LawyerKM

The 11th annual KMWorld & Intranets Conference and Exhibition will be held on November 6-8, 2007 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, in San Jose, California.  Here’s the program. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms

This just doesn’t get old – It’s funny because it’s true – it may be as true now as it was back in 2001.

By the way, the link to this article is done via Cite Bite, see our previous post about Cite Bite here.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms

Word on the Street: Ark Group/Managing Partner Magazine’s 3rd Annual KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN THE MODERN LAW FIRM conference has been scheduled to take place in Chicago, IL on October 24-25, 2007. 

You didn’t hear it from us.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms

From SirsiDynix is an upcoming free webinar about RSS for Libraries, featuring the the same person who brought you the Wiki webinar, Meredith Farkas, the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University.  She has a blog called Information Wants to Be Free and a book called Social Software in Libraries.  LawyerKM has no affiliation with SirsiDynix, we just think the free info is cool. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms

Can Digg help lawyers?

Digg is social networking / social bookmarking / collaboration website that displays content submitted by its users.  Once content (in the form of a news story, website, video, etc. — anything with a URL, really) is submitted, other users can “digg it” or “bury” it by clicking on the appropriate link. Digging content elevates it and when “a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes ‘popular’ and jumps to the homepage in its category.” (See, Digg.com/how). Basically, it’s a popularity contest for stuff on the web. The site started out with categories such as gaming, music, technology, and Apple — to appeal to the young techie crowd.  It has since expanded to include six main topics: technology, science, world & business, sports, entertainment, and gaming; and several sub-categories. 

What’s in it for me? In addition to the proud feeling of peer validation that comes when you see people digg stuff that you submitted (there is a digg counter that shows the number of diggs),

you can keep up with what is popular in categories of interest by clicking on links that show you the most popular content in the last day, week, month, or year (believe it or not, the announcement of Apple’s iPhone ranks only second in the last year – check out Digg to see number one).  This could be a real time-saver if you don’t have time to read all the good stuff that’s out there.  Let the power of the crowd work for you to vet the stories.
 

But, Can Lawyers Digg It? So how can these social bookmarking concepts help lawyers? In the microcosm of a law firm there is a lot of content — some good, some not so good.  On your document management system (DMS) alone, there are probably millions of documents.  Some of those (thousands?) may have made it to your collection of models, samples, forms, “best practices,” etc. — if you have such a collection.  If you’re lucky, then your firm has a work product retrieval system, like RealPractice, Lexis Total Search, or West km (and maybe an enterprise search system like Recommind).  So, you can find what you need, but is it a good piece of work product? 

Unless you have a small army of KM staffers, Practice Support Lawyers (PSLs), or attorneys with too much time on their hands, it’s unlikely that anyone will manually vet the firm’s work product to give it the thumbs up or down. 

RealPractice has employs a feature that approaches what Digg does, but it only allows a single tag that designates “best practices” documents.  There is no voting to elevate the popularity of the document — more like a monarchy than Digg-style democracy.  One issue that the RealPractice model raises is: Who determines whether a document is worthy of “best practice” status?  The author?  Practice group leaders?  Anyone?  

A Digg-style voting system would allow lawyers to passively tell other lawyers that certain documents are valuable. Would this pose the risk of hurt feelings (“Why doesn’t anyone like my model document?”) or worse yet, stuffing the ballot box, bribes, or campaigning to gain document popularity?  We KM people only wish lawyers would be so enthusiastic about participating in KM activities. 

The bigger challenge is to get lawyers to click on the Digg button.  One incentive is that doing so remembers the documents that you Digg.  The result is social and personal: You have cast your vote (helping others), and you get a handy list of documents that you have voted for — sort of a personal KM system — that you can reference later. 

Even better would be an “auto-Digg” feature; a system that elevates the popularity of documents based on the number of attorneys who access them, the amount of time it is open in a word processor, or the number of times it is copied. What about: who accesses the document?  Should a two votes be cast if a partner (or her secretary) opens or copies the document? 

