MARK WHEELER - Senior Data Engineering Manager at CLYDE & CO

Sponsored by LexisNexis

Automation & Strategy

Clyde & Co is undergoing a shift from legacy systems with no formal technology road-map. How are you approaching automation in such an environment—and what’s your strategy for ensuring it supports, rather than disrupts, day-to-day legal operations?

The IT ecosystems of all business over a certain size are complex – we are a 5,500 person law firm with around 1/3 of staff supporting the “fee-earning” community. We have also grown through mergers and thus have absorbed and number of additional – sometimes overlapping - systems, processes and “technical debt” over time. All of which has added to the complexity of legacy systems.

There is no obvious, external, vendor-led, road-map to give us a single direction to head in so we have had to create our own road-map comprised of the best-fit (best in class but with an eye on how they interact with other strategic platforms) systems.

Part of this is ensuring that changes are implemented in the right order so that something which relies on a certain application / data

structure / security posture is not implemented before the thing it relies upon. Fortunately, we have experienced Enterprise Architecture and Data Architecture teams to help us through this process.

As a business where the vast majority of the business (and all those who “earn money”) are running legal cases that is clearly the area that most automation and innovation efforts should be spent.

Part of the journey with any change is to map and assess the current business process and required business outcomes to compare any automation outcome against. Where the current process is optimal then we can confidently implement an automation to simply support the current day-to-day and free up more business time, where an existing process is sub-optimal then more changes in the operational tasks are needed but if it removes unnecessary effort then the net gain in the long run is worth it.

Migration Lessons

Moving from outdated tech to modern systems is famously risky in professional services. What key lessons or principles are guiding your approach to data migration at Clyde & Co?

Our Case Management System (CMS) of choice is a “dual” installation of Lexis Nexis ‘Visual Files’ and ‘Every File’ platforms. These give the flexibility of extremely configurable workflows alongside web interface for simplicity of access.

A couple of years ago, following a series of mergers Clyde & Co was running a total of 14 individual CMSs – which is obviously a challenge to maintain / consolidate information from / attempt to automate within.

With the notable assistance of our vendor - Lexis Nexis - we have so far migrated over 47,500 cases (including circa 19M documents / 498M data points) to this strategic platform and will proceed to decommission 6 of those systems - with the migration processstill ongoing.

Our over-riding principle as we have approached this project is one of agility and “fix-forward”. If an issue is minor and ultimately fixable without affecting business operations, then it is permissible to continue the migration process and correct afterwards. This has allowed the process to continue in a timely manner whilst retaining top-level oversight of the progress towards an ultimately “complete” migration.

The other key principle we have taken on our migration journey is not to get too involved in cleaning the data. Obviously, there are key “data-type” transformations needed as no two systems are structured in the same way at a database level.  However, Clyde & Co adopts the general principle that the lawyer handing the case is responsible for the information held against that case. We are not therefore attempting to add complexity to the migration process by checking data accuracy as part of the migration itself. The same lawyer will still be responsible for the information on the new system post-migration, so it is important for transparency and accountability that the data is migrated, unchanged, to the new system.

This decision has removed a significant amount of complexity and associated time / cost from the end-to-end process.

Data Quality at Scale

Legacy systems often mean fragmented, inconsistent data. How are you planning to embed data quality improvements into routine legal workflows, so this doesn’t become just a one-off clean-up exercise?

Broadly, our strategy is one of capturing the data accurately inthe first place rather than cleansing it later.

We have identified a set of key data points that we believe are crucial to the accurate inception (end-to-end Practice Management and Case Management creation) of a case.

Our approach is to develop automation at the start of the case to ensure the instructions we receive from our clients are processed in the most accurate and efficient manner into these key data points. We believe by getting these fundamentals right we save time in both data entry (capture once and use many times) and in correcting inaccurate entries.

This approach will be extended to other key touch points in the case lifecycle (offers / settlement etc) to support the case handlers to efficiently run their volume caseloads.

Several of the volume business areas also have data quality teams for downstream / offline data checking and correction processes with a mandate to get the data corrected in the system itself.

Business Value & Culture

Law firms need to see clear business value in change. How are you aligning your data strategy with the firm’s broader goals—and how do you make the case for investment to senior leadership who may not be tech-focused?

As with any change, it is a case of showing the key decision makers what is “in-it” for them a part of the process for obtaining agreement to the change in the first place (within a partnership this process can be complex with sometimes lots of equal-level partners involved). We then rely heavily on those decision makers to assist in presenting the change in the right way with the rest of the lawyers who will be affected.

Each change is different, but typically we would host several training or demonstration sessions leading up to the release of a change where the details are presented to those affected along with the reasons for doing so. Ideally these are attended by the key decision makers to present the business view along with the “technical” one.

These sessions are backed up with recordings / documentation where appropriate to ensure the information is available when the user needs it.

The most visible point of any change process is immediately following the release. Any major change will have a “hyper care” process for at least several days following the release, typically this will include: in-person “floor-walking”; a dedicated MS Teams channel; a technical group available to deal with any issues; and dedicated support for the decision makers (who also typically find out about issues first).

