July 2006 Archives

I'm a big fan of feeding the right information to users at the right time without them even asking for it. Of course, that's not an easy thing to do, but there are products out there trying to perfect the process, such as West KM and Lexis TotalSearch. When these products are installed, they provide a firm's internal documents to a user doing a Lexis and/or Westlaw search, helping those who might not realize that there's useful, internal information available.

That might be fine for litigators who frequently search case law on Lexis and/or Westlaw during the course of their research, but what about transactional attorneys who spend most of their time in Word, drafting documents? According to Lisa Kellar, in Document Drafting Tools, (Practice Innovations, July 2006), "new tools are beginning to emerge that help attorneys draft documents in context, allowing them to perform all the steps involved without ever leaving Word: from searching for examples of past work product, to performing legal research, to easily applying styles, and to proofreading documents."

Suffice it to say, this can be cool stuff, for example, allowing automatic links to subject materials from within Word documents, and offering examples of clauses that can be dragged and dropped into the appropriate section of a contract. If the user won't go to the mountain....

St. Louis continued...After spending all that time at the Newsgator booth, I became a woman on a mission. Here we were, in the same convention center with many of the leading legal publishers; but which ones are offering RSS feeds for their content? I canvassed the exhibit hall, and while I didn’t visit every booth, I found some serious progress is being made on the RSS front.

First, there’s BNA. Their email newsletters are very popular among the attorney population. And yes, their information is soon to be offered via RSS. They can even create keyword specific feeds that searches across all the publications you subscribe to, and aggregate the result in a separate feed. Contact your rep for more information.

Lexis, in their Publisher product, and Westlaw, with Westlaw Watch, give you the option of RSS feeds. If you’re using these tools, these can be a significant source for RSS data.

Westlaw is also incorporating RSS into their Docket Watch product. An RSS feed could be perfect for keeping up with developments in that area.

What about CCH? Not so much. Heck, they’ve only just started sending selected newsletters out by email. It may take them a while….

During my rounds, I suggested RSS feeds to any publisher offering current awareness tools. RSS feeds are not technically difficult to create, so it’s within easy reach of any publisher large or small. Once the demand is there, I daresay so will the feeds.

I’m sure there were more, but that’s the RSS news I was able to glean from the exhibit hall floor this time around. You can thank me later, when all the news that’s fit to print is being delivered seamlessly to your attorneys desktop.

I had good intentions. I had planned to blog regularly while at AALL in St. Louis. But things just got too busy, as they tend to do at such events. Besides, you really wouldn't want to read anything I might have written after a long day at the exhibit hall. Still, I have a few of what I think are items of significance to discuss. Better late, than not at all!

Newsgator was is the exhibit hall this year, and that’s where I headed first. I had a strategy. I knew I wanted a thorough demo, so I skipped the first program under the correct assumption that the exhibit hall wouldn’t be busy. It’s a good thing, too. Things were relatively quiet, and I spend a good hour looking at Newsgator’s enterprise product.

Newsgator’s RSS reader has been around for a while. It integrates nicely with Outlook, adding folders for RSS feeds in the Outlook folder structure, and is a popular software choice. But I have bigger fish to fry. My fantasy is to make Newsgator the delivery method of choice for all of the firm’s electronic current awareness newsletters, alerts, internal information and outside third-party content. It looks like it might be up to the task. Email alerts could become a thing of the past; forget managing Outlook subscriptions lists. With Newsgator, attorneys could easily subscribe and unsubscribe to the RSS feeds of choice. Newsgator offers an administrative interface to handle your RSS offerings. Feeds can be pushed to a particular group or user, and selected ones can be made mandatory. You can even create topic folders that will combine more than one RSS feed into a single, readable display.

So, for example, if you have an alert running on the name of your firm or organization, you can include a Lexis Publisher feed for general news, and Westlaw Watch for legal news, and offer both RSS feeds in a single folder, so that they can be reviewed separately, or together. And all of this would happen within Outlook, in a folder that looks just like another email folder. Feeds can also be optimized for viewing on handheld devices, such as Blackberries.

If you’d like to provide more focused news, you can choose to set up special keyword searches to run across all your available RSS feeds, collecting that information in to a custom topical feed. For example, you could create a special search on Sarbanes Oxley, to collect news headlines from your available RSS feeds, and presents them as one specialized feed. You can also easily create your own RSS feeds with Newsgator.

