3 Geeks and a Law Blog

At the ILTA conference I was introduced to 3 different legal KM blogs of note. They are: Caselines has a Litigation KM angle to it (but not e-discovery - which is good). I saw David Hobbie present on Litigation KM - which is his thing at Goodwin Proctor. Good presentation showing great KM implementation. Nice KM blog to watch. KM Space, which is the blog of Doug Cornelius. I also saw Doug present, then noticed him in a number of sessions with his laptop open. He was blogging live from the sessions. Cool stuff and nicely thought-out posts. LawyerKM is the last one. This blog included live ILTA posts as well, but the author shows as anonymous (with a little effort you can find his name). Being at a large firm, I can understand that approach. In any event, another well-written legal KM blog to follow.

Rachel Beckman, a staff writer for the Washington Post, writes a hysterical commentary on Facebook advertising: Facebook Ads Target Where It Hurts

Although this time convergence is not in-house counsel cutting its number of outside firms, its software providers cutting the number of platforms they work on. One example is the partnership announced at the ILTA conference between Interwoven and Lexis. The two are combining their products into one offering Lexis is calling "Lexis Search Advantage." This combines the intelligence of Total Search with the enterprise search power of IUS. As Doug Stansfield noted in their announcement meeting, this creates a unique combination of Work Product Retrieval with Enterprise Search. IUS allows you to search multiple data sources, then Search Advantage applies its legal value-add of marking up the results with case citations and Shepardizations. On its own, this combination is interesting. But it is also reflective of the industry moving towards converged platforms and systems. Large firms especially these days struggle with supporting too many platforms and search engines. So this trend is welcome relief. After seeing more demos than one person should in the span of four days, I can see this trend taking shape in many corners of the market. Both Interwoven and Lexis separately talked about taking all of their products and moving them towards "unified platforms." This effort will not happen overnight, but the path is clear. I suppose now it will just become a race among the various vendors. Being last in this game will probably be quite expensive.

After not seeing much value in the Martindale-Hubbell - LinkedIn deal and after waiting (and not alone) to see more value come from social networking, I admit Lexis may be on to something. What many of us have been waiting to see is some definable business value to come from social networking. There is some value in building up your network, but leveraging those connections into a business proposition has much greater value. LexisNexis owns the InterAction CRM software, having purchased Interface Software. They announced at the ILTA conference that the next release of InterAction (Version 5.6 SP1) will include LinkedIn functionality. Contacts within InterAction can include LinkedIn icons which will pull in the LinkedIn tools, focused on how you and those you know are connected to the contacts. This adds the power of social networks directly into a CRM application. This new connection between InterAction and LinkedIn equals business value. Some firms will be challenged by this value. Social Networks are not universally valued by firms, as they can threaten IT and data security. And they challenge the dogmatic hoarding of contacts by many lawyers. Whatever a firm's point-of-view, overlooking tools that bring value to your firm and clients is not good business.

Now I get to try out IE 8.0 and Google Chrome and test them side-by-side!