Digital White Papers

46 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT KM in a Time of Innovation Practice Notes Lawyers' professional obligations require them to have a certain level of competence with technology. For instance, Australia's Practice Notes require lawyers to have reasonable knowledge of how to use technology to achieve cost effectiveness; essentially, this requires lawyers to have a technical mind. The Supreme Court of the state of Victoria in Australia goes still further, by requiring in "Practice Note SC Gen 5 Technology in Civil Litigation" Para 8.2 that: » All legal practitioners will be competent and equipped to deal with electronic documents in common formats during the discovery process. » Parties will endeavour to remove repeated or duplicate electronic documents where possible… . » Parties will seek out and utilize the most cost-effective means of dealing with documents electronically, including the use of external providers. Courts expect lawyers to understand the costs and risks involved in the discovery and trial process. Both federal and state courts mention technical ediscovery concepts such as deduplication, email threading analysis, predictive coding and technology-assisted review, none of which should be unfamiliar to legal practitioners. The challenge today is not only to deliver the best legal advice but to do so efficiently and cost-effectively. Courts consider technology to be both a cost- and time-saving strategy, meaning lawyers must keep their technical minds sharp and understand the process. Back in 2010, zipping and unzipping folders, copying files to a USB, and sending or downloading aachments could have been considered technical tasks. In 2017, these are basic computer skills that all working professionals, including lawyers, must possess to do their jobs. KM's role is not to train lawyers to carry out complex technical tasks but to train legal professionals to meet the basic standards of technical competency and to close any lingering gaps in technical knowledge. KM and the Technical Mind Technology has made many tasks simpler; most of us can easily use most apps having no technology background or need for help from IT. This simplicity blurs the line between technical and nontechnical skills and creates a new concept –– the technical mind. People who cannot code or perform other advanced technical skills but can use most applications comfortably have a technical mind. KM must help lawyers develop technical minds by helping them stay inquisitive and ask the right questions. In this way, KM helps lawyers understand processes and avoid hidden traps. Take searching, for instance. A lawyer may know of different search engines such as dtSearch and Lucene, but a "within four words" search takes different syntax in each of these search engines and can return very different results. The lawyer must make sure the dra search plan will meet discovery or regulatory requirements. This can be as simple as asking, "Can you make sure the syntax is correct for the specific search engine?" or "Can you limit the keywords to document contents only?" A simple check such as this can go a long way. We recently moved 80 percent of our business-critical applications from our existing Citrix ShareFile solution to the Amazon Web Services cloud.

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