Digital White Papers

25 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT One Size Does Not Fit All: Practice Group KM This body of work exists in multiple forms, including memoranda, email and documents. The challenge is collecting it. While weeding memoranda out from the DMS might be easy, identifying critical advice in email or valuable clauses in agreements is much more difficult. Most of us still need lawyers' participation, input and cooperation to surface this rich content. Puing KM processes and workflows in place to make it easy for the lawyers to capture and identify their past work product is a good start. » Research Resources: With deep expertise in a narrow area of the law, regulatory and advisory lawyers' research resources must be rich. While using third-party research resources broadly available in the firm is a given, these lawyers oen need access to specialized resources. We have found that the number of these specialized resources has increased in recent years. The KM challenge is providing advisory lawyers access to what they need and using the resources they have requested without breaking the budget. » News/Content Aggregators: Staying on top of new developments is critical for the regulatory or advisory lawyer. They want customized pages automatically populated with the latest information –– whether it comes from colleagues, regulators, newspapers or publishers –– and they want to choose when they receive alerts about new information. This reasonable request can be difficult to achieve. The challenge is combining three sources of information: Those internal to the law firm Free third-party information Purchased third-party information While many products and tools allow you to aggregate information from multiple places on the web, we are finally seeing viable tools to use inside the firm that will let us aggregate content from the three sources. » Search: Like transactional lawyers, regulatory lawyers need access to KM content and work product through search. However, unlike a transactional lawyer, a regulatory or advisory lawyer is more likely to look for research and analysis and want to use more complex Boolean search operators. Not every search tool can support that complexity. » Wikis/Discussion Threads: Of all of the practices, regulatory and advisory lawyers are more likely to embrace collaboration TOP TOOLS 1 2 3 ANDREA ALLISTON Andrea Alliston is a Partner with Canadian law firm Stikeman Elliott, where she is responsible for the strategic direction of knowledge management in the firm's Toronto office. She leads knowledge management initiatives, spearheads programs to capture and leverage intellectual capital, and works with practicing lawyers on innovative approaches to delivering legal services to clients. As a part of the senior management team, she works on strategic initiatives related to legal project management, budgeting and fee arrangements. Contact her at aalliston@stikeman.com.

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