IBM Legal Experience with WebSphere Portal

Description

  • Modernization of the IBM Legal Information System (LIS)

Business Needs

  • Increase productivity
  • Foster a collaboration-rich environment
  • Leverage skills and resources

Software

  • IBM WebSphere Portal
  • IBM DB2 Content Manager
  • IBM OmniFind 

CLIENT BACKGROUND

IBM creates business value for clients and solves business problems through integrated solutions that leverage information technology and deep knowledge of business processes. IBM solutions typically create value by reducing a client’s operational costs or by enabling new capabilities that generate revenue. These solutions draw from an industry leading portfolio of consulting, delivery and implementation services, enterprise software, systems and financing. IBM has nearly 400K employees worldwide including a legal department of over 500 attorneys.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

IBM deserves its hard earned reputation  as a deeply experienced, award winning  legal department; however, better leveraging the accumulated  knowledge of the worldwide department  was a pressing challenge.  It was necessary to ensure that  IBM lawyers, both new and experienced, were able to access a comprehensive system which provides access  to important  material such as   corporate directives, contracts, negotiating strategy documents, and legal  memos.  Further, the department wished to improve its  process for communicating company news such as important policy directives, significant developments in case law, or major court decisions affecting IBM.

The objective was to develop a knowledge management infrastructure for the IBM legal department, empowering IBM's lawyers to share information, leverage skills, locate resources of all types, manage workflow, stay abreast of important developments affecting the legal department and the business, and inform their clients of legal-related information as appropriate.

In summary, the IBM legal department wanted a unique worldwide Legal Knowledge Management System that would support collaboration and shared knowledge on legal issues such as compliance, patents, trademarks, certificates of originality, privacy, etc., include an advanced search expert finder, enable collaboration & notification tools for the attorneys, and selectively share knowledge and case status with clients.

SOLUTION

Originally, IBM’s attorneys relied  on Lotus Notes and Domino. By migrating their infrastructure to IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM felt they would gain the unified, enterprise-scale infrastructure and collaboration improvements required to better support their business objectives. The solution provides a state-of-the-art portal for IBM's lawyers to share information.  Combining IBM DB2 Content Manager with IBM OmniFind, the attorneys will be able to search, post and retrieve from their 10K+ documents utilizing metadata.

The conversion of LIS from its Domino-based platform to WebSphere Portal also provides the flexibility to use portlets, which would provide the legal staff with a customizable and personalized place to organize and perform work, receive content, information and run needed applications.

As the attorney’s workspace hub for conducting day-to-day business, its simple and intuitive user interface includes a ‘dashboard function’ with ‘single-click’ access to numerous resources including external databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw. In addition, the department  publishes periodic newsletters to enhance communication and more efficiently works with their case teams through collaborative wikis.

Perhaps most importantly, the new site provides search capabilities to locate information among more than 10K documents used by department members. Improved collaboration is provided by the enhanced search option through the new People Finder portlet. Photos and in-depth biographies assist in identifying subject matter experts on specific areas of law.   Law department members have appropriate levels of visibility into what other colleagues are working on and their skill set making it easier to gain assistance. The next phase of LIS will include more personalization. Offline and other accessibilities are also being considered.

The new infrastructure remains consistent with the look and feel of IBM’s Intranet, W3, a critical component and key driver to the solution overall. The resulting solution helps to increase the operational effectiveness of the IBM legal department, as well as the satisfaction of their clients.

This is a significant cumulative savings in time and effort for attorneys and the staff that support them and their clients. Conservatively speaking, the new LIS Portal will save thousands of man hours per year. By using its own WebSphere Portal technology, IBM will yield exponential savings and productivity.

“We teamed with  Prolifics which enabled them to combine our law dept experience,  IBM’s market
Leading technology, and Prolifics’ technical roadmap to enable Prolifics to create a Knowledge
Management Portal Solution.” — Maura Roberts, Project Manager LIS Systems