该律师事务所的智能资源工具有助于平衡工作量，确保合作伙伴找到具有合适技能和经验的员工，同时使员工能够在公司的全球足迹中建立联系。
人工智能正越来越多地被用于各行各业的工作场所改进，其中包括法律界。总部位于匹兹堡的全球律师事务所礼德律师事务所（Reed Smith）已采用人工智能来促进资源管理，提高员工敬业度，并减少整个公司律师之间不平衡的工作量。由此产生的智能资源为礼德赢得了 2023 年 CIO 100 创新和 IT 领导力奖。
虽然资源管理在会计等行业已经很成熟，但对于律师事务所来说仍然相对较新，礼德律师事务所智能资源团队总监Aaron Pendlebury说。该工具旨在促进合伙人和律师之间的关系，其开发的重点是利用每个人的技能，提高整个公司的生产力和效率。Smart Resourcing 有助于确保为律师分配他们感兴趣的工作并发挥他们的技能，有助于减少人员流动，同时提高公司律师的敬业度和保留率。
数字化转型总监兼解决方案开发团队负责人Jon Oeler表示，智能资源平台是该公司之前使用资源管理的自然发展，其中包括大部分自助服务模式，以及本地化到几个特定办公室的早期全方位服务。在开发智能资源时，Oeler 的团队和 Pendlebury 的团队联手研究如何最好地平衡这两种方法，以创建一个更强大的资源分配平台。 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
“我们看到了每种 [方法] 的价值，并真正希望将其整合到一个整体工具中，”Oeler 说。“所以这就是很多分析的地方，这就是智能资源背后的想法诞生的地方。
虽然该平台对人工智能的使用提供了有价值的红利，但Oeler表示，该公司并不将人工智能视为一种“pancea”，而是将其视为一种帮助解决业务问题的工具，他的团队将继续深思熟虑地实施人工智能工具，因为它有意义，可以帮助人类提高效率和生产力。
一、资源匹配器
智能资源的核心是Oeler所说的“预测性”模型，该模型将“工作与人联系起来，将人与工作联系起来”。员工可以将他们的技能、专业知识和知识输入平台，并与 Smart Resourcing 预测他们既适合又感兴趣的可用项目相匹配。对于合作伙伴来说，该平台提供了一种快速识别具有新项目合适技能的员工的方法。
在这样一个庞大的全球性组织中，Smart Resourcing 还帮助公司感觉自己更小，将可能从未有过交集的同事联系起来。 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
技能、经验、带宽和知识是智能资源算法用于匹配目的的关键因素之一。为了帮助改进这些数据，该平台会提示用户有关其平台配置文件中列出的体验的问题和建议。它还会向员工询问潜在的新技能，从他们过去从事的项目中汲取灵感。员工可以修改、拒绝或接受建议;他们还可以手动编辑他们的个人资料。Oeler 说，随着该算法不断提高其匹配能力，Smart Resourcing 现在对平台建议的技能的接受率约为 90%。
“当你开始将所有这些数据源结合在一起时，你就会开始超越实践的界限来看待公司。我们已经能够识别出不同实践、不同办公室、不同地理位置的人，这些人具有[合作伙伴]所需的确切特征，“Pendlebury说。“我只是认为，如果我们没有一个系统，将数据以智能资源工具的方式结合在一起，我们将无法识别这些机会或这些人。”
当然，礼德的业务速度不尽如人意，因为礼德经常在最后一刻召集团队，同时在客户的最后期限前工作，这些因素极大地限制了合伙人寻找律师的时间。Smart Resourcing 旨在实现这一过程的自动化。从人才管理的角度来看，它也有帮助，因为员工可以标记他们是否正在积极寻找工作、将休假或太忙而无法承担新项目。
“它可以帮助您进入开始对话的最佳位置——与谁交谈，谁可能是这个机会或这笔交易的最佳人选，”Pendlebury 说。“事实上，有一个人机界面和元素，这是公司所有这些系统如何工作的重要组成部分，它们都不是独立的。 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
该平台的数据还可以帮助平衡整个公司的工作量——注意哪些团队或个人最忙，以及谁可以承担更多项目。礼德律师事务所的领导可以客观地查看数据，以确定各办事处之间的细微差别，以评估其是否可能人手不足或过剩。Pendlebury说，该平台还可用于及早发现潜在的倦怠和工作量问题，并确保“工作分配的平等”。
二、赋能员工推动其职业发展
Pendlebury说，拥有丰富经验但不忙于工作的员工经常发现自己处于这个位置，因为他们没有在公司中建立强大的网络。由于找不到合适的机会来锻炼他们的技能，这些员工在没有正确关系的情况下冒着脱离的风险。 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
Smart Resourcing 让这些员工能够自主地建立自己的网络，通过使用该平台确定合适的人来与之交谈，以建立他们的案例或职业生涯，或承担超出其典型范围的项目。
Pendlebury指出了达拉斯办事处的一个例子，公司领导发现了一位觉得自己没有得到充分利用的员工。在与他交谈并发展了他的技能档案后，Smart Resourcing 能够将该员工与他执业之外的合作伙伴联系起来，该合作伙伴正在寻找具有与达拉斯员工相匹配的技能和经验的人。如果没有智能资源工具，“你永远无法自然地在这两个人之间划清界限，”他说。
“通过这样做，我们带走了一个利用率下降到29%左右的人，我们今天把他们的利用率提高到略低于100%，否则这可能不会发生，因为这两个人永远不会自然地找到对方，”Pendlebury说。
礼德律师事务所迪拜办公室（Reed Smith Dubai）的律师索汉姆·潘查米亚（Soham Panchamiya）利用该平台“与全球网络中在异常繁忙时期有能力的员工建立联系”，并认为他“对初级资源的能力有了更多的了解”，以及“参与全球办事处事务的机会”，他说这有助于改善团队合作。 发展内部关系，增加交流机会。
“它帮助我发展了我的网络，体验了不同的团队和工作方式。我也有更多的机会在处理复杂的客户事务时练习管理和领导技能，“Panchamiya 说。 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
Pendlebury表示，为了更好地平衡工作量，礼德律师事务所的领导在实践层面检查智能资源数据，以确保“最忙的人和最不忙的人”之间的差异很小，自发布平台以来，差异从大约50%提高到20%。
此外，Smart Resourcing 还帮助减少了合作伙伴求助于他们一直做的同一个人的常见做法，为他们提供了一种简单的方法来寻找新的帮助，而无需在他们自己的盘子上增加大量工作。
人工智能系统能够做到这一点的速度是一项重要的商业利益。Pendlebury举了一个例子，一个大型文件审查任务需要“一小群同事”。合作伙伴正在努力组建一个团队，因为他们正忙于完成交易。使用 Smart Resourcing，他们能够在 6 小时内组建一个 40 人的团队，而这项任务需要几天时间才能手动完成。
礼德伦敦律师Roxana Burghel注意到，自Smart Resourcing推出以来，她的团队的工作分配有了更好的改善，她在她感兴趣的项目上获得了更多的经验，与她通常不合作的合作伙伴合作，同时也“在我有能力的时候得到帮助，以确保我们为客户提供服务。 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
