What does innovation in the legal community look like? Whose responsibility is it? Who pays for it? Can lawyers actually innovate, other than to dream up new causes of action? Or do we mostly buy or adopt others' innovations?

Do firms have to be big to innovate? Or do solos and small firms have the innovation advantage? Has the ability and willingness to innovate become a core law practice competence? Or is all this talk of innovation just a fad?

No easy answers

Innovation depends on your goals and expectations, your perspective, your resources, your willingness to experiment, a sustained commitment and on the benchmarks against which you chose to judge success.

One reasonable way to begin to get a handle on innovation is to go in search of it. So I did. I called people. I posted to local legal discussion lists and I asked others to do so for me.

The substance of my calls and messages was simple: "I'm looking for innovation in the Minnesota legal community. Who do you think is doing something innovative? What are you doing? Tell me what has come of changes you have put into place recently - tell me how you have been able to improve things that matter  quality, efficiency, communication, collaboration, risk reduction, decision quality, client satisfaction and perceptions of value received."

I was able to spread that message to hundreds of people connected with Minnesota legal community "entities." Even though I made it clear the inquiry involved no competition, that there would be no winners or losers, the vast majority of those who received the message, in both large and small settings, just did not respond at all. Others were eager to share what they were doing.

I talked with, or exchanged detailed e-mails with, nearly 30 people, from solos to senior partners, paralegals and administrative staff members in Minnesota law firms and solo practices on the subject of innovation.

There is a lot to report, but limited space. Since volunteer participation was the key, groups that did not hear of or did not respond to the inquiry are not represented, no matter their level of innovation. This is not a benchmarking report. It is a sampler, a series of anecdotes recording changes accomplished or underway that people wanted to share.

Blogs

Gregory Reigel of Reigel Associates, Ltd./Aero Legal Services decided to add a blog to his Web site. He can add posts easily. His site's search engine visibility and traffic have improved. He has found an additional benefit, too. He has figured out a way to use his blog as a component of a free, home-grown knowledge management system.

Reigel subscribes to several RSS feeds (a method of publishing information to those who want to know about it), including his own blog's, and several e-mail lists. The subscriptions go into his Outlook. After deleting posts he does not want to keep, the remainder serves as his personal, searchable knowledge base.

"I have frequently had issues come up that I previously discussed in my blog or in another post, but cannot remember the details," Reigel said. "A search gives me instant access to my analysis and links to supporting law or information. With each post to my blog, I expand my personal reference library regarding aviation law and related issues."

Computer forensics/e-discovery

If you get a chance to tour Kroll OnTrack's Eden Prairie corporate headquarters, as I did earlier this summer, do it. This Minnesota operation is part software company, part service provider. It is no secret that computer forensics and e-discovery are high growth, rapidly changing businesses these days. Tech tools and tech-enabled processes are essential for the big electronic document cases that are making headlines.

Michelle Lange, one of a handful of attorneys at Kroll OnTrack, says she has a nontraditional legal job. In addition to a lot of public speaking and co-authoring the ABA-published book, Electronic Evidence and Discovery: What Every Lawyer Should Know, Lange acts as a liaison between attorneys and litigation support staff using the company's electronic discovery services and software and company programmers to improve the effectiveness of their legal technology tools.

Dorsey & Whitney partner Bill Dossett chairs a firm electronic discovery committee. I asked him about the impact of this vast sea of electronic data on litigation practice. He discerns a trend for litigation counsel to meet and confer to determine what data will actually need to be reviewed for production. Increasingly, documents are screened and produced in native electronic file format. Lawyers have beefed up their ability to manage electronic evidence and consultants work in tandem with law firms on these issues. Dossett says one effect of all this electronic discovery is to enhance honesty in litigation. Going through e-mails and other electronic files, "you find things you never would have found before," he said.

Caroline Sweeney, a paralegal who works with Dossett, said the firm has centralized litigation support so that files are accessible anywhere, from any of the firm's offices.

