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Ryan McClead is Principal and CEO of Sente Advisors, a legal technology consultancy that helps law firms turn innovation from a buzzword into an operational practice. He has spent more than two decades in legal technology, starting on a law firm help desk and working his way through knowledge management, global technology innovation leadership at Norton Rose Fulbright, and a stint as Senior Vice President at Neota Logic before founding Sente in 2018.

He is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, a Fastcase 50 honoree, and the author of Your New AI Colleague: A Field Guide to the AI That's Going to Do Your Job. Before any of that, he spent a decade as a musical theater composer, which explains the cadence of his prose if not his career choices.

In my last post, I made a particularly provocative assertion that the Legal KM community was primarily made up of lawyers and that their being lawyers clouded their interpretation of KM in a legal environment so that they were missing the KM needs of at least 50% of the firm, specifically, the staff. I

A few weeks ago I wrote a post attempting to define KM. It was simplistic and possibly naïve, but you have to start somewhere. Since then, I’ve come to realize that beyond a conceptual understanding of KM, you shouldn’t waste too much time trying to define it. The search for a single definition that

A wise man once said, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”. Today I’m introducing my own corollary to that maxim. “Sometimes it’s worth the risk of proving you’re a fool in the hope that you might learn something from the backlash.”


There are moments in the life of every Information Technologist when you wonder, maybe only to yourself, silently, why do I care so much? And yet you do. And the next question is, am I doing the right thing? In the right way? Is there a better way? It’s a slippery slope and it’s hard

Happy New Year! It’s the time of the year when everyone is optimistic. When we reevaluate who we are and what we’re doing and almost universally decide that it is not good and it must change. But still, no one says, “this time next year, I’ll be fatter, uglier and make less money”. We all

At the risk of being typecast as a kooky prophet of doom, I’m going to make another prediction that should prove to be about as popular as my last. Say goodbye to the World Wide Web. Sorry Sir Tim, it was great while it lasted, but it just couldn’t stand the test of time.