该平台的未来目标包括提高数据源的复杂性，以改进该工具的建议。Pendlebury的团队还计划继续改进用户界面和用户体验，以保持员工采用的积极势头。
Pendlebury说：“拥有一支专注于推动变革的团队，并能够推动那些只需要一点帮助的人忙碌起来，是拥有智能资源工具的成功案例之一。“这就是技术、人员和流程的’金三角’汇集在一起的地方。”
英文原文：
Reed Smith turns to AI for lawyer staffing solution
The legal firm’s Smart Resourcing tool helps balance workloads and ensure partners find associates with the right skills and experience, while empowering employees to make connections across the firm’s global footprint.
AI is increasingly being embraced for workplace enhancements across every industry — and that includes the legal world. Pittsburgh-based global law firm Reed Smith has enlisted AI to facilitate resource management, improve employee engagement, and reduce imbalanced workloads among lawyers across the firm. The resulting Smart Resourcing earned Reed Smith a 2023 CIO 100 Award for innovation and IT leadership. 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
While well established in industries such as accounting, resource management is still relatively new for legal firms, says Aaron Pendlebury, director of the Smart Resourcing team at Reed Smith. The tool, which was envisioned to boost the relationship between partners and lawyers, was developed with a focus on making use of everyone’s skillset and improving productivity and efficiency across the firm. Smart Resourcing helps ensure associates are assigned with work that interests them and plays to their skills, helping to reduce turnover while improving engagement and retention of the firm’s lawyers.
Jon Oeler, director of digital transformation and head of the solutions development team, says the Smart Resourcing platform is a natural progression from the firm’s previous use of resource management, which included a mostly self-service model, along with an early stage full-service offering localized to a few specific offices. In developing Smart Resourcing, Oeler’s team and Pendlebury’s team joined forces to figure out how best to balance the two methods to create a stronger platform for allocating resources.
“We saw value in each [method] and really wanted to incorporate that into a total tool,” Oeler says. “So that’s where a lot of the analysis went, and that’s where the idea behind Smart Resourcing was born.”
While the platform’s use of AI has provided worthwhile dividends, Oeler says the firm doesn’t look at AI as a “pancea,” but rather as a tool to help solve business problems, and his team will continue to thoughtfully implement AI tools where it makes sense and can help humans be more efficient and productive.
1. Resource matchmaker
At the heart of Smart Resourcing is what Oeler calls a “predictive” model that relates “work to the people and the people back to the work.” Employees can input their skills, expertise, and knowledge into the platform and be matched with available projects that Smart Resourcing predicts they will be both suited for and interested in. For partners, the platform provides a way to quickly identify associates with the right skills for new projects. 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
In such a large, global organization, Smart Resourcing has also helped the firm feel smaller, connecting coworkers who may have never crossed paths otherwise.
