Making the Move – Transforming Challenges into Opportunities with SydneyEnterprise

Miles & Stockbridge is a mid-Atlantic law firm with over 460 employees, including more than 225 lawyers working in 7 offices. The firm‘s lawyers possess deep practice experience and also provide an extraordinary focus on the industries in which their clients do business, requiring not only legal research support, but competitive intelligence capabilities as well. To deliver these services, Sara Thomas, the firm’s Director of Research and Information Services, leads a team of 11 library staff, half of whom are located in offices outside the Baltimore headquarters.

Solutions Portfolio

Miles & Stockbridge library staff have many plans for leveraging SydneyEnterprise, but after a smooth migration and data conversion, enabled in part by Lucidea’s (as Ms. Thomas describes them) “professional, friendly and top-notch” client services staff, immediate results have been achieved in the areas of:

Reporting and Request Tracking
One of the first “new imperatives” was to demonstrate the library’s relevance and usefulness through statistics. Ms. Thomas uses the SydneyEnterprise Requests Module to track reference requests and time spent, and to quantify library resources applied to particular clients and matters – this powerful capability is not available through the firm’s Accounting department. She then communicates the department’s productivity and efficiency to leadership through relevant management reports, which are easy to create and run in SydneyEnterprise.

Multi-branch workflow
Managing the collection for multiple offices (some staffed with people allocated only part-time to the library, and untrained) was a challenge, requiring multi-step procedures that posed increased risk of failure, especially for tasks like checking in new or exception-based materials. With SydneyEnterprise’s check in system, it’s a snap to handle exceptions – and ease of use means that junior staff can leverage it very effectively with minimal training. It saves a great deal of time at the headquarters and local offices. Local office staff can take the initiative when managing their own collections, without going through the headquarters library; as a result, they feel empowered and much more connected to the department.

Marketing with statistics and the portal plug-in
Data drawn from the Requests Module is certainly a marketing asset, but the easy portal plug-in is a huge asset too. Users can search the library catalog right from the portal; they don’t have to bookmark the page or remember that it’s there, and it looks completely seamless. There is a simple search bar, and no need to log in. The integrated search and item request functionality makes things really convenient for lawyers and staff, and keeps the library at the forefront of daily workflow.

Limited Only by Your Imagination

Per Ms. Thomas, library staff feel that “using SydneyEnterprise is a discovery process that gives you ideas for what you can do down the road.” First up is OverDrive integration for their eBooks. Then they’ll get started on maximizing their use of the financial modules, along with organizing passwords, building databases (e.g., vendor contacts) and streamlining access to all the firm’s critical resources by integrating with other currently siloed or distributed internal data sources.

Unified Library and Knowledge Management? Check.

Within a year or two of joining the firm, Ms. Thomas faced a scenario where all the previous library staff had retired. When that happened, they lost a lot of institutional knowledge. Says Ms. Thomas, “SydneyEnterprise’s ability to keep and organize records in an intuitive way prevents that from happening again, and allows Miles & Stockbridge staff and lawyers to have all the information they need about their collection at their fingertips, now and well into the future.”