Doug Cornelius .com

I spent a big chunk of the last two days at a conference in Cambridge on Enterprise 2.0. One of the other attendees was Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp. Paul just had an article published on Legal Week.com about legal online communities: An Opportunity Waiting to Happen.

Paul puts forth ten reasons why an online community is suited for the law:

1. Law is a social profession
2. Legal content and expertise are developed and shared socially.
3. A social platform is the easiest way to go global.
4. A social platform can address clients’ demand for greater efficiency
5. A social platform can be used to manage privileged work.
6. A social platform gets lawyers closer to clients.
7. Social platforms will change the competitive dynamics of law.
8. Participating in the broader community is the best way to energize your own community.
9. An online community could prevent future shock.
10. Social platforms are not about technology, they are about people.

Paul and I were able to spend lots of time chatting about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 affecting law firms and the practice of law.

My attendance at the conference was subject to a non-disclosure agreement so I have no posts to share my notes with you yet. (I have submitted them for approval from the conference host.)

In my last post (Interwoven Express Search and Worksite 8.3 Update) on Interwoven’s new tools I noted quite a few problems. Now, after re-configuring some settings we are getting back on course. Problems 3, 4, 5, and 6 have all been fixed and the searching is great. Those quirky search errors are gone. Express Search even seems to be running faster.

Express Search introduces a Google-like search for our document management system. It moves the search dialog from a screen full of database fields to one simple box. It also brings relevancy to the search results.

Going back to my earlier theory of searching, there are four basic types of searches for documents: fetch, recall, research and precedent. The Interwoven document management system has always done well with the fetch and recall types. Those are the types of searches that you know what you are looking and are the type of searches a document management system was built for. But it had always been fairly poor at the research type where you do not know what you are looking for. The search results do not come back ranked in relevancy so there is limited ability to deal with a long list of results. Also, even though we separated out document collection into several different libraries to speed the search results, the libraries have just continued to grow. The big libraries make the full text searches very slow in all versions prior to 8.3. Express Search brings speed and relevancy ranking. That makes it a great solution for doing a research type search. The sister tool to Express Search is Data Miner. It allows you to group the search results based on the metadata from the document profile. This gets closer to addressing the needs of a precedent search.

We are still testing and banging on the tools, but two problems remain on our list.

First, 8.3 is still configured to return all versions of a document that meet the search criteria and not just the latest version of that document. For key transactional documents, we will go through several versions of the document. We have our 8.2 document management system currently configured to only show the document a single time in the search results. That is problem 1 from my prior post.
This multiple versions problem is still a big problem. Unfortunately, it carries over to Express Search, DataMiner and DeskSite.

Second, it is a challenge to search by the document identification number. If you put the document ID in the Express Search box, without specifyiing the “doc.num:” syntax, it will execute a full text search and you may get the document back in the search results if you have included the document ID in the text of the document. (We generally put it in the footer of the document, but not always.) Even though you can search by document number there is no way to limit the search to a particular library and the search results do not identify the library of the document. The complicating factor is that we have six libraries in the document management and do not make the document ID unique except within a single library. So document number 123456 would be unique within a library but could exist in each of the six libraries. Of course, you could use the bulkier DataMiner which does display the library.

We can probably cope with document ID problem by keeping the old DeskSite interface on the desktop. People would use that interface to search by document ID.

But the multiple versions problem is still an impediment to our moving forward with Express Search and Worksite 8.3. We find it very jarring to the search experience.

I heard rumors that Interwoven is working on a patch to fix the multiple version problem and the library problem for the document ID in Express. In the meantime we will continue testing.

It looks like Tom Baldwin and Lisa Kellar Gianakos are hitching their cart to Recommind as they are kicking off the knowledge management program at Reed Smith: Reed Smith Builds Knowledge Management Solution on Recommind Technology.

“Reed Smith’s knowledge management platform needs to accommodate our vast network of lawyers around the globe. We evaluated several solutions and quickly realized that the other products do not provide the usability, relevance and structure needed to effectively access the vast amount of knowledge we generate,” said Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer, Reed Smith. “Our new knowledge management solution, built on the MindServer platform, brings the right content – in context – to the people who need it, allowing us to focus on what we do best: giving our clients the best service available. Additionally, using Recommind’s unique Matters and Expertise locator, Reed Smith’s lawyers and staff now have a system that automatically leverages our broad knowledge base of experience across the entire firm by allowing us to instantly find the most experienced lawyer for any type of situation imaginable. With the rapid pace of our firm’s growth, giving our lawyers across the globe an understanding of everyone’s experience was paramount in our decision to purchase the MindServer platform.”

An article in this week’s The Economist discusses the endowment effect: It’s Mine I tell You. The endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion):

“is a hypothesis that people value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established. In other words, people place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they do not. In one experiment, people demanded a higher price for a coffee mug that had been given to them but put a lower price on one they did not yet own.”

I look at this behavior as to its impact on knowledge management. One of the many challenges in knowledge management is getting people to contribute. You need to build a cultural and enable the tools to get people sharing what they know. There are obvious technology challenges to this sharing. But the soft side of encouraging the sharing has been the bigger problem.

The endowment effect now seems fairly obvious to me. People are less likely to share because they have a sense of ownership over the knowledge. Inside the law firm, this knowledge is usually acquired through the assets of the firm. The attorney probably started with some existing agreement from the document management system, used their secretary and junior attorneys to help craft the knowledge and attended seminars on the firm’s dime.

The endowment effect seems to explain why people are less likely to share. One of my approaches to knowledge management is to look for ways to capture the knowledge of the attorney in a way that is more useful to the individual attorney. That the knowledge is being shared is just a by-product. I have seen this approach labeled personal knowledge management and knowledge management 2.0. The most important consumer of an individual’s knowledge assets is that individual.

