A footnote in the MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Fall 2006 at 89, n.1 set me thinking. “The terms intangible assets or intangibles refer to any nonphysical assets that can produce economic benefits. They cover broad concepts such as intellectual capital, knowledge assets, human capital and organizational capital …” Consider these…
InsideCounsel, June 2007 at 58, has a meaty article on knowledge management and law departments. This blog has more than 40 posts on various aspects of legal department KM (See my archival category, Knowledge Management.). The article outlines seven steps toward a successful program, one of which is to designate…
I recently heard a veteran legal technologist describe what he saw as the three stages in law departments by which knowledge management. I will boldly add one more. First there were simply tools installed, mostly databases and document repositories. Next firms and departments went beyond technology and content to gather…
Myth 3 – If you have a records retention schedule that applies to paper records, you need to create another schedule for electronic records. Truth 3 – Not necessarily so. If you have a sound, well researched records retention schedule that covers all of your hardcopy records, you are ahead…
Myth 1 – The law says that as a lawyer, you have to keep everything forever. Truth 1 – Not true. If fact, ethics opinions (Michigan Ethics Opinion R-5 (1989)) state that lawyers should have and enforce a records retention schedule because to do otherwise may put their client at…
It is important and useful for in-house lawyers to understand some of the basic concepts of accounting as they apply to management of a department (See my posts of May 10, 2006 with data from Canadian law departments on the value of this knowledge; and May 7, 2006 on training…
Lucent Technologies’ law department came up with a clever idea: “The department allotted every attorney [I think there were at least 60 at the time] $200 to purchase a book relevant to his or her practice area. Each attorney generated a summary or digest of the book for the rest…
Touched on here and there (See my posts of Sept. 10, 2005 on communities of interest; July 21, 2005 on brokering knowledge; and July 25, 2005 about knowledge management and communities of practice.), I haven’t defined communities of practice (sometimes called “communities of interest” or “centers of excellence”). A nice…
In a recent speech, Mark Chandler, the general counsel of Cisco Systems, spoke fiercely and creatively at Northwestern School of Law’s 34th Annual Securities Regulation Institute (See my post of March 8, 2007 for Chandler’s thoughts about the plummeting cost of legal information.). Chandler referred in his talk to the…
As veteran lawyers retire, invaluable experience goes with them. To ask them to write down their hard-won tacit knowledge is to be disappointed: few people like to write. “Enterprise search” capabilities, from such companies as Autonomy in the UK and Fast Search & Transfer in Norway, are alternatives on the…