Once deployed, Visualfiles will be the default application that users will use to open any file or matter, seamlessly feeding information into Elite 3E, InterAction and Interwoven. This will provide users with a single, integrated business environment and allow them to record information efficiently and accurately for the benefit of the entire organisation.
7/10/09
When the Technology Isn't Being Used - Let's Add More Technology!!
7/9/09
KM's View of E2.0 - Savior or Harbinger of Death?
7/8/09
Open Source in Law Firms - Unimaginable or Brilliant?
7/7/09
Social Networking: It's All About Relationships
About nine months ago, Greg--my co-conspirator and co-blogger in crime--started following me on Twitter. Then he met a bunch of folks online and he passed on my Twitter handle to a bunch of his friends.
So I started following Greg's friends that followed me.
Then one of my new Twitter friends found me on Facebook. We started interacting; we were swapping Greenie plants, acres of virtual farmland, virtual law gifts and other goofie stuff. Just dinking around.
I didn't really know who she was.
Then Greg and Toby recommended me for a speaking engagement at an all-day conference. Coincidentally, my new Twitter/Facebook friend was also speaking. I was excited to finally meet her.
And meet we did. I found out that she worked at the same law firm I did--hard to know everyone in a firm with 3,000 employees. We arranged to have lunch later that week. A fascinating person, we continued to meet for lunch regularly and are now friends. She has been over to my house, we have swapped books and, today, I attended her going-away party.
She's moving on to a new job as a law professor and legal librarian.
But thanks to social media, we will stay in touch: Twitter, Facebook and now e-mail are all available to me.
She and I have achieved the inner circle of friendship.
Who knows where the future shall bring us?
7/2/09
Has ‘IT’ Killed ‘KM’?
I’ve commented in the past about how I think that Knowledge Management (KM) has become so overwhelmed with technology products that the individuals in KM have become ‘tech support’ rather than knowledge managers. Yesterday, I read two different articles that reinforced my conception of what I think is a major flaw in the idea of “Knowledge Management” within law firms.
Michael Maoz of Gartner brought up the issue of why ‘IT lacked the prowess to perceive or advise on the unfolding crisis’ of the financial meltdown. When I was reading this, I kept replacing “IT” with “KM” (as I think what Maoz was talking about fit more of the KM model in the law firm setting.) Questions Maoz raised such as:
- Where has all of our [KM] investment in data mining, analytics, forecasting, and measurement gotten us?
- And how, exactly, did [KM] track, identify, perceive, illustrate, communicate, or work to prevent rotten loans and false premises about future growth and profit and shaky forecasts?
These questions show the flaw in how we are looking at KM. Knowledge Management isn’t a software or database issue! These questions seem to take on the idea that by putting your contacts in a database, storing your documents in a central repository, and slapping a search interface on all of these databases is “Knowledge Management”. We seem to think that if we have enough technology it will magically transform into some quasi-artificial intelligence.
The second article I read was one of the Penny Edwards’ articles on Social Networking for the Legal Profession. Edwards mentions that the approach we take to capturing “knowledge” is a hold over of the 1990’s IT ‘centralized’, or as she put it in her book “Industrial Technology.” Edwards states it best when she writes that our KM tools are ineffective because:
many of the large, centralised, top-down implementations in firms have focused on enforcing information and management processes. It's no wonder that many of these specialist applications are underused - with their different interfaces and rules for user interactions that require people to spend time figuring out how to use them, compiling information to be approved for inclusion, and then trying to find the information once it has made it into the system. They are not user-friendly, and they don't reflect the workings of a network where people turn to people to get what they need.
As I’ve said before, the original concept of KM was to “leverage our internal experience and expertise to help us face future challenges”. Knowledge Management was originally an idea that came forth in the library field as a way to catalog internal information in a similar way we where cataloging external information. However, because it would be nearly impossible for a librarian to catalog every piece of internal information, KM slowly moved over to the IT structure by attempting to make the creator of the information (that would be the attorney who wrote the document or made the contact) also be the “cataloger” of the information. Processes were created through the use of technology that were supposed to assist them in identifying the correct classification. In my opinion, this type of self-cataloging and attempt at creating a ultra-structured system creates a process that is:
- difficult to use;
- doesn’t fit the way that lawyers conduct their day-to-day work;
- gives a false sense of believing that the knowledge has been captured and can be easily recovered;
- leads to user frustration and “work around” methods; and
- results in expensive, underutilized software resources.
7/1/09
Alternative Fees - "How To" Tech
I've previously posted on 3 Geeks about how budgets sit at the core of AFAs and on methods for building reasonable budgets. With that concept in mind, a firm needs a tool set for creating, modeling and then monitoring AFA budgets. Creating is something previously discussed. Modeling is playing with the budget; shifting tasks, adjusting leverage and generally driving numbers that will benefit clients and lead to profitable engagements for firms.
Budget monitoring is the long-haul, oar-in-the-water effort of making sure efforts stay on budget and firms remain profitable. As well, these monitoring efforts will create a knowledge base that will enable more effective budget creation and modeling going forward.
So what tools are out there? The short answer: not much. The Lexis owned Redwood Analytics is the the most evolved tool I found. And it's on a reasonable development path. Redwood has been around a while and with a focus on law firm financial analysis, was well-poised to meet the emerging AFA needs. So it's good to see a viable tool on the horizon.
Beyond Redwood, I found vendors willing to build something. This is not encouraging. For all the push for AFAs, a lack of tools will serve as a serious impediment to adoption. A vendor building a one-off custom application is not a good option in my opinion. These leave firms in a dead-end position. The power of a commerically developed tool with ongoing development will go a long way towards driving AFA adoption and success.
On a side / related note, the in-house law department vendors seem to be heading in the same direction as Redwood. I suppose with their more immediate demands for AFAs, legal departments should be driving this development.
I must say I am disappointed at the lack of tools for managing AFAs. In the short-run firms will be doing a lot of AFA management manually. Not the best situation, but one we'll live with for the time being.
6/30/09
Review of Headshift's Penny Edwards' "Social Networking for the Legal Profession"
Although I follow a number of blogs dealing with the topics of law and technology, I would have to admit that one of the best out there is the Headshift Blog. Their byline of "smarter, simpler, social" hits a chord with me and it is one of those types of blogs where you tend to read something that allows you to say "We could do something like that here."