IT March 5, 2008 Roundtable Review

On Wednesday, March 5 2008, SALIX hosted several IT Professionals for an IT Roundtable discussion. Those in attendance included:

Terry Abaray – Burg Simpson Eldridge Hersh Jardine
Larry Buskey – Deters, Benzinger & LaVelle
Phil Harman – Waite, Schneider, Bayless & Chesley
Brenda Hinkle – Faruki Ireland & Cox
Blake Jamison – Strauss & Troy
Paul Meyers – Frost Brown Todd
Jeff Middendorf – Katz, Teller, Brant & Hild
Steve Smith – Taft Stettinius & Hollister
Sandi Surber – Arnzen Parry & Wentz

Rob Adams, Jon Adams and Jim Hillmann, all with SALIX, moderated the discussion.To start, the moderators asked those in attendance to share a recent IT initiative that had
a positive impact on their firm.

Steve Smith stepped forward first and commented that while many IT initiatives have hidden challenges, he felt that the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) integration worked “as advertised” and the adoption of the Blackberry platform has been a huge plus for his firm. This prompted several comments from the group including a question from Brenda Hinkle as to what other PDA platforms are being supported by those in attendance. Several in the group including Jeff Middendorf, Paul Meyers, Larry Buskey and Phil Harman said they are currently supporting, or have supported, other PDA platforms
including Palm, Windows Mobile and the iPhone. The conversation then moved to the security and support of these devices. Steve Smith commented that the BES platform was the only one which allows a device to be “killed” remotely and thus, was the only one which satisfied his firm’s security concerns. Steve also said that standardization was of the utmost concern which was another reason why his firm only supports Blackberry.
Others in attendance commented on the Blackberry’s ability to run other applications which interface with the firm’s core applications such as time & billing software.

Next, the moderators asked the group to comment on the ever increasing need for remote access. Several attendees said many of their attorneys have laptops while others said the firm maintains only a few laptops to be “checked out” as needed. Blake Jamison said they have tried to stay away from laptops for attorneys because of security concerns but the need for remote access is here to stay. This comment turned the discussion toward
the various tools being used for remote access. All present were offering some remote access via one or several means, including: Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Citrix, GoToMyPC or Terminal Server. There were positive and negative comments for each variation but everyone in the group agreed that remote access was necessary.
Jeff Middendorf cited his need for the attorneys to work from anywhere so that vacations and traveling are no longer black outs and that time spent can be tracked and billed.

Email and internet access was the next topic. Several of the attendees said their firms offer email accounts and internet access to all attorneys and support staff and have been doing so for years. Others, citing productivity and security issues, said they issued email accounts and internet access on an “as needed” basis. All in attendance agreed that the increased usage of the internet for research and hosted applications would result in more and more employees needing access to the internet. However, all agreed that some level of policing is necessary to insure productivity and security.

The moderators asked what metrics were used to judge a project’s merit. Jeff Middendorf felt that you cannot rely exclusively on return on investment – ROI does not tell the full story. Jeff cited remote access as an example where his firm may not have moved forward if the sole basis for the decision was ROI because it would have been impossible to pinpoint the return. However, having made the investment, everyone at the firm concedes it was the right move. Steve Smith echoed Jeff’s thoughts and added that how the initiative affected the bottom line was not as much of a gauge as what type of effect it has on end users.

The attendees were asked to share some of their IT initiatives that did not meet expectations. Steve Smith shared that they invested resources in building extranets to serve their clients only to find that most of their clients did not really care to use them. Another mentioned that most of their disappointing initiatives start with an attorney who promises a client access to some technology which is not currently in place. Most often this results in an expensive and poorly planned implementation which brings little value to the rest of the firm. Paul Meyers voiced some disappointment with their SharePoint roll out saying the product over-promised functionality which was not available out of the box. Several other attendees agreed with this statement and said they have had frustrations with SharePoint as well.

Running short on time, the moderators asked the attendees to list some important issues they are facing currently or in the near future. Many commented on the explosion of Electronic discovery and the importance of having reliable vendors and best practices in place to deal with E-discovery issues. Several other attendees cited document management and document retention as important issues on their horizon

Read the IT June 11, 2008 Roundtable Review

More about E–Discovery