Digital White Papers

31 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Advancing KM in a Security-Conscious World could more easily lead to risk exposure, the effort could be worthwhile. The productivity gains from these projects are more obvious to aorneys, which encourages adoption — especially if the documents are incorporated into the normal workflow through your DMS or maer management platform. Be sure to develop a process for ongoing updates and additions to mitigate the possibility of forms going stale. If the process of developing and coding complete document sets seems daunting, start with clause libraries particularly useful for transactional aorneys. Document assembly and automation tools can provide ways to centrally maintain these clauses and make them available to aorneys at the point of draing within Microso Word. A Public Domain Database: Documents filed publicly with a court or agency (the Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance) are a rich source of high-quality content with fewer security concerns. Although publicly-filed documents generally are not confidential, confirm whether your clients have imposed requirements that limit this approach. The challenge is how to pull these documents into a separate database or apply different levels of security. Talk to your firm's library about research tools that could allow you to mine documents the firm has filed. Or, given that most court-filed documents now are electronically signed, explore whether you can leverage your e-signature platform. Develop processes with your firm's legal assistants, who frequently are involved in any filing, to save public filings into a separate database, such as a firmwide pleadings library. Pulling these documents into a searchable database is one way to provide access to some of the highest-quality work product without accessing client files. Once you have this body of documents, you can apply your enterprise search tools against it to allow for more sophisticated searching and filtering without indexing your entire DMS. New Sources for Forms: Aorneys love forms and precedents if they are reliable and updated. Demand will only increase the more a firms' document repositories are restricted. You are unlikely to see much appetite to add headcount or give billable credit to creating and maintaining KM collections. Instead, try finding outside sources of quality forms, such as one of your library's vendors, a bar association or other publications.

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