Doug Cornelius .com

The last item on the agenda for the roundtable was for each person to quickly identify their top knowledge management priority for the coming year.

The most mentioned priorities were:

• Intranet/portal redesign or implementation (Many are moving to Sharepoint 2007)
• Capturing matter information and matter profiling
• Enterprise search
• Auto-categorization/metadata extraction
• Collaborative tools like wikis and blogs

The third session was a roundtable on What’s Hot and What’s Tough in knowledge management. We asked the participants to submit their topic by adding into a wiki we set up for the event. We ended up with 58 entries, with over 80% of the attendees submitting an item. Some participants submitted more than one. We grouped the submissions into a few common themes.

What is Knowledge Management?

What should our elevator pitch be for what knowledge management is in a law firm? How do you get lawyers to pay attention? This group had dozens of different titles and different responsibilities. Is that evidence that law firms are still grasping with how to incorporate knowledge management.

• Its about expertise and experience.
• “Efficiency and quality”

Client-Facing Knowledge Management

Clients are asking for this but do not follow-up. The group seemed to think this subject is showing up in RFPs because consultants told them to put in RFPs.

Example of UK delivery: Lots of legal updates. The clients want dedicated libraries open for search.

Client demand is disparate. It seems like they are not sure what they want.

Outsourcing

One participant told the story of a meeting where clients were opposed to the idea of outsourcing. Some big American companies do not want work going outside US.

Firms have outsourced some administrative functions. Maybe there will be more outsourcing of “legal work”, EDD, or even KM (Gasp!!)

One participant gave the UK perspective on outsourcing. In the UK, law firms make extensive use of practice support lawyers. Magic Circle firms spend approximately 20 million pounds on PSL. Practical law is outsourcing forms and precedents for the Magic Circle firms. The Practical Law approach was that those practice support lawyers were doing same thing at each of their law firms. Some of the work was not really distinguishing one firm from another. Practical Law’s approach was to pool those resources together and outsource them.

Collaboration

This topic came with entries on both sides of hot and tough. Wikis, blogs, discussion forums and the like have been bandied about in one form for years. The tough group asked why does thins new technology make things any different? The hot side countered that we are a new paradigm where the computing power and software is being developed and deployed externally and is not coming into law firms. In the past, the applications were developed inside firms and then found their way into the consumer market. (Remember when word processing could only be done in the office?) These new tools are being developed externally with millions of users testing them and providing feedback. As a result we are getting tools that are much easier to use and to learn than in the past.

Expertise location

This topic came down on both sides as being hot and tough. One aspect making it tough was the ownership of the project: marketing or knowledge management. The two groups are looking for different levels. Marketing is generally looking broader. Knowledge management is looking for more granular and precise expertise. Several participant pointed to the use of time entries as treasure trove of information for an expertise search.

Post Action Reviews

Where do you get the human input? Technology will only be able to go so far in extracting the important information from the matters we work on. Many participants thought that gathering more information about matters is one of the best knowledge management efforts.

Matter opening information is lacking in information. If you require too much information at matter opening then attorneys are less likely to open matters.

There was a broad consensus that you need to hire people to extract the information. You cannot expect the attorneys to be doing all of that extraction and work.

How is Knowledge Management Morphing?

Knowledge management, business intelligence, marketing, client development and other functions are continuing to bleed into each other making some indistinguishable from another. Do they need to be separate? Should the administrative groups remove the balkanization and work more collaboratively? Do we need knowledge management as a separate discipline and as a separate group inside a law firm? This goes back to first topic What is knowledge management at your law firm.

We started this session at the roundtable by talking about some of the factors of email that are useful to knowledge management.

Some elements of an email that are relevant to knowledge management are:

• The parties – showing the flow of communication
• Body of the message – useful information may be in the body of the email or the attachments
• Classification of the email – where the email gets filed adds some information around the email

Some types of knowledge management solutions and other business process improvements that can come from email:

• Finding precedents – often useful content exists solely in an email. Being able to search emails would increase the knowledge base of the firm
• Expertise location – The flow if information in email can be used to identify subject matter experts
• Client development – Lots of information about contacts and the relationship to those contacts does not make its way into the CRM system. Tapping into the email flow could expand the collection of information on the firm’s contacts

Then the meat of the discussion came when we moved on to the challenges of making email public, which is necessary to accomplish the goals and processes above.

The first issue is the glut of email. What has to be filed? What should be filed? What should be thrown away? One firm admitted that they made their users file every sent email into public matter folder or private folder. The audience joke was whether this was his idea or his predecessor’s idea. There is also the issue of how to deal with administrative emails. Half of most law firms employees are not practicing attorneys.

There was a fair amount of discussion around privacy concerns. Of course, ten years ago before the proliferation of email, people filed hard copies of letters into paper folders that anyone could pull from records. One conclusion was that people need to rethink email. Not every email is relevant to the matter and irrelevant ones can be thrown out. The biggest point was do not write it down if you do not want people to see it. By putting it into email it becomes findable.

