Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

I do not believe that the half-life of legal knowledge possessed by in-house counsel is all that short, indeed if the notion of steady brain drain has any reality. Nothing erodes the value of what a lawyer knows along the lines of “you lose half the value of what you know every five years …”

The vast bulk of the law remains quite stable, whereas change takes place primarily at the borders, or occasionally with tectonic shifts from either the passage of a major law or a Supreme Court decision (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006: is the notion of knowledge half-life valid?). Grey matter doesn’t steadily and mathematically black out.

“The CBS Legal Department has created a new intranet, which is populated with substantive content designed to benefit CBS law Department’s in-house lawyers. This information, which is provided by both CBS’ in-house lawyers, as well as CBS’ retained outside law firms, includes breaking and new developments in the law and best practices in the industry.”

This quote comes from Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), Vol. 1, Chapter 6 at §6:29. The reference is not only to a good practice for law departments but a good opportunity for law firms (See my post of Nov. 30, 2008: legal department intranet sites with 12 references.).

Books are conversations. I write in them, underline copiously, dog-ear pages, and note ideas for possible blog postings. Books feed this blog (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: thirteen books cited on this blog.). The latest sources include these ten books. Among them I have assembled a handful of “blook reviews.”

Gregory Berns, iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently (Harvard Bus. Press 2008) (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009 #1: polar diagrams.).

E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) (See my post of July 30, 2009: blook review.).

An example of how a SharePoint application helps a legal department appears in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 19.

Tim Glassett, the former general counsel of Hilton Hotels and its 40 in-house lawyers, used SharePoint “lists” for each of the legal department’s subunits (whether a practice or region). They had a “View” (their own customized page) that they populate at least weekly by each lawyer with brief descriptions of key information: top three developments, top three unfavorable developments, all new matters).

Users could view only the Highlights if they choose. That way, all lawyers worldwide had a consistent, quick and easy way and frequently received high-level global information. If they wanted more detailed information, they could go to any of the subunit views. SharePoint also includes some limited “push” communication tools” (See my post of June 9, 2009: SharePoint with 6 references.). Hilton’s SharePoint application offered capabilities much like a wiki (See my post of Sept. 1, 2008: wikis with 8 references.).

Robert Ambrogi, the prolific host of LegalLine.com and other activities internetal (to coin a term), points out a useful resource for in-house attorneys.

In-house lawyers may want to learn from the published work product of law firms, but how do they find the needle in the haystack of “thousands of client alerts, briefing papers and memoranda on a range of corporate, regulatory and industry issues”? They would like it if “someone pulled together the links to all these materials and organized them in a way to make them more useful and more readily accessible?”

He discusses the recently launched site, myCorporateResource.com, which does exactly that. “The free site aggregates these law firm memoranda, summarizes them and then sorts them by industry, corporate role, area of law and geography. In addition, it provides more than 70 separate RSS feeds for each of these topics to provide notifications of new additions.”

In the legal department of FMC Technologies, the lawyer responsible for a matter may not close it until he or she completes the “Lessons Learned” section. This method to encourage lawyers to record post mortem insights is more than a nudge; the elapsed time between opening and closing of a matter is also tracked, so the responsible lawyer wants to get that knowledge in and be able to claim completion. This technique comes from the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Nov. 2008 at 73.

A lawyer could mindlessly plug in some bland point – “ hire a good firm” – but at least the requirement not only pushes the lawyer to think a moment about insights earned but also raises the consciousness level regarding knowledge and its preservation (See my post of May 27, 2008: post mortems with 7 references.).

The champion of legal blogging, Kevin O’Keefe, published a wonderfuly informative post on June 16, 2009 about the number of blogs maintained by the US’s largest firms, the AmLaw 200. Having just written about one firm that monitors blogs and circulates references to itself (ironically, Wachtell is not listed by Kevin as blogging), I relish this empirical research and results. I have mostly quoted Kevin, but have combined some of his text.

 41 percent of AmLaw 200 law firms in 2008 (82) have blogs.

 15 percent growth in last 6 months in the number of AmLaw 200 law firms publishing blogs.

Many of my 400-500 visitors a day come from a search on Google, bing or other engines (See my post of Feb. 11, 2007: “About 65 percent of my readers look at a post that came up on a search engine, mostly Google. About 20 percent come to the site directly such as through a feed and the remaining 15 percent visit from another blog.” Others come from a feed reader or aggregator site (80% from Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, and NewsGator, and approximately 580 in all according to Feedburner). Twitter is the source of some visits (See my post of April 28, 2009: Twitter and 6 references; and June 16, 2009: hits here from Twitter.).

Finally and very importantly, all kinds of blogs and websites entice their readers to click through to Law Department Management Blog. I thank them and plan to recognize other blogs that do the same. Each of these blogs has material that may interest in-house attorneys. Here are 14 from the past two days:

alllaw.com

Blog posts, the short-and-to the point way I write most of them, compress information significantly. In two or three paragraphs – my self-imposed limit – it is admittedly hard to do justice to complex topics, such as Poisson distributions, post-modernism, McKinsey’s 7S system, or ethnography, to pick some at random that I have tackled, but in 140 Twitter characters even the attempt is a joke. Even so, people visit here ten to twenty times a day from Twitter, and more if someone with a following – a noTweetable person such as Kevin O’Keefe or Ron Friedman – tips their hat to one of my posts and adds a tiny URL.

For general counsel, and much more for the generation on their heels, Twitter and its ilk serve as the canary in the coal mine, the reconnaissance scout deep behind the lines, the town crier of ideas. On June 15, 2009, from 8:45 AM until noon, a dozen people visited my site from Twitter or Twitter-related sites. I think I will go and tweet now.

“[B]ased on our research, we know 60 percent of legal professionals already use online social networks regularly,” according to an article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 72. I was dubious so I wrote one of the co-authors, Michael Walsh, the CEO of US Legal Markets And Global Legal Solutions at LexisNexis. The next day I received the 2008 research report that underlies the quote. Earlier, it turns out, I had reported on the press release from the study (See my post of Oct. 12, 2008: LeaderNetworks poll of 449 corporate counsel.), but this time I pored over the actual data. The study report does not say how the in-house counsel who responded were identified and contacted.

One question asked was “Are you a member of an online social network such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook or MySpace?” Of the corporate counsel, 48 percent answered “Yes.” Of that group, two-thirds of them who were 25-35 years old answered Yes, with a drop off in later age groups.

Given the ubiquitous presence of FaceBook, MySpace and Friendster and other online watering holes among college students (and perhaps law school students), that nearly half of the in-house lawyers who responded belong to one sounds completely believable. It’s not 60 percent, but no matter.