A blog is a classic example. Especially inside the law firm, the blog is a great tool to “catch the butterflies” of knowledge as they pass through your day. It is a quick and easy way to capture interesting articles, thoughts and ideas that may otherwise end up in a stack or file folder. With the blog you can categorize your butterflies and search for them in a way that makes sense to the individual. That others inside the enterprise can find them is merely a by-product. It is an important by-product for knowledge management. But the focus of the tool is on the individual, not the firm.

There is a new legal blog aggregator: LexMonitor.com. It was set up by LexBlog, the purveyor of legal blogs. As they describe LexMontor:

LexMonitor is a free daily review of law blogs and journals highlighting prominent legal discussion and the lawyers and other professionals participating in this conversation.

Pulling from nearly 2,000 sources and 5,000 professional authors, LexMonitor will shine a light on the ongoing conversation among thought leaders in the law for the benefit of the legal profession and the public at large.

The great aspect of this site is it’s power as a research tool. I ran a search for “Massachusetts Easements” and up come two blog posts on the topic. One was my post: You Can Construct a Sewer Line In Your Private Right of Way. I was testing to see if it would pull up a post from Friday.

This a great tool from Kevin O’Keefe of Real Lawyers Have Blogs and his team.

Constructing a sewer line under a preexisting easement which allows for ingress and egress is permissible under Massachusetts General Laws c. 187, § 5.

Massachusetts General Laws c. 187, § 5 provides that the owner of property abutting a private way who has existing rights of ingress and egress upon such way “shall have the right by implication to place, install or construct in, on, along, under and upon said private way or other private way pipes, conduits, manholes and other appurtenances necessary for the transmission of . . . sewer service, provided such facilities do not unreasonable obstruct said private way or other private ways, and provided that such use . . . does not interfere with . . . the existing use by others of such way.”

A driveway easement has been ruled to be a “private way” for purposes of this statute. See Barlow v. Chongris & Sons, Inc. 38 Mass.App.Ct. 297 (1995)

This right applies retroactively to easements granted before the statute was enacted in 1973. See Nantucket Conservation Foundation, Inc. v. Russell Management, Inc. 402 N.E.2d 501 (Mass 1980). The sewer service need not be installed by a public utility service; the private owner may install the necessary pipes and conduits himself. See Robinson v. Bd. Of Health of Chatham, 791 N.E.2d 350 (Mass. App. 2003). This ability to install utilities under a right of way is intended to “reflect the importance of utilities to modern society.” Id. at 354. Thus, § 5, supported by this policy consideration and Massachusetts case law, allows an owner with a right of way to construct a sewer line under the right of way.

Thanks to Lorretta Waitr for her research.

Disclaimers

I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster. The presentation was a retake of the presentation he gave at the Enterprise Search Summit.

Oz has done some great work on finding documents. So I was enthusiastic to see his take on finding people.

My Notes:

The goal of CRM has been to help you find someone and to deliver information about that someone to help you decide if that someone is the “one.” We need to make it easy to find people, whether internal or external, and see our shared experience with this person.

Oz set forth Amazon.com, with all of the related content related to the product. With Facebook, he pointed out the flow of information from Facebook.

There are three keys around people: who, why and what. Who are the People and Contacts. The Why is the client, matter or project. The What are emails and documents. It also important to coordinate those with when and where.

The goal is to make the information findable in a Google-like manner. That is one simple search box that integrates all systems. It also important to filter the results like you do in Amazon or Clusty (powered by Vivisimo).

Oz moved onto a presentation of the contacts module of his AnswerBase system. AnswerBase is powered by Recommind. The tool uses a relationship analysis tool from Contact Networks (in a proof of concept). This tool looks at the email traffic between internal and external people to show the strength of relationship. They also add info from the CRM system, HR databases, document management system, billing system, matter management system and marketing systems.

They had a privacy issue related to harvesting email. They limited it to emails that were put into their email filing system. This allows you to expose the email and alleviated privacy concerns.

Oz moved onto finding contacts in context. This involved some entity extraction. They use West KM to find courts, judges and parties mentioned in the document. (This is very litigation focused.)

Oz moved on to finding internal expertise. They mash together information from the HR system, the documents the attorney has drafted, the information on the attorney’s matters and the attorney’s time entries.

For those of you using RSS feeds, you have grown used to seeing the orange icon appear whenever you are on a site with a feed. Now there is a universal edit icon if you are on a page that is publicly editable. (If you use the Firefox brower).

“The Universal Editing Button (UEB) will allow a web surfer to more quickly recognize when a site may be edited. It will be a convenience to web surfers who are already inclined to contribute, and an invitation to those who have yet to discover the thrill of building a common resource. As this kind of public editing becomes more commonplace, the button may become regarded as a badge of honor. It may serve as an incentive to encourage companies and site developers to add publicly-editable components to their sites, in order to have the UEB displayed for their sites.

In these ways, we hope that this button catalyzes the acceleration of the editable web, and helps accelerate society’s trend toward building valued common resources.”

I just downloaded the Firefox extension and it seems to work great. Now I am off to edit.

Thanks to Lily Hill of Digital Advocate for pointing this out (via Twitter: @lilyhill) from Marshall Kilpatrick of Read Write Web: Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button.

In yesterday’s post, LinkedIn is Worth $1 Billion, I had a clear mathematical error in computing Bain Capital’s interest in LinkedIn.

In the meanwhile, I stumbled across 100+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn and Stephen Smith‘s LinkedIn and Productivity.

Perhaps those sites will give you more value than my math.

The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly has launched a blog: The Docket.

“Breaking stories and noteworthy information from the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly newsroom. If it impacts Massachusetts lawyers, we’ll be blogging about it here.”

Disclaimers