InnovAction Awards

The College of Law Practice Management is looking for entries for its 2008 InnovAction Awards.

"This is a worldwide search for lawyers, law firms and other deliverers of legal services who have invented and successfully applied totally new business practices to the delivery of legal services. The goal of the InnovAction Awards is to demonstrate to the legal community what can be created when passionate professionals, with big ideas and strong convictions, are determined to make a difference"

Entries are due by June 2, 2008, with an early bird deadline of May 1, 2008 (for a reduced entry fee).

We at The Firm are working on our entry.

Wikis and Happiness

Over at the Wikinomics, the Blog, Anthony Williams published this picture of the process comparing email collaboration versus wiki collaboration: Wiki collaboration leads to happiness.

One point of contention was whether the faces on the email said should be happy faces or frowning faces. Anthony goes on to say in Wiki collaboration leads to happiness:

"Are occupational spammers blissfully overflowing your email inbox with overweight word documents and seemingly ignorant of the rising tide of wiki enlightenment that is bestowing happiness on a growing legion of devout followers? Or, are emailers painfully self-aware of the tragic cycle of email misery that obscures their path to wiki salvation?"

Higher Productivity Increases the Bottom Line at Law Firms

I am one the speakers on an upcoming webinar: Higher Productivity Increases the Bottom Line at Law Firms.

In the document intensive world of corporate law, one of the fastest ways to achieve higher productivity is by providing immediate access to client information and automating the creation of corporate governance and ownership documents -- your firm's most tangible client deliverable.

In this presentation, seasoned veterans from Goodwin Procter, LexisNexis HotDocs, and Capstone Practice Systems will provide the information you need to quantify the value your firm can derive by implementing browser-based, hosted document assembly that can increase attorney and staff productivity, standardize best practices, streamline document production, ensure accuracy, and eliminate IT systems support.

The webinar is sponsored by International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) and Two Step Software.

UPDATE:
You can access a replay of this webinar on the Two Step Website: Higher Productivity Increases the Bottom Line at Law Firms

Avvo Revisited - I am a 23% Better Lawyer

In my previous post on Avvo.com I expressed concern about their use of a numerical rating. I feel even worse about it now. Last night after I signed up for the service my rating was a 6.5. Now, a day later my rating has shot up 23% to 8.0.

I guess I became a 23% better attorney today, going from "good" to "excellent."

Doug Cornelius on Avvo.com.

Avvo's Online Ratings For Lawyers Come To Boston

The controversial Avvo.com has come to Boston (and the rest of Massachusetts). I have heard about the reviews and the law suits filed. It looks like the early rating system had some problems with gathering information and weighting the information that Avvo was able to find. As of April 2, they have added Massachusetts.

Since I am a lawyer in Massachusetts, I figured I would check out my profile: Doug Cornelius on Avvo.
At first, I achieved the "No Concern Rating." There is a process for claiming your profile. After doing that, I got a 6.2 out of 10. That did not seem very good. So I added some publications, speaking engagements, employment, etc. That got me up to a 6.5.

According to their description of how the ratings work, if you add more information to your profile then your numerical rating should increase. I also jumped into the questions feature of the site and answered a few real estate questions. Answering questions got me a badge of Level 3 Contributor, but did not seem to help my rating.

I am all for public disclosure of information, especially public information like attorney discipline. I find Avvo to be an interesting exercise, but I am still not sure where it fits into my public profile. It certainly has a marketing twist to it. Is it any more useful than this blog on law firm knowledge management or Real Estate Space, my commercial real estate finance blog?

Personally, I find the numerical rating to be distasteful and somewhat random. (Admittedly, I might not take that position if I had a rating of 10, or at least above 9.) The information is clearly more robust than the rather sparse information in Martindale: Doug Cornelius in Martindale.

I will continue to keep an eye on it and see what happens.

Back to Work with a Present of SharePoint 2007

After a wonderful four weeks of paternity leave, I am back in the office working on our knowledge management projects.

As a welcome back present, the development team upgraded our intranet from SharePoint 2003 to Micrososoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. Unfortunately, they are still working on a few permission and editing issues which is keeping us from starting our Enterprise 2.0 projects. (I feel like a dog with a bone on the end of my nose, just waiting for the boss to say go so I can snatch it and eat it up.)

The delay is giving me some time to prioritize my projects. I think first up will be "wiki-fying" my multi-state conveyance database. This was one of my first knowledge management projects on the first generation of our intranet. There is a certain poetry to it being the first Enterprise 2.0 project.

The multi-state conveyance database is our collection of real estate practices, procedures, forms, transfer tax, mortgage tax, precedents and previous matters for each state. Obviously some states have lots of information and some have very little information (Sorry Wyoming!). Its not really a database. Its a collection of webpages hosting the content. They have been notoriously difficult to edit and keep up to date. Equally hard has been letting interested people know about new and updated information. By converting this to a wiki, it should be easier for the entire group to add to and edit the content. It will also be easier to see the changes, verify information and alert the real estate group to new information.

Expect to hear more about our journey into Enterprise 2.0.

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

Upcoming and Social Calendars for Knowledge Management

I recently signed up for Upcoming, "a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference."

LawyerKM mentioned the service in his Blog Buddies post. I am willing to try out new things (especially free things) and see if the are useful or potentially useful.

I created a profile (Doug Cornelius on Upcoming). I added some events and joined a group on knowledge management and one on enterprise 2.0. I also managed to add a few friends.

For example, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was already added as event to Upcoming. I added the Knowledge Management 2.0 - Real or Hype? symposium being run by the Boston KM Forum.

The site is rich in RSS feeds. You can publish a list of upcoming events and you can subscribe to your friend's upcoming events. I added my Upcoming events to Dougs' Lifestream and Doug's FriendFeed. I also subscribed to my friend's events in my Google Reader. Upcoming is also leveraging the Yahoo Pipes tool to custom your RSS feeds.

Overall, Upcoming seems to be a great way to discover new and upcoming events. Upcoming is also a way to promote any of your upcoming events.

Of course, with any social media site the power of the site is based on the number of people and their activity.

The biggest problem I have with Upcoming is that it does not allow you to import a list of contacts to see who is already using it. I managed to find a few. But it is rather hit or miss. I threw in the names of few likely subjects and found a few. The site also defers to a user name rather than a real name so it hard to distinguish the person from a list of attendees to an event or those watching an event.

It looks like Yahoo recently acquired Upcoming so there may be some changes in store. I would recommend that you sign up for Upcoming and give it a try.

Wikis and Household Knowledge Management

I have often proclaimed the virtues of using a wiki for knowledge management. But does it have place in household knowledge management? Today I have two stories. One is a great success and the other a failure in using a wiki for household knowledge management.

Wiki Success Story for Household Knowledge Management

One of the goals of my current paternity leave was to try to get The Daughter into a schedule for sleeping and eating. As any parent knows the more regular the schedule, the happier the child.

So I needed a way to track The Daughter's activities during the day. By tracking the information, hopefully I could find a common pattern. Also, The Wife wants to see how The Daughter's day went. So I would need a way to deliver the information to The Wife. If I could use a web-based tool, I could deliver a live feed of information to The Wife.

I had the content and a process for generating the content. The process is relatively straight forward because it is just a running diary. So the focus was finding the right technology tool to deliver the information.

A blog would work, because it matchs up with the diary of The Daughter's Day. Twitter would also work because the information would be fairly sparse [The Daughter does not give me a lot of time to provide a robust stream of information] . The key for me was to publish the information in a way that I could analyze some of the information. A spreadsheet or a table would be a great fit. I could plot a daily timeline along one axis and the days of the month along the other access. This would expose any trends.

Most wikis support tables so I had a broad choice. I decided to use a Google Spreadsheet from my Google Apps account. Feel free to take a look at The Daughter's Schedule.

This is a low level of the use of wiki functionality. It is really just a simple web publisher. But that is often enough for a wiki to be useful. I am able to push out a lot of very useful information that I can use and The Wife can use. The RSS feed is not necessary because it is easy to find the stream of information in the spreadsheet. I did not need collaboration because the information flow is very one way.

Wiki Failure Story for Household Knowledge Management

The Wife loves the The Daughter's Schedule wiki. So much so that she thinks we should have a household wiki.

It just so happens that Google launched their new Sites application as part of Google Apps. Although it is a wiki, Google does not use the term wiki. [You can read my prior post on Google Sites.]

Since I had not yet use a Google Site I was all fired up to set one up and give it a try.

Then I stepped into one of the classic failure points for wikis and social media in general. I had a blank page. I was so fired up to have a household wiki that I failed to gather a single piece of content. I failed to even ask The Wife what she thought should be in the household wiki.

It has only been a few days, but the household wiki sits empty and unused. How many times have I mentioned the empty wiki syndrome? But I still walked right into the same failure point.

The Wife and I need to sit down and figure out what information to put in the household wiki. There is hope yet. But I have learned my lesson. Never publish an empty wiki.

In case you missed them, here are my prior posts on Household Knowledge Management:

• Books and Household Knowledge Management
  
• Contacts and Household Knowledge Management
  
• Calendars and Household Knowledge Management
  
• Introduction to Household Knowledge Management

Books and Household Knowledge Management

The next project in my Household Knowledge Management string was to catalog the household print collection. I have been looking for a way to catalog my library and make people aware of the book(s) I am currently reading.

I first ran into this idea on Facebook. There are several Facebook applications that allow you to track the books you are currently reading and create a library. I am a fan of the Books application by Jonathan Lipps. I also like the Shelfari Books application for Facebook. They both do a good job of showing the books I am reading and pushing that information into my Facebook feed.

But I want to share that reading list beyond the walls of Facebook. I also wanted to better catalog the books in my home library.

It turns out Ray Sims of Sims Learning Connections was looking also looking at cataloging his library. Ray Sims did an excellent comparison of Shelfari and LibraryThing. The conclusion was that there was no clear winner.

I created a profile and entered about 100 books into LibraryThing: Doug Cornelius on LibraryThing.

I created a profile on Shelfari and imported by LibraryThing catalog: Doug Cornelius on Shelfari.

One limitation of Shelfari is that you cannot manually add books. The book must exist in Amazon.com to be on your Shelfari shelf. That is a big limitation on me being able to catalog my library. I have several hundred antique books that do not appear in Amazon.com.

The second limitation of Shelfari is that it does not offer an RSS feed of books added to the collection. I would like to the books I am reading to my Lifestream and FriendFeed.

The limitation of LibraryThing is that is a catalog and therefore does not keep a reading list of books that are not in my library. [I am a patron of the Newton Free Library.] I would lose the list of borrowed books that I have read.

LibraryThing does offer RSS feeds of books added to my collection, but does not offer a feed of currently reading.

Neither one is a perfect fit. Since Shelfari cannot handle my antique books, LibraryThing is my current choice for the catalog.