Bradford & Barthel's Evolution with Google Apps

Rapid growth at Bradford & Barthel (B&B) in 2009 exposed a major firm challenge: finding an effective way to associate technology and knowledge management (KM) with firm strategy and business objectives. There was a lack of transparency and communication between our existing technology group, other departments and the senior management team. As the firm continued to expand, it became increasingly apparent that sticking with the status quo would put B&B at a distinct competitive disadvantage. In the creation of my dual role as KM and IT Director, I worked with senior management to focus on strategic technology and knowledge management, with an aim of integration and transparency to help drive overall business strategy. Our answer: Google Apps and the cloud, a shift that would ultimately initiate both a dramatic department and cultural firm change.

KM: So Much More than a
Technology Infrastructure

My time at ILTA in Washington, DC, in 2009 proved invaluable to the validation of how big picture concepts driven through KM can affect the culture of the firm. During the fall of that year, I worked with senior management to initiate a KM/IT department hybrid, with the goal of bridging the legal, business and technology sectors together, using Google Apps as our knowledge sharing platform. That fall, I mapped out our transition to Google Apps, based on five core business strategy objectives:

1. Creation of an evolving, collaborative, knowledge-sharing environment with transparency, scalability and real-time search.
2. Providing secure access internally and among clients in a strategic and targeted fashion.
3. Execution of a 24-month forward-thinking technology investment strategy.
4. Creation of a culture of change and adaptation.
5. Implementation and use of applications focused on tactical and strategic intelligence, as well as cost savings with increased utility in all phases.

The key to making these strategic components come to life was the implementation of Google Apps, an evolving KM platform to assist in focusing on the human elements, the business factors, and the technological innovation components of our business. We developed a plan to coordinate business strategy, create efficiencies, and allow the firm to outsource both technology and administrative resources where possible. Last, we created a scalable infrastructure aimed at future growth and development, as well as providing an aggressive path forward toward the implementation of a collaboration and information-sharing platform internally and with firm clients.

Firm Culture Challenges Change

To alter our processes and shift the firm's approach to knowledge management, I wanted to shift the perception of “too much change is a bad thing” to “the firm will not be competitive unless it embraces a culture of change.” Google's Web-based approach to e-mail for corporations was an entire shift from our norm. This is exactly what was needed to begin a culture of change ' rethinking how to store information, search for it, and explore new ways to communicate.

By choosing Google Apps, B&B picked the platform that would require the most profound change from a variety of perspectives. A consistent push-back was that our users would not be able to adapt. We ran a risk management analysis and championed the opposite view. Our firm was at too great a risk to not initiate immediate change. We also championed that, with the rise of social media, the changes we were looking to implement would be no more difficult than interaction with social media tools driven in the consumer market. In fact, consumer-driven social media technology would only drive enterprise-level collaboration unified messaging platforms faster within our market.

Learning and Teaching in the Cloud

We used a “train the trainers” approach to our training by first developing training and support experts within my department and then training other key department heads. We initiated weekly Webinars, establishing additional layers of training and leadership in each office by training the leadership in that office. Enabling that leadership empowered their contribution and understanding of the rollout, and laid the groundwork for both a learning organization and a knowledge-sharing culture primed and prepared for future updates from an evolving platform.

Post implementation, our training re-focused efforts on Calendaring, Client Panels, Litigation Guidelines, Summaries, Budgets and Project Management, to name a few, using the Collaboration Platform. Document collaboration in place using Google Docs, integrated with Google Sites in particular, streamlined how departments communicated, and bridged them together. Our cross-departmental training and collaboration are now allowing us the development of alternative staffing models previously unconsidered, while client-sharing using Google Sites as our Intranet and Extranet platforms is being augmented with a video training program for our attorneys and clients. User collaboration ' enabled via Google Sites, Docs, Email and Chat features, combined with document sharing for video, training and Web meetings ' has amounted to major time savings and collaboration, both internally and with firm clients.

We're now one year into our 24-month execution plan integrating business process management and touching users' critical applications and workflows, including e-mail, calendaring, discovery, finance, billing, intranet, extranet, voice, video, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Upon completion, the entire collaborative cloud-hosted platform will include a document management system and unified messaging platform with full business intelligence integration.

Significant savings to date have been derived from a combination of outsourcing, alternative staffing and streamlined workflows and process benefits. Based on streamlined collaboration and smoother internal processes, firm staff has been able to produce work product in a fraction of the time and work with clients on edits and changes in real-time. In terms of return on investment, in licensing alone we've realized cost savings of 10:1 based on Google's annual subscription/per user pricing model ($50 per collaboration suite user and $13 per e-mail archiving user) compared with steeper traditional licensing fees for client/server and even Web-based law practice management software.

Understanding and
Capitalizing on Vendor Business Trends

Due to the firm's relative lack of technical infrastructure and the need for formal risk management and disaster recovery policies and systems, we opted to move quickly in selecting a technology solution. In retrospect, this lack of infrastructure and existing technology also gave us the flexibility and freedom of perspective in choosing our technology path forward ' Google Apps.

