Digital White Papers

66 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT From Content Aggregation to Content Intelligence R E A L - T I M E A L E R T S Since many publishers now provide real-time alert services via an email push, you should confirm that your content aggregation tool can push those alerts onto a user's dashboard, practice group or client team page rather than to the lawyer's email inbox. There may be times where a specific alert needs to be pushed via email, so look for the flexibility to offer it in both the content aggregation tool and in email. E N D U S E R C R E A T I O N A N D M A N A G E M E N T O F C U S T O M A L E R T S While many partners do not fully utilize many of the technology tools deployed at law firms, we are seeing that change due to the hands-on approach of millennial lawyers. A CI platform should provide end users with the ability to set up their own custom alerts and allow them to edit and delete alerts on the user interface. While these are not substitutes for the professional alerts created by information professionals, they do provide end users with more choices. The Market Players in the Legal Sector and How to Evaluate Their Tools There are some excellent CI tools in the legal market. What makes a great tool for one law firm may make a poor choice at another, so information professionals need to perform their due diligence. Create a detailed request for proposal (RFP) focusing on the content, features and functionality you need to solve the business problems you are facing. Survey your lawyers and conduct focus groups to determine their needs. While no tool is likely to check off all the boxes in your RFP, you can dra into the contract agreement a provision for the vendor to develop the functionality you need. Also, pay aention to the service-level agreement to ensure your vendor can deliver on a platform that works as close to 24/7 as possible with lile downtime for maintenance and upgrades. While you can use your RFP checklist to narrow down your choices, to understand which tool gets you closest to solving your firm's content needs you must conduct at least two pilot tests to kick the tires. The pilot will provide you with valuable feedback to understand what the tool does well and where it falls short. Pilots should include information professionals and a pool of end users comprised of lawyers and marketing professionals. Good candidates to evaluate a new tool should include the top complainers at your firm who tell you they are drowning in information. Be careful not to get side-tracked by products that only have a great administrative tool that helps information professionals manage content but does not address the needs of end users. Focus first on the needs of your core audience, the lawyers, since they are the ones who will be using the tool. Next, look for a tool that has an easy-to-use interface; unnecessary complexity will be a barrier to adoption. Secondarily, focus on the needs of the information professionals. Once you find a CI tool with all the bells and whistles you want, provide the vendor with a list of all of the publishers and titles you would like to disseminate to your users to confirm that the content vendor has fully executed licenses and distribution agreements with those publishers. This is particularly important with your premium content sources. Neutral CI tool vendors that do not create and sell their own content (such as InfoNGen, Manzama, Ozmosys and Vable) Be careful not to get side-tracked by products that only have a great administrative tool that helps information professionals manage content but does not address the needs of end users.

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