Cisco Legal Increases Efficiency

Cisco's corporate law department is a global multi-disciplinary team. The department's 200-plus attorneys and staff members work in 23 countries, delivering legal and business advice to Cisco's 60,000 employees to enable the creation and commercialization of Cisco technology and solutions for our consumers.

The Challenge

An ongoing challenge of Cisco Legal's priority to deliver value efficiently to its business customers is the need to facilitate intra- as well as inter-departmental collaboration with outside counsel and business partners and customers.

The department had outgrown its current communication and collaboration tools such as e-mail, browser-based discussion forums and content and shared document repositories. Informal discussions addressing negotiation policy and guidance or departmental announcements about new regulations were promulgated often via e-mail ' there was a need to move from e-mails that were manually and individually saved on hard drives to know-how that maintained its informal nature but was seamlessly and automatically captured, centralized, shared and re-used. Publishing was centralized (via a Webmaster) ' but practice groups needed easier content publishing via a decentralized tool in order to collaborate quickly without a gatekeeper. Identifying the department's internal or external counsel experts was something that recent hires learned only over time ' the department's challenge was to find who knew what using a tool that organically and automatically maintained expertise information.

In addition to outgrowing its legacy tools, the global department had also outgrown itself with respect to easy collaboration: the small primarily U.S.-based department when Cisco was formed could no longer rely on proximity for collegial collaboration ' the colleague you saw at the water cooler or who could walk next door to your office in many cases now worked in another state or country, sometimes in a time zone too different to permit a quick call.

In sum, a new collaborative climate was required that could take a large global department beyond standard communication and collaborative tools and precedent repositories and move to a malleable, sophisticated and facile collaboration tool of the ilk frequently called “Web 2.0.”

The challenge was to build a tool that created a collaborative environment flexible enough to allow each practice group within the department to mold that tool to its own unique business processes (not the reverse). To create a tool that offered a plethora of collaborative options, from in-the-moment practice advice to expertise location to trusted, organically maintained content repositories ' layering Wikipedia-style democratization of publishing with vetting by experts ' to automatically captured, centralized, searchable and re-used institutional know-how.

The Solution

In late 2006, Cisco Legal created a new position to lead the legal knowledge management (“KM”) initiative. One of the first tasks was drafting a KM strategic plan that addressed, among other things, collaborative tools. The strategic plan identified several critical success factors, including an automated system to capture informal discussions, a decentralized publishing tool and a centralized searchable content repository for formal guidance and informal know-how. In 2007, Cisco Legal began its search for a tool that would meet these factors, looking at a wide range of options, such as upgrading its existing browser-based discussion forum, buying a third-party off-the-shelf product, using corporate enterprise tools like wikis, etc. The objective was to centralize knowledge, automate knowledge capture (a successful KM program emphasizes automated capture over manual), decentralize publishing and integrate favored Web 1.0 technologies like e-mail into a new Web 2.0 tool. After evaluating available buy, build and upgrade options for extant home-grown tools, Cisco Legal decided that the best option for Cisco Legal was a custom-built new collaboration tool that blended wikis, discussion forums, e-mail, documents and search, designed in-house by KM and practicing attorneys ' an ASP, built and hosted by (and licensed from) Qulas, Inc. (the team behind the popular public internet site, Legal OnRamp).

The solution, currently called “ORX,” was launched in the fall of 2008; in late-January 2009, Cisco decommissioned its legacy tool, a browser-based discussion forum and content repository.

Customization

The ORX ASP, using Linux, Apache, MySqL, PhP technology, offered good built-in wiki functionality, but Cisco Legal needed a customized option to achieve its objective: to provide continuously updated trusted content. So the KM and practice attorney team tasked with building this solution began working with the Qulas team to outline the project requirements. One customization requirement was to use a moderated wiki, where anyone could propose edits (and all could view those revisions). A moderator received automated alerts if edits were proposed and was tasked with reviewing and publishing approved revisions. A second customization requirement was to allow attorneys and staff to continue to use e-mail for selected informal discussions (that users knew were slated for capture in ORX) but to capture the e-mails in ORX discussion forums automatically. The discussions had the functionality to allow outside counsel or business partners to participate in a threaded conversation as well. A third customization requirement involved the discussion forums. Questions were automatically directed to the right subject matter experts (“SMEs”), with the option to add additional recipients.

