The folks at Westblog.net did a video interview of me just prior to the start of my Wikis in Law Firms presentation at International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference. You can see it at the Westblog: Using Wikis in Law Firms,
or just watch it here below:
The recruiting manager has created a firm FaceBook site. The marketing director is encouraging all the lawyers to join LinkedIn. The firm’s general counsel is freaking out over the possible ethic violations and malpractice possibilities. The older lawyers simply aren’t sure what to do. The younger lawyers are wondering what all the hoopla is about. We explore social and business networking, the potential problems and rewards and what you can do about it.
Speaker: Jeffrey Brandt, Chief Information Officer and Chief Knowledge Officer at Crowell + Moring LLP
My Notes:
Jeff started off with definitions of social networking and a long list of web 2.0 sites.
He got focused on this areas because of overly exuberant people at his prior firm. Nobody talked to the risk management people to talk about the ethical and bar regulations that apply to lawyers.
Jeff is a big fan of LinkedIn (His profile: Jeffrey Brandt). He also uses Plaxo (although much less so), Twitter (but he is not sure what it is all about), and Facebook (but is seriously lacking friends).
Facebook and MySpace are for kids. Except that there are 100 million + user of Facebook and it is the fourth most trafficked site on the internet. All of them cannot be kids
LinkedIn is a fad. Of the Fortune 500 companies, 499 have director-level profiles in LinkedIn. Barack Obama used it to extend his campaign. In looking at LinkedIn, for many law firms, the number of profiles has doubled over the last year. If it is fad, it is a powerful one.
Second Life. Sun and Intel hold meetings in Second Life. Companies have set up storefonts in Second Life.
Less than 10% of people on the ILTA listserv have a formal or informal policy on social networks.
Jeff noticed that there were problems with some of the profile information for attorneys in LinkedIn. Marketing had pushed it to raise the personal profile of the attorney and to raise the profile of the firm. It also works as a “who knows who.” It is a great way to address alumni networking and classmate networking. It is a great information update tool.
Facebook has a lot of potential for recruiting. The recent college graduate crowd uses Facebook a lot.
Malpractice Nightmare?
You can inadvertently create an attorney-client relationship? Absolutely! LinkedIn Answers is particularly problematic. The big problem is that these web-based answers last forever. So there is a permanent record of the legal advice that you give. It is okay to say give me a call.
Social network profiles need to be in compliance with local bar rules and ethical requirements. Recommendations and specialties can be particularly problematic. Of course they must also be truthful.
The problem is that firms are not addressing the use of these sites. Blocking them is useless. Your employees will still access the sites outside of the workplace. If they say they work at the firm, the conduct of that person on the internet will get attributed to the company.
Law firm management need to wake up and pay attention to these issues. Social networks are here to stay and are to be avoided at the firm’s risk. Well established procedures and policies can help manage and reduce risk.
Enterprise Content Management combines hardware, software, infrastructure and process enabling an organization to store, manage and access information generated throughout the organization, without regard to its form or source. How do intranets, portals and SharePoint aid in these efforts? Learn strategies firms can use to enhance relevance and usability of these tools so attorneys and other timekeepers develop trust in the information produced, and how firms can use these tools to get the right information to the right people at the right time for better business decisions and more effective client service.
Speakers:
My Notes:
Enterprise content management is focused on the process of publishing information into a public space. It involves the creation, editing, publishing and updating of content inside the law firm. A huge part of knowledge management is about the collecting organizing and disseminating explicit knowledge. The technology is the piece in disseminating that explicit knowledge.
But why is enterprise content management becoming a hot topic? There are better front-end channels pushing information. People are expecting a better delivery of information.
One issue is self-publishing. You need to find a way to get lawyers to create and publish content.
Shy started off the session with interviews of several people related to the topics and issues of enterprise content management.
Catherine presented a case study with their use of SharePoint. Catherine defines ECM as collecting information, organizing information and publishing it in a way that makes sense to consumer of that information. ECM=Knowledge Management + Information management. The focus is on efficiency.
You want to reduce redundant data entry, end-user search time, and confusion is selecting different sources of information .
ECM is about software. But is also about knowing the workflow of your people, where the information is being stored and how people are using the information.
One key to success is how to get the attorneys to trust the system. Jim mapped out some key elements to developing trust in the system.
They rolled out practice specific pages for practice groups. They have gatekeepers for content being published into the Sharepoint intranet.