In dealing with the records issue of email the one participant theorized that law firms not been subject to enough litigation and have to deal with litigation holds and producing their content. Our client have been sued enough and subject to enough litigation holds that they see the need for a comprehensive program for managing email.

The meeting then moved onto the importance of not just the information in the email but the relationship evidenced by the email. Do you know someone and what do you know about the person? By emailing the person, there is an indication that you know the person. The more you email that person, or they email you, a stronger relationship is evidenced.

Software companies have recognized this value and starting to exploit this. One example is Contact Networks which passively collects the flow of communication between people, the number of emails and frequency of emails to imply the strength of relationship. It then goes on to map the email address to specific contact information. I saw a similar demonstration of Small Blue at the Boston KM Forum.

Clearly email and managing email is something our knowledge management efforts need to address. But it will not be easy because it will be a big cultural and workflow process change.

The first session at the roundtable was about trying to reconcile knowledge management and e-discovery. Is there interplay between the two?

There is certainly a technology tools theme. Both are trying to deal with big volumes of information. However, with E-discovery it is mandatory; with knowledge management it is discretionary.

With EDD, you’re willing to cull down to smaller and smaller sets of documents. With KM, you want the one document or a very small set of documents.

The money is in EDD (and more risk). As a result there seems to be more innovation in EDD. Auto-classification, clustering etc. coming from EDD.

Another theme the panel discussed was business process. Both need the development of business processes of people with skill sets. They need to educate lawyers as to process, issues and benefits. Both have the need of project management. EDD can be revenue generating but KM is rarely revenue generating (directly). One participant pointed out that for EDD he would probably hire a manager from Toyota than a lawyer to run Electronic discovery. The needs of project management, quality assurance and quality control exceed the needs of legal analysis.

One benefit combining of combining EDD and KM is the revenue generation from EDD. The crowd railed against this as covering up real issue. You are just trying to sneak KM in and hide under the EDD budget.

Another common theme was the emphasis on metadata. Both EDD and KM about adding metadata around documents and putting documents and information into context. With EDD, you have a defined domain of interest and a defined social network of participation. With KM, you do not have a defined decision often anticipating demand and requests for information.

I have to admit that I came into the session pooh-poohing e-discovery. After the discussion I came away with the understanding of common themes and ideas. I am not sure if I am going to act on it.

I attended an informal gathering of thought leaders on law firm knowledge management and the heads of knowledge management at large law firms. There were four discussion blocks:

• E-Discovery and Knowledge Management
• Email and Knowledge Management
• What’s Hot and What’s Tough in Knowledge Management
• Top Projects in Knowledge Management

I am not revealing the names of the attendees (except mine, I guess) or the firms of the attendees or even the place or time of the meeting. The group feels the anonymity of the participants allow for a very frank and open discussion that we could not otherwise have. My notes on the sessions will be somewhat cryptic and vague in order to maintain the goals of the gathering.

Here are my posts from LegalTech:

• Legal Technology Best Practices
• Creating Efficiency and Productivity in Law Firms
• Technology Integration – The New Face of Law Firms
• Law Technology News Awards Dinner
• ClosingBinders.com
• Practice Management

Although Monica Bay encouraged blogging from LegalTech, the facilities were lacking. The WiFi was spotty and was not free. There were very few power outlets in the rooms. I managed to fire off a few live blog posts but most were re-typing notes.

Other bloggings from LegalTech:

• Legal Blog Watch – Has many summaries
• WestBlog.net – Thomson West was live blogging Legal Tech
• Ross Ipsa Loquitur by Ross Kodner
  - JimEidelman at LegalTech
  - Law Technology News Award Winners
  - My Favorite LegalTech Giveaways
  - Microsoft and the Next Big Thing
• Legal Sanity by Arnie Herz
• EDD Blog Online
• Law Department Management by Rees Morrison
  - Google at LegalTech
• On the Mark by Mark Reichenbach
  - Day One
  - Day Two (He also found it strange that the bathrooms were sponsored.)
• Ediscovery Info
  - Googling Your Document Review
  - Keynotes
• Martindale-Hubble Blog
  - Straight from the Floor
  - Only 10% of LTNY Participants Have Their Own Blog (ONLY?!?! – I think that is a staggeringly high number)

I ran into the anonymous LawyerKM. But I have not seen any posts on LegalTech come up from him (or her).

I also ran into LawTech Guru, Jeff Beard, while he was talking with Rob Saccone of xmLaw. I have not seen any posts pop up from him.

Overall, I found LegalTech to be crowded and loud. I was always looking for a place to sit and chat with people bu there was nowhere to be found. The air quality was horrible. Sure it was warm outside for New York in January, but the conference rooms all felt like saunas. Vendors were tucked into every nook and cranny and hallway. It seems like LegalTech has outgrown this space.