While discovering first-hand how collaborative cloud solutions would affect our firm and how it could affect the legal industry, we closely studied (and continue to do so) business trends between Microsoft and Google's cloud offerings. We made the following observations:

• Google's evolving collaboration cloud platform was the right fit for B&B, both tactically and strategically. This alignment eased the decision to jump in with both feet.
• No other law firms of comparable size (200+ users) we could identify were embracing Google Apps to the extent of our roll out. Instead of viewing this as a deterrent, we figured it to be a “first mover” opportunity.
• Microsoft would ultimately have to compete with Google on a global scale by offering a similar platform to protect its profit margin from Office, Exchange, SharePoint, LiveMeeting and related products. This will allow B&B a collaborative cloud-hosted exit strategy.
• Google would have to compete with Microsoft to protect its share in ad revenue that Microsoft threatened by integrating Bing into their collaborative product suite, allowing B&B to benefit from a rapidly evolving SaaS collaboration suite with a per-user, per-year, pricing model that directly threatened Microsoft's licensing structure.

In presenting the case for Google Apps to senior management, we had no existing case studies moving forward, but seized the opportunity to write our own as we went along. When looking at the business models in Google and Microsoft, we ultimately championed to the firm the out-of-the-box innovative take Google has in its product evolution and vision, and championed Google Apps as the most creative solution for short- and long-term cost savings, as well as business process management across the firm.

Although Google currently markets its cloud platform as an IT communications solution for business, it has viable potential as a KM-driven solution for businesses and law firms. Google's innovative approach will force competing vendors to adapt and integrate their platforms on both a consumer and enterprise level. Microsoft's competition with Google's platform is already lowering licensing costs in its cloud collaboration offerings and opening up the potential for third-party legal vendor integration.

The Evolution Forward

As B&B focuses on tactical and strategic intelligence, our Google Apps environment continues to evolve. Restructured personnel within my department and other departments and practice areas focused on training for our Google Apps implementation as the primary objective pre-implementation, and are still in place as the platform evolves. This continually raises the expertise level across all departments and practice areas, and also raises the bar in expectations of what is possible moving forward.

We face many significant challenges as we continue to integrate in this evolving collaborative system, and as the collaborative cloud integrates both with consumers through social media and the legal enterprise. As we continue to evolve with this collaboration platform, the most significant achievement we've made as a firm in this journey is in building a culture change and the creation of a knowledge-sharing culture.

Rapid growth at Bradford & Barthel (B&B) in 2009 exposed a major firm challenge: finding an effective way to associate technology and knowledge management (KM) with firm strategy and business objectives. There was a lack of transparency and communication between our existing technology group, other departments and the senior management team. As the firm continued to expand, it became increasingly apparent that sticking with the status quo would put B&B at a distinct competitive disadvantage. In the creation of my dual role as KM and IT Director, I worked with senior management to focus on strategic technology and knowledge management, with an aim of integration and transparency to help drive overall business strategy. Our answer: Google Apps and the cloud, a shift that would ultimately initiate both a dramatic department and cultural firm change.

KM: So Much More than a
Technology Infrastructure

My time at ILTA in Washington, DC, in 2009 proved invaluable to the validation of how big picture concepts driven through KM can affect the culture of the firm. During the fall of that year, I worked with senior management to initiate a KM/IT department hybrid, with the goal of bridging the legal, business and technology sectors together, using Google Apps as our knowledge sharing platform. That fall, I mapped out our transition to Google Apps, based on five core business strategy objectives:

1. Creation of an evolving, collaborative, knowledge-sharing environment with transparency, scalability and real-time search.
2. Providing secure access internally and among clients in a strategic and targeted fashion.
3. Execution of a 24-month forward-thinking technology investment strategy.
4. Creation of a culture of change and adaptation.
5. Implementation and use of applications focused on tactical and strategic intelligence, as well as cost savings with increased utility in all phases.

The key to making these strategic components come to life was the implementation of Google Apps, an evolving KM platform to assist in focusing on the human elements, the business factors, and the technological innovation components of our business. We developed a plan to coordinate business strategy, create efficiencies, and allow the firm to outsource both technology and administrative resources where possible. Last, we created a scalable infrastructure aimed at future growth and development, as well as providing an aggressive path forward toward the implementation of a collaboration and information-sharing platform internally and with firm clients.

Firm Culture Challenges Change

To alter our processes and shift the firm's approach to knowledge management, I wanted to shift the perception of “too much change is a bad thing” to “the firm will not be competitive unless it embraces a culture of change.” Google's Web-based approach to e-mail for corporations was an entire shift from our norm. This is exactly what was needed to begin a culture of change ' rethinking how to store information, search for it, and explore new ways to communicate.

