Peer to Peer Magazine

46 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2018 FEATURES Will Need-to-Know Security Destroy KM? Tighter Security Could Make Prior Work-product Worthless? Firms have made a noble effort to move toward becoming paperless operations. Aer years of moving away from paper files and implementing systems that enable beer content filing and electronic records management, firms have now found themselves in a quandary. Electronic information is booming and the amount of data firms manage continues to grow exponentially. Unfortunately, few have truly capitalized on the opportunity presented by this volume of data. They simply file-away their content and perhaps expect that search will provide them the answers they need. To enable their professionals to benefit from the wealth of experience learned from prior maers, firms allow lawyers to search for prior work product. It makes lile sense to reinvent the wheel for every new, yet similar maer when lawyers can rather improve service delivery in terms of time and quality by re-using others' prior work. In theory, implementing need to know access will immediately create a problem for them by virtue of limiting the pool of prior work product any individual lawyer can search or access. Imagine – it will instantly limit that lawyer to re-using only the work product from maers he previously worked on or from certain clients from other lawyers who provide services as a team. However, consider this: many firms today hold document repositories that exceed tens of millions of documents; contrary to what some might assume, limiting how many can be searched could rather improve efficiency. The more limited dataset being searched could lead to more relevant search results, making it easier to locate specific documents, especially when those searches are being conducted on such a regular basis. That being said, this alone is not the answer. Targeted Searching via Better Profiles – Focus on Experience Searching works because it enables people to find content that they may not have known exists simply by using keywords and concepts. Many lawyers search for content they know exists but which they don't recall specifically where; if it's their work, it's not impacted by In theory, implementing need to know access will immediately create a problem for them by virtue of limiting the pool of prior work product any individual lawyer can search or access. tighter security controls. However, when systems are locked-down so that people no longer are able to search across all others' work, they lose the ability to find and reuse that work. Does this mean the end of sharing? Not necessarily. First off, this requirement to apply need to know security is not applicable to public data. That data is easier to handle from a knowledge management standpoint. A significant portion of the data that law firms work with is or eventually becomes public. Examples of this type of data include pleadings filed in court (except for maers under seal, which are rare) and documents filed with most government agencies such as the SEC or UK Companies House. This data is still important to and plays and integral part in the broader firm knowledge management initiative. Most firms already are automating the creation of indexes to track this type of data; this includes pleading indexes, closing indexes, bundles, and other various indexes. Meanwhile, some firms have invested heavily in knowledge management teams and people – typically 'practice support lawyers' or other knowledge professionals. These people could process all key documents and make them available for sharing. They could anonymize documents and add them to brief banks; create curated systems of exemplar materials and templates. This already occurs at some well-structured (and well-staffed) firms. However, it is a labor-intensive process and comes at a cost – of both human capital and time. Isn't this what technology is meant to address? Well, thankfully, yes. Firms file content into their document management systems. Most today have adopted maer centric filing and therefore hold basic metadata around each document in the system. However, that metadata as it exists today, while sufficient for ensuring appropriate content security, is likely insufficient to address this more current need. This is where the broader concept of maer profiling can prove invaluable for K and sharing of content. If firms properly tracked and organized the correct metadata around their engagements and used it to create maer profiles, this challenge of searching and sharing others' content in a locked-down world would be solved. This concept of maer profiles already should

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