recommend investing in a considerable upfront design phase. Sharedo describe this as the ‘definition phase’, which includes:

  • Process mapping of workflows – these facilitate conversation with stakeholders and forces the thought process to ensure workflows are workable and gives clear, testable outputs for completed workflow.
  • High level design document – describing the overall scope of the initiative, this bible is laser-focused on what an MVP should be and ensures strong stakeholder buy-in to the end solution.

6. Build an agile, multi-disciplinary team

You will require a variety of disciplines to successfully implement a CMS or Legal Operational Management system. Our clients enjoy the greatest level of success when the following roles are fully involved in the process.

  • Change Champion or Business Partner – the Change Champion is actively working with Practice Groups to build business cases for incremental process improvement and manage these improvements into the business. This role could be part of a wider Six Sigma style initiate.
  • Lead Configurator / Business Analyst – solutions such as ShareDo are designed to enable Business Analysts to quickly translate requirements into working solutions. The ideal person here can not only “speak the legal language” of a particular practice group, but can also translate and configure as well. Within our organisation we see this as the most critical role on the project. This individual tends to be the most experienced people in the team.
  • Document Automation Specialists – most, if not all, legal process improvement initiatives will involve significant levels of document automation. Getting automation right is essential and should not be overlooked as a dedicated role.

While the above roles are considered as the ‘core three’ on any winning implementation, larger initiatives will add further dedicated roles into the mix.

  • Workflow Developers – in a similar way to Document Automation, where there is significant demand for workflow automation across the firm, we recommend this becomes a specialist role. This frees up the Business Analysts to focus on mapping process, while enabling the Workflow Developer to focus on creating reusable and consistent workflows.
  • Quality Assurance – across most of our initiatives we see the quality role being fulfilled by the above core team. However, for large initiatives there are significant benefits to specialising this role. Not only does it allow you to cover the more scale but comes with the added benefit of not ‘marking your own homework’.

7. Craft the right data migration strategy

Due to the maturity of today’s CMS market, you will more likely be replacing a legacy solution than moving to a new platform for the first time. As such, you’ll need to give considerable thought to your data migration strategy and the ‘cost benefit versus change’ trade-off. We have identified three migration strategies, each of which have their own benefits and challenges.

Run off files from previous system or don’t migrate any data

If you decide not migrate data, but instead run-off files on your old CMS, then we urge you to consider restructuring your operational teams around the newly created files. When a new system goes live, there is always a period of adjustment as people get used to it, during which time productivity often declines for a short period before accelerating and realising benefits. This period is critical in the change lifecycle and is often referred to as the “trough of despair”. During this period, should you decide not to migrate any legacy data, your people will be using two systems – one of which they are expected to learn. This will undoubtedly impact productivity and the effectiveness of change. To this end, we recommend restructuring your operational teams.

Migrate all case data

The seamless transfer of data between systems on ‘day one’ is by far the most acceptable solution for your end users but comes at considerable cost. There will most like be no easy mapping between the data of your new and old system and considerable effort will have to be channelled to achieve a like-for-like transfer. This effort needs to be carefully weighed up against the change benefits.

Migrate core case data and add the rest as unstructured

A common cost/benefit trade-off to address the complexity of migrating all case data is to only migrate the data required for day one processing, e.g. case status and milestones information. The remaining information, such as file notes or comments, can be migrated as a follow-up stage. We recommend that administrative support is provided to necessitate your case handlers “setting up” each file when they arrive to this task.

Conclusion

We’re not going to fabricate reality and say that implementing case management systems is easy. Step changes that can truly transform your business for the long-term take time and effort to get right. Like any other core operational system, your new CMS will touch the majority of processes in your firm and, if done correctly, will be the catalyst to re-energise and propel your performance to the next level.

However, with this impact comes a significant amount of change. Change that needs to be managed carefully.

Our Professional Services team’s day job is implementing Case and Matter Management Systems for Enterprise Legal Service Providers. They’re a friendly and smart bunch, so if you need some advice or even a “virtual” cup of tea then feel free to reach out!