There’s a chicken and egg problem, of course. While there’s a lot of information available via RSS, certainly not everything is there yet, so the transition to all RSS alerting can’t happen all at once. On the other hand, Newsgator offers a function that allows you to receive an email and include that email in a Newsgator folder. (This is good for listserv email as well.) But still, any non-RSS email alerts wouldn’t be optimized for RSS, and wouldn’t be as easily scanned by the user. The other problem is that Newsgator can only handle straight text emails, and won’t render html email. That may be remedied in the near future.

It’s one thing to talk about the future, but the burning question, at least in my mind, is what exactly is available in RSS now? Ah, that’s the subject of my next blog.

When I'm ready to buy something like an MP3 player, a digital camera, or, heaven forbid, a big purchase like a car, I research the product to death, poring through Consumer Reports and checking online reviews, ad nauseum. Then I throw up my hands when I realize that no one product has all the features I want at a price I'm willing to pay. Indecision call stall the purchase for months.

This same principle applies when I'm looking at online services, search engines and other KM products. Hmm, I like the interface on this one, but the relevancy ranking of the other. I get close to nirvana, then my hopes are dashed.

Ali Shahidi and Denise Grigst at Alschuler Grossman Stein & Kahan LLP, a Los Angeles law firm of about 100 attorneys, don't let such things get to them. Alschuler has the distinction of having not just one, not just two, but three different KM products. It all started out with Lexis TotalSearch, then they later added Real Practice and West KM.

Why all 3? At Alschuler, Lexis and Westlaw usage is split about 50-50. So Lexis Totalsearch solved only part of the problem, leaving Westlaw users without the same benefits as those who used Lexis. (This was in the early days when access to Lexis Totalsearch was exclusively available via Lexis.com.) So they purchased West KM. This was fine for the litigators, but the transactional attorneys weren't about to hop onto Lexis or Westlaw to run an internal document search. So Real Practice was introduced to meet the needs of the transactional group.

The bottomline is, just like digital cameras, no product does it all.

(Ali and Denise presented at the AALL KM Workshop on Saturday.)

During the normal course of business, librarians typically get a good feel for the needs of their patrons. After all, they work directly with attorneys, paralegals and staff day in and day out. That could result in some complacency; we don't know it all, and it can be dangerous to assume that we do. As Donald Rumsfeld said so eloquently :-), and as quoted by Janet Smith in her presentation yesterday, "Unknown Unknowns: Conducting an Information Management Audit", "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns, that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." The problem is, Rumsfield miscalulated which knowns he knew and which ones he didn't. How do you avoid that same fate and find out about the unknown unknowns in your environment? Conduct an information management audit, of course!

Janet discussed the process they used to conduct an audit at Kirkland and Ellis, which included an extensive survey and well as interviews with selected attorneys. As a result, they were able to present to management an ambitious and detailed strategy, including planned implementation of an enterprise search engine and portal, all guided by the direct input of their constituency.

One interesting observation made by Janet was that the attorneys who expressed the most satisfaction with the status quo were those who had been with the firm for many years. They simply didn't know what they were missing. It was the laterals, those with experience with KM tools at prior firms, who made the strongest case for the need for improvements.

I think this is true across the board when it comes to technology. So, thank the laterals. Without them, we'd probably all still be using DOS.

I mentioned PKM last week and think it's an interesting concept. If you provide ways for knowledge workers to store and retrieve information to enhance their own efficiency, and tie that ability to enterprise systems, you may have a better chance of capturing some very important knowledge for sharing more broadly within the organization.

Today I attended the KM workshop held in St. Louis as part of AALL. Janet Smith of Kirland & Ellis LLP discussed an information audit they conducted to determine what their priorities should be in terms of information search and retrieval. The top priority among their survey participants was an enterprise search engine for locating work product. That certain makes sense. But email search was also right there at the top of the list.

I don't think we can overestimate the value of of email search in terms of managing our own personal knowledge. Desktop search engines can open up a whole new world where just about any tidbit of information you've written in an email is accessible. That is a very powerful thing. Can easy access to personal email translate into an environment where more email is shared across an organization, thereby increasing it's value even more? I don't know the answer to that, but I'd like to!

The web has always been about content, but in the early days, it was also about understanding the technology that allowed you to publish to the web/intranet. These days the technology is no longer a barrier. We have more tools at our disposal than ever before to help us easily post content; wikis, blogs, discussion forums, etc. are all available at a small cost. Using these tools, anybody in your organization can easily contribute without needing to know html, or go through a gatekeeper. As a result, you might think that intranets are teeming with pertinent, relevant information contributed by those in the know. If that's the case, your experience is very different from mine.