By choosing Google Apps, B&B picked the platform that would require the most profound change from a variety of perspectives. A consistent push-back was that our users would not be able to adapt. We ran a risk management analysis and championed the opposite view. Our firm was at too great a risk to not initiate immediate change. We also championed that, with the rise of social media, the changes we were looking to implement would be no more difficult than interaction with social media tools driven in the consumer market. In fact, consumer-driven social media technology would only drive enterprise-level collaboration unified messaging platforms faster within our market.

Learning and Teaching in the Cloud

We used a “train the trainers” approach to our training by first developing training and support experts within my department and then training other key department heads. We initiated weekly Webinars, establishing additional layers of training and leadership in each office by training the leadership in that office. Enabling that leadership empowered their contribution and understanding of the rollout, and laid the groundwork for both a learning organization and a knowledge-sharing culture primed and prepared for future updates from an evolving platform.

Post implementation, our training re-focused efforts on Calendaring, Client Panels, Litigation Guidelines, Summaries, Budgets and Project Management, to name a few, using the Collaboration Platform. Document collaboration in place using Google Docs, integrated with Google Sites in particular, streamlined how departments communicated, and bridged them together. Our cross-departmental training and collaboration are now allowing us the development of alternative staffing models previously unconsidered, while client-sharing using Google Sites as our Intranet and Extranet platforms is being augmented with a video training program for our attorneys and clients. User collaboration ' enabled via Google Sites, Docs, Email and Chat features, combined with document sharing for video, training and Web meetings ' has amounted to major time savings and collaboration, both internally and with firm clients.

We're now one year into our 24-month execution plan integrating business process management and touching users' critical applications and workflows, including e-mail, calendaring, discovery, finance, billing, intranet, extranet, voice, video, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Upon completion, the entire collaborative cloud-hosted platform will include a document management system and unified messaging platform with full business intelligence integration.

Significant savings to date have been derived from a combination of outsourcing, alternative staffing and streamlined workflows and process benefits. Based on streamlined collaboration and smoother internal processes, firm staff has been able to produce work product in a fraction of the time and work with clients on edits and changes in real-time. In terms of return on investment, in licensing alone we've realized cost savings of 10:1 based on Google's annual subscription/per user pricing model ($50 per collaboration suite user and $13 per e-mail archiving user) compared with steeper traditional licensing fees for client/server and even Web-based law practice management software.

Understanding and
Capitalizing on Vendor Business Trends

Due to the firm's relative lack of technical infrastructure and the need for formal risk management and disaster recovery policies and systems, we opted to move quickly in selecting a technology solution. In retrospect, this lack of infrastructure and existing technology also gave us the flexibility and freedom of perspective in choosing our technology path forward ' Google Apps.

While discovering first-hand how collaborative cloud solutions would affect our firm and how it could affect the legal industry, we closely studied (and continue to do so) business trends between Microsoft and Google's cloud offerings. We made the following observations:

• Google's evolving collaboration cloud platform was the right fit for B&B, both tactically and strategically. This alignment eased the decision to jump in with both feet.
• No other law firms of comparable size (200+ users) we could identify were embracing Google Apps to the extent of our roll out. Instead of viewing this as a deterrent, we figured it to be a “first mover” opportunity.
• Microsoft would ultimately have to compete with Google on a global scale by offering a similar platform to protect its profit margin from Office, Exchange, SharePoint, LiveMeeting and related products. This will allow B&B a collaborative cloud-hosted exit strategy.
• Google would have to compete with Microsoft to protect its share in ad revenue that Microsoft threatened by integrating Bing into their collaborative product suite, allowing B&B to benefit from a rapidly evolving SaaS collaboration suite with a per-user, per-year, pricing model that directly threatened Microsoft's licensing structure.

In presenting the case for Google Apps to senior management, we had no existing case studies moving forward, but seized the opportunity to write our own as we went along. When looking at the business models in Google and Microsoft, we ultimately championed to the firm the out-of-the-box innovative take Google has in its product evolution and vision, and championed Google Apps as the most creative solution for short- and long-term cost savings, as well as business process management across the firm.

Although Google currently markets its cloud platform as an IT communications solution for business, it has viable potential as a KM-driven solution for businesses and law firms. Google's innovative approach will force competing vendors to adapt and integrate their platforms on both a consumer and enterprise level. Microsoft's competition with Google's platform is already lowering licensing costs in its cloud collaboration offerings and opening up the potential for third-party legal vendor integration.

The Evolution Forward

As B&B focuses on tactical and strategic intelligence, our Google Apps environment continues to evolve. Restructured personnel within my department and other departments and practice areas focused on training for our Google Apps implementation as the primary objective pre-implementation, and are still in place as the platform evolves. This continually raises the expertise level across all departments and practice areas, and also raises the bar in expectations of what is possible moving forward.

We face many significant challenges as we continue to integrate in this evolving collaborative system, and as the collaborative cloud integrates both with consumers through social media and the legal enterprise. As we continue to evolve with this collaboration platform, the most significant achievement we've made as a firm in this journey is in building a culture change and the creation of a knowledge-sharing culture.