Corresponding with Cornelius on Collaboration with Clients

In a post earlier this week Doug Cornelius (now over at Compliance Building) hit the extranet nail on the head by identifying the primary obstacles and benefits to extranet collaboration. His post sparked a flurry of activity with Luis Suarez of IBM making enticing comments about LotusLive (I have yet to check it out although I do note that now it is, in fact, live).

At ILTA 08 I heard of some firm-provided extranets through which clients obtained some access to up-to-date billing and fee information. Although it had to be done on a one-off basis, the clients who received that information valued it highly.

In addition to the instance of the large deal that requires very detailed item-level security access control, products liability litigation provides another extranet use case. There a whole set of cases revolves around a recurring group of experts, expert reports, plaintiff's attorneys, coordinating counsel, and local counsel. From the defense perspective, there is great value in aggregating information from many different people (such as local and coordinating counsel from law firms) who are repeatedly interacting with the same players and some of the same documents; you would think that could happen more easily on an extranet, though perhaps the logistical issues you note are a challenging barrier.

For their own marketing and KM needs, firms such as mine may already have collected information about the matters that clients also need and would like to have. If firms can aggregate and display (on an extranet) in a robust way rich sets of information about a lot of cases they handle for a major client, they are providing more value to the clients. That may initially be more of an information-gathering and reporting problem, but even this type of information could be made more useful through an interactive and collaborative online environment.

The First Enterprise-Class Social Search For Law Firms: Interwoven Universal Search & Lexis Search Advantage Come To Market

I saw an updated demonstration of the Interwoven Universal Search / Lexis Search Advantage (IUS/LSA?) search product in early December 2008. An excellent lunch by Radius was part of the inducement to visit.

IUS is powered by Vivisimo's enterprise-class search engine. I was pleased to be able to see a more fulsome demonstration of the IUS/LSA product following on the demonstration at ILTA, now with the addition of a potentially powerful social search component for the law firm market.

Background

IUS/LSA is a feature-rich, complicated product. I don't mean to imply that it would be difficult for users to understand, although certainly getting them to use the social search features would be a challenge just like rolling out any new business process is a challenge. I've therefore identified some previous posts in the next paragraph, should you like some background information on enterprise search, social search, and work-product retrieval search.

I first blogged about Vivisimo's social search in October 2007, covering Vivisimo's initial announcement, Lyndo Moulton's framing of social search from a "traditional KM" perspective, and then a live demo of "Velocity 6.0" as that product is called. In August 2008 I also blogged about implementations of IUS (without a social search component) at three law firms; I also noted the rollout announcement for IUS / LSA, again, without a social component, largely by reference to my former colleague Doug Cornelius' highly favorable post on KM Space. For more see my posts with the "enterprise search" tag.

IUS/LSA combines "work product retrieval" and "enterprise" search. As quite nicely explained by Cindy L. Chick in this 2004 post on the subject, these two have been essentially different categories of search products, with the the former sharply focusing on a limited pool of internal (perhaps highly vetted) precedent, and the latter "federating" or broadly combing different pools or silos of enterprise information. Typical content "sources" for enterprise search include a document management system, intranet, and traditional enterprise database such as Expert/Aderant.

The rest of this post discusses particular features of IUS/LSA.

Case Linking and Validation

A key feature of IUS/LSA is its outstanding case validity check (through signals from Shepard's case updating service) and citing references links. The search identifies cases and statutes present in the content and takes that reference information to Lexis' enormous database, containing information how courts have treated each published decision (i.e., citing favorably, overuling, etc.). It returns a signal to the search engine, which is visible as a flag of some sort in an HTML view of the document from within the search (on a click).

Case validity tells attorneys reviewing work product that the cases (or statutes) are or are not valid; citing references provide an extremely efficient way to find or collect all of the work product on a particular topic, by linking all of the work product that cites to a particular case or statute.

The significance of case validation for busy attorneys cannot be overstated. Litigators are constantly weighing the strength of their arguments, based on the facts at their disposal and the extent to which those facts mesh with a legal theory. Legal theories themselves carry varying degrees of authority or persuasiveness—compare for instance the complete invalidation of slavery under the XIII Amendment to the US constitution with the Supreme Court rulings on the validity or invalidity of various race-based affirmative action plans. Case validation allows lawyers to tell at a glance if they might be treading on shaky ground in citing to a particular line of cases.

The "citing references" ability (my term, not theirs) allows researchers to quickly find other work product resources that cite to the same case law or statutory resources. Since lawyers making a legal argument ethically must cite to the leading authority in their jurisdiction on a given point, even if to distinguish its application in the present instance, finding other instances of case citation can quickly lead you to other instances where other lawyers have made the same arguments (or argued the same point from the other side!). Examining work product that cites to less significant authority can also be very productive, since this authority may be one of a line of cases on the your side of a particular issue.

Both of these features are found in West KM, although West KM is not currently bundled with an enterprise search tool as powerful, versatile, and social as IUS. In particular, the ability to cluster results on the case and statutory authority is extremely powerful.

Social Search

The newest aspect of IUS/LSA is Vivisimo’s cutting-edge social search features taken from Velocity 6.0. These have been officially released, although I do not personally know of any law firms that have actually implemented these features in production (they have been available in the broader business community for something less than a year, I believe).

Once results are found, users can tag, rate, or comment. The main initial use of tagging is to help individual users refind their documents and create personal precedent collections. The magic of tagging is that each tag in turn enhances findability of documents (they directly effect relevance ranking) and expertise. Users can also tag into "shared folders," say by practice area.

Furthermore, users can identify who applied the tag and see all of a users' tags. Pivoting on known user information is a big advantage of tagging inside the enteprise (as compared to anonymous social tagging such as available on delicious).

One of the truly powerful aspects of integrating tagging into search (tags are applied at the time a search result is displayed) is that it integrates tagging into normal work flow. Users search all the time; they don't have to go a separate system to enter a tag, and the tags are immediately displayed and available for their own use the next time around.

I am a huge fan of social tagging . It is a key aspect of Enterprise 2.0, will greatly enhance findability for individual users, and then will only get better as more and more people add their own targeted markers of significance and relevancy. Ranking and commenting also have great potential for enhancing search inside the enterprise.

Guided Navigation

Like other enterprise-class search tools, IUS displays sets of results clustered by key metadata alongside a directly accessible relevancy-ranked set of search results. Where a collection contains significant metadata, drilling down into a set of search results through clusters of metadata is much more effective than a simple ranked list, because it lets users identify resources with directly relevant attributes or whose attributes are close enough to be useful. It also might let a searcher exclude large sets of returned documents.

For instance, a litigator looking for a Markman brief in patent litigation where guided navigation is available might search across all courts, but then drill down into the particular jurisdiction or into jurisdictions in the same federal circuit.

Semantic or Concept Clustering

In addition to clustering into categories predefined by DMS administrators, the Vivisimo engine has the remarkable ability to group documents into clusters based on concepts extracted from the documents. Vivisimo's "calling card" is its ability to generate clusters of documents based on similarities between groups of documents; at the same time, it identifies the groups by what it determines to be key characteristics of that "cluster." Depending on what the settings are, there can be clusters within clusters, allowing you to drill down into the set of documents most relevant to your search (instead of starting the search over when you get too many hits).

