Recently in Knowledge Management Category

ILTA does the best job of offering educational seminars all year round of any association I've been involved with. You don't always have to be a member to benefit; the webinar they're offering, "When One Search is Not Enough: Case Studies in Using Multiple Work Product Retrieval Tools" is open to non-members, so whether you join, and you probably should, or not, you can also benefit.

We all know that there's no such thing as the one perfect work product solution. Every application has its weaknesses and strong points. Though the vendors are trying to come up with a one size fits all approach, they don't necessarily succeed. Some tools may work better for litigation, others for corporate documents. One search engine might do a great job of relevancy ranking, but lacks some other feature that you think is critical. Though no one wants the expense, the reality is that purchasing just work product retrieval tool may not be enough.

Now, how to convince your management of that is a whole other topic!

By the way, I went to a similar program last year at AALL. Even if you are only planning on purchasing one product, you can get no better information on how the different ones out there stack up than by listening to people who are working with more than one search tool. They know the comparative strengths and weaknesses like nobody else!

I've always suspected that my lazy streak is the basis for my technology skills. If I have the choice, I'd rather spend an hour figuring out how to automate a repetitive task, than spend an hour DOING the repetitive task. I guess I just like problem solving.

There are some good and valid reasons for being lazy. If you start a system that requires a great deal of labor and maintenance, there's an excellent chance that somewhere down the line, the system that you worked so hard on will be abandoned due to lack of staffing. I've worked in law firms long enough to see that happen a few times...and I hear stories...

So when it comes to KM I'll admit I like automated solutions whenever possible. Along those lines, if you're considering collecting expertise/experience information, you might want to consider some of the sources OTHER THAN YOUR ATTORNEYS, for such information like the ones discussed by on KM Space You may not get everything you want this way, but you certainly can collect some valuable information on the kind of work your attorneys do. If you have Recommind, as does MOFO, you're in good shape to leverage these data sources into a useful resource.

I'd also like to extend this kind of approach to work product. There are many third-party research services that collect documents that are public records, such as court filings and SEC documents. If you can search by law firm, and often you can, these services can provide you with a way to search an admittedly limited body of documents. It's not everything, not even close, but if you have no other internal way of finding these documents, it's a quick and easy way to go.

Law librarians frequently complain that attorneys are terrible at knowledge management because they're just not willing to share. That may be true, but I'm not so sure librarians are much better. We have to ask ourselves if WE are good at collecting and sharing our knowledge with other librarians and library staff.

What kind of things am I talking about? Knowledgebases, bookmark managers and email are all things that need to be managed and shared if we want to leverage the work we do. For more information, see my article in Law Librarians in the New Millennium, entitled "Putting Your Knowledge Where Your Mouse Is", in the March/April issue, p. 3.

There sometimes seems to be a lack of detailed information on what firms are doing internally with their Intranets and search engines. So I was interested to see the Microsoft Case Study on Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton's new Intranet based on Sharepoint and and product called XMLAW.

Watch Tom Baldwin's blog for more specifics on how things are going at Sheppard. He's now working on introducing a faceted search capability.I don't know about you, but I'm always happy to find a search engine that supports faceted searching.

Law Technology News announced the winners of the 7th annual LTN awards for technology innovation and implementation at LegalTech in New York this week. (As reported by LawFuel.)

Of particular note is West KM's win for the best knowledge management system and MoFo's prize for the most innovative use of technology for their AnswerBase system. A demo of Answerbase is available on the MoFo web site.

Congratulations to all the winners!

It must be the holidays that are making me feel overwhelmed. There's just not enough time to do the presents, food, parties AND keep up with what's going on in the KM arena. But information stops for no one. KM & Intranet World took place right after Internet Librarian, and the presentation links are now available on the Information Today web site.

Let's face it, PowerPoints by themselves are of limited use. Luckily, the sessions were recorded, so if you're interested, you might want to buy the CD. I know I'm interested....but I'll think about that tomorrow. Or in January :-)

[Via Portals and KM]

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....

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.]

