Doug Cornelius .com

I have been a fan of Google Maps and Google Earth for a while. In my real estate practice it is generally very useful to see the building and surrounding land to help identify problems.

One thing I have been thinking about, and working with off and on, is how to represent information from our firms systems and my personal systems on a map.

On the personal side, I set up a Google Map that shows a few of my real estate transactions. I set that up several months ago and it needs some updating. I found it powerful to show a breadth of practice. Personally, I think the map is a more powerful display of information than a list of real estate transactions.

In the firms we set up a few tests of displaying our transaction data on our SharePoint intranet. Many of the problems came from our underlying data source. (We were not good about capturing a property address).

Now, according to the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog, you can incorporate Virtual Earth Maps on SharePoint. I will have to revisit this after we upgrade our SharePoint platform in the next few months.

With my current fascination with wikis, I wondered if you could use one to draft a legal agreement. No, I thought. That’s just crazy.

Well someone is crazier than me. Tractis.com has set up a library of legal agreements, using wikis to draft them. They have also layered on document management and signature tracking.

Like a good crash test dummy, I signed up and used one of their templates to draft a Non-Disclosure Agreement [Free Registration Required]. Feel free to edit my agreement. Interesting exercise, but I do not think I will be drafting agreements this way.

But individual clauses for agreements? That could done with a wiki.

I have a leasing clause library sitting in a folder in my document management system. I have been toying with the idea of putting each clause into a separate wiki page. You could add a description of uses for the clause, issues to watch out for and links to other related clauses.

I should warn you that Tractis is a Spanish company and most of the agreements are in Spanish. Despite several years of people trying to teach me Spanish, I can’t do much with it except to point out that my pencil is yellow.

Thanks to Matt Homann for pointing this out.
the [non]billable hour: Web 2.0 Replaces Lawyers Again?

Below is the list of resources from the session on Social Networks & Social Media: Implications for Law Firms

• International Network for Social Network Analysis [http://www.insna.org/]

• NetWIKI [http://netwiki.amath.unc.edu/]

• NetLab [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/netlab/ABOUT/index.html]
• Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) New York, Cambridge University Press.
• Degenne, A., & Forse, M. 1999. Introducing Social Networks. London: Sage.

• Barabasi, A.-L. 2002. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.
• Buchanan, M. 2002. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks. New York: Norton.
• Monge, P. R., & Contractor, N. S. 2003. Theories of Communication Networks. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Watts, D. J. 1999. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
• Watts, D. J. 2003. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton.
  
  
• Rob Cross http://www.robcross.org
  
• The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations
• Networks in the Knowledge Economy

One take-away from the New York Toronto Forum was this reading list:

Sociability and Story Telling

Stephen Denning
The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations

Laurence Prusak, et al
Storytelling in Organizations: Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management

Social Nature of Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Creation

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
The Social Life of Information

Cass Sunstein
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

James Surowiecki
The Wisdom of Crowds

Communities of Practice

Hubert Saint-Onge and Debra Wallace
Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage

Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William Snyder
Cultivating Communities of Practice

Social Nature of Learning

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives)

Knowledge Management and Servant Leadership

Robert K. Greenleaf
Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness 25th Anniversary Edition

James A. Autry
The Servant Leader: How to Build a Creative Team, Develop Great Morale, and Improve Bottom-Line Performance

I put together some notes from the New York Toronto Law Firm Knowledge Management Forum:

Personal Knowledge Management
Making Knowledge Management Relevant in Client Development
Sorry I do not have notes on the Future Technology/Web 2.0 session. I do have the reading lists:

• Reading List on Leveraging Human Sociability to Facilitate Knowledge Sharing
• Reading List for Social Networks & Social Media: Implications for Law Firms

Here is also Ted Tjaden‘s notes: Personal Knowledge Management. It sounds like he has embraced my preaching on Web 2.0 and Facebook. From my poll of the room on blogging, it is unlikely that there will be any other blog posts from other attendees.

You may have noticed that the names of the presenters and their organizations do not appear in my posts. One tenet of the New York Large Law Firm Knowledge Management Group and its Toronto counterpart is to keep them limited to actual KM practitioners in law firms. The reason is to keep the groups candid and forth-coming. Something the members agree would be harder to do if clients, consultants or others were part of the group. In an open session we would need to present a rosy picture and only focus on the positives. We would hate for our frank discussions to cast any negative light on our law firms.

My notes are somewhat incomplete and murky in places to respect the tenets of forum.

One mantra of knowledge management is to not reinvent the wheel. The focus of this panel was on KM’s role in developing a better wheel.

This panel consisted of a representative from a U.S., Canada and a U.K. firm to share the experience of how knowledge management can integrate with marketing, client development and client communications.

There was some discussion of extranets, a place to store information for clients to find.

The UK representative has two different models for the extranet: a deal room and a client research repository. The client research repository collects client alerts and legal publications.
They also develop extranets for clients to collect there forms, knowledge and materials. Effectively being KM consultants for their clients.

A poll of audience revealed that there are very few law firms that have a fee-based legal delivery service. There are some commercial providers looking to re-market the law firm’s materials.

