Thursday, January 31, 2008

Email and Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0

Email is not going away. We need to find a way to better integrate email into law firm knowledge management 2.0. The issue is what to do with email. We get lots of it. It lies unshared in our inbox.

One of my goals of law firm knowledge management 2.0 is to reduce the amount of internal email traffic. Another is get that email into a shared and searchable repository.

Are there technology fixes and ways to match the process? One example is that I can publish a post to this blog through email.

The real step is to get lawyers to recognize that there are ways to communicate other than email. Ten years ago, many lawyers thought email was just a passing technology fad. It took a long time to get to this place where email is ubiquitous. It will take a long time to adopt other methods.

The first step is acknowledging the problem.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Doug

    In conjunction to your observations on email and law firm knowledge management, we had another observation to make regarding the pervasive use of email as a communication medium which actually contains a lot of knowledge - trapped & siloed.

    It is our firm belief that a informal communication medium like email is the next (r)evolutionary step in user interfacing and knowledge input.

    This is my first time visiting your blog and am loving my experience here.

    Hope to spend more time here now on.

    Cheers,
    Poorna.

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  2. Poorna -

    Thank you for your thoughts.

    Email is a powerful communication tool and a good way to share knowledge. The problem is capturing the knowledge in the email and synthesizing the information.

    As the web tools like blogs and wikis become more used, I think peopel will see the advantages over email for some modes of communication.

    The issues is communication with clients. Email works because it is so pervasive. Inside and outside the enterprise.

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  3. @Doug

    We ourselves have been using wiki inside our own startup for some time now but one of the points that we also observed was, though it worked great as a knowledge retrieval, it also had an additional operational footprint which did not work for a small team like us.

    As you said on our Kabooru site too, email has a huge network effect that has built behind it that works so splendidly for us. By Kabooru, we hope to use the best of email (as a knowledge capture tool) and integrate it with other knowledge sharing/retrieval tools (wikis,blogs,social networks,subject matter expert systems).

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