They have client centricity on the intranet. This largely done using Handshake webparts. They also have matter centricity, that is also largely done through Handshake webparts.
They are looking to industry focused pages. This would be focused around awareness and news feeds on the relevant topics.
The firm has rolled out a personalization of the intranet. They push out a selection of suggested sites, based on their practice, such as practice area sites and external sites. They pull relevant information out of subsites and push it to the person’s home page.
They are using the MySite as the firm directory. They have shut off the customization, but they are using webparts to pull information from other systems onto the MySite for the person.
They broke the navigation from the firm structure. They use a flat list of departments and practices rather than a hierarchical structure. Users found the hierarchical view too hard to navigate.
Next, Ellen spoke about her and her firm’s experience. She started with a view of the lawyer’s task starting with a client question and moving on to how a lawyer gathers the information the lawyer needs to answer the question. One key is trying to get internal and external information tied together. There is an incentive for lawyers to publish to the internal collection, which then gets pushed out to the external site. This is a particularly effective approach for marketing oriented lawyers.
My Take: My problem with the panelists’ approach is that I am focused more opening up the publishing process. I do not want anyone to have to to KM or IT to publish information on our intranet. These are just barriers to contribution. I have been advocating to open out intranet even more. Of course the key to this is being able to monitor the content as it is added and changes. Since our intranet is based on Sharepoint 2007, the blogs, wikis, lists and other collections have an alert feature associated with them.
I am trying to shift the firm from “ask for permission” to “ask for forgiveness.” At the same time, moving it from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture.” I do not think that enterprise content management fits into my approach of collecting my firm’s knowledge.
Join the G100 CIO Advisory Board as they provide a recap of the G100 CIO event held on Monday, August 25 in conjunction with ILTA ’08. The focus is “Web 2.0 – What It Means to Law Firms,” including a summary of what Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps shared with the group around the phenomenon of Web 2.0 in general.
Speakers:
My Notes:
G100 is a forum for the CIOs from the 100 biggest law firms in the world. This year, the topic was Web 2.0. Some of the things they heard were speakers from an Australian law firm, Microsoft and Google.
The panel started off with a definition of Web 2.0, then moved on to Enterprise 2.0. They wonder if there will really be an impact on corporate information systems.
One panelist noted that it changes their way of looking at information and whether it needs to be as structured as it currently is structured inside their firms.
They were surprised to find out that more of the content being added is coming form partners and not junior associates. (We have the same experience. We are getting much more contribution from partners than associates.)
Two big factors they noticed. One is that the content gets in very quickly. Second, you need very little IT control or input after the initial set up.
It is very cheap to fail with these tools. There is very little incremental cost for each additional wiki page.
The panel although impressed with web 2.0 are not sold on them. Most of panel was not ready to start adoption of wikis.
They had the same view on blogs. One panelist stated that they have a ban on external blogs. But just the same, they had one internal blog that is highly viewed.
The panel moved on to Google apps. They were very impressed with a presentation from Google on Google apps. They were very impressed with cloud computing and the ability to quickly push out updates to the programs. (I hate to rain on their parade, and Google does not use the term, but Google Docs is a wiki system.) They are intrigued with moving from an integrated desktop to a virtual desktop.
My view. I think the CIOs need to get out more often. They are missing the change that is coming.
At the ILTA conference, Lexis and Interwoven announced that they have teamed together to provide some integration. (This is the big announcement I mentioned earlier: Interwoven – Big Announcement at ILTA.)
Lexis Search Advantage is a new product from Lexis Nexis. It links to case law, statutes and regulations, with real time Shepard’s indicators for cited cases. It also works with transaction documents by creating a virtual table of contents, a search for reusable clauses and links to companies and people.
The key to Lexis Search Advantage is that in integrates into Interwoven Universal Search. Lexis is adding value to firm’s existing content and not creating a separate silo of information. This collapses searches of internal content, Lexis content and updating cases into one platform and one step. Internal content is combined with Lexis sources.
According to Doug Stansfield of Lexis, they partnered with Interwoven Universal Search because they thought it was the best enterprise search product in the marketplace for law firms.
In the search results, there is a “research preview” button. This brings up a HTML preview of the document with live links to the cases cited in the document and Shepard’s signals to the treatment of those cases. Clicking the Lexis content triggers the Lexis charges. The charges are based on your firm’s subscription model. You also have highlighting that shows the search terms in the document. The Shepard’s signals are updated when the document is opened and rendered. Not when the document is indexed.
