ILTA Conference - My Schedule

I am working on my schedule for the International Legal Technology Association's Annual Conference.  Here are the sessions I am most interested so far:

KM1 - Starting a KM Program
Monday, August 25: 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Elizabeth Ellis - Torys, Cherylyn Briggs - Dickstein Shapiro LLP, Nola Vanhoy - Alston & Bird, Mara Nickerson - Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
With all of the KM tools and possible projects flying around the legal industry, it's hard to know where to start.  Everyone has ideas and expectations on what a KM program can achieve.  If your firm is just venturing into the KM arena and you are wondering where and how to get started, learn from some who have been there and survived.

KM2 - Experience Management - Case Studies in Tackling a Difficult Challenge
Monday, August 25: 1:00 p.m - 2:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Kathrine Cain - Winston &Strawn LLP, Stan Wasylyk - Michael Farrell Group, Doug Cornelius - Goodwin Procter LLP
A request frequently made of KM or IS professionals in law firms is to implement a way to efficiently track and report the experience of individual attorneys.  Doing this can help both sell work and deliver work.  However, experience management has proven surprisingly difficult.  Just defining the type of work to be tracked can pose a stumbling block, as it can be tough to find the "just right" level of detail between the "too broad" and "too narrow."  This panel explores ways to manage law firm experience through case studies from firms who have made good progress. Each panelist will discuss the business challenge they faced, the tool they built or adapted to address it, the processes they deployed to ensure good tracking and reporting and the results realized.


KM3 - Enterprise Search - Impact on How We Do Business
Monday, August 25: 2:30 p.m - 3:30 p.m.
Speaker(s): Robert Guilbert - Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Jeff Rovner - O'Melveny & Myers LLP,  Rachelle DeGregory - Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP, Chad Ergun - White & Case LLP
Description: Knowledge workers spend approximately a quarter of their time searching for information, but how successful are they at locating what they are looking for?  Our panel members have had enterprise search engines implemented at their respective firms for over a year and discuss the changes they have encountered with enterprise search.

KM4 - Wikis in Law Firms
Monday, August 25:  4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Michael Mills - Davis Polk & Wardwell, Doug Cornelius - Goodwin Procter LLP, Ayelette Robinson - Morrison & Foerster LLP
Wikipedia has over 2,000,000 articles created and edited by users.  Can you have a wikipedia for the knowledge inside your law firm? Wikis provide an easy-to-use platform for capturing content and facilitating collaboration. We discuss some of the technical, cultural and procedural issues you need to address in setting up wikis for your law firm.
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Monday

Leveraging Interwoven WorkSite for Matter Life Cycle Management: KM, RM and IT Perspectives
Monday, August 25: 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
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Tuesday:
 
SharePoint Basics for Law Firms - Part 1
Tuesday, August 26: 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
 
SharePoint Basics for Law Firms - Part 2
Tuesday, August 26: 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Social Networking - Marketing Boon, Malpractice Nightmare or Simple Boondoggle?
Tuesday, August 26: 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

The Ultimate Legal Technologist
Tuesday, August 26: 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Collaboration Tools and Technologies for Lawyers
Tuesday, August 26: 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Managing Practice Management Department as a Business Unit
Tuesday, August 26: 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Versus Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM)
Tuesday, August 26: 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
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Wednesday:

Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools (Blogs, Wikis, MashUps, IM, Text Messages, Social Networks and More)
Wednesday, August 27: 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.

Sharpening SharePoint - Real Views from Peer Firms on Getting the Most Out of MOSS and SPS 2003
Wednesday, August 27: 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Web 2.0 - Law Firm Adoption
Wednesday, August 27: 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Making External Information Manageable
Wednesday, August 27: 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Search as Strategy - Creating "Information Gravitation" in a Firm
Wednesday, August 27: 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.


Three Ways to Use Wikis in Law Firms
Wednesday, August 27: 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
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Thursday:

Going Beyond The Extranet
Thursday, August 28: 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.

SharePoint 2007 Search - Installation, Customization, Acculturation and KM
Thursday, August 28: 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.

Building Bridges to the Practice
Thursday, August 28: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Sally Gonzalez — Navigant Consulting Inc

Strategies for Successful Law Firm CRM Implementations
Thursday, August 28: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Speaker(s): Victoria Gregory - Reed Smith, Michael White - Client Profiles


Law Department Roundtable - Knowledge Management Focus
Thursday, August 28: 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Looks like I am going to have a busy week.

Weekend Book Review: A Few Seconds of Panic

A few years ago, Stefan Fatsis set out to become a Scrabble champion.  Now he is trying to be a player in the National Football League.  In A Few Seconds of Panic, Fatsis sets out to be an active participant in a National Football League training camp.  Given his physical size, athletic prowess and reconstructed knee, he sees the role of kicker as one that may work for him.  Fatsis quotes Jason Elam, the Denver Broncos incumbent kicker during that training camp, describing the role of kicker as "hours and hours of boredom surrounded by a few seconds of panic."  

The book is far from boring.  If you  enjoyed Wordfreak, Fatsis' book on Scrabble, you will also enjoy this book. Even if you are not a football fan. When Fatsis is not competing at Scrabble or football, Fatsis is a sports writer for the Wall Street Journal.

Fatsis convinces the National Football League to let him join a team in training camp as long as he can find a team willing to let him in. This is not an easy task in the very controlling NFL.  He finally convinces the Denver Broncos to let him participate in training camp.  Fatsis participates in training camp and even suits up for a pre-season game against the Detroit Lions. Although the NFL refuses to allow him to participate in the game.

Fatsis tries to make some comparisons between football and Scrabble:

Both great football players and great Scrabble players say that when they're in the proverbial zone, the game decelerates and the instantly see the answer. I, for one, think that's easier to accomplish without the continual threat of being steamrolled by a charging goliath, which is not a major concern in Scrabble.

A Few Seconds of Panic is full of insight to the psyche of a football and football players.  It is a great exploration of the psychology of competitive athletes.

What to Do with Sharepoint Wikis

I have expressed my displeasure with the Sharepoint Wikis: Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.  We have been looking at wiki platforms to replace or supplement the Sharepoint wikis. One platform is Atlassian's Confluence. These are the answer we received for a few of our questions:

Thanks for your interest in our award-winning enterprise wiki, Confluence. Sorry for the delay in responding, but we released Confluence 2.9 today and I wanted to wait and reply after the release because some of the new features may be very appealing to you. Based on your requirements, I think that Confluence could be a very good fit for your law firm.

Email notifications of the changes

Yes, highlighting or only showing the changes to the page itself;
Yes, Confluence allows users to 'watch' pages (or entire spaces) and then sends you an e-mail every time they are updated. The e-mails themselves contain the page and a link to the page where you can easily view the most recent changes. The changes are presented in a nice format highlighting both what has been deleted and what has been added.

Here is a quick overview: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/oCAC

Confluence also allows the creation of custom RSS feeds that allow users to subscribe to certain pages, spaces and blogs and lets them check the updates at their discretion without filling up their inboxes. 

Checkout on editing

Confluence has very strong capabilities in this area. If a user clicks to edit a page that is concurrently being edited by another user, they will be notified. Confluence can automatically merge their changes if the two users edit different parts of the page. If there are any conflicts, Confluence will display them for you and give you the option to either 'Overwrite' the other user's changes, 'Merge your changes' manually, or 'Discard' them.

Our page describing this functionality is here:http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/TzUC

Confluence also has very fine grained permissioning, meaning that you can easily restrict which individuals and groups can view or edit a page. 

Integration with Sharepoint / MOSS 2007.

Microsoft is embracing partners who are leaders in Web 2.0 technologies and so we had SharePoint Connector designed. This plugin allows for integration between Confluence and SharePoint on multiple levels. You can embed SharePoint content on a Confluence page, create links between the different programs, run searches among content on both programs and more.

You can see the homepage for the connector here:http://www.atlassian.com/sharepoint/default.jsp The documentation for the SharePoint Connector offers more comprehensive information on the product: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/9AHrBQ

Today, we also release a free plugin called the Office Connector. This makes it easy to convert MS Word documents into Confluence pages and also to embed Excel and PowerPoint content. I'd highly recommend watching the video on its homepage: http://www.atlassian.com/office/

Has your law firm tried an evaluation of Confluence yet? You can download a free 30-day evaluation and see how it works from: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ConfluenceDownloadCenter.jspa

It sounds like they are addressing the holes we have found in SharePoint wikis.

JD Supra Revisited

When JD Supra launched backed in February, I jumped on board: JD Supra Launches.  I added a couple dozen documents and sat back and wondered what to do with JD Supra: Profile for Doug Cornelius on JD Supra. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical and had not been back to the site since.

Then I got this message:

I'm an editor at [...] magazine, planning a law office technology and practice management theme, and we absolutely need to have an article that deals with social networking as an attorney tool. I downloaded "LinkedIn to My Facebook on My Blog: Social Media for Lawyers and Law Firm " on JDSupra, and that's the kind of article we're looking for. However, it would need to be focused for our readers, who are [...] . They are mostly small office or solo practitioners who work on a contingent fee basis and rely on networking to generate business -- they're generally a little slow to move to "new" technology and need to have its pros and cons clearly described. I'm envisioning an article that will describe using social networking sites and other tools to improve both trial lawyer image and a specific lawyer's practice.

Is there any chance you could retool the article you and Jenn Steele wrote to our  [...] readership—or write an update from scratch, since the technology changes so quickly?

So I was wrong in being skeptical. JD Supra has created value for me. I went back and posted a few more articles.

Maybe you should post some of your documents and articles on JD Supra?
Have you used JD Supra?
Have you gotten anything back from JD Supra?

Stewart Mader Launches a New Venture

I had the chance to sit down with Stewart Mader and Matt Moore to talk about Enterprise 2.0 and wikis in particular: Enterprise 2.0 Discussion with Stewart Mader, Matt Moore and Doug Cornelius.   There was also bit of discussion of location based social computing (is it as good as dog urine?) and bit more in a separate podcast on social bonds and salty language.

Stewart just let me know he is branching out in a new venture and sent me this information:

"Grow Your Wiki" Grows into Specialist Consultancy

Today, I'm taking the wraps off something I've been working on for a long time.Grow Your Wiki is growing - into a specialist consultancy focused on organizational wiki adoption.

This is as much a launch of something new, as the continuation of something I've been doing for a long time. I built my first wiki in 2003, for science curriculum, and building The Science of Spectroscopy showed me the amazing capability of a wiki to bring information to life, and get people more deeply involved in its creation, growth, and use.

Since then, I've been working with organizations to introduce wikis for internal collaboration, knowledge sharing, and project management. I've done it both as a full-time job, at Emerson College and Brown University, and as a consultant for a number of other organizations. In late 2006,Atlassian (makers of the Confluence wiki) as their Wiki Evangelist, and have continued to evangelize the benefits of wiki use in an organizational context at conferences, on blogs, and in my latest bookWikipatterns. I've also continued to work with an even broader range of organizations on their wiki adoption efforts.

In the past several months, I've been fielding more and more questions from organizations that want to know how to get wiki adoption going the right way. I believe that to make wiki adoption successful and fully realize its benefits, they really need a good plan for managed growth that takes into account their size, history of enterprise software use (or misuse!), ensures people get the most out of their wiki use, and helps minimize performance and efficiency issues related to too-rapid growth.

So, I'm launching this new venture to focus all my energy on helping organizations get the most out of their investment in wikis as a collaboration, knowledge sharing, project & meeting management, and communication platform.

To that end, I'll be leaving the full-time employ of Atlassian as of this Friday, August 15th. I'll continue to work part-time on some special projects for the company until the end of September.

If you're looking to grow wiki use in your organization, I'd love to help you plan a strategy for managed growth. You can use the contact form to get in touch, and I'll get back to you within two business days.

--
Stewart Mader
Grow Your Wiki - www.ikiw.org

Stewart also sent along this tidbit on his four steps to successful wiki adoption (.pdf).

Book Review: Long Way Down

Ewan and Charlie went back on the road again.  In The Long Way Down, they depart from the tip of Scotland and travel 15,000 miles on their motorcycles to the tip of South Africa.

This journey is a follow up to their 2004 trip The Long Way Round ,when they they rode their motorcycles from London, across Europe, Asia and the US to New York City.

The Wife and I really enjoyed watching The Long Way Round when it aired on television. So when she saw The Long Way Down in the bookstore she grabbed a copy.

The book alternates between Ewan and Charlie telling the story of their journey starting from John o' Groats at the northern tip of Scotland. Each hands the story off to the other to continue as they travel across Great Britain, France, Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and finally into South Africa. Their journey ended at Cape Agulhas but they were accompanied from there to Cape Town by a group of other bikers.

To be honest, Ewan and Charlie are better television personalities than authors.  But I really enjoy watching The Long Way Round and really enjoyed the first episode of The Long Way Down, so that is a fairly high bar.

I was hoping they would highlight some of the dangers and challenges of such a long journey.  One of the purposes of the journey was to highlight some great charitable organizations in Africa.  UNICEF was a big reason for the journey.

They also highlight the effort of Riders for Health. By ensuring health workers have access to vehicles that never break down Riders for Health is making sure millions of people across Africa receive regular reliable healthcare. Riders for Health sends riders out on motorcycles to provide healthcare across the countryside.

The Long Way Down is worth buying and reading.

Social Network Site Survey

Last summer, I surveyed The Firm's summer associates to see how they use some of the popular social networking sites: A Survey on the Use of Social Networks and Updated Social Network Site Survey. I ran the same survey this summer to see what changes have happened over the past year.

• 90% of the summer associates have a Facebook account. That is an increase over the 80% result from last year.
• 66% of those with Facebook accounts check it at least once a day. This is the same percentage as last year.
• Only 25% of those with Facebook accounts would use it for business purposes. This a big drop from last year, when 75% said they would use Facebook for business purposes.
• Only 13% had LinkedIn accounts and only 13% have a MySpace account. These are similar numbers to last year.
  

My take away is that the wave of Facebook users is continuing to roll into law firms and they use it frequently.  If your firm choses to block Facebook, you are cutting your junior lawyers off from their network of contacts.

These summer associates do yet seem to grasp the business purposes for Facebook, but may quickly realize that their Facebook "friends" will quickly become their colleagues, clients and potential clients.

You can download the raw survey data: SocialNetworkSurvey2008[.xls]

What is your take on Facebook for law firms?  Please leave a comment.

Thought Leadership Space

We had a great crowd at my presentation on Establishing the Digital Relationship, along with Tim Parker and Yuval Zukerman. It looks like some of the audience really understood the message. 

Bob Buday of The Bloom Group, who set up the presentation, ran off and set up his own blog the next day: Thought Leadership Space. Here are his posts so far:

• Why Display Ads Should Display Expertise
• Can You Give Away Too Many Thoughts? 
• Horse Before the Cart 
• The lightbulb goes on! 

Web 3.0 Attorney Social Networking

Next month, I will be speaking with Paul Lippe and Robert Ambrogi on Social Networking for Attorneys for the New York Legal Marketing Marketing Association.

I am not sure why they are using a Web 3.0 designation for the program. That will really annoy the semantic Web 3.0 guys.

Even with the odd moniker, it should be a great program. Here is a more detailed description:

Most law firms have experience using some sort of web technology, particularly with their own websites and associated blogs, podcasts, alumni mini-sites, client extranets and the like. A firm's online presence has become a fundamental element of its overall marketing and communications strategy. But in today's online world, static web pages and one-sided blogs are beginning to resemble the land-line phone: great as a basic tool for communicating, but definitely not the only - or the best - connection to the world.

New and emerging technologies are providing an interactive experience and allowing users to create their own networks of connections and information. These changes are already having a direct impact on business development and enhanced client service. Online tools such as LinkedIn, Legal OnRamp, and TakeLegalAdvice, strengthen attorney-client relationships and foster collaborative efforts between law firms and in-house legal departments. The web as we know it is changing. Again.

Don't let your firm be left clinging to that land-line! Stay abreast of this exciting (and profitable) technological leap by joining us to hear from professionals at the forefront of this continually evolving technology. Led by moderator Robert Ambrogi, our panel of experts will guide attendees through practical approaches that your firm can and should be considering in this brave new world.

Web 2.0 for Professional Development

On Friday, the Professional Development Consortium invited me to co-lead some table discussions on Web 2.0 for professional development.  The PDC is a group for those "working in-house at law firms, government agencies and corporations who are charged with the responsibility of developing and administering the training and professional development for lawyers."

Chris Boyd and I led two discussions on  how web 2.0 tools can help with professional development. We started off using Jessica Lipnack's technique of asking the audience to introduce themselves and why they were here. The topic was only briefly described and very open-ended, so Chris and I were prepared to talk about a wide range of use of Web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 tools. Most of the audience claimed ignorance of web 2.0, but wanted to learn more. Most did not know what a wiki was.

Chris and I started off with a few examples of how wikis can be used:

• Chris and I use an external wiki to help communicate and organize information for ILTA's Knowledge Management Peer Group's Steering Committee. 
• I am using a wiki to plan a meeting of Toronto and New York law firm knowledge management leaders.
• I use a wiki to manage one of my client teams.  
• My knowledge management department uses a wiki to manage our projects. 

We gave the audience a handout containing the wikis and happiness picture and my Wiki While You Work article published by ILTA. Most of the discussion focused on using wikis to help manage their own internal projects.  I think the instigation was the wikis and happiness picture showing the differences between using email to collaborate and a wiki to collaborate.

The audience really grabbed onto the concepts. We turned tables of skeptics in tables of bobbing heads by the end.  Chris ran into one of the participants at dinner that night. She had already gone back to her room, built a wiki on PBwiki and announced it to her group.  I think the session was a great success.

Thanks to Bridget Huffstutler and Scott Westfahl for inviting me to the PDC Conference. A big thanks to my co-presenter, Chris Boyd.