There's one thing most of us have in common, that is, we spend a great deal of time using email. Whether for good or bad, the predominant application for enterprise email is MS Outlook. So there's a tendency to want to deliver more and more information, whether email related or not, into the application that's already open on everyone's desktop. Remember when that's what a portal was for?

Lisa Kellar discusses the inclination that many have to incorporate KM applications into Outlook in her article, MS Outlook: KM Friend or Foe? (Practice Innovations: Managing Change in a Legal Environment, October 2005)

I just have one question. Can Outlook really handle all the application plug-ins that connect it to the document management system, Interaction, and KM applications? Or will it collapse under the load? Will adding all this stuff make Outlook inoperable for the purpose for which it was designed? Just wondering...

[Spotted on Excited Utterances]

Just one more reason to join ILTA, the formation of a new KM Peer Group was announced today by Peggy Wechsler. The group plans to offer educational programs, networking opportunities, and meetings at the ILTA Annual Confrence. If you're interested, there is also an existing KM listserv, which will not doubt become more active as this group progresses.

The weak link in most KM systems is the need for attorneys to take the time to contribute. Sure, they have good intentions, but it just doesn't happen. If the content isn't there, users won't come back. If they don't come back they won't think to contribute. The potential of another good application goes unrealized.That's why I'm always particularly intrigued by applications that don't require any thought or effort on the part of the contributors.

CRM (Client Relations Managements) software can suffer from the same difficulties. Enter ContactNet, an "enterprise relationship search" technology that automatic analyszes e-mail traffic to determine who knows who, and how well.

According to a recent article in Law Technology News, Nurturing Relationships, "algorithms analyze the frequency and pattern of e-mail communication, and assess how recent it is, and then search results are ranked, much like a Google search, to put the strongest relationships at the top.

What better way to determine who knows who than to monitor who is sending email to whom?

As the saying goes, you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. And you can create a great new KM product that facilitates communication and collaboration among knowledge workers, something that most of us would consider a good thing, yet it can languish, unused. It's a common problem, according to Michael Chender, who says "numerous collaborative systems have been implemented at enormous expense within companies and then rarely used...." in his article in the Nov./Dec. issue of Intranets, where he addresses the phenomena of the unused application, giving hints on how to maximize usage.

Chender further explains that though technology is powerful, ultimately the success of these corporate applications are dependent upon the willingness of individuals to participate. How do you increase the likelihood of that happening? User groups should be involved in the development process, helping to define the system that they'll be expected to use. In addition, individual contributions should credited and visible and the people you're depending upon need to see evidence that they will benefit from its use.

Of course, this won't happen unless the application has an intuitive design, "organized around a users needs and work flow."

Thinking through all of thes issues BEFORE starting work on a new application is definitely critical to its succes.

Freshfields has been busily reworking their KM system to make their "know-how" more accessible, a process discussed in the recent Law Technology News article, In Search of Athena.

Of particular interest to me was the description of the search interface. We know that users crave a simple Google-like search box, but sometimes need the more precise advanced search, and Freshfields Athena offers both. It also includes a "results basket", similar to a shopping basket, where you can save useful documents for later review. That's a feature that hadn't occurred to me!

But it was their training strategy for Athena that I thought was especially unique. They felt sure that Athena would require little formal training, so rather than offering training programs, a lawyer in each of 40 practice groups was assigned responsibility for finding a real-life, practice-specific example of how the system could work well for their group. What a great idea!

According to an article by Judith Lamont, Law Firms Reinvent KM, KM is being integrated nicely in many law firms these days. Though the general KM hype has definitely died down, Dennis Kennedy is quoted as saying "Law firms have become more pragmatic in their use of knowledge management technology. They are less concerned about the buzzwords and more focused on what can be accomplished." So KM is now emphasizing practical, mangeable applications that can effect how lawyers work on a daily basis, sometimes globally, sometimes on a more local level.

Much of the emphasis seems to be shifting to identifying expertise rather than just delivering documents. At Heller, Ehrman, they're emphasized connecting people, though they're also working with American Legalnet to create a universal forms library, according to Robin Solomon, the firmwide knowledge manager.

