1) There’s no doubt that firms will be holding onto high value items like their best contracts. This isn’t about giving away the farm. More about getting more value out of quality documents in the public domain, like court filings, decisions, articles, pleadings, white papers.

2) Most of the documents in the JD Supra are court filings & decisions, and not simply articles.

3) As far as KM goes, you’re right that KM must support the law firm’s business objectives. But the fact is, there will always be a portion of law firm knowledge operating on the public internet. What about law firm’s that blog about their subject expertise? That’s great KM fodder, and content that I intentionally used RSS to pipe back into our firm’s internal KM collections. That content was valuable for internal sharing, AND valuable for firm marketing.

4) Every firm I know of has increasing the firm’s profile and generating business as primary objectives in their annual plan. KM has an important role to play in law firm business development.

5) You mention the fact that it’s difficult to get lawyers to share? My experience has been that if you put business development in the mix, lawyers have a much greater incentive to share. An example - http://www.bcrelinks.com - the commercial real estate group at my former firm used this site to gather every resource they knew of (downloadable forms, articles, links, hot topics), and shared it with local decision makers. Rather than doing this behind the firewall, they did it publicly, generated great business from it, and were diligent about adding new materials. Why? Because clients were looking. Great ROI for KM in my books.

If public facing KM efforts like JD Supra encourage lawyers to gather & share untapped resources, then I think everyone is all the better. And I don’t think the type of documents here are infringing on business objectives.

Wonderful post BTW. You really got me thinking. Now I’ll have to go blog a follow-up.

All the best,
Steve