Doug Cornelius .com

Online social and business networking sites are a booming business. Tap into the success of these powerful tools by using them to strengthen your business and personal connections, share your expertise, and enhance your marketing and recruiting efforts.

This is the lead in for the article I wrote, Online Networking for Lawyers (pdf.), for the January 2008 issue of Trial Magazine, themed Law Firm 2.0.

The article is reprinted with permission of TRIAL (January 2009).
Copyright American Association for Justice, formerly Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA®).

Cross-posted from DougCornelius.com: Online Networking For Lawyers

Can he live up to the expectations?

This photo is from his senatorial website: http://obama.senate.gov/photo/001122.html

Just about everyone I talk to expects 2009 to be a difficult year for the economy as the job cuts and corporate failures of the last quarter really come into effect. Law firms with their thin capitalization and thick layer of fixed costs are bracing for a difficult year. I keep hearing “Flat is the new Up.”

Where does knowledge management fit in this climate for law firms?

Two articles address this topic in the January issue of KIM Legal magazine. Karen Battersby in: More Than Just An Overhead and Toby Brown of Fulbright and Jaworski in: Doom and Gloom, or Time to Prosper? both look ahead to the challenges.

• The efficiency gains from KM should be welcomed when clients are more likely to challenge every item on the bill.
• With layoffs (whether formal or performance-based) it is important to transfer the knowledge from individual lawyers to teams of lawyers.
• KM can allow senior lawyers to delegate more to junior lawyers, allowing the senior lawyers to focus on client relationships.
• Use KM to increase the level of client service.
• With extra capacity is some areas, it is a great time for law firms to use that capacity on knowledge management activities.  
• Focus on expanding the use of existing systems instead of going out and purchasing something new.

You can read more from Toby at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

LexisNexis has put out Lexis Web Search in beta release: http://www.lexisweb.com.

The Lexis Web product includes important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff. You can trust that all content has met LexisNexis criteria for being authoritative and accurate.

I see that my Real Estate Space blog is included in the index. I also saw JD Supra, Connie Crosby, Slaw and Goodwin Procter in the search results. I assume they have included most law firm websites. They even included Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

I could not find a list of the included sites.(KM Space is not one of the included sites.)

At first I thought Lexis had merely wrapped a frame around a Google Custom Site Search, like I did when I put together the KM Sites Search. But I saw some great tools to help you deal with the search results:

• Navigation based on Lexis Search by Topic or Headnote legal classification system
• Navigation based on Lexis LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology
• Navigation based on legal citations
• Recommended list of sources to search in LexisNexis

Those are the kinds of things I saw in great enterprise search tools like Vivisimo. Maybe this is a by-product of the partnership among Vivisimo and Lexis for Interwoven’s Universal Search.

It is a great free product from Lexis. (It is odd to put “Lexis” and “free” in the same sentence.) There are links to premium lexis content and a Google adwords panel. Perhaps that will be enough to support the creation and maintenance of Lexis Web Search.

Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog and Leslie Street of Due Process: The Georgetown Law Library Blog pointing out this new service: Lexis Offers (in Beta) Legal-Specific Search Engine for the Web.

One question that most people encounter online is where to draw the line between personal and professional. Do you keep your “friends” in Facebook and your “professional connections” in LinkedIn?

Before you start thinking how to corral information online think about how these people are grouped in real life. Are some of your co-workers your friends? Are there interesting pieces of your personal life that you would want to share with your professional contacts? (The answers should be yes if not, you need a more interesting personal life or a different job.)

Alin Wagner-Lahmy has nice article on this at the Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell: CES Day 5: The Personal and the Professional.

Sharing professional and social info with one’s professional and social connections gives a better way to broadcast your message to many people, and strengthen your online presence and relationships, and it also gives a more holistic view of a person and allows a much more interesting and fun way to communicate with your friends, colleagues, etc – a connection between two or more people is much more stronger when they share a personal experience, interest or emotion.

Anything you put online is potentially discoverable by anyone from any aspect of your life. If you are broadcasting information think about the channel of your communication. Think about the audience in the different social internet sites. You will inevitably have very different groups of information in those sites.

The same holds true for knowledge management. You want to put the information that is most interesting and relevant to a particular group in a place where that group can see it. You filter the content and organize the content depending on the expected audience.

. . . IF, you are a blogger.

Bob Ambrogi has more information on how bloggers can get a complimentary pass, special accomodations and a free breakfast at BobAmbrogi’s LawSites.