Multi-Cloud & Architecture

Given the need for resilience, security, and vendor choice, do you see multi-cloud as part of Clyde & Co’s future data architecture? How do you balance that with governance and simplicity?

These are two questions that really have a single answer.

Clyde & Co’s strategy is very much “cloud first”. Our reasoning is that if we can simply buy a “service” at an appropriate level of cost and remove the headache of maintaining the infrastructure and everything else that goes on behind the scenes then it is far simpler to account for the entirety that cost.

We also use mainly Microsoft products, so we also have a “Microsoft first” approach – although these things have got easier recently – the simplicity of Microsoft products being able to integrate with each other makes implementation much easier.

However, there are systems - particularly niche, legal specific systems - for which the available cloud options are limited.

We believe that system vendors are experts in a space, we are a law firm with an IT department that supports many complex systems to aid the business, but we are not set up to be a software development house. It would end up being very expensive to develop and maintain something that we could simply “buy” from the expert in the field.

To assist us in this journey we often use implementation partners alongside the vendor to get things set up. This provides a useful font of knowledge – who are often very aware of the complexities of implementation in a law firm – to advise, assist with (or carry out) the implementation and handover relevant knowledge for us to takeover operations.

For example, we have recently migrated virtually all of our documents across the firm to iManage cloud. We have been ably assisted in this endeavor by implementation partners Morae who have helped us move hundreds of millions of documents from a range of on-premise document storage locations to the cloud.

The biggest challenge with multi-cloud is the ease of accessing data outside of the specific cloud environment. Most cloud system providers want you to use built-in reporting to understand what is happening within their environment, however, with a multi-cloud, best-fit approach I mentioned earlier there is often information needed from multiple systems to get a real top-level understanding of what is occurring.  This has created a significant increase in the number of system-to-system data integrations needed to be managed and maintained to make sure we can leverage key data in the right place at the right time.

Sponsored by Morae

Governance & Trust

Legal firms handle highly sensitive data. As you move toward cloud and modern platforms, how are you thinking about building robust data governance frameworks that maintain client trust while enabling more agile, modern ways of working?

Within Clyde & Co we have just released the CDS (Clyde Data Services) – a modern enterprise data platform built on medallion architecture principles and hosted on Microsoft Azure technology.

The scope of this is ambitious: To manage, combine and govern data from all the key Clyde & Co systems (including all the CMS mentioned earlier) and to give a framework for data observability and ownership across the full business.

The system is built with a business terms dictionary at its heart that enables business people to really understand what people are asking for and accessing in the systems they have ownership of and uses these business decisions as the metadata to drive who can see what data product and for how long.

This way the governance is embedded in a way that is accessible to the right (non-data) decision maker and prevents anyone they do not want from accessing anything. Using these decisions as the metadata which the system uses gives agility to change access without needing any development lead-time.

Emerging Tech

There’s huge buzz around AI, data fabric, data mesh. Which of these technologies do you think will have the biggest practical impact on law firms—and how are you thinking about them in your road-map?

Whilst we are thinking about data fabricand mesh as options around our CDS platform, they are still very much data-centric conversations, they will have an impact but it is likely to be a slow-burnand gradual take-up.

AI, on the other hand, is already here and being discussed - and in some cases used - on a day-to-day basis within the firm.

AI means a whole multitude of things and it is sometimes difficult to separate hype from the actual advantages. There are a good number of use-cases that can be easily (and often much more cheaply) solved using traditional, non-AI, mechanisms. However, there are also a good array of use-cases for which AI applications can create significant efficiencies and business value.

Our approach as a firm is to democratise AI as much as possible and invite business users (who know their desired outcomes more fully than someone in IT ever will) to assist with the development and testing of AI products. They can then become champions / business owners of the products to bring other business people along.

Leadership & Legacy

You’re leading a major digital shift in a sector that can be cautious about change. What leadership lessons have been most important to you in navigating that—and what advice would you give to others tackling similar challenges?

I must be clear than not all the tech changes I have discussed are led by me – there are many talented senior managers and leaders in Clyde & Co IT. From my perspective, however, I would view the following as the most important leadership elements when managing any change.

Transparency: Telling people both directly within the project team and those who will be affected by the change what is going on is the most important facet of leadership. Internally it is important because you can never know everything and having input from those doing the work allows you to avoid pitfalls / issues in delivery and keeps people involved. Externally you build more buy-in by facing / dealing with objections early on and keeping people along for the journey which leads to less complaints after release.

Ownership: in a similar way to transparency, owning the key decisions give a face / person for people to discuss with – it sometimes leads to awkward conversations, but they often mean less complaints in the long run.

Build trust at all levels: as mentioned around our change process earlier, it is important to have a relationship / a level of trust at all levels of the business. Obviously, you need the right decision makers to back (& fund) things at the outset, but the rest of the delivery process is much simpler if you have the people who are going to use the system involved and bought in from the start.

Keep trying: not everything will work first time, you will get rejections and failures on the route – it is important not to give up and keep trying with all endeavors