With Microsoft Office 2007 finding its way onto more and more client desktops, law firms face an emerging client service challenge.  How do we best collaborate with clients who are early adopters of Office 2007 before our firms move to Office 2007?

While industry analysts vary widely in their predictions, it seems a safe bet that another 10 to 20 percent of the 450 million Microsoft Office implementations globally will begin migrating to Office 2007 within the next year.  With millions of new Office 2007 users coming on line — many of them law firm clients — putting proactive plans in place to serve early adopters has become an imperative.

In our February Peer to Peer article on managing Word 2007 document exchange and collaboration ("Word 2007 – Managing Document Collaboration with Early Adopters"), we outlined several options for serving early adopter clients.  Since then, we have worked alongside dozens of law firms to define and implement Word 2007 document exchange strategies.  These field-tested best practices in Office 2007 document collaboration are summarized here.

Understand Client and Practice Area Needs
The most noteworthy trend we've seen is the proactive identification of client needs.  Rather than wait to react to a client's adoption of Office 2007, we've seen many firms reach out to key practice areas to help them define their client's collaboration requirements.

To facilitate defining these requirements, law firms have enlisted their business analysts to act as liaisons between IT and the practice areas.  Other firms, especially those that do not have a business analyst on staff, have determined that senior training team members may be the best fit for this responsibility.

Define High-Priority Workflows First
Where should your business analyst initially focus his or her efforts?  Practice areas with tech savvy clients, such as intellectual property, are usually the best places to begin your Office 2007 collaboration planning.  These clients are the ones most likely to explore new features (e.g., equation editor or content controls) that may expose any potential problems with processes such as document round-tripping.

An "everyday" use of Office 2007 may also present important collaboration requirements.  For example, practice groups with power users of Excel will need to be made aware of the potential loss of data when collaborating between Excel 2007 and earlier versions.  Lawyers and clients who explore the expanded comparison functionality in Word 2007 should know how tracked moves are affected in scenarios involving collaboration among versions.

Deploy Office 2007 to Targeted Groups
After identifying practice areas with the most critical requirements, choose the technology approach that will enable the most successful collaboration and optimal client service.  Installing Office 2007 in your environment is likely to be your best option to meet these needs.

At a minimum, deploy Office 2007 for your document experts in word processing or your helpdesk, and provide advanced Office 2007 training to ensure that any client collaboration problems experienced by key practice areas are understood ahead of time.  Deploying Office 2007 to at least one desktop available to document experts has the added benefit of helping firms prepare for their own eventual rollout.  Remote desktop environments can extend the reach of these systems to secretaries and other critical support staff within practice areas to further reduce support turnaround cycles.

Virtualization technology is also an increasingly popular option for targeted deployments of Office 2007 to support practice areas, business units or an individual lawyer who must collaborate with early adopter clients.

Consider Firmwide Compatibility Pack Deployment
The next best collaboration option, aside from Office 2007 itself, is Microsoft's Compatibility Pack, which enables "same file type" collaboration between parties.  This makes it possible for law firms using Office 2000, XP and 2003 to collaborate on and exchange documents with Office 2007 users.  But the Compatibility Pack does not fully preserve all of the new Office 2007 functionality introduced into the document.  Full-feature fidelity is still possible only when using Office 2007 as the collaboration platform.

The Compatibility Pack has proven to work the most effectively with Office 2003.  If your firm is currently on Office 2000, you'll find the Compatibility Pack provides less than optimum capabilities.  Firms running Office 2000 should open Office XML files in Office 2007, then save documents back to legacy versions to enable collaboration.

Before deploying the Compatibility Pack firmwide, test your Office 2007 document collaboration workflows and technology thoroughly.  Verify support of mission-critical, third-party applications such as your document management system, PDF producers, template/macro packages and comparison solutions.

Map Your Workflows Today
Microsoft made backward compatibility a strategic focus for Office 2007, and collaboration technology such as the Compatibility Pack will greatly improve document exchange with Office 2007 early adopters.  But the scope and volume of document collaboration required by law firms pushes the limits of this functionality.

Careful collaboration workflow planning — from defining client collaboration needs to developing contingency plans for inevitable document problems — will ensure that your firm provides consistent client service through what is the most significant legal technology transition to occur in more than a decade.

About our author . . .

Sherry Kappel is Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Microsystems.  She plays an integral role in the design and delivery of Microsystems products and services and is a recognized expert on document production problems and solutions.  Sherry has been a featured speaker at numerous ILTA events, from the annual conference to regional meetings and webinars.  She can be reached at sherryk@microsystems.com.