As things are winding down here at KM Space, I thought I would offer up a look back at 2008.

Below are the top ten blog posts viewed over the past year. I pulled up the top content list from Google Analytics. I am not sure these are the best posts or the most interesting posts. But they are the most visited.

1. Sharepoint Wiki Disaster. A post highlighting two of the fatal flaws of Sharepoint’s wikis.

2. Wikis in Sharepoint. Some images of Goodwin’s Sharepoint wikis, including one of the (few) great features.

3. About this Blog and Doug Cornelius. This is a lesson to you other bloggers. Your readers want to know who you are and more about you.

4. Maps on Sharepoint. I never did get around to setting up maps on Goodwin’s Sharepoint intranet.

5. Facebook at Law Firms: Cannot be Banned. An old post that first got me interested in Facebook and how law firms could use Facebook.

6. Making Wikis Work – Success Factors. I point out some of the great uses we found for wikis at Goodwin Procter.

7. Tacit Versus Explicit Knowledge. I point out that writing something down is not enough.

8. Wikis at The Rosen  Law Firm. A great success story on the adoption of a wiki by a law firm.

9. Lawyers, Law Students and Facebook. A study of the numerous Facebook groups for law firms.

10. Blogger and My Blackberry. It just goes to show that you can generate interesting content when you are trapped in a delayed airplane.

Steve Matthews of Stem Legal has announced the winners of the Canadian Law Blog Awards for 2008.

Congratulations to the winners!

For the second year in a row that includes me. Once again, Steve bestowed a Friend of the North Award, as a U.S. blogger that looks north of the border to network and exchange ideas. I am honored to share this award with Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM (newly re-launched at www.aboveandbeyondkm.com).

I was happy to see Jordan Furlong’s Law21 as the winner of best Canadian Law Blog. He has wonderful insight into the practice and business of law.

It was tough to beat out SLAW with its all star line-up of contributors, including Jordan. They did not go home empty-handed. SLAW grabbed the CLawBie Legal Culture Award and Best Legal Technology Award.

The delightful Connie Crosby picked up the Non-legal Audience Award CLawBie for her Connie Crosby blog and micro-blogging on Twitter.

Those also happened to be my three nominees for CLawbies.

Back in early October a group of New York law firm knowledge management leaders and a group of Toronto law firm knowledge management leaders gathered to discuss current issues in knowledge management. One of our topics was: Does Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?

You can read some more notes on the gathering:

• NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston by Jack Vinson
• Culture and Technology by Mary Abraham
• Does Enterprise 2.0 = 2 Knowledge Management 2.0? by Ron Friedmann

One exercise was to have half of the attendees compile a list of words  and concepts related to knowledge management while the other half compiled a list of words and concepts related to Enterprise 2.0. I decided to reproduce the lists. Take what you will from the lists and the intersection of the lists.

Knowledge Management:
• Adult learning
• Best practice identification
• Best practices
• Blog searching
• Business activity monitoring/alerting
• Business intelligence – generation; dissemination
• Business processes for collecting, storing and retrieving information about people, key events and work product
• Capturing hidden information
• Capturing, organizing and leveraging institutional knowledge
• Client base
• Client stickiness
• Codify
• Collaboration
• Collaborative work
• Collective expertise and experience
• Collective knowledge
• Content – management, presentation, search, structure
• Creation of precedents so everyone has a starting point to work with
• Cultural acceptance of the need to store and collaborate and providing incentives to share
• Deal/matter tracking
• Decision management
• Delivering more value to clients
• Delivering right information to right person at right time
• Discipline that makes wise use of intellectual and business resources
• E-mail folders and inquiries
• Enterprise search engines
• Experience
• Experience management
• Expertise
• Expertise location
• Expertise location (internal and external)
• Findability
• Gathering, indexing and sharing information for the purpose of furthering the organization’s strategic business goals
• Harnessing the collective intelligence of the organization
• Having actionable information at your fingertips
• Improving the way people work; marking them work smarter
• Information flow
• Information management
• Innovation
• Integrating business processes
• Integration
• Knowledge base – searchable, sortable
• Leverage
• Leveraging corporate memory
• Lotus Notes
• Making information useful/useable
• Matter databases
• Matter info/management
• More than precedents
• Multi-disciplinary
• Multi-faceted
• Networking
• Not valued enough
• Organized information flow
• Organized retrieval
• Organizing work product to prevent reinvention of wheel
• People / processes / technology
• Personalized generally
• Portals
• Practice smarter
• Process of transforming: data > information > knowledge > wisdom
• Promoting and supporting collaboration and efficiency
• Right place – right time
• Sharing knowledge to further the aims of the enterprise
• Skills
• Social networking – knowing who has interests and expertise in your company and finding it quickly
• Standards
• Storing the collective wisdom of the organization
• Structured
• Synthesize
• Systematized
• Tacit information
• Thinking in public
• Using knowledge to find solutions for client problems
• Using social media tools and storytelling to enhance collaboration and exchange information
• Using social media tools and storytelling to permit in-the-flow exchange of information in context
• Using technology to improve process
• Value-added information
• We know more than me
• Who worked on what and what did they do
• Wikis/blogs
• Wind milling existing processes to collect and deploy knowledge
• Working smarter

