Demise of Document Management?

Ron Friedmann has reported [Strategic Legal Technology :: Demise of Document Management?] that the UK firm Lewis Silkin is replacing their Hummingbird document management system with Sharepoint.

As I pointed out in my posts last week on the four types of document searches, they lose the critical fetch and recall searches to get a more effective research search. The traditional DM is great system for managing documents; it is not a great system for knowledge management.

I prefer the approach that Tom Baldwin at Sheppard Mullin has taken with layering the Sharepoint search engine on top of the DM system. This gives you the best of both worlds with the great management of the DM and the superior search of Sharepoint.

Topic Maps

In response to my post on taxonomies and folksonomies, Matt Hodgson offered a solution of topic maps as a way to deal with the unstructured chaos that comes along with folksonomies.

I have been looking at a similar approach of leveraging topic maps in my search for an enterprise search engine. Products like Recommind are able to create a relationship among words and phrases in a document and equate them as synonyms. So when you search for a "P & S" the search engine will return a "purchase and sale agreement", "sale agreement", and "purchase agreement" as well as a"P&S."

The next step is to get them to recognize the folksonomy tags and create relationships among them as well as the words in the document. Effectively, the folksonomy tag would be just another piece of metadata for the document.

Knowledge Management among the Top Ten Tools

Bain & Company released the 11th edition of their Management Tools and Trends Study. Among the top ten "most used" tools was knowledge management (for the first time). Knowledge management had been in the bottom 5 for satisfaction for the last ten years. From 1996 to 2006 it moved from 28% to 69% usage average, with the highest coming from Asia and the lowest in Latin America.


Executives Are Taking a Hard Look at Soft Issues, According to Global Management Study by Bain & Company

Taxonomies and Folksonomies

Matt Hodgson has three posts on taxonomies, folk taxonomies and Folksonomies.

I have struggled with trying incorporate taxonomies into our work product retrieval and precedent storage systems. It has been difficult to create anything that exists beyond a single practice area. As Matt highlights in his post, taxonomies create a one-size-fits-all approach that may be comprehensive, but it is hard to get all of the concepts in place. As the taxonomy gets bigger it just makes it harder for the user to find topics and harder to file items into the taxonomy.

We have implemented a tool that auto-categorizes documents: West KM. It does an excellent job of categorizing substantive legal memos into the West key system. But is it worth the effort? In our analysis, users start with search terms. Very few browse through the categories. I also find the west taxonomy to be lacking in depth in many areas.

Folksonomies are intriguing to me, because they put categorization in the users hands (for better or worse). I have become a big fan of del.icio.us (you can see my tags).

Folksonomies have a lot of flaws. Just take a look at the most popular tags on Del.icio.us. "video" and "videos" are two separate entries.

What really intrigues me about folksonomies is being able to include them as part of the metadata for an enterprise search. As we have experienced with WestKM, most users will start with a search. If the tags allow us to manipulate the rankings of documents it could make the enterprise search engine more powerful and useful.

I assume the enterprise search engine will use stemming and other techniques to eliminate the noise of the "video" and "videos" tags.

Knowledge Management Jargon

The Applied Knowledge Group put together this list of terms used in the practice of knowledge management: http://www.akgroup.com/company/jargon.html.

Wikis for the Legal Profession

Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell present an good primer on wikis for lawyers: The Strongest Links -- Wikis for the Legal Profession.

The big advantage of wikis is being able to produce a notification of change. In particular, the generation of an rss feed and the user having an rss aggregator.

I have been experimenting with wikis for our next generation of our intranet. Wikis by themselves do not offer much more functionality that a folder of documents in our document management system. However, the notification feature of a wiki turns the document into a communication tool.

One area I having testing wikis is for a client's practices and procedures memo. A question came up at a client team meeting: "How will I know when there is a change?" Keeping the practices in a word document would require two steps when a procedure cahnges: (1) the attorney makes the edits and (2) then the attorney has to send out an email alerting others to the change. By converting the memo to a wiki, the two steps are compressed into one. The attorney makes the edits. The intranet then generates the rss feed with the change. Then all of the subscribed attorneys get a notification of the change in their rss aggregators.

Insurance company refuses to cover law firm's blog

The New Jersey Law Journal is reporting that An Insurance company refused to cover a law firm's blog.

As Ron Friedmann reported, there is a distinct lack of blogs produced by large US Law firms. Anecdotally, most law blogs (blawgs?) I find are produced by smaller firms.

There are the advertising limitations on law firms that impacts blogs. Bar overseers are struggling with how to deal with the web presence of law firms and how they should be treated.

I understand the liability concerns that come with attaching the firm's brand to a blog: the possibility of the blog being considered legal advice or the inadvertent creation of a lawyer-client relationship.

There is also a question of removing posts that are no longer valid due to changes in law or are found to be inaccurate.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with blogs is getting lawyers to contribute to them. As with all knowledge management tools, content is king. Convincing a lawyer to make contributions on regular basis will be a difficult task.

Nonetheless, my firm is working on a blogging policy and has identified one of its regular publications for a blog pilot. This publication should be an excellent fit since it is published weekly and is full of substantive content. The process is already in place for a weekly mass email of the publication as a PDF file. Conversion to a blog will give it a much broader audience.

The ABCs of Search Engine Marketing

CIO.com has a detailed article on search engine marketing. Although it goes into detail about the use of a search engine marketing specialist, there is enough background information on how to enhance the relevancy of your website in search results.

The same techniques carry over to intranet searching as well, since most intranet search engines operate in a similar way. The need text in the html of the page.

The ABCs of Search Engine Marketing - ABCs

Google Customized Search

Google now allows you to create a customized search that will only search the sites of your choosing.

Ron Friedmann of Strategic Legal Legal Technology blog and Prism Legal Consulting used this to search the websites of the AmLaw 200 firms.

I created one to search the essential knowledge management sites. (Mentioned in my previous post)

27 essential knowledge management sites.

Lucas McDonnell in his Uncommon Knowledge blog posts
27 essential knowledge management sites.

These are great resources for learning more about knowledge management across a wide spectrum of industries and academia.