Need to know: Introducing a new current awareness service

27 Sept 2011News

LIS manager Dean Mason shares his experiences in developing a new current awareness service at Salans

Key takeaway points

Make sure you have a clear understanding of your firm’s needs before looking at solutions.
Ensure you have input into the development of a product so that you can align it with your firm’s needs.
The flexibility of a solution is key, as each lawyer will have different needs and the service will need to adapt as the firm changes.
Don’t be afraid to make changes if the evidence indicates they are needed. There will be those who prefer the old way of doing things, but the overall benefit will quickly become apparent to the majority.

Keeping up to date, commonly known as current awareness, is a fundamental information need of any lawyer. It is usually the responsibility of a law firm’s library and information service (LIS) to provide a current awareness service and ensure it is relevant, current and easily digestible.

The service can take many forms, but two that are commonly employed are:

information professionals acting as a filter and publisher by manually sifting through a variety of sources to produce newsletters or email alerts for their users; or
information professionals using their searching skills to set up alerts through various services, which are delivered directly to recipients.

As an information professional working in a solo capacity for the London office of Salans, I was very aware of how much time each day I was devoting to producing a current awareness legal update.

The limitations of these bulletins were easily recognisable. They were:

too generic and therefore users had to find the relevant items themselves from a list of content;
not comprehensive and had to be supplemented by separate email alerts; and
suffering from unreliable delivery, due to being dependent on my workload.

It became clear that providing a service in the London office that ticked all of the boxes would not be possible manually and, even if it was, would not be cost-effective or the best use of my time.

Background research

I became aware of a few current awareness systems on the market in early 2010. These looked promising and had the potential to provide the solution we needed.

With these in mind, I started a current awareness project in March 2010 to determine what the situation was in our London office. It was important for us to find out what the issues were before finding the solution. I formulated a survey to determine:

the key content lawyers needed;
the best method of delivery; and
the most user-friendly format.

I also included some benchmark questions that would allow me to measure the success of a solution, should one be found, at a later stage. These questions measured:

how much time lawyers were devoting to current awareness per week;
how many alerts they received; and
how successful the present services were in keeping them up to date.

The results of the survey revealed that our lawyers needed a daily email service that linked to legal, company, industry and regulatory news. They also identified that the update should be succinct, contain up-to-date information and be relevant in terms of subject matter.

It was evident that our current service was unsuccessful in these respects, as the majority of our lawyers were receiving on average 20 updates a week, including those from the library, and these were judged to be fairly and moderately successful in their relevance. Furthermore, lawyers were spending an average of two hours a week reading such alerts.

It was interesting to note, having spoken to a few individuals following the survey, that due to the amount of emails they were receiving, they were only reading those they deemed to be relevant.

It also emerged that we already had access to the legal content that was most valued, but our lawyers were not being kept up-to-date with information on companies and industries in a coordinated way.

It was clear from the feedback received that we needed to increase the relevance and streamline the format of content to reduce the amount of information that was being delivered to lawyer’s desktops and therefore the time they were spending on this task.

We also needed to widen the type of content included. We had legal content that was valued but had no effective way to filter and deliver the information. To run the service using existing and other freely-available products would increase email traffic and not resolve the issue identified, i.e. bombarding lawyers with several emails was a barrier to an effective current awareness service.

Choosing a provider

With the groundwork in place, choosing a provider was a lot easier than I had expected. This was helped by having a clear picture of what we needed before we started to look at solutions.

We could immediately rule out the news and publishing solutions offered by the key legal vendors on the basis that we had the legal information we required and did not need to procure additional content.

Furthermore, we could source news content from our Westlaw UK subscription and use free sources, such as Google News, to fill the gaps. The only desirable resource, at this point, would be a subscription to FT.com, which would complement a news offering.

We initially focused on two vendors that offered intelligent alert services. After a demonstration and trial of both products, it became obvious that we wanted to make Linex Smart Alerts our primary focus.

At this stage, Linex had the potential to deliver the solution we needed as well as provide first-class support, which was essential to me working in a solo capacity. I also sought views from current users of the system in other firms and it was evident that we could expect to receive the same level of service after implementation.

In June 2010, I arranged for a group of users in the office to test and provide feedback on the Linex proof of concept. The group consisted of people from different departments who had varying roles.

For two weeks, the testing group received daily alerts featuring content relevant to their practice from PLC and Lawtel. I also asked them for suggestions of any companies, industries or other content that they would find useful.

Halfway through the trial I spoke to each user to check how they were getting on and if they had experienced any issues. It was important to ensure that such issues were not influencing the effectiveness of the trial. A few tweaks were required at this stage, but otherwise the feedback was good.

At the end of the testing period, I asked the participants to complete a feedback form addressing the key objectives identified above and, on the whole, the response was positive.

A few issues that arose concerned users receiving content much earlier via the emails directly from the information providers rather than from Linex. This was a timing issue that our system was able to rectify immediately.