Enterprise 2.0:
• Accessible
• An enterprise where everyone knows what everyone knows, and who they know and what they have done
• Collaboration
• Comprehensive management
• Confusing label
• Connectivity
• Content over format
• Contributing not just extracting
• Dynamic financial data
• Enabling end users to use computing more easily and effectively to manage and analyze information and to collaborate
• Enterprise search
• Framework for sharing
• Giving up control
• Globalization
• Holistic approach to an organization’s organization
• I never heard anyone say Enterprise 1.0
• Integrated organizational function
• Jargon
• Knowledge = KM, Marketing/Business Intelligence, Financial; mash-up
• Knowledge sharing
• Learn
• Leveraging Web 2.0 Technology
• Listening to the customer/client
• Manage
• “Merger” of technology with commerce and business making it more interactive and collaborative and participatory for the transaction; an “active” partnership
• Misunderstood
• Overwork
• Peers
• Personalization
• Profile knowledge
• Profitability
• Ramped-up customer service
• RSS
• Social networks
• Tag knowledge
• Technology enabling collaboration
• The successor to Enterprise 1.0?
• Value
• Virtual organization
• Web stuff plus something
• Where enterprise knowledge (+ not individual knowledge) rules
• Works across systems in organized way

I have update my KM Sites search tool.

The search below is built from a custom Google Search

It searches the following sites:

• 3 Geeks and a Law Blog
• Aa..ha![Thinking Inside The Blog]
• Above and Beyond KM by Mary Abraham
• AcidLabs by Stephen Collins
• All of Us are Smarter Than Any of Us by Chris Collison
• APQC’s KM Edge
• Andrew McAfee
• Anecdote
• Association of Knowledgework
• Babson Knowledge
• Boston KM Forum
• Boxes and Arrows
• BRINT
• Caselines by David Hobbie
• ChiefTech by James Dellow
• Cindy Gordon
• CIO’s Knowledge Management section
• Cognitive Edge
• Collaborative Thinking
• Column Two
• A Compound of Alchymie
• Connie Crosby
• Creative Chaos: Dina Mehta’s blog
• Dr. Dan’s Daily Dose
• Elsua
• Engineers Without Fears by Matt Moore
• Enlightened Tradition by Mark Gould
• Excited Utterances
• Green Chameleon
• Gurteen Knowledge
• How to Save the World
• Innotecture by Matt Moore
• InsideKnowledge Magazine
• KM.gov
• KM Space
• KM World
• The KNOW Network
• Knowledge and the Cardinal by Andrew Trickett
• Knowledge Connections by James Mullan
• Knowing Knowledge
• KnowledgeBoard
• Knowledge Jolt with Jack Vinson
• Knowledgeline by Tom Baldwin
• The Knowledge Management Advantage
• Knowledge-at-work
• LawyerKM
• Leveraging Organizational Knowledge by Peter-Anthony Glick
• Mathemagenic: Learning and KM Insights by Lilia Efimova
• Networks,Complexity and Relatednessby Patti Anklam
• Not Otherwise Categorized by Seth Earley
• Next Big Thing by Tom Davenport
• Portals and KM by Bill Ives
• Reflexions
• Stan Garfield’s Weekly Knowledge Management Blog
• Strategic Legal Technology by Ron Friedmann
• Strategic Librarian by Nina Platt
• Talking Knowledge Management
• Trends in the Living Networks by Ross Dawson

Some of these sites are not active any more, but still offer a great repository of thoughts on knowledge management.

Let me know of any other sites that should be on the list and included in the search.