Lexis also allows a search of web content to be another place that you search with Universal Search. I noticed the search they used also included content on JD Supra and some blogs. (Yet another reason lawyers should be blogging and posting documents to JD Supra.
For transactional documents, the document has a link to information on people and companies. If the document has IBM as a party, you have a live link to the Lexis Dossier on IBM. You can also pull up the SEC filings for public companies. The links are configurable, so you could link to Interaction information or other internal sources of information instead.
Search Advantage also offers some auto-profiling of documents. It can be matched to a firm’s taxonomy or a Lexis taxonomy.
There are three big advantages to the mashup:
Universal Search is already an impressive product. This integration makes it that much more powerful.
There is public demo of the product on Wednesday in Texas Ballroom 5.
Press Release: Interwoven and LexisNexis Team Up to Introduce Integrated Solution
I am not alone in live blogging from International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference.
David Hobbie of Caselines is broadcasting his notes:
LawyerKm is broadcasting his notes:
Mark Reichenbach of On the Mark
The official ILTA Conference Blog
Is anyone else blogging at the conference?
Wikipedia has over 2,000,000 articles created and edited by users. Can you have a wikipedia for the knowledge inside your law firm? Wikis provide an easy to use platform for capturing content and facilitating collaboration. This session will discuss some of the technical, cultural and procedural issues you need to address in setting up wikis for your law firm.
In the true wiki spirit, the panel has established a wiki in connection with the session. Feel free to logon to the wiki, explore and edit: http://iltawikisinlawfirms.pbwiki.com
The invite key is: ilta08
Speakers:
- Doug Cornelius, Knowledge Management Attorney at Goodwin Procter LLP
- Michael Mills, Director of Professional Services at Davis Polk & Wardwell
- Ayelette Robinson, Practice Resources Attorney at Morrison & Foerster LLP
My Notes:
Since I was one of the speakers, I did not take notes. But I did not have to. Everything the panel spoke about and more is on the wiki site we set up for the panel: http://iltawikisinlawfirms.pbwiki.com. Feel free to explore the wiki.
Thanks to PBwiki for giving us the wiki upgrade for the panel.
PBwiki is the world’s largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis. We host over 500,000 wikis, serve millions of users per month, and 96% of our business users would recommend PBwiki to a friend.
Leading companies from AT&T to Wal-Mart, including 1/3 of the Fortune 500, choose PBwiki to help them with knowledge management, collaboration, project management, and a host of other business processes and workflows.
Knowledge workers spend approximately a quarter of their time searching for information, but how successful are they at locating what they are looking for? Our panel members have had enterprise search engines implemented at their respective firms for over a year and discuss the changes they have encountered with enterprise search.
Speakers
My Notes:
Recommind at O’Melveny + Meyers LLP
Jeff was heavily influenced by the Long Tail (as explained in the The Long Tail by Chris Anderson). Their analysis of enterprise search tools was based, in part, by what was coming out of the consumer internet. The firm chose Recommind. Their search solution imputes lots of of information about a document based on the client/matter designation assigned to the documents. They pull information form the financial system, the matter tracking system, etc. and add it to the metadata for the document.
They started the Recommind proof of concept in November 2006, finished this June 2007 and launched it in September of 2007. They started with Recommind as a stand alone application. They used flickr as model for the the visual landing page. They also modeled the search training on searching for products on internet shopping sites. If you could shop online at Macy’s, you could use Recommind.
Their second stage of Recommind was integrating it into the intranet. For example, the people search uses the Recommind people search tool. You can filter the search results or used an advanced search to find very specific skills.
Autonomy for White + Case
Chad’s experience was similar to Jeff’s experience. they put together a very long list of features and comparison of four vendors. They picked autonomy. A big issue for them is that they have 38 office with many different language.
They did a quiet roll out of the product. Their IT systems are very decentralized. Each office had their own document managment system. It would take hours for an attorney to hook into all of the different offices and conduct the search across all 38 systems.
They have Autonomy index each of the systems and create a united search. They get blazing speed. (Especially compared to the searching each of the separate document management systems.)
Autonomy also has a desktop application to go along with the web-based search. This was really fast. It also can be incorporated into MS Word. As you type in a document it show you other relevant information in the firm’s resources.
They will also have a search for voicemail.
. . . .
Tagging
The panel thought the tagging features in the next versions of Universal Search and Recommind will be very useful.
