Training Questions Andy Kass

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1 Concordance Tip Sheet September 2012 Training Questions Andy Kass Let me start with a disclaimer: I have been training software for a long, long time. A significant amount of training I have done over the years has been on various versions of Concordance, its add-ons, and its companion products. So this month s column comes from direct experience as someone who has given, and received, training on various software in myriad settings, in the hope that it will help you to determine the best instructional strategy for your organization. Why Train? This question really does get asked, if not out loud, by the action or inaction of litigation stakeholders. It is often couched in terms of cost quantifiable return for the trainer fee and the lost productivity of the trainees. And it is true: you want a productivity return for the time and effort. Your people do not require grandmaster skills, but at minimum they should get sufficient instruction to enable them to use and apply the software tools efficiently. This is another way of saying that your people should be able to focus on review and simply use the software without having to stop and think. The stop and think part is the cost of not training. And how constructive is the think without knowledge of the tools at hand? An attorney who doesn t know about tags or search methods may simply print documents of interest by the hundreds for a personal portfolio. This does give the individual a set of documents related to a given issue, and does not help the team with the big picture come deposition or production time. Document review is generally considered the most expensive component of litigation. Addressing review efficiency in a focused manner will help.

So this month s column comes from direct experience as someone who has given, and received, training on various software in myriad settings, in the hope that it will help you to determine the best

2 Concordance Tip Sheet September Train What? Having decided to go ahead with training, you want to make sure that the subject matter addresses what specific users require, with (a) enough depth and detail to be able to generalize beyond a specific classroom example, but (b) not so much as to leave users awash in excess detail without any foreseeable application. For example, drilling document reviewers in creating and loading databases is a waste of time; save that for the practice support and litigation support management groups. As a trainer, you only want to take as much time as is necessary to cover material appropriate to the group, with a little extra for Q&A (and nature breaks). As previously noted, time is valuable, and must be put to good use. With that in mind, here are some preliminary guidelines that I use in training Concordance: >> Reviewers: Document review essentials process, linear, search-based Concordance screen quick tour Concordance views: Browse, Table, Edit, Review Viewing, annotating and printing images Basic search fulltext, Simple and Form search Basic tags and Tag Search Basic Table report send to Excel >> Review Managers: All of the above, plus: Advanced Search Advanced Tabs Advanced Reports Quality control methods Document production >> Administrators: Overview of Reviewer essentials for context, plus: Production/Load File analysis Database creation / templates Database/imagebase/OCR load Database overlay versus merge Quality checking tools and methods Maintenance / backup / export Synchronization and concatenation Security tools

specific classroom example, but (b) not so much as to leave users awash in excess detail without any foreseeable application.

3 Concordance Tip Sheet September >> Senior Attorneys: Overview of Reviewer essentials to understand process. Senior attorneys need a basic understanding of the process in order to set and manage realistic expectations; they normally won t be doing searches or productions. They simply need to know the practical capabilities of the software and its users. This briefing should be scheduled to take no more than an hour; if the Q&A goes longer, that s fine! Train Where? Take it from someone who has trained at a lot of desks: you don t want to train someone at their desk. The phone rings. s come in. Orders march in requiring immediate attention. Flow: none. Retention: close to zero. The best settings are either at a purpose-built training site, or at a conference room fitted out with individual laptops or workstations, with a projector for the instructor. This allows people to focus on the instruction with minimal distraction (smartphones aside). Not everyone wants to go through exercises on the PC; some people are tactile learners, some visual learners, some are auditory learners. That s all fine: the important thing is to have all needed resources available, and a setting conducive to learning. The above description does not include venues such as a dozen people in a small war room, door closed, air conditioning off, and the instructor with projector and laptop balanced atop a wall of bankers boxes, or a corner of a cafeteria, though these must sometimes do in a pinch. Bring an extension cord and a power strip! It is also worth noting that more and more instruction is taking place over WebEx and similar remote meeting services. The trick here is to keep the sessions relatively short (no more than two hours), because the lack of stimulation on-line and the availability of the distractions listed in the first paragraph of this section are working against you. Train How? This is the biggest intangible for a trainer, and the hardest call for someone retaining a trainer: will this personality and approach reach the trainee team? There is no single right way to approach Concordance, and no pedagogical method is foolproof against all comers. However, there are a few things that I have learned myself over the years, and am happy to share them now:

They simply need to know the practical capabilities of the software and its users. This briefing should be scheduled to take no more than an hour; if the Q&A goes longer, that s fine! Train Where?

