Digital White Papers

17 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Boosting Enterprise Search with Beer Metadata Expanded Taxonomy: Conversely, expanding the firm's taxonomy presents yet another option. Instead of reducing granularity, the firm might broaden an overly tight taxonomy to offer all potential options or to incorporate subfields where profilers can provide additional details at their discretion. In this scenario, a firm might separate maer type codes into every type of lawsuit it can foresee handling. Or it might maintain a simplified maer type taxonomy (such as "Litigation") with an optional subtype field to include greater detail (like "Employment Discrimination" and "Breach of Contract"). A highly detailed taxonomy can improve precision if used properly. Unfortunately, many people find highly detailed taxonomies confusing and frustrating. Rather than search through hundreds of options to find the perfect maer or document description, many will select their favorite fallback option to save time and effort. Pushing this approach to the extreme, some firms have adopted folksonomies where firm members create their own terms for metadata. Folksonomies can benefit a firm by giving greater freedom to the people categorizing maers and documents. Work to avoid folksonomies with redundant categories, where similar maers get tagged differently. Automated Alerts: Even well-considered metadata oen becomes outdated during a maer's life cycle. The only way to keep metadata current is to successfully encourage people to occasionally review and update maer metadata. It might help to implement a system that periodically emails aorneys working on maers throughout their maers' progress reminding them to review maer information. These email messages could suggest the metadata that might have changed, such as jurisdiction and venue, with instructions on how to quickly change the information. Email reminders might be sent a few months aer a maer is opened, when it is closed, following a period of inactivity (e.g., six months with no new time entries or documents) or all of the above. Automatic alerts encourage firm members to regularly confirm metadata accuracy, increasing the odds of inaccurate or outdated entries being corrected. You'll need to find a good balance in the frequency of alerts so people don't delete the messages without reading them. Living with Imperfection To some extent, law firms might have to live with the fact that their metadata will never be perfectly complete or accurate. Situations change, and change can render previously correct metadata no longer applicable. Unique and unusual cases will arise that do not fit neatly into even the best taxonomy, and human error will mar even brilliantly designed systems. Nevertheless, a law firm's metadata remains an invaluable asset to enterprise search. With the right combination of techniques, training and positive reinforcement, law firms can significantly improve the quality of their metadata and enhance their members' ability to quickly find the information they need, when they need it. ILTA FLYN FLESHER Flyn Flesher is Knowledge Management Counsel for the 700-plus attorney labor and employment law firm of Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak & Stewart, P.C. His responsibilities include creating processes, best practices and templates to leverage the firm's institutional knowledge and allow the firm's attorneys to work more effectively and efficiently for firm clients; providing updates on legal developments; developing technological tools that help manage, track and trend litigation (and training attorneys to use those tools); helping client teams and practice areas collaborate and manage their content; and fostering knowledge sharing among attorneys. Contact him at flyn.flesher@odnss.com.

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