Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

The ALSP Update, Vol. 1, Dec. 2007 at 9, the monthly newsletter of the Association of Litigation Support Professionals(See my post of Jan. 27, 2008 on ALSP.), talks about the Yahoo Groups LitSupport listserv. A listserv is a way for people to post messages in threaded discussions and read others’ messages by topic.

This particular listserv has been running for more than a decade and currently has over 7,000 subscribers. It has amassed some 35,000 messages. Related to the substantive listserv is a LitSupport-Announce list where job openings are posted.

I mention this resource because it may be useful for law department lawyers and staff who have some responsibility for e-discovery and litigation support (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007 on internal e-discovery groups.). Listservs are yet another way those who care about management issues in law departments can keep abreast of the latest thinking and meet others who share their interests.

Typically we think of knowledge management as the collection of documents and other material – guidelines, checklists, alternative clauses – that someone might find helpful (See my post of March 5, 2005 on altruistic information sharing.). Another value of knowledge management repositories like these is discussed in Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2008 at 16. The article makes the point that not only does the material itself have value, but also that it points to a person who knows about the documents and the practice area.

Indeed, the human connection may be even more valuable. In a law department, knowing whom to call about a problem may be much more useful than a cold and sterile document. Furthermore, lawyers will not feel as compelled to write erudite documents or spend time polishing their submissions if they know that what they contribute is a pointer to them (See my posts of March 23, 2007 on office proximity and knowledge transfer; March 23, 2006 on business intelligence compared to knowledge management; July 21, 2005 on knowledge brokering; Feb. 25, 2007 on knowledge preservation through video recording; and Nov. 6, 2006 on organizational network analysis.).

InsideCounsel, Jan. 2008 at 14, highlights the blog of the National Arbitration Forum, which has been online since November 2004 (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 on ADR-favoring companies; and Feb. 7, 2007 on the cottage industry of arbitrators.). I wondered what else I had written about arbitration.

More than a dozen posts on this blawg have referred to arbitration. A few address arbitration in certain situations (See my posts of July 20, 2005 on employee disputes and ADR; March 29, 2005 on arbitration clauses to reduce litigation costs; Dec. 31, 2006 about online arbitration systems; and Nov. 10, 2007 regarding arbitration of disputes with outside counsel.).

Several posts have criticized arbitration (See my posts of Nov. 17, 2006 on mandatory arbitration; March 7, 2007 on a swing toward mediation over arbitration; May 4, 2007 about expensive international arbitration; and June 19, 2006 on a dissenting view regarding arbitration; May 23, 2007 # 2; and June 11, 2007 #5 on costs.).

More useful than tracking their time, in-house lawyers might better report on the two-to-four legal issues that recently came to their attention. If every two weeks, for example, every lawyer in a department summarized three to five legal issues they had grappled with during the previous two weeks, each in a two- or three-sentence paragraph, the departmental report would not only keep the general counsel and others abreast of what is being worked on but would also educate everyone. Others might also weigh in on a problem, where before they would not have known about its occurrence.

This variation would serve as a status report (See my posts of Aug. 1, 2006 on reasons to do and not to do status reports; and June 25, 2007 on benefits to clients of status reports.) as well as a building block for knowledge management (See my category, “Knowledge Management.”).

A new book bursts with provocative ideas: David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Henry Holt 2007). It explores clearly and engagingly how in the coming years, with huge amounts of online information searchable, sortable, rateable, and improvable by users, we will change how we think about information. No longer will we be restricted to first-order organization, where we put the information in a physical structure such as books in the law department’s library. We won’t even be restricted by second-order organization, where we compile information about the first-order information, such as a card catalogue, which have time and space limitations.

Both of these traditional orders of information have physical boundaries and both imply the imposition of authority. For example, first-order knowledge management was a drawer with precedent documents stacked in some kind of arrangement. Second-order knowledge management was an index of those documents. Drawers being in short supply, the first order had physical limitations. Candidate documents for the collection needed to be vetted and approved, so someone had authority over what was included.

The third “order of order” removes the limitations we have previously faced on how to organize information. Digital information confronts no physical limits; indeed, the more of it available, the better the quality and usefulness.

LawyerKM on Nov. 1, 2007 has a post that had me nodding my head in agreement. Your law department could try a blog.

“But some [law] firms are using blogs to communicate internally. We love the idea because (in theory) it can help cut down on mass emails that contain general, non-urgent information. Those periodic case law update emails are a good example. Blogs are also great because (unlike email) they create an automatic, searchable, taggable archive of content. So, if you need to find that blog post about that certain case law update from three months ago, you can search the blog rather than your Outlook folders. You can also bring new members of a department up to speed more quickly – “Check the blog…” The result: a real KM tool – a place to store our collective knowledge for quick and easy retrieval.”

The entry points out that SharePoint offers a blogging component. Other solutions include WordPress, Movabletype, and Community Server. Law departments! To the ramparts of blogdom!

A previous post described some of the features of the EDGE, the knowledge management platform of DuPont’s legal department (See my post of Jan. 18, 2007.). KM Space, a site hosted by Doug Cornelius, reports some comments by Gabrielle Townsend of DuPont (See my post of June 4, 2007 about other in-house knowledge managers.).

After a Six Sigma study and a calculation of the return on investment, a team of law department employees, led by a knowledge manager, chose Interwoven’s Worksite MP to serve as the platform for the EDGE. Townsend said that the EDGE has 75,000 documents and 1,169 users (458 external and 711 internal). Law firms that DuPont retains have access to the extranet site. “Team rooms” are the locus for knowledge sharing, something like electronic communities of practice. The system has 95 active team rooms “with 5 to 7 team rooms being currently active.”

My skepticism about efforts in law departments to rather disseminate knowledge has been expressed (See my post of March 5, 2005 on altruistic information sharing.). Not withstanding my doubts, I believe firmly that general counsel should try to build their department’s knowledge capital. Here are some of the steps I recommend.

1. Keep an up-to-date list of lawyers and paralegals who have sufficient experience with a certain area of law to be regarded as go-to people in those areas (See my post of March 17, 2006 about internal subject-matter experts (SMEs).).

2. For documents that you use with some frequency, develop templates and standard forms (See my posts of April 5, 2007 on document assembly; and June 12, 2005 about the value when a veteran lawyer prepares form documents.).

An article in the Economist, Aug. 4, 2007 at 48, discusses efforts by accountants to count the value of intangible investments in the business sector. How might law departments quantify and describe numerically their initiatives to increase the availability of knowledge?

The most obvious tally is budget and hours devoted to training and professional development (See my post of May 24, 2007 on law firms providing CLE training.).

Next, expenditures – in time and hours – on knowledge management could be added up, such as for the development of a forms library, licensure of a document management system, client training, development of standard document templates, or document assembly applications.

I welcome to Law Department Management Jane DiRenzo Pigott, the Managing Director of

R3 Group LLC. Jane, a former partner in a leading Chicago firm, founded its diversity program and over the years developed a leading reputation in the area of law firm and law department diversity. Her periodic blog posts will comment and counsel on issues related to diversity.

By contributing author Jane DiRenzo Pigott, R3 Group LLC