Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

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 resources.), or have been line item strikeouts during budget cuts.

To the contrary, according to data from the 2005 Hildebrandt International Law Department Survey. Of 130 law departments that reported position information, 26 of them had a “Librarian,” and 12 of them had “Information Center/Library Staff.” The total library positions compared to the total lawyer positions means a ratio of one librarian for every 123 lawyers.

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 lawyers also generally feel comfortable with Boolean word searching. From early days of using on-line tools in law school, they learned to search for a word within five of another word (proximity) or one word before another word (relative location). But, the most powerful technique should be concept searching.

Concept search software looks at a portion of text, or perhaps an entire document, and characterizes it by certain words, their frequency, and synonyms to those words. Using that entire package of interpretation and various search algorithms, the software finds elsewhere what it deems conceptually-similar passages.

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 branches. Color coding adds even more information, so that the person looking at it can take in a great deal of information at once.

What else? What about cases citing other cases? Thomas Smith, a law professor at the Univ. of San Diego has started to map how cases, opinions, and statutes connect to one another (Legalaffairs, Vol. 5, No. 1, Jan./Feb. 2006 at 65). Among “more than four million federal and state cases, almost a quarter were cited just once before lapsing into obscurity.” Narrow the set to Supreme Court decisions and “56 percent of the citations were made to just 2 percent of the cases.” As for law review articles, “nearly 80 percent of citations refer to just 17 percent of the 385,000 articles from 726 journals in Smith’s samples.

I can imagine a similar analysis of authorities cited in briefs or in a large firm’s precedent collection. The findings should invigorate study by lawyers of the most pivotal cases, regulations, statutes, or treatises See my post of Sept. 24, 2005 on Pareto’s Law.). When all the data shows visually, the sweet spots of legal learning will claim their due.

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 portal.

The site would allow the law department to see such material as “client invoices, working procedures, litigation reports, document templates, telephone listings” and other commonly requested information (id. at 17). According to Jones, the law firm could also load the extranet with business development information, which would supplement its marketing efforts.

My reaction is that law firms ought to consider posting substantive material that the law department’s lawyers might use. New case decisions, proposed regulations, checklists for common activities, examples of frequently-used contractual provisions, issue taxonomies and other boons will earn gratitude. True, such material allows in-house lawyers to serve themselves, which might reduce some demand for the law firm’s services, but the larger gain of more and better work could compensate.

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 any commercial, hard-copy offering, but legal wikis are sure to sprout.

When a critical mass of in-house lawyers who handle bankruptcies, for instance, start a no-cost sharing of experiences, documents, guidance, Q&A, lobbying information, and evaluations of outside counsel, the collective expertise available in an easy-to-use wiki – much better than listservs or websites or blogs – will attract more users. A network effect will propel the legal wiki medium (For more on wikis, see Keith Ecker, “Wiki Revolution,” InsideCounsel, Feb. 2006 at 40.).

Quickly, law firms will realize that if they make useful, timely contributions, buyers will take note. In fact, law firms with a practice specialty will seed and support the wikis.

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 the software survived that onslaught, it might advance automatic knowledge management, a means of bringing together people in law departments who do not know others are working on (or have worked on) a similar legal issue.

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 of responsibility down the hierarchy, leadership skills have become increasingly important. (See my posts of Dec. 5, 2005 about male/female differences, Dec. 19, 2005 about leadership as a key goal, and Dec. 21, 2005 on emotional intelligence quotas of leaders.)

Talent management bids to overtake cost control in the next few years as the most pressing challenge of law departments. (See my dozens of posts in the category archive “Talent Management”.)

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) at 91, and had within its targets all managers.

I visualize lawyers adding to their knowledge continuously, which forestalls decay (See my post of May 21, 2005 on spreading the learning from CLE.) At the same time, given the pace of change in laws, regulations, court decisions, and legal practice, if an in-house attorney fails to keep pace, that attorney’s knowledge is not the only thing to suffer a shorter life.

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 specialty lawyers (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005 on inside specialists.) the internet could be a resource resorted to frequently. As more law firms pour material into the internet, as the legal blawgs flourish (See my post of July 20, 2005 on legal blogs.), as government agencies turn more and more material into digital form online, as legal Wikipedia projects increase (See my post of Dec. 29, 2005 about Cornell’s initiative.), time spent online by in-house lawyers will grow.

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 call that “knowledge management” – because it would design itself to encourage everyone to “keep thinking, innovating, collaborating, talking candidly, [and] improving their capabilities.”

A grand notion, Panglossian, but perhaps a useful platform idea, one on which we can build.

A learning law department would look for ways that software can extend its lawyers’ effectiveness, that simpler processes can improve productivity, that better delegation can increase efficiency at lower cost, that standardized documents and guidelines can improve quality – all the management initiatives and personal correlatives (CLE, reflecting on what has been learned, rotations, coaching) that propel a department farther along the road to delivering the most.