Other thoughts:
UPDATE: slight revision to protect the innocent
A request frequently made of KM or IS professionals in law firms is to implement a way to efficiently track and report the experience of individual attorneys. Doing this can help both sell work and deliver work. However, experience management has proven surprisingly difficult. Just defining the type of work to be tracked can pose a stumbling block, as it can be tough to find the “just right” level of detail between the “too broad” and “too narrow.” This panel explores ways to manage law firm experience through case studies from firms who have made good progress. Each panelist will discuss the business challenge they faced, the tool they built or adapted to address it, the processes they deployed to ensure good tracking and reporting and the results realized.
Speakers:
My Notes:
Since I am speaking, my notes are sparse. It looks like David Hobbie of Caselines and LawyerKM are in the audience and hopefully taking notes they will share.
To start the project, a small knowledge audit is in order. You need to assess where the information lives and what information is missing. You also need to figure out who controls the information and who need the information. Then you also need to figure out how the information is being used and how people want to use the information.
Kate spent a fair amount of her time establishing a taxonomy and vocabulary to identify expertise. To pull this off, they were organizationally agnostic and separate from compensation analysis.
Stan focused on his experience establishing a platform for Foley & Lardner. There focus was initially on staffing. They wanted a better way to get associates staffed on matters. They wanted to avoid partners controlling a stable of associates, they wanted to improve associated development.
One problem was that the needed information was held in separate silos, often controlled by different groups in the firm.
They started with an off the shelf product called Maven PSA.
The end result looks very similar in substance and approach to Goodwin Procter’s iStaff application that I am speaking about after Stan.
One of the challenges of experience management is identifying expertise. With most systems that we have seen with self-rating expertise, experts tend to say they don’t know anything and those with the least skill tend to say that they are experts at everything.
Download the session materials.
UPDATE:
International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference presentation on how to start a knowledge management program.
Speakers:
My Notes:
This is the first session for me at the ILTA conference
Organization and Leadership
Who should lead a knowledge management initiative? There were professional service organizations that were doing KM long before law firms got on board. There is no right answer or wrong answer. It depends on the culture of the firm and the leadership of the firm. Inevitably, you are going to be stepping on someone’s toes. KM tends to stick its fingers in lots of different areas, both legal and administrative. That means you may be intruding into an existing area.
It may work having KM under the CIO/IT dept. (You can do KM with technology, but it just makes it harder.)
There is a generally a good synergy with the Library. They hold lots of substantive information and are used to finding and organizing substantive knowledge.
Most important is finding a champion. Who in the organization really understands KM and wants KM to succeed? It is easier to start off as part of an existing sphere of influence.
The Stealth Approach
Don’t label it as KM. Start small and create success, then build on these. It may be easier to get resources dedicated once you can show the value.
Identifying and Prioritizing the Need.
Start by making sure that KM is aligned with the firm’s business plan. If the firm is planning to expand, find ways for KM to add value in the expansion. As a firm gets bigger, you need better tools to find resources and expertise. Look for piles of documents and information on shared drives or disparate locations. Look for silos of information that could benefit the firm by being more open and accessible.
Cherylyn shared two stories from Dickstein Shapiro, they cataloged a hard copy collection of information and published it to the firm’s intranet. The second step was an early implementation of WestKM.
It also important to highlight that KM is not about purchasing a single technology program. There are technology tools that are useful for KM, but there is no single application that will solve all of the KM goals.
How do you pick the first KM project? Research first. Find out what other firms have done and how successful they have been. Then find the pain points inside your firm. It is better to find an existing pain point to create early value, instead of a high level, conceptual or expensive project. Look for existing activity that is KM, but does not have a KM label. Lawyers are always doing knowledge management, just not intentionally. (Let’s face it. Lawyers sell knowledge. They collect their own knowledge resources. Knowledge management is really about knowledge sharing.
Getting Management Buy-In
Be realistic when you start. Management sees KM=cost. You need to show value. It is hard to show ROI, but you can gather success stories to show value. Tangible examples can sway management. Pictures and real-life examples work best for showing the benefits.
Knowledge management is all about context. It is about substance, not technology. Lawyers deal better with other lawyers. It is better to appeal to the lawyers and get them to understand the need and the problems that need to get solved. If you are in KM, you need to talk with the lawyers.
Knowledge management needs to be institutionalized. We need to keep people from building silos. KM is about integrating information and making it accessible, wherever it may be.
© 2012 Doug Cornelius .com. All Rights Reserved.
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