Doug Cornelius .com

Findability is a keystone of knowledge management and is a keystone of law firm knowledge management 2.0. The goal is get information out of inaccessible locations and into accessible locations and putting it into context.

If the information is in an accessible then it should be search-able. Is the reverse true? If I search for it, can I find it?

One goal of law firm knowledge management 2.0 is to reduce the number of places people need to search to find the information they need. Email has one search, the document management system has another search, the expertise system has another, the intranet has its own search, the CRM system has its own siloed search and the KM system stands by itself.

We need to unite the searches to make it easier to find stuff. Otherwise the first step of the search is searching for the right place to search.

Enterprise search will be a key tool in law firm knowledge management system. The search should unite the content in the various systems. So if I search, I find it.

Email is not going away. We need to find a way to better integrate email into law firm knowledge management 2.0. The issue is what to do with email. We get lots of it. It lies unshared in our inbox.

One of my goals of law firm knowledge management 2.0 is to reduce the amount of internal email traffic. Another is get that email into a shared and searchable repository.

Are there technology fixes and ways to match the process? One example is that I can publish a post to this blog through email.

The real step is to get lawyers to recognize that there are ways to communicate other than email. Ten years ago, many lawyers thought email was just a passing technology fad. It took a long time to get to this place where email is ubiquitous. It will take a long time to adopt other methods.

The first step is acknowledging the problem.

For a law firm, the document management system is their factory assembly line. Lawyers draft documents. We start with a form, precedent or blank sheet of paper. We add text, add more text, revise, and further revise the content. We use multiple versions to show to others and incorporate their comments. We share the documents with our secretaries to help us with the edits. The document management system is key to dealing with this production.

As a result the document management system is our of our biggest repositories of findable information. The deficiency with the document management system has always been an inadequate search tool in the document management system. Without a good search, the documents become less findable and less useful for future work. Since the vast majority of documents produced by the firm end up in the document management system, useful documents lie side-by-side with useless documents. Our form securities purchase agreement sits in there next to fax cover sheets.

One challenge with law firm knowledge management 2.0 will be identifying those items in the document management system that can be better handled in a wiki or a blog instead of a document.

Another challenge (or opportunity) will be using blogs and wikis to identify and highlight the better content in the document management system. Law firm knowledge management 2.0 can and should be used to better identify why someone should use one

Blogs, along with wikis and RSS feeds form the big three new technologies from web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 that will impact law firm knowledge management 2.0.

A blog (like this one) is just a webpage that allows you to easily publish new information, doing so in a chronological manner, with notifications of new information being added.

A blog can give a lawyer or other employees the ability to quickly capture knowledge and publish it. As a result it is available for others to find. Since the blog post is html, even a simple search engine should be able to index it and produce good results.

Blogs may be a natural migration for lawyers. Lawyers (like me) are used to writing letters and sending them out. Essentially, that is the same process as a blog.

Personally, I find this blog to be great personal knowledge management tool. I write for me. These are thoughts I want to capture for my own later use. You reading it and finding this content is just a by product. I publish a new blog post when I feel like it and categorize it in the way that makes sense to me.

I think the big use for a blog inside a law firm will be the administrators trying to make the law firm community aware of new information, policies and happenings. I have already threatened many of my firm’s practice area managers with blogs. They seem to be willing guinea pigs for blogging. (Six more weeks until our enterprise 2.0 platform is released.)

The other feature of a blog that makes it a more powerful communication device is the ability of others to participate in the blog by allowing comments. The post and comment become captured elements of the collaboration and communication.

Right behind wikis in the toolbox for law firm knowledge management 2.0 is the use of RSS feeds. Without RSS, a wiki is a much less powerful tool.

RSS is simply a notification of a change or new content on website. The notification can be sent by email. Even better is through feedreader. Google Reader, Bloglines, Attensa, and Newsgator are examples. (Most of you reading this are getting it through a feedreader. There are few getting it by email and some keep coming back to the page to read the content.)

RSS disaggregates the content from its source. You do not need to go back to the website to find the change or discover the new content. The content is pushed to the subscribers of the RSS feed for the website. Wikis publish the changes to a wiki page or the addition of another wiki page to the subscribers of the wiki. Blogs push out new blog post with RSS.

The power of RSS is to showing the flow of information rather than just seeing static content. RSS turns a webpage from a repository of information into a broadcaster of information.

Wikis will be one of the most important pieces of law firm knowledge management 2.0.

An intranet or portal has usually been one of the centerpieces of a knowledge management at law firms. The problem with the intranet was the content was not well indexed and therefore not easily searchable. Also, the content was hard to edit. Generally someone in IT would be tasked with updating content. Either the security model was too rigid or the editing process was too complex. As a result content was not in the hands of the front line attorneys. The security model of the intranet imposes a barrier to the keeping content up to date and complete. Wikis can remove these barriers.

A wiki is just an easy to edit webpage, with a version history and a notification of changes. Wikis are meant to be simple to use and easy to teach. If an attorney wants to edit the content, they hit the edit button, they make the changes and hit save. A new version of that wiki page is made and the wiki sends out an alert to the subscribers of the page.

Wikis are simple enough to use that they require little training and little tech-savviness. It is not much different than making comments to a document by editing the document itself. You can generate a blackline of the changes by comparing the previous versions of the wiki page. You can see who made the changes to the wiki page by looking at the history of the wiki page.

