Baker & McKenzie Jumps to Office 2010 and Embraces Templates
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Baker & McKenzie is by some measures the world’s largest law firm. Currently it has approximately 10,000 lawyers and support staff in 73 offices in 46 countries. The geographic distribution, and cultural and language differences, make any global system project challenging. But replacing a core system can be especially harrowing. Fortunately, our story has a happy ending, as we successfully developed and deployed Microsoft Corp.’s Office 2010, including new templates. We were able to upgrade our software with minimal impact on our personnel, with the end result of creating new, effective systems, with lower maintenance costs, that also achieved long-desired global standards for document production.
Like many law firms, we bypassed Vista and Office 2007. The upgrade path for those technologies was not compelling from either cost or function perspectives. But when we looked at Office 2010 we realized that it offered many function advantages over Office 2003, so we started planning our upgrade shortly after it was released by Microsoft. Planning kicked into high gear when the first of our clients began talking about also upgrading to Office 2010. While we have completed our project, for firms that have not yet upgraded from Windows XP, this process is now becoming pressing as Microsoft will terminate its support for XP in April 2014.
We realized that our objective was not just to roll out Office 2010 across all our offices, but also to roll out a global set of Office 2010 templates. Templates are automated documents that enable our lawyers and support staff to quickly and easily create new documents that comply with our global branding and font and paragraph styles. They relieve people of having to manually format documents, and allow efficient re-use of both content and variables. For example, once a letter is generated to a client group of litigants, the client contact and matter details can be pre-filled when subsequent correspondence is created.
Read original articleTags: Baker & McKenzie Jumps, Microsoft, Microsoft Corp.'s Office 2010, support staff
