Four general counsel who have had distinguished careers have come together through a law firm’s efforts as an advisory group. In January of this year, Rees Smith encouraged Carl Krasik, Lawrence Stein, William Mutterperl, and Michael Bleier to offer no0cost advice to any executive of a client of the firm.…
Danette Galletin, the law department administrator at The Williams Companies, sketched at Mitratech’s Interact some things that department has done to accumulate and disseminate knowledge. One is to start a law department blog, which they use mostly to post communications to the group of 70 lawyers and 31 support staff.…
Every law department that tries to institute a knowledge management program thinks of department-wide efforts. “Let’s set up an intranet for the legal department!” “Let’s put in document management!” “Let’s create a memo repository!” Those across-the-board efforts almost always peter out, lead to spotty participation, and usually languish (See my…
Frank Fletcher, the general counsel of Nero AG whom I cited in a post a couple of days ago, wrote me. “We used MediaWiki, available at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki. We have been happy with the software except on occasion links to documents have become corrupted.” That is useful background, and thank you,…
Speculation here about a proliferation of apps for in-house lawyers was on the mark (See my post of June 15, 2010: apps that screen out distractions; Feb. 1, 2011: cottage industry of apps for matter management; and March 29, 2011: HTML5 enriched apps.). Eversheds has released an app for the…
It is a red-letter day for me when someone publishes a book on law department management. So, I celebrate by quoting from promotional material I just ran across from the International In-House Counsel Journal (IICJ). The book is 160 pages, it costs $200 and I believe quite a bit of…
A knowledge-based theory for legal departments, and its link to transaction cost economics “According to the knowledge-based theory of the firm, the raison d’être of firms is to generate, combine, recombine, and exploit knowledge.” This quote comes from the Acad. Mgt. J., Dec. 2001 at 1212. Further, “whether a firm…
If lawyers take the time, they can record the lessons they learn from their practice. Among the many forms recordation takes, this blog has recognized guidelines, checklists, and annotations. Here, to make explicit my tacit posts, I have collected them. As to checklists (See my post of Jan. 26, 2010:…
For large collections of documents, law departments can improve on indices and search tools. If the documents have meta-tags, which capture their higher-level attributes, it is easier to find related documents, manage them such as under retention policies, connect them to other information such as comments, and link them to…
A piece in the London Rev. of Books, March 3, 2011 at 11, wrestles with the claim of a recent book that over-use of the Internet robs us of intelligence, happiness, memory, and creativity. The reviewer disagrees regarding all but creativity. My reduction of his discussion goes toward mini-Internets: knowledge…