Ballad in Plain E

Our librarian, Susan, and I went to today’s CBA BC Legal Research Section lunch, where Steve Matthews gave an excellent presentation on KM in law firms.

After a Star Trek reference that I didn’t understand, Steve took the floor (phew! What is it with research lawyers and their nerdy tv shows? I thought library geeks were bad enough!). He said right off the bat that KM has a bad reputation for being a jargonny buzz concept, but that that you needn’t even use the term to implement it within your firm.

One of KM’s biggest goals is to get knowledge out of people’s heads and into a form that can be preserved and retrieved by others. Whether you call this “getting our resources in order” or something a little more specific, it’s all done keeping one idea in mind: get knowledge out there so that everyone can benefit, and therefore profit, from it. Law firms are, or should be, interested in KM projects for several reasons: attrition and retirement of lawyers (the loss of tacit knowledge), an increased emphasis on the “business of law”, the commoditisation of legal services, and the quest to offer value-added services.

Blogs are just one sexy KM tool du jour. Whether used internally for true KM purposes or externally as more of a marketing function, Steve sees value in both.

Great KM potential lies in the library catalogue. Imagine being able to annotate records on the fly, or to create reading histories. This reminded me of the rating system that Imagine Canada has in place on their web-based OPAC, which I wrote about in a FreePint article a couple of months ago. The OPAC allows users to rate an item and leave comments for others to see. Steve’s suggestion would be even more useful since the user base is relatively small and specialised, and has easily identifiable research needs.

Steve also suggested creating mash-ups of collections. For example, mash floor maps with user profiles and photos, or even library shelving diagrams enhanced with books’ circulation status. (In my wildest dreams!)

The first key to successful KM is a flexible set of repositories. KM is not advanced searching with a document management system! Ideally, KM repositories are separate from matter work product (i.e., they are not residing in and accessed solely from the DMS).

The second key lies in the way that you work with people–which aside from the obvious task of harvesting knowledge, includes selling the process and gathering usage statistics. The most useful tip for me in this section was that once you identify a potential for a KM project, you have a very small window of time to get it up and started before people start losing interest and enthusiasm. It’s essential to be nimble and able to create prototypes on the fly.

Steve gave lots of tips on best practices. He emphasised that practice group-based collections have been his most successful, since they deal with smaller groups of people with common goals and needs. He has experienced the “me too” phenomenon where one practice group sees a KM collection that’s been developed for another, and say, “Hey, we could do that too!”.

Quality control/vetting is essential, otherwise there is a great risk of GIGO. Steve suggested appointing “collection editors” to act as trusted sets of eyes.

In closing, he offered some tips on selling: start small, one practice group at a time. Remember that not all collections will be successful. Change from the “bottom up” is just as important, if not more important, than from the “top down”. KM initiatives must fit the culture of the firm. Celebrate and publicise small successes.

Another fantastic presentation from Steve, who never ceases to stir envy in those of us who wish we had his madd KM skillz! Thankfully, he is also so humble and passionate about it all that we can’t help be inspired and motivated by his successes!

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A 99%-unrelated question brought on by today’s lunch. When on earth did cookies get so big? Every time we get lunch at the office, or you have lunch at someone else’s, the cookies are huge! I’m not complaining; who doesn’t love cookies, especially the exotic ones like M&M and white chocolate/macadamia nut that you’d never buy or make at home. But seriously. Whatever happened to cookies that weren’t bigger than your hand?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 1:54 am and is filed under Law Libraries, Knowledge Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.