Digital White Papers

14 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Boosting Enterprise Search with Beer Metadata is wrong: reasonable people could disagree over which description is more appropriate for saving these documents into a firm's document management system. Unless the firm provides its employees with guidance on how to classify position statements, firm members are unlikely to categorize them uniformly. Several descriptions might apply to a document or maer. Employment lawsuits oen include multiple claims in a single complaint. Complaints alleging discrimination and wage-and-hour claims under federal and state law, alongside a potpourri of contractual and common-law tort claims under state law, are not uncommon. Some might be single-plaintiff claims, while others are class or collective actions (frequently true of wage-and-hour claims). Assuming a firm allows users to enter only one "maer type" code when opening new maers, how should an aorney decide which of the many claims to enter into the maer field? Should the decision be based on which claim is the most meritorious, which has the highest potential exposure or which is listed first? Any of these options is beer than relegating the maer to "other" or "miscellaneous." Many users faced with this choice might give up and select the least descriptive option just to complete the new maer intake form and move on to the next task. Still, law firms allowing their employees to enter multiple maer type codes could end up with poor metadata, as many people decline to enter more information than required to open a maer. Another problem with collecting metadata arises because lead aorneys on new maers –– the people with the most knowledge about the maers –– are oen not the people who enter the metadata. Aorneys oen delegate these tasks to paralegals or legal assistants without providing the information needed to properly categorize a document or maer in the firm's taxonomy. In these cases, the person entering the metadata could enter inaccurate or misleading information. Even if initially entered correctly, metadata can become outdated quickly. Cases might be removed to federal court, venues could change and claims can be added, dropped or re-pleaded. Developments might arise during a case that render descriptions provided at the outset no longer correct a few months later. To maintain accurate metadata, law firms must encourage people to revise metadata as circumstances change. To maintain accurate metadata, law firms must encourage people to revise metadata as circumstances change.

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