Litigation Knowledge Management Sample Filing & Retrieval

A question was posed on the semi-private ILTA listserve this week that asked the KM peer group for assistance with folder structures that litigators have "actually used" for filing KM sample materials, presumably in folders or by document types in a document management system.  With the submitter's permission, I'm addressing that question here as well.

I can't say I've had too many positive experiences with expecting / asking lawyers to file or folder materials for KM purposes in any folder structure. This type of activity is outside their workflow, and inevitably the materials you get are very limited, quickly go stale, and / or are not referred to later.  Attorneys simply have too little motivation to routinely and successfully carry out this activity, in normal circumstances. My opinion is, if you had a detailed enough taxonomy of papers to be helpful in finding or browsing work product, it would inevitably be too complex and difficult to use from a filing perspective. In other words, it's generally not worth it and won't work (not to be too negative!)

I've taken two approaches to the "sample litigation papers" need. The one most comparable to what you are thinking of took all of the pleadings from a half-dozen cases, and grouped them in case timeline order by the most commonly used types of papers, at the following level of detail:

A. Initial Pleadings

1. Complaints (link)
2. Answers (link)
3. Replies (i.e., in response to counterclaim, not a reply brief)

B. Response to Complaint

1. Preliminary Injunction--Motion
2. Preliminary Injunction--Memorandum in Support or Opposition
3. etc. etc.

The documents were organized and displayed on our SharePoint portal via a SharePoint list. The purpose of this system is not to provide the "best" samples of particular types of papers, but to provide less experienced practitioners (such associates and paralegals) with a basic understanding of what the types of papers contain and look like.

For more substantive drafting and legal research purposes, we use document search and retrieval tool West KM, which has the huge advantages of A) automatically drawing on all of the litigation documents saved to the document management system and B) having its own automated document categorization engine. It also supplies case validation signals, and lets attorneys locate firm work product based on case and statutory authority cited in that material, which is a huge time-saver. The major effort required once it's set up is on user training and adoption.

If you don't have West KM or a comparable product such as Lexis Search Advantage, another approach you might want to consider is setting up "canned" searches of your document management system. iManage actually has fairly sophisticated capabilities in this regard, although they aren't as user-friendly as one might hope. Modern enterprise search tools also typically provide canned search capability, which can also obviate the need for lawyer filing.

Presentation to ARK Group Law Firm KM Conference

On Monday, October 27, I will be presenting on Day One of the Chicago Ark Conference on "Knowledge Management in the Modern Law Firm," at the Gleacher Center of the University of Chicago.

I'll be addressing two related topics.

The first talk is a panel on litigation knowledge management. I'm appearing with two other litigation KM practitioners (a rare treat!), Mary Panetta of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and Amy Halvorson of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. We'll be discussing strategies for handling litigation precedent collections and also collecting information about a law firm's litigation experience.

The second talk, titled "Fostering and Nurturing the Research & Development Function at Your Firm" focuses on how to enhance adoption of good KM tools.

I hope to see some of you there!

Williams and May on Thomson West KM tools

The first KM session I attended at LegalTech 2008 featured Meredith Williams of Baker Donelson and George May of Thomson West. Some of the time they addressed the West KM work product retrieval system, and some of the time they recapitulated this same team’s presentation at ILTA 2007 about the West 360 business information (see my post on the subject). The primary difference I noticed in the West 360 part was more of an emphasis on client-facing information systems. Oh, and George threw in this stress toy abuse video.

In his discussion of integrating new tools with existing functions, George also had a couple of good points about another type of “red flag” that may arise in dealing with vendors. Given the variety and importance of legacy systems, vendors should not be saying to us “you’ve taken that standard application and warped it too much, we can’t integrate with it.” Most firms are “tweaking” and customizing their apps these days, so vendors should consider some integration part of the deal.

West KM is a work product retrieval tool, well known in the legal industry, that applies West search technology to a firm’s own product. It provides a key aspect of legal context by importing live KeyCite “flags” that indicate whether a particular case or statute is still good law. It was selected and implemented at my firm before I arrived, but training and evangelizing our attorneys on it has been a significant aspect of my work. I am a big West KM fan because of the value and context it adds to our litigation work product.

George also noted, as has been previously disclosed, that West KM has taken the wise approach of letting other search engines (Recommind and Sharepoint to date) take advantage of the “value added” by the flagging and HTML features of West KM and incorporate West KM functionality within their own user interfaces.

Meredith Williams’ firm goes beyond normal, out-of-the-box implementation of the West KM application. In her talk this was framed as bringing the search into the attorney’s workflow, by breaking out parts of the application. One example is putting a direct link to a particular KeySearch topic* on a practice area page (what a good idea!). As is more “normal” for the West KM application, the case flagging aspect of West KM at Baker Donelson can be accessed through an “Insert Flags” button in Word. A click pulls in a KeyCite “flag” indicating the validity of the case or statute at issue and also provides hyperlinks to the original authority and the firm’s other work product that cites to that authority.

*KeySearch is a West KM feature that in effect is a canned search for internal firm work product related to a particular legal topic. The legal topics are those of the famous West Digest system, and the Westlaw attorneys have developed roughly 10,000 of these KeySearch topics, which are arranged in a browseable, drillable hierarchical structure.

McAfee on Enterprise 2.0 In Law Firms

Leading Enterprise 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee (he coined the term a few years back, to Davenport's disgruntlement) has taken a look at some potential implications of Enterprise 2.0 in law firms, should they move away from a billable hour-based business model. He suggests that attorneys and others at firms could be given credit for engaging in collaboration through Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, mashups, and prediction markets. Moving away from the billable hour could help knowledge workers contribute productively "in the flow", instead of having a separate track for KM or collaborative activities.

I agree with McAfee that succesful adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies will require embracing these tools "in the flow." Having separate silos for knowledge sharing work and "normal" work can be a recipe for ignoring the former. The most succesful knowledge sharing tools I've seen, such as West KM and Interwoven, rely on a tiny amount of input up front, but only such input as is demonstrably to the user's benefit. For instance, a user will put in a matter number when saving a document to a DMS because it helps the user find that document again when they search by matter. Doing so also lets us KM types bring over a lot of other context from other systems for that matter.

I'm not so sure that law firms will need to move away from the billable hour in order to be able to achieve some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. Picture a wiki that is used on a particular matter team's work, with RSS feeds and the entire team always able to access the deal or litigation status, history, and context. Or a blog by a practice area manager used to update attorney internally on the latest decisions, briefs, and practice area numbers. Even complicated systems may be adopted, if it is easy to prove to both the line-level users and the supervisors that the benefits will greatly outweigh the hassel.

Entity Extraction & Enterprise Search

Earlier in September, Ron Friedmann posted, with permission, some Oz Benamram comments from an ILTA conversation on enterprise search.

Ron opined that the ability to zero in on the best results through finding documents with a particular business or legal context, achievable in Recommind's MindServer Enterprise Search, is derived from entity extraction.

Certainly entity extraction is what Oz' firm uses and is a feature that legal enterprise search products are starting to achieve. The long time leader in the legal space is Real Practice. I am sure that other vendors are also developing entity extraction toolkits if they do not have them already (see, for instance, page 24 of this April 2007 presentation by Thomson West VP / manager of West KM George May).

But I do not believe that context has to be provided solely through entity extraction. In a professional services firm, context can also be provided through bringing in information from other systems about the matter in which the document was generated. For instance, at a law firm, a matter opening a code could be provided that indicates the "matter industry" (shorthand for the underlying business context of the matter, rather than the legal context). This information could also be imported into a matters database at the time a deal is closed, a litigation case is publicly reported, or some other triggering event. An enterprise search engine can take advantage of a "facet" like industry because both the matter and the document have a matter number that links these pieces of information. This way, the better job a firm does in capturing information about its matters, the better and more focused search it can have.

I suspect that Ron is also missing a key point about relevancy. The faceted navigation provided by Recommind and, by now, the other major enterprise search vendors such as Vivisimo*, allows the user to select the facets (such as a particular industry like shoe manufacturing) that are relevant to them, instead of presenting the user with an undifferentiated list or "wall" of results. The engine does not have to predetermine the higher relevancy of a particular author or industry because the user can drill down into what interests her. (Endeca is the firm that actually pioneered what they call "guided navigation", and they have dominated the e-commerce enterprise search market as a result.)

Of course, it isn't just the facets that matter. I understand that MindServe both provides facets for guided navigation and takes advantage of the metadata to pull up the most relevant documents (in addition to the document content). Good relevancy makes the search worthwhile but is not the only criteria since guided navigation also greatly enhances the lawyer's search experience.

Last ILTA Session: Sharepoint 2007 at Sheppard Mullin

Tom Baldwin, ILTA Regional VP, Chief Knowledge Officer at Sheppard Mullin, and blogger.

Sheppard Mullin has 500 lawyers and 1,000 users. They have 10 offices (including Shanghai).

Microsoft's Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (I use "Sharepoint" and "MOSS 2007" interchangeably to refer to this software) includes six pieces; workflow, business intelligence, collaboration, portal, content management, and search. Sheppard Mullin is "eating most of the pie" except for business intelligence.

Sheppard Mullin gets more use out of search than any other features. Microsoft has invested a huge amount in search.

Sharepoint acts as the initiator and host of workflow processes, but Sharepoint is just the front end of that (you'll need something else at the back end).

