Last Thursday I attended a seminar on using IntelliConnect hosted by Lachlan Macquarie Chambers in Parramatta.  We have been preparing these seminars tailored to the research needs of barristers for a while and it was wonderful to finally hold one.  The first lesson for me was that my map reading skills need polishing and I can’t assume that I will always have access to GPS.  Jennifer Rose Hannan (the driver I was misdirecting and one of our client trainers) displayed her usual calm and got us safely to our destination.  The anxiety I experienced while trying to navigate was the only anxiety I experienced in an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.

We were welcomed to the Chambers by Paul Sansom (a family law barrister) and Anna Zambellakis, the clerk.  As well as members of Lachlan Macquarie Chambers Paul had invited barristers from Arthur Phillips Chambers (the other chambers in Parramatta) and a number of his instructing solicitors so we had a range of Parramatta family law practitioners as our audience.

The atmosphere at the session was relaxed and welcoming and the level of engagement and participation by the attendees was amazing.  Jennifer started by running through some information about IntelliConnect and the design principles underlying it.  The most important point was that it was designed in consultation with our customers and that it will continue to evolve in consultation with our customers.  In fact as part of the session Jennifer took note of some suggestions from the participants to feed back to the design team.

Jennifer then moved on to showing IntelliConnect live using research terms / scenarios suggested by the attendees at the session.  It was intensely rewarding to watch people move from positive but slightly sceptical to clearly impressed as the capabilities of IntelliConnect became apparent.  The session ended with 2 curly research questions* (that the questioners clearly expected wouldn’t be answered) being answered by in one case a single search and in the other a single search with a small amount of filtering of the results.

All in all it was a thoroughly rewarding experience (although I’m glad the next one on 13 August is in Phillip Street in the CBD so I won’t have to navigate).

*Question 1:  can I marry my niece?
*Question 2:  was there a case that considered the grant of a stay in the context of a transfer of proceedings between the Local Court and the Family Court?

In case you hadn’t noticed, here at CCH we’re pretty excited about our new research platform IntelliConnect.  I imagine if you ask nearly anyone here what they think of IntelliConnect their eyes will light up and they’ll talk your ear off about how wonderful it is.  Or maybe that’s just me.  Nah, I suspect it’s a lot of us.

Anyway, as part of the rollout of IntelliConnect we are holding a series of training seminars around the nation throughout August.   We’ll be heading to Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Perth, Hobart, Launceston, Ulverstone, Canberra and Darwin (just in time for the Australian Law Librarian’s Conference!). 

We’ve worked really hard to ensure that our training matches the way professionals conduct and manage their research, so I’m sure you will find these seminars of value whether you are a lawyer, accountant, or knowledge manager.  Attendance is free and participants are able to claim CLE or CPD points where relevant. 

To see a calendar of events and register for a session please click here .  Get in quick, Sydney and Melbourne sessions start this week!

For those of you unable to attend, don’t forget that we offer live online training several times a week.  Click here for more details.

Tax writers were once described to me as tax practitioners waiting to die. Considering I started at CCH in my mid-20s I was hoping that statement was untrue. While writing is certainly a combination of heaven (when a book is completed) and hell (when the Senate amends a bill on the copy deadline day) I don’t think the description is that fitting.

From my view being a CCH tax writer is a noble position. I like to think of it as an egalitarian role, where we write about the important tax issues for lawyers, accountants and businesses, regardless of their size or location. I think this is a key reason why CCH has built up its tradition for over 40 years - we help at every level from undergraduates struggling with consolidation tax cost setting rule to a lawyer checking whether the latest GST margin scheme case has been appealed.

While the goals above are lofty, tax writing is far more down to earth. We spend our time researching, writing, working with external contributors, editing, editing, editing, checking, double-checking and praying that there are no gremlins in the final print. We then respond to any questions from customers and move on to the next update.

Well that’s a brief insight into the mind of a CCH tax writer. I don’t think Hollywood will make a film about our exciting life and times but you never know; The Shawshank Redemption, the Untouchables and the Firm revolved around tax advisers and accountants after all (if you can think of other films then let me know below, it would be great to have a top 5 list!).

One of the highlights of the last few weeks has been starting our Innovation program at CCH. We have a number of people from across the Asia Pac business involved in this and we meet regularly to brainstorm ideas and then split into teams to explore the best ideas in more detail and see where we can take them.

As part of the CCH commitment to innovation we became members of the Hargraves Institute and I attended their two day Business Innovation workshop.  The course covers innovation fundamentals, thinking techniques - such as Six Thinking Hats -  and generating ideas and selling an idea. The most valuable part of the training for me was sharing experiences with other companies that attended. A diverse range of industries were represented  - Aristocrat Technologies, Roche Products and BlueScope Steel  - and it surprised me how much I learnt about innovation from organisations where I thought there would be no overlap and no connection. One exercise we did - the spiders web – made us find links between the products the various companies offer: legal and tax information; pharmaceuticals and gaming machines. Hmmmm, could we find any workable connections? (Yes, we did!).  We then looked at how the relationships between the products could be innovated. Some connecting products we thought of would never be viable but the exercise was still worthwhile and thought provoking.

I am trying to bring all the good things I learnt back into the workplace and encourage more innovative thinking. It’s one thing spending two days channeling your innovative energies but quite another to bring that back into the work place and maintain the creative energy. Thinking innovatively every day can be a challenge but the thinking techniques we learnt are helping. There are also plenty of websites to inspire: Springwise is a good place to start getting used to looking to other industries for innovative ideas and solutions. How do you stay innovative at work?

Last week I had the opportunity to get out of the office and head up to sunny, warm Brisbane for the day (it’s pretty cool in Sydney at the moment!).  The occasion was a workshop I was running on IntelliConnect as part of the Law Librarianship: Legal Research course run by the Queensland University of Technology.

The course is a week-long intensive designed for librarians who have just moved or are planning to move into law librarianship.  The students came from university libraries, government departments and state libraries and were pretty clued in about research practices in general. 

The course itself seems to be incredibly interactive and practical – I wouldn’t have minded doing it myself!  All three large legal publishers, including CCH, offered a workshop on researching with their services.  There were also group discussions led by practicing law librarians on topics such as training graduate lawyers.  I was lucky enough to sit in on this one and it was fascinating to hear the experiences of different librarians.

While I am not a member of our dedicated training team, I really relished the opportunity to train some fellow librarians on IntelliConnect.  For the past year I’ve been part of various projects related to the development of IntelliConnect (and some of them are ongoing!) so it was quite exciting to let some librarians loose on the system for an hour or two and see what they thought.  Here in Australia the main migration to IntelliConnect is in August, so these students were really getting a sneak peak at the platform and what it can do.

All of them seemed to find it easy and intuitive, and were impressed not only with the smoothness of the system but also some of the funky extra features such as being able to bookmark and search across your favourite titles, or store results in a research folder for review a few days (or weeks or years) later.  The final assignment for the course is an evaluation of one of the three major research platforms, so I’m looking forward to more feedback from the group as they really put IntelliConnect through its paces!