This was presented at ILTA14. Strategic technology has great potential to tip business units (practice areas) toward opportunities to be efficient and profitable. Find the tipping points as we focus on approaches to developing and identifying opportunities for strategic change and ensuring the successful completion of these initiatives.

1. Finding the Fulcrum & Tipping Boulders:
Strategic Approaches to Effecting Change

2. Our Panel
Richard Clark
Director of Conflicts &
Records,
Haynes and Boone LLP
Sally Gonzalez Jeff Willinger
KM & IT Strategy Consultant
Michael Farrell Group LLC
Social Business Strategist,
Rightpoint
@jwillie

3. • Creating a sense of urgency
• Common barriers to change
• Psychology of change; how to foster listening
• Identifying and prioritizing opportunities
• Case Studies
• Q&A
Agenda

4. 8. Anchor new approaches in culture
7. Consolidate gains; produce more change
6. Generate short term wins
5. Empower broad based action
4. Communicate the vision
3. Form vision and strategy
2. Broad-based coalition
1. Create urgency
High
Organizational
Reach
Low
Change is easier when the
platform is burning…
High
Number of
Leaders Needed
Low
Source: Leading Change; John Kotter

5. The Good
Old Days…
Pre 2008
The Legal Platform is Finally Burning…or Smoldering

6. Pre-2008
Demand Exceeds Supply
• Demand growth of 4.5% per
year
• Rate growth of 6-8% per year
• Modest competitive pressures
• Healthy growth rates even for
firms lacking strategic focus
Post-2008
Supply Exceeds Demand
• Organic growth dependent
on stealing market share or
finding market niches
• Strategic focus becomes
critically important
The Legal Platform is Finally Burning…or Smoldering

7. Pre-2008
A Seller’s Market
• Law firms control basic structure
and processes of legal work as
well as pricing, organization, and
scheduling
• Focus on rates and billable hours
• Few incentives for efficiencies
Post-2008
A Buyer’s Market
• Clients demand efficiency
and cost effectiveness in
delivery of legal services
• Firms beginning to work in
different ways
• New competitors in market
The Legal Platform is Finally Burning…or Smoldering

8. “Well, in our country,” said
Alice, still panting a little,
“you’d generally get to
somewhere else – if you run
very fast for a long time, as
we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!”
said the Queen. “Now, here,
you see, it takes all the
running you can do, to keep
in the same place. If you
want to get somewhere
else, you must run at least
twice as fast as that.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the
Looking Glass and What Alice
Found There

9. • Leadership coming from same background
• Closed-minded attitude
• Client demands / external pressures
• Absence of financial incentives or motivation
• Scale of change required
Barriers to change

10. What makes attorneys good for their clients?
• Critical Thinking:
• Skeptical
• Cynical
• Pessimistic
• Negative
• Attorneys all come from the same background
• Always top of class
• Smartest person in the room
• Result oriented, rather than process oriented
Psychology of Attorneys

11. • Avoid coercive or incentivized approaches
• Make sure you understand the objective
• Obtain attorney buy-in
• Solicit input, or
• Make them think it is their idea
• Listen to Needs
Psychology of change; how to foster listening

12. Identifying Opportunities --
In A Target Rich Environment

13. Identifying Opportunities --
Measure Against Business Value

14. Identifying Opportunities --
Setting Priorities

15. Identifying Opportunities --
Transform Into a Roadmap

16. Case Studies

17. “Kotter Step” Approach
Create urgency Powerful business case presented in KM Strategy
Broad-based coalition
Project team included representatives from all stakeholder communities (KM,
IT, Firm Management, Lawyers)
Form vision and strategy Spent 2-3 months envisioning and strategizing
Communicate the vision
Formal communications plan; tightly controlled and consistent messaging
and language throughout
Empower broad based
action
Outreach to KM Community and Practice Groups; engagement of IT
resources
Generate short term wins
Agreement on work flows, policies, and procedures; culling of legacy
collections; agreement on doc types; system pilots
Consolidate gains; produce
more change
Policies & procedures enabled work flow changes; system enabled desired
behaviors
Anchor new approaches in
culture
KM Central team conducting individualized consultations with practice groups
in each office to foster/reinforce behaviors
Case Study: Driving Change in Project Athena

18. The US
Military after
WWI
The US
Military in
WWII
Korea Vietnam Gulf War
Iraq War Afghanistan
Cross fertilization from other organization types

19. CRAWL, WALK, RUN….
WHY?
ENSURING ALIGNMENT OF
GOALS, USERS, AND SOLUTIONS
DEFINE BUSINESS
CONTEXT
• Business Case
• Definition of ROI
• Stakeholder Deep Dive
• Milestones
DEFINE THE HUMAN CONTEXT
• Who are the end-users?
• What do we want them to do?
• How do we engage them?
• What’s in it for me?
DEFINE PROCESS & TECHNOLOGY CONTEXT
• Process
• Platform Requirements
o Functionality
o Content
o Workflow
HOW?
To deliver accelerated acceptance, adoption, and
advocacy.
WHO?

