Essay concepts and applications

Law Office Technology

Using Content Management Systems in Law Offices

The many processes that a law office relies on are all centered on the efficient management of content and knowledge.

To the extent a law office or practice can translate accumulated content into knowledge (Britt, 22-26) is to the extent it can better serve clients and more thoroughly analyze its own strengths and weaknesses. Plagued by manual processes many law offices, firms and practices allow records, cases and content to become siloed, disconnected from the process workflows that could significantly benefit from having the content and knowledge available. The records management processes often gain significant efficiency once content management systems are put into place (Stein, 34) making knowledge management possible from the accumulated learning enabled from organized content (Plessis, Toit, 36). The catalyst of any successful law practice is the accumulated content that leads to the accumulation of knowledge (Krause, 89). This area of technology has the potential to revolutionize people, processes and systems within any law office, firm or practice. The intent of this paper is to compare two industry-leading enterprise content management systems (ECM). Oracle's Stellent Enterprise Content Management system is compared to Vignette's suite of ECM solutions which includes their Web Content Management and Vignette Collaboration application. In making these comparisons the fundamental need of streamlining content workflows, accumulating content to transform it into knowledge, and creating a portal-based platform that allows for collaboration throughout the practice is critical. A definition of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is next provided, and then a comparison of both suites of applications.

Defining Enterprise Content Management

In evaluating the body of research on enterprise content management and knowledge management, the following key insights immediately emerge and also guide the comparison of the Oracle Stellent ECM Suite and the Vignette ECM and Collaboration suites of applications. First, there is the need to define what a consolidated enterprise content management strategy means in the company or organization of interest. For many companies this entails breaking down the barriers between the many repositories of data, synchronizing up the taxonomies that vary significantly across departments in a law firm, and creating a single version of the truth throughout of a law practice (Lamont, 13). Second, the link of enterprise content management and knowledge management needs to be defined in the context of knowledge frameworks applicable to the specific process workflows of the law office. Third, in addition to accumulating content to have it transformed into knowledge and the enhanced collaboration made possible through this process, there are additional benefits as well. These include meeting auditability and compliance requirements, improving responsiveness to clients, re-defining such content-specific jobs as research and review functions as well. Taken together, all of these factors need to be taken into account as the needs an ECM system will need to address in order to be successful. The following comparison is organized by the seven specific areas of need law practices must contend with when defining an ECM strategy. The best approach is to first re-align processes and make them as efficient as possible. Next, selectively automating those processes with the implementation of an ECM system leads to the change brought by the system becoming more integral to the ongoing daily processes of the law firm or practice.

Comparing Oracle Stellent and Vignette ECM Suites

The seven categories that will be used in the comparison are Customer Support, Information Worker Productivity, Improving Process Agility, Meeting Compliance Mandates, Supporting Service Creation and Management, Support for Client Referenceability and Technologies. Each of these areas has specific topics of interest to any legal firm that faces the challenge of managing their content and transforming it into knowledge.

Starting with Customer Support, the experience and expertise of Vignette is one of its core strengths, as are the four previous product generations of the Vignette portal platform that supports the ECM applications of this vendor. For a law office, this translates into process modeling templates for translating workflows into an ECM system that can capture content and translate it into knowledge. Oracle's Stellent suite of applications has little previous expertise in the legal industry, and the application is now being ported to the Oracle Fusion architecture. This translates into a greater risk for any law office or practice, as the application has not actually shipped yet on the new Fusion platform. The last two areas of Customer Service are Interaction or Graphical Interface and Infrastructure. The Interaction aspects of Vignette are significantly greater, again benefiting from the four product generations that the company has been providing ECM systems. Ironically Vignette is more adept at infrastructure than Oracle, as the former has invested heavily in creating their own architecture based on Java Web Services and frameworks. As a result, Vignette customers report that the underlying Vignette platform is less expensive to maintain than the Oracle Stellent platform, and as a result has a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The second factor these two suites of applications were compared on is Information Worker Productivity. Oracle's Stellent ECM suite has the advantage over Vignette in this area, due to the usability testing Stellent invested in prior to the application being acquired by Oracle. The Oracle Stellent suite is also modular, capable of being more precisely aligned with the processes already in place within a law office or practice. Law firms that have specialized on Oracle also report that the integration of ECM and knowledge management systems, including the availability of search across each type of content management repository is also possible. Third, Oracle Stellent includes analytics that can assist law offices in benchmarking performance of their ECM systems over time, providing a framework for how to achieve higher levels of process efficiency including records management (Stein, 34).

Both vendors have made process management and re-engineering the highest priorities in their product strategies. Oracle Stellent uses a hierarchical modeling interface for defining how taxonomies of content, from legal briefs to records, can be integrated with one another. What is impressive is that the taxonomies can be selectively used depending which employee has a role in the process. Role-based data customization is possible using the Oracle Stellent hierarchical modeling interface. Vignette however takes a more business process analyst approach and has created an interface that is Microsoft Visio-like in appearance and design. Within the design space of this Visio-like interface are drag-and-drop modules that allow system analysts and it staff the opportunity to create customized workflows to align with the needs of a law office or practice. The Vignette platform also supports data interchange between Web Content Management (WCM), Document Management (DM), Records Management (RM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) so that a single Master Data Management (MDM) platform can be created. Oracle lacks the integration of these components at the platform level, due to their acquisition of Stellent still being in process. The critical need in legal offices, practices and firms is the ability to unify dissimilar content to turn knowledge into a competitive advantage (Lamont, 12, 13).

Meeting Compliance Mandates is another area where the Vignette has the advantage as their Java-based platform has gone through intensive database integration testing with Oracle, SAP, and Sybase databases. The reliance on audit trails and the ability to create accessible ECM platform-level logs accessible through the portal interface by administrators is critical in smaller law offices and practices. Oracle's Stellent platform has not been as rigorously tested for integration with 3rd party databases and lacks the ability to run on lower-end Intel-based servers, making it quite expensive for a smaller legal office to set up and run. The compliance aspects of the comparison therefore favor Vignette.