See for instance this clusty.com search for "senators", which lists "members" (of Congress) "Ottowa Senators" (the hockey team), "Legislation, Law" (which includes state senate information), and so forth.

Expertise Identification

The out-of-the-box people search looks at document authorship and official firm website biographies. Expertise can also be identified through looking at who is tagging what, which is exposed both through the lens of individual tags and through a view of a user profile. I suspect it would be also possible to use IUS/LSA to incorporate and analyze billing and matter records to further refine the people search.

Searching Across Silos

A key challenge for KM and information management strategy is the distribution of enterprise content across mutually exclusive “silos” of information. A matters database might have information about the general type of work being done on a particular deal and the partner who opened the matter; a document management system might have documents tagged with those same matter numbers; a separate system might contain final pleadings or vetted content; and a billing system might indicate who has worked on that matter the most. Typically the three sets of data never meet, and certainly cannot be leveraged in any reasonably user-friendly manner.

Enterprise search, of whatever platform, provides the “glue” that can bring all of these pieces together. A search for Delaware patent litigation briefs through such an engine might identify not just the Markman brief that the attorney was looking for, but also patent matters and people who with previous experience from that jurisdiction. In some use cases an enterprise search might even extent to designated or licensed content from the internet or proprietary databases.

IUS/LSA clusters based on source as well as documents' content and metadata.

Spotlights

IUS also has "Spotlights", very much like “Best Bets” or canned prepared sets of responses to particular queries. Knowledge management or other firm groups can promote particular sets of precedents or practice guide. In the demo, a search for "motion philadelphia" gets "How to file a motion in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas."

This kind of spotlighting ties in well with efforts to provide procedural guidance for litigators, or deal checklist assistance to junior business lawyers. I am engaged on a wiki-based project to gather just this kind of information (on the litigation side).

Metadata

The search previewed here will also add metadata about court and judge to that about cases and statutory references. This is through a trick known as “entity extraction”, where key parties or case numbers from the documents are matched up with party, case, and judge information from Lexis’ massive databases. I am not sure if this feature has been publicly released.

Profiling

They also demonstrated automatic document profiling, through which documents can get assigned document types such as memo, pleading, correspondence, and so forth, based on their content and similarity to comparison sets of documents. I do not believe this feature has been publicly released either.

Information Gravitation

Some clients are using search to populate client pages that combine information from internal sources and saved searches of the web, in Sharepoint web parts. They have a federated search connector for Google, or, can search particular sites.

Such pages highlight enterprise search's ability to expose and make useful content previously buried in unconnected databases.

Kennedy and Mighel on Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools--ILTA Wednesday AM

Title and Session Link and Slides: Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools (Blogs, Wikis, MashUps, IM, Text Messages, Social Networks and More)

Description:

Collaboration technologies help promote information sharing, efficiency, cost reduction and can provide competitive advantages. How does the legal environment deal with the information overload and the security of confidential information escaping the realm of the organization? What aspects of legal information need to be considered to help determine how collaboration tools should be utilized in the legal world (and when they should not)? What policies must be in place to protect the shared information?

Speaker(s):


Tom Mighell - newly of Fios
Dennis Kennedy - MasterCard Worldwide
Their new collaboration for lawyers blog

My take:

There were two nice moments in Dennis’ and Tom’s presentations on collaboration today and yesterday. At the end of both, they had a “contest” to find the person who had most recently joined legal technology. Two people who had been doing legal tech for less than three months were selected, and received a copy of the collaboration book. That was the spirit of ILTA!

Dennis’ main thrust was that, because collaboration is no longer an option, we need practical approaches to addressing collaboration issues. Free internet tools make it easier to collaborate, perhaps without your knowledge.

Much of Tom & Dennis’ talk was at a fairly abstract level. Although they clearly knew their subject well, they didn’t have as many specific examples or choices of collaborative tools that lawyers might make as I would have liked. Perhaps it would have helped to focus on a particular aspect of collaboration technology, whether it be document collaboration management, wikis, social networking, or another smaller part of this large field, or to focus on collaboration at a particular type of firm, be it solo, small, large, or corporate. Even so, they did not address IP issues, discoverability, or contractual implications of collaborative lawyering.

There was a fair amount of interesting audience participation. For instance, they elicited that no one at the presentation had firm-branded blogs that allow comments. 10% or so of the people present had firm IM systems, or allowed external systems in. Tom mentioned that some firms are using IM-style messaging that lives wholly inside browsers.

Web 2.0 has allowed people to move from team collaboration to community collaboration. One example is Yelp. It is a site for food that lets you pose questions and get answers. Another example is delicious.

LinkedIn recommendations are an area of potential concern.

Google Sites lets you display calendars, financial information, and documents in one place “like Sharepoint.”

What can we do to select good collaboration tools? An example of how not to select a tool is “track changes” in Word. Once that cycle gets started, it’s hard to break out. IM methods should be secure. If you survey what people are using, you’ll be surprised at what you use. One can then start to guide people to the right tools to use.

Litigation support has been functioning as project managers for a long time. The new technology makes it easier to keep track of documents and what people are doing. The goal should be to enhance workflow.

We use email too much now as a collaboration tool. The ultimate goal is to have happier, more connected clients.

Loss of control is one common concern. Transactional lawyers are taught to control the draft. Working in Google docs does not provide that same feeling of control.

Tom said that “firms are starting to move to Google apps.” When I asked him about this after the formal session, he indicated that this statement was based on anecdotal evidence about smaller firms. Some attorneys think that having stuff on other people’s computers is more problematic. The reason seems to be that when your own machines fail and your data center goes down, you can do something about it. Personally, I’d rather have Google’s 500+ security engineers and global reputation worrying about my documents than the 2-3 people the firm can afford. Tom indicated that the Google brand makes people feel more comfortable about security.

Going outside the firewall inevitably raises security issues. Even a Service Level Agreement (SLA) will not protect you if the vendor goes out of business. Another issue with new collaborative tools is the process for allowing downloads of new software.

The two main technology use issues addressed by the ABA have been email and metadata. The ABA issued an opinion that email need not be encrypted to maintain attorney-client privilege. At least one state has found that lawyers should have some knowledge that metadata exists, and that lack of knowledge of that fact is a potential violation of their ethical violation. A Canadian opinion stated that attorneys should know the technologies that they are using to serve their client.

Appropriate balance between risks and benefits.

If the telephone was just rolled out today, some firms would consider it too risky. The risks should be compared with other existing risks. How do risks for wikis compare with those for existing documents? IM vs. email?

You have to go with the culture of the firm to some extent.

Cost of "Free" Collaboration Products

Security, backup, lack of guarantees, and hidden costs all make most “free” tools less than free. What additional hardware will be required?

Collaboration Choices

Firms should have a “basket” of collaborative choices. Some can be high-risk, high-reward options. Having an appropriate policy is important. You want to channel appropriate behaviors. Controls might cover things like blogging, use of particular sites, and assessing what programs are running on the firm systems.

Whatever systems firms use must have authentication and security features. Tom feels that there should be a blogging policy. You wouldn’t want to have unmoderated comments on a firm-branded blog. Taking a public position on a policy could lead to problems with a position taken in a future lawsuit.

The SLA with the collaboration vendor must spell out specific guarantees and what happens in the event of a breach or business failure.

Tom feels that the price of gas is one of the factors driving collaboration and videoconferencing.

Next Steps

Tom and Dennis left us with three recommended action steps to further our firms’ handling of collaboration issues.

1. assemble whatever firm policies may apply
2. look at collaboration tools in use (through a survey?)
3. sketch out the main issues in a potential collaboration tools policy

Enterprise RSS Day of Action and RSS Learning

Tomorrow is the Enterprise RSS Day of Action. Because I can't link to it enough, by way of background, I'll post again to Common Craft's basic but brilliant explanation of RSS in Plain English.

I've been up to my elbows in Enterprise RSS as my firm has been evaluating various vendors and I've been making presentations to groups and individuals about RSS over the last two weeks in particular.

I view RSS as a key technology for taking advantage of the tremendous wealth of fresh information available on the Web. Because RSS is based on the flexible .xml standards, RSS within the firewall has tremendous potential to solve some existing problems and enhance knowledge sharing.

One of the existing problems is corporate "spam" or irrelevant, bothersome email. Email comes in a glut into my Inbox and I have to do something with it--mark it as read, or delete it, at a minimum, which means to pay some attention to it because I don't know what it's about until it's in there. By contrast, an RSS feed comes into an Outlook reader already categorized by the type of information it belongs to, whether a litigation victory announcement, lost mail, conflict check, or whatever else. I choose when to pay attention to that category of information instead my having to pay some attention to whatever's there, lest I lose something that is actually directed to me in the flood of emails.

Enterprise RSS can enhance knowledge sharing. It will inform you if a change is made to an internal wiki or blog--critical for quality assurance on these internal knowledge sharing platforms. As the KM team I am on has learned through use of pbwiki.com, such a notification also greatly enhances the project management use of a wiki.

This week I have been learning more about the power and flexibility of RSS. See this excellent post on how to mash up and otherwise play with RSS feeds. Not all of the services described here are 100% reliable or necessarily useful for enterprises, but I don't think it would take a genius to figure out how some of these "tricks" could apply within the firewall.

Today to my delight I learned from LifeHacker how to convert an email subscription to an RSS feed, using mailbucket.org (tip of the hat to Damon Jablons*). Getting email subscriptions out of my Outlook Inbox makes me really happy. It may let me help others overwhelmed by email.

If you want to learn more about RSS, I recommend you check out the popular Delicious tags on RSS.

*name previously misspelled.

Why are wikis better collaboration tools than email?

It is hard to capture the "flow" of a business process with words, just like it is difficult to grasp the aural universe(s) present in the score of a late Beethoven quartet.

Jim McGee of JVM Associates* provides a striking visual explanation of the reason for the superiority of wikis as a collaboration tool. Just like the "Yays" and "Boos" of the Common Craft video, this diagram (once you get past the smiley faces) says it all. Users have to do roughly more work more often with email. It's time to wikify the law firm!

*Thanks to Dennis Kennedy for the tip, from his weekly links.

Social Connectivity and Business

Clay Shirkey, author of Here Comes Everybody, recently posted on what social connectivity "means" for business. He suggested that some major changes have already started to occur, giving as one example the ability of a heretofore disorganized group of individuals (airline passengers) to get their act together through blogs and other participant-based internet activity and successfully lobby for the Passenger's Bill of Rights, in opposition to the airline industry. (Clay did not identify this law, which is a New York state law, N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law s 251-H, Article 14-A, giving airline passengers rights such as food and water, recently unsuccessfully challenged in the Northern District of New York.).

In the legal arena, clients could organize in similar fashion. Many individual clients of a law firm might have insufficient interest and desire to organize. I imagine, however, that corporate and institutional clients in many cases have sufficient social-networking awareness and wherewithal to organize around issues of common interest.

Indeed, some such organization is already starting. According to David Jabbari, a "Know-How" leader* at Allen & Overy, as reported here, some of the big banks in Europe joined forces and required their firms to publish their client alerts on a single Banking Legal Technology web site, without charge to the clients. In this case the banking industry's will to cooperate may have been there already, but the technology was only recently able to meet that objective.

Legal On-Ramp's corporate counsel section is another example. The idea is that some law firms would provide some good current content "free" in return for greater visibility with clients. More explicitly, OnRamp marketplace allows clients to "place matters anonymously to evaluate lower-cost alternatives for legal services."

*just call it KM already!

Vivisimo hits the bullseye--Rebecca Thompson on Velocity 6.0

I'm attending a presentation at the Omni-Parker Hotel on Vivisimo's new enterprise search tool that promises to bring enterprise 2.0 to search. Rebecca is the VP of Marketing at Vivisimo. I attended a reception afterwords, but did not partake of the "Terminal Velocity" tequila drink.

Organon --"Where enterprise search is today."

Rebecca showed a sample search screen from pharmaceutical company Organon. As she rightly pointed out, most companies do not have a search this effective. Their enterprise search has content from a variety of domains (types of sources) including people bios / intranet / internent / sharepoint/ documentum / network. Like other Vivisimo GUIs I've seen, it has multiple sets of clustered results, one based on its semantic navigation, and two others by criteria (or metadata) specific to pharma, one by "therapeutic area" metadata and another by "brand name" metadata.

Next Steps--Enterprise Search 2.0

Web 2.0 is changing user expectations. People now want to interact with the information in a simplified way. If they have to take a training class, it's not going to happen. People go home to web 2.0. they use delicious, facebook, digg it, and share information (my informal surveys of our youngest associates suggest that these tools have not quite penetrated as far as Rebecca suggests). The new generation's method of communicating has been facebook--there is no need to send email when they can post. (This is certainly true--see my colleague Doug Cornelius' post on summer associates' use of web 2.0 technology). The sites are so easy to use that people won't suffer through training. Their common complaint is, "Why can't we have a corporate facebook."? They want "a better way to communicate and collaborate."

Enterprise search is a natural fit with collaborative software because the search goes across content domains and pulls in content from different sources.

Social search gives people power and control over their search, also leads to buy-in through their investment and participation in the process.

Three aspects of social search in Velocity 6.0

· Social Tagging
· Collaboration
· Social Networking

Social Tagging

There are three types of social tagging in Velocity 6.0 ("6.0").

The first and simplest option is "voting" on usefulness of results by clicking on a green "thumbs up," or a red "thumbs down." Votes can affect relevancy, or not, as you choose. There can also be some "super-raters" whose votes have more weight or who are the only people whose votes count. The system knows who you are, so you can change your vote (and can't vote multiple times on one document).

A second kind of tagging is "rating." One to five stars, and average rating is also displayed. Rating has the same set of controls on whether relevancy is affected. The engine can sort results by ratings.

The third way is adding keywords (I'd call this real "tagging"). The keywords become metadata bound to the search result and add context to the documents that you and others can see. The firm can control the available vocabulary for tagging--auto fill or drop-down list. Permissions to tag are controlled in the same fashion as voting and rating. Tags will not reveal documents otherwise marked as secure and documents are not revealed to a walled-off person just because they search on that tag. The engine will start to show similarly-spelled tags as you type. The 6.0 engine displays and finds tags by clusters on your search result.

Collaboration

Users can also annotate search results with their own thoughts and commentary. People's comments on documents remain as a type of institutional knowledge. This can turn into a view of people's work and experience.

Every user has a profile and can be alerted if there is a change in a search result or a given tag. This is a "reader-like" feature that can lead to more collaboration as users can see others that are working on similar issues or documents.

Virtual Folders

6.0 has "virtual folders" where search results can be stored. Folders can be public or private, although I did not see the "private" feature in the GUI of the demo. Individual search returns, that is, pieces of content, are dragged into that folder.

Virtual folders are shared on a group or public level.

One client of theirs, a "major NY-based media company", has a fixed group of KM / library researchers who set up folders on particular topics, and then grant project teams have read-only access.

Virtual folders appear only when relevant to your particular search.

One limitation, elicited by a questioner, is that you can't tag or annotate an external URL. Binding search results to documents rather than URLs allowed faceted guided navigation.

Social Networking

Search for personnel shows the tags that they've used. A search for content can also switch to a view of the people who have authored or tagged the content.

Clustering on employee results--after running a search for a particular key word, 6.0 can further cluster semantically on the employee information. This approach appears to be a great way to find particular types of employees with particular expertise.

Administration

As an administrative and KM tool, 6.0 has a set of tagging dashboards. They show top keyword tags, top taggers, by time frame. It helps manager see what employees are doing and demonstrate ROI.

The next step will be to give people more control over what they see in the results.

Other Thoughts

Rebecca recommended to treat search as an ongoing, living project. Don't set it up and walk away. Keep an eye on user behavior and on how content is changing.

Velocity 6.0 can be configured to ignore or stop clustering on certain terms, or to relate one "theme" to another, if, for instance, a company name was also an acronym.

Looking Back At What I Wanted

Last week I posted on the 6.0 announcement. There were a couple of features I was looking for:

1. Pivoting on other users' tags and favorites;
2. Pivoting around others' tags;
3. Ranking or segregating people's tags on documents based on their role within an organization;
4. Controlled sets of tags (as an option);
5. Predicting and displaying others' tags based on what you have started typing;

The short answer is, the demo I saw absolutely had features 1, 2, 4, and 5. It also had the ability to rank the tagging based on a person's role in the organization, which is close to what I was looking at in feature 3 (you can have "super taggers").

Reaction

Vivisimo has really hit the Enterprise 2.0 target here. The four different ways that 6.0 brings in social collaboration into search have the potential to provide a rich, intuitive search experience inside the firewall, without much training required. Both tagging and virtual folders have tremendous potential to enhance collaboration and findability of content and people. And it's already associated with a really strong enterprise search engine.

The lawyerly skeptic in me wonders if lawyers will start contributing by rating, ranking or tagging, when a social collaboration tool like this is turned on. I think, however, that because a tool such as tagging has immediate personal benefit (i.e., it will help you find what you've previously found), without requiring significant investment of time, it will likely catch on. Tagging has even more benefit the more and more broadly it is used.

Taking advantage of the annotation feature will be more complicated and may require significantly more structure and institutional investment such as organization by practice areas, since lawyers by training can be quick to criticize and are proportionally more concerned about others' criticism of their comments.

Lynda Moulton on Social Search

It feels like there has been a tremendous crunch on my time since roughly mid-November. With the holidays approaching I am finally getting around to revving up some posts on this blog again, and clearing out some discussions that I have been saving up for a while.

I attended (in person) Lynda Moulton's talk introducing business motivators for social search , part of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 Boston event in Boston that I posted about earlier. Lynda's talk was quite dense but provided a "knowledge management" take on this collaborative technology; that is, she explained in terms familiar to knowledge practitioners the reasons why social search provides such an advantage over search without social context.

Lynda posted on the session as well.

Why does social search help?

Under the knowledge management concepts of "trust and validation," people will use most and seek to find content (such as a prior brief of a litigation expert) that has been validated by someone they trust. The extent of someone's trust in content is based on the content's expertise, authority, and affiliation as well the seeker's professional and personal relationships with the source or "voucher" of the content.

Seeking the company of others with similar business challenges is an existing, sound KM model for "bringing more to your work." Meeting in a trusting spirit and participating in sharing is known as a great way to get more out of content and your business.

How Does Social Search Help?

There are several different styles or methods of knowledge sharing.

• Informing--reflected by commentary and analysis


• Visualizing--done by dashboards, clustering


• Demonstrating--reflected in clustering and federating


• Expository--done by annotating and tagging

Together these tools play to our inclination to be self-sufficient with our technologies (and these tools work together in a social search enterprise tool). The human touch has much to offer clarity of knowledge. People are willing to engage in knowledge sharing when in fits in their workflow. You have to have early adopters, enthusaistic self-starters, and sharers. Once they demonstrate to others, it becomes contagious. Being able to see how others view a set of content, without having to ask them, is a new way of looking. We expect social search to play a strong role in organizing activities and work, at many levels.

• for communities of practice--organize people
• for domains--organize content repositories
• for content--organize search targets, be they documents, video, web pages, or people's expertise
• for clusters--organize content groupings
• for tags--social tagging has no controlled vocabulary, metatagging is controlled.

Can social search "transform behaviors into business wins"?

Social search has the potential to elevate search discoveries into teaching moments:

• it can leverage lost assets
• it can save others time by placing discoveries in view with notations
• nuggets of information can place content in context.

(This is really important because context is the bane of the legal work product searcher's existence--you need to know what how the document's litigation / deal / transaction context differs from yours in evaluating whether to use a sample or form).

Because of people's demand for trust, who was associated with a document can be just as important as what it is. (to provide an example, the brief on an evidentiary point authored by a partner noted for his learning on the subject is infinitely more valued than the one-off memo of the summer associate).

Leveraging your network can save you time--annotating what you learn as you learn it increases your own understanding and that of others as well.

Clustering has the effect of revealing relevant content no matter how you search for it.

Tagging can prevent the "second fire drill."

Benefits of these social behaviors accrue over time.

Social Search Adapts Content To The Culture Of Organization

Social search moves the content into an organization that members of a common culture understand.

For instance, the pharmaceuticals industry is highly technical, with strong demand for efficiency, and its teams are made up of professionals with advanced degrees (I think Lynda suggested that taggers and annotations in this culture can afford to be quite technical and not intelligible to those without a Ph.D in biology.)

In media, content is multi-media, poorly labeled. Teams are highly collaborative, and need in-depth and accurate fact-finding.

Financial services pushes tens of thousands of products and funds out to its millions of customers. Customers have a wide variety of sophistication. Customers are also trading partners.

Perhaps more collaboration and knowledge sharing in the defense industry would have led to a lower priced toilet seat.

Recommendations For Social Search Projects

Lynda recommended that a social search project needed to start with some questions about an organization's content:

What are our most important knowledge assets?

Could we benefit from collaboration?

Why would content sharing get to better business processes?

Lynda had several recommendations for implementation of any social search.

• Build a map of who works and what content they use (I don't see how this is any kind of prerequisite for implementation of social search. Part of the idea is to let people build thier own maps of the content they use and see how they fit with others' maps).
• Find teams with early adopter attitudes and with serious information gathering challenges;
• Get a vision, a target that will give an edge;
• Get a bunch of wins;
• Communicate the outcomes and plan for the next; and,
• Don't expect technology to solve the problem.

You will need people who understand content and content architecture, especially on teams that might otherwise be skeptical.

Metrics

A woman in the audience asked if metrics for proving success are different with social search? Lynda suggested that the best metrics are stories. Search logs can also be a good source of success proof. You can set up a system where the expectation of how it is supposed to work is conveyed up front.

( I don't find this satisfactory--can't you look at amount of content, ranking, annotations contributed, to develop metrics and establish a return on investment? Another way to establish success would be to conduct pre-and post-rollout surveys of people's satisfaction with their ability to find stuff. The hazard there would be conducting the survey too soon since the value of this type of search would increase dramatically after people had been contributing content for a while).

Major enterprise search development--Vivisimo & social search

Enterprise search vendor Vivisimo announced this week that they will be including a social collaborative component with the next version ("6.0") of their software. Lynda Moulton blogged about it; she is presenting next week at both a Vivisimo-sponsored webinar and also a more private event that I will be attending (disclosure: I may get a free lunch out of the deal). I have heard Lynda speak in the past and have generally been impressed with her depth of knowledge about search.

Accessing Group Smarts Through Tagging and Ranking

Providing some social context, through user tagging, shared user search result ranking, and exposure of other's favorites, has great potential to enhance findability and context inside the firewall, and I think 6.0 is a major development. I have previously posted an introduction to tagging, pivoting in Del.icio.us, and on CommonCraft's "howtoon" video introduction to social tagging.

The leading example of leveraging mass opinion to enhance findability that I know of outside the firewall is Amazon. Amazon uses not just these three methods of social collaboration, but also now has designated key reviewers, user blogs, and much more, such as listing "what do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?" But the key remains other people's reviews, which let you know if what you are considering buying is any good, and other people's tags, which help you find the products. It is no accident that other major evendors such as Tiger and even brick-and-mortar powerhouses like Sears have jumped on the customer review/ranking bandwagon. It simply works, for the users and the companies.

I've been reading legal scholar Cass Sunstein's Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, which provides a clear explanation for the effect of "group wisdom" on decision making. He is quite hopeful, though not Pollyannish, on our ability to pool information. If people on average are more than 50% likely to rank and tag accurately (substitute "answer a question right" or "make a decision" as needed), then with a large group, ranking will tend to dramatically enhance accuracy, that is, the group will almost always identify "the right answer" or the most relevant page or document for the particular search. The outlier case is the converse; if users are not likely to be accurate (as when asked to guess the distance to the moon, or who will win the next Federal Circuit decision on obviousness leading to patent invalidity), then a large group will be even less likely than an individual to be accurate.

The more people and the more content you throw at it, the better group intelligence will do. By contrast, interpersonal collaboration and intrafirm internal communication becomes much harder the larger (and more geographically scattered) the enterprise gets. Tagging, like other enterprise 2.0 tools, has a way of making the enterprise feel smaller.

Other Social Software Inside The Firewall Vendors

There was some fairly insightful coverage of Vivisimo's announcement in eWeek comparing Vivisimo's offering with a social collaboration module introduced by guided navigation pioneer Endeca. From a professional services perspective, I think it compares more closely with Connectbeam. Connectbeam provides social collaboration inside the firewall, organized around private, group, and company "topics," but does not itself have a search component; their publicity materials indicate, however, that they have connectors and have integrated with "major enterprise search engines" (by which they seem to mean Google and Fast.) Honeywell apparently implemented Connectbeam with Google Enterprise in March 2007.

There was also coverage of 6.0 in Information Week.

Another enterprise social software vendor, this one purely on the "tagging" side, is Cogenz. They have an excellent demo that serves as a good introduction to tagging (see also my previous post on Del.icio.us, a free web tagging service that can be integrated with Cogenz' product) I especially liked their promotion of tagging as the way to "tap into the collective intelligence of an organization by collecting, sharing and connecting around unstructured information."

One question is whether these tools have a connector or can readily be integrated with Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 intranet / DMS search. Many firms already have it, it's free, and some firms (like Sheppard Mullin) have used it as the basis for intranet searches.

Features of 6.0?

I'll be curious to see if, like Connectbeam, "6.0" will allow users to pivot on other users' tags and favorites, as well as pivot around others' tags. Will it be possible to rank or segregate people's tags on documents based on their role within an organization? A litigation partner might only want to look at sample complaints or settlement agreements that have been used or endorsed by another such person.

I will also look for how 6.0 manages the tension between the organization wanting control over what the tags might be (and perhaps to drive them to certain content and away from other content) and the necessity to free up people to make up tags that make sense to them. I've noticed with my Delicious tags that it is all too easy to add a comma or use a slightly different word and thereby miss much of the context that tagging can provide. Cogenz handles this tension by predicting and displaying others' tags based on what you have started typing. I'm curious if more popular tags will be displayed first.

Enterprise 2.0 and face-to-face interaction

These days, knowledge management practitioners work on computer technologies day-in and day-out. I think it is fair to say that without the power of technologies, starting with email and moving on up to collaborative technologies like blogs, wikis, and Sharepoint lists, many of us might not have jobs.

These technologies are so powerful in part because they enable communication in multiple ways. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, a presenter opined that communication technologies could be broken down by the number of communicants on each side of the transmission:

• One person to one person: telephone, IM, email.
• One person to many people: intranets, (email), blogs.
• Many people to one person/company: RSS, message boards, suggestion boxes.
• Many people to many people (web 2.0): video teleconference, face book, wikis, del.icio.us, blogs with actual comments.

(I wish I could identify who said this, but I wasn’t doing live blogging then.)

I think these technologies are amazing and would reject any suggestion that I am a Luddite, ready to toss my laptop. Yet much suggests that the most effective communications occurs face-to-face (a/k/a F2F, F/F) and not through any of these methods.

For instance, LucasFilm has moved its special effects, animation, and computer gaming groups under one roof at the Presidio in San Francisco—even these technologically savvy people say in Business Week that with their projects requiring high-level collaboration, “there's no substitute for face-to-face interaction for their team-oriented projects.” (“The Empire Strikes at Silos”, August 20, 2007).

Looking back over my fairly brief time in the field, I have found that face-to-face training and approach has been a critical part of most KM successes I have had. Once I build trust with attorneys through face-to-face interactions, I can be much more effective in transmitting skills and information to them.

Why is face-to-face so much more effective? There are lessons from the science and KM literatures, art, and the law.

One of the most recent scientific or business literature articles to address the uniqueness of face-to-face was an article in the August 2007 issue of “Scientific American Mind” (free preview, but registration required) which suggested that a different set of neurons is activated when we think we are face to face and responding to another person. Carol Kinsey Goman in the May/June 2007 KM Review (article not available on-line) also opined that a “in face-to-face meetings, our brains process a continual cascade of nonverbal cues that we use as the basis for building trust and professional intimacy—both of which are critical to high-level collaboration, negotiation, and communication.” (I especially like her phrase “professional intimacy”, which seems contradictory at first but comes to make sense as you think about it).
More broadly, there is a perception, backed by some studies, that people are best at learning through not just one but a broad range of methods. In addition to the obvious preferences for visual or audio, some people have to do it to learn it (“experiential learners”) while others prefer abstract or theoretical approaches. Working face-to-face may provide each of the different kinds of learners with the type of learning experience that they need; in fact, a good teacher may well consciously or unconsciously be able to adapt the approach to the audience, based on live feedback.

My experience as a long-time classical music performer provides another answer. While a high-level audiophile might disagree, there is no question in my mind that the immediacy and raw power of the sound a live performer makes, working his magic (or not) directly in front of you, cannot be matched by a recording, no matter the depth of the sound. That is true as well for any decent speaker as well.

Another lesson from my musical background is that drama and excitement arise merely from seeing the person sweat (and possibly fail) in the performance—whether a literal high wire act, or violinistic pyrotechnics, or anything that is live and difficult. The listener identifies with the performer and thrills as the performer vanquishes the difficult run in the concerto (or, more pessimistically, feels schadenfreude or sympathy should the fingers slip). There is usually no such gripping drama in any electronic medium—while we know that theoretically there is a possibility of failure through such communications, experience has taught us that by their nature these are carefully vetted and approved well before they are displayed to the world. An exception that proves the rule are the highly promoted product demos, such as Steve Jobs’ spectacular iPhone demo or Bill Gates’ Windows 98 implosion.

There is another lesson from art and theatre. By coming to the event, the audience has already demonstrated a communal commitment to the message or the event. They are no longer passive recipients of a message. In a very real sense, even if (like all internal company events) it is “free”, they have paid for the message, through investing their time and energy in attendance, and they are wanting something back.

My background in law is in litigation. In most cases, people or their representatives actually get a chance to stand up in court in front of a decision maker (such as a judge or arbitrator) who, by law and tradition, is neutral in the dispute. Making the plea in person, or perhaps even better yet, paying someone more eloquent than you to stand up in court, provides this opportunity. We also feel that we can better assess credibility in person, through our assessment of the veracity and likeability of the witness. The face-to-face “plea” satisfies the litigant that at least their voice has been heard. A comparatively anonymous written submission might not.

So what can the practitioner draw from the significance of face-to-face?

One point, ironically, is to keep an eye out for technologies that replicate some of the key aspects of face-to-face, like Cisco’s Telepresence (disclaimer: Cisco is a client of Goodwin Procter.) While I have not seen a demo, Telepresence comes closer to in-person communications by allowing much of the same type of interactions, such as non-verbal cues. The video is high-definition, and replicates the direction of a speaker’s voice; it is also at face level, not up on a TV-like screen. Another (more limited) F2F technology is the Lotus Webconferencing System that via a web connection shows a picture of all participants on an audio conference and indicates via a visual cue who is speaking and who is moderating. And trainings, even stored presentations, should include as many aspects of in-person communication as possible, whether that is video or audio.

A second point is to keep traveling. Integration across offices is a major challenge for all sorts of firms, and all of this makes plain that real integration requires cross-office travel by all sorts of people, in order to build the necessary “professional intimacy” at different operational levels. KM professionals should try to meet as many people as possible in their travels, not just those that they have appointments with, to broaden their personal network and effectiveness.

A third point, a professional development remark, is that KM practitioners should do everything they can to become more effective speakers. A small amount of study in effective speaking can provide a remarkable degree of improvement. The best communication teachers are those who make their living through the voice; actors, directors, and singers. I will always remember the effective coaching I received during a certain transitional period from Michael Allosso, a stage director in the Boston area. I know it helped me tremendously in several job interviews (admittedly a very specialized type of F2F), and I've also sent friends to him, also with good results.

Finally, as noted in the LucasFilm article and in a June 2007 post from my colleague Doug Cornelius, firms can enhance a culture of knowledge-sharing and collaboration by creating a flexible set of spaces within the workplace where people can meet face-to-face. While my current firm has wonderfully large and naturally-lit conference rooms, for more formal business interactions, I have noticed a deficiency (compared to previous firms I have worked) in informal spaces equivalent to coffee shops, eating places with banquettes, or markets. Some ideas for spaces like this would be: extend existing coffee / kitchen space by addition of tables & chairs, have more employee “lounge”-type areas, add a firm cafeteria as these Boston firms did. Even a firm apparel shop (selling branded clothing, mugs, and so forth) could be another such space.

New CommonCraft Video--Social bookmarking

CommonCraft Video has the best training materials I've seen on social collaboration tools. See for instance Doug Cornelius' KM Space posts on Wikis and also on RSS feeds, "RSS in Plain English."

Their next video educates about the power of social bookmarking:




Last month in Pivoting In Delicious I dug down a little bit more into the social collaborative aspect of the tagging than Lee Lefever does here. In particular, I explained how you can examine others' Delicious tags for a particular URL, and, how useful that social context can be.

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.]

ILTA Session Report, Day 3: Current Awareness: Critical Information Management Tools

Speakers:


Doug Hoover, Thompson West
Dennis Kennedy, http://www.denniskennedy.com/.
Meredith Williams, Director of Knowledge Management at Baker Donelson

The goal of this session was to get enough background to make an informed decision about current awareness technologies. The speakers were well informed and current and this was a useful session. The information about collaborative information technologies was far from comprehensive, however, and omitted discussions of wikis, blogs and tags.


Dennis Kennedy started. There used to be a sense that the cyberspace was separate and apart from us; now it feels more that we are part of the cyberspace.

We might have a surfeit of information generally, we don't necessarily have the information we need when we need it. We are overloaded, have to wade through too much spam, and generally have information overload.

We suffer from "continuous partial attention" (also defined as the look on a person's face the second time their Blackberry has vibrated (or beeped) while they are talking to you.)

How can we bring information to us in a way that lets us get to the stuff we actually want to take action on? Dennis proposed an evolution:

• Search;
• Email newsletters or alerts; then,
• RSS feeds; then,
• The "Daily Me"; then,
• Actionable intelligence.

"News that comes to you." "Newsreaders let you triage and manage information and bring you information you can act upon."

Dennis introduced RSS as "Really Simple Syndication" and with the wikipedia definition; technically speaking, it is a format specified using xml. RSS separates the content from the manner it is displayed, so people can choose the way they want the information displayed. An RSS feed is consumed by an email application or by a reader. It is put out by a blog or news.

"Outgoing" RSS feeds allows people to push out content.

Google Reader, which I use, is now the classic or accepted way to start getting sets of RSS feeds. The default view within Google Reader is the most recent posts--called the "river of news." You can *star* entries and also set up a feed on sets of shared items. Techies can even import an "OPML" file to obtain sets of RSS feeds. A law firm could develop sets of feeds for its clients, or a vendor could develop sets of RSS feeds from different sets of internal training or support resources.

Feedreader gives you better control of views of the feeds, but doesn't automatically refresh. It lets you can download everything at one time so you can work off-line. It is more powerful, but costs $29.

Shared feeds give a social context to RSS. You can have documents such as a podcast fed into a feed.

Dennis believes that RSS can greatly enhance the quality of information that attorneys receive. RSS can bring you information in a form that you can use it right away.

Ready, Willing and Able; Client Awareness in US Law Firms
Doug Hoover, Thompson West

Doug's background is in business or competitive intelligence. While Dennis is very comfortable using feeds to triage information, attorneys don't want to do that themselves. They want to know what other firms, attorneys, and practice areas are doing. Most importantly, attorneys want to know what is happening with their key clients.

West's "Firm 360" product is one attempt to get this set of information ready for attorneys.

The typical business intelligence process is depicted as a "wheel" of information collection, starting with data collection, and moving on to information analysis, knowledge assessment, intelligence, decision, and finally, hopefully, results.

Usually primary data collection is done by the marketing department (as with client surveys) and the library (who accesses primary information). Finance and business management is outside this circle.

You can get attorneys' attention by delivering them timely significant information about their clients.

Who is responsible for client awareness and market intelligence? Thompson ran surveys, broken down by the size of the firm, that suggested that the responsibility does not lie in just one department (often split between marketing and the library). Some of the "mid-size" (150-500 attorneys) firms have some of the best competitive intelligence practices. Once a firm has a full time employee dedicated to this job, the demand increases sharply, and more than one employee is hired.

The most sophisticated firms or "reactive analyzers" are constantly proactively gathering information about clients and competitors. Does the firm know which are its most frequently contacted clients?

The most popular use of current awareness was helping attorneys prepare for client meetings. The next most popular was helping the firm prepare RFP responses.

Doug showed a map (not with his slides for proprietary reasons) that showed sources, identified responsible people, and analyzed a firm's collective intelligence processes, with particular output and recipients established. They calculated how long it would take to collect, digest, and analyze the necessary information for the necessary number of practice areas or attorneys. It did not escape this attendee's notice that this sort of process could easily be used to justify a certain level of current awareness or competitive intelligence staffing.

Meredith Williams then addressed competitive intelligence iniatives at her firm, Baker Donelson.

KM is involved in competitive information because their job is to make the attorneys more efficient. KM helps the bottom line by providing the key decision makers the information they need when they need it.

Meredith demonstrated BakerNet, their LawPort set of matter pages, containing financial information and so forth. It integrates information on the number of proposals sent a particular client.


The Firm 360 product pulls publicly available information from Westlaw. Graphs help attorneys identify if the type of work they do is increasing or decreasing. You can drill down to see who else is representing the client on what types of matters. It also links to case dockets. A client site also searches publication mention history, lawsuit filing.


Partners can subscribe to an RSS feed that will provide an email if the client site changes. No monitoring is required once set up. They can also set up "target client" sites.


Practice group sites have Lexis feeds of relevant news, practice guides, dockets, and so forth. Attorneys are relying on the information to serve their clients. They have another page on ediscovery with live feeds.


Lessons Learned:

• Make everything seamless, with no passwords required.
• Keep it simple.
• Keep it low maintenance for your team.
• Make it a part of their daily practice (as with pinging email.)

ILTA Conference Report, Session KM3; How Wikis, Blogs and Discussion Forums Relate to KM in the Legal Field

Dennis Kennedy quoted Jack Vinson's new definition of "How people are using technology, information and one another to get work done (or solve problems)." Also quoted David Snowden's 3 KM Rules.

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted.
2. We know more than we can say and we can say more than we can write.
3. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
   
   

He also highlighted three aspects of Web 2.0 features:

• Lightweight Content Management
• Collaborative
• Capture Conversations

Blogs have:

• individual posts
• reverse chronological entires
• RSS feeds
• archives
• comments

Dennis thinks about these tools in terms of the unit of communication and its response:

Tool Unit Response

Blog Post Comment
Wiki Article Edit
Discussion Board Topic Reply


Kevin O'Keefe--founder of LexBlog, leading provider of marketing blogs. His blog is "Real Lawyers Have Blogs." He spoke very quickly.

A blog is like an on-line discussion that creates a community. It can help you make in-roads into different groups you want to know.

You can start by finding blogs through Google, blogsearch.com, blawgsearch.com.

Should have feeds that provide blog entries on your name, the firm, clients, and relevant legal topics (such as angioplasty or bank trademarks). These feeds help drive conversations.

Examples:

• Maryland Intellectual Property Law Blog (associate at Blank Rome)
• Counterfeit Blog--has gotten to know the organization of the manufacturers fighting counterfitters.
• In the (Red)--Business Bankruptcy Blog
• Privacy and Security Law Blog--Davis Wright Tremaine LLP--mention blog as a marketing tool, getting huge feedback as a demonstration of expertise
• New Jersey Law Blog--Stark & Stark; 48 lawyers contribute to this one; associates produce podcasts with nice music; allows RSS feeds to individual lawyers' pages.
• Fair Use Blog--St. Louis lawyers--

The AMlaw 100 firms have 73 Blogs. 55 blogs from AMLAW 200 are firm-branded. Some firms have many firm-branded blogs. Fox Rothschild alone has 10+ blogs,

Blogs are fun, so getting content out of lawyers is not difficult. "The best lawyers are getting into this now." Blogging increases the lawyers' own knowledge and expertise, through the comments and the research necessary to maintain accuracy in the posts.

Later Dennis discussed choosing particular Web 2.0 tools.

Wikis tend to be a little bit harder to start to use. Some choices are Mediawiki (wikipedia's base), Instawiki, PBWiki, Drupal, SocialText (ST is the big one for business), Sharepoint. Wiki makes sense where you are building a body of work that everybody should be able to edit. SocialText has some plugins to Sharepoint.

Blogs are easier because you don't have to learn HTML. You also get quick gratification from comments. Choices are WordPress, Movable Type (can be installed internally), Roller (IBM)

There are also custom options, including hosted and free software.

Costs are very small, close to free in terms of software. People should look out for open source software issue. Very popular internal blogs have been created for no software cost. "I'd rather take a chance on spending $0 than half a million when trying to explain two years later why there's no content in there."

Is it a repository of expertese? (wiki)
Do you want to publish information to other people? (blog)
Do you have a culture where people will respond to each other? (message boards)

Can you pull an RSS feed into a blog?
Can you pull information from a blog or RSS feed into a wiki?
Will there be business applications on top of Youtube

People will be careful about what they say because the feedback is instantaneous.

"People can become stars within their firm [through blogging.]"


Gloria Fox

Gloria Fox has spent 17 years in Knowledge Transfer. Per a comment she posted to an earlier version of this entry (thanks Gloria!), she is at Blank Rome as Knowledge Manager. The library there is a part of the KM team and has set up its blogs and wikis. Gloria works on the people part, addressing the culture and finding inroads and ways to create positive change.

The main advantages of wikis and blogs are interactivity and how easy it is to add content.

The goal is to harness the collective intelligence of a firm. Wikis and blogs and harness and leverage the "networking effect" for firm benefit.

Individual bloggers build relationships with other knowledge brokers and can become known as experts.

Blank Rome's Expertise Directory can hold visuals as well as narratives.

Top Down or Bottom-Up

Any firm platform needs official blessing.

You want opportunity to build a culture of collaboration. At Blank Rome, she created a library wiki, complete with information for summer interns.

What's In it for me?

Attorneys spend excess time at meetings discussing simple logistics, such as what case is going to trial or who is going to a conference. Attorneys could move more quickly to the more interesting collaborative work if they just posted such information on a blog.

Best Practices

Identify business objectives for blogs; pick a group that might be open to using wikis or blogs. Some will fail. Start small with enthusiastic and committed groups and make Web 2.0 champions.

Lisa Kellar Gianakos*

Lisa moderated the panel discussion. She also said that she will be moving some practice guides to wiki format. Think of low-hanging fruit (law fruit?). Take practice guides and let people run with them, making edits. Wikis work very well for project management, and also for basic information about onboarding.

