Digital White Papers

30 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Advancing KM in a Security-Conscious World closed DMS to a colleague unaware of the trend, she was in disbelief and wondered how to approach work without the benefit of the firm's collective work product. If (or when) this change comes to your firm, communicate early and oen and address the effect on aorneys. Aorneys must be offered strategies to work effectively and efficiently in the new environment. Your communication plan should be far-reaching because nearly everyone in the firm will be affected. Adjust Your KM Strategy KM appears to be entering yet another cycle in its evolution, and you should start thinking about how to advance your KM strategies in the absence of broad access to firm work product. We started out by creating libraries of forms. As that task grew too monumental to sustain, we looked for ways to automate KM or switched from contribution models to passive models that could leverage existing workflows. This led to the popularity of search technologies that allowed us to link content and context to information without asking aorneys to create separate KM content. We now see the seeds of the next phase, where KM no longer reaps the benefits of an open DMS. To continue to advance KM, consider two questions: How can we continue to provide the documents aorneys need to create additional work product? How can we promote knowledge-sharing approaches that are not document-based? 1 2 Rethinking Document-Based KM Aorneys are accustomed to using one or more documents as a starting point, leveraging everything from formaing to carefully craed legal arguments and contract provisions. This promotes efficiency, consistency and continuous improvement. With a closed DMS, how can we provide precedents or tried-and-true work product for reuse? Does this mark a return to "old school" KM, with its library of templates and forms? We abandoned these efforts because they were too labor intensive to scale and content quickly became outdated without the right incentives in place to maintain it. The content in these libraries also favored the work of those who contributed — who may or may not have been the firm's experts. Given these valid reasons for moving away from curated forms, do we now return? Using enterprise search tools to eliminate content creation and curation –– on the theory that the engine intelligently cuts through millions of documents in the DMS –– has its own shortcomings. The DMS contains so much noise in the form of email messages, dras, and non-substantive documents that quickly identifying the right precedent is difficult. More curation of documents could be preferable — if we can figure out beer ways to do it. Commodity Documents and Automation: Rather than develop massive collections of forms and precedents, hone in on the most frequently used documents and integrate them with document assembly soware to enhance their utility to aorneys. Projects like this are labor-intensive because they involve creating and reaching consensus on the forms and coding them for the soware. However, if you judiciously limit these projects to commodity or high-volume work where efficiency is most needed or areas where deviation from a form If the process of developing and coding complete document sets seems daunting, start with clause libraries particularly useful for transactional attorneys.

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