The Qulas team completed its phase 1 work in October, when the solution was released. In January, Qulas completed phase 2; the metrics reports requirements, allowing practice group leaders, KM, learning and development and content managers to analyze usage and then direct their resources to the most heavily discussed legal topics.

Benefits

With the launch of ORX, Cisco Legal has brought its collaboration capabilities to a new level. We have a sophisticated collaborative climate that addresses the complaint heard round the corporate law department world: if only we could find what we already know and could find who knows what. Formal guidance is centralized and easily updated, informal discussions and guidance are captured for re-use in ORX automatically, users control editing, publishing and subscriptions to updates, and the centralized site and search capabilities fosters efficiency, greater responsiveness to clients, standardization of legal advice, and gives users the ability to locate experts.

Automates Know-How Exchange Capture

Automating know-how capture is one critical success factor for knowledge management, rather than relying on colleagues to remember to submit a useful contribution to the centralized site, but the key is also to automate in a way that doesn't force users to abandon a favored business process or tool. ORX achieves that with its automated informal communication capture. Communications requesting guidance prior to ORX were primarily in e-mail, and ORX is flexible enough to allow that to continue for those who wish to use that technology.

Facilitates Content Publishing And Maintenance

Another critical success factor for knowledge management initiatives is to give users “push” and “pull” control over content, and ORX is used with that in mind. Department attorneys or staff research wiki content during negotiations for policy resolution and guidance, for standard clauses, and during that research usage, if a user wants to revise or add to new wiki content, they can, easily. With ORX, it is just a button push to publish wiki revisions, and the publishing process from there is automated: moderators receive notification of the updates, a redline, and then revise and publish (the Webmaster gatekeeper to publishing is eliminated). Early usage statistics show that this revision feature is used by a broad base of users, and revision approvals are published by SMEs within 48 hours of receipt. In addition, users choose to receive automated alerts for content updates or discussions via a self-subscription model. For example, a technology licensing attorney may want to receive updates on wikis or informal conversations outside of his or her area, related to legal sales and patent and copyright infringement; ORX offers that functionality.

Centralizes Know-How

Knowledge management mantra: Capture it, centralize it, make it searchable for content, make it searchable for experts. At Cisco Legal, attorneys and staff use the new Qulas-built tool not only for the training of new hires, research, and updated standard clauses, but also to locate the informal department experts by searching on the topic and finding the people who contribute content, respond to questions and moderate topics (SMEs). To further their own professional development, attorneys have started using ORX SME reporting functionality to determine which subject areas do not have a SME assigned, and then volunteer to moderate that topic.

Cost-Savings

By licensing the ORX tool from Qulas, Cisco Legal is saving costs associated with maintaining and improving the tool. Cisco Legal's objective is to get out of the business of building or buying and maintaining tools and to license useful tools. As the designers of ORX, Cisco Legal has the advantage of using a customized tool that meets its corporate legal department knowledge management needs; as licensees, Cisco has the advantage going forward of utilizing its Legal IT resources elsewhere and leaving the IT maintenance costs in the good hands of the Qulas team who built this highly useful tool.

What's Next?

Although the new solution has seen overwhelming adoption by the department, and already has increased efficiency for attorneys and staff working together and with outside counsel, business partners and customers, Cisco Legal anticipates greater benefits after its next phase of work with the Qulas team to implement enhancements that include: integration with the contract management system (standard clauses edited in ORX will be automatically uploaded to the contract/clause management system), wiki templates (users can load new content into ORX with templates and decrease editing/format cleanup time), enhanced integration with e-mail and handheld devices and improved search.

