I have had the impression that law department libraries, and the professionals who maintain them, have been vanishing into the online world, bowing to the availability of information about anything on the Web (See my posts of Jan. 10, 2006 about lawyers online and Oct. 31, 2005 about online legal…
In-house counsel use word searching frequently. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can use the “find” function within a single document or in Outlook across directories. Lawyers are also familiar with Google Desktop Search and its ability to search for multiple words (See my post of March 5, 2005.) In-house…
Two vendors at LegalTech, Syngentics and Attenex, offer software that creates visual displays of information. For example, the programs show e-mails that are related to each other by some concept and how they are related. The visual displays look like dendrites and synapses, or spiral nebulae, full of nodes and…
Kenneth Jones, COO of Xerdict Group, writing in The World of Intranet, Extranet and Portal Technologies, International Legal Technology Association (Jan. 2005 at 16, thinks that law firms can develop business with a law department by giving the department access to a secure, online collaboration product – an extranet, a…
Previously, I urged lawyers who practice in a company to network with other lawyers in similar roles (See my post of Dec. 19, 2005 about PELF.). In the future, in-house counsel will network as they contribute to wikis. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki, a web-based encyclopedia that rivals…
A vendor at LegalTech, Aungate, has software that many companies use to enforce internal policies. It can monitor all e-mails and instant messages for improper terms. My first reaction was to blanch at the intense opposition most people would have to such Big Brotherism. My second reaction was that, if…
For organizations where knowledge workers preponderate, the quintessence of a law department, three components most commonly crop up as answers to the question of what is most important: leadership, talent and culture according to the Economist, Vol. 378, Jan. 21, 2006 at 11. In well-run law departments, with their disaggregation…
How true is it for in-house counsel that “50 to 70 percent of what they know today won’t be needed or cared about in two to five years.”? The quote comes from James R. Lucas, Fatal Illusions: Shredding a Dozen Unrealities That Can Keep Your Organization from Success (AMA 1997)…
A senior environmental lawyer at a law department estimates that she spends approximately an hour a day on Google finding material that helps her in her practice. She brings up proposed regulations, court decisions, regulatory rulings, information about Superfund sites, expert witnesses and a plethora of other material. For many…
In its list of the top 10 business concepts of the past decade, Strategy + Business, Fall 2005, Issue 41, at 37, the second most important concept is the “learning organization.” A “learning law department” would strive for more than just having its members share knowledge and skills – let’s…