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Knowledge Management

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KM BRINGS VALUE TO AFAS attorneys and other knowledge workers to create a wizard that asks questions in a logical sequence, perhaps beginning with basic questions about parties and attorneys and then moving to questions that determine what documents are produced with what clauses. At the end, a document (or multiple documents) with the appropriate structure is produced. As with knowledge collections, knowledge managers can serve as primary generators of such tools, or they can facilitate their use. Any number of users can answer the questions and generate documents such as mortgage agreements, wills or trusts, or more complex agreements. In this way, some of the legal work becomes automated. While it may be possible to generate a near-final draft of a simple document, document assembly may also save time and effort simply by creating the shells of a large number of more complex documents, with the correct names of agreements, attorneys and parties already in place. Document assembly assists particular fee arrangements by automating part of the work and by allowing lower-cost providers to carry it out. Some firms (such as Bryan Cave) have even charged clients direct access to document assembly systems, a wholly different economic model akin to software development where the lawyer’s up-front effort may be substantial but the marginal cost of additional clients is low. In the article “From Bespoke to Commodity,” published in Legal Technology Journal (2006), Richard Susskind referred to this as “making money while you sleep.” Document assembly is very resource-intensive. While the interface for the ultimate user can be straightforward, setting up a wizard tends to be quite complicated, even for technically sophisticated users. Wizard creators must understand the many different substantive options embedded in the documents, must be able to break out a logical question structure, and then understand how each answer will change the document(s). It’s master-level legal chess. Lawyers who possess some degree of technical sophistication combined with substantive legal knowledge in the relevant area will be best able to leverage document assembly. If such a person lays out the logical structure, consultants and others can assist with the programming. Because they have a similar substantive bent, document assembly efforts run the same risk of becoming outdated as knowledge collections. LARGE-SCALE KM AND AFAS Many knowledge management activities are less targeted at particular types of work. Just as a “rising tide lifts all boats,” these efforts make all attorneys (or large groups of them such as a firm’s litigators) more efficient and effective. Leveraging dynamic information — a firm’s entire document management system or billing system, for example — has the twin advantages of always including the most up-to-date information and allowing attorneys to contribute work product and other content in the regular flow of work. ENTERPRISE AND WORK PRODUCT SEARCH A sophisticated panel of technologists at ILTA’s 2009 conference in Washington, DC identified enterprise search as the single most effective knowledge management tool for reducing costs. Enterprise search impresses information www.iltanet.org Knowledge Management 35

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