Law and online collaboration

When one of the world's top international law firms decided to forge ahead with an ambitious online collaboration project last year, the effort met with serious internal resistance. After all, introducing the application meant that the 130-year-old firm would open its network to clients and other business partners, possibly even exposing sensitive documents to outsiders.

But surprisingly, it wasn't Morgan, Lewis & Bockius' lawyers who balked at the rollout: They were gung-ho.

Rather, it was the firm's IT staff that raised objections.

"There has been a tussle between lawyers and IT people," says George Loveless, the Morgan, Lewis attorney who pressed the case for deploying eRoom Technology's Web-based collaboration software. "When we started out using eRoom, we knew we would open up our [network] for client use. Our IT department wasn't even close to [enabling] this, but our clients were experiencing this need."

Don't get the wrong idea about the firm's IT staff. It wasn't that the group was opposed to meeting the needs of the firm's 2,500 end users. It was more that the staff had a full plate, including a $25 million Fast Ethernet and Lotus Notes upgrade in the works. And besides, the 140-member IT staff was doing its best to establish common desktop and server software standards - something the eRoom project could compromise.

"We don't want clients mucking around in our internal systems, but we do recognize the need for the new method of doing business," says Stanley Wasylyk, the firm's chief information officer.

Client pressure

Online collaboration got its start at Morgan, Lewis when some of the firm's attorneys were pressured by top clients, such as Pennsylvania Mutual Life Insurance, to find a way to do business electronically.

The lawyers went software shopping and chose eRoom's offering. Before using eRoom's software of the same name, the law firm had to resort to faxing and overnight mail delivery of lengthy legal documents to finalize multimillion-dollar financial deals for clients. Sometimes, all parties ended up huddled for a week in the posh, art-filled Morgan, Lewis conference room, marking up documents to make a deadline.

Nowadays, participants in these high-powered deals are more likely to meet at the Morgan, Lewis Web site to thrash out complex negotiations.

In their assigned eRoom, the bank, insurance company and accountants can pick up legal documents electronically, send them back with comments or engage in some online lawyerly chat.

When a financial deal is completed, the lawyers can scan signed documents for retrieval in eRoom by all participants. The handwritten signature found in a Portable Definition Format file makes it clear that this is the final word following a round of unsigned drafts, Loveless notes.

"The efficiencies of this are extraordinary from a lawyer's point of view," he says.

Another of the firm's attorneys, Ronald Roubley, loves eRoom's instant messaging feature. This lets him "page" Penn Mutual's investment managers and advisors at their desktops when he needs immediate review of any financial document sent by HTTP to the eRoom.

Ann Strootman, Penn Mutual's financial controller and a vice president, says she insisted on online collaboration because of the need to meet strict deadlines, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission requirement to file documents related to financial offerings.

"The number of filings has grown, and there are so many handoffs, so much paper," she says.

As the two business partners mulled exactly how to enable online collaboration, Strootman suggested that Penn Mutual open its network to facilitate a hosted document exchange service based on Citrix software.

But Morgan, Lewis attorneys worried that there would be questions about ownership of the legal documents if they were stored inside another company. The law firm then tried e-mailing the large documents around. But with the huge legal files, the mail had to be batch processed, often hours after being sent, Loveless says.

The Windows NT-based eRoom software caught their attention, and the lawyers tested it for several months as a hosted service to get a feel for it. They liked how they could set up restricted access for file exchange of any kind in a workflow routine, with chat and instant messaging, using the eRoom browser plug-in.

Once the firm decided on eRoom, Loveless negotiated a site license so every Morgan, Lewis client and employee can use the software without anyone having to worry about the usual $200 per-seat charge.

Then he prodded the IT department to support the server, its password management and its backup.

Wasylyk acknowledges that he had little chance of winning against this bunch of high-powered lawyers.

"I've had lawyers come in and say, 'If you don't plug this server in, I will.' You can't say no to these people. They're too smart, and they'll find a way," he says. The firm's network has been brought down more than once by lawyers plugging in powerful computers without notifying the IT department, he adds.

Now that eRoom seems there to stay, the debate centers on how to improve it and make it work better with the firm's primary iManage document management system, which itself has been opened up via a Web interface to Morgan, Lewis clients. The lawyers don't think eRoom needs to share documents with iManage, but Wasylyk says he thinks otherwise.

"There's tension, but it's a healthy tension. It's a sign that people are thinking about what they're doing," Wasylyk says. "We do have to find new ways of interacting with our clients."