Knowledge Management in Todays Law Firm

Hummingbird Web Seminar [KM Overview Section Only] February 16, 2005
Ron Friedmann Prism Legal Consulting, Inc

Agenda
KM overview Types of KM Approaches to KM

KM Overview Definition
Knowledge management is the process by which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets KM seeks to implement processes to collect, exchange, and deliver knowhow to those who can profit from such knowledge Capture and re-use know-how

KM Why it Matters

Profitability
Improve realization rates Client retention Lawyer retention Competitive necessity?

Quality
Of work product Of life

Risk management

Types of KM

Explicit
Documents, e-mail Precedents Documented best practices

Tacit
Best practices / know-how Expertise Relationships

Finding versus Understanding

Finding a document is one thing, understanding it another Even if finding is easy, the need to understand often drives the searcher to talk to the author or an expert Making documents truly valuable for re-use may require

Categorizing into a taxonomy Providing context Adding metadata

KM and Metadata
Data about data DM profiles Taxonomies Context

Document specific Practice notes

General guidelines Document comments Clause/section comments Convergence with professional development

Taxonomies

Categorization system

Plants, Dewey Decimal West Key Numbers

Hierarchical Exclusive v. nonexclusive System spanning

Taxonomies Pros and Cons

Cons

Expensive to create
Define taxonomy Classify documents

Hard to maintain conceptually Hard to maintain technically

Benefits
Provides context Allows browsing by menu rather than searching: recognition versus recall

Context and Practice Notes

Context and practice notes

Labor intensive Practice notes need constant updating Document context is unique to document (or perhaps matter)

Precedent files
Selection requires subject matter expertise Context enhances value Managing shelf life is time-consuming

Processes
COLLECT / ORGANIZE Manual Manual Automatic

DELIVER

Lawyer and staff intensive

Mix of lawyer, staff, and IT Information technology intensive

Mix of Automatic lawyer, staff, and IT

Process Trade-Offs + Options

Which is worse?
Too few documents or Too many? Recall v. precision

What are your options?

Filtering and collection manually performed by staff

Vetting processes performed by lawyers Selection, context, shelf-life management

Filtering and collection performed automatically by machine

Technologies to Automate
Full text Expertise mining

Often a variant of full-text Relationship mining

Taxonomy management

Manual, rules-based, automatic

Inferential
Tagging and inferring from time and billing Document submissions

Full-Text - Contours

Types
Boolean + proximity Advanced semantics Leveraging structure meta-data extraction (e.g, profiles, XML, HTML)

Scope
One repository Multiple repositories Spanning servers across offices

Security (e.g., ethical walls)

Full-Text Results

How to handle large result sets

Filter Cluster Visualization

Relevance Ranking

Many algorithms

Summary with search term hits

KM Trend is to Automate
COLLECT / ORGANIZE Manual Manual Automatic

DELIVER
Automatic