Craig Wilson, Winthrop & Weinstine MIS manager and co-chair of the Minnesota Legal Administrators Association Systems and Technology committee, said his firm can sometimes save clients money by doing some electronic discovery work itself rather than outsourcing it.

E-billing

Aafedt, Forde, Gray, Monson, & Hager partner Michael Forde said his firm is doing more electronic billing because it primarily practices insurance defense. Several of their national insurance company clients require it. Some but not all pay bills electronically too. He thinks electronic billing is more efficient for clients.

William Davidson, a partner at Lind Jensen, Sullivan & Peterson, says one-third to one-half of his firm's clients now require electronic billing.

I asked Mark Brauch, MIS director at Larkin Hoffman Daly & Lindgren, what clients are requesting in the way of technology. His immediate answer: electronic bills. From an IT perspective, the challenge is that there is no standard format for an electronic bill. Company A may use service X, Company B may have its own format, and company C uses service Y.

E-filing

These days, if you do federal court litigation, you e-file. Wilson said that the 2 megabyte maximum file size the court allows can create complications because of the need to break big documents into compliant files. E-filing rules can also vary from district to district. Still, Wilson believes that in implementing e-filing "the federal government helped law firms because, if they aren't technologically savvy, it forces them to become more so."

Electronic newsletters

When Arthur Anderson folded, competitive intelligence researcher Jan Rivers moved down the street to Dorsey & Whitney, where she now serves as the firm's competitive intelligence liaison.

When the firm started an Iraq practice group, Rivers started supplying firm attorneys with intelligence to keep them abreast of what was going on in Iraq. Her goal: "give them what they needed that they didn't even know they needed." Soon attorneys sent her intelligence reports on to clients. "It mushroomed," she said. Her Iraq electronic newsletter received an industry award in 2004.

Rivers then turned her focus to supporting the firm's life sciences practice. Soon she was pumping out daily Dorsey Life Sciences News e-mail industry briefings for clients and other interested parties. She spends an hour a day assembling the Life Sciences newsletter from free resources on the Internet. The newsletters have turned into "viral" marketing. Recipients stay on the list despite job changes. They recommend the newsletter to others. And they send in news.

E-mail management

Wilson says attorneys are "inundated" by e-mail and complain about that more than anything else. Winthrop has made it easier to bring e-mail into the document management system, where it becomes accessible across the firm, not just to the original recipient. Wilson helps this process along by limiting each attorney's Outlook disk space allocation.

Meanwhile, Brauch reported that his firm has been providing better ways to manage incoming spam.

Extranets

Peter Sipkins, co-chair of Dorsey's products and technology liability litigation group, is an extranet proponent these days. Representing a Scandinavian company involved in a series of lawsuits in the southeastern United States, he used an extranet to keep everyone  from the client, to insurers, to experts  up to date. With multiple security layers, different groups had access to the information they needed but no more than that to which they were entitled.

Pleadings, discovery fights, expert reports and status reports all went onto the extranet. The client could review documents added in Minneapolis in the afternoon during the night (actually the next morning in Scandinavia because of the time differential). Everyone was ready for discussions the next Minneapolis business day, with the full file, on the extranet, close at hand as needed. A bonus is that the client did not have to build redundant litigation files.

"Extranets have become very popular with my clients," Sipkins says. "It's the commonality of communications tools that makes it so effective. Extranets are usable to one extent or another in every client relationship. Clients have a much better understanding of what we lawyers are doing, and how much time and work litigation actually takes."

Winthrop & Weinstein has had extranets for several years. The firm's legislative group uses them during legislative season to keep clients informed about bills. A real estate client has improved its own productivity by accessing the firm's extranet to retrieve the most current master documents it needs, allowing it to close transactions several days sooner than it once could.

Wayzata solo practitioner David M. Langevin demonstrates that password-protected private client file repositories can be feasible for a firm of any size. He has uploaded not just documents but photos, audio, and video for client access. It saves time and money. "Clients think I'm really cutting edge," he said.

Knowledge management

CIO Curt Meltzer of Dorsey & Whitney says the firm added Google search capability to its document management system this spring. "We have had great success in finding documents that escape retrieval via profile searching." Dorsey indexes almost three million documents. The improved central repository holds all firm work product. That makes it easier to find what anyone in the firm has written and increase collaboration across the firm.

