June 3, 2016
Online
Foundation Software Group
Releases KM Platform as
Central Location for Expertise
Foundation Experience Management is geared toward large, multi-office
law firms, some of which have already rolled out trial service over the past year
by Zach Warren
Ever meet a senior partner
that didn’t have at least one
piece of wisdom to impart?
Probably not. Experience and
learned skills are one of the
lifelines of the legal profession, and this wisdom can be
crucial to helping a law firm
thrive.
But is there a technological
way to impart this wisdom to
even more people than oneon-one conversations? Foundation Software Group is looking
to try. On June 2, the software
company announced the launch
of Foundation Experience Management, a knowledge management (KM) platform that seeks
to provide a central repository for law firms to leverage
lawyers’ work experience and
expertise.
The company said its goal
with the platform is to provide
not only experience for marketing teams to handle RFP
responses, submissions for
various awards and rankings,
website updates, and other
activities, but to provide this
information to the whole firm
as well. In this way, the firm
could better handle other
practice support functions,
such as staffing matters with
the right people and identifying similar past work to price
services.
Nate Fineberg, co-founder
and president of Foundation
Software Group, told Legaltech
News that while KM is growing in importance, the company “spoke to many CMOs
and CKOs at large law firms,
however, who acknowledged
the ineffectiveness of their approaches toward experience
management — whether it’s
in-house built solutions, legacy marketing system, or just
spreadsheets and email. And
in today’s market for legal
services, they understand the
firm can’t effectively compete
unless lawyers and marketers
have access to the latest and
most relevant experience and
expertise.”
As a result, his company
looked to provide that experience. “Foundation Experience
Management is a realization of
the vision many firms have had.
It’s just been too expensive to
build, and no vendor has been
able to provide the necessary
capabilities.”
June 3, 2016
Online
As Fineberg noted, the platform is primarily geared to
large, multi-office law firms.
Many of these firms have
already rolled out a trial service of Foundation Experience
Management over the past
year and have provided the
company with feedback.
And, of course, Foundation
hopes to attack the central issue
of information siloing. Through
working with firms over the
past year, Fineberg said he has
found that firms set up marketing and business development
in a number of ways. Because
of this, Foundation Experience
“Firms are thrilled that they now have access to critical information
in minutes versus days. Ultimately, this is the difference between
winning and keeping a client versus losing to another firm. In
addition, firms now feel like they have a strategy in place to build
their collective knowledge. This will benefit the firm in the long run
with greater revenue and profitability.”
“Firms are thrilled that they
now have access to critical information in minutes versus
days. Ultimately, this is the difference between winning and
keeping a client versus losing
to another firm. In addition,
firms now feel like they have
a strategy in place to build
their collective knowledge.
This will benefit the firm in
the long run with greater
revenue and profitability,”
Fineberg said.
Management was built to be
a “configurable solution that
works within the firm’s structure and processes,” such as
integrating with other business applications and working
within the firm’s intranet or
SharePoint portals.
“A big problem in all the
firms is that information is
spread across many systems. It
is quite a complex problem to
integrate this information into
one accurate, consistent, and
normalized database,” Fineberg
added. “A straight dump of data
is not sufficient to deal with the
quantity and complexity of data
at today’s firms. We have spent
a lot of time on the integration
aspects of our solution. We provide a multitude of mapping
tools and configuration options
to successfully aggregate the
relevant matter, client, and lawyer data into a central source
for experience and expertise
information.”
Foundation
Experience
Management was created by
Fineberg and Brett Balmer.
Previously, Fineberg was the
CEO of Interface Software,
the company that developed
InterAction before it was sold
to LexisNexis in 2004. Balmer,
meanwhile, previously founded CRM software company
Scout Solutions.
Reprinted with permission from the June 3, 2016 edition
of Legaltech News. © 2016 ALM Media Properties, LLC.
All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission
is prohibited. For information, contact 877-257-3382 or
[email protected]. #010-07-16-01
www.foundationsg.com | [email protected]