4 Concordance Tip Sheet September Introduce yourself. Try to learn people s names, particularly those who participate. It helps personalize the information and encourage discussion. 2. Make sure that everyone is following. Are there any questions? should punctuate every topic. I have had mixed classes, with newbies, experts and everyone in between thrown in. Short of being able to align the starting skill levels of each class, you need to find a middle pace that the top group can live with that draws the slower folks along. You may even encourage buddying up to set up a dialog that can continue after you leave. 3. Don t over-train. I have seen too many situations where a group was well on their way to adopting software, only to have a trainer get into such a molecular level of detail that everyone was scared to touch anything from then on. You re not training the software; you re training the people who need to use the software to do a certain job. 4. PowerPoint. I don t. Yes, I know how to use it, and have done some quite nice things with it, thank you, but I am not training PowerPoint, I am training Concordance, so that is what I use, dynamically. Since things are not spelled out on pretty wallpaper with cool change effects, people are freer to participate actively, ask questions, and I am freer to go off-script. I don t condemn the use of PowerPoint as a framing device for instruction, but please, do not read the slides. Talk to the topic points. Better yet, talk to the people whose eyes are getting the early stages of that PowerPoint glaze. The more and better you learn, the freer you are to do. The views expressed in this Concordance Tip Sheet are solely the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of U.S. Legal Support, Inc. NEWS YOU CAN USE Concordance Evolution has been released by LexisNexis as a hosted review platform. I had a look a couple of weeks ago, and can report that, at least as interactively demonstrated, the user interface looks fully cooked and well-conceived (nary a wireframe in sight). Whether it has arrived in time to join the party a user-installable version is said to be possible by around LegalTech is a question for another day... The Concordance Tip Archive (all the way back to October 2005!) is available on our

Short of being able to align the starting skill levels of each class, you need to find a middle pace that the top group can live with that draws the slower folks along.

5 Concordance Tip Sheet September Web Site at Feel free to leave me a note, a comment, a suggestion or a Tip request. While you re there, don t miss our Resources page, which lists the Tip Sheet Archive and our current CLE offerings ( and of course, check into all the other great things U.S. Legal Support can do for you. -- Andy Kass akass@uslegalsupport.com U.S. LEGAL SUPPORT, INC. Array Technology Group ESI & Litigation Services PROVIDING EXPERT SOLUTIONS FROM DISCOVERY TO VERDICT e-discovery Document Collection & Review Litigation Management Litigation Software Training Meet & Confer Advice Court Reporting Services Record Retrieval At Trial Electronic Evidence Presentation Trial Consulting Demonstrative Graphics Courtroom & War Room Equipment Worldox Document Management Deposition & Case Management Services Document Review & Contract Staffing Copyright 2012 U.S. Legal Support, Inc., 425 Park Avenue, New York NY (800) All rights reserved. To update your address or unsubscribe from these mailings, please reply to this with CANCEL in the subject line.

com/litigation-services/resources/), and of course, check into all the other great things U.S. Legal Support can do for you. -- Andy Kass akass@uslegalsupport.com 917-512-7503 U.S. LEGAL SUPPORT, INC.

Hosted Concordance Andy Kass

Concordance Tip Sheet February 2010 Hosted Concordance Andy Kass Quite a while ago September 2007, in fact I discussed the Internet gateway to LexisNexis Concordance, FYI Server. This tool allows Concordance