Since the content of the wiki page is basic html, even a simple search engine should be able to easily index and return the content in it results.

The technology barrier is all but removed when using a wiki to capture content.

The challenge is getting the attorneys to use a wiki instead of (or in addition to) email. We are trained to draft letters, send letters and send responses to letters. With a wiki the process is compressed into editing and adding content to the wiki. It requires the attorneys to synthesize content into existing wiki pages.

The advantage of using a wiki is that synthesis. Content should get edited and added upon, with that stream of edits being pushed out to the subscribers.

At its simplest, the wiki can act as a simple content manager. At its best, the wiki will engage the subscribers in the conversation happening in the wiki. Either way, content is being generated in a form that it is easily searchable and retrievable.

I admit that my first exposure to real estate was building houses out of Lego bricks. Today, January 28, 2008, is the 50th anniversary of the Lego brick. Even the Google logo has been lego-fied today.

Some facts I found interesting:

• There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants.
• The LEGO bricks sold in one year would circle the world 5 times.
• More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949
• 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the earth with the moon.

[Gizmodo]

Back in June, I had the good fortune of going to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. (Thanks to Luis Suarez.) Those of you have been reading this blog know that I have been talking about and experimenting with blogs, wikis, tagging, social media sites, enterprise search and other enterprise 2.0 tools.

One of the questions that I had coming out of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was the relationship between knowledge management and enterprise 2.0. Which was correct: (a) enterprise 2.0 is a subset of knowledge management (b) knowledge management is a subset of enterprise 2.0 (c) knowledge management is the same thing as enterprise 2.0 (d) knowledge management has nothing to do with enterprise 2.0?

I have come to the conclusion that enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management are two disciplines that need to join together.

Several of the sessions were run by Jessica Lipnack. Her focus was on the need to focus on the people and process side of the problem and not on the technology. Enterprise 2.0 was 90% people and 10% technology. That is a common theme in knowledge management.

Early knowledge management was about developing a “knowledge management system.” One big database to hold the knowledge of the company. It was a top down approach, trying to force people into the process and the technology. The theme was to contribute to the common good. But the “knowledge management system” did not really give the individual user much in return. It lacked personal knowledge management. People have a hard enough time managing their own stream of information and knowledge. The “knowledge management system” was outside the typical workflow. You had to implement a different process and a roundabout way of collecting the information. Information that was already collected some other way. The “knowledge management system” would rarely give the individual a way to organize information in a way that makes sense to them.

Incorporating enterprise 2.0 technologies into the knowledge management toolbox, gives people easy to use – easy to learn tools. It allows them to capture and organize their information is a way that works for them. The focus of knowledge management should be on the individual, by giving them tools for personal use, the content of which can leveraged by the rest of the enterprise. Knowledge management is trying to get people who do similar things communicating with each other and collaborating. Then capture that collaboration for their own re-use and re-use across the enterprise. That sounds like what the enterprise 2.0 movement is about.

One aspect of enterprise 2.0 at a law firm is that there is less of a hierarchy at a law firm. It is more of a caste system. The newer, younger attorneys are at the bottom and the senior partners are at the top. The bottom of the caste produces lots of the substantive knowledge. It is those junior lawyers that are doing the research and analysis that gets consumed by the higher levels of the caste. The lawyers move across cases and work for different players in the senior levels of the caste. (My family asks if I have good boss. I have dozens of bosses.)

Law firm knowledge management 2.0 is about incorporating Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 technologies and processes into the law firm knowledge management toolkit. I am going to have few follow-up posts on the use of the technologies as part of a law firm knowledge management strategy.

The American Land Title Association (ALTA), recently approved three new form closing protection letters. These new forms took effect on January 1, 2008.

• Closing Protection Letter
• Closing Protection Letter – Limitations
• Closing Protection Letter – Single Transaction Liability

Jon Anderson, Senior Title Counsel for CATIC wrote an article on these new forms and how they clarify the underwriter’s liability.

The Closing Protection Letter is the broadest form. The Closing Protection Letter – Limitations imposes a specified dollar limit on the liability, although this limitation is not applicable to mortgage loan transactions for individual one-to-four family residential properties. The Closing Protection Letter – Single Transaction Liability is limited to a single transaction with funds not in excess of a specified dollar amount.

I always ask for a closing protection letter when using an agent to issue the title policy and handle funds (as opposed to using an officer of the the title company.)

The trouble with these new forms is that they limit the protection to damages relating to the status of title to an interest in the land or the validity, enforceability or priority of the lien of the mortgage. You are protected if the deed or mortgage is not recorded.

With these new forms, you are not protected for the closing or settlement services being provided by the title agent. Clearly, an over-funding of the purchase price will not fall under the protection of these new closing protection letters.

From Bruce McKenna at the Canadian Commercial Real Estate Law Blog, is this piece on the increase Toronto’s Land Transfer Tax. Here is a copy of the Municipal Land Transfer Tax By-law from Toronto.ca.

I spend a fair amount time structuring transactions to avoid triggering the payment of transfer tax. Massachusetts has proposed closing some of those loopholes, but not taken any action. Maryland has a new law effective later this spring that extends the reach of that state’s transfer tax.