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September Edition
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EDD Hits $2B in Socha-Gelbmann Survey
The Importance of Workforce Training - More Than Just "Welcome-to-your-job-now-get-to-work!"
Project Management Bridges the Gap Between Legal Issues and Information Technology
EDD Hits $2B in Socha-Gelbmann Survey
The fifth annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey Report has been published, providing a comprehensive view of the Electronic Discovery landscape. The E-Discovery market continues to grow rapidly, though the pace of that growth has slowed slightly in the past year. One key trend is that the largest, most prominent providers have been consolidating their share of the market. As a whole, the number of electronic discovery providers continues to increase. This can be seen in contrasting terms as some providers drop out of the market or are acquisition targets, while on the other hand, new E-Discovery vendors are entering the market as well. The largest (Tier 1) vendors and the smaller (Tier 3) vendors have each capitalized on additional market share, having siphoned a few percentage points from the mid-to-large providers (Tier 2).
Link to complete article from Law.com: http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1185959203368
The Importance of Workforce Training - More Than Just "Welcome-to-your-job-now-get-to-work!"
In early 2000, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) did a study which showed that 77 percent of employees go home early on the first day at a new job because employers are not ready for them. According to the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), that percentage has been diminishing over the last several years. Workforce training not only welcomes new employees to the company, but also improves workforce morale, increases employee retention and improves the overall competitive skill set. In a company where specialized skills and information are needed, such as Electronic Discovery and Computer Forensics, training and development can be even more vital.
On the first day of work, new employees come to the table equipped only with the skills with which they were hired - essentially the reasons they were hired. What value can they add to the company? Beginning with the first day, the company must develop new employees into "company contributors". Any good new hire training program contains three elements: company orientation, company information and company-specific job instructions. New hires must spend time learning the company's policies and procedures and "lay of the land". They must also learn as much as possible about the company's history, products and services. In addition, despite being hired for specific knowledge, new hires need to learn what it takes to perform the desired job at that particular company. An actual new hire training program is imperative to making all this possible. If a training program is not in place, new people can feel very out of place on the first day, and current employees responsible for those new people feel at a loss for what to do with those new people. Where specialized jobs such as e-Discovery and Computer Forensics are concerned, it is important to ensure a new hire is trained on all of the company's Standard Operating Procedures relevant to the particular job to avoid any possible liability.
Morale means "attitude towards work." When employees feel their employers are willing to invest in them, they feel good about contributing to their companies. In other words, morale is higher than if employees feel as if their employers are not willing to invest in them. In the November, 2003 issue, CIO Magazine listed "training" as one of the top six ways of boosting employee morale. In lean times when companies have to find ways to stretch a dollar, there are still ways to be creative and get education opportunities for your teams.
Steve Agnoli, CIO of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, arranged a Microsoft-led .Net concepts and applications training course for his systems development staff at no charge to the firm. The class provided an informed evaluation of how the .Net framework might work at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, and Microsoft benefited from showcasing its new technology solution to an eager client audience. - Martha Heller, CIO Magazine, November, 2003
Investing in training for employees not only enables new contributors and boosts morale, but also helps retain the people you have. When performance planning is done as a joint effort, employees see training and development as a benefit and not as a punishment. Not only does training let employees know you are willing to develop them, it tells them they are actual assets and not just employee numbers. This makes them less likely to seek employment elsewhere. Additionally, remember the old adage, "employees don't leave companies - they leave their supervisors!" It is just as important to train managers and supervisors in management, leadership, compliance and communication so that they are strong leaders for the employees. This empowers the managers and supervisors to help retain the employees.
The skills and knowledge required to perform jobs and tasks evolve practically daily in most fields of work. This seems to be particularly true of late in the world of e-Discovery, and has always been true of the legal world in general. That being the case, ongoing training and development is a necessity - not a luxury. There are several different ways to approach staying on the cutting edge of knowledge within your organization. Retaining your own industry expert to act as a "subject matter expert" to disseminate knowledge or going to a third-party vendor are just a couple of examples.
