The Zero-Percent Rule | Knowledge Management

I mentioned my Zero-Percent Rule* in a previous post, Knowledge Harvest. There I stated the rule as: you should try to make any KM initiative require zero percent of an attorney’s time. This is not a rule because it is desirable to have zero input from attorneys on KM initiatives. To the contrary, I think that most legal knowledge management folks would love to have more attorney input. This is a rule because it is uncommon to get more than zero percent of an attorney’s time on KM initiatives. As I’ve said, for most attorneys, when one case or deal is done, it’s usually on to the next.

Therefore, I am revising the ZPR to state: legal KM folks should not expect more than zero percent of an attorney’s time on KM initiatives.** If we live by this rule we will not be disappointed.  And if we get some input from the lawyers, then it’s like icing on the KM cake. 

Now that we have that squared away, the Zero-Percent Rule should not be seen as an insurmountable problem. Technology is here to help. No, I am not trying to incite the age-old dispute about whether knowledge management is about technology or people or culture or whatever. Let’s agree that all of them are important. But, technology is important when you can’t get the ”knowledge seekers” to participate. 

One example of how technology helps overcome the problems of the ZPR is MoFo’s AnswerBase, which is powered by Recommind.  Part of that tool enables lawyers to identify experts within the firm.  The great thing is that it is a passive system that requires no active participation by attorneys.  The idea is that expertise is determined by data from various systems.  For example, the fact that attorney Jones billed 1,500 hours last year on area of law Y (data from time and billing system) and was the author of 14 briefs on that same area of law (data from the DMS) and is the responsible attorney for several other similar matters (data from the accounting system) helps make the determination that attorney Jones probably is an expert in that area of law.  

Another example is a system like Contact Networks, which I wrote about in the Who Do We Know? post.  Such applications passively determine relationships among your lawyers, clients, potential clients, and others by mining e-mail traffic and other contact information.  Again, zero-percent attorney input.  I really like this because it helps eliminate internal spam e-mail, otherwise known as “PTI” e-mail.  You know about PTI e-mail: “Pardon the interruption, but does anyone know Mike Smith or any other senior executive at Big Corp?”  With a system like Contact Networks, or the like, those questions can be answered without spamming every single lawyer in the firm. 

How are you working to overcome the problems of the Zero-Percent Rule? 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

* I have a feeling that this “rule” may have been met with some objection, but since LawyerKM has been–and still is–on vacation, I have no idea.  (Thanks to the magic of WordPress technology, this post, and all posts since, and including, Knowledge Harvest, were pre-written and published on a schedule.)

** I reserve the right to further revise this rule at any time.

Blogs: Empowering Employees | Knowledge Management

Blogging is not easy. It takes thought, time, and effort.

What does blogging say about bloggers? At the very least, it says that they are interested in the blog subject. Interested enough to spend time thinking, researching, writing, and editing. This is time that could otherwise be spent doing any number of things (relaxing, exercising, socializing, etc.). One might argue that blogging demonstrates more than just interest - it demonstrates a passion for the blog topic. If one’s blog is related to what they do for a living, that means passion for one’s profession. And a passionate employee is a good employee.

Should employers encourage employees to blog? Should they prohibit blogging? Should they pretend that it’s not happening? I’m not talking about whether employees should be permitted to blog on company time. While most employers would say no, Michel Anteby, in his Harvard Business Review article, Working in the Gray Zone, suggests that it may be OK, and even beneficial. Anteby says that this has to do with employees’ need to “enact their ‘occupational identities,’” (i.e. “the self-image that a person trained in a specific vocation develops as a member of that profession.”). Much the way blogging indicates a passion for the subject, “gray zones signal a higher aspiration among employees that immediate supervisors deem worthy of pursuit.”

Blogging (on your own time) is good. I know that I personally–and professionally–benefit from blogging. It makes me a better KM guy. I learn from my blog buddies, some of whom are listed in my blog roll (and on the LawyerKM Netvibes Universe). But a blog, like any medium, should not be abused. A good blogger’s guide is The Golden Rule. Another word to the wise is “don’t [write] anything you wouldn’t want published on the front page of the New York Times” (aka The New York Times Rule). (I know, I know, some bloggers would love to have their stuff published in the New York Times - anywhere in the New York Times.)

In my opinion [see opinion disclaimer], a reasonable approach is best. Lawyers love the word “reasonable.”  What does this mean? Todd Alan Ewan and Carolyn M. Plump put forth some pretty reasonable blog policy ideas in their article, To Blog or Not to Blog: An Employer’s Dilemma (although I think that they may have borrowed the title from another blog post. I’m kidding.). Perhaps another piece of guidance comes from our friends at Thomson Reuters, which recently released its Code of Business Conduct and Ethics.