There was also a concern that very little information appeared in the alerts and that relevant items may have been missed. But, having checked, the items were present and it had just been a quiet period.

On this point, it was interesting to note that building confidence in the system would play an important part in the implementation process.

Implementation process

With the trial and testing complete and a solution in place, I started the process of implementation in July 2010.

In order to meet our objective of providing concise and relevant updates, the ideal solution was to provide each lawyer with a daily email tailored to his needs. However, it became evident that this was not going to be possible from the outset, as it would require a detailed analysis of every lawyer’s needs, which would then be translated into a bespoke update.

The method we employed, which proved to be far simpler and more effective, was to use the key content identified in the survey to create a selection of group and practice-based alerts.

For example, the employment department would be set up to receive the following alert content:

Lawtel employment cases;
PLC employment update;
Lawtel employment articles and news; and
Lexology employment updates.

Over time, we could then move this content into a single alert for each employment lawyer, which would allow us to tailor the content at the level of the individual rather than the group.

The advantages were that we could implement the system quickly and get feedback from users on this key content, as opposed to a paper-based exercise. Working with something tangible would allow users to identify the items that were not relevant.

The next stage was to create the necessary RSS feeds on Lawtel that would supply content to our system and be pulled into the relevant feeds. PLC already had a number of pre-defined feeds that we could use, but we also needed feeds that were not available for particular PLC content (such as betting & gaming and money laundering). Fortunately, our new system included functionality to allow us to create bespoke PLC feeds, which resolved this issue.

We structured the email alerts by creating blocks of content for each source, as opposed to a continuous list of results. The block format allowed users to easily identify the source; this had been deemed important in the survey and had received good feedback during the group testing.

With the feeds and structure in place, I arranged for all of the alerts to be delivered only to me for a week. This enabled me to iron out any issues before rolling out the service to the office.

During this period, there were more timing issues to address. For example, the vendor’s RSS content was generated after the alerts were sent out. Also, some of the RSS feeds were not working correctly and were missing content, so we had to work with the vendor to resolve this issue.

We also became aware that the text used in the vendor’s RSS feeds was not that useful and only included, for example, the title of the article, subject terms and a journal reference.

In the majority of cases, this information was not sufficient for users to get an idea of the content and such items were likely to be ignored. I appealed to the vendor to make these feeds more descriptive by adding a few lines summarising the underlying item.

Finally, we improved the overall presentation to ensure all of the text that appeared in the subject of the emails was consistent and that any superfluous text was removed from the titles of the blocks.

Introducing a new current awareness service

Relevant information. Relevance is subjective and not easily achieved – it is best to provide users with content and ask for feedback. Relevance is also likely to change over time, so periodic reviews are essential.
Testing, testing, testing. The more testing you do before rolling out the service, the better. Confidence is vital in a new service being used and accepted, and any technical issues will get in the way of this.
Background research. The work you do before looking at solutions will save you time in the long run. You will inevitably have important decisions to make and it’s easier to do this in a position of knowledge.
Content decisions. Make a distinction between content-publishing services and intelligent alert solutions, as you could end up paying for content that you do not actually need.

Impact assessment

We agreed the rollout date with the vendor so that they would be on hand to assist; the service started in August 2010. The impact was immediate and good feedback was received.

The vendor later added statistics functionality to the service, which showed that our users were making good use of the service and that key sources were being used regularly. Our lawyers were now receiving a reliable current awareness service in a single daily email with comprehensive coverage in an easy-to-use format.

Following implementation, the focus turned to working with users to ensure their alerts were relevant. The feedback received enabled us to move some users to individual updates, as their practice area did not reflect their current awareness needs, while others felt the general content was relevant.

To complete the rollout, it was necessary to ensure the focus was on the new current awareness service, so we phased out users’ individual email alerts.

Continuing development

Formal review

We have been using Linex for just over a year now and are due to run a follow-up survey to compare against our previous benchmarking and see whether any changes need to be made to users’ alerts. We also now have a subscription to FT.com and need to ensure we utilise the content to its full potential via our system.

Intranet

With a review of our intranet underway, there is the opportunity for Linex content to appear in department and group workspaces.

New content

With the possibility of feeds emerging for internal resources, we will be keeping an eye on whether it is beneficial to incorporate these into users’ alerts – for example, lawyers being notified via alerts when new books or know-how are added to our systems.

System developments

The vendor continually provides enhancements to our system, including a completely new platform this year. It is important to ensure that we utilise these changes to their full potential and have input into the process so that these meet our needs.

Information needs

Keeping up to date is fundamental to a lawyer’s work and therefore a suitable current awareness service to fulfil this need is important.

However, like any project, it never really ends at the rolling-out stage and the focus just changes to the next level of development.

What we have endeavoured to do at Salans is to provide a solution based on the principles of improving the pre-existing service.