For the third year, I have offered readers the opportunity to contribute to the “Dewey B Strategic Start/Stop Poll.” Although it is a very informal and unscientific poll, prior annual polls have been among  the post popular Dewey B Strategic posts each year. Thanks to everyone who responded to this year’s poll. I will be reporting the results in two parts. Today I am reporting on processes and on Monday I will be reporting on which new products are making the grade and which products may be starting a slide into oblivion.We are once again being offered a chance to learn from the “Wisdom of Colleagues.”

START. The initiatives that were most often cited as priorities in  2015 and 2016 are: workflow process improvements including centralization specifically research tracking and virtual teams,  formal project planning, embracing analytics products. Knowledge access projects include knowledge management initiatives, enhanced mobile access to digital resources (Research Hub), enhanced practice portals, intranet redesign, product monitoring (Onelog or Research Monitor) and curated news (Manzama).

Additional organizational initiatives started in 2015:

• Using SharePoint to manage vendor contracts using the end date feature to track renewals
• Subscribing to e-books from Aspen.
• Teaching lawyers process rather than products.
• Reducing spending on deskbooks by ending automatic distribution and replacing it with “opt in” only distribution.
• Outside counsel guidelines review.
• Use data-driven analytics for outcome prediction.
• Streamline approval workflows by adopting real-time chat.
• New 

STOP A new trend this year is digital hygiene.  People are looking at ways to eliminate emails, attachments, home grown databases, newsletters, digital archives. Print is still under fire. All manner of print is being tossed, books newsletters, loose-leafs, paper files and periodicals. The challenge of completely eliminating the routing of print newsletters was noted repeatedly— even when a digital version is available – legal information professionals still struggle with lawyer attachment to print. One respondent was giving up on custom curation of newsletters. although that remains a growing trend in many law firms.

• Stop filing loose-leaf services completely–just replace the books periodically.
• Moving away from SharePoint.
• Giving up on an unsuccessful custom newsletter curation project.