LawyerKM

Given the announcement of LinkedIn Applications this week, you may not have noticed the announcement last week about the addition of a news sharing feature that was added to LinkedIn Groups.  With this new feature, members of groups, like Knowledge Management for Legal Professionals, for example, can share, discuss, and recommend news articles within groups.

Knowledge Management for Legal Professionals

To get to the news feature, simply select your group, and click on the News tab.  From there, you can see news submitted by group members, and you can submit an article yourself.

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

Let me begin with the end in mind:

Take Aways: (1) Gradual change may be more effective than abrupt change; (2) KM has broad reach and impact; (3) KM and change management (CM) are inseparable.

How do you boil one of these?

It has been said that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out; but if you place a frog into a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature to a boil, you’ll have dinner (if you like frog legs). Some have disputed the veracity of this claim (experiments date back to the late 1800s). I’ve never tried it; but true or not, there is a point. Beings (frogs or humans) react differently to abrupt changes than they do to slow, gradual changes.

Yahoo is applying this theory (in a much more animal-friendly way) as it slowly changes it’s home page. A colleague pointed me to an article in the New York Times called Changing that Home Page? Take Baby Steps that discusses what they’re doing. “You could call it stealth innovation. The company’s goal is to end up several months from now with a completely different, and presumably better, front page — with its audience intact.” You might be wise to approach KM efforts the same way. However you do it, don’t forget one of the most important things: the perspectives of the people whose work lives you are changing. How will they be affected?

Knowledge management is different wherever you go. For a law firm, KM concerns (among other things) issues about who the firm knows, what the firm knows, and how the firm does what it does. That can be pretty broad and far-reaching. And dealing with the “who-what-how” issues can have a huge impact on the people in your firm. Managing the effect of that impact is part of the job of a knowledge management professional. In my opinion, knowledge management cannot exist without change management.

Nina Platt wrote about the connection between KM and CM a while ago in a piece called Change Strategies are the Key to KM. There, she has some words to the wise when dealing with the change management issues that come along with knowledge management initiatives. One message is, don’t just understand and acknowledge that change will have an impact. Be proactive. Let people know why the change is happening, what it will be like, how it will be done, and what their role will be. In other words, don’t plan to announce a major new process, procedure or application on a Friday afternoon and launch it on Monday morning. Ease them into it. Raise the heat slowly so it’s not such a shock to their systems.

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

LawyerKM is three today! They grow up so fast, don’t they?

We came to life three years ago with a simple question: Is blogging good for law firms? We were referring to internal blogging at the time. But it didn’t much matter because nobody answered. For all we know, nobody even read that post.

Since then, however, we’ve written quite a bit about blogs and lots of other stuff. And people have been reading — and commenting.

Thanks for reading and for all of the great ideas in the comments and on Twitter and elsewhere.

Here’s to the future.

-Patrick

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

Last I checked, blogging is alive and well. But in this month’s Wired Magazine, Paul Boutin advises you to Kill Your Blog. Boutin says blogging is no longer worth the time. The glory days are over. You’d be better off using Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr. He says that even well-known bloggers are calling it quits because, essentially, blogging–as a medium–has sold out. “Professional” bloggers have cornered the market on blog search engine rankings and the little blogger has been left out in the cold. The other factors killing blogs are brevity and speed. Twitter gives you just that. And I must agree (about the speed and brevity). I have little tolerance for long blog posts [I'll keep this short] unless they are very compelling. However, for some topics, you need more than 140 characters. I don’t think blogging is dead yet, but I’m a blogger. For the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it at that and just ask you what you think, with this poll:

[polldaddy poll=1032182]

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

Jack Vinson (who just had a birthday) wrote about a new list of KM bloggers: A Study of KM Bloggers.   Pumacy Technologies assembled the list and it’s a good source for all things KM.   Like Doug Cornelius, of KM Space, LawyerKM was under Pumacy’s radar at first, but has now appeared on the list.

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