Rider Bennett's Eric Magnuson called to talk about his firm's experience with West km. Selected documents are indexed overnight. The next day, someone searching for, say, res judicata, will find not only Minnesota caselaw but also Rider Bennett documents citing that caselaw.

Magnuson makes a convincing case for the value of knowing what your firm collectively knows and has done, regardless of what specific route a firm might take to get there. Magnuson once received a call from a general counsel with a question he vaguely remembered may have been answered by a recent case. As soon as he got off the phone, he searched, found the case, then saw Rider Bennett documents discussing the case in detail that he had not known about. Voila! He pulled up a seminar paper his partner had recently written on this very subject.

Within 10 minutes, Magnuson was back on the phone with the general counsel, offering not only the paper but the opportunity to confer with its author. The general counsel, he said, was flabbergasted.

Instances such as this make Magnuson, and his partners, believers in the value of mining their own work more efficiently for the benefit of clients.

Mobile communications

"A lot of firms are using Blackberries," Bassford Remele IT director Jeff Alluri says, because they are a fairly low-cost system that increases communication "tremendously." He cited the example of a shareholder able to reply to a client even though the shareholder was in the midst of an Italian vineyard. "You're saying you will still address their needs no matter where you are," he said.

Brauch said his firm too has increased communication capabilities through Blackberries. They are also looking at a new telephone system providing unified messaging  a way to bring all e-mails, faxes, and voicemail together.

Wilson arms every attorney in his firm with a Blackberry. That way they can attend to business even if they are at a child's baseball game or at home without needing to come into the office. His firm provides unified messaging so people can listen to their email over the telephone.

St. Louis Park attorney Trent Jaeger  a "true" solo  has practiced since March sans secretary or other staff. Instead, he relies on his "mobile secretary"  a combination of call forwarding, e-mail and Palm-based cell phone, loaded with contacts  to keep in contact with clients no matter where he is at the moment.

Office technology

Thomas Tuft, of Tuft & Arnold in Maplewood, writes that his three-attorney firm is building a new office that will incorporate several technology infrastructure upgrades. Among the upgrades: upgraded network cabling, increased front door and lobby security through video feeds attorneys can view on their own computers, and conference room projection equipment that will let attorneys work with spreadsheets on a wall with clients and in settlement conferences.

Bassford Remele offers wireless Internet access in its office. Clients like the convenience and what it implies about the firm's technological savvy.

Paper reduction

Joseph Roby, Jr., a partner at Johnson, Killen & Seiler, P.A., in Duluth, observes that since last year his firm has seen a dramatic decline in U.S. mail volume. Faxes are down too. Most documents come in by e-mail. If they receive paper documents by mail from opposing counsel, they scan them into PDF and send them on to the client. Acquiring a more powerful copier/scanner last year made a dramatic difference. They scan everything now.

Forde said three insurance company clients have moved to a paperless filing system. All correspondence to them must be sent by e-mail.

Margie Bodas, vice-president of practice management at Lommen Nelson, says a benefit of the federal courts being online is that it reduces paper inside the firm too. If they need documents, they download them to CD, keeping files much slimmer than before.

"At first there was concern about paperlessness, but it hasn't taken additional resources the way we have done it," she said. Clients also prefer receiving real estate closing books on CD. And when the firm closes a file, it scans it to CD, saving document storage charges.

BenePartum Law Group, a five-attorney practice in Eagan, has changed its work flow and paper handling practices without investing in new technology or retraining. According to Charles Nagle, a paralegal at the firm who has a strong tech background, they have simply used their own copier/scanner and changed their habits. Incoming faxes and mail go directly into the appropriate electronic folder. Nagle estimates they are 90 percent paperless and have reduced file room visits 90 percent too. Files are accessible to everyone, including remotely. Daily lists of incoming and outgoing documents make everyone more aware of what is going on.