Empowering legal professionals through technology and process support

sharedo on January 24, 2022

The challenge

Your brightest professionals will be passionate about their chosen careers but will often wear many hats out of necessity and end up handling tasks that don’t require a legal degree or the experience gained over years of practicing law. These “distractions” will at best diminish their billable hours or client relationship building but will at worst diminish their love for the firm. For these reasons empowering legal professionals should be at the heart of our legal operations mindset.

To understand how we might best empower our fee earners we need to focus in on 3 elements:

Non-value activities

  1. Using the data from ShareDo, methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma can be applied to determine the value and non-value add activities that are being performed in the system.
  2. Identifying non-value adding activities, those that clients are unwilling to pay for directly or indirectly, and eliminating them either via process change or automation can significantly improve the value that clients receive and your ability to competitively provide quality service to your clients.

Utilising specialist skills set

  1. Legal professionals are hired primarily for their expert knowledge, creativity, ability to build client relationships and the ability to draw expert based opinions from limited information.
  2. Their legal training and experience allows them to perform skilled tasks such as identifying points of weakness in an opposition, identify technical challenges in contracts and negotiating settlements.
  3. Identifying tasks that take them away from these core functions is critical in implementing the efficient and effective legal operations required to bring client value and succeed in a highly competitive market.

Rework

  1. Using data captured around when activities are performed correctly the first time can allow identification of sticking points in the process and reduce the overhead on legal professionals by applying corrective measures to those processes or practices that are causing them additional work.

Our challenge then is to design our services to maximise the “lawyering” that are legal professionals are able to do and provide appropriate support to ensure that non legal activities are delivered to the same high quality standards.

Since ShareDo has been designed for the single purpose of making legal process more efficient it contains 100s of rich features to make your legal professionals life easier!

12 quick processes to automate that will make your lawyers happy

1. Go Paperless and share files seamlessly

Electronic files are a faster and easier mechanism for providing legal services than traditional paper. Documents can be searched for, shared and collaborated on in real time and can be securely accessed from anywhere using cloud based technologies such as ShareDo.

  1. Seamlessly store documents to your document repository tool
  2. Use Sharedo virtual data rooms to securely share and collaborate on documents
  3. Use workflow to trigger actions based on the upload of documents
  4. Initial automated chase processes for documents that have missed their deadline

2. Delegate work

The ShareDo delegation functionality allows you to delegate a task or part of a task to another user whilst keeping accountability and ownership of the task. This allows fee earners to hand off tasks to colleagues with different skill sets without losing sight of progress or visibility of the outcome.

3. Disaggregation

Use ShareDo’s work disaggregation capability to make sure your legal professionals receive the right tasks at the right time and ensure legal professionals are working on the activities where they add the most value to your clients.

  1. Use ShareDo competencies to define the skills of your users and teams
  2. Smart allocation rules use the context and complexity of the work to determine who the most appropriate resources is and make sure your legal professionals are receiving skill appropriate work.
  3. Round robin and ‘busyness’ capabilities allow you to allocate tasks based on resource workload as well as capability
  4. Set up centralised teams to deal with common processes allowing standardisation and the ability for the legal teams to focus on applying their valuable expertise to legal activities and client relationships
  5. Allow senior legal professionals to reduce risk and to mentor and guide their colleagues using complexity based approval processes

4. Automate your precedents using smart content

ShareDo’s rich document automation functionality allows legal professionals to focus on the parts of precedents that require their legal acumen rather than focusing on standard clauses or, more frustratingly, the formatting of a document.

Author
Author pre-defined precedents using our integrated word app downloaded from the Microsoft App Store.

Automatically vary content
ShareDo precedents pull in data from your matter and use smart content to hide and show content based on work type, complexity or other factors.

