Peer to Peer Magazine

47 WWW.ILTANET.ORG be familiar to business development and marketing teams who rely on experience and expertise information for purposes of winning new business. Having such robust maer profiles would certainly make content searching far more powerful and vastly improve knowledge management. Rather than training on document management search systems, once firms have implemented the requisite need to know security they would be best served looking at how maer profile search would work in their environment. It can readily drive key knowledge sharing needs. While still maintaining the clients' needs for limiting access, profiles can deliver a more holistic method for readily identifying the most appropriate work product, regardless of whether a lawyer already has access to the documents in question. Maer profiles provide beer context as to the purpose of each document. Examples of the data that would need to be tracked in such profiles include: maer type, sub-type; area of law; qualifiers or tags; deal / demand / selement amount; court / location; and industry. Once this information is being collected and aributed, lawyers can track and easily find an appropriate maer and then request access to the data, without the conflict of need to know security. This enables need to know security while still offering a method to provide awareness of the wealth of experience and prior work that exists within a firm. Other Benefits These same maer profiles could empower business development and resourcing decisions. Firms can make more intelligent decisions about where to invest and focus resources and marketing programs to improve pitch success rates. To this end, that same metadata can drive: Opportunity Management for firms to track and forecast pipelines; Proposal Generation to streamline and reduce costs and improve results; Maer, Client, Lawyer, Staff, Vendor, and Other Profiles for beer search capability; and, Experience Scoring to more quickly locate and identify appropriate personnel. As firms typically already create pleading and closing indexes, they have an opportunity already to capture and leverage beer metadata. Almost all the valuable maer profile information is contained in these documents. Information such as closing dates or key court dates and transaction amounts are typically included in the closing index. A trained person can easily extract and capture such valuable metadata during preparation of that index. In today's competitive market for legal services, firms must be able to demonstrate expertise, understand cost structure, price competitively, manage a pipeline of work, and recognize opportunitites for cross-selling. Core to all of these processes is leveraging the firm's data, and it goes well beyond knowledge sharing, which already is at the heart of what lawyers have been doing for years. As we enter this next stage of knowledge management and this mandate for need to know security, the argument asserting the inherent value of sharing prior work product without any limitations can no longer eclipse the security needs and demands of clients. Rather, firm leaders should take the opportunity to invest appropriately in technology to enable more current processes. This includes beer data collection and management as well as automation. This is an opportunity to improve data practices overall. Everything firms do today is related and can be tied- together with the same core data—and the mandates of need to know security just provide another opportunity for improvement. P2P Will Need-to-Know Security Destroy KM? FEATURES Firm leaders should take the opportunity to invest appropriately in technology to enable more current processes.

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