LawyerKM

Is knowledge management about technology or people? Sometimes its about people using technology well. I don’t know exactly how much KM (or other business) efforts are compromised when key people are in remote locations, but I think that most would agree that it can be significant. [If you are aware of any please link to studies or statistics in the comments] “Out of sight, out of mind” can often turn into “Out of sight, out of knowledge.”

Google is taking a step to solve this problem with its “Collaboration with Marratech.” And by “collaboration with” we mean “acquisition of” Marratech’s software. Marratech, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is a maker of videoconferencing software. Google hopes that this effort will “enable from-the-desktop participation for Googlers in videoconference meetings wherever there’s an Internet connection.” Easy desktop videoconferencing isn’t so easy, unless of course, you use an Apple Mac with iChat. And you’re a lawyer, so chances are slim.

If Google does it right, this collaboration with Marratech will result in some slick videoconferencing web application [called "Google Conferences"?] and will integrate with all of their other wonderful (and cheap, if not free) applications. Maybe even the forthcoming Google Presentations a.k.a. “PowerPoint Killer.” And as Google CEO Eric Schmidt has no doubt learned from Steve Jobs by virtue of sitting on Apple, Inc.’s Board of Directors, integration of applications is what will really wow the users.

So even if you can’t get that ultra-experienced employee into the room to unload her high-value intellectual capital into the minds of some sponge-like knowledge workers for a session of tacit knowledge trading, at least you may soon be able to get her face on a computer monitor in real time. Maybe that will get people to drop their BlackBerry devices and pay attention.

Justia has done it again. In addition to the Federal District Court Dockets and Filings resource, Justia has added a tool to search the Federal Register and track changes to it. The Justia Regulation Tracker (in beta) allows you to search and track rules, proposed rules, and notices from all U.S. Government departments, agencies and commissions. Best of all, of course, turn your search into an RSS feed and the changes come to you when they are published. A great knowledge management tool that helps get the right information to the right people at the right time.

If you need to describe RSS to a bunch of lawyers, you need to watch this short video from commoncraft — or just have those lawyers watch it. It is non-technical and quite entertaining. As we’ve mentioned before, RSS is big and it will only get bigger. Law firms are deploying enterprise RSS, like NewsGator, and individual lawyers are using free readers, like Google Reader. No one has the time to visit all of their blogs and websites to search for the news and information that they need.

Knowledge Management

The Knowledge Leadership Forum 2007 is happening this week: Thursday and Friday, April 26-27, 2007 at Le Parker Meridien Hotel in New York City. The event is sponsored by Recommind and West km, two leaders in law firm KM software.

Here is a handy web tool that you can use when you need to direct someone to a particular part of a web page. It is called Citebite.

Here’s how it works: (1) Go to www.citebite.com. (2) Open a second web browser (or tab in Firefox)and navigate to the web page that has the content you want. (3) Copy and paste the URL of that second web page into the “Source URL” field at Citebite. (4) Copy and paste the content from the web page that you want to highlight into the “Quote” field at Citebite. (5) Click the “Make Citebite” button.

In about 20-30 seconds, Citebite will make a Citebite link (a special URL) and will provide a preview of the web page with the text highlighted in yellow. You can copy and paste the Citebite link in an email and send it off. When the recipient clicks on the link, it opens the web page and goes right to the highlighted text. Slick.

The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) published a new white paper (which is ironically neither white nor a paper) entitled “Knowledge Management – Refinement and Enlightenment.” From ILTA’s description: “Our last white paper on knowledge management (June 2006) focused on finding the knowledge available in firms and law departments. This time around, the undercurrent seems to have shifted toward the softer side of KM – categorization, vetting and taxonomy – allowing the technology to work more efficiently for us. The shift only leads us to believe that a majority of organizations have some flavor of KM in place, and they are now in the fine-tuning phase.”

Google announced that it will add “Presentations” to it’s Google Docs & Spreadsheets family. The launch is expected this summer. The announcement follows Google’s acquisition of Tonic Systems , of San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. Tonic Systems specializes in technology for presentation creation and document conversion. There were no specifics about the abilities of the presentation application other than referring to creating slides and real-time, web-based collaboration. It sounds like a shot across the bow to Microsoft’s PowerPoint, but we hope that its collaboration abilities will go beyond that.

We would like to see perhaps a combination of Google’s applications, like Google Talk, along with Presentations so that users can carry on a conversation while sharing slides (or maybe even sharing the host user’s screen for web demos ala WebEx?).

All of this in a tidy Google package may be too much to ask for, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed. We’ll also keep them crossed for the public launch of JotSpot, which we haven’t seen since Google acquired it sometime late last year.