HighQ helps a corporate legal team in a global bank

See how one of HighQ’s clients, a global bank, uses HighQ’s collaboration platform. The bank’s Head of Knowledge Management (KM) explains why the company chose HighQ and how the system enables his department to revolutionize internal collaboration and strengthen relationships with its legal panel firms. The client is the legal department of a multinational bank and financial services firm that provides support and legislative oversight to the company’s banking and retail departments.

The challenge: Connecting thousands of lawyers across jurisdictions

With more than 1,000 people in the in-house legal team, HighQ’s client is a massive organization with lawyers across many jurisdictions. The client’s Head of KM explains how the organization struggled with information silos: “In our legacy intranet we had separate domains for different teams, which meant that knowledge was siloed across the business. Certain teams couldn’t access other teams’ intranet sites, and even our central database wasn’t accessible to all users globally.”

The company sought a solution that could be a central point of access for every person within the organization. “HighQ Collaborate appealed to me because it is globally accessible,” the Head of KM explains. “Unlike our existing on-premise solutions like SharePoint, HighQ Collaborate is cloud-based so the same information can be accessed by anyone from anywhere in the world. This was really important to us as we are a global organization working with teams across a universal bank and external law firms in multiple jurisdictions.”

The solution: A hybrid intranet/knowledge sharing solution

HighQ offered a complete solution that would allow the bank’s legal department to keep the large number of teams within the organization connected. “For us, HighQ Collaborate is a sort of hybrid between an intranet and a knowledge base,” the Head of KM says. “It’s where we store all our data, documents and information, such as training handbooks, but also where our teams can share knowledge and contribute to each other’s projects. Our knowledge base site forms part of our initiative to bring teams together in one place and provide them with information that everyone can access.”

The legal department have found their own unique way of using the platform which works for them, as the Head of KM describes: “Instead of setting up separate sites for each team, we can keep everyone in one big site and assign each team a section of the wiki. We have broken the wiki module down into team hubs, so each team gets a top level page and sub-pages where they can link to documents, provide background information and access training materials specific to that team.”

“We use Collaborate’s advanced permissioning controls to ensure that only authorized users have access to information in particular hubs of the wiki,” explains the Head of KM. “It’s easier to do it this way than setting up separate sites because it’s less challenging to administer. Using system-level groups, we can simply set permissions on what access is given to each group of users, and this can be easily altered to give more or less access if necessary on a wiki-by-wiki basis.”

Separate sites are reserved for individual projects, and these are used more deeply than the knowledge base, as the Head of KM explains: “When it comes to specific regulatory projects, project teams set up sites where they have discussions using the social tools, store documents in the Files modules and create project trackers using iSheets. The project trackers are particularly useful as they get filled in as people reach different stages in the project, and each separate project tracker feeds into one main tracking iSheet for all of the legal projects going on within our team.”