Skillset, experience, bandwidth, and knowledge are among the key factors used by Smart Resourcing algorithm for matching purposes. To help improve this data, the platform prompts users with questions and suggestions about their experiences listed in their platform profiles. It asks employees about potential new skills as well, pulling from projects they’ve worked on in the past. Employees can amend, decline, or accept suggestions; they can also edit their profiles manually. With the algorithm working continually to improve its matchmaking abilities, Smart Resourcing now has around a 90% acceptance rate for skills suggested by the platform, Oeler says.
“When you start to combine all these data sources together, you start to look at the firm beyond the boundaries of the practice. We’ve been able to identify people in different practices, in different offices, in different geographical locations that have the exact profile [partners] need,” Pendlebury says. “I just don’t think we would be able to identify those opportunities or those individuals if we didn’t have a system with the data being wedded together in the way that the Smart Resourcing tool enables.”
Certainly not at the speed of Reed Smith’s business, which often involves pulling together teams at the last minute, while working against client deadlines — factors that greatly limit partners’ time for searching for associates. Smart Resourcing aims to automate this process. It also helps from a talent management perspective, as employees can flag if they are actively seeking work, will be away on vacation, or are too busy to take on new projects.
“It helps you get into the best place to start the conversation — who to speak to, who might be the best person for this opportunity or this deal,” Pendlebury says. “The fact that there is a human interface and element to this is the important part of how all of these systems in the firm work, none of them are standalone.” 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
The platform’s data can also help balance workloads across the firm — noting which teams or individuals are busiest, and who is available to take on more projects. Reed Smith leaders can objectively look at the data to identify nuances between offices to assess whether they may be under- or overstaffed. The platform can also be used to identify potential burnout and workload problems early, and to ensure the “equal allocation of work,” says Pendlebury.
2. Empowering employees to move their careers forward
Associates who have a lot of experience but aren’t busy with work often find themselves in that position because they haven’t developed a strong network in the company, Pendlebury says. Unable to find the right opportunities to exercise their skills, these employees run the risk of being disengaged without the right connections.
Smart Resourcing gives these employees the autonomy to build their networks by using the platform to identify the right people to speak with to build their caseloads or careers, or take on projects outside their typical scope. 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
Pendlebury points to an example in the Dallas office, where firm leaders identified an associate who felt underutilized. After talking to him and developing his skills profile, Smart Resourcing was able to connect that associate with a partner outside of his practice who was in search of someone with skills and experience that matched those of the Dallas employee. Without the Smart Resourcing tool, “you would have never naturally been able to draw the line between these two individuals,” he says.
“And by doing that we took an individual who was down at around 29% utilization and we’ve brought them up to just under 100% utilization today, which might otherwise not happen because those two individuals would never have naturally been able to find each other,” Pendlebury says.
Soham Panchamiya, an associate at Reed Smith Dubai, has used the platform to “get connected with associates in the global network who had capacity during exceptionally busy periods,” and feels he has gained “more visibility on junior resources’ capacity,” as well as the “opportunity to get involved in matters from the global offices,” which he says helps improve teamwork, grows internal relationships, and boosts networking opportunities. 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
“It helped me grow my network and experience different teams and ways of working. I’ve also had more opportunities to practice management and leadership skills in the delivery of complex client matters,” Panchamiya says.
To better balance workloads, Reed Smith leaders examine Smart Resourcing data at the practice level to ensure that there is low variance between the “most busy person to the least busy person,” taking it from roughly 50% to 20% since releasing the platform, Pendlebury says.
Moreover, Smart Resourcing has also helped reduce the common practice of partners turning to the same people they always do by giving them an easy way to source new help without adding a ton of work to their own plates. 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
And the speed with which the AI system can do this is a significant business benefit. Pendlebury points to the example of a large document review task that came in requiring a “small army of associates.” The partners were struggling to pull together a team because they were busy finalizing the deal. Using Smart Resourcing, they were able to bring together a team of 40 people within six hours — a task that would have taken a couple days to do manually.
Roxana Burghel, a Reed Smith associate in London, has noticed better work allocation across her team since the launch of Smart Resourcing, and she has gained more experience on projects that she was interested in, with partners she doesn’t typically work with, while also “getting assistance when I was at capacity to ensure we deliver for the client.” 数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）
Future goals for the platform include increasing the sophistication of data sources to improve the tool’s recommendations. Pendlebury’s team also plans to continue improving the user interface and user experience to maintain positive momentum on employee-adoption.
“Having a team that is focused on driving that change, and able to push those people that just need a little bit of help to get busy, is one of the success stories of having the Smart Resourcing tool,” Pendlebury says. “That’s where that ‘golden triangle’ of tech, people, and processes all come together.”
本文由数字化转型网（www.szhzxw.cn）转载而成，来源于CIO；编辑/翻译：数字化转型网宁檬树。
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