Part of that code states:

It’s OK to mention Thomson Reuters in a personal blog. However, if you maintain a personal blog, it should not contain or discuss any confidential or nonpublic information about Thomson Reuters, our customers or other people or companies that we do business with. You should not cite or reference customers, employees or business associates without their approval. If your blog mentions Thomson Reuters, it should be clear that any opinions that you express are your own, and not those of Thomson Reuters. Even then, you should be mindful of the Trust Principles in discussing Thomson Reuters or any of its competitors. Further, personal blogs should never be used for internal communications among fellow employees and you should not use a personal blog to air any differences with co-workers, Thomson Reuters or people or companies that we do business with. Some Thomson Reuters businesses may have their own supplemental policies and guidelines on blogging.

That seems reasonable. And it seems that some law firms subscribe to such reasonable ideas. David Hobbie (Caselines) and Doug Cornelius (KM Space), of Goodwin Procter, write about KM topics and are pretty open about things they do at the firm. Tom Baldwin, of Reed Smith, also shares some of his KM experiences with the world via his blog, Knowledgeline. The KM community benefits from their ideas and experiences.

In the end, whether employers love it, hate it, allow it, prohibit it, or tolerate it; they shouldn’t ignore it. They need to be aware that people blog. And some of those people may be their employees. Reasonableness may be / probably is / definitely is–in my opinion–better than ignorance.

And for you bloggers out there, The Golden Rule and The New York Times Rule are good guidance, but perhaps the best way to put it is: Don’t Be Stupid.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Knowledge Harvest | Knowledge Management

In their article, Don’t Just Capture Knowledge - Put It to Work, Katrina Pugh and Nancy M. Dixon discuss ways to ensure that institutional knowledge is available for those who need it and not simply filed away in the archives. They use an approach called a “knowledge harvest: a systematic, facilitated gathering and circulation of knowledge.”

“The key,” they say, “is to identify, before the harvest begins, others in the organization who could use the knowledge (the ‘knowledge seekers’) and involve them in gathering valuable lessons.” The case study in the article involved a health-care consulting team. The authors reported that the knowledge seekers participated out of self interest and therefore asked “tough, exploratory questions of knowledge originators, extracting important nuances…how knowledge might be applied elsewhere, what worked and what didn’t, and so on.”

One factor not discussed was the ease with which the facilitators were able to obtain the assistance of the key participants, the knowledge seekers. For law firm KM folks, we know all too well that getting our knowledge seekers–the attorneys–to participate in knowledge-sharing activities is tough. Since KM activities don’t directly contribute to the all-important Profits Per Partner (it’s Am Law 100 season!), when they finish one case or deal it’s usually on to the next. “Post mortem” and “after action review” are not terms they teach in law school. And good luck getting attorneys involved before some “knowledge harvesting” activity begins.

Legal KM folks always have to keep in mind what I like to call the Zero-Percent Rule: try to make any KM initiative require zero percent of an attorney’s time. It’s a half joke, but painfully funny. Ask anyone involved legal knowledge management and they’ll tell you that it’s a real problem. More on the Zero-Percent Rule later.

So, to all you legal KM folks out there: Can a knowledge harvest work in a busy law firm? Is this a question of KM culture, technology, both, or neither?

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Legal Blogs Create Buzz | Knowledge Management

I’ve written before about legal blogging.  But being a KM guy, I usually focus on the benefits of using blogs inside the law firm, for KM purposes. 

Kevin O’Keefe (Real Lawyers Have Blogs) writes a lot about using blogs as marketing tools.  And he should know - he’s helped a lot of firms dramatically increase traffic to their websites.  Check out his recent post, Lawyer blogs driving traffic to law firm websites. 

Just as most firms got on the website band wagon in the 1990s (some reluctantly, remember?), most firms–the ones that haven’t already–will have one or more blogs in the next few years.  I know, I know: this is not such a ground-breaking prediction given the recent report that “53 of the Am Law 200 firms in 2007 were blogging a total of 110 blogs.“  And it’s not just small firms that are on the band wagon: check out Kevin’s post that has a long list of firms that blog.  There’s some big names there. My favorite take away from Kevin’s “Lawyer blogs driving traffic…” post (above):

Blogs are turning out to be a very cost effective means to drive traffic through the law firm website and particular, practice areas and lawyer bio’s.