Reinhart, Boerner, Van Deuren, a Wisconsin firm with 180 attorneys, installed West KM in June 2003 as part of a pilot program to evaluate it's usefulness for the firm. Carol Bannen, the firm's director of information resources, discusses their experience with West KM in the Law Technology News article, Evolving into Automation.

When trying to decide how to move forward with the firm's knowledge management system, they specifically looked for a solution that would help retrieve those documents that otherwise never would have made their way into their traditional work product library. "We realized we needed something to help us retrieve valuable work product - but it had to take much of the work out of the hands of the attorneys."

Carol says that their litigators were the biggest beneficiaries of the new system, and found the natural language searching to be particularly useful. The transactional attorneys at Reinhart were less inclined to use it, especially since they generally did not use Westlaw to the extent that the litigators did. This was prior to the release of West KM for transactions.

The bottom line according to Carol is "The ability to use Westlaw searching capability, to update any legal citations and to see easily when there is a Reinhart document citing a case has been invaluable to us and to our clients."

I'm a big fan of search technologies that push relevant information to you when you're most likely to need it, instead of requiring that you make a conscious choice to seek it out. ResultsPlus from Westlaw is an excellent example of this method of information delivery.

So I'm intrigued by a recent announcement from Handshake Software, "Baker Donelson and Handshake Software announce the First Legal Knowledge Management Initiative under Microsoft's Office 2003 Information Bridge Framework."

If you missed KM World, you might want to peruse the PowerPoints from selected presentations at the KM World web site. For recordings of the sessions, see The Digital Record. The exhibit hall must have been fun...according to the exhibitor list the search engines were really out in force.

[Spotted on TVC Alert]

This is what happens when you get behind on your reading..but better late than never! The September issue of Law Technology News has an article by Peter Ozolin, Case Study: Paul Hastings (requires registration) discussing their choice of Recommind as a universal search tool, and the Practice Technologies Real Practice product as a targeted work product retrieval system.

In IT @ Goodwin Procter: Migrating to a New Philosophy: Teamwork (Law Technology News), Trudy Ernst, Director of Knowledge Mangement describes how they used Sharepoint to build client pages with information pulled from 3 different sources.

KM as a discipline is a very recent development, and knowledge managers are having a difficult time establishing their identity and justifying KM as a separate function and profession, especially when some are questioning whether whether KM is even all all that good of an idea.

Lisa Kellar, in the July issue of Practice Innovations, cites a variety of opinions on the subject, ranging from a general dismissal of KM, to a suggestion to rename KM altogether.

Dennis Kennedy and Ron Friedmann, in a recent feature article in Law Practice Today, discuss the disappointments and difficulties of using document management systems for KM purposes, and brainstorm on other possible solutions to the dilemma of work product retrieval.

It can be an expensive and labor intensive proposition to create a taxonomy and/or thesaurus from scratch. Though sometimes your organization's needs are unique and require a custom approach, other times a well-developed, ready-made taxonomy would fit the bill. However, it's not always obvious where to find such an animal.

Taxonomy Warehouse offers a database of available taxonomies on different topics, some of which can be ordered directly from the Warehouse.

The results are in and the votes have been tallied. Matthew Parsons, in conjunction with excited utterances' Joy London, recently conducted an online survey of the legal KM community. A discussion of the findings is published this month in Legal IT in an article entitled Share the Knowledge.

At Paul Hastings we spent considerable amount of effort last year reviewing various search technologies, both in terms of "universal" search (that is finding information/data from a multitude of sources) and more targeted search solutions, such as West KM. This said, we found the problems that the various approaches are solving are different and thus we elected to pursue a two-prong strategy covering both types of knowledge searches detailed below.

According to PC Magazine, "search has become one of the hottest technologies in the computer industry." From products designed to search data on a single PC, to those aimed at small, medium or large companies, there is an ever growing number of vendors promoting full-text search products for document management systems(DMS), litigation support, databases, email, intranets, and some that try to do it all, high-end, enterprise search engines such as Autonomy, Verity and Recommind, just to name a few.