Social tagging may have a place in law firms, but how much value will it really add?  Is developing a such a feature worth the effort?  And is it even necessary? 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms. 

This is a nice, free archived webinar that explains wikis.   Brought to you by the SirsiDynix Institute.  

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers and Law Firms

“Email overload” is so . . . last century. RSS was supposed to help with that, but it seems that RSS has a bit of an overload problem itself. Apparently, the “inundation of information” knows no bounds.

RSS power users have dozens of feeds and (literally) hundreds of posts to read each day. Just look at this Google Reader Blog post (with video) about how Robert Scoble, can go through 600 feeds in a flash. He demonstrates some tips on how to breeze through all of that RSS goodness and focus on the stuff that is important to him.

Others look to technology to vet the deluge of RSS data. One such company is AideRSS. According to their blog (which ironically does did not – at the time of original posting – have a prominent RSS subscribe button), it works this way:

AideRSS is an intelligent assistant, which continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you. We do the grunt work of collecting information on every post, allowing you to focus on your agenda and stay on top of the news stream.

That is interesting, but what does it mean? This “PostRank™” apparently is a scoring system that ranks articles based on “relevance and reaction” (is this a Digg-like component where users vote and thereby to elevate a story’s relevance?). In any event, a picture says a thousand words:

And moving pictures (with sounds) say even more. Here is the AideRSS screencast page.

Enter BlastFeed. Another company that apparently has the same frustration with RSS (and is doing something about it) is BlastFeed. In addition to essentially filtering RSS feeds, it allows delivery to an RSS reader, email, or IM. In contrast to AideRSS, BlastFeed does not appear to have an automated scoring system. Here, you define the keywords that activate the filter.

According to their about page, “BlastFeed lets you create “channels” of information. A channel describes: (a) what to search for, i.e. a set of keywords defining the topic you are interested in; (b) where to search for, i.e. in which RSS content sources these keywords will be detected; and (c) how to receive results, i.e. by email, on IM, or as a RSS feed.”

Oh, the possibilities for lawyers. I can hear it now: “I want a feed on Antitrust law, but only blog posts that mention Microsoft.” Or, “I like that Wall Street Journal Law Blog, but I don’t have time to read all the non-sense like associate salary news, can you review it and only send me the good stuff?” Etc., etc. etc…

What about KM salaries?

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers

Common Craft, who brought us those great videos RSS in Plain English and Wikis in Plain English, have published another nice one about Social Networking. It’s called Social Networking in Plain English (surprise, surprise).

As always, it is straight forward, very easy to understand (even for a lawyer), and quite entertaining. The video doesn’t really endorse any social networking site, but does suggest a few at the end:

MySpace (probably the most popular among the children of readers of this blog), Facebook (which is apparently very popular at Allen & Overy), and the big one for the professionals among us, LinkedIn.

It should be noted that MySpace has been known to help some lawyers find clients.

As the battle grows among these three social networking leaders, the only important question is: Which will be acquired by Google? Orkut, Google’s networking site, is not all that popular here in the States, but is big in Brazil.

With Google’s acquisition of Postini, they have their foot in the doors of some law firms already, as it is a popular spam fighter in firms (apparently 48% of firms use them). Only time will tell. On a related note, Wikipedia has this interesting list of Google acquisitions.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers

From the Press Release:

Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced an agreement to acquire ZANTAZ, Inc., a global leader in content archiving and electronic discovery solutions and software as a service. The combination of the two companies will redefine information risk management by proactively automating the full spectrum of consolidated archiving, e-discovery, analytics and real-time policy management uniquely in one system. Customers’ information will simultaneously be available in operational systems and consolidated archives, allowing rapid e-discovery and analytics to be run seamlessly across all information sources using advanced methods such as conceptual search, clustering and alerting…

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers

Google announced today that it has acquired GrandCentral.  GrandCentral is a great service that gives you one phone number that will ring all of your other phones.  and it does a lot more … see our previous post about it. 

 LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management for Lawyers