November 17, 1994 January 1993 Designing Your Law Office in Cyberspace By: David R. Johnson I. Introduction If you practice law with a computer, you already have an office in Cyberspace. Cyberspace is the place you (and others) go to through your computer screen. Think of it as a series of underground tunnels and caverns magically entered through the glass surface on the computer monitor on your desk. The most interesting thing about Cyberspace is that it connects all the other desks on which there are computers. You may have allowed the tunnel to your computer screen to be blocked up. And you may have neglected the design of your cave to such a degree that it is messy, ill furnished, lonely and inhospitable. But at least you have established an office in Cyberspace -- and the good news is that its not too late to talk to an architect, to open up some breezy corridors and inviting meeting rooms, and to hang out a suitably tasteful and inviting shingle, and to connect your Cyberspace office to the portion of Cyberspace occupied by clients. You should pay attention to your Cyberspace office for two critical reasons. First, there are many clients who can get there more easily than they can get to your physical office (or to you via your telephone). You sell your legal expertise -- in response to questions from clients. You need to make it as easy as possible for clients to ask you questions. Opening a well designed office in Cyberspace is not the only way to serve clients better - but it is one way that deserves your prompt attention. The second main reason you should pay attention to the design of your office in Cyberspace is that, unless you take an interest, the place you personally go to through your computer screen will be designed by staff members or computer companies who have no idea at all about your taste in virtual furnishings. Insofar as your electronic office is open to others, you need to control the image you present to the outside world. Insofar as you personally use your electronic office every day, good design will improve your productivity and quality of life. II. Entrance and Access The first architectural feature of your firm that affects potential clients (and you, every morning) is the entrance. You are selling your expertise, so you want your electronic "shingle" to reflect well upon you. so how should you design the door-way used by others to enter your piece of Cyberspace? First, you have to have a doorway. You may well have one even if you don't know it, in the form of an electronic mail address. If you have an email account on a public system, like ABA/Net or CompuServe or MCIMail, then others - literally millions of others -- can send you messages. These can include short notes or, in many cases, long WordPerfect files like drafts of contracts or pleadings. If you have only LAN-based email, you may have to make special arrangements to establish a "gateway" or to distribute remote access software in order to allow anyone other than employees of your firm to send you messages. These gateways are still evolving, but, having exchanged 2,000 messages with outsiders last month, lawyers at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering know that they can work. An electronic mail address is very respectable, these days, but it doesn't exactly draw clients in the door. Nor does it help to identify you or communicate anything about your expertise or experience. Traditional lawyer listings can do this, but -- so far at least -- someone seized by the brilliance of your Martindale-Hubbell writeup (even if reading it online) cannot immediately push the doorbell on your Cyberspace cave. One answer is to establish an open access portion of your office in Cyberspace, designed for clients and potential clients. You can use a computer "bulletin board" or an area of your LAN that provides remote access - or maybe even a special conference area on a public online service. Potential clients would still need to find your address -- but this kind of open area for stored information (akin to a reception room with firm brochures strewn on the table) allows potential clients to sample the firm's wares and decide which lawyers in the firm might be able to help them. You can even supplement this with an outreach program -- sending email messages to clients and friends on recent developments (so that a little piece of your reception room visits your customers' offices from time to time). As more firms and inhouse legal departments develop LANs and WANs holding electronic files that embody prior work product and other substantive resources, serious questions regarding who should have access to these materials will arise. Already, the electronic file rooms created by scanning documents and saving electronic deposition transcripts in big cases are shared by inside and outside counsel, and in some cases by opposing counsel. If a large company creates a database of contract exemplars and research memoranda, should it encourage (or, perhaps, even require) its outside firms to draw upon this resource? Should it insist that the outside firms it pays to do research contribute the resulting work product to the new electronic library controlled by the client? Cyberspace can have tunnels that connect every subterranean chamber with every other chamber - but no architect would advocate building every possible hallway. so you will have to decide which clients and colleagues can have access to your stored files. When thinking about how to design spaces to give access to people and other resources, architects are not limited to thinking about doors and locks and walls. They can assume that the space is inhabited, that there may be a receptionist to point the way (or politely to discourage intruders). Consider the possibility of populating your cyberspace office with helpful people. Why not establish a law firm email address that goes to a "client help desk" - with a lawyer desk officer whose job it is to redirect inquiries to teams of lawyers who can collectively generate the most helpful response? Should you establish virtual cameras that track activity on an open access LAN to make sure that potential entrants are not trying locked doors or otherwise engaging in disruptive or unauthorized activity? If you do so, how can you give clear and polite notice of this monitoring to those who enter, without scaring or turning them off? We are rapidly approaching the time when law firms will have to have lawyers who know how to be good hosts in an online environment. A most significant question now facing every law firm is whether and how to connect its own Cyberspace office to the offices of competitive firms. We regularly share seminar podiums with competing experts - and everyone is better off for the resulting exchanges