Where does WestKM and the Lexis Total Search products fit into the mix? Lisa Kellar, Practice Automation Manager at Hunton & Williams, explains the difference between these KM products and the enterprise search engines.

A free webinar, "Information and Knowledge Portals - A Practical View", is scheduled for June 2.

The panel members, "leading portal and knowledge management experts", will attempt to answer the question "If portals are the solution, what is the problem they solve?"

Registration is required.

[via NetLawBlog]

Managing Partner Magazine recently released an entire issue devoted to Knowledge Management. My favorite article of the bunch was "The right culture for KM" by Gretta Rusanow.

Recently on the law-lib email discussion list, the question was asked, "What are other firms doing in relation to their document management systems to maintain a 'brief bank'?" The responses indicate that most firms are still struggling to find ways to collect and search their firm's work product. Document management systems are not the panacea that perhaps some thought they would be, in some part due to difficulties with cross-office searching in addition to generally poor full-text searching capability. Firms with fewer locations seem to fare better using their DMS for work product retrieval.

If only we could quantify the cost, monetary and otherwise, of not finding the information we need. If only we knew when we weren't finding it! The classic example of such failure is the volunteer on a Johns Hopkins research project who died when given a drug whose adverse effects were documented in the medial literature prior to 1966, literature that wasn't found by the researchers. Susan Feldman further discusses the implications of NOT finding information in her KM World article, "The High Cost of Not Finding Information."

Michael Angeles sees many reasons to use weblogs for KM, and he details those reasons, plus much more, in his recent presentation, "Supporting Enterprise Knowledge Management with Weblogs: A Weblog Services Roadmap", given at the recent Computers in Libraries conference.

Valuable information in any organization can be spread across a variety of databases, intranet pages, and of course, document management systems.

I'm convinced that we need to stop requiring attorneys to figure out which data store contains the information that they need, but rather, provide a search engine that will pull all the firm's resources together, and present the appropriate content based on the search terms. Everyone wants something "Google-like", and I don't see why they can't have it! Apparently the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb agrees. Brenton B. Miller describes their search for just such a product in a recent article in the Legal Times, The Engine that Could.

Lately I've been searching for just the right portable CD player to take on the train. I want one that plays MP3s and includes a FM radio. I'm a big fan of Amazon, but I was frustrated trying to search for a CD player with all these characteristics.

I tried searching using the terms "CD FM MP3", but still ended up with some products that didn't offer what I wanted. Amazon provides quite a few browse options, but of course, I could only browse one feature at a time, and so was left sifting through the results to find the right combination.

I happened to have a gift card for Circuit City, so I popped over to their web site, and low and behold, they included an option to refine the search by brand, radio built-in, MP3 capable and car kit included. Just what I needed! A faceted classification!

It was a long, painful transit strike. But it's over, at least for now, and I'm back on the train. And none too soon. My reading has really stacked up. Paying for parking in downtown L.A. was getting old, too. Then there was the traffic. But I digress.

My first day back I perused "KM and Elearning: A Powerful Combination", from Econtent (Oct. 2003). I was struck with how little I've heard elearning, or training of any kind, mentioned in the same sentence as KM. Yet the transfer of knowledge in professional training programs could be significant.

Creating a KM database isn't difficult. The technology is common, the tools are abundant. Of course, it takes thought and care. But after you've launched, that's when the real problem begins - maintenance. How do you keep the data current? If you've ever experienced this dilema, you'll enjoy a Dilbert cartoon from last week that pretty much says it all.

There aren't any easy answers. But I do have a few suggestions.

Perhaps too much attention is placed on the technology for KM, and not enough on the human element of implementing that technology. That's the conclusion you could come to after reading Nina Platt's excellent article appearing in the Oct. 2003 issue of Practice Innovations.

If you don't get Law Technology News, you need to visit their web site and sign up. They publish some excellent articles, and it's free!

There are several good articles in this month's issue. One article of particular interest is Knowledge Management: U.S. or U.K.? Who Really Rules?" (Requires registration.)

Sally Gonzalez has some very interesting insights into how KM is evolving in both countries.

Spotted on excited utterances, there's a new book out on knowledge management for lawyers, Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer