Knowledge Management in a 2.0 World

My latest article has been published in National, the magazine of the Canadian Bar Association: Knowledge Management in a 2.0 World.(.pdf)

It’s never been more important for lawyers and law firms to be able to organize and access all their knowledge. And thanks to the emergence of Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis, it’s also never been easier. Welcome to the next generation of KM.

I take no credit for the French translation of the article. My french is not that good.

Knowledge Management Blogs

The folks at Pumacy Technologies put together a list of knowledge management blogs. This a great resource for finding thought leaders in the area.

After initially being missed by the authors, I ended up number three on the list. The ranking is based on the number of posts in August. I met their four criteria: at least 10 blogs posts (I had 35 in August), 10 comments (I had 15), a Google PageRank of at least 5 (I am a 5) or an Alexa Ranking under a million (I am 774,585)

Thanks to Jack Vinson for pointing out the list: A Study of KM Bloggers.

Law Firm Adoption of Web 2.0

Continuing my live-blogging from International Legal Technology Association's Annual Conference. . .  As Web2.0 tools mature, there is an increased number of adoptions by Fortune 500 companies. We explore and learn if Web 2.0 solutions already being adapted by Fortune 500 companies would be accepted by the lawyers in your firm.

Speaker: Bruce MacEwen of AdamSmithEsq.com

Bruce is cautious optimist about the adoption of the these tools. He sees the most important change from Web 1.,0 when you surfed, to Web 1.5, when you searched, and to Web 2.0 when you share.

He thinks they have a real place as a management tools in professional services firm. They have so many advantages over email [See Luis Suarez's approach on Elsua.net]. Of course there are rules of the road.  He pointed to IBM's Social Computing Guidelines. He recognizes that HR and PR will be concerned about the loss of control and approval.

An audience member focused on the comment function.  Bruce has seen it. But he thinks it is a defensive position. On his own site, Bruce gets 10 personal emails for every comment. I pointed out that legal blogs are not that interesting and do not get that many comments.

Bruce went through DOs and DON'Ts for blogging. (You can see them in the session materials.) Bruce views blogs as a way to prove expertise. You can say you are an expert. But you need to prove it. He also sees blogs as a great tool for knowledge management.

Bruce also sees a strength for a blog to be in project management. The reverse chronological nature of blog lends itself nicely to project management. You are typically interested in the latest piece of information. A blog displays the most recent post at the top.

Bruce moved on to wikis. A wiki is just a blog with lots of authors.  Wikipedia does not work in theory, it only works in practice. Vandalism fears are unfounded. Are your people going to vandalize your reception area? No, so why would they vandalize a firm wiki.

He cited the case of Dresdner where the introduction of wikis reduced email traffic by 75%.

He cited another case study (You can see them in the session materials.) The company rolled out six internal group blogs with 150 contributors. It worked because it is very intuitive. They are much like the way people think. People do not think in structured information like databases. They think unstructured like wikis and blogs.  You also have the update features, the categorization and easy searches.

Bruce moved on to mashups. He focused first on companies use of Google Maps.He showed an example of locating key clients on a Google Map. So if you are out of the office with some free time, the attorney could quickly see if there are any key clients nearby.

He calls Web 2.0 not "Hi-Tech," but "Appropriate Tech." The tools are easy to use tools that allow you to easily share information.

Bruce is more cautious than optimistic on social networks. He thinks they have intriguing opportunities. He thinks MySpace is appalling.  He sees LinkedIn as still being scattered.

He thinks if anything is going to work in the legal field it is Legal OnRamp. He has a concerns that it is getting too big. He cited the natural connection limit of 150 people. It is hard to know more than 150 people. He also did not like the presence feature on  Legal OnRamp. He found it creepy.  

Bruce is still striving to find success stories. He sees much more proven success inside law firms than the deployment outside firms. The McKinsey report on Web 2.0 showed much success in the corporate world.

The power of the tools is to form and strengthen networks.  But it does require the business side to engage with IT on development and for IT to look over the horizon. 

To end, he played this video, Information R/evolution by Michael Wesch:


A great presentation and insight from Bruce.


Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule

I Freed Myself From Email's Grip

Unfortunately not me, but my pal Luis Suarez. There is a profile of Luis in the New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  Luis describes how he started using platform communication tools like blogs and wikis instead of email. He managed to reduce his email traffic by 80% and still effectively communicate with his colleagues.

"Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes."

Endowment Effect on Knowledge Management

An article in this week's The Economist discusses the endowment effect: It's Mine I tell You. The endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion):

"is a hypothesis that people value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established. In other words, people place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they do not. In one experiment, people demanded a higher price for a coffee mug that had been given to them but put a lower price on one they did not yet own."

I look at this behavior as to its impact on knowledge management. One of the many challenges in knowledge management is getting people to contribute. You need to build a cultural and enable the tools to get people sharing what they know. There are obvious technology challenges to this sharing. But the soft side of encouraging the sharing has been the bigger problem.

The endowment effect now seems fairly obvious to me. People are less likely to share because they have a sense of ownership over the knowledge. Inside the law firm, this knowledge is usually acquired through the assets of the firm. The attorney probably started with some existing agreement from the document management system, used their secretary and junior attorneys to help craft the knowledge and attended seminars on the firm's dime.

The endowment effect seems to explain why people are less likely to share. One of my approaches to knowledge management is to look for ways to capture the knowledge of the attorney in a way that is more useful to the individual attorney. That the knowledge is being shared is just a by-product. I have seen this approach labeled personal knowledge management and knowledge management 2.0. The most important consumer of an individual's knowledge assets is that individual.

A blog is a classic example. Especially inside the law firm, the blog is a great tool to "catch the butterflies" of knowledge as they pass through your day. It is a quick and easy way to capture interesting articles, thoughts and ideas that may otherwise end up in a stack or file folder. With the blog you can categorize your butterflies and search for them in a way that makes sense to the individual. That others inside the enterprise can find them is merely a by-product. It is an important by-product for knowledge management. But the focus of the tool is on the individual, not the firm.

Above and Beyond KM

My buddy Mary Abraham started a blog: Above and Beyond KM, a discussion of knowledge management that goes above and beyond technology. Mary has often been a rudder keeping our knowledge management groups focused on knowledge management and not on the technology.

Mary and I were recently sparring over whether lawyers are good at sharing knowledge. Being at a big law firm, I see lots of sharing. Senior lawyers must share with the junior lawyers on their team if they want the junior lawyers to get anything done. I see lots of requests for information in emails. (Unfortunately, I rarely see the responses. More on that below.)

Sharing happens in the law firm at several levels: between a junior lawyer and their mentor, among peers, within a matter team, within a client team, within a practice, and across the firm. I believe the most effective sharing is the sharing among smaller groups. So, I see much more sharing within the matter team than within a client team. It is just human nature and the nature of sharing.

But, I am firm believer that we are missing some technology tools to make sharing easier and more effective. We need better tools for the small groups to share their information within the group, but also allow the entire firm to access that sharing.

Unfortunately, the default way of sharing in a law firm is by email. I long lost count of the requests to better capture email to share the knowledge and information in the email. The problem is not sharing the email; the problem is the email itself. It is just not a good way to share.

That is why I am so excited about Enterprise 2.0 tools. They combine the communication power of email with the sharing and finding powers of the web. In particular, blogs and wikis make it very easy to share information and do so in a way that it seems very close and focused on what the smaller group is doing. But, all of that information in the blog or wiki is easily findable and useable by others in the firm who are not part of the smaller group.

Are Blogs Marketing Tools?

If your answer to this question is no, perhaps you should take a look at the website for Hill| Holiday. For those of you outside of Boston, Hill | Holliday is a PR/marketing firm with clients that include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Chili's, AOL, Anheuser Busch, and Dunkin' Donuts.

The home page of the Hill| Holiday website is a blog. You can even scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the "proudly powered by WordPress" designation. They even have comments activated.

Is your marketing group still unsure about whether blogs are useful? The biggest marketing firm in Boston thinks a blog is a useful marketing tools for themselves. Does you marketing group know something that Hill| Holiday does not know?


Thanks to Stewart Mader at WikiPatterns for pointing this out in his Random Things he reading this weekend post.

When To Use A Blog and When To Use A Wiki

As we are working on deploying wikis and blogs inside The Firm, we have been working on ways to explain these tools. Most of the lawyers have heard the terms, but are not familiar with the tools.

One question that arises in the difference between a blog and a wiki. The distinction between the two becomes less clear inside the enterprise.

Mark Miller at endusersharepoint.com put it beautifully when he said:

Blogs are great when one person is trying to communicate to a team or group. Think of a blog as pushing out information from a single source to anyone who is willing to listen, “one-to-many”. The listener has the ability to participate in the communication through comments, but the main direction of the message is controlled by the person writing the blog posts. . .

By the very nature of wikis, many people will be adding content and that content can be consumed by any number of readers, “many-to-many”. At first, it seems like a free-for-all, but in an intranet situation, it is extremely useful for letting content experts participate by contributing in their area of expertise. In general, someone sets the basic beginning structure of the wiki by creating a table of contents and some starter pages. From there, user generated content drives the expansion of the wiki, based upon the needs of the participating audience.

Simple test: one or two people providing content, use a blog; many people providing content, use a wiki.

State of the AmLaw 200 blogosphere

Kevin O'Keefe of Lex Blog has but together his latest status report on big law firms that blog: State of the AmLaw 200 blogosphere, March 2008. Kevin includes a list of the firms and list of the blogs.

Since August of 2007 the number of AmLaw 200 firms with blogs has increased from 39 to 53. Since many of the firms have multiple blogs, the number of blogs has increased from74 to 110. That is great growth

Lifestream - Aggregating Youself

As social media is spreading and as I am using more social media tools, I find that the information about me is being spread across more and more sites. Of course one of of the great things about most "2.0 tools" is that they allow you to easily manipulate the information.

I created a lifestream using Yahoo Pipes:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/dougcornelius/lifestream

Shortly after putting that together I ran into Friend Feed:
http://friendfeed.com/dougcornelius

I am recombining the feeds from several sites into one more comprehensive stream. Anyone who is interested can see a large swath of what I am writing about, what I am doing and what I am thinking about.

Now translate this to a use inside the enterprise. It is possible to pull disparate communication and authorship from a particular person and display that information in one place inside the enterprise. You can combine someone's internal blog, external blog, internal postings, internal tagging, external tagging and other sources and create a dynamic profile of that person. If you then store that "story" as it grows, you are creating a searchable repository of experience, expertise and interest for that person.

Currently, my friendfeed and lifestream are both pulling together information I add from:

• KM Space
• Real Estate Space
• Twitter for dougcornelius
• Shared Items from Doug's Google Reader
  
• Del.icio.us bookmarks for Doug Cornelius

Of course, like any good "2.0" tool, my friendfeed and lifestream each have a separate RSS feed that you can subscribe to or easily publish.

Blogging at Sun Microsystems

As a blogging lawyer, I tend to keep an eye on Mike Dillon. Mike is the general counsel of Sun Microsystems and writes a blog: The Legal Thing.

Mike was interviewed by Real Lawyers Have Blogs. A few things caught my eye in the interview.

One, Sun has between 3,000 and 4,000 employees blogging externally, including their CEO. As of this morning, they had 4039 blogs, with over 94,000 entries and over 96,000 comments. They leverage these blogs in one platform so you can search across all of this blog posts: http://blogs.sun.com. I ran a search for "knowledge management" and got over 8,000 results back. This robust collection of blogs is a tremendous knowledge resource. It seems like a great way for the company's employees to stay connected and for the customers of the company to be connected with the company.

The second was his take on in-house lawyers blogging:

"It's surprising to me that more GCs don't blog. But, I think there are two factors behind this. First, attorneys are by trade somewhat conservative and risk adverse (I still remember attending legal seminars in the 1980s about the terrible risks associated with a new type of communication called "email"). Consequently, I think many of us focus more on the risks of divulging confidential information or violating the attorney-client privilege; risks that while possible are more than offset by the value of a blog.

The second issue is generational. I doubt that few GCs of large public companies today grew up using wikis, social networking, mash-ups, virtual communities or blogs. The current generation of law students cannot imagine life without them. They understand the incredibly rich and powerful benefit of these knowledge sharing and communications tools. And, they doubtlessly will apply them in their legal practices as they become GCs in the future."

Third, I discovered that Sun has collection of blog postings from Sun's alumni. I particularly noticed their legal disclaimer:

"The individuals who post here are part of the extended Sun Microsystems community and they may not be employed or in any way formally affiliated with Sun Microsystems. The opinions expressed here are their own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual authors, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them. This site aggregates content posted on third-party sites. The content posted here may be hosted at third party sites in no way affiliated with Sun."

Obviously, Sun's adoption of blogging comes from Sun's open corporate culture and focus on building communities. In the process they are building a rich knowledge repository that can be leveraged by their employees and customers.

Are Lawyers Blogging? - Yes they Are!

Lawyers are blogging. Kevin O'Keefe of Real Lawyers Have Blogs noted an article in the Financial Post: Blogging Can Be Useful As a Low-cost Public Relations and Marketing Tool. They cite an American Express Survey that 5% of businesses with 100 or fewer employees have blogs.

Kevin goes on to note that law firms adoption of blogs are on pace with other businesses. With "40,000 small law firms and 2,000 lawyer blogs, our profession is right on pace." Kevin also noted that 39 of the AmLaw 200 firms have blogs: State of the AmLaw 200 Blogosphere, August 2007.

Over at my Real Estate Space blog, I compiled a list of 39 blogs that originate from Massachusetts based lawyers: Massachusetts Blawgs.

I have found that law firms (including my firm) are unsure how to deal with blogs. There is a lot of concern about how blogs amplify bad content and make it easy to find that bad content. They are rightfully concerned about preventing the release of confidential client information, inadvertently creating attorney-client relationship, stating positions that are adverse to clients and attorney advertising restrictions.

I think the mistake is thinking that blogs only amplify bad content. They amplify all content. Good content rises to the top as well. I ran an example of a Google search for "bad boy guaranty" (that's a commercial real estate finance term). My blog posts on bad boy guarantees at Real Estate Space appeared on the top of the search results. Similarly, a Google search for "Interwoven Express Search" pulls up my posts on Interwoven's new search tool in the top position. (Ahead of Interwoven's website.)

Those results do not come from implementing expensive websites and SEO campaigns. (My blogs run on free blog hosting services, with no support from my marketing department or IT department.) The results come from writing content. If you are not writing content, people are not finding you. Some people may not like what you have to say and some people love what you have to say. You can't please everyone. But you will not please anyone if you remain silent. Blogs are about having that conversation. Lawyers should join the conversation.

Blogging Lessons Learned from a Curmudgeon Turned Blawger

Mark Herrman, author of The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law, wrote a piece in The National Law Journal: Blogging Lessons Learned. It turns out he is also co-author of the Drug and Device Law Blog.

Here are his four lessons from legal blogging and my thoughts.

1. "Blogging about substantive legal issues is hard." A blogger must regularly post fresh content about interesting issues. There is not always interesting legal content on the subject of your legal blog. Often times I will read a case that sounds interesting for my Real Estate Space blog, only to find out the case lacks much meaning.

2. "Blogging is personally satisfying." Every blog post is a snapshot of an idea that I can easily retrieve. Even if nobody reads the blog post except me, I have created a resource for me. Of course it is great to see others referring to your article. [You like me. You really, really like me.] Even better is getting comments and criticism to help craft and fine tune my thinking.

3. "Law firms, like law schools, are clueless about how to value blogs." Most law firms are not sure whether to encourage lawyers to write blogs or to forbid them? Should they sponsor blogs (to claim credit) or disavow them (to avoid risk)?

4. "Blogging pays off. It pays off in part by being a self-fulfilling prophecy." Whether or not you know anything about the topics you cover in your blog, you appear to be an expert in that field. You can hold yourself out there as an expert. But unless people hear what you have to say (or read what you have written), they are not going to buy into your expertise. Also by blogging, I force myself to think about my subject for at least a few minutes a day. Blogging forces me step out of my workflow and "think" rather than just "do."

Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?

Tom Davenport seems to have found some middle ground with Andy McAfee in their battle over Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?

"But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of
greater responsiveness, better “knowledge capture and sharing,” and more
effective “collective intelligence,” there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked
about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I
remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM. . . . Sure, there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one."

I touched on this in my Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0 post and the ensuing series of Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0 posts:

• Summary
• Wikis will be a great way to synthesize knowledge
• Blogs will be a great way to make announcements and summarize meetings
• Email needs to be incorporated
• Document management systems can host
• RSS is there to spread the word
• Search to find all of the good stuff

Blogs and Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0

Blogs, along with wikis and RSS feeds form the big three new technologies from web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 that will impact law firm knowledge management 2.0.

A blog (like this one) is just a webpage that allows you to easily publish new information, doing so in a chronological manner, with notifications of new information being added.

A blog can give a lawyer or other employees the ability to quickly capture knowledge and publish it. As a result it is available for others to find. Since the blog post is html, even a simple search engine should be able to index it and produce good results.

Blogs may be a natural migration for lawyers. Lawyers (like me) are used to writing letters and sending them out. Essentially, that is the same process as a blog.

Personally, I find this blog to be great personal knowledge management tool. I write for me. These are thoughts I want to capture for my own later use. You reading it and finding this content is just a by product. I publish a new blog post when I feel like it and categorize it in the way that makes sense to me.

I think the big use for a blog inside a law firm will be the administrators trying to make the law firm community aware of new information, policies and happenings. I have already threatened many of my firm's practice area managers with blogs. They seem to be willing guinea pigs for blogging. (Six more weeks until our enterprise 2.0 platform is released.)

The other feature of a blog that makes it a more powerful communication device is the ability of others to participate in the blog by allowing comments. The post and comment become captured elements of the collaboration and communication.

Davenport Versus McAfee and Twitter

Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport squared off today on a debate on Enterprise 2.0. This was rematch from their debate back in June at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

I was disappointed that the webinar was less of a webinar and just a conference call. However, that lack of visuals allowed me to jump into a twitter and have a discussion with Luis Suarez, Dennis Howlett, Ami Chitwood, kellypuffs, Steve Matthews and others. At the time I was sitting in a conference room with others from my knowledge management department. It was interesting to hear the take of Tom Davenport about how enterprise 2.0 tools are interesting, as I was listening to the debate, discussing it among my team and twittering across the globe at the same time.

As for the debate, I think Davenport was getting hung up on the term "Enterprise 2.0." His take was that Enterprise 2.0 is an over the top terminology. My take has always been that enterprise 2.0 is short for "web 2.0 applications brought inside the enterprise." I do not think the tools themselves are going to change the way business operates. The way business operates is already changing. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have an excellent presentation on this in Wikinomics. The Web 2.0 suite of tools has created a new way to communicate. One that can be outside the traditional boundaries of business. As the tools do a better job of memorializing the communication, this non-hierarchical communication is on display for everyone to see.

Frankly, I thought Davenport was spending most of his time quibbling over language. For a lawyer like me to think that someone is quibbling over language, it must have been really bad.

McAfee broke Enterprise 2.0 down into three parts. First are the tools. Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, linking, tagging and robust search do make it much easier to organize, find and disseminate knowledge. Second are the change management issues. The organization needs to embrace a more open method of communication. The firm needs to realize that communication does not happen through a hierarchy. Third are the signals from management. Management must not only permit a more open dialog, they need to encourage it and participate in it themselves.

Everyone on Twitter was focused on the change management and management signals. I think we all agreed that if there was no culture for sharing, then the tools are not going to work. McAfee and Davenport also agreed on this point. Davenport just thought the tools are not all that different than the tools that have been previously been available.

I disagree with Davenport on this point. I think the suite of Enterprise 2.0 tools are much easier to learn and use than existing tools. If they are easier to learn and use then more people are going to use them. Also, I think the Enterprise 2.0 tools are more powerful and offer the individual user much more benefit than existing tools. I use my wikis, because I capture the information in them better for myself than any other tool. The wikis work as a better communication tool within the group because the message is made, synthesized and preserved in the wiki. Emails and word documents cannot do that.

Although I found the debate interesting, I found the reactions and discussion on Twitter to be more interesting and really enhance the experience of the webinar. I have never been a big user of Twitter. But this was great use for it. (An interesting note about Twitter is that it was set up by the same person who originally created blogger: Evan Williams.)

Why Blog? - Business Objectives and Types of Posts

Bill Ives put together a list of business objectives for blogging and the types of business blog posts. All these seem applicable for objectives and types within an enterprise or inside a law firm.

Social Networks and Social Media

Joel Alleyne put together a great piece on Social Networks – Why You Should Care. Joel draws a sharp distinction between social networks and social media. Social networks being the connections and social media being a method of communicating with a social network.

Joel puts together 10 ways to leverage social media. Four of my favorites are:

1. Use social sites for alumni.
   Instead of creating your own silo of internal alumni databases, use the social media where your firm's alumni may already be.
   
2. Use social sites for recruitment.
   Stay in touch with young recruits. They will be more interested in real communication and interaction than slick videos.
   
3. Keep an eye on your brand on social media.
   Every law firm should be scouring the web and news sites for information about the firm. Every professional should be doing the same. It is easy to set up persistent searches on any of the major internet search engines.
   
4. Look for internal opportunities to use social media.
   These tools are inexpensive and easy to use. Setting up a wiki or blog is quick and easy. If it does not work, little time or money was spent. It is a "safe fail" project.
   
   

Why Blog in the Enterprise

An example of how to use blogs inside the enterprise?
From Geek and Poke

Why Blog? - Blogs in Plain English

The crew at Common Craft has come out with a great new video: Blogs in Plain English.