At Tuft & Arnold, if a client brought in important documents, Tuft used to have to call in his secretary to scan them. Now, he scans them himself on the spot into the client's file.

Wilson reported his firm is replacing printers with multifunction machines so secretaries can easily scan documents into the electronic document management system. The new machines will also cost less to operate than the old printers.

Davidson says they "sure don't see the paperless office." Like many other firms, their incoming mail volume is way down, but their printing costs are "through the roof."

Practice management software

When Roseville solo attorney Julie La Fleur went out on her own, she "soon realized the true value of [her] previous assistant and paralegal." She implemented a practice management package with contacts, document assembly, accounting and timekeeping. She has constructed document templates and is "always looking for ways to reduce production time and increase productivity."

Although Tuft's firm has a case-management program, he has come to realize that "there is no application that really does what I need in my family law practice." He is planning to develop his own family law practice database system.

Practice process improvement

Hamre Schumann Mueller & Larson, a new Minneapolis firm launched in May, started with an established international IP clientele and a concept of systematizing the practice in just the way the partners wanted to practice. Founding partners Curtis Hamre and Michael Schumann said, "We have invested significantly in automation. It is a critical part of our practice."

They emphasize, though, that it is the team that matters, and automation is but one member, along with staff and policies that guide how work is done. "To the extent that we can trust our system, we can use it more effectively. We organized ourselves in a way so we could use it. We define internal standards and procedures. It helps that we're a boutique."

Hamre and Schumann are trying to stamp out idiosyncratic practice styles, down to defining, for example, how to make a docket entry so such entries will be consistent across the board. With more engineers and paralegals than attorneys, the system matters. "It is efficiency that lets us make money. We can handle a higher volume of cases. Clients have liked the bills. Service is better. We are more responsive," they said.

Julie Hoff is Faegre & Benson's Director of Client Technology Services. While not a new unit of the firm, Client Technology Services is designed to manage change and complexity in the document arena.

She has 55 permanent people in her in-house consulting firm, which develops and implements document strategies.

"We call ourselves Client Technology Services but we don't really care about the technology," Hoff observed. "It's about making it work. What we want to be better at is exploiting the resources. The resources available will change, and change really fast." Hoff is as concerned about the resources clients have available as those Faegre has.

A conversation about Client Technology Services is replete with discussion of understanding processes, repeatable actions, execution, moving to analytics, business analyses, measuring performance, accountability, post mortems, business impacts and replicating services.

Even though Hoff's business is managing documents, "nothing has to hit paper. People come to look. They ask, 'Where's the paper?' I say: 'There is no paper.'"

And what about that intangible, innovation? "We are doing everything to be ahead," Hoff responded.

Conferencing

Alluri cited a dramatic cost reduction in charges to clients for teleconferencing after his firm upgraded its phone system and no longer had to rely on outside teleconferencing vendor. A lengthy multiparty teleconference that might have cost $2,000 two years ago now costs under $100.

According to Bodas, attorneys at her firm have used video conferencing more than they initially expected for depositions and arbitrations.

Bassford Remele's video conferencing has saved lawyer time and cut out-of-pocket costs for out of state and international depositions. Alluri cited its utility, for example, in a two-hour deposition of a witness located in Australia.

Building better orders

Large firms and corporate counsel may have more resources, but nationally, it is interesting to observe how legal assistance providers are emphasizing technology-driven innovations and efficiencies.

Locally, at Central Minnesota Legal Services in Minneapolis, Amy Hermanek is one of two legal services attorneys who have streamlined and improved the process of preparing petitions and affidavits for orders for protection. Her work is part of a national legal services project to use document assembly technology. Because the application is on the Web, it is available to legal services advocates statewide.

Hermanek said, "We created it for others to use. The goal is to make it possible to produce a very detailed account to provide a proper basis for seeking relief from the court. We had to learn how to program the software. It took us four or five months in between keeping on top of a full caseload."

Innovators arise!

This article is but a small sampling of evidence of change, progress, adjustment to change, innovation and innovators at work in many parts of the Minnesota legal community.

We can all learn from others. We can especially learn from others who work to change business as usual into something even better.