Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries many people kept journals that were called “commonplace books.” They wrote out observations, inspirational quotes, poems they liked, aphorisms, sketches, ideas worth preserving. They mined those collections to keep the insights fresh and the connections between them live. A memory aid, commonplace books allowed a dialogue over time for thoughts to germinate.

In-house counsel would do well to keep their own professional commonplace book. With cut and paste so easy, additions would take but a moment. With low-cost search software so powerful, retrieval and recombination would be effortless. In fact, when Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 84, honors those early databases, he praises a program for the Mac called DEVONthink (at 114) that uses artificial intelligence capabilities to locate and link items (See my post of May 27, 2008: my years of dictating nuggets of learning about consulting.). Beset with fallible memories, we can each write down what we want to learn and make use of.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries many people kept journals that were called “commonplace books.” They wrote out observations, inspirational quotes, poems they liked, aphorisms, sketches, ideas worth preserving. They mined those collections to keep the insights fresh and the connections between them live. A memory aid, commonplace books allowed a dialogue over time for thoughts to germinate.

In-house counsel would do well to keep their own professional commonplace book. With cut and paste so easy, additions would take but a moment. With low-cost search software so powerful, retrieval and recombination would be effortless. In fact, when Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 84, honors those early databases, he praises a program for the Mac called DEVONthink (at 114) that uses artificial intelligence capabilities to locate and link items (See my post of May 27, 2008: my years of dictating nuggets of learning about consulting.). Beset with fallible memories, we can each write down what we want to learn and make use of.

Another provocative idea is found in Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 12. Johnson proposes the 10/10 rule for new technologies in communication: “a decade to build the new platform and a decade for it to find a mass audience. He cites HDTV, color TV, AM radio, DVDs, software innovations like the graphical user interface and more instances in the physical world of this development cycle.

Something similar to that pacing may happen with ideas about law department management as well as with that balance between formation of the infrastructure and beliefs and then diffusion of the practice into common play. It took perhaps a decade for the notion to evolve that excellent lawyers employed within companies makes sense and another decade for that to trickle out and commonly take hold. Or a decade passed, roughly speaking, while matter management software achieved platform status, but another decade for it to become completely mainstream and adopted. Perhaps we are mid-way through a comparable cycle with convergence, electronic billing, project management, and offshoring.

Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 9-10, explains a fascinating study of cities around the world. The study gathered data on creativity and innovation, such as patents, R&D budgets, “supercreative” professionals, and inventors, and found that a quarter-power law operates positively. (In math terms, that means the population raised to the fourth root, or to ¼. If the population were squared, it would be raised to the exponent 2, but this is raised to the exponent 1/4.) “A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.”

The explanation Johnson gives rests on the energetic exchange of more ideas, among more people, with the greater incentives and resources inherent in size. The logic of that size-fueled synergy surely applies also to larger law departments: a richer soup of hunches, experience, opportunities, talent, brilliant or hare-brained ideas, data and everything else that sparks creativity and innovation.

Having ventured this extrapolation, I wonder whether the lawyers have to be co-located, or can the boost from size come about even if they are located all over the globe? I also sniff still another reason why total legal spending drops off with increased revenue.

My friend Greg Bufithis has used his huge network of international staff and colleagues at Project Counsel to create Babel-Law. The site will provide articles, news, and commentary on various legal issues for general counsel — corporate governance, regulation, global competition & antitrust, compliance, litigation & e-discovery, law department management— from their native sources in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the U.S. Babel-Law posts material in its native language.

The item I particularly noticed was about a corporate counsel conference in Europe. “Building on 14 years of success with its Annual Corporate Counsel Institute, Georgetown Law inaugurated its ”Corporate Counsel Institute” – Europe in London in November. Planned by a special advisory board of in-house and outside counsel, the new program was designed to give in-house lawyers and private practitioners practical tips and up-to-the-minute developments affecting the representation of companies throughout Europe.”

For an offsite or a planning session, a general counsel might solicit opinions from the members of the law department. Several software packages enable low-cost yet powerful means to gather such input.

A software program from All Our Ideas, developed at Princeton University, collects opinions but also has an interactive function. “Users can make their own suggestions about the problems or issues they’re being quizzed about. Subsequent users of the site then are queried about both the original and the new proposals.” This neat trick comes from the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Nov. 12, 2010 at 37.

The notion of an organic survey, one that enriches as it matures, fascinates me. Think about the possibilities of a question such as “On a scale of one to ten, how effectively do you think discounted rates save us money?” Mere numbers leave us cold. Lawyers in the department would not only provide a scaled answer but they could refine the question, add their reasons for their response, comment on other cost-control methods or generally both learn and contribute more. The formerly inert survey morphs into a vibrant knowledge exchange and debate.

A framework evolving slowly for me orients law department management around three broad conceptual systems: the theory domains referred to separately as information, network, and decisions. In the course of gradually fleshing out, understanding, and applying this tripartite framework, I read in Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, why does E=mc2 (Da Capo 2009) at 63, regarding physical laws generally that “The tool that allows us to search and exploit these properties of nature is mathematics.”

Information theory revolves around the mathematics of signals and noise; network theory relies on calculations of proximity, relationship, and frequency; and decision theory rests on probabilities and statistics. Numbers are the glue for my conceptual system.

The brochure for a KM World conference contains a nutshell description of a session on this topic. The speaker’s blurb includes eight key themes that I quote below and comment on.

[1]“communities should be independent of organization structure” – the topic or goal holds the community together, not reporting lines or functional silos;

[2] “they’re different from teams” – knowledge development and dissemination motivates communities and they can last for years, teams can simply decide and disband;

New types of entrants in the legal market foreshadow the organization and delivery of legal guidance outside the walls of law firms. In-house lawyers who locate and apply the alternative, available information will to that degree bypass law firms. This inevitability occurred to me as I read Iberian Lawyer, July/Aug. 2010 at 16.

(1) The author makes the point that legal process outsourcers (LPOs) will move into this space as they create systems, prepare work product, and develop training material.

(2) Another source is and will be legal publishers. Publishers can organize case law, commentary, and practice guides, both in traditional forms such as books and magazines as well as in online and electronic forms. They can explore novel pricing terms.