One item they pointed out is the Proskauer Rose LLP publication on the internet: Proskauer on International Litigation and Arbitration: Managing, Resolving, and Avoiding Cross-Border Business or Regulatory Disputes. This is a great treatise that the firm invested hundreds (if not thousands) of lawyer hours to create.

An ALM survey from last year indicated that 65% of client proposals have input from the knowledge management group. The group was skeptical of that number and poll of the room revealed a much smaller number.

What should the relationship be between knowledge management and marketing?

I am at a knowledge management conference today. The personal knowledge management session is focusing on ways to rethink knowledge management.

Where are we now? Knowledge management has spent a lot of time fiddling with content, finding ways to serve it up and berating people to use our systems.

The current trajectory of knowledge management is to have grand plans with bigger budgets and expanding the staff. With all of this investment, the system needs to be fail-safe. If they fail (and they do most of the time) we engage people to figure out why it did not get used.

Maybe we should concentrate on personal systems and less on firm-wide systems?

Should knowledge management adopt the Ayn Rand philosophy: Forget the collective good and focus on the individual.

Train front line lawyers to implement personal KM and KM specialist to coach the lawyers and provide the necessary tools to implement personal KM. Coach attorneys to help develop personal knowledge base, give them the platforms and systems to implement their personal knowledge base, and mine those systems to leverage across the firm.

To create a personal knowledge base, we need a strategy for transforming the random bits of information and transform it into a usable system. It is important for others in the attorney’s network and for the firm to be able to harvest the individual’s personal knowledge management systems.

Things like shared folders in the document management system, blogs and wikis provide simple and easy to use tools to collect information that can be harvested by others.

Does training for these personal knowledge management systems require personal training? It is hard to get attorneys into training rooms. (It is hard to get anyone into a training room). One firm has one-on-one training sessions in the attorney’s office. This allows them find out what the attorney does not know and expand on the tools that work best for their practice and their workflow. It was also useful to show that attorney how other attorneys use the various tools. The benefit of the one-on-one training is that is removes the possible stigma of being identified as not knowing how to use popular tools.

Should be also make this personal knowledge system to be portable? Departing attorneys are going to take stuff with them when they leave. It may be controversial, but it is going to happen anyway. The portability could be another incentive to contribute, knowing they can take it with them. (I think we need to make sure they only take a copy.)

Part of the role of knowledge management will be to get the attorneys to use platforms that can leveraged across the enterprise. Collecting shortcuts that can shared with others is a useful to gather information for the individual, but can be harvested by others.

Incorporating the narrative is an important part of KM training. People respond to stories (particularly failure stories) better than they do to statistics and databases.

In poking around the settings on Blogger I noticed a new feature (or a feature that I have not noticed before). It allows you to set up an email address for sending blog posts. So I set up the email address, added the contact to Outlook and synced it to my Blackberry.

I am sitting on the tarmac at Logan Airporty tapping away on my Blackberry.

I have enough of an issues formatting and spellchecking my blogposts. Creating them on Blackberry is not going to help. But it is interesting to see the two communications media coming together to collect and distribute information.

Now if I can just figure out how to keep out the flotsam below from popping up in the blog post.

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Sent from my Blackberry .

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One thing I noticed in our search for an enterprise search tool is the serendipity factor. People were finding interesting and informative things that they did not expect to find.

Our sample database of documents and intranet sites for testing enterprise search had been targeted at the guinea pigs in the proof of concept. We wanted to make sure that the information in the sample was some of their information. That way we could test the precision of the various search engines. The user would know about a particular document and craft a search to find it.

A good percentage of the searches would bring back a useful item that they did not know about. They would find out a colleague had drafted a memorandum on the same topic or find a brief on the subject from someone they did not know.

Two things brought up the subject of this post. One was a post on the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog: Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor by Erica Driver.

The second was my own experience using WestKm. I was giving my annual introductory knowledge management training session for the new associates last week, which includes a segment on WestKM. We use WestKm to search a subset of our Interwoven document management system using the WestLaw search engine, citation checking and other features. This subset of documents is targeted at those documents with legal analysis (as opposed to agreements), especially those with case citations or statutory citations.

Being a “seasoned” transactional lawyer, I rarely do primary research anymore. But one issue comes up every year. “What can I do about my neighbor’s tree that is hanging over my yard? Can I trim the tree?” I wrote a brief memo on the issue several years ago. I use a search for this memo during my WestKM demonstration.

Serendipity struck this year when another item came up in the WestKM search results ahead of my memo. Someone else had gone and drafted a memo on the same topic for a client. (I hope that she found my memo and re-purposed it.) Unfortunately, the new memo was much better than mine. (It should be; a client paid for it.)

Another serendipitous moment was that the memorandum had the unfortunate title of “Memo to File.” So, I was able to teach the new associates another lesson: Give your documents a meaningful name. “Memo to File” is not a useful name for you to find that document again. It certainly is not a useful name for someone else interested in that subject. Even though the other memo was better than mine, people would be more likely to read my memo because it is called “Tree Trimming in Massachusetts.”

I find one of the great features of powerful search engines is this serendipity factor. It is always great to find interesting things that you do not expect to find. Run a Google search on yourself and see what comes up. If you have a blog, use the Google Webmaster tool or Technorati and see who is linking to your blog. Serendipity could be in your future.

knowledge management
WestKM
enterprise search
serendipity