By contrast, the collaboration tools in MOSS 2007 are limited. In particular, Tom mentioned that the built-in RSS feed only has the capacity to capture one fee, and that it was not easy to customize the blogs. At Sheppard Mullin they used the "discussion thread" aspect of MOSS 2007 instead. Blogging is limited as only three blog posts fit on one page. SM lawyers had some practice area requirements, like the ability to post a document to a blog, that didn't work out of the box. An attendee cautioned that Sharepoint wikis and blogs use a completely different set of master pages, so branding has to be recreated.

MOSS 2007 led to savings in maintenance, enterprise search, and workflow at Sheppard Mullin.

Lessons Learned

They almost had too tight a conception of what they wanted. Sharepoint 2007 is very different from 2003. It can take a developer a few months to get up to speed on sharepoint 2007.

Tom suggested starting with search. It's easier to get buy-in.

Try to figure out how to consume data from as many different data as possible. Rollout of a new application might mean simply adding a new tab to a user's home page.

Microsoft may not have understood the massive scope of Sharepoint 2007 adoption across the business world. Getting support can take a while.

What Sharepoint Does For You

They wanted to provide some level of personalization for the lawyers. The portal looks at practice group, office, and title to dynamically dictate content.

A "My $" tab has partner's WIP, A/R and so forth.

There is a "My Library" list that shows research sites most relevant to that practice.

Search

The default view on the result list is by relevancy. The other option is by date. In collaboration with XMLaw, Sheppard Mullin enhanced document search results with links to relevant metadata like matter, client, and author. Sheppard Mullin's search requires licensing from XMlaw.

They have adopted matter centricity for email with Interwoven. Each matter space has documents, including emails from the matter workspace. Search may be driving import of emails into workspaces some.

The seach crawls Ceridian (HR/firm directory), accounting, and the DM.

Financial Information

They have drill-down into matter financial information through Aderant. Partners can get to pdf copies of the bills from the finance.

Knowledge Management / Expertise Location

They have a self-sourced attorney information data in a directory in Sharepoint. This was a highly-customized aspect, drawing data from 3 sources. The screen shot shows a mug shot, contact into, education, language, and bar admissions, and can be refined in faceted fashion by attorney type and practice area.

Extend Sharepoint

The standard firm home web page shows news and events are tailored to the individual--from their office and practice group. There were too many "attaboy" announcement. They now have a "vanity page" that lets the marketing department filter events. Two or three of the announcements cycle with forward/back and pause. Each office page has 10 tabs including Hotels, Restaurants (with reviews), Floor Maps, Cars, Directions; the office manager's secretary usually is the publisher.

The rollout of Compulaw will lead to the addition of a "My Docket" tab, targeted to the practice area (i.e., a transactional lawyer wouldn't see it). Tom has abandoned classroom training. Firms are adding applications at an alarming rate.

Partners have a "CFO Reports" tab that has the most current version of financial information for them.

Another "Contacts Network" application is mining email to show who at the firm knows who, with a particular focus on outside contacts. A comparison between that product and the firm's more traditional contact management software showed roughly a three-fold increase in the number of relationships exposed.

Tom has one full-time developer and there is one more in IT who deals with workflow. Apparently, in selecting developers, ".net" and Sharepoint knowledge are not good enough; Sharepoint 2007 developers also need XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language).

Usage Tracking

Tom looks at who is and who isn't running searches. He bought a separate reporting module from Microsoft (for not a lot of money). Most people providing add-ons are quite inexpensive.

West KM

It is a challenge is getting lawyers to use any separate search. Sheppard Mullin wanted to integrate West KM into their advanced search. They have been working with Thompson to get some of the functionality of West KM into their document search results.

By way of background, West KM uses some of Thompson West's well-known search technology, first to vet, and then to search a firm's internal work product.

Sheppard Mullin will be adding a tab to the results that targets "premium" content from the separate West KM document repository; documents found through this tab have a "KM Preview" option. (Tom mentioned aftewards that they might also decide to have the KM Preview be the default search tab). The "KM Preview" shows an HTML representation of the document, complete with the West KM treatment of case citations. This means:

1. a live check of a KeyCite flag (indicating whether or not a case remains good law, per Westlaw's databases);
2. a hyperlink to the full KeyCite, from Westlaw;
3. a separate hyperlink to the case authority itself; and,
4. a "km" icon to link you to all other internal firm workproduct that cites to that case authority.

[West KM is a key piece of knowledge management software for litigators at my firm. I'm impressed with Thompson's willingness to open up and work with Sheppard Mullin to integrate West KM functionality with Sharepoint search, without having the West KM logos all over the place. Of course, it is in their interest to have the West KM technology spread as far as possible, since it tends to drive people to use Westlaw research tools. They were smart to do this with MOSS 2007 since, per the general impression I received at ILTA, it looks like it will eventually be the dominant platform in the legal market.]