Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

James E. Bartlett III, Senior Counsel–Export/Import at Northrop Grumman, compiles and edits the GC Ex/Im Daily Update. He writes in an introductory email that more than 3,000 people receive his update “every business day of every change to the ITAR, EAR, FTR, Customs, HTSUS, and OFAC regulations, plus related news and comment, courtesy of Northrop Grumman Corporation’s law department.”

He also provides subscribers with his “The Annotated ITAR”©. It is fully searchable electronic file that prints out as 225 pages. The busy Bartlett has also written “The Annotated FTR©,” a Word and PDF version of the Foreign Trade Regulations, 15 CFR Part 30, that regulate Automated Export System reports. It runs 123 pages double-sided.

Here is a guest post by Sarah Brown, host of Exterro’s blog, E-Discovery 360.

“Ralph Losey, a partner at Jackson Lewis and an authority on e-discovery has created

the Online Electronic Discovery Law program. Its 61 modules cover the topic well. Students get certified once they’ve proved their knowledge to Losey through assignments and conference calls. The full program takes roughly 50 to 150 hours to complete. It’s free for the first 15 classes with the remaining courses and certification costing up to $1,500.”

A review in the NY Rev. of Books, Jan. 13, 2011 at 40, contrasts critical history and popular memory. Critical historians debunk common but mistaken images of what happened. George Washington never cut down the cherry tree; Soujourner Truth didn’t ask “A‘n’t I a woman?” and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration was not really very original.

This blogger approaches law department management somewhat like critical historians look at the past. The goal is to understand management empirically, level-headedly, almost clinically instead of simply recycling myths, wannabe’s, and notions based on someone selling something. Popular images of what works for law department operations, heavily colored by ideologies and subjective impressions, ought to give way to reality, quantification, and a more scientific understanding.

Popular impressions, however, flourish, even if they are wrong. Simple, self-serving generalizations spread powerful roots. We want to believe that some words have talismanic powers, that “out there” lie “best practices,” that technology will transform the legal industry, that good old common management sense by just plain GCs does fine, thank you. For psychological reasons, the collective memories of general counsel, journalists, and consultants – there are no historians of law departments – stand strongly despite critical contextualism that tells it like it is.

As I read through the latest supplement to Robert Haig’s Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (West) I marveled at the large number of articles cited in the various update chapters. True, some of them go back to 2006 and 2007, but if you want to find what has been written about all kinds of legal department management topics into 2010, this is the source to visit. The co-authors, many of whom are distinguished partners in law firms, know how to do research!

As one example, Chapter 77, on Outsourcing, refers on page 818 to no less than 16 articles in the footnotes. That number is not unusual and the mixture includes trade journals, law review articles, blogs, conferences, and items from the business press.

The hot-stove league of law department management – would that there were one! – could jaw forever about the All-Stars of concepts. Here I nominate a third group: accountability, competency, competition, expectations (perceptions), diminishing returns, experience curve, power, satisfaction, scope of responsibility, and trade-offs.

I would add these to the twenty central concepts discussed previously (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: ten most important concepts: client, risk, quality, productivity, talent and then structure, information flow, decisions, value and objectivity; and April 5, 2009: collaboration (teamwork), delegation, empowerment, knowledge management, priorities, processes, professional development (CLE), technology (software) and recognition and rewards.).

Some of these important ideas have accumulated sufficient material on this blog to form a metaposts (See my post of May 23, 2008: core competence with 12 references; and Nov. 19, 2010: departmental core competencies with 12 references and 1 meta; June 20, 2007: happiness with 10 references, employee satisfaction, morale, engagement; and Jan. 29, 2009: role, scope and functions of legal departments with 8 metaposts and 19 references.).

It turns out that my speculations about org charts that convey much more information already has a working prototype (See my post of March 22, 2006: perk up org charts.). For IBM’s 400,000 employees software called SaNDVis “does this by showing a web of relationships around a search term to reveal who within IBM has expertise on a topic.” Employees don’t have to laboriously enter their capabilities and experience into a database, a sure show-stopper for knowledge management. Instead, the IBM software “uses writings, meetings attended, personal profile information and previous work experience to map these connections with lines showing who is closest to whom.” It compiles support from reports, internal wikis, instant messages, and communities of excellence.

The software assembles information from multiple sources – for law departments think also of time records, e-mail messages, memberships on online networks – to create a network of knowledge that it portrays visually. All this was spawned by an article in the NY Times, Dec. 20, 2010, at B3.

A large law department could deploy a software tool such as this. Eventually, tools like it will troll outside the company to add additional connections and resources such as with preferred law firms and service providers. Let search and visualization software unlock the value of disparate information. The key to knowledge management is finding the right person; this kind of software will make it much easier.

A website created by IBM researchers, Many Bills, analyzes the text of Congressional bills as they move through the legislative process. The site pools the work of other sites that collect and format federal legislation. If XML-type formats are used consistently, along the lines of the coding that must be applied to EDGAR filings, the power of computers to search, organize and display can be put to excellent use.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) may be behind Many Bills. XML adds metadata to a document as computer-readable tags that describe data. In addition, XML documents can include information about keywords for search engine optimization, relationships between pieces of information, and the software used to create the XML file. Many Bills also could use a data language called Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF lets a person name each item, such as a document, tag, piece of benchmark information, or PowerPoint presentation and the relations among the items in a way that allows software to automatically interchange information among them.

Why not have the same techniques applied to decisions reported by courts? And if that, why not do the same for update bulletins from law firms? Sites already collect them, but they do not have the coding inserted or the sophisticated analysis and portrayal capabilities. And then, why not the briefs filed in courts? In short order there will be coding of blog posts and social network comments. My futuristic scenario jumped off from an article in the NY Times, Dec. 20, 2010, at B3.

Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) frequently refers to certain kinds of networks as “small worlds.” Nothing to do with planetary size, the term describes a collection of “nodes” – groups that numbers of people belong to with relatively close affinity – that have people who belong to and bridge multiple nodes. Those bridging interconnectors allow ideas to spread quickly between the nodes.

In a small world network, you can easily connect to anyone you want to within the network (at 14). A small world means that the well-known six-degrees-of-separation, made famous in connection with Kevin Bacon, applies. There may be high clustering around the various nodes but there are also ample connections between the nodes.

It is certain that in the aggregate, large law departments and large law firms operate as a small world network. Pick any random in-house lawyer in the Fortune 500 or an AmLaw 100 law firm. That lawyer is no more than three or four people away from any other lawyer. For example, the in-house lawyer knows her general counsel who knows the managing partner of the firm who knows the law firm lawyer – three degrees of separation.