There are many different modes of training, such as live classroom training, distance learning, e-learning, video training and computer-based training. Each type of training has its advantages and disadvantages. It is also important to remember that every person may learn in a different way - through a different sense (i.e., seeing, hearing, touching). This means different learners work best learning via different methods, so it is best to have a variety of training modes available.
Training offers many great benefits to an organization: it gets new employees ready for the workplace, it builds morale, it helps retain people and it builds skill sets. So why would all organizations not jump on the training bandwagon? Training's biggest obstacle has always been proving its return on investment because it is difficult to prove a direct link to "the bottom line" of increase in revenue. Fortunately for training managers, there are about a million resources out there for proving to those in charge of counting the money the return on investment. One excellent resource, as demonstrated at the 2007 ASTD Conference in Atlanta, GA, is Telling Training's Story: Evaluation Made Simple, Credible and Effective by Robert O. Brinkerhoff. This resource explains how to use a Success Case Method (SCM) instead of statistics to prove effectiveness and ROI of training.
It is important to remember that because investing in training brings so many different rewards the return on investment will be much greater than the cost to your organization. For more information on training effectiveness and workplace learning, please see the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) web site.
Back to topProject Management Bridges the Gap Between Legal Issues and Information Technology
As technology has increasingly permeated the legal environment, the need to join information technology and legal issues has never been more critical. Increasingly, electronic discovery vendors have turned to project management as the bridge between these two worlds for electronic discovery.
Project management bridges the gap between legal issues and information technology to take processed/restored/culled data and provide meaning in the context of ongoing litigation matters. Instead of passing along 100 page spreadsheets with the results from keyword searches and custodian lists, project managers deliver reports that help inform the context and meaning of these mountains of information.
As technology has moved from boxes of paper documents filling the halls of law firms to terabytes of data representing email files, disaster recovery backups, and other forms of electronically stored information, the need has grown to give context and meaning to the ever-growing masses of information. Law firms and corporate legal departments, especially, have struggled to strike a balance in the interaction of IT professionals, paralegals, and attorneys in terms of who is handling the lion’s share of early discovery work. In many cases, paralegals and IT departments are handling most of the early stage discovery work, with attorneys becoming involved as a particular matter edges closer to the trial stage.
In order to juggle the intricate relationship between substantive law, discovery procedure, and information systems technology, E-Discovery companies have turned to project management as the bridge between these vastly different functional areas. An effective project manager serves as part E-Discovery consultant, sales engineer and analytical problem solver in this relatively new industry. Since requirements, and therefore expectations, of the end client are constantly changing, how a project manager consistently communicates status updates is a critical factor for success.
In addition to the day-to-day utility of project management assisting law firms, corporations, and government entities through the E-Discovery process, this critical function will increasingly serve as a differentiator in the larger Electronic Discovery marketplace. Organizations that are best able to bridge the gap between legal issues and information technology will ultimately become the standard against which others are judged.
Advances in technology and electronic discovery processing capabilities are increasingly commoditizing the legal services market, thus quality of service and ability to provide added value become a greater measure of the true value of litigation support and electronic discovery vendors. Ultimately, those organizations that are best able to create meaning out of massive amounts of data and drive the integration between procedure, technology, and substantive law will emerge at the top of the heap, and those who cannot will be left behind.
Project managers lead pre-job meetings that outline the expectations and deliverables to make sure that the client is on the same page with the production group and the sales team. From that point, regular updates are provided to the client as to the status of the job, as well as bringing up any potential issues to the client before they become critical stops. Project manager continually works with the client, production, and sales to solve any problems that arise, as well as potentially adjusting expectations and deliverables as those issues are resolved or worked around. Project managers work with the client to establish the best method for deliverables, whether hard drive, CD, through electronic transmission, or other mutually established format.
A good project manager will understand what the client needs not just for a particular task/job, but the larger needs of the clients in the long term, to recognize additional issues, future needs, or gaps between what the client may ask for and what the client’s true needs may be. A project manager is the true tie-in between what the client asks for and what that client really needs.
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