Write it once
Smart content and content blocks can be used to significantly reduce the operational overhead of maintaining a large volume of precedents

Clause bank
Fee earners or document authors can create or maintain predefined legal clauses or text

Integrate into your existing infrastructure
Take advantage of our O365, DocuSign, iManage and sharepoint integration to seamlessly integrate your fee earners experience of generating, storing and sharing documents

5. Implement smart working with smart plan workflow

Legal professionals can take advantage of our powerful smart plan technology to automate areas of the legal process that are repeatable or require additional oversight. Where processes can’t be fully automated our dynamic workflow engine can assess the type and complexity of work and provide tasks, activities and checklists that allows users to execute their workload in the most efficient way.

For every activity that is produced in the system helpful calls to action are added to present the user with the right piece of the application in which to perform the action. Documents and emails can be automated including chasers for information or documents required from the client or third parties.

6. Implement shared service centres

Many legal professions find themselves spending time on tasks that are often administrative and common across multiple work types. Typical examples of this are the matter inception process, conflict or AML checks, inbound post.

Implementing a shared service centre using ShareDo is an excellent way to centralise common processes and provide relief for your fee earners from these non-legal tasks whilst providing them with up to date information about progress.

ShareDo also provides the infrastructure and security to share workload with outsourcing providers, allowing you to further allow your fee earners to focus on their core skillsets and to make use of lower cost resource.

7. Time recording

Keeping track of your billable and non-billable hours can be challenging. ShareDo offers sophisticated time recording functionality that enables fee earners to log time with little or no effort.

Delight your legal professionals by taking away from them the burden of time recording and allow ShareDo to automatically stop and start timers or automatically logging time when they are completing certain tasks.

8. E-signature

Use our e-signature capability to speed up the ability to get final documents signed off. Integration with DocuSign allows fee earners to share documents with clients and third parties and receive signatures online.

9. Client Self Service

Whilst building and maintaining client relationships is one of the key skills of any legal professional many clients want to be able to proactively track and monitor the progress of a case.

ShareDo’s external portals allow the fee earners to provide the clients with their own dashboard on which to track cases. Different business areas can choose to securely show as little or as much information as they like to clients. External views can provide sophisticated management information to B2B clients whereas consumers can see a simple, intuitive version of external portals.

Portals can be configured to allow clients or third parties to upload documents, provide approvals and even action their own tasks. Empowering the client in this way not only brings value to them but allows the fee earner to reduce the amount of ‘are we nearly there yet’ conversations by keeping the client in the loop at all times.

10. Client Reporting

Reporting to you clients should be a simple task however we have all seen legal professionals spending significant portions of time on extracting or manipulating data to provide custom client reports.

Implementing ShareDo gives your fee earners the freedom to capture the specific data points required for client reporting without requiring the overhead of creating specific work types or processes. Clients can either self-serve via the external portals or reports can be produced from our powerful data warehouse capability. The modern API structure of the system also allows data to be pushed or pulled through into client systems to allow your process to be fully integrated with theirs.

11. Work Management

Using our work management tools and screens allows legal professionals to quickly gain an oversight of the progress of work on a specific matter or to gain a holistic view across their teams work portfolio.

Our out of the box reports can be used to view the workload of different team members and to drill down into the detail of individual tasks or cases. Work is prioritised by due date enabling team members to understand when tasks need to be completed and to ensure that client SLA’s are met.

12. Collaboration

Use the many collaboration tools in ShareDo to allow your lawyers teams to seamlessly work together. This is just a sample of some of the ways you can collaborate using ShareDo.

Shared view of work
A secure shared view of work and matter portfolios allows teams, departments and individuals to share and re-allocate work

@Mentions
Use social media style mentions to notify colleagues of changes or comments on a file – choose to receive in app or email notifications

Milestone visibility
Use key dates to share key milestones on your matter amongst colleagues and use our configurable plan views to share these

Collaborate
Collaboratively work on documents for your case either internally with colleagues or externally with clients or third parties

Share Knowledge
Use a matter wiki to build up a collaborative view on the matter

Share the story
ShareDo’s powerful chronology features allows you to share the story of the matter amongst colleagues and clients. Giving you the ability to filter or sort the narrative based on points of interest, time or people.