Digital White Papers

32 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Advancing KM in a Security-Conscious World Subscription services are available for forms, checklists, practice guides and clause libraries draed and maintained by staff aorneys. These resources can be expensive but require no internal bandwidth to produce the same content. Expect to need some aorney time to validate and customize content for your firm's preferred approach. Even these activities require lile time compared to creating your own content. New tools offering a variety of practice resources are frequently introduced, so keep your eyes and ears open, especially in the ILTACON exhibit hall. Moving Beyond Documents While documents form a foundation for many law firm KM programs, KM professionals can do much more to help legal teams work more productively. Faced with a closed DMS, efforts can be targeted to projects that do not depend on broadly accessible work product. Experience and Expertise: Consider stepping up your efforts to connect aorneys with experience and expertise at your firm. If your firm has invested in enterprise search tools, explore whether you can continue using them to search for maers where the firm has experience or people with particular expertise in lieu of documents. Again, first determine whether the terms of your confidentiality agreements with clients permit you to continue indexing their documents (noting that carefully craed search results would not expose their content). Documents associated with a maer or author coupled with other information, such as biographies, timekeeping narratives and experience database records, can answer the questions of whether the firm has tackled the same or similar issues before and with whom one should consult on the topic at hand. In this way, enterprise search is used not for finding a document to use as a starting place, but instead for identifying other aorneys in the firm who have prior experience with the specified issue. This approach is more likely possible in firms that have classified types of client data such that DMS restrictions can be finely tailored. Another way to address experience and expertise is through a more traditional tracking database. The database could capture information about cases or maers, including a brief description, type of case or transaction, court and judge, opposing parties, jurisdiction, and transaction size. These databases fall into the KM contribution model, so implement processes and incentives to ensure people contribute. Integrating information, such as the areas of law codes, timekeepers and client industry, that automatically pulls from another source will help streamline efforts. If you do not already have an experience-tracking database, talk to your firm's marketing department; this database will likely also advance their goals. Marketing can be a good partner in this effort. If you already have an experience-tracking database, investigate whether you can integrate more information, improve the processes or otherwise enhance its utility for aorneys. Be certain the database reveals no more than your clients would permit. You might need to restrict database access so most people see only sanitized information (for instance, a general maer description that does not identify the client), even if your database collects more detail. Collaboration and Tacit Knowledge: Although law firms have not adopted collaboration and social tools to the same extent other industries have, aorneys could finally be ready to embrace them. These tools provide an excellent opportunity to share tacit knowledge If you already have an experience- tracking database, investigate whether you can integrate more information, improve the processes or otherwise enhance its utility for attorneys.

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