The technology isn't the hard part. Participation, now that's difficult to come by. Look at the Internet email lists you subscribe to. What percentage of the subscriber base actually ever writes a message? I'd be interested in the statistics. I'd guess it to be quite low, maybe 5-10%, and I suppose that a good thing, or we'd be inundated with email, but the flip side is the amount of knowledge out there that is never shared. This trend carries over to other forms of communication, including wikis and blogs. The truth is, understandably, few people are inclined to spend the time to think, write and share. After all, why should they? What's in it for them? Lack of participation extends to intranets as well, and that, more than anything else, is what's hobbled KM.

For that matter, many of us don't do a good job of managing our own knowledge, for our own use, though we'd likely benefit greatly in terms of efficiency if we did so. Personal knowledge management (PKM) is about creating our own knowledge bases and tools to help us do our job's better. From there, the step to sharing what we've collected is just a short hop.

In Steve Barth's article, Self-Organization: Taking a Personal Approach to KM, he discusses the elements of PKM, and mentions that companies are incorporating PKM into their knowledge management strategies. For example, Hill and Knowlton, a public relations company, expects employees to "participate in knowledge sharing for their own reasons first, and the company's reasons second....Hill & Knowlton employees are expected to participate out of enlightened self-interest: to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively..."

Maybe we should promote KM products, first and foremost, as ways for lawyers to find their own information. If they contribute for that reason only, everyone benefits.

Any other ideas? Come on, participate! :-)

[Article reference spotted on Knowledge Jolt with Jack.]

We all have our limitations. There are few organizations, webmail services, or internet service providers that don't put some kind of limit on the size of attachments that can be received and/or sent. For example, my home ISP limits my mailbox to 10 meg, so large video attachments or photos sent to me by friends will most likely get blocked. At work, we also have limits on file attachments including size and type of file. Even Gmail, generous though they may be with storage space, limits email size to 10 meg. The problem is, files are getting bigger and bigger all the time, and sometimes you really need to send/receive a large zip file or PDF.

There are web services for just about everything these days, and luckily there are free web sites that let you upload a file, then distribute the URL to friends, families and/or co-workers. I've been meaning to try one out for some time, and since this weekend I needed to send a 4 meg scanned document, I decided now was as good enough time as any. Of course, I couldn't seem to locate the information I've saved on such services, (Where did I put that? Is it in Bloglines? Email? FURL?) but luckily, the July issue of PC World includes an article, Store it on the Web, that reviews web storage, including file download services which can be found in the section, Share the Web Way. The article also includes information about online backup and collaboration services, just in case you're interested.

I tried out the recommended choice in this category, YouSendIt. It's straightforward, easy to use, and free free free. Register, upload the file, enter the email address or addresses of the people you want to send it to, and you're set.

There are couple of things to keep in mind when using these services. If someone sends you a link to a file, realize that there's certainly potential for contracting a virus by downloading an infected file, just as there is with email attachments, so make sure your anti-virus software scans it and pronounces it safe. If you have sensitive information in the file, consider encrypting it. Even then, I probably wouldn't use this service for anything confidential, especially if it was work-related, just because I'm paranoid.

As always, keep in mind that just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean you SHOULD. But if you can't resist sending around that cute video of the dancing dog to 100 of your closest friends, at least this way you won't be forcing people to receive something they may not want to see.

Those of you who subcribed to LawLibTech at some point in the last few years may or may not have realized that you haven't received an email notification of new content for some time. Since establishing LawLibTech.com, I've used Bloglet to deliver emails to subscribers, but for some reason, Bloglet hasn't worked for many months. It's way past time for a change! I'm now using FeedBlitz for email update delivery. If you've already subscribed, you don't need to do anything. You should start receiving email updates right away. If you'd like to subscribe, just type your email in the subscribe box on the right column of the main page, and you'll be added to the list right away!

For more information on how to receive RSS feeds via email, see RSS to Email Options.

Thanks for reading!

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of dual monitors. There are certain tasks that I simply won't do unless I'm in my office with my laptop monitor alongside my "regular" monitor. I've heard that some people are so hooked on this configuration, they've offered to pay out of their own pocket to add the requisite video card and display to their work PC. Still, your local technology department may not be thrilled to change your workstation to a non-standard setup, even if the money isn't coming out of their budget.

Now you can attach an additional monitor without having to "open the box" to add a display card. Just use the Tritton, a USB device that let's you connect a second monitor with nothing more than the installation of the appropriate drivers.

You, too, can easily gain the efficiency afforded by two monitors!