of ideas. Should we establish seminar rooms online? If we do so, will that make it easier for members of the audience with the desire to ask follow up questions to follow the electronic trail to the email address of a member of the panel? In our experience at Wilmer, Cutler, a very powerful use of electronic mail is to canvas other members of the firm for helpful advice and other resources. Under what conditions will it be possible and desirable to send similar requests for assistance to groups of expert lawyers who do not happen to practice in the same firm? If your law firm can bring a wide array of talent to bear on solving a client's problems, the design of your office in Cyberspace may help to communicate this capability to potential clients. Some firms divide their physical offices into departments -- to facilitate close working relationships. Whether or not you allocate physical offices in this way, you can use the computer screen to create an explorable map of your firm's practice expertise. Conveniently, a lawyer with multiple areas of expertise can have a cyber-office in every pertinent area - with no increase in over-head. If you allow clients and potential clients to explore this map, you will effectively communicate how your firm is uniquely qualified to help the client Obviously, many clients will still want to call a lawyer they know and ask for personal guidance. But, even if this personal handholding remains central to our profession, an electronic map of a firm's expertise can be invaluable to the rainmaker trying to match the client's needs to the firm's capabilities. Many business development opportunities are lost because one lawyer in a firm simply does not know about a resource that is available to meet client needs. So hanging out a good shingle in Cyberspace may be helpful even if the only people who ever access it are your partners. If any outsiders can gain access to your office in Cyberspace, you need to think hard about security. But don't overreact. Think about the compromises that you already make with regard to physical security in order to make it possible for everyone to do their jobs. You do have to monitor your systems for viruses and for at-tempts to gain unauthorized access. But if lawyers want to sign in from home, they should be allowed to do so - the extra billable hours will more than pay for security measures that become necessary. Don't discourage work by lawyers outside your physical office. And don't shut potential clients out of your electronic office - the connection that makes it easier for them to find you increases the value of your legal services. III. Meeting Spaces Architects designing a law firm's physical space spend a lot of time on meeting spaces - conference rooms. You do want your physical conference rooms to be well equipped to allow entrance into your firm's electronic spaces. But the key, less often considered, question is how to make your firm's electronic spaces good places for meetings and joint work by teams of lawyers. Many law firms that have electronic mail do not have "conferencing" software - software designed to store discussions under topic headings and to encourage an exchange of views by lawyers entering the system at times of their own choosing. Yet electronic conferencing holds great promise as a effective and efficient means of sharing expertise. Once the potential for online meetings is understood, subsidiary questions arise. How can you label different conferences so that attendees can quickly find the right meeting room? (Meetings proliferate, and last for longer periods, in Cyberspace so there will be many more conference rooms in your electronic office than there are in your physical office.) Who can call a meeting? Who can determine who is invited or excluded? Will clients or co- counsel (or even opposing counsel) be included in some meetings? Should your electronic meeting rooms be equipped with fancy voting software or only with the ability to follow a conversational "thread"? How can you induce active moderators to keep the discussion moving in a productive fashion? what policy will you adopt regarding meetings on topics other than firm business? Do you want to support "live" (real time) electronic conferencing or only asynchronous conferencing? Do you need to tie in remote locations? Can you use conferences for training and, if so, how should your "training room" function? Sometimes architecture is used to send a message regarding status (e.g. the corner office). In contrast, the architecture of Cyberspace may often have the effect of filtering out status messages. All electronic messages submitted to a conference look the same, whether they come from the managing partner or from a newly arrived legal assistant. Some conferencing systems are specifically designed to filter out all identification of a message sender. Even if the sender can be readily determined, the tendency of those reading text on a screen is to focus on content, rather than on body language, position of the sender or other socially significant characteristics of the writer. Indeed, even the amount of time it took someone to come up with a message is filtered out in an asynchronous electronic exchange. In consequence, electronic meetings are great levelers. Often, this is a virtue - opening the minds of participants to ideas and approaches that would otherwise have been unduly discounted due to the status of the person originating the idea. When this feature is used to involve clients more deeply in the problem solving process, it can have very valuable results. IV. Libraries Law firms have historically invested a lot in developing well designed libraries. Following the growth of Lexis and fax-based practices, fewer and fewer lawyers get to go to the library anymore. The obvious answer is to bring the library to the lawyer's desk. Many lawyers collect key materials in their offices now - but that hampers sharing with others in the firm. If you design a shared, electronic library in your Cyberspace office, you can have key research materials available in all lawyers' offices simultaneously. Even firms that have access to Lexis from every lawyer's desk tend to spend very little time designing the electronic library available to their lawyers. Most law librarians leave the computer stuff to the systems department -- and the techies rarely think about the substance of what goes on the screen. As a result, there is a real need for more creative thinking about how to structure the substantive materials you make available to your lawyers online. Should you have an electronic card catalog of all paper-based resources in the firm? How should you build a database of forms and research memoranda? Should there be a reference librarian available online? Should