Cisco's corporate law department is a global multi-disciplinary team. The department's 200-plus attorneys and staff members work in 23 countries, delivering legal and business advice to Cisco's 60,000 employees to enable the creation and commercialization of Cisco technology and solutions for our consumers.

The Challenge

An ongoing challenge of Cisco Legal's priority to deliver value efficiently to its business customers is the need to facilitate intra- as well as inter-departmental collaboration with outside counsel and business partners and customers.

The department had outgrown its current communication and collaboration tools such as e-mail, browser-based discussion forums and content and shared document repositories. Informal discussions addressing negotiation policy and guidance or departmental announcements about new regulations were promulgated often via e-mail ' there was a need to move from e-mails that were manually and individually saved on hard drives to know-how that maintained its informal nature but was seamlessly and automatically captured, centralized, shared and re-used. Publishing was centralized (via a Webmaster) ' but practice groups needed easier content publishing via a decentralized tool in order to collaborate quickly without a gatekeeper. Identifying the department's internal or external counsel experts was something that recent hires learned only over time ' the department's challenge was to find who knew what using a tool that organically and automatically maintained expertise information.

In addition to outgrowing its legacy tools, the global department had also outgrown itself with respect to easy collaboration: the small primarily U.S.-based department when Cisco was formed could no longer rely on proximity for collegial collaboration ' the colleague you saw at the water cooler or who could walk next door to your office in many cases now worked in another state or country, sometimes in a time zone too different to permit a quick call.

In sum, a new collaborative climate was required that could take a large global department beyond standard communication and collaborative tools and precedent repositories and move to a malleable, sophisticated and facile collaboration tool of the ilk frequently called “Web 2.0.”

The challenge was to build a tool that created a collaborative environment flexible enough to allow each practice group within the department to mold that tool to its own unique business processes (not the reverse). To create a tool that offered a plethora of collaborative options, from in-the-moment practice advice to expertise location to trusted, organically maintained content repositories ' layering Wikipedia-style democratization of publishing with vetting by experts ' to automatically captured, centralized, searchable and re-used institutional know-how.

The Solution

In late 2006, Cisco Legal created a new position to lead the legal knowledge management (“KM”) initiative. One of the first tasks was drafting a KM strategic plan that addressed, among other things, collaborative tools. The strategic plan identified several critical success factors, including an automated system to capture informal discussions, a decentralized publishing tool and a centralized searchable content repository for formal guidance and informal know-how. In 2007, Cisco Legal began its search for a tool that would meet these factors, looking at a wide range of options, such as upgrading its existing browser-based discussion forum, buying a third-party off-the-shelf product, using corporate enterprise tools like wikis, etc. The objective was to centralize knowledge, automate knowledge capture (a successful KM program emphasizes automated capture over manual), decentralize publishing and integrate favored Web 1.0 technologies like e-mail into a new Web 2.0 tool. After evaluating available buy, build and upgrade options for extant home-grown tools, Cisco Legal decided that the best option for Cisco Legal was a custom-built new collaboration tool that blended wikis, discussion forums, e-mail, documents and search, designed in-house by KM and practicing attorneys ' an ASP, built and hosted by (and licensed from) Qulas, Inc. (the team behind the popular public internet site, Legal OnRamp).

The solution, currently called “ORX,” was launched in the fall of 2008; in late-January 2009, Cisco decommissioned its legacy tool, a browser-based discussion forum and content repository.

Customization

The ORX ASP, using Linux, Apache, MySqL, PhP technology, offered good built-in wiki functionality, but Cisco Legal needed a customized option to achieve its objective: to provide continuously updated trusted content. So the KM and practice attorney team tasked with building this solution began working with the Qulas team to outline the project requirements. One customization requirement was to use a moderated wiki, where anyone could propose edits (and all could view those revisions). A moderator received automated alerts if edits were proposed and was tasked with reviewing and publishing approved revisions. A second customization requirement was to allow attorneys and staff to continue to use e-mail for selected informal discussions (that users knew were slated for capture in ORX) but to capture the e-mails in ORX discussion forums automatically. The discussions had the functionality to allow outside counsel or business partners to participate in a threaded conversation as well. A third customization requirement involved the discussion forums. Questions were automatically directed to the right subject matter experts (“SMEs”), with the option to add additional recipients.

