LawyerKM

Lots of people are writing about JD Supra, the new free database of legal documents. Is this the start of some sort of inter-law firm KM? Is there such a thing? Doesn’t the definition of KM for law firms (or at least a good one from Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer by Gretta Rusanow) exclude the idea of inter-firm KM? One of the goals of KM in law firms is to meet the firm’s business objectives, right? Perhaps sharing legal articles (MoFo is the #2 contributor to JD Supra, but all of the documents are articles) helps meet business goals if doing so is seen as marketing. But are any firms going to share the good stuff — the “intellectual capital” that really gives them the competitive advantage over the other firms out there? It’s difficult enough to convince some lawyers to share knowledge within their own firms, so only time will tell. It just went live.

Regardless of the future of the KM implications of JD Supra, I like the resources tab. It is a nice collection of web sites for state and federal courts, law school clinics and journals, and national and state bar associations. Handy stuff to maybe link to on your law firm’s intranet.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Here are some of my favorite legal knowledge management & technology blog posts and other items from the week of February 17 – 23, 2008:

• Best practices in law firm blogging (Real Lawyers Have Blogs – Kevin O’Keefe)
• Will Social Bookmarking Pay Dividends with Search Result Augmentation? (Read Write Web)
• Decent Search v. Good Librarian; Social Search and Iterative Questioning (Caselines – David Hobbie)
• Embed PDFs YouTube-Style with Scribd iPaper (LifeHacker)
• Digg Gets More Mainstream; But Are Their News Sources Too Narrow Now? (Read Write Web)
• LifeHacker Overload (LawLibTech – Cindy Chick)
• Law Library of Congress Adds RSS (Slaw – Steven Matthews)

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Harvard has launched an online version of The Bluebook.  I haven’t cracked the Bluebook in a while, but I remember not being too crazy about the thing.  It was difficult to navigate.  Let’s hope this online version cures that problem. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Collaborative book writing is nothing new. Wikinomics authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams have an “unwritten chapter” of their book in a wiki.

One of my recent favorite books — The 4-Hour Workweek — by Tim Ferriss,

is heading into its expanded and updated version [read his blog entry about it here] and he is asking his readers to help him edit it on a PBWiki wiki. The wiki password is in the blog entry.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

With all the peer pressure from Doug at KM Space to write something about LegalTech, I just had to do something. Better late than never, right? So, while looking for something else, I came across a bunch of interviews of folks at LegalTech. Here is one of Monica Bay:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eQzmEemvt4&rel=1]

Here is a link to a bunch more. Other than the interviews of Monica and Bob Ambrogi (below), most all of these are of Thomson people.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYBKdskhSYI&rel=1]

And seeing that this is a KM blog, we’ll have to highlight one more: George May talking about West KM 4.0.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVjXTmRWzKQ&rel=1]

Clearly clever marketing by the Thomson folks. But I must say that I like the use of YouTube to promote legal KM and technology. (Marketers can be innovative, too, right?) I, for one, would like to see more video of KM products on the web. And not just videos. Screencasts of KM products would be great. I would much rather see a demo than read some dry description about how an application works.

Finally, props to Craig Carpenter of Recommind, who apparently beat the everybody to the YouTube video marketing punch (by about a week) by posting this YouTube video interview.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq3s8Tl-yo8&rel=1]

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Here are some of my favorite legal knowledge management blog posts and other items from the week of February 10 – 16, 2008:

• 2/15 – Launch of Enterprise 2.0 Task Force – David Hobbie of caselines gives us a look at what they’re doing (and their approach) over at Goodwin Procter with wikis, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, RSS, SharePoint, etc.
• 2/15 – Knowledge Management Snapshot for 2008 – Ron Friedmann of Strategic Legal Technology summarized a nice list of what participants of a recent KM function noted as their top KM priorities for 2008.
• 2/13 – Putting the Social into Social Media – Doug Cornelius of KM Space reflected on real-life connections brought about by online activity.
• 2/15 – Do Wikis belong in Law Firms? – (also posted here) – Connie Crosby shared a really nice slideshare presentation on Wikis in law firms.
• 2/12 – Wikis in Law Firms – An Alternative View – Ted Tjaden sparked a hot discussion in the comments about how (or if) wikis belong in law firms.
• 2/12 – iConnect at Deloitte – Jack Vinson of Knowledge Jolt with Jack wrote about Deloitte’s new expertise location application that monitors email traffic and extracts key words and phrases from communications.
• 2/10 – GoogleDocs – Collect Spreadsheet Data via Email – Cindy Chick of LawLibTech tells us how to use Google Docs to create a form and collect the data from email recipients. More info from the Google Docs Blog.
• On a wiki-related note, but from last week, before I started “In case you missed it…,” Doug Cornelius of KM Space, is looking for law firm wiki stories and speakers for a panel on the use of wikis in law firms to be presented at the ILTA conference in August. Details here.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Fastcase announced its free law library on the Web, called the Fastcase Public Library of Law
(http://www.plol.org). It is billed as “the most comprehensive free resource for legal research online, making it the best starting point for anyone who wants to learn about and use the law.”

Here’s what is available on PLoL:

• Cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals
• Cases from all 50 states back to 1997
• Federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states
• Regulations, court rules, constitutions, and more!

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Updated – Registration link added below.

I’ve written (and read quite a bit) about Interwoven Universal Search before, but the more I see, the more I like.  I was impressed with Interwoven’s DeskSite and FileSite products (it looks like they are collectively calling the product WorkSite now?), when I deployed them at my former firm.  I like the matter-centric environment.  But from what I can see, the killer feature is the collaboration with Vivisimo.   To see what it’s all about, check out this self-running demo.  It’s really well done. 

Not to be out done, however, Google Enterprise recently launched universal search for business, and will be putting on a show to demonstrate its Interwoven connector.  There are several shows, but there is one specially for law firms.  I’m looking forward to learning more about this – the demo is on March 12.   Register here.

In fact, Google is doing some very interesting things that might be of value to law firms, like the related web results feature.  I also like the the left (or right) hand search navigation, which is part of Google Experimental Labs project.  Check out a sample search here, and see how the results areclustered on the left (sort of like Vivisimo’s).  The “suggest” feature is not really new–it’s built into the Google search on my Firefox browser–but I like it too.  Try it out here (start typing in a search term). 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Update: the Wired link below is apparently dead.  Here is another link to the same study on ABC News and another on MSNBC.

Great article [dead link] on Wired. Best take-away: “Resist the urge to immediately follow up an e-mail with an instant message or phone call. Make sure the subject line clearly reflects the topic and urgency of an e-mail. And use ‘reply all’ sparingly.”

We in KM have a special hatred of email. Let’s hope that 2008 brings RSS, internal blogs, and wikis to reduce the amount of unnecessary email we have to battle. We’ll deal with RSS overload at another time.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms