Tacit knowledge “includes the unspoken knowledge that people draw from within themselves: observations, ingrained habits, inspirations, hunches, and other forms of awareness that are typically not written down or codified, but that live in people’s minds and bodies, and give any organization much of its distinctive edge over competitors.” Law…
Most knowledge-management initiatives imposed from the top down fail to take hold. The big picture forest wilts. Better to plant some trees: tools, initial encourage, and ongoing recognition, and then let lawyers below them devise their own ways to circulate what they learn and value. A description in Consulting, Nov./Dec.…
LT Online, the provider of the Lawtrac matter management system (MMS), announces in Law Tech News, Dec. 2008 at 9, that Lawtrac can now download directly from CT Corp.’s Universal Service of Process Interface. As I thought about this database combination I gazed into a future of other databases feeding…
“People hate asking for help,” according to Stanford Bus., Vol. 77, Nov. 2008 at 9. “It makes them embarrassed, guilty, and fearful that they will look incompetent.” Now, couple that commonplace with the risk aversion typical of lawyers and the premium most lawyers place on intelligence, and you understand why…
A website has a useful explanation of XML tags as applied to portfolios of contracts. “The basic mission of XML is that it can make whole documents visible and meaningful to machines. And not just a snapshot of high level data. XML allows you to tag documents with meaning, right…
At a PLI conference, Ed Greene of Citibank shared his department’s definition of knowledge management: “Leveraging of a department’s collective wisdom by creating systems and processes to support and facilitate the identification, capture, dissemination and use of the department’s knowledge.” Four phrases or words in that definition deserve special attention.…
Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (Continuum 2004) at 57, cites to two sociologists who “forcefully argue the case for the close association between the sense of risk and the increase of knowledge.” As lawyers gain experience and legal knowledge, they read about and…
In the final decades of the 20th century, a backlash to Enlightenment values came to be known as postmodernism. “Postmodernists are hostile to the idea that truth can be objective, are skeptical of the authority of science and resist the idea of progress,” according to Frank Furedi, Where Have All…
Lawyers (well, people generally) tend to change not so much when they learn through abstract principles and theories as when they learn through experience, during so-called “action learning.” Action learning means a person tries out the new behavior, gets feedback, and keeps improving. Action learning is experiential (See my post…
One general counsel I know asks the senior lawyers to contribute an update about their group’s activities from the previous two weeks to a document that is collectively available for editing by everyone. A few precatory guidelines exist for how to contribute to the online collected document. Mostly, however, the…