Why?

• Law blogs focus on substantive legal information, as opposed to promotional copy. Google can tell the difference and is obviously more interested in pushing information, as opposed to marketing copy, to the top of search results.
• Blogs have more frequent updates. More updates, the more keywords and key phrases people will be searching for that you’ll have in your blog site.
• Viral marketing. Blogs routinely get cited by other blogs and reporters. You’re seen when your target audience is doing research on your niche in the law.
• Subscribers by RSS and email. Websites don’t have subscribers.
• Blog RSS feeds being aggregated by Google Blog Search and Technorati so blog posts are picked up by reporters and bloggers subscribed to keywords and key phrases at those places.
• Links. The holy grail of search optimization. Incoming links from other relevant sites (law in this case) establish the importance of a site in Google’s mind. The more links, the more important, and the higher you’ll be in search results.

 LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Who Do We Know? | Knowledge Management

There’s an interesting article, Email Software Delves Into Employees’ Contacts, in The Wall Street Journal that discusses how more firms are using applications that mine email traffic and other contact information to infer relationships. Thomson-owned Contact Networks and Dun & Bradstreet-owned Visible Path are mentioned, but BranchIT is not.

I like these tools to help solve the “who-do-we-know?” problem. If you’re not familiar with this type of tool, there is a nice online demo from Visible Path that helps explain things. The best part about these tools is that they require no input from the lawyers. They need not submit contacts or even keep their Rolodexes up to date. Relationships are determined passively. The downside: some people just don’t like the idea of an application monitoring their email and other electronic activities. Apparently, these companies are slowly overcoming such obstacles: Contact Networks reports that “about 40 law firms, including Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP” are using the application.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

The Enterprise is YOU! | Knowledge Management

With most of my time devoted to knowledge management at a law firm, I often forget about my own needs. I’ve got a lot of digital stuff in various silos that could use the KM treatment. At home, on my iMac, it’s not a problem because I have Spotlight. I can find just about anything on my iMac pretty quickly. But I have a lot of stuff on the web - and it’s not all that easy to find. Off the top of my head, here are some of the web applications that I use frequently:

• Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail (multiple accounts), iGoogle, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Reader, Upcoming.org, Meetup.com, WordPress, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Netvibes, Picasa, Mac Web Galleries.

In the Google applications alone, I have a lot of pretty important information. My Gmail contact information is more up-to-date than my Outlook contacts at work.

In some ways — on a smaller scale, of course — I have the same problems as a large enterprise: there’s a lot of information and no easy way to find it. If I am looking for contacts, for example, I can go to Gmail, LinkedIn, or Facebook. But, I have to go to each and search them individually. And with new web applications popping up all the time, it’s only going to get worse.

I need a search engine for the enterprise called “me.” One search box that will tap into all of my online silos. Clearly, Google should be the one to offer such a solution.

Google already has Google Custom Search, which allows you to build a search box that searches specific sites to the exclusion of others. Several KM folks have written about Custom Search. See here, here and here [Doug, I think there's a KM blog missing from your KM Sites Search list ].

So, Google, let’s take Custom Search one step further: maybe call it “Personalized Custom Search” or “iCustom Search” or “Self Search.” Give me the ability to search all of my web apps in a secure, password-protected way. One search that hits all of my web apps. So, when I do a search for my business contact, “Jim Smith,” the results include emails to and from Jim, pictures of Jim that I tagged in Picasa (and in Facebook), a Google Map that shows me where Jim’s office is (based on the information in my Gmail contacts), Jim’s LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, the activities that Jim will be attending from Upcoming.org and Meetup.com (because he is tagged as a friend), his Twitter posts and Delicious tags, etc., etc.

While you’re at it, please make an advanced search page that allows me to select or un-select certain web apps. Now, is that too much to ask?

By the way, I created the image with Gliffy. Check it out.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Microsoft Enterprise Search: Extending SharePoint for Advanced Search Solutions | Knowledge Management

KM World put on a nice webinar called Microsoft Enterprise Search: Extending SharePoint for Advanced Search Solutions.  It is archived for about 90 days, so check it out.  (Sorry no notes on this one).

Also, here is an interesting press release from CMS Watch called SharePoint Has Become the New Lotus Notes.  I would love to hear what everyone thinks about it. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Google’s Universal Search for Law Firms & Interwoven | Knowledge Management

Google’s Universal Search for Law Firms & Interwoven  

Presentation on March 12, 2008, Vijay Koduri, Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise and Gautam Malkamekar of Persistent Systems. 