20. 5 step process to achieve social collaboration
goals
2 3 4 5
Define
Create Personas &
User Requirements
Discover
Conduct
Stakeholder
Workshop
Design
Create Collaboration
Adoption Strategy
Develop
Create Roadmap
Deploy
Execute Roadmap
Project Management and Quality Assurance
1
Roadma
p
WHY WHO HOW

21. Collaboration goals
OVERALL COLLABORATION GOAL:
Develop a purposeful social collaboration approach that unleashes the power of
ORGANIZATION’S people and knowledge and helps form a “culture of
collaboration”.
GOAL FOR INTRANET:
1. Enable INTRANET to be a model for how best to manage and grow collaborative
communities that meet clearly defined business goals.
2. Lead by example - influence the company’s behavior and culture by making collaboration a
regular practice – not an isolated event.
3. Enable the Portal to leverage collaboration to:
 Drive innovation for products and capabilities
 Energize decision making by putting together the right information with the right experts
 Accelerate the spreading of new ideas

22. Collaboration Maturity model
Level 1:
Traditional
Collaboration
» Face-to-face, phone, email
Level 2:
Experimentation
» Point solutions; departmental/business unit focus
» Prompted by specific user needs
Level 3:
Proliferation
» Tools in use on widespread basis
» Lack of interoperability; duplicate functionality
» Basic enterprise standards / governance
Level 4:
Standardization
» Enterprise strategy in place
» Standardization on collaboration platform
» Collaboration partially integrated into business
processes
» Anytime / anyplace access
Level 5:
Culture of
Collaboration
» Integrated workspace strategy in place
» Collaboration fully integrated into daily processes
» Cultural integration
If current
collaboration
maturity level is
at Level 1, with
steps taken
Level 2.
To achieve
effectiveness, we
recommend focus on
attaining high Level 3 /
low Level 4 capability.

23. Collaboration Adoption Barriers
“We’re not
seeing the value
of social
collaboration”
“We don’t know
how to use
SharePoint to
collaborate.”
“We don’t have enough
resources to focus on adoption
right now”
“We don’t really
understand the
value social
collaboration”
“Our
leadership
team doesn’t
get social
collaboration”
“Our culture
doesn’t
support this
whole social
thing”
“We can’t
collaborate
socially because
of compliance”
“The tools are
hard to use
and
cumbersome”

24. “Straw man” adoption plan
Collaborating using social tools is often a behavior change for an organization. A
thoughtful communication plan will help prepare your users and drive fast adoption.
Pre-launch Ideas
1. Create multi-channel communication plan.
2. Conduct Collaboration Adoption Strategy
Workshop.
3. Define the core goals for end-user
participation and create an incentive program.
4. Create an idea generation initiative
5. Enable sponsors and champions to build
buy-in and enlist participation.
6. Send teaser emails to end-users to create
buzz and awareness.
Launch Ideas
1. Create a focused contest
2. Disseminate Trivia to create engagement
3. Implement Gamification / Badging Program
4. Incorporate a “No Email Day” into the
Launch
4. Celebrate great use, encourage users,
address frequent questions
Ongoing Ideas
1. Conduct Listening Tours to guide the
Communities – based on feedback and
observation, provide gentle guidance to drive
the right behaviors
2. Celebrate Success – share great use cases,
quotes, etc. to show value and drive the right
behaviors
3. Disseminate “Tips of the Week” via different
channels
4. Conduct User Experience Testing

25. Questions & Answers

26. • Leading Change; John P. Kotter; 1996
• The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their
Organizations; John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen; Harvard Business
School Publishing; 2002
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference; Malcolm
Gladwell; Little, Brown & Company; March 2006
• The Village; Bing West; Simon & Schuster, Inc.; 1972
• One Tribe at a Time; Major Jim Gant; Nine Sisters Imports, Inc.; 2009
• “What Makes Lawyers Tick” (www.lawyerbrainblog.com); Dr. Larry
Richard
• Jeff Willinger www.linkedin.com/in/jeffwillinger
Reading List