the firm store standard Lexis searches and send updated results to lawyers to keep them up to date on their special practice areas? Should the firm distribute its internal newsletters and memos electronically? How can you create a good set of electronic pointers into all of the specialized research materials available in any given lawyer's office? The distinction between the firm's library and its working files fades a bit when the problem is dredging up previously acquired expertise. So another serious question is whether to allow each lawyer in the firm to browse through the electronic files of each other lawyer in search of helpful precedents, forms and pointers. Obviously, each lawyer will want to preserve a private area to which no one else has access. But there may be merit in an "open file" policy that encourages full text searches of the type that would discover that (1) the firm really does have experience with Mr. X on the other side of the case, or (2) that someone long ago wrote a brilliant footnote on some arcane issue, or (3) that another lawyer across the firm is just now grappling with a very simIlar issue. In any case, think hard about your electronic file archiving policies - don't discourage the saving and reuse of valuable firm expertise just to avoid spending a few extra dollars on relatively cheap hard disk space. In designing your firm library in Cyberspace you will need to decide how much shelving to install, relative to card catalog. Should you place emphasis on providing "pointers" to materials that are stored on paper in lawyer's offices? Or should you try to scan in full text of substantial amounts of materials? where others have already created CD-Roms full of materials for you, how can you provide this over your LAN for multiple users? when and how should you build links from locally stored citations or search strategies into the full text databases maintained by Mead and West? Can you persuade Mead or West to build a portion of your full text electronic library for you on a local basis? Because every office in Cyberspace can be tied to every other area of Cyberspace, and because new publications by and conversations between the inhabitants of Cyberspace occur on a regular basis, you have the option of making your office a recipient of regularly, automatically, collected materials. Discussion groups on the inter-net produce a wealth of information - and peripheral vision - on a wide range of issues. You should subscribe to one today. Stored searches can be run automatically and can alert you when new developments implicate the interests of your clients. So one key design element for your electronic library is how proactive you want it to be - whether you want a virtual librarian to wake you up when you dose off at the reference table. I know of no equivalent to the calm, luxurious library armchair in Cyberspace -- but maybe you can create an area that encourages creativity and reflection. Maybe a piece of brainstorming software can replace part of what we lost when lawyers' stopped meeting over the periodicals rack. In any case, you will want the access hallway to your library to be easy to use. Consider creating your own menu-based system that leads into useful materials by various alternative paths. Remember that human helpers make the library more useful -- and this is especially true for access to the wide world of online information resources. Your electronic library will contain computer-based librarians as well as human ones. You have to decide how sophisticated these should be. Will you be content with Boolean searching? Or will you want software that can automatically expand the words used in your searches based on a domain-specific thesaurus? Or weight the "hits" in relation to likely relevance? Do you want to be able to search dynamically assembled categories of documents? Do you want to be able to generate indexes and hypertext links within a newly uploaded full text file, on the fly? You won't know exactly how lawyers will use your electronic library, at the outset. But you can plan for greater flexibility in rolling in new information gathering and filtering tools as these are developed. V. Lawyers' Offices Just as most of a law firm's physical space is taken up by lawyer and staff work areas, most of your Cyberspace office will consist of the applications and files run by individuals. But any good architect knows that the layout of individual space has an impact on productivity and interaction between all concerned. The policy issues posed with respect to the design of the lawyer's desktop are legion. But the most important questions concern how the role played by the lawyer affects design. Does the managing partner have an "open-door" policy in Cyberspace? Is there a suggestion box on every employee's desk? From which discussions are staff or associates excluded? Does the firm call electronic meetings on issues of general concern? Does the firm use the electronic medium to encourage and facilitate partnership meetings and discussions? Lawyers work for particular clients, whose needs generally can be anticipated over time. A key indicator of well designed electronic office is that it is optimized to provide quick and useful responses to the needs of foreseeable clients. Has the lawyer collected his or her own expertise into readily accessible electronic structures? Does the team of lawyers working for the same client meet regularly by electronic means to update each other on recent developments? Are electronic files used to keep a history of the client's circumstances, so as to minimize the cost of bringing a new team member up to speed? Is the client available directly, and is the lawyer available to the client, by electronic mail? VI. Conclusion That greatest challenge facing any architect is to tie together the solutions to a large number of specific problems into a single whole that "works together". Easy traffic flow, flexibility, friendliness, on overall style that inspires confidence -- all of these design considerations apply just as much to your office in Cyberspace as they do to your physical digs. You might hire an expert to design your office -- but you would never turn over the final decisions concerning your furniture and your letterhead to someone else. Chances are, however, that you have ignored the design of your office in Cyberspace. That may have been a reasonable strategy before data networks provided the potential for your clients to visit your office electronically. But it is time you took a hard look at how you present yourself to the world electronically, how you use your LAN to meet with colleagues and to do research, and whether you can design your office in Cyberspace in a way that will better serve both you and your clients-to-be.