My notes from the presentation:

• Google Enterprise overview:
  • “mission organize the world’s information…”
  • enterprise information (i.e. info behind the firewall) is 40% world’s information.
• 600 Google employees dedicated to G Enterprise.
• 15,000 customers.
• Google Apps - the suite of apps (now also including Google Sites [see my gripe about Sites here]).
• 2000 new Apps customers every day!
• “Search is the starting point to the world’s information.”
• Knowledge workers (”KWs”) spend 25% of time looking for information.
• KWs search about 5 repositories looking for information.
• Expertise location is important 
• Impact on business is loss of productivity, not optimizing billable hours.
• What is Universal Search?
  • one search searches multiple repositories
  • the results are delivered without categorizing
  • the results are ranked by relevancy
  • an example of Universal search is Google’s Moma internal knowledge base
• Universal search allows client access via extranets (security is observed to only give access to allowed material).
• ROI: increase of billable hours - eliminate some time searching so that billers can spend some of that time doing billable activities (time is money).
• The Google Search Appliance (GSA) searches pretty much all repositories in the enterprise (file shares, intranets, databases, enterprise apps, content management).
• “OneBox” - Can make real time queries into various apps (ex. see a snapshot of a regional sales report in the search results - not just a link to the report).
•  Case Study: Akin Gump (not many details).
  • deployed GSA
  • used it to search intranet pages

Second part of webinar - Persistent Systems & Live demo 

The info here is spare because there were some technical problems)

How Universal Search is “extended” to interwoven

• Persistent Systems overview
• Connector Deployment - there is Persistent Systems connector between the Interwoven databases and the GSA (fed via XML)
• Quick - easy install, simple configuration. 

Live demo of Connector

• an apparently simple “walk through” set up - it took 5 minutes. 
• A Google browser is used, allowing to search just public content or public & secure content. 
• only content to which the user has access appears - demonstrated this feature by signing in as different users with different access credentials. 
• demonstrated Google OneBox - shows relevant real time information in the search results.
• They can also connect into other DMS products, like Hummingbird

Q&A:

• The GSA is a closed box and Google does not share the info with anyone outside of the enterprise
• GSA can search MS Exchange databases, too.
• It can search across multiple Worksite servers in different geographical locations.
• Security is checked
• The search must originate from the web page, but can be embedded in FileSite, with some custom work.
• Pricing: based on number of documents in organization.  Starting $30,000 (for two-year license, hardware, software, support) for 500,000 documents.  Can index up to 30 million documents with stacked GSAs.
• There is a small business version of product “Google Mini” 50,000 documents - $3,000.
• Application can search Word Perfect, as well as Word and many, many other file types.
• Information can be compartmentalized so that only certain people can see it.
• Works with single sign on mechanisms. 
• OneBox works by doing a real-time query. 
• Google does not keep your search statistics, but you can keep track of your own search statistics within the enterprise with Google Analytics. 
• They skipped my question: how many Am Law 100 firms have deployed GSA and how many have deployed the Persistent Systems connector?

Webinar is archived here.

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Google Search for Law Firms & Interwoven | Knowledge Management

Reminder: Webinar “Google Search for Law Firms & Interwoven” tomorrow (March 12, 2008).   

See our write up here.

Register here. 

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms

Knowledge Management for Law Firms :: In case you missed it… Mar 2 - 8, 2008

Here are some of my favorite legal knowledge management & technology blog posts and other items from the week of - March 2 - 8 , 2008:

• Is Technology Failing to Simplify Life? (Tim Ferriss)
• Legal Issues from Facebook and Related Social Media Technologies: Panel Discussion (Slaw - Connie Crosby)
• Apple Aims to Put iPhone Into the Workplace [I hope they succeed] (NY Times)
• 10 guidelines for building your blog’s credibility (Real Lawyers Have Blogs)
• Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond (Read Write Web)
• Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone (NY Times)
• Padded lampposts for distracted texters being tested in London (Engadget)
• What a feed reader can do for you (Caselines - David Hobbie)
• DLA Piper launches trainee internet portal (”…similar … to the popular social networking sites Facebook and Bebo…” Managing Partner Magazine)
• Document Management Systems (DMS) and Knowledge Management (Eric Blue’s Blog)
• Lifestream - Aggregating Youself (KM Space - Doug Cornelius)
• Federal Court to Put Information in Your Pocket (Law.com - Lynne Marek)
• If you must use PowerPoint, study Steve Jobs, Cory Doctorow, or Larry Lessig’s speeches (Scoble on Twitter)

LawyerKM :: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms