Toronto New York KM Forum Wrap-Up

I put together some notes from the New York Toronto Law Firm Knowledge Management Forum:

Personal Knowledge Management
Making Knowledge Management Relevant in Client Development
Sorry I do not have notes on the Future Technology/Web 2.0 session. I do have the reading lists:

• Reading List on Leveraging Human Sociability to Facilitate Knowledge Sharing
• Reading List for Social Networks & Social Media: Implications for Law Firms

Here is also Ted Tjaden's notes: Personal Knowledge Management. It sounds like he has embraced my preaching on Web 2.0 and Facebook. From my poll of the room on blogging, it is unlikely that there will be any other blog posts from other attendees.

You may have noticed that the names of the presenters and their organizations do not appear in my posts. One tenet of the New York Large Law Firm Knowledge Management Group and its Toronto counterpart is to keep them limited to actual KM practitioners in law firms. The reason is to keep the groups candid and forth-coming. Something the members agree would be harder to do if clients, consultants or others were part of the group. In an open session we would need to present a rosy picture and only focus on the positives. We would hate for our frank discussions to cast any negative light on our law firms.

My notes are somewhat incomplete and murky in places to respect the tenets of forum.

Knowledge Management's Role in Developing Better Products

One mantra of knowledge management is to not reinvent the wheel. The focus of this panel was on KM's role in developing a better wheel.

Making Knowledge Management Relevant in Client Development

This panel consisted of a representative from a U.S., Canada and a U.K. firm to share the experience of how knowledge management can integrate with marketing, client development and client communications.

There was some discussion of extranets, a place to store information for clients to find.

The UK representative has two different models for the extranet: a deal room and a client research repository. The client research repository collects client alerts and legal publications.
They also develop extranets for clients to collect there forms, knowledge and materials. Effectively being KM consultants for their clients.

A poll of audience revealed that there are very few law firms that have a fee-based legal delivery service. There are some commercial providers looking to re-market the law firm's materials.

One item they pointed out is the Proskauer Rose LLP publication on the internet: Proskauer on International Litigation and Arbitration: Managing, Resolving, and Avoiding Cross-Border Business or Regulatory Disputes. This is a great treatise that the firm invested hundreds (if not thousands) of lawyer hours to create.

An ALM survey from last year indicated that 65% of client proposals have input from the knowledge management group. The group was skeptical of that number and poll of the room revealed a much smaller number.

What should the relationship be between knowledge management and marketing?

Personal Knowledge Management

I am at a knowledge management conference today. The personal knowledge management session is focusing on ways to rethink knowledge management.

Where are we now? Knowledge management has spent a lot of time fiddling with content, finding ways to serve it up and berating people to use our systems.

The current trajectory of knowledge management is to have grand plans with bigger budgets and expanding the staff. With all of this investment, the system needs to be fail-safe. If they fail (and they do most of the time) we engage people to figure out why it did not get used.

Maybe we should concentrate on personal systems and less on firm-wide systems?

Should knowledge management adopt the Ayn Rand philosophy: Forget the collective good and focus on the individual.

Train front line lawyers to implement personal KM and KM specialist to coach the lawyers and provide the necessary tools to implement personal KM. Coach attorneys to help develop personal knowledge base, give them the platforms and systems to implement their personal knowledge base, and mine those systems to leverage across the firm.

To create a personal knowledge base, we need a strategy for transforming the random bits of information and transform it into a usable system. It is important for others in the attorney's network and for the firm to be able to harvest the individual's personal knowledge management systems.

Things like shared folders in the document management system, blogs and wikis provide simple and easy to use tools to collect information that can be harvested by others.

Does training for these personal knowledge management systems require personal training? It is hard to get attorneys into training rooms. (It is hard to get anyone into a training room). One firm has one-on-one training sessions in the attorney's office. This allows them find out what the attorney does not know and expand on the tools that work best for their practice and their workflow. It was also useful to show that attorney how other attorneys use the various tools. The benefit of the one-on-one training is that is removes the possible stigma of being identified as not knowing how to use popular tools.

Should be also make this personal knowledge system to be portable? Departing attorneys are going to take stuff with them when they leave. It may be controversial, but it is going to happen anyway. The portability could be another incentive to contribute, knowing they can take it with them. (I think we need to make sure they only take a copy.)

Part of the role of knowledge management will be to get the attorneys to use platforms that can leveraged across the enterprise. Collecting shortcuts that can shared with others is a useful to gather information for the individual, but can be harvested by others.

Incorporating the narrative is an important part of KM training. People respond to stories (particularly failure stories) better than they do to statistics and databases.

Blogger And My Blackberry

In poking around the settings on Blogger I noticed a new feature (or a feature that I have not noticed before). It allows you to set up an email address for sending blog posts. So I set up the email address, added the contact to Outlook and synced it to my Blackberry.

I am sitting on the tarmac at Logan Airporty tapping away on my Blackberry.

I have enough of an issues formatting and spellchecking my blogposts. Creating them on Blackberry is not going to help. But it is interesting to see the two communications media coming together to collect and distribute information.

Now if I can just figure out how to keep out the flotsam below from popping up in the blog post.

_________________________________
Sent from my Blackberry .

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Knowledge Management and Serendipity

One thing I noticed in our search for an enterprise search tool is the serendipity factor. People were finding interesting and informative things that they did not expect to find.

Our sample database of documents and intranet sites for testing enterprise search had been targeted at the guinea pigs in the proof of concept. We wanted to make sure that the information in the sample was some of their information. That way we could test the precision of the various search engines. The user would know about a particular document and craft a search to find it.

A good percentage of the searches would bring back a useful item that they did not know about. They would find out a colleague had drafted a memorandum on the same topic or find a brief on the subject from someone they did not know.

Two things brought up the subject of this post. One was a post on the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog: Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor by Erica Driver.

The second was my own experience using WestKm. I was giving my annual introductory knowledge management training session for the new associates last week, which includes a segment on WestKM. We use WestKm to search a subset of our Interwoven document management system using the WestLaw search engine, citation checking and other features. This subset of documents is targeted at those documents with legal analysis (as opposed to agreements), especially those with case citations or statutory citations.

Being a "seasoned" transactional lawyer, I rarely do primary research anymore. But one issue comes up every year. "What can I do about my neighbor's tree that is hanging over my yard? Can I trim the tree?" I wrote a brief memo on the issue several years ago. I use a search for this memo during my WestKM demonstration.

Serendipity struck this year when another item came up in the WestKM search results ahead of my memo. Someone else had gone and drafted a memo on the same topic for a client. (I hope that she found my memo and re-purposed it.) Unfortunately, the new memo was much better than mine. (It should be; a client paid for it.)

Another serendipitous moment was that the memorandum had the unfortunate title of "Memo to File." So, I was able to teach the new associates another lesson: Give your documents a meaningful name. "Memo to File" is not a useful name for you to find that document again. It certainly is not a useful name for someone else interested in that subject. Even though the other memo was better than mine, people would be more likely to read my memo because it is called "Tree Trimming in Massachusetts."

I find one of the great features of powerful search engines is this serendipity factor. It is always great to find interesting things that you do not expect to find. Run a Google search on yourself and see what comes up. If you have a blog, use the Google Webmaster tool or Technorati and see who is linking to your blog. Serendipity could be in your future.


knowledge management
WestKM
enterprise search
serendipity

Social Networks Update

Back in the end of July, I posted a story: Does anyone know ____?: CRM vs. LinkedIn vs. Facebook comparing the features and powers of three social network tools that I use. One aspect of the post was the number of people I knew in each system.

InterAction is the firm's Contact Relationship Management software. In the system I am identified as knowing 1362 people, up from 1300 on July 23. The system can identify who knows who so it is a social network tool. This includes people inside and outside the firm.

In LinkedIn, I now have 114 "connections" up from 62 in late July.

In Facebook, I now have 40 friends, a huge increase from the 8 I had in late July. Of those 40 almost half are people who work at my firm. Almost all of them have joined Facebook since late July.

Email is still the dominant form of business communication and has been for many years. It was no surprise that the contacts in InterAction (which is largely driven by email) continue to grow at a steady pace.

I am really surprised at the growing numbers in Facebook. Surprised is not the right word. I was surprised by the communication powers of Facebook. I think most people find that communications power to be a great tool to use. The big barrier is wading through the media coverage to try Facebook out for themselves and see what it can do for them.

I ran into one of my Facebook "friends" in the hallway. Although we had not run into each face-to-face for weeks, we both remarked how it felt like we had been talking to each other everyday.

That is the real power of social network tools: the ability to enhance personal communications.

Computers Are About Trying To Murder You In A Lake

I heard a short presentation on knowledge management on Thursday night:

"Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections.

And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake."

Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin

Wikis and Facebook

Web 2.0 technologies are starting to overlap, merge and mash together. Over the last few days I have heard of two wiki applications for Facebook.

Wetpaint released their Wetpaint Wiki Whiteboard application for Facebook. Wikimono released their Facebook wiki.

I do not think I have much use for a wiki application on my Facebook profile. But, I would love to see a wiki application in the Facebook Groups. So far, I am bit underwhelmed by the groups function in Facebook. It is great that you can send a message to the whole group and use the wall and discussion board. I am not sure why there is a wall and a discussion board. I would really like the ability to add applications to the group and have applications developed for groups. A group wiki is the first thing that came to mind.

Conference Live Blogging

The Boston KM Forum this week was the first conference I attended that I did not live blog since I started blogging. I was surprised at how alien I found the experience. I was writing down my notes instead of typing them. I kept wanting to look up the presenter's background information, links to the subjects and links to studies they mentioned.

I intended to live blog, but I chose a bad place to sit and had technical problems. It certainly reinforced by belief that conference blogging is a great way to capture a presentation and my thoughts on the presentation.

Dave Snowden was live blogging at the conference and was able exchange some posts, comments and connections during the conference. My notes felt very cold and stale when I started assembling them later in the day.

Dave Snowden point out some conference blogging tips from Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman that he found at TED: Lunch over IP: Tips for conference bloggers - for downloading.

I also came across Josh Hallett's Hyku post on How to Blog a Conference.