Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

Sociometers are small sensors that lawyers could wear at a retreat (See my post of Sept. 28, 2007: electronic name tags.). They record data about face-to-face interactions such as who is near whom and the location and duration of the interaction. Research based on sociometers, as described in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009, at 37, shows how creative people oscillate between centralized research and richly interconnected group time.

What particularly interests me is the finding that “employees with the most extensive personal digital networks were 7% more productive than their colleagues.” That speaks well for the deployment of social networks, wikis, and other Web 2.0 tools for law departments. In the same organization, however, “the employees with the most cohesive face-to-face networks were 30% more productive.”

Thus, you might use sensors at a conference and use the data to understand better who interacts with whom and how to boost interchanges (See my post of March 26, 2009: McDonald’s and assigned seating.). Right, no one will want to be tracked every moment. Still, the data would be interesting to everyone.

As reported in the Fin. Times, Oct. 17, 2008 by Rod Newing, the UK firm, Allen & Overy, has created Diligence, an online database of legal memoranda prepared by its local offices or commissioned from local counsel. Law departments may subscribe to this service for a fixed annual fee of $3,000-$4,000 per jurisdiction.

According to the newspaper article, Diligence had attracted 11 subscribers in the year since its launch in August 2007. “It needs about 15 subscribers to breakeven and has a target of 48 within five years.” This is an impressive example of an alternative model for delivery of value to law departments (See my post of Oct. 17, 2005: online offerings by law firms.

It makes sense to me that lawyers in large departments tend to specialize more. They see more examples of any given issue than do Jill-of-all-trades generalists in small departments. The more experience you accumulate, the quicker and more skillfully you can handle a new variant, which is another way of saying that you are accelerating on the experience curve toward greater productivity.

Expertise should build up with experience if the lawyer consciously attends to learning (See my post of Sept. 1, 2008: learning methods with 12 references.). The resulting improvement is known as the learning curve (See my post of Nov. 6, 2006: delegate to go up the efficiency curve; May 31, 2006: the sigmoid curve of management initiatives; Feb. 2, 2008: specialist billers at law firms and learning curves; Oct. 10, 2006: core competencies and skill curves; July 15, 2006: Horndal effect; June 20, 2007 # 1: Horndal effect of increasing productivity; May 21, 2008: lesson of the experience curve from manufacturing; Nov. 6, 2006: expert lawyers work hard to get there; and May 23, 2008: use less outside counsel as experience deepens.)

Feedburner showed on Feb. 28, 2009 that LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com had about 440 subscribers. The top ten aggregators were the following with the number of subscribers they handle shown in parenthesis. The descriptions come from Feedburner. What amazes me is that another 39 aggregators also are feeding my posts to their readers. Some of them are variations and versions of Mozilla.

Google Feedfetcher Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or iGoogle. Subscriber counts include Google Reader and the iGoogle. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services. (177)

Bloglines Bloglines is a web-based aggregator that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. (94)

My friend Ruth Balkin told me about the Private Law Librarians Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (PLL/SIS), and more specifically its Corporate Law Librarians’ Group. The Group hosts a webpage.

Johanna Bizub of Prudential and Paula Carroll Schwindt of Manulife/John Hancock are the Group’s current co-chairs. Bizub estimated, without much data to go on, that two or three years ago there might have been 50 or more law departments with librarians (See my post of March 12, 2006: one librarian for every 123 in-house lawyers; Jan. 10, 2006: lawyers doing research online; Oct. 31, 2005: online legal resources; March 17, 2006: virtual law libraries; Sept. 27, 2005: data on legal research expenditures; April 2, 2005: unbundle library costs; Oct. 31, 2005: state bar associations share libraries; and Sept. 10, 2005: specialized roles, including a librarian at CSFB.).

The general counsel of Rockwell Automation, Doug Hagerman, has graciously allowed me to excerpt his description of a learning project he undertook. Every law department could try a variation on this technique.

“Faced with the challenge of wanting key members ready to become GC, either here or at another company, I identified the corporate secretary (CS) function as the largest gap in the knowledge of my people. So, I and my direct reports divided up the CS subject matters.

Each of us took a major area, such as audit committee and financial reporting, executive compensation, stock plans, fiduciary duties, securities liabilities, etc. and prepared written materials and four hours of teaching/discussion on our area. We took turns teaching each other, one topic per month over six months. Each topic was broken into two sessions of two hours.

In the past week, at least 50 people have visited this site from a very large pharmaceutical company. As I reconstruct what happened, somebody senior notified the law department that a particular post on this blog ought to be read. That set in train the large number of visits from the same corporate website.

You can do the same in your law department or law firm. If one of my posts strikes you as insightful or provocative, send your colleagues a permalink (a unique identifier on the Web for the post). Here’s how:

Go to the bottom of the post that interests you and click on “Permalink” (it is to the right of “Comments”). Next, go to your browser window and copy the permalink that appears there. [I use either CTRL C or right click on my mouse and click “Copy.”] The permalink looks something like this

Social scientists have discovered that “who you know” has much to do with “what you know.” According to research cited in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 36, “engineers and scientists looking for information were roughly five times more likely to turn to friends or colleagues than to electronic and paper-based repositories.” Unfortunately, that research was published in 1977 so it may be that huge advances in search software and capabilities have narrowed the edge of people. On the other hand, with information overload from the Web and databases, the power of an experienced brain may now be even more at a premium.

I doubt it, however, because nothing in silicon beats a human brain for sorting through facts and providing on-point information quickly. Lawyers may be even more likely than engineers and scientists to favor personal conversation than online queries.

As the online world inexorably proves that information wants to be free, in-house counsel will increasingly have more forms of agreements available online, and at no cost. One example of the genre is YourFreeLegalForms.com.

According to an email exchange I had with a business developer for the JACI Group,

jack@thejacigroup.com YourFreeLegalForms currently has over 500 forms uploaded and is steadily adding more. No one will claim that sophisticated legal agreements will become a dime a dozen on the Web, but pieces of them and indeed entire agreements that are simpler and will suffice for many purposes are sure to proliferate.

The Am. Lawyer, Dec. 2008, at 110, discusses topic forums on Paul Lippe’s Legal OnRamp. The forum with the most members is “Effective Management of Law Departments,” which I proudly moderate. It has more than 110 members. If in-house counsel want to join Legal OnRamp and take part, I welcome them all.

Correspondingly, the Law Department Management group in LinkedIn, which I also created and nurture, has 76 members. Members do not contribute much, but they appreciate material published on the forum.

I have not cross-checked the members to see how much duplication, if any, there may be. If you are reading this post, you might want to join either or both. Also, let me know of other online fora (or fauna as I am fauna them all) that pertain to in-house management.