The Qulas team completed its phase 1 work in October, when the solution was released. In January, Qulas completed phase 2; the metrics reports requirements, allowing practice group leaders, KM, learning and development and content managers to analyze usage and then direct their resources to the most heavily discussed legal topics.

Benefits

With the launch of ORX, Cisco Legal has brought its collaboration capabilities to a new level. We have a sophisticated collaborative climate that addresses the complaint heard round the corporate law department world: if only we could find what we already know and could find who knows what. Formal guidance is centralized and easily updated, informal discussions and guidance are captured for re-use in ORX automatically, users control editing, publishing and subscriptions to updates, and the centralized site and search capabilities fosters efficiency, greater responsiveness to clients, standardization of legal advice, and gives users the ability to locate experts.

Automates Know-How Exchange Capture

Automating know-how capture is one critical success factor for knowledge management, rather than relying on colleagues to remember to submit a useful contribution to the centralized site, but the key is also to automate in a way that doesn't force users to abandon a favored business process or tool. ORX achieves that with its automated informal communication capture. Communications requesting guidance prior to ORX were primarily in e-mail, and ORX is flexible enough to allow that to continue for those who wish to use that technology.

Facilitates Content Publishing And Maintenance

Another critical success factor for knowledge management initiatives is to give users “push” and “pull” control over content, and ORX is used with that in mind. Department attorneys or staff research wiki content during negotiations for policy resolution and guidance, for standard clauses, and during that research usage, if a user wants to revise or add to new wiki content, they can, easily. With ORX, it is just a button push to publish wiki revisions, and the publishing process from there is automated: moderators receive notification of the updates, a redline, and then revise and publish (the Webmaster gatekeeper to publishing is eliminated). Early usage statistics show that this revision feature is used by a broad base of users, and revision approvals are published by SMEs within 48 hours of receipt. In addition, users choose to receive automated alerts for content updates or discussions via a self-subscription model. For example, a technology licensing attorney may want to receive updates on wikis or informal conversations outside of his or her area, related to legal sales and patent and copyright infringement; ORX offers that functionality.

Centralizes Know-How

Knowledge management mantra: Capture it, centralize it, make it searchable for content, make it searchable for experts. At Cisco Legal, attorneys and staff use the new Qulas-built tool not only for the training of new hires, research, and updated standard clauses, but also to locate the informal department experts by searching on the topic and finding the people who contribute content, respond to questions and moderate topics (SMEs). To further their own professional development, attorneys have started using ORX SME reporting functionality to determine which subject areas do not have a SME assigned, and then volunteer to moderate that topic.

Cost-Savings

By licensing the ORX tool from Qulas, Cisco Legal is saving costs associated with maintaining and improving the tool. Cisco Legal's objective is to get out of the business of building or buying and maintaining tools and to license useful tools. As the designers of ORX, Cisco Legal has the advantage of using a customized tool that meets its corporate legal department knowledge management needs; as licensees, Cisco has the advantage going forward of utilizing its Legal IT resources elsewhere and leaving the IT maintenance costs in the good hands of the Qulas team who built this highly useful tool.

What's Next?

Although the new solution has seen overwhelming adoption by the department, and already has increased efficiency for attorneys and staff working together and with outside counsel, business partners and customers, Cisco Legal anticipates greater benefits after its next phase of work with the Qulas team to implement enhancements that include: integration with the contract management system (standard clauses edited in ORX will be automatically uploaded to the contract/clause management system), wiki templates (users can load new content into ORX with templates and decrease editing/format cleanup time), enhanced integration with e-mail and handheld devices and improved search.