It's better to have wiki or blog where it's almost all right than to have perfectly crafted annotations. There's a lot of value in quickly getting to 90%.

*name spelled correctly after an embarrasingly long time.

ILTA Conference Report, Session KM 2; Stories from Client-Facing KM Implementers

Clint Moore has been with Littler Mendelson for 5 years as "Manager of KM Technologies." 8 KM attorneys in his firm, he is a technologist, looking for 1 more; 7 web developers. KM is not part of IT, they work closely with the library. The KM attorneys have a revenue goal, which they meet through selling subscription tools to "Littler Monitor" and Littler GPS.

The "Littler Monitor" service provides a method to monitor wage legislation and regulation in 50 states; provides action items and an indication of whether legislation is pending.

Littler recently launched Littler GPS, 50-state surveys on discrimination, employment benefits, unemployment, and so forth. Littler also has a collective bargain agreement service. Two models of subscriptions--17 of most popular surveys, or they can pick some they care. It takes 40-100 hours.

Chard Ergun is Manager of Practice Management Systems at White & Case, a firm with 2,135 attorneys world-wide and 38 office in 23 countries. White & Case has PSLs in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, "Knowledge Resource Attorneys" in Americas. White & Case has a system that tracks model documents called "Knowledge Bank; the KRAs are part of practice groups and are responsible for "sanitizing" or cleaning up monitors. The external resource is called "White & Case Universe," an application that "assists clients in implementing and coordinating their compensation and benefits, global employment, and labor strategies around the world." Access is subscription-based; there is a free public section including a demo. A built-in workflow process ensures that only partner-approved content gets posted. Firm attorneys can subscribe to particulary types of content or regional activity. The application was developed in coordination with clients. There is some "push": clients get notice of new content directly from the site. Site also leads to client-specific extranets.

Menus of resources are country-specific and are managed by the attorneys. Attorneys were nervous about sharing everything because they feared clients weren't going to call them. It didn't work out that way and in fact led the clients to the right attorney more quickly.

Fiona Gifford is International Development Manager at Freshfields. She worked at White & Case as an arbitration lawyer, and is now on Freshfields' central KM team. Europe has a large number of knowledge lawyers. Freshfields has an integrated KM and business development function. 80 knowledge management lawyers, with 5-10 years client experience, as well as 70 knowledge management assistants, organized by practice groups and sector groups. Total related staff is over 400, including library and information services. Most KM teams are based in practice groups, but there are also central KM staff who help spread knowledge across and between offices. Freshfields reorganized recently due to extensive overlap with business developments in areas such as Client Alerts and Pitches. They combined the two into a "KBD" (knowledge and business development) department. What we see as adding value is what clients expect "at 600 pounds an hour."

The KBD department is treated as a business service---they have KM business plans that are supposed to align with the overall business goals of the different practice areas. Training department is folded into KM at Freshfields.

I appreciated the opportunity to meet Fiona after the formal session. The London firms have so much more advanced KM groups in terms of numbers of personnel and resources that it is always interesting to hear what is happening with them. Fiona opined (based on her own experience as a PSL lawyer) that part of why KM has become KBD may be that the PSL lawyers, unlike the centralized business development staff, were very close to the practice areas and in some cases the clients, and so were in a position to intimately know exactly what the practice areas in particular offices needed.

Client facing KM is in three strains, current awareness, client training & seminars, and KM consulting,

Freshfields produced about 150 Client bulletins. They also put out newsletters, extranets, and online services. Clients really care about format, and try to tailor information to show how it affects a client's particular needs. Some sites like "FSnet" provide financial services information. Some clients have encouraged Freshfields to work collaboratively with other firms (example: banks) in a "BLT."

Freshfields will do tailored training for business and legal teams. First, the relationship partner needs to ask the client what they want.

Clients with large KM teams or legal departments are also looking for help with their own KM.

• Secondments,
• Strategic consultancy,
• Tools & processes (as by having a KM attorney audit), and
• Technology and systems.

To measure value, they record the time spent on KM activities (without billing). They openly discuss client feedback.

Freshfields has tried to bring in KMLs into U.S. offices but client expectations have dampened that effort.

Pivoting in Delicious; Litigation KM and Social Tagging

Before I first started using Del.icio.us last week (yes I am a connectivity software newbie), I questioned the value of tagging. I thought tagging would merely help me find web sites that I was interested in, and that other people's tags would be of comparatively little interest. Since I was fairly happy with storing web sites I used in the IE "Favorites" list, I didn't really see why I should bother.

Count me in as a convert. The power of site tagging is not simply that it helps me find and logically group my own sites. Since so many people are using it, Delicious also provides access to a very substantial collective intelligence about topics I care about, simply through the happenstance of having tagged web sites with the same or closely comparable words.

But as an incredibly important bonus, the tags not only lead you to the web sites, they also point to the delicious accounts of the people who made them. In other words, tagging has uncovered not just the information, but the people who are interested (and may be working on) the same things that I am working on. You can mine other's delicious pages to see not just the tags that you have in common, but the other words and sites that they think are significant.

The example that educated me was the tag "enterprise2.0."

I had tagged the website for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference that I caught the tail end of last week with the logical tag "Enterprise2.0." When I went back to my delicious site, and clicked on my "enterprise2.0" tag, I saw that I could view others' use of that tag, either the most "Popular" uses or "All" uses.

Delicious cleverly puts these "popular" and "all" tags into readily comprehensible and recreatable URLs, such that you can see the page for the enterprise2.0 tag at http://del.icio.us./tag/enterprise2.0 and the popular tags for "Enterprise2.0" at http://del.icio.us/popular/enterprise2.0.

Next to each of the sites listed, Delicious identifies the number of people who have tagged that site (the pink lines).

Each of these pink lines is in turn a hyperlink to the Delicious page devoted to that link or resource (with an indecipherable URL, in this case http://del.icio.us/url/59d38fef1d29b2b73e9b2d5add9e1d34) .

The presentation at this "URL" or "link" page is different; it is now easy to see who has tagged what, and to jump into the user profiles, since the tagger's name is listed beneath their tags and description of the URL, if any. For understandable reasons, however, doubtless having to do with spammers and privacy, you cannot actually contact or reach out to the other Delicious users. I had hoped that there would be some way to direct a comment or reach out in some way to the Delicious users with whom I apparently have a lot of interests in common.

In effect Delicious lets you "pivot" and explore idea categories (tags), those who created them (the users) and the resources themselves (in this case, web links).

Circling back, what does this have to do with litigation knowledge management?


Imagine that a tagging system for documents and URLS is implemented internally at a law firm, such that others in the firm can see what you call another document, can see your tags, and aggregates the tags. It would be significantly easier than it currently is to identify and find:

1. the documents that people go back to again and again (a/k/a exemplars, forms, models);
2. what people think documents pertain to (removal, subject-matter jurisdiction, pulp plants);
3. who is concerned with which issues and trends (Joe Partner in DC, Amy Associate in NY).

I am trying to provide these same resources day after day to the attorneys in my firm, which is possible through my extensive time investment in the available search technologies and databases that my firm offers. With social tagging they wouldn't have to call me, but could take advantage of other's perspectives.

Social tagging has the potential to allow attorneys to add rich context to their work product and search efforts, and to lower the effort required to take advantage of the work of others in the firm.