Law Technology News - Sample Issue

“A well managed precedent system can help ensure that institutional knowledge held by Senior Partners remains with the organization when those partners retire.” — Connie Crosby of Crosby Group Consulting

PORTALS

The most common KM platform is the portal, and SharePoint is the leading portal in the legal industry. Ninety-two percent of the respondents to the ILTA survey said that they use SharePoint6. However, SharePoint is often used only as a document repository. It, and other tools have a range of functionality that can be used to support broad KM initiatives such as expertise identification through the use of <My Sites> or blogs, creating Communities of Practice, and creating a lessons learned process for various types of matters. “Knowledge management is about learning, process improvement and maturing the organization’s use of knowledge. Document management is more about making sure people have a place to store documents; it’s less forward looking,” explains Ms. Barnes.

PRECEDENT SYSTEMS

Precedent systems support efforts to improve efficiency by making historical information available. ALM surveys have found that when drafting documents, almost 70% of attorneys use prior work product more than half the time. A system that provides access to historical documents, without much effort, is imperative to efficiency initiatives.

These precedent systems are also excellent repositories for mid-matter and post-matter analyses of strengths and weaknesses. This information can inform a firm’s business development efforts or a corporate legal department’s future RFP response-drafting and outside counsel collaboration.

Ms. Crosby finds that firms are concerned about the loss of knowledge when knowledge providers exit. She offers up knowledge management as a solution, “A well managed precedent system can help ensure that institutional knowledge held by Senior Partners remains with the organization when those partners retire.”

CONFIDENTIALITY

Any system that facilitates the reuse of prior work product must also include tools to ensure the maintenance of confidentiality. No attorney wants to inadvertently violate confidentiality agreements or invalidate attorney/client privilege. Today’s KM systems often include tools to expedite the redaction of both native PDF documents and documents that originated as paper and were scanned into the system. Along with the manual redaction functions that many legal professionals are already familiar with, these tools provide auto-redaction functionality, with “looks like” technology that recognizes account numbers, social security numbers and similar standard-format confidential information. Redacting the visible contents of documents is not sufficient, though. Confidential client information can be found in the metadata of documents as well. So an “anonymizing” tool that also scrubs the metadata is a necessity.

By maintaining, providing access to, and tracking its knowledge assets, a legal organization can increase productivity, improve client acquisition and retention, and facilitate the transfer of knowledge across the organization. This initiative requires buy-in at the highest levels and cross-departmental teams must collaborate to develop processes and identify supporting technology. A well designed and implemented KM system ensures that the organization can gain the most benefit from its most important asset – knowledge.