Document and Knowledge Managemen

Sysero Current Awareness

Clients employ law firms to deal with issues that affect their businesses. Some of these issues may be created from a client's internal activity, but many new matters are created in reaction to external events. Making clients aware of the affects of current events is the single most affective method of generating business for a modern law firm.

Live News feeds (aka RSS or ATOM feeds) are available from almost all organizations that communicate new events. From national newspapers to specialist blogs, global legal information providers to regional publishers, live news feeds can used to trigger clients to action. With the wealth of information being pumped out, law firms need tools to categorize events by practice area, filter the important from the inane, discuss and prioritize the most significant, and inform clients in a timely manner with details and advice.

SyseroCA is an intranet application that can be used within an existing SharePoint intranet or as an outsourced service to categorize and monitor live news feeds. It allows KM staff/PSL’s to group feeds by practice, use news aggregation services to monitor for specific client related events and select and comment on stories for practice groups. Fee earners can create their own email news alerts and KM and BD can communicate selected stories through newsletters and via integration with the corporate web site.

Main features

Practice based news portal: SyseroCA allows KM staff and PSL's to build SharePoint sites to present practice specific news to keep the firm up to date on the latest events.
Personalisation: Users can select practice based news feed to add to their own portals.
News Alerts: PSL's can create e-mail alerts which fee earners can consume, edit and cusomise.
Multi-channel newsletters: PSL’s, KM Staff, Fee Earners and BD can now collaborate around current events and simultaneously publish e-mail newsletters, corporate web pages and RSS feeds to inform clients of the ramifications of current events.
Direct integration with Google News’ advanced search options: KM staff & PSL’s to directly build news monitors using both Boolean and location filters.
Practice based news feeds & searches: One of the limitations of Google News is that you cannot group similar feeds into a single subject based news source. We have added the ability for administrators to build consolidated feeds from user defined feed groups and enabled fee earners to search different these feed groups from each page. This allows firms to create news portals for each practice area using related news sources and including a specialist search function per practice.
Site management: Clients can manage their own news portals including creating and removing practice/client pages and adding and removing items from the top menu.

News Aggregation

Whilst the feeds from the major news providers feeds will contain relevant facts, filtering out the important information can be difficult. News aggregation services such as Microsoft Bing, Yahoo Pipes and Google News can help you build filters that can be used in SyseroCA. As well as direct integration with Google News, SyseroCA allows firms to select specific feeds and build their own news aggregators.

Clients expect their law firms to keep them abreast of events that may affect them. Effective communication of the implications of events will drive clients to open new matters with your firm as opposed to your competitors. Any marketer will tell you that communication needs to be regular and relevant, but how can an organization that exists through imparting factual advice create a direct communication channel with it’s clients without a large investment of fee-earning time?

The answer lies with using the services available and creating a streamlined publishing process.

Capture relevant news events

As a law firm you already have subject matter experts who can identify sources of relevant news. Group these into individual pages to represent the best sources of information. Once you have identified the feeds, the news stories will present themselves. SyseroCA’s custom aggregator allows you to create a single feed from a group of feeds. Additionally you can filter the grouped feed to look for key phrases. Now you need to select individual stories and add them to database.
SyseroCA has a simple “star” rating system where a story can be captured by a simple click of a mouse.

Filter out the best stories using peer rating

Once everyone has had a look at the available stories, SyseroCA displays an average rating across the group. Now an individual can hone the list down to the most relevant stories for publication. Any comments made by the team can be incorporated into the pre-published selection and the list can be viewed for final comment. SyseroCA’s rating system allows stories to be listed in specific orders and grouped by practice.

Publish via web, e-mail and RSS feed simultaneously

Once the stories that will generate the most interest have been selected and commentary and advice has been added, the list need to be communicated to clients quickly. SyseroCA allows firms to use the editing features with SharePoint to create a formatted e-mail newsletter using the firms styles. Integration with the corporate web site allows the news-letter to be published on the web at the same time as being emailed allowing the email to point back to the web version. To complete the offering the published feed can be viewed as an RSS feed, saved to a document library and index for later retrieval.

Everyone wins

Using RSS feeds to keep on top of the latest changes in legal, industry and global events can be a very efficient use of a fee-earners time. Communicating the impacts of these events to clients keeps them up to date and placing more business with your firm. SyseroCA can be used with an existing intranet or used as an on-line service and will produce results within days of being implemented.

News Portals

There are examples of news portals all over the web (MSN, Yahoo, BBC) which use RSS feeds to dynamically create content. By combining feeds relevant to practice areas, law firms can create their own news portals. SyseroCA also allows fee earners & PSL’s to discuss and rate stories internally, helping identify what news should be communicated to clients.

Creating a firm-wide news portal

Before building a firm wide news portal it is important to choose the best platform. When designing SyseroCA, UC Logic selected Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as the platform for a number or reasons. Firstly it’s free to firms with Microsoft servers (a good price point) and it can be deployed as a standalone, single server application. Secondly anything developed using WSS will automatically support MOSS, the full version of SharePoint. Thirdly, SharePoint is an intranet platform that many developers are targeting and as such is becoming the defacto standard in the latest intranet based business applications.

Building a news portal needs input from the firms’ Knowledge Management specialists such as the library and PSL staff. The main consumers of the information provided by the system will be Fee Earners and Business Development staff. When designing the top level architecture of the site it is best to model views/pages around the existing practice and functional areas. A single news feed may be relevant in multiple areas within the firm and there’s no overhead in presenting it from different viewpoints.

Modern web development is all about personalization and it’s time to move away from applications designed around fixed views. Allowing users to create their own view of the available news is essential to user acceptance. And don’t forget email alerts, users love them.