George Rudoy, Director of Global Practice Technology and Information Services at Shearman and Sterling LLP
Michelle Mahoney, Director Applied Legal Technology at Mallesons Stephen Jaques
Kelly Inglese, Director Litigation Support Services at McCarthy Tétrault LLP

What is Practice Management?

George’s vision of practice management is the integration of knowledge management, library services, future services, conflicts and records management into practice management.

Michelle presented the Australian view of practice management. She pointed out that the Australian, New Zealand and South African markets are incredibly competitive. She is evaluated on profitability; not revenue generation. She points out that lawyers in a leadership position need to accept that law firms are a business and need to be run like a business. [I think part of the growth of practice management comes from lawyers wanting to offload the business side of law so they can focus more on the practice of law.]

George is struggling with where knowledge management sits in a law firm structure. He likes the idea of bundling it into practice management. Then it is better integrated as a full suite of services available to practicing attorneys and groups of attorneys.

The concept is interesting. Largely, should the firm be divided between practice and practice support? Perhaps practice area managers should be equipped with being a point of contact being able to create solutions across administrative departments and groups. Of course, that requires practice area managers with a long skill set: being comfortable with marketing, technology, finance, knowledge management, records and conflicts. Effectively, practice area managers could be a one-stop for the attorneys to get solutions to help their practice.

George’s paradigm in moving from increased coordination, to improved productivity and efficiency, to strengthen competitive advantage, to enhanced customer value, to growing business profitability. It is not the technology, it is the solution around the technology that delivers value.

It was great to run into old friends and former colleagues Mark Mansoor and Bernie Podurgiel of ClosingBinders.com at LegalTech. Both Bernie and Mark were attorneys at Goodwin Procter they started ClosingBinders.com. Since then, they have managed to add 30%+ of the AmLaw 100 firms as clients. ClosingBinders.com convert thick, bulky paper closing binders into slick, snazzy CD-Roms.

We also integrate their electronic closing binders into our matter database system and client database system. That gives us quick and easy access to the binders for a matter or for a client. This is a big improvement to trying pull my bulky closing binder off the shelf (or trying to remember where I left the binder).

This year was ClosingBinder.com’s first time having a booth at LegalTech. Surprisingly, another Goodwin Procter alumnus, Rob Saccone, has his booth for xmLaw set up two booths away from ClosingBinders.com

I spent Tuesday night at the Law Technology News Awards Dinner. Peter Lane, our Chief Information Officer, picked up an award for Most Innovative Use of Technology by a Law Firm for our iStaff system.

iStaff is a system designed by our practice managers and attorneys staffing managers to give them information needed for assigning new projects as they come into the firm. The iStaff web interface pulls information from the time and billing system, vacation calendars, current assignments and the attorneys expertise. This allows the staffing managers to better assign work to best attorney based on availability, expertise and experience.

These were the other law firm winners:

IT Director of the Year
John Sroka – Duane Morris

Champion of Technology
George Rudoy – Shearman & Sterling

Most Innovative use of Technology by an In-house Legal Department
Gene Stavrou – Kraft Foods

Most Innovative use of Technology during a Trial
Ropes & Gray Graphics and Litigation Technology Support team

Most Innovative use of Technology for a Pro Bono Project
Wills for Heroes Foundation

I did not keep track of the vendor awards, except that Interwoven won the Document Management System award for Worksite. In talking with Keith Lipman from Interwoven, he promised to combine the various names for the product into Worksite. [I am tired of also seeing Desksite and Mailsite program names, in addition to Worksite. With all those names we still call it iManage.]

Dinner was great. Peter, Angel and I had a great time at dinner and at the photo session.

I have been a basher of Interwoven for years, ever since we deployed it (when it was called iManage) almost a decade ago. It has always been good at managing documents and retrieving your documents. It shortcomings was in finding other people’s documents. Especially when you were not sure if the document existed. Interwoven is taking a big step to curing that problem.

We are pretty far down the path of deploying version 8.3 of their Worksite product. The big change is the new Vivisimo Velocity search engine. So far it is giving us blazingly fast search results.

They have also delivered a new way to search: Express Search.

Interwoven is giving us “The Google” for documents. It is one simple box that combines several of the metadata fields into one cohesive fast search. It combines the full text search with the document name and other metadata fields to one unified fast search. The results come back fast and based on relevancy rather than a grid sorting on a field.

Did I mention fast?

I can run a simple search. Add other terms one at a time to narrow results and delete terms to back out the search. All with results coming back at the snap of my fingers.

Having the results come back based on relevancy is fantastic. Getting two hundred documents back based on the last edit date is not giving you a meaningful search result.

The Express Search is especially compelling when you compare it side by side with the traditional Interwoven search.

We are still running some testing and deciding on some global settings. But we hope to have it deployed by the end of the month.