A decade plus of committed involvement in a subject is the pre-requisite for expertise. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 93 state that Anders Ericsson’s research across many domains leads to this conclusion:…
Patent applicants will soon be able to tap the on-line, collective knowledge of other patent lawyers. The New York Law School Institute for Information Law & Policy has collaborated with the Patent and Trademark Office – along with a steering committee of patent lawyers from Red Hat, GE, Microsoft, and…
No one in law departments makes much of training provided to them by outside counsel. Firms sometimes offer CLE credits to law departments who attend their training sessions. A few firms offer access to precedent databases. But real training, purposefully showing the corporate lawyer how to do something, doesn’t come…
If a law department compiles guidance for its clients, and perhaps for its own members, regarding recurrent legal questions, some people term it a “resource guide.” This was the idea expressed in the Corp. Compliance and Reg. Newsletter, March 24, 2006. The benefits of a resource guide that people consult…
Along the lines of the internet making available much management information for in-house counsel (See my posts of March 26, 2006 about open-source management information; Jan. 10, 2006 about internet tools; and Jan. 13, 2006 on more resources.), give some thought to the potential exemplified in a new website called…
A new technique that might be useful for large law departments is organizational network analysis (ONA), also known as social network analysis (See my posts of Dec. 19, 2005 on top business concepts; and Aug. 2, 2006 on what we don’t know.). One company developed its organizational network analysis by…
The cost of acquiring knowledge may be so high that it exceeds the utility of the knowledge acquired even if that utility is also high. This point from Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University Press 2001) at 153, applies to knowledge management in law departments…
For law department lawyers who take the time to forage on the web sites of large US law firms, the pickings can be priceless. Thus, the Bloom Group has done law departments a service when it evaluated 20 prominent firms based on their site’s usefulness of organization for potential clients…
A few years from now, perhaps, in-house counsel may benefit from new search methods when they want to ask a question about a legal issue. Imagine a web site that collects all the postings on a certain area from blogs and law firm sites and legal publications – candidates might…
Hans Albers, Cisco’s Director of Legal Systems for the US and Canada, describes his department’s legal information platform in Law Dept. Quarterly, Vol. 2, May-July 2006 at 28. Any Cisco lawyer can post a question or start a “conversation,” and any other lawyer can post replies offering information and ideas.…